I listen to the news and hear of war and rumor of war, of crime and wanton destruction and loss of humanity, and think of Ionesco's brilliant play, Rhinoceros. It starts out in a small French village on a Sunday morning; everything is normal and ordinary; the people in the village are very much like the people we know, like us. Then a rhinoceros strolls through the village square, and this first rhinoceros is like a presage of plague, because the people of the village start, one by one, turning into rhinos; they are willing to give up being their particular selves, to give up being human beings, to become beasts. And one of the character says, 'Oh, why couldn't all this happen in some other country so we could just read about it in the papers?"

Excerpt from A Circle of Quiet

I must confess- growing up scares me. It's not the solemn responsibility of being a respectable and loving adult: citizen, wife, mother or grandmother. Of course some of that holds its own fear and mystery. But rather, I am terrified of losing my youth, of losing this sense of novelty about life, of which I find here in my youth. I may be impetuous and wide-eyed and may on occasion laugh too much, but, how else am I to feel the world? I am afraid as I grow older, my wonder will dissipate, diminishing immensely, leaving me aloof, severely mature with an air about me which mutters, I've seen it all. Of course I will know more of the world later on- for discovery and experience are found and learned over time. But what I don't want is to become like the majority of people I've observed around me- to become like the solemn faced, grey-haired woman who comes in often and orders a soy chai; she is civil and old, yet nothing more. Perhaps that's it- I don't ever want to become old. We all grow old, naturally, but I don't want to be old. Old as in: joyless, apathetic or I've seen it all. I don't want to be that kind of old. I don't want my perspective of existence or my awe of God to grow stale and cold as I age. Those are two things I don't ever want to "get used to."

"Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel." (Crime and Punishment)

...The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain swing, for all they went so slowly; it was different indeed from the heavy creaking tread of Henry Jekyll. Utterson sighed. "Is there never anything else?" he asked.

Poole nodded. "Once," he said. "Once I heard it weeping!"

"Weeping? How that?” said the lawyer, conscious of a sudden chill of horror.

"Weeping like a woman or a lost soul," said the butler. "I came away with that upon my heart, that I could have wept too."

-Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde