Question of "Where We Begin" turns to be not only a formal question but also a question central to the attempt to make sense of things about which it is very difficult to make any sense - illness, death, despair, suicides, cruelty, the various troubles love can provoke, our inability to really know one another when we our inner selves are walled off by our bodies.

There are as many kinds of missionaries as there are human beings. There are the terrible, colonialist power-grabbers, still, and there are plenty of the sort of well-intentioned villains who do great harm and don’t understand that they are doing great harm.

You can't know how weird your own life is until you get some distance on it. Everything seems mundane or boring or embarrassingly small.

Mistakes were made long ago. It is someone else's fault. We can't be held responsible, but we are very sorry.

If you start parsing the cause-and-effect chain backward through time, eventually you land in cosmology - does the story begin with the Big Bang or the out-of-nothing creation of the world by the word of a Southern Baptist god? And that question is even more fraught than any of the others. The stakes couldn't be any higher, because not it's not just a question of life and death, but also a question of life after death or eternal torture after death.

Everything is possible for the writer. There isn’t anything anyone can tell you that you can’t do, and there is no such thing as "getting away with" anything. There’s no one to tell you what you can or can’t do. You’re only limited by the fences you allow yourself to build around yourself, for whatever reason, including fidelity to some idea about literature someone else imposed upon you some time long ago or five minutes ago.

Question of "Where We Begin" turns to be not only a formal question but also a question central to the attempt to make sense of things about which it is very difficult to make any sense - illness, death, despair, suicides, cruelty, the various troubles love can provoke, our inability to really know one another when we our inner selves are walled off by our bodies.