She couldn’t, but she said something that changed my life. "Watch her carefully right now," she said, "because she’s teaching you how to live."

I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. Time is so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children. They spend big round hours. So instead of staring miserably at the computer screen trying to will my way into having a breakthrough, I say to myself, "Okay, hmmm, let’s see. Dying tomorrow. What should I do today?" Then I can decide to read Wallace Stevens for the rest of the morning or go to the beach or just really participate in ordinary life. Any of these will begin the process of filling me back up with observations, flavors, ideas, visions, memories. I might want to write on my last day on earth, but I’d also be aware of other options that would feel at least as pressing. I would want to keep whatever I did simple, I think. And I would want to be present.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it - but take whatever comes with great trust, and only if comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing. This emptiness does not claim the past because it is always here. It does not have to claim the future as it blocks out the future. It is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had. Some days I battle it until we both fall down like injured animals. That is when I wonder: What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?

One child said he slept outside because the house was filled with the cries of nightmares. The doctor had the impression that no conversation took place in houses anymore, only vicious discipline, orders and brutal teasing.

You know, we all came out of the war aged, dearest Anna, with a sense of life and death that does not exist in normal lives. So, how does one look forward if all that exists as soft-weeping wounds? You cannot imagine any future . . . You just lie. And wait.

Yes, but Lordgod, I am alone. And it stabs me in the back daily. Not that there are no people here, it is that what I have become has become uncommunicable. How many times will I still absentmindedly make coffee for two persons? So many years of silence and I am not comprehending that death is forever. My heart shrivelled in my ribs this morning when I heard the front door open and it was not your father’s voice calling.

The farm. Nobody speaks directly to me, but between the lines I hear: it is being appropriated.