Whatever they say about going back to the beginning, they’ll be interested in the car. - V. S. Naipaul

Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.

My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had – the dullness, the pointless tension, ‘the situation of the country’. It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.

I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.