The Day of the Triffids ...

... by John Wyndham is an apocalyptic book, a genre I often struggle with, but he writes beautifully and hauntingly about desolation ...

"The sun comes out.  Everything looks bright and fresh, but even that, and the fact that for the next twenty miles all went smoothly, did not shift the mood of depression that was closing over me again.  Now I was really on my own I could not shut out the sense of loneliness.  It came upon me again as it had on that day when we had split up to search for Michael Beadley - only with double the force ... Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative - an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary ... That day I had learned that it was much more  It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary, and play tricks with the mind.  Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care.  It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the times its chance to frighten and frighten horribly - that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do ..."

Marx and Divorce ...

"You don't simply dissolve marriage; divorce means that you retroactively establish that the love was not the true love" is an interesting take on the subjective and temporal nature of love ...