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Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky - Always On My Mind

I have written several times about the influence on me of Paul Bowles' remarkable novel, The Sheltering Sky. This post perhaps explains best my fascination with the book. Tonight I am thinking of two of my favorite passages, which I have quoted before. The first is this, which upon reading the first time, literally changed the way I thought about life: "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more