Since the world began has any man ever been able to know what would happen tomorrow? The world of men is today. I'm asking you to open your heart tod… - Paul Bowles

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.

Like any romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy-perhaps even death.