Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Jinny speaking:

“Come, then, let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. The body is stronger than I thought. I am dizzier than I supposed. I do not care for anything in the world. I do not care for anybody save this man whose name I do not know. Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? My peers may look at me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one of you. This is my world. Now I take this thin-stemmed glass and sip. Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Scent and flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, to a yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture; this is relief. The bar at the back of my throat lowers itself. Words crowd and cluster and push forth one on top of another. It does not matter which. They jostle and mount on each other’s shoulders. The single and the solitary mate, tumble and become many. It does not matter what I say. Crowding, like a fluttering bird, one sentence crosses the empty space between us. It settles on his lips. I fill my glass again. I drink. The veil drops between us. I am admitted to the warmth and privacy of another soul. We are together, high up, on some Alpine pass. He stands melancholy on the crest of the road. I stoop. I pick a blue flower and fix it, standing on tiptoe to reach him, in his coat. There! That is my moment of ecstasy. Now it is over.”

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SDH

I’m Scott David Herman, I’m an American living in Canada, and I’ve been running erasing.org since 1999.

The expatriate life is very glamorous. I live and work on the fifth floor of a mid-rise glass-and-concrete ant farm situated in the abandoned ruins of downtown Hamilton, that legendary city many call the most beautiful smoke-spewing slag heap in all of Southern Ontario.

I enjoy staring into open books, mentally rotating Shakespeare’s skeleton, stacking objects in my quote-unquote office, and chopping at the Parnassian permafrost in the company of my wife Laura.

You can email me at scott at erasing.org.