— Vanessa Duriès, Le Lien This is much later, now, of course. I’m in New Hampshire, beautiful lake country. It was an impulse decision to come up here from the Cape. I can think clearly up here; the city can be intellectually claustrophobic, what with the low-ceilinged apartments, the earsplitting noise and lack of sky. It’s early morning: I’m sitting on a lake, paging through a book I still haven’t read, my father’s copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. So what happened? I actually like lakes more than oceans, anyway, having grown up on a lake myself; the blue is more pungent, and they’re smooth, smooth enough to allow a small pool of petrol to spread unperturbed, amply, into a black and gold plate, shimmering like an insect’s wing, radiating, really approaching insubstantiality, like the Euclidean plane that bisects space. I remember taking a motorboat out on a lake in upstate Wisconsin with my father when I was young. The smell of petrol on a predawn lake, while environmentally harmful, is nevertheless one of the most beautiful odors in the world.
