Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone be… - Joan Didion

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

"This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning."

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.