“It’s a lieder cycle,” Greenwell said, borrowing a term from classical music. “That’s what the ideal, platonic version of the book is in my head.”
Indeed, the nine stories of “Cleanness” have the cohesion of a song cycle, the genre of Schubert’s “Winterreise” and Schumann’s “Dichterliebe.” While they don’t appear in chronological order, there is a symmetry to their organization, with a life-altering love affair rippling out from the center.
For me, fiction is a kind of Schrödinger’s box — a way of simultaneously being in the world and not being in the world. Some books deliver that uncanny feeling better than others, but in the right context any book can do that, not just the “literary” ones that studies typically advocate.
What if reality truly sucks and, while depressed, we lose the very illusions that help us to not realise this?
A ball pit is nothing but a big empty hole with a bunch of plastic spheres dumped inside. But there’s also something strange and special about it: the half-swimming, half-freefalling sensation of playing neck-deep in a pool-like space that your brain knows should be filled with water, but instead feels like the inside of a giant gumball machine.
For the better part of 50 years, the ball pit has been a mainstay of the childhood experience for millions of kids across the globe. But whether it’s at an amusement park, a fair or inside a McDonald’s, all of the world’s ball pits can be traced back to one man: its inventor, an English man named Eric McMillan.
At home working on a client’s website
—an archive of Yiddish memories—
I look up in time to see a yellow poplar topple.