Three weeks after Trevor died a trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing a miracle, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them.

It was the act of imagining herself as she had once been that enriched her syntax and extended not only her images but the coherent flow of association that led directly into the task at hand.

The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. It was, after all, a baptism by fire that was being described. To see her ambitious young self burning to know what her mentor knew, we had to see the mentor as well: an agent of threat and promise: a figure of equal complexity.

It is as though to put black people into fiction or to imagine them in the future would be to participate in an unseemly exercise in political balance, as though black presence could only and ever be there to represent “blackness.” He can hear himself arguing now and he dislikes the sound of it.

He had thought of Tuymans and Dumas but now he thinks of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose portraits are all of fictional persons. There is an abundance of black presence in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, black people who do not exist anywhere but in her paintings, paintings that may be set in the past, present, or future.

The world is a wild and wondrous place, it cannot be mastered, but within the dimensions of a painted picture, large or small, some of its complexity can be contemplated and some of its strangeness can be enjoyed.

A lot of the suffering we will witness in life will be greater than ours. There’s the question of what we can do to help and the different question of what to do when we can’t help. Often one thinks of another’s suffering: my dear friend you have so much life due you, how can this be happening? (I’m at Mass General waiting to see Emily.) For the sake of loyalty we keep in our minds the imagination of their private anguish. We cycle through all the emotions with them but often we also think—or behave as if we think—the abyss is remote for us.