Princeton’s campus is insulated from the dangers of a city. It teems with P-Safe cars. But for much of the community, in the privacy of our dorm rooms and our own mattresses, it is not safe.
The wind in the west blows across the Sioux prairieland, bending the wheat stalks at their waists. Nelson Elling lies beneath the swaying stalks, and from where he’s sprawled the wheat fields are dusted in a purpling haze.
The Prince article on the death of Tobias Kim does not speak about him as a person so much as a story pitch, someone whose meaning was apparent in the story he could provide. “Argentina”—Where? Why? To say it was sensationalist would defeat the purpose; I am not here to write about what the Prince did wrong, nor am I here to correct it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, bibliophiles and book lovers and lovers and book characters and bookish lovers and lovers of lovers of books, you all want the same thing. You aren’t unique for wanting this. People have done it before. Those doomed lovers in Atonement, releasing their furious need against each other, just once, bolstered by the burnished bookcase behind the two beloved.
If you get off the N train at 8th street, walk past the tattoo parlors and bright storefronts of St. Mark’s Place, you’ll find the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant next to a corner of other Ukrainian bakeries.
I’m sitting on one of the loveseats in the Starbucks on Nassau Street, weirdly conscious of my calves sticking to the cold leather seat covers, experiencing what I imagine only certain paparazzi have felt at the peaks of their careers. The strangeness of spending years seeing someone in two dimensions, only to have them sitting across from you, alive and fidgeting. Lorena Grundy gestures at my coffee cup.
