Care of Wooden Floors

A room is not just a room. A room is a manifestation of a state of mind, the product of an intelligence. Either conscious (...) or unconscious. We make our rooms, and then our rooms make us.

There is a moment between sleeping and waking where one is free. Consciousness has returned, but awareness has yet to rip away the thin screen between the waker and his surroundings, his reality. You float free of context, in no place – not sleeping, not fully awake, not at the mercy of the unknowns of the subconscious, and not yet exposed to the dull knowns of care and routine. It is at this point, between two worlds, that I think I am happiest.

Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking?

No one forgot how to play their instrument halfway through. No one ran amok in the audience. Nothing caught fire. Music played and I was so bored that my hair was bored.

I was woken by a shell-burst in the trench of sleep. Heart skipping, with eyes fighting light, my thoughts sprang up like a field of starlings startled by a farmer's gunshot, a thousand separate, autonomous specks that swirled into a single united black shape.

Furniture is like that. Used and enjoyed as intended, it absorbs the experience and exudes it back into the atmosphere, but if simply bought for effect and left to languish in a corner, it vibrates with melancholy. Furnishings in museums... are as unspeakably tragic as the unvisited inmates of old folk's homes. The untuned violins and hardback books used to bring 'character' to postwar suburban pubs crouch uncomfortably in their imposed roles like caged pumas in a zoo. The stately kitchen that is never or rarely used to bring forth lavish feasts for appreciative audiences turns inward and cold.

The age that had had the confidence and power to smash these lines through its own capital had apparently balked at tweaking God into compliance. Like the Islamic carpets that contain a deliberate flaw, the avenue was disrupted by the Divine.

My sensitive soul was no longer held down by heavy chains of duty and distraction -- it would now (I had theorized) take wing. But I was gripped by a kind of dull horror. Even in perfect conditions, I couldn't muster the perfect mood to be all that I wanted to be. I simply could not do it. If nothing was stopping me, what was stopping me?

With provocative, lingering lack of haste, the cat arched up its hindquarters, stretched out its front legs, and exposed its claws, which it then raked back across the leather with a terrible ripping, popping noise. I

What made my position uncomfortable was the fact that my innocence was so slippery. I could not keep my grip on it. I would look, and it had oozed away, nowhere to be seen. All the facts were elastic.

One is lonely and two is crowded. Maybe it is like life.

It was a state of aloneness. It was the kind of place that started shooting political prisoners because it suspected that they would enjoy solitary confinement and internal exile too much.

But I do not think that you see that your tolerance has become...a poison, a poison to you. You care too much about how others see you, and making room for them, and you tolerate, you tolerate everything; you live in this dim little flat, and you do not even like it, I do not think you like Emma very much but you tolerate her because you think you should have a girlfriend, and I am sure that you hate your job, but you tolerate it, and why? For money? There is no money! Because you work at home? Why do you want to work here? And the very bad thing is that you tolerate yourself. You are messy and chaotic and disorganised and to be frank rather lazy, and it makes you unhappy, but what do you do? You are tolerating the situation.

Europe's skies are older than America's; Europe's clouds start over there and by the time they reach here they are tired and ragged from their journey.