A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.

I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred Baboon." It's wonderful. It's a scientist's journal about baboons, but it relates to the search for human origin.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig