Once Upon A Time There

I Think In The Whole Field Of Questions About What We Take To Be "real," One Of Those Questions Is About The Self. When You Talk About The Self We're Always Talking About Whether It's A Construction And It's A Construction We're Always In The Process Of Working On. I Don't Think That Work Ever Ends, To Some Degree.

What Interests Me Very Much As A Writer Is The Ability For Writing To Have Our Lives To Be Occupied So Vividly By Others. I Think That's What We Long For As Writers.

Now That Mine Is Almost Over, I Can Say That The One Thing That Struck Me Most About Life Is The Capacity For Change. One Day You're A Person And The Next Day They Tell You You're A Dog. At First It's Hard To Bear, But After A While You Learn Not To Look At It As A Loss. There's Even A Moment When It Becomes Exhilarating To Realize Just How Little Needs To Stay The Same For You To Continue The Effort They Call, For Lack Of A Better Word, Being Human.

One Of Us Had Loved The Other More Perfectly, Had Watched The Other More Closely, And One Of Us Listened And The Other Hadn’t, And One Of Us Held On To The Ambition Of The One Idea Far Longer Than Was Reasonable, Whereas The Other, Passing A Garbage Can One Night, Had Casually Thrown It Away.

An Average Of Seventy-four Species Become Extinct Every Day, Which Was One Good Reason But Not The Only One To Hold Someone's Hand.