No   Should

                  Only     Is

                                                                                                                        Word Art

                                                                                                                        Paul Matisse

                                                                                                                        Tape on Glass

Here I end this reel.

Box (pause) three (pause).

Spool (pause) five.

Perhaps my best years are gone.

When there was a chance of happiness.

But I wouldn’t want them back.

Not with the fire in me, now.

No, I wouldn’t want them back.

Samuel Beckett

Krapp’s Last Tape

The detective is the hero. He is everything.  He must be a complete man and a common man, and yet an unusual man.  He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without the thought of it and certainly without saying it.  He must be the best man in the world and a good enough man for any world. 

                                                                                                                        Raymond Chandler

The whole point is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens, that he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be.  That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life, except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to leave his clothes.

                                                Raymond Chandler