Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.

Tenors get women by the score.

You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more. She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she?

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.