I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

I think it's especially important for an editor to say what he's enjoying. For a novelist to be told, midstream, what he's doing right can actually influence the unwritten parts of a novel in a positive way - praise helps a writer know what's good about what he's written, what's interesting and exciting, and what to work for in writing the conclusion.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.