The More You Learn, The Less You

I Was Initially Planning To Write About Grief In Terms Of Eurydice And The Myth Thereof. By That Point The Overall Metaphor Of Height And Depth And Flat And Falling And Rising Was Coming Into Being In My Mind.

Had My Life Increased, Or Merely Added To Itself? There Had Been Addition And Subtraction In My Life, But How Much Multiplication?

You Can't Have A Novel Without Real, Believable People, And Once You Get Into Either Too Theoretical A Novel Or Too Philosophical A Novel, You Get Into The Dangers That The French Novel Has Discovered In The Past 50 Or 60 Years. And You Get Into A Sort Of Aridity. No, You Have To Have Real, Identifiable People To Whom The Reader Reacts In A Way As If They Were Real People.

What Makes Us Want To Know The Worst? Is It That We Tire Of Preferring To Know The Best? Does Curiosity Always Hurdle Self-interest? Or Is It, More Simply, That Wanting To Know The Worst Is Love's Favorite Perversion.

In Those Days, We Imagined Ourselves As Being Kept In Some Kind Of Holding Pen, Waiting To Be Released Into Our Lives. And When The Moment Came, Our Lives -- And Time Itself -- Would Speed Up. How Were We To Know That Our Lives Had In Any Case Begun, That Some Advantage Had Already Been Gained, Some Damage Already Inflicted? Also, That Our Release Would Only Be Into A Larger Holding Pen, Whose Boundaries Would Be At First Undiscernible.