There’s no arguing, no needling, no discussion. It is quiet and awkward and terrifying.

Delaurier makes an intrigued noise and picks up the finished drawings Renoir has sitting under a rock, just in case the wind picks up.
"I like them."
"Of course you do. They're the cruelly oppressed creatures of society," Renaire says. "Look at how the bourgeois humans have hurt them, how they're forced to huddle near sewer vents for warmth in this brutal freezing world. These poor souls need your help, Emile. Look at their plight, their misery. Save the pigeons.

If all material were transparent—the ground that supports us, the envelope that sheathes our body—everything would be seen not as a fluttering of impalpable wings but as an inferno of grinding and ingesting. Perhaps at this moment a god of the nether world situated in the center of the earth with his eye that can pierce granite is watching us from below, following the cycle of living and dying, the lacerated victims dissolving in the bellies of their devourers, until they, in their turn, are swallowed by another belly.

I didn't know if I should hug him, and he didn't seem to know if he should hug me, so we just sort of stood there not touching, which to be honest is my preferred form of greeting.

It was one of those problematic occasions with long silences, sporadic coughs, and people saying isolated things like, "Well, isn't this nice.

That's been a little awkward,