When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be, by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
  Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
  Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,      
  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
  That I shall never look upon thee more,    
Never have relish in the fairy power
  Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
  Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

L又聽見了那首曲子，事隔多年之後。

那曲子以及伴隨那曲子而經歷的一切，曾經頻繁地浮現於L的腦海，提醒L關於那些不可克服的無盡痛苦與暴烈欲望。

如今，究竟是哪裡出了問題呢？L心想。某種改變馴服了一切，或者顛倒了一切。原本是擾亂的來源，如今卻成為將擾亂切除的手段。過去是：因為做愛，所以產生了無窮的煩惱而頭痛；如今卻是：這情況真令人頭痛，那麼讓我們做愛吧。

一模一樣的曲子，聽來如此冷酷，一刀刀地切割著L的記憶。

多愁善感是無濟於事的，W略帶鄙夷地說道，真正該擔心的不是做愛的功能，而是做愛的無功能。

也就是說，W鄭重地伸出食指指出，當做愛既非令人困擾，也不能解決困擾，而成為徹頭徹尾無所謂的，可有可無的東西時，那才是麻煩大了。

L被W煞有介事的神態逗得笑了起來，然後像是想起甚麼似的，突然陷入沮喪。

Scriabin Etude Op. 8 No. 12, by Morton Estrin

You Kindly, by Sharon Olds

Because I felt too weak to move
you kindly moved for me, kneeling
and turning, until you could take my breast-tip in the
socket of your lips; and my womb went down
on itself, drew sharply over and over
to its tightest shape, the way, when newborns
nurse, the fist of the uterus
with each, milk, tug, powerfully
shuts. I saw your hand, near me, your
daily hand, your thumbnail,
the quiet ordinary self, when your mouth at my
breast was drawing sweet gashes of come
up from my womb made black fork-flashes of a
celibate's lust shoot through me. And I couldn't
lift my head, and you swiveled, and came down
close to me, delicate blunt
touch of your hard penis in long
caresses down my face, species
happiness, calm which gleams
with fearless anguished desire. It found
my pouring mouth, the back of my throat,
and the bright wall which opens. It seemed to
take us hours to move the bone
creatures so their gods could be fitted to each other,
and then, at last, home, root
in the earth, wing in the air. As it finished,
it seemed my sex was a grey flower
the color of the brain, smooth and glistening,
a complex calla or iris which you
were creating with the errless digit
of your sex. But then, as it finished again,
one could not speak of a blossom, or the blossom
was stripped away, as if, until
that moment, the cunt had been clothed, still,
in the thinnest garment, and now was bare
or more than bare, silver wet-suit of
matter itself gone, nothing
there but the paradise flay. And then
more, that cannot be told — may be,
but cannot be, things that did not
have to do with me, as if some
wires crossed, and history
or war, or the witches possessed, or the end
of life were happening in me, or as if
I were in a borrowed body, I
knew what I could not know, did — was
done to — what I cannot-do-be-done-to, so when
we returned, I cried, afraid for a moment
I was dead, and had got my wish to come back,
once, and sleep with you, on a summer
afternoon, in an empty house
where no one could hear us.
I lowered the salt breasts of my eyes
to your lips, and you sucked,
then I looked at your face, at its absence of unkindness,
its giving that absence off as a matter
I cannot name, as if I was seeing not
you but something between us, that can live
only between us. I stroked back the hair in
pond and sex rivulets
from your forehead, gently raked it back
along your scalp,
I did not think of my father's hair
in death, those oiled paths, I lay
along your length and did not think how he
did not love me, how he trained me not to be loved.