I should have worked just long enough to discover that I didn't like it. Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art. The Peace Corps is a sort of Howard Johnson's on the main drag into maturity. Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.