Cold Enough for Snow

Perhaps, over time, she found the past harder and harder to evoke, especially with no one to remember it with.

Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner

I said it was almost like how painters had once used the camera obscura: by looking indirectly at the thing they wanted to focus on, they were sometimes able to see it even more clearly than with their own eyes

I wondered how I could feel so at home in a place that was not mine.

it was like we were children again, mad and excitable, endlessly talking, endlessly laughing, always hungry for more.

I wanted for some reason to speak more about the room, and what I had felt in it, that strange keenness. Wasn’t it incredible, I wanted to say, that once there were people who were able to look at the world – leaves, trees, rivers, grass – and see its patterns, and, even more incredible, that they were able to find the essence of those patterns, and put them to cloth? But I found I could not.

I felt that this would put us on equal footing in some way, to both be made strangers.