I Read A Book Called The Art

I Would ... Go Up To The Mailbox And Sit In The Grass, Waiting. ... Till It Came To Me One Day There Were Women Doing This With Their Lives, All Over. There Were Women Just Waiting And Waiting By Mailboxes For One Letter Or Another. I Imagined Me Making This Journey Day After Day And Year After Year, And My Hair Starting To Go Gray, And I Thought, I Was Never Made To Go On Like That. ... If There Were Woman All Through Life Waiting, And Women Busy And Not Waiting, I Knew Which I Had To Be.

It Was At This Time That She Entirely Gave Up On Reading. The Covers Of Books Looked Like Coffins To Her, Either Shabby Or Ornate, And What Was Inside Them Might As Well Have Been Dust.

It Almost Seemed As If There Must Be Some Random And Of Course Unfair Thrift In The Emotional Housekeeping Of The World, If The Great Happiness--however Temporary, However Flimsy--of One Person Could Come Out Of The Great Unhappiness Of Another.

I Have Never Kept Diaries. I Just Remember A Lot And Am More Self-centered Than Most People.

I Began To Understand That There Were Certain Talkers - Certain Girls - Whom People Liked To Listen To, Not Because Of What They, The Girls, Had To Say, But Because Of The Delight They Took In Saying It. A Delight In Themselves, A Shine On Their Faces, A Conviction That Whatever They Were Telling About Was Remarkable And That They Themselves Could Not Help But Give Pleasure. There Might Be Other People - People Like Me - Who Didn't Concede This, But That Was Their Loss. And People Like Me Would Never Be The Audience These Girls Were After, Anyway.