I Have An Instinct For Survival, For

Life … Is A Bit Like Reading. … If All Your Responses To A Book Have Already Been Duplicated And Expanded Upon By A Professional Critic, Then What Point Is There To Your Reading? Only That It’s Yours. Similarly, Why Live Your Life? Because It’s Yours. But What If Such An Answer Becomes Less And Less Convincing?

There Is Accumulation. There Is Responsibility. And Beyond This There Is Great Unrest.

A Pier Is A Disappointed Bridge; Yet Stare At It For Long Enough And You Can Dream It To The Other Side Of The Channel.

Back Then, Things Were Plainer: Less Money, No Electronic Devices, Little Fashion Tyranny, No Girlfriends. There Was Nothing To Distract Us From Our Human And Filial Duty Which Was To Study, Pass Exams, Use Those Qualifications To Find A Job, And Then Put Together A Way Of Life Unthreateningly Fuller Than That Of Our Parents, Who Would Approve, While Privately Comparing It To Their Own Earlier Lives, Which Had Been Simpler, And Therefore Superior.

You Would Think, Wouldn’t You, That If You Were The Child Of A Happy Marriage, Then You Ought To Have A Better Than Average Marriage Yourself – Either Through Some Genetic Inheritance Or Because You’d Learnt From Example? But It Doesn’t Seem To Work Like That. So Perhaps You Need The Opposite Example – To See Mistakes In Order Not To Make Them Yourself. Except This Would Mean That The Best Way For Parents To Ensure Their Children Have Happy Marriages Would Be To Have Unhappy Ones Themselves. So What’s The Answer?