If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.