On startled awake mid-morning on a Saturday, with the line "you are a vessel of happiness" in his ear, he sits in bed and remembers stray snatches of poems borrowed in his head. First these lines of Eliot:

"And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time."

and then these lines by Derek Walcott arrive:

"The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self."

He gets up from the bed, and walks to the bathroom and greets himself, his face changed, older now, with eyes a little more aware and forgiving of the follies of the self, and the world of give and take in which this self lives, with this line from Chekov's "Seagull":

"All living things have completed their cycle of sorrow"