As It Is in Heaven

Neither did she realise yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.

He had a stillness like white linen folded inside him. But when he heard in the man’s tone the desperate beseeching for life, Hadja Bannerje felt the grief rumple him like an illness of the stomach and acknowledged in himself the awfulness of reaching this place at the end of medicine. This, he thought, is beyond the last page of all the books I have studied. This is a place further than prescription.

Stephen did not intend to go to the concert, not because he disapproved or wanted to distance himself from the notion of such music in a place like west Clare, but because there would be people there.

Pollini was twenty-eight and looked like a man who had fire for breakfast.

He knew his son’s life was lacking in excitement or joy, but believed that it needed to be fiercely protected from the treachery of dreams.

The place in his spirit where he was broken had grown so familiar to him, and he had so long ago abandoned the notion of any fingering or magic that could repair it, that his living had assumed a frayed quality, waiting for the last thread to give.

like an old explorer fingering the route he had taken across the unknown, he would trace all his happiness.)

I'll tell you the truth: I'm not really a teacher anyway, I don't care enough about codes of discipline, acceptable standards of uniform, punctuality, all that.” He waved his hand as if clearing a desk. His eyes were burning. “I care about the history and the few who want to learn it. But what I have discovered is this: it's not my life. It's someone else's life that I'm living, that I just fell into, the way people take wrong turns and don't know it and just keep going because it's too hard and frightening not to, and then they find themselves years later in some place they never wanted to be, with the regrets eating them up like cancers.

Neither did she realize yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.)