I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.

Unless you are rich, and can con vales center in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you ato your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.

People act as if the internet will never die, that the Cloud will never die. In the face of that, much of human civilization, including our human bodies, seem so defective and mortal and constantly fading. Our lifespan is 80 years, 90 years if we're lucky, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to how long we think the internet will live.

I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, God always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.

If beauty is only skin deep, look really, really hard.