Like Most-maybe All- Writers, I Learned To

Like Seeing A Photograph Of Yourself As A Child, Encountering Handwriting That You Know Was Once Yours But That Now Seems Only Dimly Familiar Can Inspire A Confrontation With The Mystery Of Time.

But If I Were Asked To Pick One Constant, One Quality That Seems Dependable, Immutable, Endlessly Available, I'd Say That It Was Intensity. For Nothing In Sicily Seems Withheld, Done Half Way, Restrained Or Suppressed. There's Nothing To Correspond To Say, The Ironic, The Cerebral Remove At Which A Frenchman Might Consider An Idea Or A Question, Or The Scandinavian Distrust Of The Sloppy, Emotive Response.

The Mystery Of Death, The Riddle Of How You Could Speak To Someone And See Them Every Day And Then Never Again, Was So Impossible To Fathom That Of Course We Kept Trying To Figure It Out, Even When We Were Unconscious.

There Are Many Occasions In Literature In Which Telling Is Far More Effective Than Showing.

So Perhaps The Correct Conclusion Is That Green Was Less Attuned To How People Sound When They Speak - The Actual Words And Expressions They Employ - Than To What They Mean. This Notion Of Dialogue As A Pure Expression Of Character That...transcends The Specifics Of Time And Place May Be Partly Why The Conversations In The Works Of Writers Such As Austen And Bronte Often Sound Fresh And Astonishingly Contemporary.