Books Admitted Me To Their World Open-handedly,

Life, As The Most Ancient Of All Metaphors Insists, Is A Journey; And The Travel Book, In Its Deceptive Simulation Of The Journey's Fits And Starts, Rehearses Life's Own Fragmentation. More Even Than The Novel, It Embraces The Contingency Of Things.

Travel. It Was An Intransitive Verb. It Didn't Involve Any Destinations. It Was Going To The Going's Sake, To Be Anywhere But Where You Were, With Motion Itself As The Only Object.

At Night, What You See Is A City, Because All You See Is Lights. By Day, It Doesn't Look Like A City At All. The Trees Out-number The Houses. And That's Completely Typical Of Seattle. You Can't Quite Tell: Is It A City, Is It A Suburb, Is The Forest Growing Back?

Lincoln, Steeped In The Bible And Shakespeare, Set An Impossibly High Bar For Presidential Prose.

If We Live Inside A Bad Joke, It Is Up To Us To Learn, At Best And Worst, To Tell It Well.