A Short Story Is Something That I

As I Drift Back Into Sleep, I Can't Help Thinking That It's A Wonderful Thing To Be Right About The World. To Weigh The Evidence, Always Incomplete, And Correctly Intuit The Whole, To See The World In A Grain Of Sand, To Recognize Its Beauty, Its Simplicity, Its Truth. It's As Close As We Get To God In This Life, And Reside In The Glow Of Such Brief Flashes Of Understanding, Fully Awake, Sometimes For Two Or Three Seconds, At Peace With Our Existence. And Then Back To Sleep We Go.

Even At Its Most Perceptive, Sociology Deals In Abstractions.

My Dad Had This Rock Hard Body And Would Work 12- To 13-hour Days. The Guys He Worked With Were Scrap-iron Guys. Nobody On That Road Crew Had Read A Book In 10 Years, But There Was Something About The Way They Lived I Really Admired.

Who But An English Professor Would Threaten To Kill A Duck A Day And Hold Up A Goose As An Example?

That Afternoon I Came To Understand That One Of The Deepest Purposes Of Intellectual Sophistication Is To Provide Distance Between Us And Our Most Disturbing Personal Truths And Gnawing Fears.