There's a really wonderful book called "Man Is Not Alone" by Abraham Joshua Heschel, which makes the case that everybody is religious. You know, we've just been sort of too vigilant about our terminology and our definitions and too precious about it. But there's nobody who is indifferent to the experience of standing in front of an ocean at night. There's nobody who is indifferent to the feeling of, you know, lying on your back and looking up at the night sky.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

Only a few months into our marriage," writes the grandfather, "we started marking off areas in the apartment as 'Nothing Places,' in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist.

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.