What Do Any Of Us Really Know

A Man Without Hands Came To The Door To Sell Me A Photograph Of My House. Except For The Chrome Hooks, He Was An Ordinary-looking Man Of Fifty Or So.

It's Possible, In A Poem Or Short Story, To Write About Commonplace Things And Objects Using Commonplace But Precise Language, And To Endow Those Things—a Chair, A Window Curtain, A Fork, A Stone, A Woman's Earring—with Immense, Even Startling Power.

It Ought To Make Us Feel Ashamed When We Talk Like We Know What We're Talking About When We Talk About Love.

Remember Haydn's 104 Symphonies. Not All Of Them Were Great. But There Were 104 Of Them.

If We're Lucky, Writer And Reader Alike, We'll Finish The Last Line Or Two Of A Short Story And Then Just Sit For A Minute, Quietly. Ideally, We'll Ponder What We've Just Written Or Read; Maybe Our Hearts Or Intellects Will Have Been Moved Off The Peg Just A Little From Where They Were Before. Our Body Temperature Will Have Gone Up, Or Down, By A Degree. Then, Breathing Evenly And Steadily Once More, We'll Collect Ourselves, Writers And Readers Alike, Get Up, "created Of Warm Blood And Nerves" As A Chekhov Character Puts It, And Go On To The Next Thing: Life. Always Life.