Love Is Deep, A Mystery - Who

A Certain Slightly Cruel Disregard For The Feelings Of Living People Is Simply Part Of The Package. I Think A Writer, If Hes Any Good, Is Not An Entirely Benign Entity In The World.

Like The Morning You Walked Out Of That Old House, When You Were Eighteen And I Was, Well, I Had Just Turned Nineteen, Hadn't I? I Was A Nineteen-year-old And I Was In Love With Louis And I Was In Love With You, And I Thought I Had Never Seen Anything So Beautiful As The Sight Of You Walking Out A Glass Door In The Early Morning, Still Sleepy, In Your Underwear. Isn't It Strange?

You Have Started The Book With This Bubble Over Your Head That Contains A Cathedral Full Of Fire - That Contains A Novel So Vast And Great And Penetrating And Bright And Dark That It Will Put All Other Novels Ever Written To Shame. And Then, As You Get Towards The End, You Begin To Realise, No, It's Just This Book.

We Throw Our Parties; We Abandon Our Families To Live Alone In Canada; We Struggle To Write Books That Do Not Change The World, Despite Our Gifts And Our Unstinting Efforts, Our Most Extravagant Hopes. We Live Our Lives, Do Whatever We Do, And Then We Sleep--it's As Simple And Ordinary As That. A Few Jump Out Of Windows Or Drown Themselves Or Take Pills; More Die By Accident; And Most Of Us, The Vast Majority, Are Slowly Devoured By Some Disease Or, If We're Very Fortunate, By Time Itself.

What A Thrill, What A Shock, To Be Alive On A Morning In June, Prosperous, Almost Scandalously Privileged, With A Simple Errand To Run.