A Good Novel Begins With

A Good Novel Begins With A Small Question And Ends With A Bigger One.

Labels Not Only Free Us From The Obligation To Think Creatively; They Numb Our Sensibilities, Our Power To Feel. During The Vietnam War, The Phrase Body Count Entered Our Vocabulary. It Is An Ambiguous Phrase, Inorganic, Even Faintly Sporty. It Distanced Us From The Painful Reality Of Corpses, Of Dead, Mutilated People.

A Year And A Half After The End Of The War And The German Occupation, Paris Was Muted And Looked Bruised And Forlorn. Everywhere I Went, I Sensed The Tracks Of The Wolf That Had Tried To Devour The City. But Paris Proved Inedible, As It Had Been Ever Since Its Tribal Beginnings On An Island In The Seine, The Ile De La Cité.

We Are, In This Country, More Open To New Ideas. But We Are Also, It Seems To Me, More Inclined To Hail The New As Absolute Truth - Until The Next New Comes Along.

The Truth Came Slowly Like A Story Told By People Interrupting Each Other.