I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

It was hard to remember in the heavy and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.

As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.

We are all born equally far from the sun.