My Father Told Me Once That The

...and Our Footsteps Rang And Echoed Till It Sounded Like The Room Was Full Of Dancers, The House Calling Up All The People Who Had Danced Here Across Centuries Of Spring Evenings, Gallant Girls Seeing Gallant Boys Off To War, Old Men And Women Straight-backed While Outside Their World Disintegrated And The New One Battered At Their Doors, All Of Them Bruised And All Of Them Laughing, Welcoming Us Into Their Long Lineage.

Have You Noticed How Easily The Very Young Die? They Make The Best Martyrs For Any Cause, The Best Soldiers, The Best Suicides. It's Because They're Held Here So Lightly: They Haven't Yet Accumulated Loves And Responsibilities And Commitments And All The Things That Tie Us Securely To This World. They Can Let Go Of It As Easily And Simply As Lifting A Finger. But As You Get Older, You Begin To Find Things That Are Worth Holding Onto, Forever.

Don't You Ever Feel That - That You Just Need To Get Away? From Everything? That It's All Too Much?

I Had Always Felt That I Was An Observer, Never A Participant; That I Was Watching From Behind A Thick Glass Wall As People Went About The Business Of Living--and Did It With Such Ease, With A Skill That They Took For Granted And That I Had Never Known.

Now Death Is Uncool, Old-fashioned. To My Mind The Defining Characteristic Of Our Era Is Spin, Everything Tailored To Vanishing Point By Market Research, Brands And Bands Manufactured To Precise Specifications; We Are So Used To Things Transmuting Into Whatever We Would Like Them To Be That It Comes As A Profound Outrage To Encounter Death, Stubbornly Unspinnable, Only And Immutably Itself.