Do not make up your mind about the future in advance. Easy enough to say. I could see the future. It stretched away in front of me, flat, bare, running on out of sight. Never a plan, never a wish. I should write no more. Then what should I do? What an emptiness within me—all around me. Useless. The Greeks called their old people hornets. “Useless hornet,” Hecuba called herself in The Trojan Women. That was my case. I was shattered. I wondered how people managed to go on living when there was nothing to be hoped from within.