Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel -movement through space -provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions -perhaps one of the secret terrors -of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.

Being known primarily for their well-knownness, celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by becoming widely known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off one another.

In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.