flâneur

“Travesty,” by Lillian Fishman | The New Yorker

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When the conversation with Ruth finally came, Prima was not shocked. She’d had a consciousness, since that first day in Hamilton Hall, of becoming increasingly entangled in the universe, of her name no longer being the name of an innocent, of deliberation and responsibility, of laying down tracks that would determine the direction of decades in her life. This she relished. There was a feeling among her classmates of wanting to remain clean—not sexually clean or physically clean but clean of commitments. The other students wanted to be well rounded; they wanted the freedom to choose, later on, from a variety of paths for which they had prepared; they wanted to have relationships that would ready them for an eventual mate but would not yet tie them permanently to anyone. They wanted more than anything to maintain their neutral goodness. They did not want to appear in articles online or in newspapers, unless they were cast in a glowing light. They loved stories of grotesque misbehavior an

Save this story Save this story When the conversation with Ruth finally came, Prima was not shocked. She’d had a consciousness, since that first day in Hamilton Hall, of becoming increasingly entangled in the universe, of her name no longer being the name of an innocent, of deliberation and responsibility, of laying down tracks that would determine the direction of decades in her life. This she relished. There was a feeling among her classmates of wanting to remain clean—not sexually clean or physically clean but clean of commitments. The other students wanted to be well rounded; they wanted t

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