I think of Baldwin arriving on the Left Bank with virtually nothing, just after the war, and how almost immediately he fell gravely ill. He lay in his grim hotel room and might have died if the Corsican woman who owned it had not decided to nurse him; to climb the stairs each day and make sure that he had food, that he was still alive.
Read MoreOne day I climbed the bones of a grand staircase in an entryway off the back courtyard. It had been stripped of its plaster, stripped of its embellishments, but seemed structurally sound. It led up to another staircase, and then up to a locked door.
Read More“…it may have developed separately, a kind of writerly convergent evolution, a carcinization of words, like how animals keep independently evolving into the shape of crabs, over and over again in the dark depths of the seas. Creatures forged by the same environmental pressures.”
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