A reply to a friend who shared values of my formative years:

Your letter conveyed an intimate empathy and provided a glimpse of a person I knew, and who I believed knew me, having heard me speak, or read me write, every word I spoke or wrote for the first time, and which is still the only language I speak, and who shared with me fifteen of the most significant years of my life, and supportively protected me from the rigours of my thought.

Wholly alienated from the reality as perceived and practiced within the ambit of what we call human civilisation, and crushed by the vigour of my own discoveries, I have a dysfunctional present, no vision for the future, and am entirely an accumulated mass of the past. Your making an emotional, affectionate allusion to it was an act of kindness towards me, which moistened my eyes with gratitude.

(1992)