"She looked down at her plate, at creamy globules of curry gravy, and knew that her life from then onwards would be a lie, that her belief that love could knife through the barriers of pride and ambition that isolated each and every human being was delusion and that the individual's grasping need for respect would keep her erecting these fragile edifices of pretence. She would work hard, smile at her mother, humour her colleagues and laugh with friends, but grow rich and old alone unless she met a man she could accommodate as easily as her mother did her father, someone with whom to share living costs and a child, someone of whom she would have no illusions that he could ease the burden of her loneliness."
"

From "Evening Under Frangipani", by Philip Jeyaretnam, from the book "First Loves".
Winner of the First Prize in the 1985 Singapore National Short Story Writing competition


What insight... but steeped in hopelessness.

What an insipid, uninspiring life to live... a life which many might have already succumbed.


The unexamined life is not worth living~
Socrates