You're very comforting, I don't know why. You're like a very small casserole – has anyone ever told you that? - Sarah Ruhl

Oh, where is it, where did my past go, when I was young, happy and intelligent, when my dreams and thoughts had some grace, and the present and future were lit up with hope? Why is it, that when we've just started to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, useless, with flattened-out souls?

What is easily understood by a five-year-old — that language invents worlds — is assumed by producers to be intellectually ungraspable by an audience of well-educated grown-ups, who, it is thought, need to see spigots and so forth to represent kitchens, because holding up a mirror to nature — or the sink — is thought to be transcendent.

When diseases and stories are chronic, doctors and writers often both run for the hills