Life Was An Impenetrable Mystery Cloaked In

We Are, In This Country, More Open To New Ideas. But We Are Also, It Seems To Me, More Inclined To Hail The New As Absolute Truth - Until The Next New Comes Along.

Words Are Nets Through Which All Truth Escapes.

Literature Is The Province Of Imagination, And Stories, In Whatever Guise, Are Meditations On Life.

My Father Brought Me A Box Of Books Once When I Was About Three And A Half Or Four. I Remember The Carton They Were In And The Covers With Illustrations By Newell C. Wyeth.

Labels Not Only Free Us From The Obligation To Think Creatively; They Numb Our Sensibilities, Our Power To Feel. During The Vietnam War, The Phrase Body Count Entered Our Vocabulary. It Is An Ambiguous Phrase, Inorganic, Even Faintly Sporty. It Distanced Us From The Painful Reality Of Corpses, Of Dead, Mutilated People.