Over the last few nights, half-longing for sleep, I've seen Lisa as she was at 14, the two of us almost side by side, about to take the front steps of East Hampton High School for the first time.

The world we are born into is not the one we leave. Mary Ruefle: Madness, Rack, and Honey, 243, 2012. 1938′s Marie Antoinette burbles up another ball scene on the television aspark in a corner of the bedroom, the one to the right of the wall of windows looking out, if windows, like eyes, could look out, on the red-bricked junior high school shut because of too many lousy student/teacher performances. Noah sees that I am busy at what...

Dr Siegel says You’ve tested negative, and you imagine that the hook hidden in his mouth pierces through each word: his bottom lip sticks against his teeth on negative, as though he could hardly bear to let it go. But Dr. Siegel is like that with words. You remember–when you came before–the particular kind of quiet with which he met your nodding at his Harvard and Columbia degrees, while the swimming...

To save our personhood is to dispossess ourselves of what we thought we knew of it, so that aiming our desire--our re-schooled longing--at dispossession, we liberate objects and world from our engorgement.

If Woolf points, in “Walter Sickert” (1934), to the reciprocal stewardship of persons and things, adumbrating how the one can only be the custodian of the other, what manner of seeing structures the import of custodial care? We are meant, I think, to interpret care not in the penitentiary sense, not as though the two categories were locked in a mutual keeping founded on the compulsion to...

Each day I attach less value to the intellect. Each day I realize more clearly that only away from it can the writer possess something of our past impressions, that is attain to something of himself and to the one subject matter of art. What the intellect gives us back under the name of the past is not it. In reality, as happens with the souls of the departed in certain popular legends, each hour of our lives, as soon as it is dead,...

It is inevitable, as well as desirable, that we should bear each other’s burdens. E.M. Forster: “The Eternal Moment” (1928), 294. The actors in Antigone open their mouths. The sounds that pass between their lips, combined with the resolute immobility of their bodies, with the way in which each declaration answers another and reflects the very thinking it amends, as though syntax, syllabled out, were capable of...

We cannot make a cotton cap out of a metonymy; we cannot put on a comparison like a slipper; we cannot use an antithesis as an umbrella; unfortunately, we cannot lay a few gaily-colored rhymes on our body by way of a waistcoat. Gautier: Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834) (My translation) ‘But if there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning?’ Woolf: The Waves (1931) It should not be difficult to imagine him,...

When we pause to consider what a tiny fraction of our evolutionary history has been taken up by our post-farming existence, it becomes blindingly obvious that our biological make-up was formed almost entirely before farming...

In honor of the ringing among these epigraphs, I lead up to an imaging presence: it is early 1996. After coming to NYU from Columbia University, I am in my last semester of being a doctoral student who does not teach...