I'd Rather Be At The

Nothing Succeeds, They Say, Like Success. And Certainly Nothing Fails Like Failure.

There Are Some Writers Who Wrote Too Much. There Are Others Who Wrote Enough. There Are Yet Others Who Wrote Nothing Like Enough To Satisfy Their Admirers, And Jane Austen Is Certainly One Of These.

Auntie Phyl's Last Months In The Care Home Were Extra Pieces. Age Is Unnecessary. Some Of Us, Like My Mother, Are Fortunate Enough To Die Swiftly And Suddenly, In Full Possession Of Our Faculties And Our Fate, But More And More Of Us Will Be Condemned To Linger, At The Mercy Of Anxious Or Indifferent Relatives, Careless Strangers, Unwanted Medical Interventions, Increasing Debility, Incontinence, Memory Loss. We Live Too Long, But, Like The Sibyl Hanging In Her Basket In The Cave At Cumae, We Find It Hard To Die.

Lord Knows What Incommunicable Small Terrors Infants Go Through, Unknown To All. We Disregard Them, We Say They Forget, Because They Have Not The Words To Make Us Remember. ... By The Time They Learn To Speak They Have Forgotten The Details Of Their Complaints, And So We Never Know. They Forget So Quickly, We Say, Because We Cannot Contemplate The Fact That They Never Forget.

Because If One Has An Image, However Dim And Romantic, Of A Journey's End, One May, In The End, Surely Reach It, After No Matter How Many Detours And Deceptions And Abandonings Of Hope. And Hope Could Never Have Been Entirely Abandoned, Even In The Worst Days.