the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.