The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

I myself discovered many authors through school reading lists and through school anthologies. The positives are: young readers can find the world opening up to them through books they study. The negatives may include bad experiences kids have - if they don't like the book or the teacher, or the way the book is taught.

This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.

Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?

I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.