Section 1: Part 5 (pp. 68-93) Summary

The narrator begins this section with commentary on how he always felt energized, philosophically and physically, by storms of the sort that seem to be raging around him as he writes. He then reflects upon how he came to live the life he imagined for himself as a child - quiet, academic, sitting at his desk writing and thinking (see "Quotes", p. 69). This leads him to another reflection on how past and present seem to be intertwining, and on how both when he was a child and now when he's an adult, his contemplations take him to a place "where [he is] neither alive nor the other thing."

This in turn leads to a recollection of how he and Anna both, in the early days of her illness before pain made life intolerable, seemed to move through...