One cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very ( Read more... )

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

On the Nature of Understanding

Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it halfway.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it’s
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store ( Read more... )

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian BorderThis is the field where the battle did not happen ( Read more... )

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would DoIf you said "Nice day," he would look up ( Read more... )

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

Two girls discover

the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I ( Read more... )

...I write my books on what I call "The Pizza Model." Fifty years ago, pizza was a strange exotic food, the subject of ethnic slurs. Now, not only does it have coast-to-coast acceptance, but American chefs and eaters have made it their own: in Italy you would be hard put to find a Cajun-blackened-chicken pizza topped with mango salsa on a whole- ( Read more... )