The quieter notebook,
kept by lamplight.

The trick to a long lunch is to forget that you ordered it.

The bread arrives, then the wine, then the conversation — and somewhere around the third small plate the afternoon collapses gently inwards, like a tent in soft rain. I have been trying for some years to work out whether this is laziness or grace.

The honest answer is that I no longer think the two are different things; they are simply the same act, performed at different volumes. A long lunch is grace at the volume of laziness. A meeting is laziness at the volume of grace. I prefer the lunch.

Airports at five in the morning are confessional.

Everyone is honest, briefly, because no one has slept enough to perform. The coffee is terrible and the lighting is worse and somehow it's the most truthful room I'm ever in all year.

I have started writing in airports the way I used to write in churches: with the assumption that whoever else is in the room is having the same low-level metaphysical crisis I am, and that this is private and shared at once.

On souvenirs, and the small objects we ask too much of.

A souvenir is just a small object asked to do too much. I keep buying linen napkins and matchboxes from bars I'll never return to, and arranging them on a shelf as if that constitutes remembering. The shelf is now full and I am no better at remembering.

Sentences I keep re-reading — and why I don't trust the ones that are too clever.

The sentences I return to most are not the ones I admired first. They are the ones I underlined and then forgot I had underlined, and found again a year later in better light. There is something humbling about being moved twice by the same line.