If We Had Not Met, That Day,

All I Know For Certain Is That Reading Is Of The Most Intense Importance To Me; If I Were Not Able To Read, To Revisit Old Favorites And Experiment With Names New To Me, I Would Be Starved - Probably Too Starved To Go On Writing Myself.

I Am Addicted To Arrivals, To Those Innocent Dawn Moments From Which History Accelerates.

Perhaps I Shall Not Write My Account Of The Paleolithic At All, But Make A Film Of It. A Silent Film At That, In Which I Shall Show You First The Great Slumbering Rocks Of The Cambrian Period, And Move From Those To The Mountains Of Wales...from Ordovician To Devonian, On The Lush Glowing Cotswolds, On To The White Cliffs Of Dover... An Impressionistic, Dreaming Film, In Which The Folded Rocks Arise And Flower And Grow And Become Salisbury Cathedral And York Minster.

We Open Our Mouths And Out Flow Words Whose Ancestries We Do Not Even Know. We Are Walking Lexicons. In A Single Sentence Of Idle Chatter We Preserve Latin, Anglo-saxon, Norse: We Carry A Museum Inside Our Heads, Each Day We Commemorate Peoples Of Whom We Have Never Heard.

Getting To Know Someone Else Involves Curiosity About Where They Have Come From, Who They Are.