Entropy by Thomas Pynchon

What can I say? The booze, the drugs, the music...It was a never ending party and Meatball, I gathered, was the host who tried his best to please his guests. Frankly, I would have chosen his first idea and just gone to the closet.
Some members of the party: Duke, Callisto, Aubade, and Saul, seem to have troubled pasts or let their lives spin out of control.  Through all of the substances they use almost constantly (even as Meatball tamed the second party, he suspected a third waive coming on), each of these members feel like they achieve some new understanding, a superior understanding, about the situation they are in or the future, 
       " Rotarian. But it occurred to me, in one of these flashes of insight, that if that first quartet of Mulligan's had no piano,
        it could only mean one thing."
       "No chords," said Paco, the baby-faced bass.
       "What he is trying to say," Duke said, "is no root chords.  Nothing to listen to while you blow a horizontal line.  What
       one does in sucha a case is, one thinks the roots."
       A horrified awareness was dawning on Meatball, "And the next logical extension," he said.


And, "the Duke di Angelis quartet were engaged in a historic moment. Vincent was seated and the others standing: they were going through the motions of a group having a session. only without instruments." Really?!
Bottom line is, I was baffled at the fact that all of these people were attempting to have discussions of the starts, orbit, computers and humans, music masterpieces or jazz, when they were so full of substances and had not left the apartment for a couple of days.
I suppose much has to do with the characters utter disillusionment with the world and the fact that they feel like there is no way they could possible change anything about it.
  

The Third Dimension by Denise Levertov

"The Third Dimension" is the description of a feeling a person feels after they have been put through a rough situation.  It is the feeling you get the next day after an intense fight that ended in a parting of ways or the death of someone close.  Everything keeps going on, traffic, rain, the sun comes up, your boss wants you on time to work, the dog still needs to be fed, and you feel like you don't want to join in all of the hustle and bustle of the day.  You see everything as if you were in a third dimension, but when someone approaches you to say "How are you?," you go ahead and give a standard response, "good," as is felt by the following final verses, 

and I'm
alive to

tell the tale--but not
honestly:

the words
change it. Let it be--

here in the sweet sun
--a fiction, while I 

breathe and 

change pace.

"Those Winter Sundays" by Hayden

     This poem takes us into a glimpse of a father's schedule and a boy's relationship with him and it.   Throughout the poem, there are hints as to the relationship this boy (does not have to be a boy) has with his father. For example, in the verses, "and slowly I would rise and dress," shows his reluctance to be in the presence of his father which is emphasized in the verse, "fearing the chronic angers of that house."  Moreover, their relationship is more clearly defined by the verse, "Speaking indifferently to him." So we are faced with a boy who does not understand his father very well, and a father who feels that his weekly schedule of kindling a warm fire for his son to wake up to and polishing his shoes, are enough proof of his love for this boy.  

       The final two verses, "What did I know, what did I know, of love's austere and lonely offices?" show the boy's, now a man, understanding that love can come in many forms.  The emphasis on the words "lonely" and "austere" allude to the author's interpretation of love as a warm and sunny room full of hugs and kind words.  His father's love, however, was more practical than demonstrative.  He probably believed in long-term acts of love such as a warm house in the morning, building a college fund, fixing up an old car for him to have later...The author learns that love has many unexplored, or rather unexpected, rooms that may not always bear the face we expect to see.