I Have No Useful Theories About Love

I Think Of The People Who Commit These Acts As Children. They're In Their 20s, But Like Certain Children, They Have Been Told Only One Story, Over And Over. Like Most Children, They Believe In An Easily Identifiable Good And Evil, And Like Most Children, They Are Capable Of Unthinkable Cruelty.

I Was Living My Own Future And My Brother's Lost One As Well. I Represented Him Here Just As He Represented Me There, In Some Unguessable Other Place. His Move From Life To Death Might Resemble My Stepping Into The Kitchen - Into Its Soft Nowhere Quality And Foggy Hum. I Breathed The Dark Air. If I Had At That Moment A Sense Of Calm Kindly Death While My Heart Beat And My Lungs Expanded, He Might Know A Similar Sense Of Life In The Middle Of His Ongoing Death.

Here Is The World, And You Live In It, And Are Grateful. You Try To Be Grateful.

Maybe It’s Not, In The End, The Virtues Of Others That So Wrenches Our Hearts As It Is The Sense Of Almost Unbearably Poignant Recognition When We See Them At Their Most Base, In Their Sorrow And Gluttony And Foolishness. You Need The Virtues, Too—some Sort Of Virtues—but We Don’t Care About Emma Bovary Or Anna Karenina Or Raskolnikov Because They’re Good. We Care About Them Because They’re Not Admirable, Because They’re Us, And Because Great Writers Have Forgiven Them For It.

She Is Not A Writer At All, Really; She Is Merely A Gifted Eccentric.