As it says in the Bible, For now we through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. If it is face to face, there must be two looking.

Oblivion is increasingly attractive to the young, and even to the middle-aged, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking can even begin to solve the problem?

From this distance it does resemble fun. Fun is not knowing how it will end.

Their youngness is terrifying. How could I have put myself into the hands of such inexperience?

It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then.

Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously. They will suffer, later, at night, in their regimented beds. They have no outlets now except themselves, and that's a sacrilege.

The ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.

It's somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is -- possibly -- the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is -- possibly -- the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.

When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles left by spiders. There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things. I believe in thought transference now, vibrations in the ether, that sort of junk. I never used to.

You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?

I thought of myself as an itinerant brain--the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute.