“Like a puppet show … Maybe it breathed like a paper flower, expanding and contracting. Maybe it was something you did just to pass the time.” — Christine Smallwood, The LIfe of the Mind (Hogarth, March 2, 2021).
But now, Dorothy wondered: What was failure? What was success? Ribbons swirling in a cold tank. Life was not a story that ended on a resolution or a revelation. It was like this puppet show—a gentle, ongoing state of ups and downs that contained moments of illusory transcendence and ultimately built to nothing, no epiphanies, or so many epiphanies that they ran together and were forgotten. Maybe it breathed like a paper flower, expanding and contracting. Maybe it was something you did just to pass the time.
— Christine Smallwood, The LIfe of the Mind (Hogarth, March 2, 2021)
Photo: Lily
It Is What It Is 