“At sixty-one, Jefferson was still standing ‘straight as a gun barrel’ – a tall thin and almost gangly man with the ruddy complexion of a farmer and an ‘iron constitution’. He was the President of the young nation, but also the owner of Monticello, a large plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, a little more than one hundred miles south-west of Washington.”
“She was hurrying out of the house, late for an appointment, purse slung over one shoulder, canvas shopping bag in her hand. A squawk came from the oak tree.”
“Even without booths, telephone conversations create locations, circumferences of absorption in which we sit, stand, circle, pace, gesticulate, think, and feel. Like the spaces we inhabit as readers, they are locations in which we are both here, and elsewhere—I can be staring something or someone, but if I am engrossed in the conversation I will see only an internal landscape, what is visible to me and no one else.”
