My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor.

All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.

With wild eyes that had seen freedom.

For nearly a century the psychoanalysts have been writing op-ed pieces about the workings of a country they've never traveled to, a place that, like China, has been off-limits. Suddenly, the country has opened its borders and is crawling with foreign correspondents, neurobiologists are filing ten stories a week, filled with new data. These two groups of writers, however, don't seem to read each other's work. That's because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.

An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.