“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Our days and nights passed in such a kaleidoscope of activity, broken by such uneven periods of sleep, that we hardly noticed whether they were hot or cold, clear or rainy. The grass began to change color from brown to a pale yellow-green. Jane often dozed in her chair in the daytime, but woke up during the nights to watch old movies on television. During her first weeks home, I seldom slept more than two hours at a time: It seemed that I was always getting up to check the dressings on her decubiti, to adjust her pillows, to help make her more comfortable on the motor-driven, pulsating air mattress we’d finally settled upon as the best recommended support available. I’d give her a sip of something to drink, and massage her legs as she lay on her back with her knees drawn up. (She can’t straighten out her legs.) I’d sit with her while she had “a few puffs” on a cigarette. The nighttime had a sublime sense of timelessness that I’d always admired. It surrounded our bedroom—but even as bleary as I often was, I became acutely aware of how that serenity could be jarringly compromised by the television set, showing programs that contained their own times of day and seasons.

Maybe I’d produced all I was meant to. Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion. Why try to fan it into life again, particularly if its initial joy had forever vanished? Maybe that course was better than the determination and painful discomforts that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence. So I was to some extent only half alarmed to hear from some strange inner existence my own voice slow down. Tremors appeared in it, as if the vowels and symbols had endless gaps—uneven edges—and some part of me was escaping like smoke even between my words.