all day long wearing a hat that wasn't on my head

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.

the golden eternity is { }

She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.

I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.