“ The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers. ”
It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.
~ Ross Macdonald
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.
