Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.

Because always,' he thinks, ‘when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance away from truth and fact.

But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.