I do most sincerely believe that ethical behavior as we best construe it ought to be followed by us throughout our lives, even on the last day of lif… - William T. Vollmann

Perhaps the sallow drunk should have taken the hint. But he needed to feel confident in his life. It was only when he drank that he felt he could be anything. He felt this precisely because his perceptions had grown so constricted that he could no longer be cognizant of his limitations, like those old people who when sight, hearing and memory slip away make unflattering remarks in loud voices about others who are still present but out of their dwindling sensory range. How amazed they’d be, if they understood that the nasty man who’d long since vanished from their apprehension like last Thursday’s television show had just now heard them denounce his nastiness! For they’d meant no harm! Backstab gossip doesn’t harm anybody, does it? It’s only steam-letting, social sport, wit, liveliness, self-comfort like complaining over an arthritic wrist.

So even that doesn’t make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all — Didn’t you learn in school, he demanded in a hateful voice, that Ivan the Terrible, having coaxed his architect into, so to speak, putting the very best of himself into building Polrovsky Cathedral, afterwards put out his eyes? Anyway, things are so much easier in our century. LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL!

But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us…and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us.