The Tent

by Margaret Atwood

I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing.

It’s the newly conscious young I mean, the ones with ambition and fresh diffidence, those who’ve learned the hard way that reach exceeds grasp nine times out of ten. How disappointed they are! And if and when they succeed for the first time, how anxious it makes them! They develop insomnia, or claustrophobia, or bulimia, or fear of heights. Now they will have to live up to themselves. Bummer.

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads,

We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.