The yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. Being enlightened wasn’t easy. It was very hard work. It was manual labor actually.

I stopped smoking, it was McClaid. From hyperventilation. Take one step you’re wafted on top of the shrubbery. You lose your hands and feet, then your head just bounces away. Except with McClaid

As she enters, it all but caresses her, the oval mirror, the luminous, tightly drawn curtains, and her shadow, an anonymous lady-in-waiting who brushes the snow from her heartshaped fur collar.

Monica calls. There is a confessional tone to her voice and I don’t want to hear the confession, the voice, anything. I’m already hungover from the upheavals of the preceding day plus I have a headache from

I read the New York Times each morning. It’s a part of the breakfast ritual. Hot coffee and the smell of printer’s ink. I depend on the regularity of these pleasures. When the paper went on strike, I suffered

Mao flicks on the radio. Music fills the room, half-notes like the feet of birds. It is a martial tune, the prelude from “The Long March.” Then there are quotations from Chairman Mao, read in a voice saturated

Today I helped bury Reinhold Wladyslaw Bezinski, the man who saved me from becoming an embittered, second-rate French horn player, I once thought telling this story would pay my debt to him.

Ever since his return from hell he dreamed of paradise. The idea struck him suddenly one afternoon at the office. But he put it off in haste trying to concentrate on the work at hand. The thought popped

I was going to say that this letter is difficult to write, but then you would wonder why I am writing it, so I will not make it easy for me by saying that it is difficult, but simply go ahead, if I can.

I am not a lucky traveler. Business has taken me often to the far parts of the world and on these journeys I have made it unhappy practice to fall ill in the place I am visiting. This time it is nothing more