Old Age Makes Caricatures Of Us All.

Children Live In Occupied Territory. The Brave And The Foolhardy Openly Rebel Against Authority, Whether Harsh Or Benign. But Most Tread Warily, Outwardly Accommodating Themselves To Alien Mores And Edicts While Living In Secret Their Iconoclastic And Subversive Lives.

To Look Back On One's Life Is To Experience The Capriciousness Of Memory. ... The Past Is Not Static. It Can Be Relived Only In Memory, And Memory Is A Device For Forgetting As Well As Remembering. It, Too, Is Not Immutable. It Rediscovers, Reinvents, Reorganizes. Like A Passage Of Prose It Can Be Revised And Repunctuated. To That Extent, Every Autobiography Is A Work Of Fiction And Every Work Of Fiction An Autobiography.

I Am Fifty Years Old And I Have Never Known What It Is To Love. I Can Write Those Words, Know Them To Be True, But Feel Only The Regret That A Tone-deaf Man Must Feel Because He Can't Appreicate Music, A Regret Less Keen Because It Is For Something Never Known, Not For Something Lost.

A Picnic May Well Be A Metaphor For Life. The Essentials For Happiness Are The Right Company, Moderate If Sanguine Expectations And A Reasonable Standard Of Physical Sustenance And Comfort, The Whole Being Bedeviled By The Belief That There Is Always Something Better To Be Had If Only One Presses On.

It Was One Of Those Perfect English Autumnal Days Which Occur More Frequently In Memory Than In Life.