Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be

You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.

If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?