The passing of time

My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

Philip Larkin

While the pages lots grew ever thicker

Over and over again I felt helplessness, anguish as I watched the remaining pages growing thinner and thinner, while the pages lost grew ever thicker. And yet, I kept reading .... Books are the maps of men. Every act of reading involves the paradoxical act of touching a map with the tip of the index finger and believing that we are travling through France, moving through a chapter of a book as if we were climging down the side of a mountain or ascending the cirque of a glacier by following it contour lines. I walked in maps ...

Belen Gopegui, The Scale of Maps