Mud And Stars

He was a tender man, and when separated from the family he could not bear to see other people’s children playing in the street. The worst part of travel is the sight of ordinary people doing ordinary things, like paying bills or watching their children kick a football.

The office environment is deliberately Soviet; it works so well that one understands how much Sovietness existed proleptically in tsarist Russia (institutionalisation of every corner of life, hierarchies) and endures in dystopian aspects of contemporary society (identical and faceless pod offices).

The great men and women of any field work all the time.

That’s a rewarding aspect of getting old. You’ve got this treasure trove of material that didn’t exist when you were young.