There Is Only One Misfortune BROWSER AIDES (Key quotes linked to their location in the text) We were connoisseurs of crazies because...we had both been mental patients... I could feel his body heat. That close, that intense, was an undeniable physical threat. " 'We would have to make you the new Pascal or Kierkegaard.' " LINKS TO THE SUBSECTIONS
marketing problem.”
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1 I had God on the telephone and I couldn’t think of a thing to say. My friend Dan, a mystic and a successful businessman in his mid-thirties, was the telephone, sitting across my kitchen table, silent, staring into himself, in a trance. I couldn’t think of a question for God because of my stupor from fatigue and hunger. I looked up at the clock and realized we had been talking for eight hours without a break. It wasn’t over yet and it was already our longest session. Of all the trances I had seen Dan enter in the year and a half I had known him, this was the deepest by far, and I knew he was as exhausted as me and could shut down any moment and the opportunity lost. But instead of coming up with a question, my mind wandered. I noticed how much my butt and back hurt from sitting so long. Also, my head ached from the hunger. We had talked right through mealtimes, not that there was anything appetizing in the place to eat. We were in my cottage in Petaluma, a farm town north of San Francisco. It was about eight on a warm spring evening and overhead a bare bulb diluted the darkness. After hours of listening to his voice, the quiet was palpable, just crickets and the distant highway. Then I remembered noticing something different in him when he arrived around noon .
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