“Today I saw a grove of fruit trees in a field of yellow flowers, and I relived, for a split second, the strange sublime scene along the road to Cuenca in Spain—where the trees were giant burls with shoots that exploded in yellow leaves like sparklers, backlit as they...

“I went swimming early this morning. The air was cool, the water warm. Sunlight on the wavelets cast a pattern on the aqua floor of the pool—a shimmering undulating net, like meshed lightning. With a child’s absorption in her toes, I trod that enchanted trap.        ...

“I could say that Karl and I have junked our old classroom schedule, to our mutual relief. I could say that my voice teacher and I are confiding like conspirators of long-standing. I could talk at length about the evening I spent playing charades with Kay and company,...

“To feel the pleasant cool spot of my own finger poised against my cheek, to savor everything a little, laugh when the crazy pampas grass stalk in my car lurched softly into my face, to pull my wool cap down to my eyebrows and rejoice that I’d found it on the seat of...

“This is the strangest day of illness of all. I am unaccountably fitful. One minute I spring up with an apparent surfeit of energy and pace about, restlessly reviewing plans and projects in my mind, the next I fall suddenly into a sleep, like a swoon, for five minutes...