She Is, Above All Else, Tired; She

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.

All Over China, Parents Tell Their Children To Stop Complaining And To Finish Their Quadratic Equations And Trigonometric Functions Because There Are Sixty-five Million American Kids Going To Bed With No Math At All.

Remember, How Often The Great Art Of The Past Didn't Look Great At First, How Often It Didn't Look Like Art At All; How Much Easier It Is, Decades Or Centuries Later, To Adore It, Not Only Because It Is, In Fact, Great But Because It's Still Here; Because The Inevitable Little Errors And Infelicities Tend To Recede In An Object That's Survived The War Of 1812, The Eruption Of Krakatoa, The Rise And Fall Of Nazism.

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.

If She Were Religious, She Would Call It The Soul. It Is More Than The Sum Of Her Intellect And Her Emotions, More Than The Sum Of Her Experiences, Though It Runs Like Veins Of Brilliant Metal Through All Three. It Is An Inner Faculty That Recognizes The Animating Mysteries Of The World Because It Is Made Of The Same Substance