“And I went to bed and hugged the memory of his attention until the roof seemed to lift off the hotel and the walls to fall away and the huge starry darkness to embrace me with the implications of what I felt. Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented? Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven’t managed to liberate my smallest toe.”