“A ritual, if it is truly a ritual and not a gauzy affirmation of the best of life, or a threadbare disdain for the lowly and the prosaic, carries something of the radioactive about it, something of the dark arts.”
“Rituals are out at the edge of what is likely, what is familiar. They are ill-advised. The ordinary days are more shaken than shaped by them. They are not habituated soothings, utterances of reassurance, making everything right, taking the bored and the bereaved to the emotional mountaintop for a psychic spa day. They are conjuring acts, iffy, nervy, doubtful as to their outcome. Rituals are waltzes with wild things.”
