The Nearest Anyone Can Come

How Can A Question Be Answered That Asks A Lifetime Of Questions.

As For My Father, I Never Knew Whether He Believed God Was A Mathematician But He Certainly Believed God Could Count And That Only By Picking Up God's Rhythms Were We Able To Regain Power And Beauty. Unlike Many Presbyterians, He Often Used The Word "beautiful.

Poets Talk About "spots Of Time", But It Is Really The Fishermen Who Experience Eternity Compressed Into A Moment. No One Can Tell What A Spot Of Time Is Until Suddenly The Whole World Is A Fish And The Fish Is Gone.

I Had As Yet No Notion That Life Every Now And Then Becomes Literature—not For Long, Of Course, But Long Enough To Be What We Best Remember, And Often Enough So That What We Eventually Come To Mean By Life Are Those Moments When Life, Instead Of Going Sideways, Backwards, Forward, Or Nowhere At All, Lines Out Straight, Tense And Inevitable, With A Complication, Climax, And, Given Some Luck, A Purgation, As If Life Had Been Made And Not Happened.

Unless We Are Willing To Escape Into Sentimentality Or Fantasy, Often The Best We Can Do With Catastrophes, Even Our Own, Is To Find Out Exactly What Happened And Restore Some Of The Missing Parts.