My Year of Rest and Relaxation

The Death of Marat was one of my favorite paintings. A man stabbed to death in the bathtub.

Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?

I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time.

Walking up First Avenue, everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born—the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile.

either creation nor sacrifice could lead a person to heaven.

Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.

each teardrop shed a vision

“When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears—into the black holes in our eyes.

, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.