A spiritual fatigue descended upon me, a recognition that my life from the age of fifty-three on was a matter of caretaking, of supervising my body like some feeble-minded invalid kept alive  by tubes and injections in a greedy nursing home, and that indeed it had always been such, that the flares of ambition and desire that had lit my way when I was younger and had given my life the drama of fiction or of a symbol-laden dream had been chemical devices, illusions with which the flesh and its percolating brain had lured me along. There is, as the saints knew, a satisfaction in this fatigue, as if sinking beneath despair and acedia we approach the abysmal condition that drove God in His vacuum  so diffidently to say, Let  the waters swarm, let the earth bring forth.