Nothing is fixed. She, the other. Ivan, the girlfriend. Christine, their father, from beyond the grave. It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.

imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined. Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live.

of them loved and complicatedly needed, for better or worse. Inextricable. The tangled web.

Oh, says Peter. I’m not sure, I don’t know. I suppose I would say, I try to. Ivan looks back at him calmly, somehow wisely. Same, he says. That I try to. Although it doesn’t always work, but I do my best.

say that. And to say that he loved you, and I love you. In a low voice Ivan answers: I love you too. You don’t have to, he says. I would forgive you if you didn’t.

And a sense somehow that she feels the same, that they are stirring towards one another painfully, unable to express anything at all.

To spend his life making conversation with such a person, working to finance the lifestyle of such a person, would, of course, represent a kind of spiritual death for him. But perhaps that would be preferable to the kind of social death that awaits him now.

That God in his unknowable wisdom and mercy has left him this much. The cool touch of her hand at his face. The flash of chewing gum, the black tights. His mother, his brother, safe and well. Cold wet windswept streets. Books he hasn’t read yet. Opening theme of the Concerto No. 24. His friends, students, colleagues, their kindly and familiar voice

The necessity of an ecological aesthetics, or not. We need an erotics of environmentalism.