If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

Over coffee and orange juice the embryonic suicide brightens visibly.