Sometimes You Have To Let Time Carry

It Seems To Me That If You Were To Take Almost Any Half-century In History, You'd Find A Grand Societal Tug-of-war Between The Community And The Individual.

My Son Is Actually Named After Beck, The Musician. We Heard Beck On The Radio And Thought That Was A Good Nickname For A Child. We Named Our Son Beckett So We Could Call Him Beck - We Reverse Engineered. And Then After He Was Born And I Saw The Name On The Birth Certificate I Realized Beckett Was A Really Pretentious Name, Way Too Literary. Luckily He's Grown Into It. We Nearly Named My Second Son Dashiell. Can You Imagine? Beckett And Dashiell. It Would Have Been A Disaster Of Pretentiousness.

Even Still, We Run. We Have Not Reached Our Average Of 57.92 Years Without Knowing That You Run Through It, And It Hurts And You Run Through It Some More, And If It Hurts Worse, You Run Through It Even More, And When You Finish, You Will Have Broken Through. In The End, When You Are Done, And Stretching, And Your Heartbeat Slows, And Your Sweat Dries, If You've Run Through The Hard Part, You Will Remember No Pain.

I Think I'm An Optimistic Person. Ultimately I Believe In People. I Believe They Can Be Robust. When My Collection Delicate Edible Birds Came Out There Were One Or Two People Who Read The Title As Being A Commentary On The Characters Within The Pages, The Women In The Book, Meaning That They Were These Fragile Girls Meant For Male Consumption. But I Had Meant The Opposite - These People Are Tough. Dark Things Happen To Them But They Get On With Life As Best They Can.

Research Is About Following The Gleam Into The Dark. It's Also About Being Sensitive Enough To Know Which Fact Is "the Creative Fact; The Fertile Fact; The Fact That Suggests And Engenders," As Opposed To The Fact That Deadens And Kills A Delicate New Project.