from The Fatalist: The best words get said frequently‚ they are like fertile pips.

The best words get said frequently—they are like fertile pips. Apples fall heavily to the ground and lie in the sun, their scent abandoning them as a philosophy which cannot be further perfected. Love releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life to think about. Take R—the only thing R could credit herself with was having lived her life and so she not only kept an account of it but did so not in the privacy of a diary but in the form of letters —abundant, profligate, indiscrete—that I want to write to you so as to note something that I read this morning: “It’s not that this or that means something to me but this!—or that!— means something to me.” Musically R bequeaths herself to posterity as a scholar might bequeath his or her library blowing twisted veils of rain past the narrow and curving windows in the last hour that will carry us along to the time when those who come after us will learn what we know—a man with a mustache waxed and dyed green, a line of tall people and a woman at the door, a committee of children without scooters but not mournful, a poet with a motive, a pilot with a flashlight, a sulking but fascinated scholar, and Goethe no doubt for whom R would have released a flock of red canaries.