"Ragtime"

<Father went on an Arctic exploration.>

• Mother lifted the back of her wrist to her forehead and pushed aside a strand of hair.
• ... writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
• What amazed father was the means by which the small and inoffensive auk was done in. One simply nudged the tiny heart in its breast.
• three or four tins of unused tea - incredible treasures in the North, but here in the parlor the embarrassing possessions of a savage.
  

<The boy>

• The boy treasured anything discarded... In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect.
• Grandfather's stories (from Ovid) proposed to him that the forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else.
• He listened with fascination to the Victrola and played the same record over and over, whatever it happened to be, as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event.
• It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
  

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