Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.

We are ruled by quotations.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

Desire has no history.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.