Postcards from No Man's Land

He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.

Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?

What a need we humans have for confession. To a priest, to a friend, to a psychoanalyst, to a relative, to an enemy, even to a torturer when there is no one else, it doesn't matter so long as we speak out what moves within us. Even the most secretive of us do it, if no more than writing in a private diary. And I have often thought as I read stories and novels and poems, especially poems, that they are no more than authors' confessions transformed by their art into something that confesses for us all. Indeed, looking back on my life-long passion for reading, the one activity that has kept me going and given me the most and only lasting pleasure, I think this is the reason that explains why it means so much to me. The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself.

Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What d'you think?

Ah, clever clogs, but it will have happened in one of my alternative lives. You know--the lives hot-shot scientists tell us we are living at the same time as this one we know about. Which being so, how do you know that what happens in one of your alternative lives doesn't sometimes leak through into your consciousness in this life, and make you sad that you aren't living that particular alternative life instead of this one? Don't you sometimes feel depressed for no reason you can think of? I do. And maybe that's why. We've had a leak from an alternative life and want that life now. Like wanting an ice cream when you were little, which you knew was in the freezer, but your mom wouldn't let you have it.

And the price for being a homo-hater should be as high as anyone can pay.

It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make Man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)

Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being." She cleared her throat again. "Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.

«Tu non credi che certe persone dimostrino più coraggio di altre, che siano più valorose e tutto il resto?» «Tu sì?» «Be, sì, io penso di sì. Quando leggi di quello che alcuni uomini hanno fatto in questa battaglia, per esempio. Non solo combattendo, ma salvando la vita di altri soldati a rischio della propria. Sono stati capaci di cose che altri non avrebbero mai osato.» «E che cosa hanno fatto quando sono tornati a casa?» «Eh?» «Cosa hanno fatto a casa loro? Come trattavano le loro mogli o le innamorate? Come si comportavano coi colleghi di lavoro?» [...] «... lo sai dove voglio arrivare. Non è che io non creda al coraggio o al valore o a cose del genere. Solo che credo che la maggior parte delle persone sia coraggiosa e valorosa ma in modi diversi e in diverse... come si dice? gelegenheden... occasioni.»

And in short measures life may perfect be