Childhood, At Its Best, Is A Perpetual

We Are Accustomed To Repeating The Cliché, And To Believing, That 'our Most Precious Resource Is Our Children.' But We Have Plenty Of Children To Go Around, God Knows, And As With Doritos, We Can Always Make More. The True Scarcity We Face Is Practicing Adults, Of People Who Know How Marginal, How Fragile, How Finite Their Lives And Their Stories And Their Ambitions Really Are But Who Find Value In This Knowledge, Even A Sense Of Strange Comfort, Because They Know Their Condition Is Universal, Is Shared.

Maybe All Wondrous Books Appear In Our Lives The Way Milo’s Tollbooth Appears, An Inexplicable Gift, Cast Up By Some Curious Chance That Comes To Feel, After We Have Finished And Fallen In Love With The Book, Like The Workings Of A Secret Purpose. Of All The Enchantments Of Beloved Books The Most Mysterious-the Most Phantasmal-is The Way They Always Seem To Come Our Way Precisely When We Need Them.

The Midnight Disease Is A Kind Of Emotional Insomnia; At Ever Conscious Moment Its Victim—even If He Or She Writes At Dawn, Or In The Middle Of The Afternoon—feels Like A Person Lying In A Sweltering Bedroom, With The Window Thrown Open, Looking Up At A Sky Filled With Stars And Airplanes, Listening To The Narrative Of A Rattling Blind, An Ambulance, A Fly Trapped In A Coke Bottle, While All Around Him The Neighbours Soundly Sleep.

He Had No Idea Of How Long His Life Would One Day Seem To Have Gone On; How Daily Present The Absence Of Love Would Come To Feel. “just Watch Me,” He Said.

I Have Confused Ideas Of Deity, Heavily Influenced By Mind-altering Years Of Reading Science Fiction, That Do Not Often Trouble Me, But One Thing I Know For Certain, And Have Known Since The Age Of Five Or Six, Is That I Really Can't Stand The God Of Abraham. In Fact, I Consider Him To Constitute The Pattern To Which Every True Asshole I Have Ever Known In My Life Has Pretty Well Conformed.