Life is short and it hurts. Love is the only drug that works.
It was conceivable that my marriage was about to break up. Maria had said it was just too stupid, but stupidity happens unfortunately to be real, and no less capable of governing the mind than fear, lust, or anything else. The burden isn’t either/or, consciously choosing from possibilities equally difficult and regrettable — it’s and/and/and/and/and as well. Life is and: the accidental and the immutable, the elusive and the graspable, the bizarre and the predictable, the actual and the potential, all the multiplying realities, entangled, overlapping, colliding, conjoined — plus the multiplying illusions! This times this times this times this. . . . Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? I didn’t think so when I left the house.
