Quote of the Day - from Camus' The Fall

'Then it was that the thought of death burst into my daily life.  I would measure the years separating me from my end. I would look for examples of men my age who were already dead.  And I was tormented by the thought that I might not have time to accomplish my task.  What task?  I had no idea.......No one, ever again, would know the truth on this point since the only one to know it was precisely the dead man sleeping on his secret.  That absolute murder of a truth used to make me dizzy.  Today, by the way, it would cause me instead subtle joys.  The idea, for instance, that I am the only one to know what everyone is looking for and that I have at home an object which has kept the police of three countries on the run to no avail is a sheer delight.  But let's not go into that.  At the time I had not yet found the recipe and I was fretting.'
From my copy of Albert Camus' The Fall, Penguin 1980 edition, page 66.
One of these books that I'd forgotten I had.  My favourite Camus used to be A Happy Death.  Pretty grim and intense stuff, but with an unrelenting honesty to it that meant a lot to me as a youngster as I tried to find a place for myself in a world that seemed terribly fake. 
(Of course I never did find a place for myself, but hey.)
I'm sure that reading volumes like this, even if like me it's so long ago that you forget that you have, affects the workings of your brain, permanently.  Affects the Actual Brain Chemistry.  Like seeing something strikingly amazing as a child,  or like meeting somebody with whom there is that unexpected warmth of like-minded recognition, so that it doesn't really matter what occurs after or that you might not meet again, because that moment has made you remember that you are not alone in the universe; or like a comforting hand upon the shoulder at a difficult moment, it always stays with you even if you can't consciously remember.  Like an imprint on the spirit, or on the soul, if you believe in souls.