Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness, and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.

It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.

It’s hard, in America, not to equate ‘happiness’ with ‘things’.

There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women.