“I don’t know anything. I can’t do anything. And yet it was work—and working was necessary to live. And you had to live, somehow, no matter what for—still you had to! Never before had I been so greedy for life. The world delighted me—thrilling me with all its details: the purplish asphalt of the streets, the swift-running smoke in the sky, the green grass of last year pushing through dirty snow with a crude symbol of immortality…”