Once Upon A Time There

To Touch And Feel Each Thing In The World, To Know It By Sight And By Name, And Then To Know It With Your Eyes Closed So That When Something Is Gone, It Can Be Recognized By The Shape Of Its Absence. So That You Can Continue To Possess The Lost, Because Absence Is The Only Constant Thing. Because You Can Get Free Of Everything Except The Space Where Things Have Been.

To Walk Into A Modern-day Bookstore Is A Little Bit Like Studying A Single Photograph Out Of The Infinite Number Of Photographs That Cold Be Taken Of The World: It Offers The Reader A Frame.

When You're Younger, It's All Theoretical. It's All Potential. As You Get Older, It Becomes Actual, And Your Life Gets Filled With Unexpected Complexity; Some Of It Asked For, And Some Of It Not. It Becomes Richer, I Find.

Why Does One Begin To Write? Because She Feels Misunderstood, I Guess. Because It Never Comes Out Clearly Enough When She Tries To Speak. Because She Wants To Rephrase The World, To Take It In And Give It Back Again Differently, So That Everything Is Used And Nothing Is Lost. Because It's Something To Do To Pass The Time Until She Is Old Enough To Experience The Things She Writes About.

Sometimes I Get The Feeling That We're Just A Bunch Of Habits. The Gestures We Repeat Over And Over, They're Just Our Need To Be Recognized. Without Them, We'd Be Unidentifiable. We Have To Reinvent Ourselves Every Minute.