As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…

Betrug und Schönheit der Sprache bestehen darin, dass sie das ganze Universum zu ordnen scheint und uns zu der Annahme verführt, wir lebten in Anbetracht eines rationalen Raumes, einer möglichen Harmonie. Doch da Wörter uns...

There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I...

Everything stayed hidden […] it was all secret – known by anyone who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays...

[…] freier Wille und Schicksal sind nichts als Illusion, falsche Gegensätze, Trostpflaster. Letzten Endes sind sie sogar ein und dasselbe: ein einziger Prozess. Man wählt, was man wählt, es könnte nie anders sein: Die Entscheidung...

He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie […] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22]

My father was one of those men who sit in a room and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose, and do something...