1. What was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle occurring everywhere, without end, forever
     
  2. the boat for france/the plane to thailand

    “Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. But again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what i was doing when i took the boat for France.”

    -James Baldwin