As the worshipper kneels to pray and the treasure-hunter kneels down to open a hidden drawer, the narrator gathers Flaubert.

…to make eye contact with outsiders to broaden our compassion for the human experience

…and set great expectations of a culture and a nation.

We long for her not to shatter the town.

…because her grandmother had “fishy” dreams and nobody else was confessing

We absorb balance and goodness and look for his look-alike in our neighborhood.

we, the readers, await the realization of wrongdoing

…without calling herself victim, and him villain.

The family story ends unsentimentally.

It’s hard to miss his disquiet with status.

…how to incorporate gossip…how to avoid sociological treatment and retain a sense of judgment.

…to nurture his capacity to see the world askew.

Who will produce ideas, who will earn a living?

… joyless and joyful moments in bright rooms overflowing with believers, in two prison cells, in one red Cadillac. 

…the husband who longs to transform the moon into a pool of water so his waitress-wife can soak her feet…

But does he who diagnosed a repressed society in the early 1900s have anything to say to us, we who live by expressing?  

As a student in UC Berkeley, he avoids “hobby lobby classes.”

…we may better see how Malcolm X, another disciple of the Nation of Islam, found a method for his many reinventions.

Talents indispensable to historians are somewhat mysterious.

In the final reckoning, whatever his purpose or motives, he stubbornly chose his course.