“...he is thinking about thoughts; so many thoughts piled up, such a quantity of half-remembered knowledge, so many emotions brought up from the well to spill out: the unrolling of history - a river into which you can't step twice, a collection of biographies end to end, a hilltop to survey the surrounding plains and so on - but also, more so, the anxieties prompted by the spooling of time and the awareness of its unstoppable nature; and random thoughts...”