It was supposed to be about a two-minute walk, but in the unfamiliar dark I missed my house and continued on past more stilt houses.

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And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

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Mr. JASPER: Definitely, and I ended up sort of writing about, you know, the underworld and the struggles of young men, so I was choosing, I guess, between the dark and white to be metaphorical because it was those young men, perhaps even more so than myself, who were going through the most difficult times around me.

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