tried to remember the sequence of a poem she’d wanted to quote to a patient earlier in the week, about Old Masters and suffering: how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. The point, of course, being the whole bright dailiness of agony, the way Icarus in the Brueghel painting could crash to earth as little but a background detail while the bland spool of life went on in the foreground, the plowman at his plow and the fabric of the day untouched, uninterrupted.
