The Thing That Makes Reading

Until I Was 42, I Could Fit Everything That I Owned Into Two Suitcases.

The Oldest Principle Of Composition: Repeat Everything.

Time Passes, As The Novelist Says. The Single Most Useful Trick Of Fiction For Our Repair And Refreshment: The Defeat Of Time. A Century Of Family Saga And A Ride Up An Escalator Can Take The Same Number Of Pages. Fiction Sets Any Conversion Rate, Then Changes It In A Syllable. The Narrator’s Mother Carries Her Child Up The Stairs And The Reader Follows, For Days. But World War I Passes In A Paragraph. I Needed 125 Pages To Get From Labor Day To Christmas Vacation. In Six More Words, Here’s Spring.

Music Forecasts The Past, Recalls The Future. Now And Then The Difference Falls Away, And In One Simple Gift Of Circling Sound, The Ear Solves The Scrambled Cryptogram. One Abiding Rhythm, Present And Always, And You're Free. But A Few Measures More, And The Cloak Of Time Closes Back Around You.

This Idea That A Book Can Either Be About Character And Feeling, Or About Politics And Idea, Is Just A False Binary. Ideas Are An Expression Of The Feelings And The Intense Emotions We Hold About The World.