As you ramble on through life, Brother, Whatever be your goal, Keep your eye upon the doughnut, And not upon the hole. - Margaret Atwood

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.