I took this ball of dirt the world for heaven and hell; the water of nerves a woman gives, hunger, a bank account: these things were solid as sunlight. I went to and back, I worked, slept deep, fulfilled my every day, and I lived in the house of the whole big world. Now the whole big world is starved of weight, that house has fallen in a flat of cards. We’re like some storybook ragpaper keeps, some Hansel and Gretel thing of scares to nightmare children into sleep; all this pother of day and night, the white sheet red with the child, wet with the middleman as he reforms his flesh, bloody again with the old man’s lungs, none of it seems more than breath. Why, seventy years are crammed in an hour: marriage and career, financial empire, death and it’s all a story to start the night, between the first and last of breath, between the ends of the bed.