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I've given birth to my second child the statistical makeup of the earth's population has moved from being mostly rural to mostly urban wars have ended and wars have begun. The years since I last published an essay collection, in 1995, have been important ones in the ways of the world, and also in the ways of my family. It began in a moment but ended with all of time. This is a collection of essays about who we seem to be, what remains for us to live for, and what I believe we could make of ourselves. Soon I understood that I was examining aspects of life that seemed a world away from the World Trade Center towers or the Pentagon, but a world away is exactly where this grief begins and ends. Within a month I had published five different responses to different facets of a huge event in our nation's psychology-little pieces that helped me see the thing whole and try to bear it. Sometimes writing seemed to be all that kept me from falling apart in the face of so much death and anguish, the one alternative to weeping without cease.
I wrote my piece, then another one, and another. When you ask a novelist for a response, especially to something so immensely horrible, you had better sit down and wait awhile for the finish. Someone from a newspaper had asked me to write a response to the terrorist attacks on the United States the day before. I began this book, without exactly knowing I was doing so, on September 12, 2001. I suppose what I am describing is the process of grief. You can look at all the parts of a terrible thing until you see that they're assemblies of smaller parts, all of which you can name, and some of which you can heal or alter, and finally the terror that seemed unbearable becomes manageable. It is possible to move away from a vast, unbearable pain by delving into it deeper and deeper-by "diving into the wreck," to borrow the perfect words from Adrienne Rich. I learned a surprising thing in writing this book. If traveling with small children, secure your own mask first.įlorence Fleming Noyes as "Liberty," suffrage pageant at the Treasury Building, Washington, D.C., March 1913. "When you have to go there, they have to take you in." The week's essentials, Washington County Hardware.ĭance of combat for female rattlesnake favor. Jaguar consuming a human heart, stone panel from post-classical Chichen Itza.Īpril, the sexiest month: broad-billed hummingbird.
The luckiest crab on Sanibel Island, 1997. The Huachuca leopard frog calls (as if he knew what was out there) from underwater.Įl que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste: If you want the blue sky, the price is high. The bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own. Grand Canyon, Thanksgiving 2001: The things we want are not the end of the world. Lorestan Province, Iran: He was crying from hunger, she had milk. The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.