If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.