I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.

You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.

You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there...You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.

It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.