I was discovering, very slowly, what it meant to be me.  ‘Ah, interesting,’ I said to myself, ‘most intriguing…’ Then I grew bored and turned the faltering spotlight of my attention to something else. The squishy sound of leukocytes squeezing through my capillaries, the whirly-whirly noise of the whirligigs skating about madly on the pond in the field across the road. ‘What’s the significance of existence?’ I wondered, ‘or is that something we should never ever think about?’ Sometimes the answers to our questions come thick and fast and sometimes not at all. ‘I am the master of all I survey’, I said, although at the same time that I said this I realised that I couldn’t actually survey very much. See very much, I mean. It was dark, or at least halfway dark, and a cloud of midges had descended upon the garden, as it always does at this time of day. ‘I am the Midge Master’, I declared, ‘I am the Lord and Master of the Seven Different Types of Midge!’ This dramatic thought filled me with intense  – but nevertheless momentary – joy, before departing again as quickly as it came and dumping me unceremoniously back in my characteristic state of soggy melancholy. ‘Life is brief’, I intoned mournfully, ‘and full of many sorrows.’ Ostensibly human, in name at least, I commune surreptitiously with creatures from the Twilight Realm. You can’t say that they are evil as such, but they aren’t very nice either. Always keen to make a good impression, I put on my brightest smile, but there was no one there. There never is, come to think of it, there never is. ‘That’s the price you pay for being Lord and Master of your own private universe,’ I reflected glumly. Nothing’s ever as good as you think it’s going to be. ‘With wisdom comes disappointment’, I quoted piously, hoping that this would cheer me up, but it didn’t. Nothing’s ever as good as you expect it to be and if that thought doesn’t disappoint you then I don’t know what will. Someone once told me that every time you think a squalid or unworthy thought then that thought goes on to become an actual entity, an actual autonomous being. Not a being like you or me it is true but a being nonetheless, a creature with his own peculiar ways, with its own habits and idiosyncrasies. That fact has to be recognised, acknowledged, taken seriously. If you ever visit the Twilight World you might meet one of your own thoughts there, grown beyond any expectations you might have had for it, possessed of its own irrational opinions and beliefs, its own political affiliations, and so on and so forth. Some would say we give birth to monsters every day but I would consider that to be an overly dramatic statement. Let us content ourselves with saying that these unacknowledged and uncared for ‘children’ of ours aren’t always devoted to the cause of light and truth. Let us just content ourselves with saying that.