Here is an amazement — once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth … - Mary Oliver

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child’s voice — I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating — its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record — that is, not words but a reality.

Love yourself. Then forget it.
Then, love the world.