Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls.

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.