Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.