“I believe in all sincerity that if each man were not able to live a number of other lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life.”

—PAUL VALÉRY,

“Poetry and Abstract Thought”

“The story is as slender as the thread on which pearls are strung; it is a spiral line, growing more and more perplexed until it winds itself up and dies like the silkworm in the cocoon. It is an interminable labyrinth.”

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU,

24 March 1842