Ever since that happened to me, I haven't been able to give myself to anyone in this world.

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

Each of us possesses a tangible living soul. The system has no such thing. We must not allow the system to exploit us.