Breathing is the metronome of life.

From Alfred’s journal

Rain all morning, so I stayed under the porch eave at the blue house and watched the old man sleep in his chair by the window. I had thought, for most of my life, that a sleeping thing was a stopped thing; a bird asleep looks like a bird finished. But his chest went up and down and the dog on his feet went up and down slightly out of time with him, and the whole room was keeping two counts at once. Breathing is the metronome of life, and nobody in that room was conducting. Switch came by around noon wanting to know what I was staring at and I could not explain it to him without sounding like I had gone soft about an old man napping. I still do not know whether the dog had settled into the man's rhythm or the man into the dog's, and the rain stopped before I worked it out.