I thought of Frannie asleep on the porch, dead quiet but drowning out the sound of the other cats. I heard her dreaming that she was racing through the woods- alone in the world, but not for long. The ice crunched beneath her feet. Snow hissed in the air and flecked her fur. She ran in that unhurried but determined feline fashion with erect body, stiffly trailing tail, and legs flickering like the frames of a silent movie. The wind flattened the fur on her face. A cat on a mission, she moved to the rhythm of her breathing, ignoring the honk of a diesel horn and my rubbernecking wife's blue car grinding to a halt on the shoulder of the road. Squirrels, cows, coyotes, ferrets, minks, lemurs, hognosed snakes, flying fox bats dispersed as her claws tore up the ground. She scattered her past into atoms as she ran. With the strength of a thousand beating hearts she was charging toward us and toward her happiness.

... Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

He's told me nothing. Yet I'm happy. He keeps his heart and his soul from me. And yet I'm happy and I don't care. Why am I so happy? "A beautiful man," I said. "You have a lovely voice." Was that forward of me? And I don't care. I don't think so, I love his voice. Why shouldn't I? And yet. I spoke to him about my Friend. "A younger sister," and he didn't understand a word. Oh, Lord. How could you make me so plain? Last Sunday at Church the woman behind me said, "She's so kind and generous. It's such a pity she's so plain ... that she is so plain ..."

How shall I help myself? By withdrawing into the garret and associating with spiders and mice, determining to meet myself face to face sooner or later.

The Pink Floyd - you're going to hear them in a minute and I do not want to prejudice you. Hear them and see them first and we'll talk about them afterwards but four quick points I want to make before you hear them.

The first is that what you heard at the beginning, that short bit, those few seconds, are really all I can hear in them, which is to say to my mind, there is continuous repetition and proportionally they are a bit boring.

My second point is that they are terribly loud. You couldn't quite because of course it isn't as loud from your sets or as it was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday. I will ask them about that when we come to talk.

My third point is that perhaps I am a little bit too much of a musician to appreciate them. And the reason why that, why I say that is that... 

Four, they have an audience. And people who have an audience ought to be heard. Perhaps it is my fault that I don't appreciate them.

Well there it is. I think you can pass your verdict as well as I can. My verdict is that its a little bit of a regression to childhood. But after all, why not?

Sometimes I think I have felt everything I'm ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I'm not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I've already felt.

You must tell me something! Oh, my God! I am forty-seven years old. I may live to sixty; I still have thirteen years before me; an eternity! How shall I be able to endure life for thirteen years? What shall I do? How can I fill them? Oh, don't you see? Don't you see, if only I could live the rest of my life in some new way! If I could only wake some still, bright morning and feel that life had begun again; that the past was forgotten and had vanished like smoke. Oh, to begin life anew! Tell me, tell me how to begin.  

And then, existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life, and goes heavily. Every one about here is silly, and after living with them for two or three years one grows silly oneself. It is inevitable. See what a long moustache I have grown. A foolish, long moustache. Yes, I am as silly as the rest, nurse, but not as stupid; no, I have not grown stupid. Thank God, my brain is not addled yet, though my feelings have grown numb.

The elk, the swans, the black-cock have disappeared. It is, on the whole, the picture of a regular and slow decline which it will evidently only take about ten or fifteen more years to complete. You may perhaps object that it is the march of progress, that the old order must give place to the new, and you might be right if roads had been run through these ruined woods, or if factories and schools had taken their place. The people then would have become better educated and healthier and richer, but as it is, we have nothing of the sort. We have the same swamps and mosquitoes; the same disease and want; the typhoid, the diphtheria, the burning villages. We are confronted by the degradation of our country, brought on by the fierce struggle for existence of the human race. It is the consequence of the ignorance and unconsciousness of starving, shivering, sick humanity that, to save its children, instinctively snatches at everything that can warm it and still its hunger. So it destroys everything it can lay its hands on, without a thought for the morrow. And almost everything has gone, and nothing has been created to take its place.