Books Are Solitudes In Which We Meet.

When You Say 'mother' Or 'father' You Describe Three Different Phenomena. There Is The Giant Who Made You And Loomed Over Your Early Years; There Is Whatever More Human-scale Version Might Have Been Possible To Perceive Later And Maybe Even Befriend; And There Is The Internalized Version Of The Parent With Whom You Struggle- To Appease, To Escape, To Be Yourself, To Understand And Be Understood By- And They Make Up A Chaotic And Contradictory Trinity.

I Walk Wherever My Errands Take Me.

There Are Those Who Receive As Birthright An Adequate Or At Least Unquestioned Sense Of Self And Those Who Set Out To Reinvent Themselves, For Survival Or For Satisfaction, And Travel Far. Some People Inherit Values And Practices As A House They Inhabit; Some Of Us Have To Burn Down That House, Find Our Own Ground, Build From Scratch, Even As A Psychological Metamorphosis.

When Someone Doesn't Show Up, The People Who Wait Sometimes Tell Stories About What Might Have Happened And Come To Half Believe The Desertion, The Abduction, The Accident. Worry Is A Way To Pretend That You Have Knowledge Or Control Over What You Don't--and It Surprises Me, Even In Myself, How Much We Prefer Ugly Scenarios To The Pure Unknown. Perhaps Fantasy Is What You Fill Up Maps With Rather Than Saying That They Too Contain The Unknown.

If You Look At A Lot Of Traditional Societies, They're All Organized Along What We Might Call Anarchist Guidelines, But It's Not Like The Zapatistas Were Reading European Social Theory.