I Didn't Think I Had

I Didn't Want It To Be A Book That Made Pronouncements.

Forever, Reading Has Been Central, The Necessary Fix, The Support System. Her Life Has Been Informed By Reading. She Has Read Not Just For Distraction, Sustenance, To Pass The Time, But She Has Read In A State Of Primal Innocence, Reading For Enlightenment, For Instruction, Even. ... She Is As Much A Product Of What She Has Read As Of The Way In Which She Has Lived; She Is Like Millions Of Others Built By Books, For Whom Books Are An Essential Foodstuff, Who Could Starve Without.

I Have Long Been Interested In Landscape History, And When Younger And More Robust I Used To Do Much Tramping Of The English Landscape In Search Of Ancient Field Systems, Drove Roads, Indications Of Prehistoric Settlement. Towns And Cities, Too, Which Always Retain The Ghost Of Their Earlier Incarnations Beneath Today's Concrete And Glass.

We All Need A Past - That's Where Our Sense Of Identity Comes From.

I Believe That The Experience Of Childhood Is Irretrievable. All That Remains, For Any Of Us, Is A Headful Of Brilliant Frozen Moments, Already Dangerously Distorted By The Wisdoms Of Maturity.