Excruciatingly

Two lines from Edmund White’s autobiography, My Lives:

1. Because this did that for me:

“We’re all creatures of habit and every old dog stares reproachfully at whatever disturbs his routine, but inspiration breaks through at exactly these ruptures.”

2. Because prose sometimes expresses a meaning through metaphor and description, but also through the stringing together of words at the same time, and this does that:

“All I was doing was living—excruciatingly—in the remembered moment, not in the perception of the scene before me (the wet pillowcase, the gauze curtains shifting and swelling in the breeze slipping in through the cracked window) but of the beautiful body that my imagination turned like a vase before setting it out to dry.”