Your feelings are none of your business.

You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.

I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.

We still and always want waking.

I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others...And you? To what end were we billions of oddballs born?

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.