The Meaning of Night

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.

The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.

It is trite to speak of a broken heart. Hearts are not broken; they continue to beat, the blood still courses, even in the bitter after-days of betrayal. but something is broken when pain beyond words is suffered; some connection that formerly existed with light and hope and bright mornings is severed, and can never be restored.

But greater than all these delights would be the possession of this wondrous library for my own use and pleasure. What more could my bibliophile's soul ask for? Here were marvels without end, treasures beyond knowing. You have seen the worst of me in these confessions. Here, then, let me throw into the opposite side of the balance, what I truly believe is the best of me: my devotion to the mental life, to those divine faculties of intellect and imagination which, when exercised to the utmost, can make gods of us all.

The boundaries of this world are forever shifting – from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires.

But who ever heeds the voice of reason when love whispers, softly persuasive, in the other ear?

I long for sleep, and for soft English rain. But they do not come.

Trust, but be careful in whom.

I think much of her - I mean my mother - and of how alike we were, and how we were both destroyed by believing it was in our own hands to punish those who had done wrong to us.

Truly divine faculties of intellect and imagination can make gods of us all