The Flamethrowers

by Rachel Kushner

Sometimes all the information is there in the first five minutes, laid out for inspection. Then it goes away, gets suppressed as a matter of pragmatism. It’s too much to know a lot about strangers. But some don’t end up strangers. They end up closer, and you had your five minutes to see what they were really like and you missed it.

Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.

We listened to Stravinsky, harsh but stirring strings, sounds that were like stiff brushes dipped in paint and used to make a geometry of lines in stark black.

Fools love to declare that they don’t suffer fools.

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.