The light is off, and it is dark. He has one hand pressed against the cold tiles of the wall above the toilet, and with his other hand he is taking aim, such as it is. He’s waiting for his prostate to get out of the way so he can take a well-deserved leak and get back to bed where he belongs, so that if by chance his heart stops this very second, he won’t be found – holding his pecker, dead on the floor – by a bunch of twenty-year-old medics who will gawk at his circumcision and bad luck.

I’m starting to think,” he eventually continued, “that maybe we leave parts of ourselves behind in certain situations – some essential piece of ourselves that we have to cut off, otherwise there’s no way out. The future becomes a kind of journey to discover what you might actually have left behind and what you’re supposed to do about it. It’s more than trauma. It’s like a phantom limb, but with a piece of your soul.

He expresses himself not in a torrent of words and ideas and disruptions, revelations and setbacks, but through an ever-expanding capacity to face what comes next.

Only the educated stop to look for words – having enough to occasionally misplace them.

Without a future, the mind turned back in on itself. That’s not dementia. One might even say it’s the only rational response to the inevitable.

It is summer and luminous.

Most things are both true and absurd.

Don’t get old,” he says to Paul. “If Peter Pan shows up, just go.

We actually do have a lot of guns. There's a lot of hunting in Norway. But there's almost no gun violence.""Why do you think that is?""On a fundamental level," says Sigrid, "I think it's because we don't want to shoot each other.""That could be our problem right there," says Melinda

You know the Norwegian police? They're a bunch of pussies. They don't carry guns, just like the English. But they stay after things for years and years, nagging and nagging. They're like herpes. You think you're rid of them, and then, when you're a little stressed out, boom! In the end they catch all the killers. They exhaust their prey into submission.