more provocative words for you from nick hornby while i listen to the oven click & hum as it expands with the heat of cooking the banana bread

p. 129 let's face it: these houses belong to people like me, so there is a peculiar circularity in all this. maybe if we all forgot about being good and saving the world, and stayed at home and cleaned our own houses, then people like mrs cortenza wouldn't need doctors. maybe mrs cortenza, thus liberated from her pain and her domestic drugery, could have got on with something socially useful. maybe she would have spent her life teaching adult literacy, or working with teenage runaways, if i hadn't been so hell-bent on curing her, and thus never having time to scrub my own floors.

p. 138 it seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. you just have to love someone.