Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad. - Henry Miller

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

Her eyes were so big and bright, as if they saw more than they could comprehend. Bright with terror, and beneath the terror a limitless confusion. That’s what made them so beautifully bright. You have to be crazy to see things so lucidly, so all at once. If you’re great you can stay that way and people will believe in you, swear by you, turn the world upside down for you. But if you’re only partly great, or just a nobody, then what happens to you is lost.

In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest.