And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We’re tiny. We don’t matter. We’re here for a second and then gone the next. We’re a sneeze in the life of the universe.

We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.

From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.

The stars looked down at me from infinite space. We are tiny, they said, but you are insignificant.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

In Dallas, people do their own thing in their own little space, and everyone just runs on the court right before practice starts. You can't criticize because it's been working for them. But us guys here, we don't need that. We talk a lot here in this locker room. It feels like you're gritting it out around here.