You have no incentive to believe me, but as per my recent resolution to work on memorization here’s where I am so far with the Cheever passage. From memory:
We admire decency and we despise death, but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night, and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale’s cage. Just let me give you one example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honestly into your own past and see if you can’t find a comparable experience…
I originally misspelled “nightingale” but otherwise: got it. Eighty-five words down, one hundred ninety-six to go.