I Work Mornings Only. I

Theirs Is The Mystery Of Continuous Creation And All That Providence Implies: The Uncertainty Of Vision, The Horror Of The Fixed, The Dissolution Of The Present, The Intricacy Of Beauty, The Pressure Of Fecundity, The Elusiveness Of The Free, And The Flawed Nature Of Perfection.

I Feel As Though I Stand At The Foot Of An Infinitely High Staircase, Down Which Some Exuberant Spirit Is Flinging Tennis Ball After Tennis Ball, Eternally, And The One Thing I Want In The World Is A Tennis Ball.

When You Open A Book,” The Sentimental Library Posters Said, “anything Can Happen.” This Was So. A Book Of Fiction Was A Bomb. It Was A Land Mine You Wanted To Go Off. You Wanted It To Blow Your Whole Day. Unfortunately, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Books Were Duds. They Had Been Rusting Out Of Everyone’s Way For So Long That They No Longer Worked. There Was No Way To Distinguish The Duds From The Live Mines Except To Throw Yourself At Them Headlong, One By One.

I Do Not So Much Write A Book As Sit Up With It, As A Dying Friend. I Hold Its Hand And Hope It Will Get Better.

Out Of A Human Population On Earth Of Four And A Half Billion, Perhaps Twenty People Can Write A Book In A Year. Some People Lift Cars, Too. Some People Enter Week-long Sled-dog Races, Go Over Niagara Falls In A Barrel, Fly Planes Through The Arc De Triomphe. Some People Feel No Pain In Childbirth. Some People Eat Cars. There Is No Call To Take Human Extremes As Norms.