I imagine the world as the cut side of a huge metal cylinder. The cut face open to everything, its nerve endings exposed, so that all the events and emotions are felt at this cut face; all the world just an effect of this cut. And everything else, the power-tripping, beer bellied, disgusting bureaucrats, and the loud, large-eyed man with lecherous male pattern baldness, these are all specks of dust in the otherwise clean, painfully exposed cut.
Yesterday, I read quite a bit of Jhumpa Lahiri, her interview with the Paris Review, a short story, a diary entry. I was teetering at the edge of sleep, covering myself with a grey blanket to escape the wind the fan beat down on me, and something suggested itself to me. A suggestion of something beautiful, so beautiful that if I could capture it in a page, it would open the gates of literary expression to me. But the suggestion was so fragile, that a moment of wakefulness pried it away from my hands and returned me to the world with the heavy feeling of loss.