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‘Culture is what is left when everything else if forgotten.’ Herriot.

Our fear of isolation creates the ‘exclusive’; in identifying oneself with a limited sequence of incidents that lonely self-esteem passionately selects, we create the very mediocrity that doggedly shadows our experience.

By assuming that one is able to identify the experiences which represent significant milestones in our lives we give birth to a melancholy vacuum of unsatisfactory activities.

Nowhere is this clearer than in relationships. Romantic conditioned reflexes discourage subtler layers of perception, producing the inevitable sense of failure in ‘achievements’ which by their very nature were chimeras.

Unprepared selectivity [emotive memories] have nothing whatsoever to do with the real nature of the experience of a relationship. By and large the major part of a relationship’s ‘meaning’ or ‘value’ passes entirely unnoticed by both partners.