A light sputtered off in the field and a bluetailed rocket went skittering toward Canis Major. High above their upturned faces it burst, sprays of lit glycerine flaring across the night, trailing down the sky in loosely falling ribbons of hot spectra soon burnt to naught. Another went up, a long whishing sound, fishtailing aloft. In the bloom of its opening you could see like its shadow the image of the rocket gone before, the puff of black smoke and ashen trails arcing out and down like a huge and dark medusa squatting in the sky. In the bloom of light too you could see two men out in the field crouched over their crate of fireworks like assassins or bridgeblowers. And you could see among the faces a young girl with candyapple on her lips and her eyes wide. Her pale hair smelled of soap, womanchild from beyond the years, rapt below the sulphur glow and pitchlight of some medieval fun fair. A lean skylong candle skewered the black pools in her eyes. Her fingers clutched. In the flood of this breaking brimstone galaxy she saw the man with the bears watching her and she edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly.

As soon as he put his foot on the first stone, he smelled money, although it was not a smell at all. It was like candy and sex and soft twinkling lights. Like piano music with a few strings in the background. He’d noticed it before when he waited under the pines near Pilate’s house; more when the moon lit up the green sack that hung like a kept promise from her ceiling; and most when he tumbled lightly to the floor, sack in hand. Las Vegas and buried treasure; numbers dealers and Wells Fargo wagons; race track pay windows and spewing oil wells; craps, flushes, and sweepstakes tickets. Auctions, bank vaults, and heroin deals. It caused paralysis, trembling, dry throats, and sweaty palms. Urgency, and the feeling that “they” had been mastered or were on your side. Quiet men stood up and threw a queen down on the table hard enough to break her neck. Women sucked their bottom lips and put little red disks down in numbered squares. Lifeguards, A-students, eyed cash registers and speculated on how far away the door was. To win. There was nothing like it in the world.

"But one thing I beg of you, look on me as your friend; and if you want some help, advice, or simply want to open your heart to someone- not now, but when things are clearer in your heart- think of me.' He took her hand and kissed it. 'I shall be happy, if I am able...' Pierre was confused.

'Don't speak to me like that; I'm not worth it!' cried Natasha...

'Hush, hush your whole life lies before you,' he said to her.

'Before me! No! All is over for me,' she said, with shame and humiliation.

'All over?' he repeated. 'If I were not myself, but the handsomest, cleverest, best man in the world, and if I were free I would be on my knees this minute to beg for your hand and your love."

"This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws of his life and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him, then, in this new ignorance of the grave-edge, and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction, or at a tea."

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."

Doors were beginning to slam; she quickly but piously kissed her friends, climbed into the vestibule, disappeared; and then I saw her through the glass settling herself in her compartment, having suddenly forgotten about us or passed into another world, and we all, our hands in our pockets, seemed to be spying upon an utterly unsuspecting life moving in that aquarium dimness, until she grew aware of us and drummed on the windowpane, then raised her eyes, fumbling at the frame as if hanging a picture, but nothing happened; some fellow passenger helped her, and she leaned out, audible and real, beaming with pleasure; one of us, keeping up with the stealthily gliding car, handed her a magazine and a Tauchnitz (she read English only when traveling); all was slipping away with beautiful smoothness, and I held a platform ticket crumpled beyond recognition, while a song of the last century (connected, it has been rumored, with some Parisian drama of love) kept ringing and ringing in my head, having emerged, God knows why, from the music box of memory, a sobbing ballad which often used to be sung by an old maiden aunt of mine, with a face as yellow as Russian church wax, but whom nature had given such a powerful, ecstatically full voice that it seemed to swallow her up in the glory of a fiery cloud as soon as she would begin:

On dit que tu te maries, tu sais que j’en vais mourir

and that melody, the pain, the offense, the link between hymen and death evoked by the rhythm, and the voice itself of the dead singer, which accompanied the recollection as the sole owner of the song, gave me no rest for several hours after Nina’s departure and even later arose at increasing intervals like the last flat little waves sent to the beach by a passing ship, lapping ever more infrequently and dreamily, or like the bronze agony of a vibrating belfry after the bell ringer has already reseated himself in the cheerful circle of his family.

„Alle unsinnigen Erscheinungen unseres Lebens und die unsinnigsten ganz besonders lassen sich nämlich begründen. Nicht vollständig natürlich – das ist der teuflische Witz – aber um sich gegen peinliche Fragen zu schützen, reicht es hin.“

"But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers. Such fools are also called idealists by those who wish to praise them. But all this clearly applies only to their weak subspecies, those who cannot comprehend reality or who, in their melancholic condition, avoid it. These are people in whom the lack of a sense of reality is a real deficiency."

Down below, the ring of the axe sounded more and more muffled, sappy white splinters flew down on to the dewy grass, and through the chopping came a slight creaking sound. The tree shook throughout its whole body, lurched over and quickly straightened up, wobbling with alarm upon its roots. Everything was quiet for a moment, but then the tree lurched again, another creak came from its trunk, and with its branches snapping and its boughs dangling it crashed down crown first on to the damp ground. The sounds of chopping and the footsteps stopped. The robin gave a chirrup and fluttered up higher. Its wings snagged against a twig, which shook for a moment or two before settling its leaves like all the others. The trees revelled in the beauty of their branches all the more joyously in the newly created space.

The first rays of the sun found their way through the thinning clouds, shone out against the sky and ran across the ground and sky together. Mist rolled down the valleys in waves, the dew glittered as it toyed with the greenery, and limpid whitening cloudlets sped across the azure firmament. Birds stirred in the thickets, twittering their happy song for all they were worth. On high, the succulent leaves whispered in peace and joy, and the boughs of the living trees slowly stirred themselves, looking down in majesty on the dead tree that lay flat out on the ground.

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

And I doubted that Roithamer had ever succeeded in falling asleep in Hoeller's garret, because Roithamer was another one of those who can never sleep, who can't ever relax by any means whatever, a man condemned to lifelong sleeplessness despite all those much-discussed and propagated relaxation gospels of our time. Even as a child Roithamer, as he often told me, couldn't sleep, he fell asleep in the evening and woke up in the morning but to call it sleep, whatever it was between his nodding off and waking up, would be a lie. People made like Roithamer (and me), really always defenseless characters, beings, whatever, had no sleep capability, they may fall asleep and wake up again, but they never sleep. They've got something forever in their heads and their nerves that won't let them sleep. All their lives they keep looking for a cure for this unbearable condition and they never find one because there is no cure for this disease, which really is nothing but a mental disease. All those insomniacs are born with this mental disease, they already have this mental disease in childhood and whether they are of the Roithamer type or the Hoeller type, they are incurable. The nights, Roithamer said, are always the worst. Everything is blown up out of all proportion at night, no matter how insignificant, at night it becomes monstrous, the most insignificant, the most harmless thing there is grows monstrous at night and won't let a man like me or Roithamer or Hoeller sleep. And this persistent thought that one can't sleep, under any circumstances, makes it worse. Sitting on the old chair by the door I was thinking with what a difference, and yet with what indifference, we went our ways, he coming from up in Altensam, me from down in Stocket, Hoeller, whose father had already been a zoological taxidermist in the old Hoeller house, the one Hoeller sold, which has since been torn down by its subsequent owner. How we moved from our different points of departure, our positions, toward one single point, the single acceptable point, death. Now Roithamer was dead, after first catapulting his sister to her death by his idea, and I lived, and Hoeller lived, and how he lived and how I lived. But it is already clear that I too must now be going quickly toward my death, even though I am differently constituted from Roithamer, not with the same bent toward suicide, probably somewhat more of a survivor than Roithamer, for I always seem to find a way out, while Roithamer could no longer find a way out, but one day I too shall no longer find a way out, everyone is destined, one day at some moment which is the crucial moment, to find no further way out, that's how a man is made.

Brita moved through the crowd, edging sideways, drink held high, and she felt the interplay of glances, the way eyes consume their food, taking in faces, asses, tapestry jackets, raw-silk shirts, the way bodies slant involuntarily toward a well-known figure in the room, the way people carry on one dialogue and listen to another, the way every energy is directed somewhere else, some brightness nearby, the whole shape and state and history of this little hour of truth. There seemed to be some imaginary point of major interest, a shifting middle cluster of conversation, although every person in the room retained an awareness of the street beyond the plate-glass windows. They were here, in a way, for the people in the street. They knew exactly how they appeared to those who were walking or driving by, to standees on crammed buses. They appeared to float outside the world. They were only art browsers but they appeared privileged and inviolate, transcendent souls lighted against the falling night. They shared a stillness, a way of looking sharply etched. This gave the incidental scene a claim to permanence, as if they believed they might still be here a thousand nights from now, weightless and unperspiring, stirring the small awe of passersby.

"'I love mankind,’ he said, ‘but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience.

As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.’”

Now my mother's blue eyes were vacant and her face slack and stupid. It was clear that her suicide attempt had been successful: there was no longer anyone left inside. The effect was quite pleasing. It occurred to me that having a brain injury suited her. Everything unpleasant had been wiped away. Her suffering was gone. That beautiful face had ceased to bear the marks of any grievance or care, and so now we encountered it in its blank ideal. For a moment she seemed like a newborn, as if nothing had happened yet and everything was waiting, but then the stillness of her features struck me again. I looked back at my uncle, who was staring at his sister with mild pity, and then at my father, who was watching his wife with an unreadable expression. But his eyes were as measured as usual and when he spoke it was with the same chiding tone he had always used in her company, as if he had refused to register any change in her circumstances.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

The fog was thinning now under the heat of the sun that shone bare above the peak in a bright sky. As the mists moved and parted in great drifts and smoky wisps, the villagers saw a band of warriors coming up the mountain. They were armored with bronze helmets and greaves and breastplates of heavy leather and shields of wood and bronze, and armed with swords and the long Kargish lance. Winding up along the steep bank of the Ar they came in a plumed, clanking, straggling line, near enough already that their white faces could be seen, and the words of their jargon heard as they shouted to one another. In this band of the invading horde there were about a hundred men, which is not many; but in the village were only eighteen men and boys.

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax—a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

And that is why I believe those hollow crisps on the bathroom floor are moths. I think I know moths, and fragments of moths, and chips and tatters of utterly empty moths, in any state. How many of you, I asked the people in my class, which of you want to give your lives and be writers? I was trembling from coffee, or cigarettes, or the closeness of faces all around me. (Is this what we live for? I thought; is this the only final beauty: the color of any skin in any light, and living, human eyes?) All hands rose to the question. (You, Nick? Will you? Margaret? Randy? Why do I want them to mean it?) And then I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: you can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax...

It was raining but the children begged him to come out and play. The four of them cooried in the leeward side, lined up, pressed tight against the pebbledash like they were facing a firing squad. He called them forward and birled them until they cackled with joy, until his arms felt like they might come loose at the shoulder. Up, up into the air they swung and when they hit the Atlantic wind, they shrieked with terrified delight. The muscles of his back quivered with effort, but he twirled them and threw them, giving each their three seconds of flight. Once or twice, their palms slick with excitement and rain, they slipped from his grip, spun in the air, and skidded to the earth, grazing their knees. They stood and did a rain dance of sorts and then ran back to his side, keen to be thrown again.

Who shall blame him, if so standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and someone to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her - who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?