Had I Been Blessed With

New York Is Full Of People . . . With A Feeling For The Tangential Adventure, The Risky Adventure, The Interlude That's Not Likely To End In Any Double-ring Ceremony.

The Genuflection Toward 'fairness' Is A Familiar Newsroom Piety, In Practice The Excuse For A Good Deal Of Autopilot Reporting And Lazy Thinking But In Theory A Benign Ideal. In Washington, However, A Community In Which The Management Of News Has Become The Single Overriding Preoccupation Of The Core Industry, What 'fairness' Has Often Come To Mean Is A Scrupulous Passivity, An Agreement To Cover The Story Not As It Is Occurring But As It Is Presented, Which Is To Say As It Is Manufactured.

You Have Your Wonderful Memories," People Said Later, As If Memories Were Solace. Memories Are Not. Memories Are By Definition Of Times Past, Things Gone. Memories Are The Westlake Uniforms In The Closet, The Faded And Cracked Photographs, The Invitations To The Weddings Of The People Who Are No Longer Married, The Mass Cards From The Funerals Of The People Whose Faces You No Longer Remember. Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. We Live Entirely By The Impression Of A Narrative Line Upon Disparate Images, The Shifting Phantasmagoria, Which Is Our Actual Experience.

Water Is Important To People Who Do Not Have It, And The Same Is True Of Control.