"The Sea"

<'Yes, things endure, while the living lapse.'>

• Arrived home, we sat outside the house in the car for a long time, loath of venturing in upon the known,saying nothing, strangers to ourselves and each other as we suddenly were.
• our afflicted presence
• In the midst of the imperial progress that was our life together a grinning losel had stepped out of the cheering crowd and sketching a parody of a bow had handed my tragic queen the warrant of impeachment.
  
• I marvelled, not for the first time, at the cruel complacency of ordinary things. But no, not cruel, not complacent, only indifferent, as how could they be otherwise? Henceforth I would have to address things as they are, not as I might imagine them, for this was a new version of reality.
• "Take off your coat, at least," I said. <> But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse.
• From this day forward all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.
  

__ Tall grasses in the ditch, blond like the woman's hair, shivered briefly and returned to their former dreaming stillness.
__ At the seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.
__ ...hens picked their way with finical steps among their own chalk-and-olive-green droppings

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