If I Had A Camera,' I Said,

He Died Alone Because He Was Too Embarrassed To Phone Anyone.

Sometimes, Waking Early Before The Others, Wandering The Rooms Wrapped In A Blanket Or Drinking My Tea In The Empty Kitchen, I Had That Most Rare Of Feelings, The Sense That The World, So Consistently Overwhelming And Incomprehensible, In Fact Has An Order, Oblique As It May Seem, And I A Place Within It.

Obviously I've Been Reading Kafka For A Long Long Time, Since I Was Really Young, And Even Before I Ever Read Him I Knew Who He Was. I Had This Weird Sense That He Was Some Kind Of Family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I Really Think Of Him That Way, The Way We Think About An Uncle Who Opened Up Some Path For Being In A Family That Otherwise Wouldn't Have Existed. I Think Of Him That Way As A Writer And A Familial Figure.

If The Book Is A Mystery To Its Author As She's Writing, Inevitably It's Going To Be A Mystery To The Reader As He Or She Reads It.

When You Are Young, You Think It's Going To Be Solved By Love. But It Never Is. Being Close -- As Close As You Can Get -- To Another Person Only Makes Clear That Impassable Distance Between You.' If Being In Love Only Made People More Lonely, Why Would Everyone Want It So Much?' Because Of The Illusion. You Fall In Love, It's Intoxicating, And For A Little While You Feel Like You've Actually Become One With The Other Person. Merged Souls And So On. You Think You'll Never Be Lonely Again.