This is still my stuff.

Holidaying in America, I took myself to a small town in Vermont, described intriguingly in guides as an artists' colony. My lodging seemed a fairytale house in the woods; I explored its environs, and took the advice of its proprietress to visit a restaurant in the centre of the town, where I met a trio of boisterous septuagenarians - Princeton professor, psychologist poet, and salty seadog - who regaled me each with tales from his own experience, alternately impressively erudite, unobtrusively insightful, and strikingly swashbuckling, before dragging me on to the bar over the road for beers and cheesy lines to local ladies. The poet-philosopher saw something in me, I know not what, but which moved him to share this piece of Kazantzakis' wisdom with me: "we come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life". It hit the spot; it helped me through some dark moments, and I’m in some way forever indebted both to the author and his representative.