“My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.”

“Regardless of how foreboding it might appear, a peak without any altitude is a bump. And how many times have I ambled on top of the latter so I could fool myself into believing that I had ascended the former?”