I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.

The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

A family is a mystery.

It might be a bad thing, not to know what's going on in the world. I can't say I really approve of it.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.