The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.

If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.