I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most
often did.
Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are so anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own. They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has refined itself as the prologue to cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested.
They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.
Thoughts are often false. A feeling's always real. Not true, just real.