Reading some of James Wood’s essays on literature here in the Lonely Place: “I like the idea that heaven might reward us for what we have lost by paying attention to detail, that heaven must perforce be a place of serious noticing. But perhaps we can bring back life, or extend life, here on earth, by doing the same: by applying what Walter Benjamin once called “the natural prayer of the soul: attentiveness.” We can bring the dead back by applying the same attentiveness to their shades as we apply to the world around us—by looking harder: by transfiguring the object.”⠀