An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.