I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. - Annie Dillard

I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.

The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is.

I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold up his head has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to find out. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.