"Do you want your porridge?"

"No."

"Do you want to go to bed?"

"No."

"What do you want, then?"

After considering the question for a moment, "No," she intones with finality, as though, in a different place, a different answer might be forthcoming; but we will never have any different places; we will have only what we are. The successive negatives reveal almost nothing; or rather, in all they leave open to suggestion, they reveal almost everything, which is worth less than nothing, their all-encompassing enigma like a phobia or a curse.

The train leaves the station. The further from home one goes, the harder it becomes – whatever “it” is, and however “it” can be said to change. Somewhere – here, anywhere – the day is going by; yet another day is passing, fast on the heels of yesterday, fast on the heels of the day before; and beyond the window, analogously, each passing detail seems both secretive and incidental: a bird in silhouette, the side of a house, long, frozen fields. Though the images are distinct, their distinctness belongs to the rhythm of the train, for they only exist, combine and separate as symptoms of its motion. Then I sense that life, too, has long been subsumed within the very phrases that make it familiar, so that, rather than comfort or recall us to anything, these exemplary symbols only complicate and conceal it

“People get on the train,” I say to myself, trying to dig in my heels: “A moment before they have been standing on the platform. As the train draws away, you remember by turns their waiting, their getting on the train, the empty platform behind them. The images make sense together because a single impulse runs through them that all of us can understand. But what is this story, over and beyond the sum of its parts? And even if I discovered that, would this be sufficient reason to remember it? We all set out upon the world in the pink dawn of our lives; our purposes are clear; each action connects seamlessly with the next, as if methodically reenacted from some indeterminate review. Then somewhere, in another sentence, a man or woman dies, and we poke around through the faeces, broken promises and pieces of old books, striving to put a value to the clutter of that suddenly incomprehensible thing called life.”