A Mystery Of The Universe Is How

Eventually, All Things Merge Into One, And A River Runs Through It.

I Had As Yet No Notion That Life Every Now And Then Becomes Literature—not For Long, Of Course, But Long Enough To Be What We Best Remember, And Often Enough So That What We Eventually Come To Mean By Life Are Those Moments When Life, Instead Of Going Sideways, Backwards, Forward, Or Nowhere At All, Lines Out Straight, Tense And Inevitable, With A Complication, Climax, And, Given Some Luck, A Purgation, As If Life Had Been Made And Not Happened.

Yet Even In The Loneliness Of The Canyon I Knew There Were Others Like Me Who Had Brothers They Did Not Understand But Wanted To Help. We Are Probably Those Referred To As "our Brother's Keepers," Possessed Of One Of The Oldest And Possible One Of The Most Futile And Certainly One Of The Most Haunting Instincts. It Will Not Let Us Go.

A River, Though, Has So Many Things To Say That It Is Hard To Know What It Says To Each Of Us.

The Nearest Anyone Can Come To Finding Himself At Any Given Age Is To Find A Story That Somehow Tells Him About Himself.