Status Updates From The Spectator Bird

“What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? Did I count the mountain peaks of my life and find every one a knoll?”

“But though we all deteriorate, we are given the privilege of deteriorating according to some poetic justice. We ourselves help establish the place and extent of our wearing out.”

“You can’t paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives?”

“The trouble is that the feelings do not die. I remember too much. I remember a futile life.”

“It comes as a shock to realize that I am just killing time till time gets around to killing me. It is not arthritis and the other ailments. It is the general comprehension that nothing is building, everything is running down, there are no more chances for improvement.”

“I sometimes get the feeling my whole life happened to somebody else.”

“I felt inside me somewhere, adjacent to or below the ailing heart, a hungry, thirsty, empty, sore, haunted sensation of being unfinished..”

“He has been a wisecracking fellow traveller in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own. There has not been one significant event in his life that he planned. He has gone downstream like a stick, getting hung up in eddies and getting flushed out again, only half understanding what he floated past, and understanding less with every year.”