“I have no qualifications in the career or, rather, pursuit I chose for my journey through life, and I’ve long ceased to think of it in those terms, although I suppose I got off to a pretty good start. In the end, though, I lost sight of my fellow runners, the ones you’re so conscience of at first, when you’re in your twenties or thirties and keep glancing out of the corner of your eye at those behind, intent (or so you believe) on overtaking you, meanwhile calculating how big a lead the runners ahead have over you and conserving your energies as you imagine the best way of getting past them for the final sprint. But there are no sprints, and certainly no final sprints. Indeed, I stopped running a long time ago. There’s no point. Just walk at the pace that suits your feet and you’ll end up arriving at the place you set out for. Or else keep quite still: lately, I’ve had the feeling that it’s simply a matter of sitting and waiting, that it isn’t us who do the walking, but the things around us, and they won’t fail us; they never do, because nothing ever fails and everything ends up happening anyway.” – Javier Montes, “The Hotel Life” (trans. Margaret Jull Costa)