This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows28 it’s about something else, way down.

This remains largely theory, but my best guess as to his never dispensing wisdom like other dads is that my father understood that advice—even wise advice—actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and

She was standing in a way that managed to connote weariness and boredom without any actual slumping, her legs well out and back supported by the wall, from bottom to crown, and staring straight ahead, holding the sign at chest level and staring into space with neither interest nor resignation.

The counter woman, who was in her early thirties and had incorporated her weight into a country mother presentation that involved pink cheeks and a laugh like a roar and a worldly good-humored sexuality, asked if she had any fuel today.

The idea that people feel just one basic emotion at a time is a further contrivance of memoirs.

There was the yeasty smell of wet men.

His mother called her down to earth and liked her, thought she was good people, you could tell—she made this evident in little ways.

Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.’

‘Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.’