What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

Q: If you could be an animal, what kind of animal would you be? A: You already are an animal.

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they're listening to what you're saying, you're off the screen.

And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder – people who closed the doors that leads us into the secret world – or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.