He wondered if there was a word for returning, after long absence, to a familiar place and feeling it shrunk, as if the physical world had given way to a mental reality that transformed the streets to neural pathways– there were so many things that could not be said, he felt, but what was worse were the things that could be said but would be left unsaid– and yet, why need to say anything at all?

The trouble with words is that we inhabit them like houses, like cities. We have learned to desire words to lay over the world around us, like sketches of a reality that stands there unnoticed. We can live in this reality, but we have become tame creatures. Some academics scoff at 'socially constructed' realities, as if the reality of a man's mind were not as solid to him as a house, as fundamental as his clothing. Like a house a man may build his inner scaffold for himself; but the vast majority let other men build their dwellings for them, perhaps as much from indolence as from ignorance of the laws of construction.

His identity, he knew, was like a film: though it seemed a constant flow, it was in truth a series of distinct objects advancing frame by frame. So we are to our past and future selves like slides seen in a row,from the outside appearing to constitute a whole.

He felt that even in their intimacy they resembled two strangers who passed in a hallway, adopting momentary faces each to meet the other. He was at the age of just learning that what is feigned is not entirely unreal; that to act on a feigned intention is still to act.

If there is a God, we better hope he has no sense of irony.

"But I've known you forever", she gasped, perhaps believing it; in our play we had forgotten the weight games take on when they become a last resort, and we clung on desperately to this performance though we had no audience.

She held up her hand as if interrupting a sentence I had not, in fact, begun.

We peeled out of the lot in her Nova. It occurred to me that somewhere she must have learned to drive, felt the anticipation of the first moments sweating at the wheel; that she had not emerged as a person merely by my sight of her, but had scores of secrets and memories I would never know about, or perhaps never believe if I were told. She had parents; someone had set her on the first bus to kindergarten, someone held watch over her in feverish nights. The world seemed then impossibly obscure, though the pavement burnt at my bare feet, and the orange sun drilled the sky, as if it were a giant house with many doors, behind which mysterious noises invoke thoughts of private dramas, festivals, natural disasters, bare chasms filled with ethereal light: all locked and forever inaccessible.

She was watching me; her voice peeled thoughts from me like a reluctant blanket, thrusting me into the bare winter of actual day.