You Put Together Two Things

Reading Is A Majority Skill But A Minority Art. Yet Nothing Can Replace The Exact, Complicated, Subtle Communion Between Absent Author And Entranced, Present Reader.

He Feared Me As Many Men Fear Women: Because Their Mistresses (or Their Wives) Understand Them. They Are Scarcely Adult, Some Men: They Wish Women To Understand Them, And To That End They Tell Them All Their Secrets; And Then, When They Are Properly Understood, They Hate Their Women For Understanding Them.

I Thought Of The Things That Had Happened To Me Over The Years, And Of How Little I Had Made Happen.

The Better You Know Someone, The Less Well You Often See Them (and The Less Well They Can Therefore Be Transferred Into Fiction). They May Be So Close As To Be Out Of Focus, And There Is No Operating Novelist To Dispel The Blur.

But I’ve Been Turning Over In My Mind The Question Of Nostalgia, And Whether I Suffer From It. I Certainly Don’t Get Soggy At The Memory Of Some Childhood Knickknack; Nor Do I Want To Deceive Myself Sentimentally About Something That Wasn’t Even True At The Time—love Of The Old School, And So On. But If Nostalgia Means The Powerful Recollection Of Strong Emotions—and A Regret That Such Feelings Are No Longer Present In Our Lives—then I Plead Guilty.