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He no longer felt distraught, one becomes accustomed to anything, but the sadness was the same; as time passed, the flaw that had opened up in him had grown and still it continued to grow.

[...] his life had been a constant hail of disappointments to which he had never grown accustomed.

He knew it was possible to recover from anything, but every day since he had won the war, he had felt as though he was losing it.

Even great joys are tinged with regret; there is a latent emptiness in everything we feel.

What precisely this gesture meant, no one is in any position to say. In it were condensed all the fears and all the hopes, all the pleas and all the questions of a twenty-three-year-old man who is wounded, unsure of the seriousness of his condition, and suffering so greatly he cannot locate the source of his pain.

Serenity, he knew, was gone forever. He had to learn to live with this animal fear, just as a man who inadvertently discovers he feels jealous realizes he must reconcile himself to this new disease. This saddened him.

He has experienced these moments of abject despair before, but this one comes at a bad time. Just when he needs to summon all his strength. He could not say why, but something inside him has suddenly given way. He can feel it in his belly. It is a vast weariness, as heavy as stone. A stubborn refusal, something utterly passive and detached. Like the end of something.