The longer I live, the more I notice with what fundamental imprecision emotions present themselves to us. The most profound grief can mingle with a sense of freedom, even relief; the greatest hope might be entangled with a sense of doom; and that dreaded thing coming to fruition might release us, however momentarily, from the burden of anticipating it. So, we might be tormented in one way and consoled in another through the process of grief, which is far more mysterious than we tend to give it credit for.

I also suspect that the longing for inexactitude or mystery—the hope that all knowledge is provisional and incomplete—is deeply human. Any time you define something utterly, you reduce it in some way; you exert a kind of force over it that, rather than expanding your sense of what it and your relation to it may be, parameterizes the possible.

…

As for the snail in “[Horns Within],” which is a stage direction from King Lear … I guess I don’t feel particularly at home among people or “in the deciphered world,” as Rilke called it. In many ways, I feel sort of alien or even subhuman much of the time, like I’m closer to the forms of life that people have historically claimed dominion or superiority over. Maybe I relate to the slug, the snail, because it’s a bit like this weird tongue dragging along the earth, tasting it, lowly without perceiving itself as such, moved along by forces it doesn’t understand. Leaving a brief residue of itself on all it passes over.