And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation–it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.
Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?
If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That’s what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman’s terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime’s habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn.