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'If you were once Finnish, at some point or other you will find all this within you, because all this is not stored in your memory, it cannot be mislaid. It is in your blood, your guts. We are what remains of something extremely ancient, something which is bigger than ourselves and is not of this world.'

Sometimes human thought gets lost in the warren of its own logic, becomes a slave to a geometry which is an end in itself, whose aim is no longer the understanding of reality, but the bolstering of some prior assumption. We are such monstrous egoists that we would rather destroy ourselves pursuing false truths than admit that we are on the wrong track.

But each age plays different music, and chords which were once regarded as the work of the devil no longer frighten anyone. There is no such thing as eternal harmony: like everything else in this world, sounds too have their day, and man has to invent new ones in order to ward off silence. What we today regard as music would have been seen as noise a hundred years ago. Yesterday's mistake is just today's harmless oddity.

What others remember of us is in fact nothing more than the effect that we have had on them. We spend our lives brushing up against our fellow humans without ever really knowing them. Even the knowledge we build up of those people and things which are dearest to us is purely matter-of-fact; we know them as the entomologist knows the butterflies he has pinned on to a sheet of balsa wood. We can describe the colour of their eyes or hair, we know them from a distance as they walk through a crowd, their features are instantly recognizable, as is their characteristic smell, or voice. Their absence makes us feel some part of us is missing. Yet they are never truly ours: our wish to possess them in fact destroys them, denies them a life of their own.

Without someone else beside us, watching us live, we might as well be dead, and there is no point in plundering the past in the vain hope of wresting its treasure from it, because that is treasure that cannot be spent, counterfeit coinage no one will accept. Life has to be spent right away, consumed on the spot, while it's still warm ...

A cruel God has fashioned us in such a way that pain never bursts out all at one time, tearing us limb from limb; filters in mind and body intervene to slow the process down, to make us fully present at our suffering, so that we may sound out each portion of ourselves as it goes into agony, gasping and wheezing and powerless to die.