Simultaneously I Am Myself, The Child I

Alec Wilkinson Is A Spare, Clear, And Lucid Writer Who Works In Stylistic Simplicity With Material That Is Not Simple At All.

In Nonfiction, You Have That Limitation, That Constraint, Of Telling The Truth.

And Only The Enlightened Can Recall Their Former Lives; For The Rest Of Us, The Memories Of Past Existences Are But Glints Of Light, Twinges Of Longing, Passing Shadows, Disturbingly Familiar, That Are Gone Before They Can Be Grasped, Like The Passage Of That Silver Bird On Dhaulagiri.

I Think In Any Writing You're Paying Attention To Detail.

When We Are Mired In The Relative World, Never Lifting Our Gaze To The Mystery, Our Life Is Stunted, Incomplete; We Are Filled With Yearning For That Paradise That Is Lost When, As Young Children, We Replace It With Words And Ideas And Abstractions - Such As Merit, Such As Past, Present, And Future - Our Direct, Spontaneous Experience Of The Thing Itself, In The Beauty And Precision Of This Present Moment.