Once again, it seemed, I was discovering the truth of the rule, a rule I’d never explicitly formulated to myself, but whose veracity I’d quite often sensed in a vague sort of way, which was...

There wasn’t a human being for several kilometers around, not a news-stand, not a shop, not a café, not a school. Not a cat, not a skinhead. Nothing.

And yet that’s the best way to watch television actively: with your eyes closed.

For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evolving, always-in-progress superficiality.

For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings – withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment – but in the prospect of suffering to come,...