We have one life to live - and one chance to live it in the richest way possible.

Insecurity, however, is a luxury on which I never economize.

Here was a monument, in fieldstone, to the art of family life.

Even after several hospitalizations for alcohol and drug-related nervous breakdowns, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay defined sobriety as restricting her daily intake of liquor to a liter and a half of wine.

As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors.

Conservatives like Palin and Reagan and others do seem to love the series, but so do people of all political stripes and backgrounds. I speak about the series' "radiant simplicity."

If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it.