I respect my husband's curiosity and knowledge, and the image of him made me cognizant of the best qualities of this man, things that vanish in the hustle and drone of the day-to-day.
Ephemera are things that vanish quickly; an ephemeron is one being, one particle, with a short half-life (the human individual might be one example, though there are entities that perish far more quickly).
Mainly Ceefax was that vanished thing, a voice of quiet authority: entirely straight, irreproachably trustworthy, even its name – "see facts" – devoid of all frippery.
Yet the most important thing that vanished when he died is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out.
Something should be vaporized here, but it's not cynicism; the cookie cutter for this stale Olympic coverage is the thing that should vanish.
There is a debt to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in the reportorial interrogation of vanished things, that would remain true of all of Sebald's work.
And I've learned that, in the foggy, confusing, often frightening slipstream of a baby's arrival, the things that vanish, no matter how much you love and think you need them, are the things that are not all that useful or necessary — even if they once seemed essential to your sense of self.
We will always care and wonder about the things that vanish, the personal ones like a jar of face cream or our 20s, and the big ones like Amelia Earhart or the MF Global money, but what's important is taking responsibility for our actions and for the things we've lost, even and especially if what we've lost is our own way.
We crushed the coke into still finer powder and spread it, thin and beautiful, on the glass coffee table, and by the time we were all packed into two cabs any memory that I had been about to read a poem or that poetry was a thing that existed had vanished.
