In the great line of Crane, Orwell and Hemingway.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

What brings us anywhere? You take one turn instead of another, you meet one woman instead of another, you have good health or you don't, luck vies with misfortune, you break down and arrive at Bellevue in your bathrobe on a Saturday morning or - what was his father's antique phrase - you pulled up your socks and got on with things. Your heart adapted to changing times. Your body did. Or it did not and you passed your days in a muffler of regret. And that was what they called intelligent design.

Watching a baseball game on television is like chasing the great white whale in a goldfish bowl. It trivializes everything: men two inches high, a ball the size of a bee. It is like looking at the heavens through a dime-store telescope.

The crane got stuck and stuck and stuck.

You were the dead; theirs was the future.