Discovering, For Example, That As Witnesses To

Sometimes I Think The Purpose Of Life Is To Reconcile Us To Its Eventual Loss By Wearing Us Down, By Proving, However Long It Takes, That Life Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be.

Does Character Develop Over Time? In Novels, Of Course It Does: Otherwise There Wouldn't Be Much Of A Story. But In Life? I Sometimes Wonder. Our Attitudes And Opinions Change, We Develop New Habits And Eccentricities; But That's Something Different, More Like Decoration. Perhaps Character Resembles Intelligence, Except That Character Peaks A Little Later: Between Twenty And Thirty, Say. And After That, We're Just Stuck With What We've Got. We're On Our Own. If So, That Would Explain A Lot Of Lives, Wouldn't It? And Also - If This Isn't Too Grand A Word - Our Tragedy.

When I Was Still Quite Young I Had A Complete Presentiment Of Life. It Was Like The Nauseating Smell Of Cooking Escaping From A Ventilator: You Don't Have To Have Eaten It To Know That It Would Make You Throw Up.

He Had A Better Mind And A More Rigorous Temperament Than Me; He Thought Logically, And Then Acted On The Conclusion Of Logical Thought. Whereas Most Of Us, I Suspect, Do The Opposite: We Make An Instinctive Decision, Then Build Up An Infrastructure Of Reasoning To Justify It. And Call The Result Common Sense.

Why Does The Writing Make Us Chase The Writer? Why Can't We Leave Well Enough Alone? Why Aren't The Books Enough?