If you don’t like the place where you find yourself, Waldemar, it pays to remember that you’ll be somewhere else in just a moment. The place itself will be a different place.

His crimped hair was subtly frosted, making him look like a preacher in some California church – the kind with acoustic guitars and headset microphones and not much use for the actual Bible.

Practically from birth - or so it seemed to him - he had been aware that the elegant, filigreed, eminently reasonable world around him was destined to collapse under its own weight, like some elaborate architectural folly; the obvious response, to any sensible observer, was to have as little to do with such a world as possible.

His crimped hair was subtly frosted, making him look like a preacher in some California church - the kind with acoustic guitars and headset microphones and not much use for the actual Bible.

Only a blind man could have lived through these last years without seeing what was bearing down upon us; so I made myself blind as I could manage. I wanted to believe the worst was behind me, and I found an easy way to make it so. I simply turned my back on what was coming.

If you don't like the place where you find yourself, Waldemar, it pays to remember that you'll be somewhere else in just a moment. The place itself will be a different place.

Harder still was the pretense her studies demanded: the need to dissemble, to parrot her professors' orthodoxies, to feign interest in theories that were of no use to her.