I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

I wonder, now, about interrogation chambers: why do they think bright light brings the truth out of people? They should try the seduction of shadows, where you cannot watch your words hit their target.

Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.

I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.

At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.