I can't explain it. It's what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can't do and what you must do. You just turn to dust. - James Salter

...at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. "No, everything I've ever learned,", he said, "has come from books. I'd be in the darkness without them."

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits.

A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold.