“I was thinking about this book I had read as a girl, about a family pioneering in the forest somewhere or other, for whom small things brought such great pleasure, an orange for Christmas, a crisp dress ordered from a catalog. It made such a huge impression on me, I remember, how such little gifts could be treasured like that. It was as if I couldn’t locate the sense of it in my own life, I couldn’t see the gifts, I had to imagine them coming still.

“Except that now I looked back on it, I perceived them so clearly, those small, significant joys: in the images in my books, and the hot dogs I ate on the beach, and the way my mother rhythmically squeezed my hand as I walked alongside her. It was this struggle, always, to take joy and make it present. To live and stop planning to live.”