All my adult life I’d considered time a resource that could be converted into other things—more than anything else, into art. Time was the instrument of my endless ambition, which was itself a frantic thing, an attempt to grasp the materials of the world and fashion from them a justification for my own existence. Being alive involved constantly justifying why I deserved to be alive, as if I were building a bridge one rung at a time across a vast chasm.
