God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.

My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.