Love And Summer

She tried to think about all that, to see before she came to it another blackened area, a different place from last time, his way of keeping the track clear. Badgers had been here once and he had shown her their setts. It was easier not to feel a stranger to herself here, to tell herself that she had allowed a convent-child's make-belief to have its way with her, to be ashamed and know it was right to be ashamed. It was easier because everything around her made sense in a way she understood. The confusion of thoughts that did not feel her own made no sense at all.

William Trevor, Love And Summer (2009)

The Name Of The World

I doubt there were more than a dozen others at the tables around us. All men. Middle-aged, middle income, midwestern. Golfers. In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don't know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their cliches yet full of helpless poetry. Meanwhile the music whamming and bamming. The women shaking themselves almost shyly.

Denis Johnson, The Name Of The World (2000)

Lines Of Vision: Irish Writers On Art

Works of art that arrest our attention, stop us in our tracks and consume us with possibilities are often not mirrors of our lives but rather they are prisms that we subtly adjust to reflect other peoples' experiences in broken parallels to our own. We do not see our past, we see another past and, with a jolting empathy, it can cut to the core of our being, in a reflection of our lives and, sometimes, our loss.

Bernard Farrell, "A Painting and a Poem" (2014)

Andy Zipf

Ray Bonneville

Reunion

All I knew then was that this was my country, my home, without a beginning and without an end, and that to be Jewish was fundamentally no more significant than to be born with dark hair and not with red. Foremost we were Swabians, then Germans and then Jews. How else could I feel? How could my father feel otherwise? Or my father's grandfather? We were not poor 'Pollacken' who had been persecuted by the Czar. Of course we could not and would not deny that we were 'of Jewish extraction', any more than anybody would dream of denying that my Uncle Henri, whom we had not seen for ten years, was one of the family. But this 'Jewish extraction' meant little more than that once a year, on the Day of Atonement, my mother would go to a synagogue and my father would neither smoke nor travel, not because he believed in Judaism but because he didn't want to hurt other people's feelings.

Fred Uhlman, Reunion (1971)