Finished three more stories from Shields this week.
Just some quotes:
“Taking the Train”
Later, she came to see happiness as something chancy and unreliable, a flash of light beating at the edge of a human eye or a tin piece of glass to be carried secretly inside her head.
Home
By some extraordinary coincidence (or cosmic dispensation or whatever), each person on the London-bound flight that night was, for a moment, filled with the steam of perfect happiness. Whether it was the oxygen-enriched air of the fusiform cabin, or the duckling with orange sauce, or the souffle-soft buttocks of the stewardess sashaying to and for with her coffeepot, or the unchartable currents of air bouncing against the sides of the vessel, or some random thought dredged out of the darkness of the aircraft and fueled by the proximity of strangers — whatever it was, each of the one hundred passengers — one after another, from rows one to twenty-five, like little lights going on — experienced an intense, simultaneous sensation of joy. They were for that moment swimmers riding a single wave, tossed upward by infection or clairvoyance or a slant of perception uniquely heightened by an accident of altitude.
The Journal
Since it is close to five o’clock, they’re beginning to gather in small cafes and bars and ‘salons du the’ in order to treat themselves to glasses of wine or beer or perhaps small cups of bitter espresso. A ‘quotidian quaff’ is the tickling phrase that pops into Harold’s head, and it seems to him there is not one person in all of Reims, in all of France for that matter, who is not now happily seated in some warm public corner and raising pleasing liquids to his lips. He experiences a nudge of grief because he does not happen to live in a country where people gather publicly at this hour to sip drinks and share anecdotes and debate ideas.
