Just what is your position here? "I'm an adviser to his Majesty." Nicodaeus smiled blandly. "He thinks I'm a master of magic, of course, but among th… - Keith Laumer

“None of that, either,” he commanded. “Keep your mind on the immediate problem—just as soon as you figure out what the immediate problem is,” he added.

The last burst picked me up and threw me a thousand miles into an open grave and the mud showered down on me and a giant tombstone fell out of the sky to mark the place, but I didn’t care any more, because I was far away, in that place where the heroes and the cowards lie together with a fine impartiality, waiting for eternity to pass, slowly, like a procession of snails creeping across an endless desert toward a distant line of mountains. (p. 18)

I wanted to tell him that all lives are the same length when viewed from the foreshortened perspective of death, and that life, like music, requires no meaning but only a certain symmetry.