Passage 1: At that moment I realized that this shabby flat strewn with trash was my apartment; and that Philip Pirrip, once my best friend, and Georgiana, once my sworn love, had packed and left; and that happiness, contentment, purpose, calm, and tranquility, everything in fact that I valued, had also packed and left; and that the urban wilderness outside my apartment, intersected with streets and subways and elevated trains, with faceless people hurrying through it, was my home; and that the dark land beyond the city was the world; and that the vast unknowable void from which the screaming in my ears seemed to come, was the cosmos; and that the miserable, useless, despicable heap of self-pity curling into a ball amid the filth and shaking uncontrollably, was me.
Passage 2: A tearful man, all in maroon fleece, with little hair on his head. A man with a brown hat, and with brown shoes, and with a COVID mask tied round his neck. A man who had been mired in poems, and buried in plays, and puzzled by metaphors, and bored by similes, and lulled by iambs, and thrilled by rhymes; who sang, and chanted, and recited and howled; and whose eyes glittered in his head as he marked my essay by the Key.