There's More Danger In The Violence You

…even The Idea Of A City Never Entered His Mind. It Was As If He Had Walked Under The Millimeter Of Haze Just Above The Inked Fibers Of A Map, That Pure Zone Between Land And Chart, Between Distances And Legends, Between Nature And Storyteller. The Place They Had Chosen To Come To, To Be Their Best Selves, To Be Unconscious Of Ancestry. Here, Apart From The Sun Compass And The Odometer Mileage, And The Book, He Was Alone, His Own Invention. He Knew During These Times How The Mirage Worked, The Fata Morgana, For He Was Within It.

Read Him Slowly, Dear Girl, You Must Read Kipling Slowly. Watch Carefully Where The Commas Fall So You Can Discover The Natural Pauses. He Is A Writer Who Used Pen And Ink. He Looked Up From The Page A Lot, I Believe, Stared Through His Window And Listened To Birds, As Most Writers Who Are Alone Do. Some Do Not Know The Names Of Birds, Though He Did. Your Eye Is Too Quick And North American. Think About The Speed Of His Pen. What An Appalling, Barnacled Old First Paragraph It Is Otherwise.

...the Heart Is An Organ Of Fire.

You Have To Protect Yourself From Sadness. Sadness Is Very Close To Hate. Let Me Tell You This. This Is The Thing I Learned. If You Take In Someone Else's Poison – Thinking You Can Cure Them By Sharing It – You Will Instead Store It Within You. Those Men In The Desert Were Smarter Than You. They Assumed He Could Be Useful. So They Saved Him, But When He Was No Longer Useful They Left Him.

So The Books For The Englishman, As He Listened Intently Or Not, Had Gaps Of Plot Like Sections Of A Road Washed Out By Storms, Missing Incidents As If Locusts Had Consumed A Section Of Tapestry, As If Plaster Loosened By The Bombing Had Fallen Away From A Mural At Night.