Status Updates From Against the Day

“‘So,’ the Professor had gone on to explain, ‘if one accepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude. . . .’”

“Not a wisp of smoke, not the last, wind-muted cry of a steam siren, only the good-bye letter waiting this morning on her work-table, held now like a crushed handkerchief in her pocket, in which he had given her his heart—but which she could not open again and read for fear that through some terrible magic she had never learned to undo, it might have become, after all, a blank sheet.”

“Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that ‘photography’ and ‘alchemy’ were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals.”