"oh christ, she's quoting from that play again!"

Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika. Act V: Heaven, I'm in Heaven. Scene 10.

Harper: Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America. God! It's been years since I was on a plane!
When we hit thirty-five thousand feet, we'll have reached the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone.
I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening...
But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things:
Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.
Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
At least I think that's so.

Afterword

Together we organize the world for ourselves, or at least we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery and help each other to discern, amidst the gathering dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace and places from whence hope may be plausibly expected. Marx was right: The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs. And also plays. Tony Kushner

I find knitting to be very soothing. It calms your head and keeps your hands busy; you can work out your frustrations and emotions as well, because shaping raglan arm-holes can be a real bitch. And you make something fine and useful in the process. Nearly half-way done.