Reading some absolutely beautiful prose today while the sky makes its mind up, snow or rain, and the leaves settle themselves in for either . . .

From Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault:

-- Jean, what I said about sadness . . . what I mean is that a building and the space it possesses should help us be alive, it should allow for the heeding of things; I don't know even how to talk about it, what words to use; just that some places make certain things possible or even likely -- not to go so far as to say a place can create behaviour, but it is complicit somehow. Is there a difference between making events possible and creating them? Does a certain kind of bridge create its suicides? I know that when I am in a great building I feel a mortal sadness, and it is so specific that when I leave the building -- the church, the hall, the house -- and walk back out into the street, I see everything around me with a clarity that only the experience of the building could bestow in me.

And what I said about building the room where I wished I'd been born, continued Avery, what I mean to say is that it would be a place to be reborn . . .