And Lethe-wards sunk, a conjecture of time entertained

The insouciance with which a boy at six can sit in church and pick and discard a booger with a nimble finger’s flick, but not without first appraising and taking its measure. His eyes grow big as the money plate comes round and thinks of what God will do with those bills.

The wild look on the sunken face of a hospice ward who vibrates near the end with a sense of there must be some mistake as the stranger in a collar strikes a falsely somber tone and stumbles at the start of last rites.

Dilating from the local color. We become afflicted with the complacencies  of the wide water, to the point of forgetting that wetness is what we emerge from into this life.  Protest just the right amount and Goldilocks will leave your porridge be.

Style being the deference grace pays to uncertainty, and mother’s milk its own reward. We wait, as though somewhere in the baked soil of this big skied Flyover country we might finally inherit a st Aubyn steeped in Cather and ready to tell a story, having shed the callow, blue-veined skin of the rich wag’s frivolity. Eliot can lose St Louis, perhaps more easily than Edward can take on the trappings of populist navel gazing and a wide, serfless landscape.

Not every self to be portrayed can cock and wield a brush before it goes off. Even the autodidact from a barren zip code has to breed celerity on credit and earn stale poise through repetitious toil before the self mythologizing can take flight.