Just don't expect getting that promotion or winning that Pulitzer to punch your ticket to bliss.

Youth no more, / Only age, / Yet mark the score / How it crowds the page, / How the leaves are thin, / Finger-worn, / Spotted and torn / Where you begin / To think the song / Is fading too, / As all along / The avenue / Of notes the blight / Is through and through / To tax the sight / And lip of you, / Till one full day / You shall hear / Your same notes play / New and clear, / Climbingly strong / As they were then, / For here is your song, / In the wind again!

[…] inside you could see the wires and cables that ran aft to the rudder and elevators and the cracked and curled and sunblacked leather of the seats and in their tarnished nickel bezels the glass of instrument dials glaucous and clouded from the pumicing of the desert sands.

‘I’ll admit,’ he conceded, ‘that right now I can’t think of where any of us will figure. That’ll need a lot of doping out.’