Lie with Me

"I remember the movement of his hips pressing against the pinball machine. This one sentence had me in its grip until the end. Two young men find each other, always fearing that life itself might be the villain standing in their way. A stunning and heart-gripping tale." --André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

The critically acclaimed, internationally beloved novel by Philippe Besson--"this year's Call Me By Your Name" (Vulture) with raves in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vanity Fair, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Out--about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress and writer Molly Ringwald.

In this "sexy, pure, and radiant story" (Out), Philippe chances upon a young man outside a hotel in Bordeaux who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he's never forgotten, a hidden affair with a boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Thomas is the son of a farmer; Philippe the son of a school principal. At school, they don't acknowledge each other. But they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.

Despite the intensity of their attraction, from the beginning Thomas knows how it will end: "Because you will leave and we will stay," he says. Philippe becomes a writer and travels the world, though as this "tender, sensuous novel" (The New York Times Book Review) shows, he never lets go of the relationship that shaped him, and every story he's ever told.

"Beautifully translated by Ringwald" (NPR), this is "Philippe Besson's book of a lifetime...an elegiac tale of first, hidden love" (The New Yorker).

ISBN-13: 9781501197888

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Scribner

Publication Date: 04-07-2020

Pages: 176

Product Dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

Philippe Besson is an author, screenwriter, and playwright. His first novel, In the Absence of Men, was awarded the Emmanuel-Roblès Prize in 2001, and he is also the author of, among others, Late Autumn (Grand Prize RTL-Lire), A Boy from Italy, and The Atlantic House. In 2017 he published Lie With Me, a #1 French bestseller that won the the Maisons de la Presse Prize, and A Character from a Novel, an intimate portrait of Emmanuel Macron during his presidential campaign. His novels have been translated into twenty different languages. Molly Ringwald’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vogue, and she is the author of the bestselling novel-in-stories When It Happens to You. She previously translated Lie with Me, a novel by Philippe Besson.

Read an Excerpt

Lie With Me
It’s the playground of a high school, an asphalt courtyard surrounded by ancient gray stone buildings with big tall windows. Teenagers with backpacks or schoolbags at their feet stand around chatting in small groups, the girls with the girls and boys with boys. If you look carefully you might spot a supervisor among them, barely older than the rest.

It’s winter.

You can see it in the bare branches of a tree you would think was dead planted there in the middle of the courtyard, and in the frost on the windows, and in the steam escaping from mouths and the hands rubbing together for warmth.

It’s the mid eighties.

You can tell from the clothes, the high-waisted ultra-skinny acid-wash jeans, the patterned sweaters. Some of the girls wear woolen leggings in different colors that pool around their ankles.

I’m seventeen years old.

I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don’t listen. Their words roll over me but don’t stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck’s back. I’m an idiot. An easygoing idiot.

I’m a student in terminal C at the Lycée Elie Vinet de Barbezieux.

Barbezieux doesn’t exist.

Or let’s put it another way. No one can say: “I know this place, I can point to it on a map,” except perhaps for the readers (and they are more and more rare) of Jacques Chardonne, a Barbezieux native who in his writing extolled the town’s implausible “happiness.” Or those (and they are more numerous) who have a memory of taking Route 10 to formally begin their vacation at the beginning of August, in Spain or in Les Landes, only to find themselves stuck there—precisely there—in bumper-to-bumper traffic, thanks to a succession of poorly thought-out traffic lights and a narrowing of the highway.

It is in Charente, thirty kilometers south of Angoulême. The limestone soil lends itself to the cultivation of vines, unlike the cold, clay soil of neighboring Limousin. It’s an oceanic climate, with mild and rainy winters. There isn’t always a summer. As far back as I can remember, it’s the gray that dominates, and the humidity. The remains of Gallo-Roman churches, and scattered chateaux. Ours looked like a fortified castle but what was there really to defend? Surrounding us there were hills. It was said the landscape undulated. That’s about it.

I was born there. Back then we still had a maternity ward, but it closed many years ago. No one is born in Barbezieux anymore, the town is doomed to disappear.

And who knows Elie Vinet? They claim he was Montaigne’s teacher though this fact has never been seriously established. Let’s say he was a humanist of the sixteenth century, a translator of Catullus and the principal of the College of Guyenne in Bordeaux. As luck would have it, that brought him to Saint-Médard, an enclave of Barbezieux. The high school was named after him. We didn’t find anyone better.

And finally, who remembers the C terminals? They say “S” today, I think. Even if this initial does not represent the same reality. These were the classes in mathematics, supposedly the most selective, the most prestigious. The ones that opened the doors to the preparatory classes that in turn led to the big schools, while the others condemned you to local colleges or professional studies or vocational school or just stopped there, as though you had been left in a cul-de-sac.

So I’m from a bygone era, a dying city, a past without glory.

* * *

Understand me, though, I wasn’t depressed about it. This was just how it was. I didn’t choose it. Like everyone else, I made do.

At seventeen, I don’t have a clear awareness of the situation. At seventeen, I don’t dream of a modern life somewhere out there, in the stars, I just take what’s given to me. I don’t nurse any ambition, nor do I carry around any resentment. I’m not even particularly bored.

I am an exemplary student, one who never misses a class, who almost always gets the best grades, who is the pride of his teachers. Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.

* * *

I’m on the playground with everyone else. It’s recess. I just got out of two hours of philosophy (“Can one assume at the same time the liberty of man and the existence of the unconscious?”), the kind of subject we are told can show up on “the bac,” the French end-of-high-school exam. I’m waiting for my biology class. The cold stings my cheeks. I’m wearing a predominantly blue Nordic sweater. A shapeless sweater that I wear too often.

Jeans, white sneakers. And glasses. They’re new. My vision deteriorated drastically the year before. I became myopic over the course of a couple of weeks without knowing why and was ordered to wear glasses. I obeyed; I couldn’t do otherwise. My hair is fine and curly, my eyes greenish. I’m not beautiful, but I get attention; that I know. Not because of my appearance, but because of my grades. “He is brilliant,” they whisper, “much more advanced than the others, he will go far, like his brother, this family is one to be reckoned with.” We are in a place, in a moment, where nearly everyone goes nowhere; it garners me equal parts sympathy and antipathy.

* * *

I am this young man there, in the winter of Barbezieux.

* * *

With me are Nadine A., Genevieve C., Xavier C. Their faces are engraved in my memory when many others, more recent, have deserted me. They aren’t the ones I’m interested in though, but rather a boy in the distance leaning against the wall flanked by two other guys around his age. He’s a boy with shaggy hair, the hint of a beard, and a serious look. A boy from another class. Terminal D. Another world. There is an impenetrable border that stands between us. Maybe it’s contempt. Disdain, at the very least.

But I don’t see anyone but him, this slender and distant boy who doesn’t speak, who’s happy just to listen to the two guys talking next to him without interrupting. Without even smiling.

I know his name. Thomas Andrieu.

* * *

I should tell you: I’m the son of the teacher, the school principal. I grew up in a primary school eight kilometers from Barbezieux, in a first-floor apartment that was assigned to us above the village’s only schoolroom. My father was my teacher from kindergarten through middle school. Seven years of receiving his teachings, him in a gray button-down writing on the chalkboard, at the head of the room, us behind our wooden desks. Seven years heated by an oil stove, maps of France covering the walls; maps of an old France, with her rivers and tributaries, and the names of the towns written in a size proportional to their population, published by Armand Colin, and the shadow on the wall of the two linden trees outside the window. Seven years of saying “sir” during school hours, not because he asked it of me, but to make myself indistinguishable from my classmates, and also because my father embodied a quiet authority. After school, I stayed in the classroom with him to do my homework while he prepared the lessons for the following day, tracing in his big checkered notebook, filling the boxes with his beautiful handwriting. He turned on the radio to Jacques Chancel’s Radioscopie.

I haven’t forgotten. I came from this childhood.

My father insisted on good grades. I simply didn’t have the right to be mediocre or even average. There was only one place for me—first. He claimed that I would find salvation in my studies, that only study could “allow one to enter the elevator.” He wanted the top-ranking higher education establishments for me, nothing else. I obeyed, just as I had with my glasses. I had to.

* * *

I recently returned to this place of my childhood, this village that I hadn’t set foot in for years. I went back with S. so that he would know. The grid was still there with the ancient wisteria, but the lime trees had been cut down, and the school had closed a long time ago. There are housing units there now. I pointed out the window of my room to him. I tried to imagine the new occupants, but I couldn’t. After, we took the car out again and I showed him the place where a delivery truck (an old Citroën van that served as a sort of mini-market) came to town every two days, the stable where we would go to get our milk, the decrepit church, the little sloping cemetery, the forest that sprouted mushrooms at the beginning of October. He never imagined I came from such a rural, almost fossilized world. He told me, “It must have taken great will and determination to have lifted yourself out.” He didn’t say “ambition” or “courage” or “hate.” I told him: “It was my father who wanted it for me. I would have stayed in this childhood, in this cocoon.”

* * *

Thomas Andrieu, I don’t know who his father is or even if that matters. I don’t know where he lives. At that moment, I don’t know anything about him, except for terminal D. And his shaggy hair and somber look.

His name I know because I found it out for myself. Just like that, one day in the most casual way, before moving on to something else. But I didn’t find out any other details.

I absolutely didn’t want him to know that I was interested in him, because I didn’t want anyone to wonder why I was interested in him. Asking that question would only fuel the rumors about me. They say that I “prefer boys.” They say that I move like a girl sometimes. I’m not any good at sports, incapable of lifting weights or throwing the javelin, and completely uninterested in soccer and volleyball. Also, I love books, I read all the time. I can often be seen coming out of the school library with a novel in my hands. And I don’t have a girlfriend. That’s enough to give me a reputation. The insults blend together regularly: “dirty fag” (sometimes just “faggot”), yelled from far away or murmured right next to me. I try to ignore them, to never respond, to manifest a perfect indifference, as though I didn’t hear anything (as though it would have been possible not to). But that only makes it worse: a real heterosexual boy would never allow that kind of thing to be said about him. He would vehemently deny it and beat up the person who gave the insult. To allow it to be said is to confirm it.

* * *

Of course I “prefer boys.”

But I’m not capable of saying this sentence out loud yet.

I discovered my orientation very young, at eleven years old. Even then I knew. My attraction was for a boy in the village who was two years older than me named Sébastien. The house that he lived in, not far from ours, had an addition, a sort of barn. Upstairs, after climbing a makeshift staircase, you would enter a room full of anything and everything. There was even a mattress. It was on this mattress where I rolled around in Sébastien’s embrace for the first time. We had not gone through puberty yet, but we were already curious about each other’s bodies. His was the first male sex I held in my hand, other than my own. My first kiss was the one he gave me. My first embrace, skin against skin, was with him.

We took refuge in my parents’ camper, which was parked in our garage for the winter at the end of the season. (At the beginning of spring it will be found in the Saint-Georges-de-Didonne campground, where we spend weekends walking on the beach, buying churros at the waterfront and fresh shrimp at the market that will end up in bowls later when it’s time for drinks before dinner.)

I knew where the key was. It was dark and the air was stale but while the gestures could have been more precise, we were not modest.

Today I’m struck by our creativity because at the time, there was no Internet, not even videocassettes or cable TV. We had never seen any porn, and yet we still knew how to do it. There are things one knows how to do even as a child. By puberty, we would be even more imaginative. That would come fast.

I was not at all troubled by this revelation. On the contrary, it enchanted me. First, because it played out in the dark and children are fond of secret games. And then also because I didn’t see the harm in feeling good; I had experienced pleasure with Sébastien and I couldn’t conceive of associating that pleasure with anything wrong. Finally because this union crystallized my difference. So I would not resemble the others after all. In this one regard, I would stop being the model child. I wouldn’t follow the pack. Out of instinct, I despised packs. That has never changed.

Later I’ll hear the famous insults, the obscene insinuations. I’ll see the effeminate gestures that are overplayed in my presence, the limp wrists, the rolling eyes, the mimed blow jobs. If I shut up, it’s just to avoid being confronted by violence. Is it cowardice? Perhaps. I prefer to see it as a kind of necessary self-protection. But I will never change. I will never think: It’s bad, or It would be better to be like everyone else, or I will lie to them so that they’ll accept me. Never. I stick to who I am. In silence, of course, but it’s a proud, stubborn silence.

I remembered the name. Thomas Andrieu.

I find it a handsome name, a beautiful identity. I don’t know yet that one day I will write books, that I will invent characters and I will have to name those characters, but I am already sensitive to the sound of identities, to their fluidity. However, I do know that first names can betray a social origin, a context that anchors those who carry them to a particular era.

I will discover that Thomas Andrieu is ultimately a misleading name.

First of all, Thomas was not a common name given to boys during the sixties in France (“my” Thomas is eighteen years old in 1984). Usually the boys then were named Phillippe, Patrick, Pascal, or Alain. In the seventies, it’s the Christophes, Stéphanes, and Laurents that will prevail. The Thomases will make their breakthrough in the nineties. So the black-eyed boy is ahead of his time. Or rather it’s his parents who are. That’s what I deduce. And then yet again, I will discover that that’s not the case either. It was the name of a grandfather who died prematurely, is all.

The Andrieu surname is an enigma. It could be the name of a general, of a man of the cloth, of a farmer. All the same, it strikes me as an everyman’s name without my knowing enough to justify that thought.

I can imagine everything. And I don’t deprive myself of doing so. On certain days, T.A. is a bohemian child from a family sympathetic to the May ’68 riots. On other days, he’s the wanton son of a bourgeois couple, as the children of uptight parents often are.

It’s my obsession with inventing characters. I told you about this.

In any case, I like to repeat his name to myself in secret. I like to write it on scraps of paper. I am stupidly sentimental: that hasn’t changed much.

So, that morning I stand on the playground and secretly stare at Thomas Andrieu.

It’s a moment that has occurred before. On many occasions, I’ve briefly cast an eye in his direction. It’s also happened that I’ve passed him in the hallway, seen him coming toward me, brushed up against him, felt him receding behind my back without turning around. I’ve found myself in the lunchroom at the same time, him eating lunch with the guys from his class, me with my friends, but we’ve never shared the same table; the classes don’t mix. One time I spotted him as he stood on the dais during a class, making a presentation. Certain classrooms have windows and this time, I slowed down to study him. He was too busy doing his presentation to notice me. Sometimes he sits alone on the steps in front of the school and smokes a cigarette. I caught his blind gaze once as the smoke evaporated from his mouth. At night, I’ve seen him leave the school, headed to the Campus, a bar that adjoins the school along the National 10 highway, probably to meet up with friends. Passing in front of the windows of the bar, I recognized him drinking a beer, playing pinball. I remember the movement of his hips pressing against the pinball machine.

But there has never been a word exchanged between us. No contact, not even inadvertently, and I always stopped myself from lingering so as not to arouse his surprise or discomfort at being stared at.

I’m thinking he doesn’t know me at all. Of course he’s probably seen me, but there can be nothing fixed in his memory, not the slightest image. Maybe he’s heard the rumors about me, but he doesn’t mix with the ones who whistle at and mock me.

There’s no chance either that he’s heard the praise the teachers have given me: we’ve never been in the same class.

To him, I’m a stranger.

I’m in this state of one-way desire.

I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine. But I have to constantly contain and compress it so that it doesn’t betray me in front of others. Because I’ve already understood that desire is visible.

Momentum too; I feel it. I sense a movement, a trajectory, something that will bring me to him.

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.

I am acutely aware of the impossibility.

Difficulty, you can cope with; you can deploy ruses, try to seduce. There is beauty in the hope of conquest. But impossibility, by nature, carries with it a sense of defeat.

This boy is obviously not for me.

And not even because I’m not attractive or seductive. It’s simply because he’s lost to boys. He’s not for us, for those like me. It’s the girls who will win him.

Not only that, all the girls are in his orbit. They circle him, constantly seeking his attention. Even those who feign indifference do so only to win his favor.

And him; he watches what they do. He knows that they find him attractive. Good-looking guys always know it. It’s a calm kind of certainty.

Sometimes he lets them approach. I’ve already seen him with a select few, usually the pretty ones. Immediately I feel a fleeting stab of jealousy, a sense of impotence.

But that being the case, most of the time, he seems to keep the girls at a distance, choosing the company of his guy friends. His preference for friendship, or at least the camaraderie that comes with it, seems to outweigh any other consideration. And I’m surprised, precisely because he could easily use his beauty as a weapon; he is at the age of conquests, when one often impresses others by multiplying those conquests. However his reticence does nothing to feed a secret hope in me. It just makes him even more appealing because I admire those who don’t use what they have at their disposal.

He also likes his solitude. It’s obvious. He speaks little, smokes alone. He has this attitude, his back up against the wall, looking up toward the sun or down at his sneakers, this manner of not quite being there in the world.

I think I love him for this loneliness, that it’s what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.

* * *

But let’s come back to that winter morning in 1984. It’s a winter of violent winds, bad weather, shipwrecks in the English Channel and snowstorms on the mountains, we see the rush of these images on the morning news. It’s a morning that should have been like all the others, consumed by my desire and his ignorance of it. Except on that particular morning, the unexpected happens.

As recess draws to a close and the bell rings, announcing the beginning of class, students leave the biting cold of the playground and go back into the hallways, talking mostly about politics, television shows, and our next vacation, coming in February.

Nadine, Genevieve, and Xavier head off to get their school bags from the student lounge, leaving me alone. I’m crouched down trying to find my biology textbook in the mess of my backpack when suddenly I sense a presence beside me. I immediately recognize the white sneakers. It’s excruciating. Slowly, I raise my head to look at the boy above me. Thomas Andrieu is standing there, also alone. He’s framed by a cloudless blue sky, cold sun rays behind him. His friends are probably taking the stairs back up to class. Later he will tell me that he invented a pretext for them to go ahead without him, saying he had to pick up a magazine at the library, or something like that. He stands there in the winter cold with me at his feet. I get up, surprised, trying not to betray my confusion and fear. I think he might punch me. The idea crosses my mind that he could beat my face in without a witness. I don’t know why he would do such a thing; maybe the insults are no longer enough and he has to do something more concrete. In any case, I tell myself it’s in the realm of possibility, that it can happen—which says a lot about the antipathy I believe I provoke, but also my oblivion, because instead he calmly says: I don’t want to go to the lunchroom today. We can eat a sandwich in town. I know a place. He gives me an address and an exact time. I look at him for a moment and then say that I’ll be there. He briefly closes his eyes, as if in relief. And then he’s gone, without saying another word. I remain dumbly rooted to the spot with my biology book in my hand before crouching down again to close my backpack. I know that this scene just happened, I’m not crazy, and at the same time it seems entirely unbelievable. I scan the asphalt tarmac, the emptiness of the playground, surrounded by a growing silence.

* * *

For a long time I will return to this moment, a moment in which a young man approached me with a confident stride. I think of it as the perfect little crack in an extraordinarily brief window of opportunity.

If I had not been abandoned by my friends, if he had failed to convince his to leave him behind, this moment would not have taken place. It could have almost never happened.

I try to figure out the part that chance played, to assess the nature of the risk that led to the encounter, but I don’t succeed. We are in the land of the unthinkable. (Later he will tell me that he waited for the right moment to approach me but until that morning it had never arisen.)

In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life.

It starts there, in the winter of my seventeenth year.

* * *

At the given hour, I push open the door of the café.

It’s at the end of the town. I’m surprised by the choice of the place, since it’s not at all central, or easily accessible. I think: He must like places away from the crowd. I do not yet understand that he obviously chose it to be out of sight. I am in this state of innocence, this stupidity. If I were used to exercising caution, or had developed the art of not responding to questions—but I barely know anything yet of concealment, of the clandestine.

I discover it there in this nearly empty café, just at the edge of town. The people here are only passing through. They’re people on road trips taking a break before resuming their journeys, or gamblers who bet on the horses stopping by just to redeem a winning ticket. Or the glassy-eyed old boozers leaning on the counter, railing against the socialist-communist government. People who don’t know us, in any case, for whom we represent nothing and to whom we will say nothing. People who will forget us the moment we leave.

He’s already there when I cross the threshold. He arranged to arrive before me, perhaps to make sure that he wasn’t followed, that we weren’t seen walking in together.

As I walk toward him, I notice the humid tiles that stick to my shoes, the blue and yellow Formica tables. I imagine the wet sponge that was quickly passed over them as soon as the espresso cups were emptied, the pints of beer consumed. I see old posters of advertisements for Cinzano and Byrrh stuck to the walls, a France from the 1950s. A guy with a stern face stands behind the counter with a ragged towel on his shoulder, as if he just stepped out of a gangster film with Lino Ventura. I feel like an intruder.

Thomas sits at the back of the room trying not to be seen. He’s smoking, or rather he nervously pulls on a cigarette (we still smoked in cafés back then). A draft beer sits in front of him (alcohol was also served to minors). As I approach, I see his nervousness, see that it’s actually just shyness. I wonder if he feels shame. I want to believe that it’s only embarrassment, a question of modesty. I remember, also, that he’s reserved in a way that sets him apart. I could be put off, but instead it moves me. Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.

When I sit across from him, without saying a word, he doesn’t lift his head at first, keeping his eyes on the ashtray. He taps on his cigarette to make the ashes fall, but he hasn’t smoked it enough. It’s a gesture intended to convey composure, but it only makes him appear more vulnerable. He doesn’t touch his beer. Me, I stay silent thinking it’s up to him to speak first, since he was the one to initiate this strange meeting. I guess that my silence accentuates his discomfort, but what can I do?

I’m trembling. I can feel it in my bones, like when the cold seizes you unexpectedly. I tell myself he has to notice the trembling at least.

Finally, he speaks. I expect something ordinary, to break the ice, something to extricate us from the incongruity of the situation and put us back in the world of the banal. He could ask me how I am, or if I like the place, or if I want something to drink. I would understand those questions and eagerly answer them, happy to let the small talk calm me.

But no.

He says that he has never done this before. He doesn’t even know how he dared, how it came to him. He hints at all the questions, all the hesitations, denials, and objections he had to overcome, but adds that he had to do it, that he didn’t have a choice. It had become a necessity. The smoke gets in his eyes. He says that he doesn’t know how to deal with it, but there it is. It’s given to me as a child would throw a toy at the feet of his parents.

He says that he can no longer be alone with this feeling.

That it hurts him too much.

With these words he enters into the very heart of the matter. He could have delayed or changed the subject. He could have simply left. He might have wanted to check that he wasn’t wrong about me, but he has chosen to offer himself openly to me and to explain, in his own way, what has pushed him toward me at the risk of being compromised, mocked, rejected.

I say: Why me?

It’s a way to go straight to the point, to show him the same candor he has shown me. It’s also a way to validate everything else, everything that’s been said, to get rid of it. To say: I understand, everything is fine, it’s fine with me. I feel the same.

However I am still in shock from what he’s told me, because nothing could have prepared me for it. It contradicts everything I thought I knew. It’s an absolute revelation, a new world. It’s also an explosion, a bullet fired next to an eardrum.

But in that split second I somehow instinctively know that I must rise to the occasion, that he would not bear to see me stammering or in a daze, otherwise everything will crumble to the ground.

I figure that a new question might save us from such a disaster.

The question that imposed itself: Why me?

The image doesn’t fit: my thick glasses, my stretched-out blue Nordic sweater, the student head slaps, the too-good grades, the feminine gestures. Why me?

He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it.

He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

Even now I remain fascinated by this sentence. Understand, it isn’t the premonition that fascinates me, nor even the fact that it has been realized. It’s also not the maturity or poignancy implied. It’s not the arrangement of the words, even if I’m aware that I probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with those exact ones myself. It’s