When You Don't Know What To Do,

The Line Of Gray Along The Horizon Is Brighter Now, And With The Coming Light I Feel A Certainty: That There Is, Despite Our Wild Imaginings, Only One Life. The Ghostly Others, No Matter How Real They Seem, No Matter How Badly We Need Them, Are Phantoms. The One Life We're Left With Is Sufficient To Fill And Refill Our Imperfect Hearts With Joy, And Then To Shatter Them. And It Never, Ever Lets Up.

You Just Kind Of Have Faith. If That Sounds Kind Of Mystical, It's Because I Really Don't Know How It Works, But I Trust That It Does. I Try To Write The Way I Read, In Order To Find Out What Happens Next.

One Of The Nice Things About Our Marriage, At Least To My Way Of Thinking, Is That My Wife And I No Longer Have To Argue Every Thing Through. We Each Know What The Other Will Say, And So The Saying Becomes An Unnecessary Formality. No Doubt Some Marriage Counselor Would Explain To Us That Our Problem Is A Failure To Communicate, But To My Way Of Thinking We've Worked Long And Hard To Achieve This Silence, Lily's And Mine, So Fraught With Mutual Understanding.

A Couple Years Ago, The Novelist Russell Banks Told Me He Was Reading The Ancient Greek Historian Herodotus. I Asked Why. He Said, 'because I've Always Wanted To And Am Tired Of Having My Reading Assigned.' I Thought It Was A Marvelous Declaration Of Independence.

I Told Him The Truth, That I Loved Him And Didn't Regret Anything About Our Lives Together. But Do We Ever 'tell The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth, So Help Me God' As My Father Used To Say, To Those We Love? Or Even To Ourselves? Don't Even The Best And Most Fortunate Of Lives Hint At Other Possibilities, At A Different Kind Of Sweetness And, Yes, Bitterness Too? Isn't This Why We Can't Help Feeling Cheated, Even When We Know We Haven't Been?