Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.