Don > Books

Together, we make for an eccentric and chaotic bunch. We're pretty formidable, apparently. We're as close as otters, and huddled together, we make our way in the world.

A goldeneye duck. They're so beautiful. Perhaps it's here alone for the winter because there's no female around. We rarely think of all that effort being made below the water, those webbed propellers whirring so that the bird can glide with such ease and grace on the river. It's just like being autistic. On the surface, no one realizes the work needed, the energy used, so you can blend in and be like everyone else.

When you first encounter the cliffs here during the breeding season, between May and July, everything gloriously slams into you at once. The not-quite pungent smell. The kaleidoscope of sounds. There are thousands of birds: kittiwakes, razorbills, fulmars and puffins, all wheeling or diving, patrolling and protecting, sauntering over the shoulder of the stack. Mind-blowing. Magnificent. This is a place vibrating with survival and endurance. I feel tickled and almost hysterical, but must take it all in.

I'm more self-conscious now. I'm older, more aware of myself. I still have vivid memories of being uninhibited like them, always talking, explaining, feeling intense, bubbling excitement. This early teenage phase in my life is quieter, more inward-looking, reticent, scarred by the hurt of others.

“All my family got together, trying to coax this book into something that was manageable,” says McAnulty. But Róisín [his mom] says she wouldn’t want people to think his writing was overly shaped by others. “Although it has been edited sensitively and beautifully, the first draft was actually incredible.” 1

To Adrian at Little Toller [the publisher] for not trying to "adult" my voice in the editing process. For smoothing my edges and for giving me, an autistic teenager, the opportunity to tell my story, in its irreverent rawness and childish wonder.

As I ran to join my family for the last stretch of the walk at Glendalough, leaving St. Kevin and the blackbird behind, a solar glare draped over us, connected us to the land with invisible stirrings. A longer, heavier line is about to be cast into the world. My heart is opening. I'm ready.

They make us think the grade is more important than the learning, and that's messed up. We're all overwhelmed. You're not alone.

In emergency, at the moment of choice, Aeneas might hesitate, confused, looking to the outcome, torn between conflicting claims and possibilities: in a torment of indecision he groped for his purpose, his fate, till he found it. Then his choice was made and he acted on it. And while he acted, his purpose was unwavering. Afterwards, he might agonise over it all again, question his conscience endlessly, never fully satisfied that he had done the right thing.

The battle isn't against an evil-doer, although some characters do evil, but against hostile environments and against the impersonal forces of fate and necessity. And, often, against the protagonists' own undiscovered emotions and fears. Le Guin's heroes seek -- like the wizards in the Earthsea series -- to maintain the proper balance in the universe, always aware that every act -- good or bad -- has unforeseeable consequences. As does every failure to act.

We talked in the summer mornings before we got to work; we talked in darkness in our marriage bed, in the lengthening autumn nights. He learned that he could talk to me as I think he had never talked to anyone, unless perhaps Creusa long ago, in the dark years of the siege of Troy, when he was young. He was a man who thought hard and constantly about what he had done and what he ought to do, and his active conscience welcomed my listening, my silence, and my attempts to answer, as it struggled for clarity.

He honored my ignorance, but I was impatient with it and ready to learn from him, as he soon learned. As often as we made love I remembered what my poet [Virgil's wraith] told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

Vergil [sic] exaggerates the sophistication of that world, I play down its primitiveness: both of us, I think, because we want these people to be Romans -- at least Romans in the making.

It can be very hard to believe that one is actually eighty years old, but as they say, you'd better believe it. I've known clear-headed people in their nineties. They didn't think they were young. They knew, with a patient, canny clarity, how old they were. If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. Even if I'm seventy and think I'm forty, I'm fooling myself to the extent of almost certainly acting like an awful fool.

Words are my matter -- my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.

So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup -- but which end up? Eggs are not perfect ovoids, they have a smaller and and a bigger end. ... I am a Big-Ender. My opinion, which I will defend to the death, is that if the big end is up it's easier to get the spoon into the opening created when you knock off the top of the egg with a single decisive whack of your knife blade. Or possibly -- another weighty decision, another matter of opinion, with advocates and enemies, the Righteous and the Unrighteous -- you lift the top of the egg off carefully from the egg-encircling crack you have made by tapping the shell with the knife blade all the way around about a half-inch from the summit.

Trying to eat an egg from the shell with a normal spoon is like mending a wristwatch with a hammer.

Everything about the world of ballet responds to the young girl looking to escape real life. ... I love it all -- the rules, the rituals, the intolerance of any slackness or leniency. Authoritarianism was, of course, in keeping with my upbringing, but now all the rules had a purpose. Ballet meant finally being taken seriously, meant being allowed to take yourself seriously.

A cheat. A litterbug. A drowner of kittens. I don't want to condemn him. I want to understand everything, imagining that the more I understand, the less he will be guilty. That old fallacy.

"Why did you go with this man? What did you want?" The doctor sitting across from me now is a woman. A stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished.

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude; above all seek solitude.

To become a professional writer in our society you have to be privileged to begin with, and the feeling is that privileged people shouldn't be writing anymore -- not unless they can find a way not to write about themselves because that only furthers the agenda of white supremacy and the patriarchy. You scoff, but you can't deny that writing is an elitist, egotistic activity.

The book is short, it can be read aloud in about two hours. But soon Apollo has dropped off, like a child at whose bedside a mother has been reading and waiting for precisely this moment to tiptoe away. I'm not tiptoeing anywhere. Pinned beneath his weight, my feet have gone numb. I wiggle them and he wakes. Without getting up he seeks my hand, still holding the little book, and he licks it.

Friends called him a cantankerous cuss who hated talk about himself. He sped long distances in his old pink Thunderbird, screaming all night to stay awake at the wheel, and howled at tourists who gawked at his camps. On a mountain, he amazed fellow climbers with his uphill speed and stamina, even in his 80s.

Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future. These Oregon people, in a climate where being is bliss -- where every breath is a draught of vivid life -- these Oregon people carrying to a newer and grander New England of the West a full growth of the American idea -- will elaborate new systems of thought and life.

These silk mammals [sea otters], up to five feet in length and with the disposition of a toddler just after a long nap, were easily clubbed, smiling right up until the moment their skulls were smashed.

"Only by knowing our surroundings, being aware of topography and the past, can we live what Heidegger deems an authentic existence."

"Only by knowing our surroundings, being aware of topography and the past, can we live what Heidegger deems an authentic existence."

...far back in the ninth millennium BC, the site may have been used because it was already considered old. The astonishment we feel at people performing these rites so long ago might simply be a version of what they felt.

In the mid-morning I lost the path. I doubled back, took a short cut and it ended the way it usually does -- crawling through a hedge, unpicking brambles from my hair. I tumbled out of the thicket and into an open field. I brushed myself down. An old Massey tractor on the far side was topping docks. In its cab sat an elderly man in clear-rimmed glasses.

The Penwith peninsula is to Cornwall what Cornwall is to the rest of England -- a loosely connected appendage stuffed with the residue of a thousand stories and mythical projections. Every rock, every hill and cliff has its tales, lore and sprites. The peninsula has a mood all its own.

...urge that drove our Neolithic ancestors to arrange the moorstone into circles at the Hurlers, to build the wall around the tor -- the same questions that tease us now: what law, what force, what patterns exist in the vastness of space? And always behind the questions, the doubt, the depth-sounder beam probing the emptiness for something solid, the fear that there might be none of these things at all.

The human being is a battling creature, beta. That will never change. To pretend otherwise is to delude ourselves. We fight as a way to make meaning of our lives. That is why protecting the citizens against war is always a recipe for long-term disintegration. The nation must be brought into the military mind-set.

Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. ... Towns were poorer, which meant schools were poorer, too. Public education started to crumble. So did the roads and bridges. There were fewer landowners giving less money to an ever-dwindling number of churches and charities. Everywhere you went, people poured into big box stores to spend less on things they had less money to buy. ... Suicide was on the rise, and so were drugs, depression, anger.

Most Americans couldn't cobble together a week's expenses in case of an emergency. They had good reason to be scared and angry. They felt betrayed and wanted to destroy something. The national mood was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, nihilistic -- and no one embodied all this better than Donald Trump. Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy ..., but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we'd allowed ourselves to become.

Some people are born into economically stable families, receive a fine education, grow up well nourished, or naturally possess great talent. They will certainly not need a proactive state; they need only claim their freedom. Yet the same rule clearly does not apply to a disabled person, to someone born in dire poverty, to those lacking a good education and with little access to adequate health care. If a society is governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency, there is no place for such persons, and fraternity will remain just another vague ideal.

"I had a good life there, so many good years. I'm grateful to America. It gave me you! But I'm glad to be back in Pakistan, beta. I'm glad to be home."

"This is where I've lived my whole life. For better, for worse -- and it's always a bit of both -- I don't want to be anywhere else. I've never even thought about it. America is my home."

The sun was sinking though its warmth still drugged the windless air and on this side of the mountains the flowers and foliage grew more and more luxurious, while the woods were full of tits and wrens and blackbirds. The woods were carpeted with flowers, sweet-smelling salvia, cranesbill, and a variety of ferns. Here and there, too, bright dots of scarlet showed him where wild strawberries grew, and in these verdant woods the pines and beeches increased in size until he calculated that he was walking among glades of trees nearly a hundred feet in height.

A huge misunderstanding had been allowed to take place. Why hadn't anyone seen that just because he hated school didn't mean he was lazy and dumb? It was unfair; it was a mistake. Somehow it must be corrected. If not, he would grow up to be something worse than an underachiever. He would grow up stupid, an ignoramus.

He knew the things he wanted now he wanted badly enough that nothing would stop him. It was only for a little while longer that his place was here. He knew that he would stay, and then, when the time came, he would go away. He did not know if he would return.

I am ugly and I speak funny. I am poor. My clothes are used and my food smells bad. I pick my nose. I don't know the jokes and stories you like, or the rules to the games. I don't know what anybody wants from me.

But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what he saw.

Like you, I want a friend.

She was the best teacher I ever had, and she was crying a little, so I walked off before she could hug me or anything.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other -- if we really listen in the parlor of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen -- then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren't the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

All the good stuff is in between and around the things that happen. It's what you imagine I might be like when I'm not telling you a story, but we're sitting together in silence. Would my hands be fumbling with themselves in my lap? Would I be nervous? Would I love it if you asked about Final Fantasy? And would I say yes if you invited me to your house?

Her books of essays -- Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album -- represent, to me at least, some of the best and most evocative writing of its kind of the past half century.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, ...

One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.

The Mimbres buried their dead beneath their homes.
At night, softly, the buried
rose, re-entered the rooms of the living
as blankets woven with the heavy threads of memory,
blankets on which the Mimbres rested,
on which they slept, and dreamed.

It was getting rather alarming. I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men.