One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns is, 'when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.