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For the pattern of their lives was as predictable as the seasons. The regular round of necessity was broken by celebrations and feasts: Christmas, Easter, family birthdays. The scope of their lives was tiny but it was profound, and to them, it was immense. The physical bounds of their world were confined to little more than a few fields and houses, but they knew these places with the deep, unconscious knowledge that a bird or a fox might have for its habitat. The idea of home was something they lived so completely that they would have been at a loss to define it. But they would have known to be inadequate such phrases as: 'It's where you are from,' 'It's the place you live,' 'It's where your family are.'

The fjeld looked like a drawing made of a few scribbled lines. Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, up here they all looked alike. The borders were covered by snow, the snow joined everything up, and the darkness covered it over. The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people.

Kathrine had married Helge, she had had a child, she had divorced Helge. She went to the lighthouse, she stayed there overnight, and she came back the next day.

It was fall, then winter. It was summer. It got dark, and then it got light again.

He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a correspo

He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

I noticed that when we walked among narrow satretches of pavement beside the roaring traffic, Ryan always took the place on the inside. "I've been reading up on statistics for road deaths in Athens," he said. "I'm taking this information very seriously. I owe it to my family to get home in one piece."

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It was the first day of my humiliation. Put on a plane, sent back home, to England, set up with a temporary rental in St. John's Wood.

It was the first day of my humiliation. Put on a plane, sent back home, to England, set up with a temporary rental in St. John's Wood. The flat was on the eighth floor, the windows looked over the cricket ground.

I walked out into the city. It was a perfect autumnal London afternoon, chill but bright, under certain trees there was a shedding of golden leaves. I walked past the cricket ground and the mosque, past Madame Tussauds, up Goodge Street and down Tottenham Court Road, through Trafalgar Square, and found myself finally in Embankment, and then crossing the bridge. ��…] When I reached the South Bank the first thing I saw was a poster advertising an afternoon event with an Austrian film director. ��…] In the middle of the program the director asked his interviewer to roll a clip from the movie Swing Time, a film I know very well, I only watched it over and over as a child. On the huge screen before me Fred Astaire danced with three silhouetted figures.

Too stoned in company once, I made the mistake of trying to explain what I found beautiful about the origins of tap dancing—the Irish crew and the African slaves, beating out time with their feet on the wooden decks of those ships, exchanging steps, creating a hybrid form—but Rakim, also stoned and in a cruel mood, stood up, rolled his eyes, stuck his lips out, shook his hands like a minstrel, and said: Oh massa, I's so happy on this here slave ship I be dancing for joy. Cut his eyes at me, sat back down. Our friends looked at the floor. The mortification was intense: for months afterward just the thought of it could bring the heat back to my cheeks.

Without knowing why, she’d nonetheless halt, fanning her bare thin arms; she lived on the verge of things. The parlor. The parlor filled with neutral spots. The smell of an empty house. But the chandelier! There was the chandelier. The great spider would glow. She’d look at it immobile, uneasy, seeming to foresee a terrible life. That icy existence. Once! once in a flash—the chandelier would scatter in chrysanthemums and joy. Another time—while she was running through the parlor—it was a chaste seed. The chandelier. She’d skip off without looking back.

She opened the door of her little apartment, penetrated the cold and stuffy surroundings of the living room. Slight stain was rippling in one of the corners, expanding like a light nearly erased coolness. She screamed low, sharp—but they’re lovely!—the room was breathing with half-closed eyes in the silence of mute pickaxes of the construction sites. The flowers were straightening up in delicate vigor, the petals thick and tired, damp with sweat—the stalk was tall, so calm and hard. The room was breathing, oppressed, asleep.

No one sounds like Lispector—in English or Portuguese. No one thinks like her. Not only does she seem endowed with more senses than the allotted five, she bends syntax and punctuation to her will. She turns the dictionary upside down, shaking all the words loose from their definitions, sprinkling them back in as she desires (along with a few eyelashes, toast crumbs and dead flies)—and doesn’t the language look better for it?

She suddenly felt pain commingle with flesh, intolerable as if each cell were being stirred and shredded, divided in a mortal birth. Her mouth abruptly bitter and burning, she was horrified, rough and contrite as if in the face of spilled blood, a victory, a terror. So that was happiness.

Her parents saw little reason to renew their ideas, which had lately been ahead of their time and were still not out of date.

Up there in the drawing-room, Aunt Violet began playing Schubert; notes came stepping lightly onto the moment in which Karen realized she was going to die. Phrases of music formed and hung in the garden, where violently green young branches flamed in the spring dusk. A hurt earthly smell rose from the piteous roots of the daisies and those small wounds in the turf that her uncle, not speaking, kept pressing at with his toe. Down there below the terrace, the harbour locked in green headlands lay glassy under the cold sky. No one familiar in Karen’s life had died yet: the scene round her looked at once momentous and ghostly, as in that light that sometimes comes before storms.

She thought, young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them. Loving art better than life, they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks. They are right: not seeking husbands yet, they have no reason to see love socially. This natural fleshly protest against good taste is broken down soon enough; their natural love of the cad is outwitted by their mothers.

When Sister Michael had left, Lib studied her own notes for a while. The velvety white pages seemed to mock her. The numbers didn't add up; they failed to tell any tale except that Anna was Anna and like no one else. Fragile, plump-faces, bony, vital, chilly, smiling, tiny. The girl continued to read, sort her cards, sew knit, pray, sing. An exception to all rules. A miracle? Lib shied from that word, but she was beginning to see why some might call it that.

She knew now that she must follow his guidance. She had found her master, as we sometimes say, and laughed at h

She knew now that she must follow his guidance. She had found her master, as we sometimes say, and laughed at herself with a little inward laughter as she confessed that it was so. ��…] She had assumed the command of the ship, and had thrown it upon the rocks, and she felt that she never ought to take the captain’s place again.

”I shall never cease to reproach myself. I have done that which no woman can do and honour herself afterwards. I have been �� a jilt.��

She knew now that she must yield to him, �� that his power over her was omnipotent. She was pressed by him as in some countries the prisoner is pressed by the judge, �� so pressed that she acknowledged to herself silently that any further antagonism to him was impossible. Nevertheless, the word which she had to speak still remained unspoken, and he stood over her, waiting for her answer. Then slowly he sat down beside her, and gradually he put his arm round her waist. She shrank from him, back against the stonework of the embrasure, but she could not shrink away from his grasp. She put up her hand to impede his, but his hand, like his character and his words, was full of power. It would not be impeded. 'Alice,' he said, as he pressed her close with his arm, 'the battle is over now, and I have won it.'

I could still fly to London and end this, and come back and say, Yes, Pat, I was lying, and he could persuade himself to believe

I could still fly to London and end this, and come back and say, Yes, Pat, I was lying, and he could persuade himself to believe me, and we could take a weekend break somewhere and be massaged together, and walk along a river hand in hand, and stand beneath a waterfall and feel the spray on our faces and laugh, and think about the cave behind the falling water, cut off from the world, and all the roaring peace to be found there, and have a drink in the bar after dinner, and go to bed, and turn to one another's flesh for warmth, and find only a hard coldness there, and no accommodation, no forgiveness of sins; and we'd turn away again from one another, and lie apart facing upwards and send words into eternity about babies never born, and needs unmet, and prostitutes and internet sex and terrible unforgivable sins and swirling infinities of blame and hollow retribution, and we could slow to a stop as the sun crept up, and turn from each other in familiar exhaustion, and sleep until checking-out time on pillows wet with tears.

…and Mary's eyes were shining and brimming with some excitement, something she had to say to me that she'd learnt just moments ago, to see if I knew this wondrous thing that she now knew. And the sky and the earth and the cut grass and the chirruping of birds and the low drone of insects and the slant of light across my father's happy face and the gleam of wonder in Mary Crothery's eyes and the smell of the morning air and the weight of life inside me all seemed even, and easy, and massless, and perfect, and right, and every deficit seemed closed in that moment.

But today I couldn't hear a sound in the house. I was the first to break the skin of the day, stepping out on the lino which struck its frozen cold up through the warm soles of my feet. When I parted the curtains and looked out, the familiar scrappy back landscape—trellis and dustbins and old bikes and crazy-paving stepping stones—was glazed in sunshine, gleaming from its dip into the night.

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on TV that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspaper nobody read, somehow connect their cases. find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they 'disappeared,' 'were lost'? Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the center, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves.

(view spoiler)[ All these months, the disgusting shredded rags jammed into your underpants, soaking through. It was worse than anything, the beatings or the hunger, the infections or insults. The wet wad of torn-up tea towels and fraying curtain and threadbare sheet, of old underpants and flannelette shirt ripped into patches and strips, somehow rolled and folded into a horrible lump, forced upwards to mould up into yourself, but the loose stupid bloomers and all of it drenching too quickly, rasping your thighs as you walked, soaking and dribbling. The coppery smell, the chafing hatred in it. Then having to rinse them in dirty tank water in the trough outside the laundry, hang the fluttering rusty flags in the sun. Yolanda had retched into the grass the first three times she'd had to plunge them into the dirty water, clouding with her own trailing mess. (hide spoiler)]

It is not Boncer. The thrashing has stopped; she can see nothing in the silence. Then there it is: the stark, dark narrow face. A kangaroo, straightening itself, growing taller. It watches her, small black paws held delicately before it. They watch each other. Then she sees the other little malleted dark faces: three, six, ten of them—all stopped, all watching her as she slowly perceives their presence. She takes a breath, very still—and then they tilt forwards and make to leap. But then more noise, and more, and all the vegetation thrashes in syncopation; all the bush leaps into shocking life, and she stands motionless, captured, as the blurring streamers of twenty, sixty, a hundred animals overtake her, hurling past. Unseeing, unstoppable, magnificent.

And they are few indeed but stoop at length
To something less than best,
And find, in stooping, rest.

The heavy mountains, lying huge and dim,
With uncouth outline breaking heaven's rim;
And while I watched and waited, o'er them soon
Cloudy, enormous, spectral, rose the moon.

This climactic expression, which, in all the other life-forms, has but the one purpose, has with you become specialized to higher, purer, nobler uses. It has—I judge from what you tell me—the most ennobling effect on character.

Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence—not as today's dead but as yesterday's living—felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected—for death cannot be so sudden as all that.

The very temper of pleasures lay in their chanciness, in the canvaslike impermanence of their settings, in their being off-time—to and fro between bars and grills, clubs and each other's places moved the little shoal through the noisy nights. Faces came and went. There was a diffused gallantry in the atmosphere, an unmarriedness: it came to be rumored that everybody in London was in love.

She had trodden every inch of the country with him, not perhaps least when she was alone. Of that country, she did not know how much was place, how much was time. She thought of leaves of autumn crisply being swept up, that crystal ruined London morning when she had woken to his face; she saw street after street facing into evening after evening, the sheen of spring light running on the water towards the bridges on which one stood, the vulnerable eyes of Louie stupidly carrying sky about in them, the raw earth lip of Cousin Francis's grave and the pink-stamened flowers of that day alight on the chestnuts in May gloom, the asphalt pathway near Roderick's camp thrust up and cracked by the swell of ground, mapped by seeded grass��.

For as far back as I can remember, I felt far outside my parents' duo. There were many times, from when I was a little girl until just a couple of weeks ago, that I was sure I was adopted. I have to admit, though: if they had adopted me, they had done a sensational job of covering their tracks. Adoptees or not, they were my one and only set of parents, and now they are gone, a fact that feel indescribably strange, even four and six years after their deaths.

And yet I was able to step back from my own sadness, as I was wiping the counters, and observe it, as if I were watching a film, or reading a novel. And as I did so, I was aware of an undercurrent of joy. The kind of undercurrent you can sometimes hear in a Chopin étude or a Bach fugue. Our little drama was playing itself out against a background of joy. Our life together had been good. Sadness wasn't the worst thing. What would have been really sad would have been if we hadn't been sad at all.