The Writer Has Little Control Over Personal

Back Then, Things Were Plainer: Less Money, No Electronic Devices, Little Fashion Tyranny, No Girlfriends. There Was Nothing To Distract Us From Our Human And Filial Duty Which Was To Study, Pass Exams, Use Those Qualifications To Find A Job, And Then Put Together A Way Of Life Unthreateningly Fuller Than That Of Our Parents, Who Would Approve, While Privately Comparing It To Their Own Earlier Lives, Which Had Been Simpler, And Therefore Superior.

Reading Is A Majority Skill But A Minority Art. Yet Nothing Can Replace The Exact, Complicated, Subtle Communion Between Absent Author And Entranced, Present Reader.

How Often Do We Tell Our Own Life Story? How Often Do We Adjust, Embellish, Make Sly Cuts? And The Longer Life Goes On, The Fewer Are Those Around To Challenge Our Account, To Remind Us That Our Life Is Not Our Life, Merely The Story We Have Told About Our Life. Told To Others, But — Mainly — To Ourselves.

Grief Seems At First To Destroy Not Just All Patterns, But Also To Destroy A Belief That A Pattern Exists.

When You Read A Great Book, You Don’t Escape From Life, You Plunge Deeper Into It. There May Be A Superficial Escape – Into Different Countries, Mores, Speech Patterns – But What You Are Essentially Doing Is Furthering Your Understanding Of Life’s Subtleties, Paradoxes, Joys, Pains And Truths. Reading And Life Are Not Separate But Symbiotic.