I was simultaneously elated and depressed, a common enough state of mind these days when people are offered a great deal of money to do something rep… - James Hamilton-Paterson

First nights in strange places can determine how one sees them forever after.

And now this same tropic opiate fills my lungs and heart and awakens memories of things which have never happened and foretelling things which will never be.

Experiences of great intensity - a special dream, a period of concentrated work, maybe a love affair - have in common that they are unusually real while they last. Yet it is precisely this quality which so easily vanishes. Afterwards, how unreal it all suddenly seems!

How vivid, still, are the seagoing smells? Oily bilges, fish entrails, a freshly lit cigarette drawn through salt paper? And at night, if you were not diving, the compressor's exhaust fumes, its lethal monoxides, barking and blattering our darkened boat's position for anyone to hear. But a shift of wind might gently lay its hand on a cheek and turn your head like a weathervane, pointing your nostrils into the smell of unseen land: forest and rot and copra, jasmine, mimosa and ylang-ylang. And you may have thought of the strangeness of it, sitting there in night's scented cocoon, propped up by nails and timber in the middle of the water while men you knew like brothers worked away in the fish mines far beneath the boat, their dim torchlight opening up fugitive seams and corridors. Their wooden goggles and floating hair.

I’m interested in things that are none of my business,
and I’m bored by things that are important to know.” — Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes strip cartoon, 1994)