Autumn arrived with a general spray of autumn color. It wasn’t winter yet, but it would be; there was a hint in the air of the cold to follow. 

Mr. Field, a concert pianist, splinters his wrist in a train crash and uses his compensation pay-out to buy a house he has seen only in photographs—a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye on a stretch of coast outside Cape Town. 

I woke to several different noises, something being picked up and put down, a tap being turned on and off. What time is it? I said. It’s four a.m., said Mim. For a moment she was silhouetted in the bathroom door before the light went off and she was reabsorbed into the dark.

What I have been doing lately: I was lying in bed and the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs. Quick. I opened the door. There was no one there. I stepped outside.

I didn’t think I would ever tell this story. My wife told me not to; she said no one would believe it and I’d only embarrass myself. What she meant, of course, was that it would embarrass her.

Sharon understands the uses of beautiful. When she comes to visit, even in this middle life, she wears her hair down and schoolgirl thick to her shoulders.

Pinkie and I had come three days from Montana to camp among the aspen at elevation on Steens Mountains, right near the top of southeastern Oregon, up where we used to live. My sister Grace had lured us along the road with talk of serious family medicine.

The situation in itself is not unique. There was a man who hated his job and wanted a new one. There was a man who was sick of his boring job and wanted an exciting job instead. This man was depressed, but he saw a way out. He thought this way out was a distantly Rilkean change of life. Not his whole life. Really, just his job. How he spent his days, occupied his mind, set goals long-term and short. The man wanted to embrace a buried part of himself, see the edges of his mind glimmer under an unknown light; wanted the blind and transcendental experience of losing himself to some craft; wanted to make art.

I was sitting at a long table with a lot of nice things on it. There was a large pitcher of ­water with an ornate handle that looked like it was made of real silver, and there were forks and spoons. 

The highest hierarchy of the crystalline sky begins just beyond the orbit of the fifty-second Aristotelian planet. This part of the cosmos already belongs to the INVISIBLE HORIZON. Isidore of Seville, who describes it, never saw snow himself. Nor does he claim to know the creatures of flame, the six-winged, eyeless beings that make up the order of the seraphim.