The Sea

The Sea

My father worked in Ballymore and came down in the evenings on the train, in a wordless fury, bearing the frustrations of his day like so much luggage clutched in his clenched fists. What did my mother do with her time when he was gone and I was not there? I picture...
The Argonauts

The Argonauts

Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think,...
Journey To The End Of The Night

Journey To The End Of The Night

While we kept Robinson’s eyes bandaged, he told me about his beginnings in life. When he was eleven, his parents had apprenticed him to a high-class shoemaker. One day he delivered a pair of shoes to a lady customer, and she invited him to share a pleasure which...
Go, Went, Gone

Go, Went, Gone

Before Richard moved to the outskirts with his wife, they’d lived in an apartment, a mere two hundred yards as the crow flies from West Berlin. And they lived there almost as peacefully as they later lived in the countryside. The Wall had turned their street into a...
The Machine Stops

The Machine Stops

They were not fighting now. Only the whispers remained, and the little whimpering groans. They were dying by hundreds out in the dark. She burst into tears. Tears answered her. They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should...
The Asra

The Asra

Every day so lovely, shining,up and down, the Sultan’s daughterwalked at evening by the water,where the white fountain splashes. Every day the young slave stoodby the water, in the evening,where the white fountain splashes,each day growing pale and paler. Then the...