What Do You Do When You're No

Virginia Woolf's Great Novel, 'mrs. Dalloway,' Is The First Great Book I Ever Read. I Read It Almost By Accident When I Was In High School, When I Was 15 Years Old.

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.

That Summer When She Was Eighteen, It Seemed Anything Could Happen, Anything At All.

There Is A Beauty In The World, Though It's Harsher Than We Expect It To Be.

There Is Just This For Consolation: An Hour Here Or There, When Our Lives Seem, Against All Odds And Expectations, To Burst Open And Give Us Everything We've Ever Imagined , Though Everyone But Children (and Perhaps Even They) Knows These Hours Will Inevitably Be Followed By Others, Far Darker And More Difficult. Still, We Cherish The City, The Morning, We Hope, More Than Anything, For More. Heaven Only Knows Why We Love It So.