This was what I couldn't manage to grasp: the yawning gap, the absolute contradiction between the ease with which one can kill and the huge difficulty there must be in dying.

The quotation central to Stephen Mitchelmore's reading of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. A great post. But I like better the one which begins like this:

Eighteen months ago, in the monochrome sunlight of a January afternoon, someone close to me was involved in a road traffic accident.

This Space is the blog to which I've returned most expectantly this year.