“You spill your breath. Nothing holds; the whole show rolls. I can imagine Virginias no less than Pacifics. Inland valley, pool, desert, plain - it’s all a falling sheaf of edges, like a quick-flapped deck of cards, like a dory or a day launched all unchristened, lost at sea. Land is a poured thing and time a surface film lapping and fringeing at fastness, at a hundred hollow and receding blues. Breathe fast: we’re backing off the rim.”

Over decades she had reclaimed what she had forfeited of her own mind, if any. She took pains to keep outside the world's acceleration. [...] She had long since cut out fashion, and any radio but the Red Socks. In the past few years she had let go of her ties to people she did not like. To ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored what did not interest her. With those blows, she opened her days like a piñata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her, the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.

She thought she was getting too old to regard her bitterness as the natural effect of a cause outside of herself.

My life is lived with a different intensity. Not the intensity of youth, but something else, some kind of spiritual audacity. I've noticed this in a lot of grieving people by the way - a kind of zeal, a kind of audacity in the face of things, a kind of reckless refusal to submit to the condition of the world.

The ceramics: