What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

Speech isn't for agony.

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

Decades go faster toward the end of a century.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.