Michael Frayn

We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized _ for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.

Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I__e agreed a principle withmyself, now I__ making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings andintentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I__entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)

Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I__e agreed a principle with myself, now I__ making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings and intentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I__ entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)

Failure, it occurred to him, was the secular equivalent of sin. Modern secular man was born into a world whose moral framework was composed not of laws and duties, but of tests and comparisons. There were no absolute outside standards, so standards had to generate themselves from within, relativistically. One's natural sense of inadequacy could be kept at bay only pious acts of repeated successfulness. And failure was more terrifying than sin. Sin could be repented of by an act of volition; failure could not be disposed of so easily.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

..deceivers must expect to be deceived.

I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.

Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky.