One wing of the British Museum, in a crowd in a heatwave while jetlagged, but I did get to see Lindow Man (an ancestor), the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the Lewis chessmen. One wing of the V&A on a cooler day and lunch with a friend in the spectacular cafe, the first museum cafe ever, what a good innovation. A bookshop in Notting Hill; no, not that one, the other one. Bike rides to Westminster and Chelsea. The Chelsea Physic Garden with a glass of Pimm’s and another friend: you are my medicine.

Our rental car: an electric blue Mini Cooper. Avebury henge, even more beautiful than I imagined it, with a gratuitous game of cricket off to one side. The warm surface of the stones, so large, so lichen-y: more ancestors. Oak trees in golden grasslands like it’s freakin’ West Sonoma county out here. Cheshire at golden hour, with hares grazing among the sheep and cattle in the hayfields. Reading Elizabeth Gaskell, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor (not that one, the other one), Virginia Woolf. A Hendricks and tonic under a tree at the Cholmondeley Arms. A walk around the Roman walls of Chester. Jodrell Bank, peering out at the cosmic microwave radiation: another ancestor.

Although Britain has yet to produce the quantities of superb art found on the continent, there are one or two examples of carving on bone, ivory and stone. My personal favourite is a very confident yet delicately executed horse’s head on a fragment of horse rib, found in a cave at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire.

She considered other writers aloofly. “Shakespeare,” she said reluctantly. “Perhaps Goethe,” she added, using a pronunciation of her own.

The Major had told him one day that in five years’ time no one would read any more. Later, archaeologists would ponder on, argue about, what books had been for. ‘It’ll all be telly; visual aids.’ ‘Then why are more books published every year?’

Seldom penetrated by love for mankind as I am, I sometimes feel sorry for the poor who don’t read Shakespeare

Did people then only go for the light and warmth, the coffee after the Sunday morning service and a friendly word from the vicar?

In 1970 the American Indian Student Association at the University of Minnesota satirized the archaeological establishment by submitting a proposal to the National Science Foundation that called for the exhumation and scientific analysis of human remains in a pioneer cemetery.

They said he had tuberculosis, but it was a mysterious death—one of the first I heard of—that fluttered the nerve endings of our collective subconscious. Someone was walking on our graves.

If you take a vacation with a close friend and it’s not the best goddamn time either of you has ever had in years, it was a flop, and marks the end of the good times between the two of you forever.

“You can feel it on that one, like a tingle. You ever feel something like that? Like you can just feel the ghosts of the raped around a certain kind of man?” “I know what you mean,” Trace says. She does. She has felt this, often.

I don’t want to divide the world up into categories anymore, I want to understand.

My writing utopia supports both introversion and community. It’s urban, but also oceanic. We heal our shameful histories with honesty and reparations. Everyone has a guaranteed minimum income. In my writing utopia, we center creativity and joy. We don’t bend to the needs of capitalism.  We know that imperialistic story structures will never destroy the empire.

I get that sometimes, the strange sense of waking up and being shocked to realize that I am me and not some other person.

Language is pitiable when weighed against experience.

As I approached the doorway to Earth, I was hesitant to enter. I kept looking over my shoulder. I heard the crisp voice of the releaser of souls urge me forward. “Don’t look back!” And I remembered how Earth is a heavy teacher yet is so much loved by the creator of planetary beings.

I cried happy tears five times this week, four times over Artemis 2 and its crew, my emotional support astronauts, just like anyone else who was paying the slightest attention. Moon joy indeed. But the fifth! On Wednesday Mary, my riding teacher, took my arm to correct my hand position slightly, and exclaimed: “Your wrist! It’s like a brick!” We spent the rest of that lesson and the next focused on making my wrists as soft as possible. It was a fault in my riding that was hard to see but easy to feel: easy for Mary to diagnose, and easy for Lenny to complain about.

He’s such a funny, stubborn, sensitive horse. As soon as I concentrated on soft wrists, soft wrists, to the exclusion of everything else, he stopped tossing his head, reached into the bridle and gave a contented sigh. And stayed there, soft and round and happy, until halfway through the next lesson, when I had to halt in the middle of the ring to have a very big emotion.

It felt like I was riding a made horse, a horse Pam or Carrie had trained, not my own opinionated little mustang that I have been riding for seven years. It isn’t just my wrists, of course. It was a thousand thousand pieces we have been working on forever, and this was a tiny addition, but it was a load-bearing tiny addition, a phase change. Before and after.

Outside of the tiny circle of people who ride Lenny, and people who teach me and Lenny, and obviously Lenny and myself, all this effortful and painstaking work doesn’t matter and will disappear when we are both dead. But we did this, together, my stout little chestnut gelding and me.

The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution

I don’t think there’s virtue in labor for the sake of labor, in endlessly harvesting beyond one’s needs.

The land we stand on feels solid, but the continents float on molten magma like dumplings on a simmering stew.

Abraxa loves them both, wishes them only good. They’ll leave me, she tells herself, and then the thought rearranges itself like a warm wax lamp: they’ll let me go.