landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.

Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

In description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene. .. This personal absorption is what we mean by 'style.' It is strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word - style - for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could, perhaps more exactly, call this relation between consciousness and its subject 'integrity.' What else is the articulation of perception?

Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that salt solution but the pain or rage, the biting shame that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.