I Have An Instinct For Survival, For

Whisky, I Find, Helps Clarity Of Thought. And Reduces Pain. It Has The Additional Virtue Of Making You Drunk Or, If Taken In Sufficient Quantity, Very Drunk.

I Was Initially Planning To Write About Grief In Terms Of Eurydice And The Myth Thereof. By That Point The Overall Metaphor Of Height And Depth And Flat And Falling And Rising Was Coming Into Being In My Mind.

The Land Of Embarrassment And Breakfast.

We Live On The Flat, On The Level, And Yet - And So - We Aspire. Groundlings, We Can Sometimes Reach As Far As The Gods. Some Soar With Art, Others With Religion; Most With Love. But When We Soar, We Can Also Crash. There Are Few Soft Landings. We May Find Ourselves Bouncing Across The Ground With Leg-fracting Force, Dragged Towards Some Foreign Railway Line. Every Love Story Is A Potential Grief Story. If Not At First, Then Later. If Not For One, Then For The Other. Sometimes, For Both.

To Own A Certain Book - And To Choose It Without Help - Is To Define Yourself.