The Writer Is Always Tricking The Reader

Becoming A Parent Is Actually Terrifying. A Lot Of People Have That Feeling About Their Dogs. And If You're The Kind Of Person Who's Going To Have That Feeling About A Dog You're Definitely Going To Have That About A Child.

I Just Read Everything I Could Get My Hands On. I Taught Myself To Read Or My Mother Taught Me. Who Knows How I Learned To Read? It Was Before I Went To School, So I Would Go To The Library And Just Take Things Off The Shelf. My Mother Had To Sign A Piece Of Paper Saying I Could Take Adult Books.

We Are Repeatedly Left, In Other Words, With No Further Focus Than Ourselves, A Source From Which Self-pity Naturally Flows. Each Time This Happens I Am Struck Again By The Permanent Impassibility Of The Divide. Some People Who Have Lost A Husband Or A Wife Report Feeling That Person's Presence, Receiving That Person's Advice. Some Report Actual Sightings, What Freud Described In "mourning And Melancholia" As "a Clinging To The Object Through The Medium Of A Hallucinatory Wishful Psychosis." Others Describe Not A Visible Apparition But Just A "very Strongly Felt Presence."

I Know Why We Try To Keep The Dead Alive: We Try To Keep Them Alive In Order To Keep Them With Us. I Also Know That If We Are To Live Ourselves There Comes A Point At Which We Must Relinquish The Dead, Let Them Go, Keep Them Dead.

A Pool Is, For Many Of Us In The West, A Symbol Not Of Affluence But Of Order, Of Control Over The Uncontrollable. A Pool Is Water, Made Available And Useful, And Is, As Such, Infinitely Soothing To The Western Eye.