from Mary Rose O'Reilley

    "To grow in compassion for one's own life is the great task of the middle years, and it requires that, first, one must embrace with love and pity a whole reception line of relatives, then move on to the politicians.  It helps to have a comic vision.  Dante and Shakespeare, younger than I, understood that comedy establishes a cosmic perspective and reconciles forces that, viewed up close, grate dangerously against each other in the social world."

    I had not realized until I read this that comic and cosmic are separated by only the letter "s," the snake.