That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.

Not that believing such things has anything to do with whether they are true. You see that, don't you?

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.