I read a book the other day that is very popular with people who are looking for answers to universal questions.  The writing was concise and clear, and the imagery was accessible, despite striking me as overly simple.

Most striking was the style.  Every chapter was short, every paragraph was short, every sentence was short.

The book didn’t engage my curiosity, but I understood how the direct language and simple images would provide a roadmap for someone who was looking to understand a mystery of human nature, who didn’t want science, and who resisted nuance.

It must be hard to write like that.  Why not try and find out?

*  *  *

ONE: The List of Love

This is meant to be a list of things about Love.

Love is something that people talk about a lot.

It’s something that is supposed to be necessary.  We need to be loved.

It’s something that is we are supposed to be good at.  We are supposed to love.

It is something that we are supposed to enjoy.  It is pleasant to be in love.

Love is something that we are supposed to be able to recognize in a second, give on demand, and enjoy when we have it.

Why is it that most of what we talk about when we talk about Love is how hard it is, how much it hurts and how we want to get away from it?

TWO: The Eskimo Word For Snow

How is Love like the Eskimo word for snow?

That’s a trick question.

The Eskimo’s don’t have one word for snow.  They don’t have just two.  They have dozens.  More than a hundred.  All to describe snow.

A man named Franz Boas was the first person to try to describe now Eskimos talk about snow.

The Eskimo starts of with a couple of simple ideas about snow.

There’s aput.  That means snow on the ground.  And gana.  That means falling snow. Piqsirpoq means drifting snow.  Qimuuqsuq means snow drift.

That’s not enough to describe all the ways that snow affects the Eskimo’s life.  Those are just the starting points.

There’s snow-that-hurts-my-eyes-because-the-window-blows-when-it’s-falling snow.

There’s crunchy-under-my-boot-because-the-sun-melted-it-and-the-cold-night-air-froze-it snow.

There’s packed-thigh-high-and-weighting-down-thin-ice snow.

So an Eskimo has a word to describe every one of those kinds of snow.

They have to.

Understanding the snow is the difference between life and death for an Eskimo.

Does it make any sense that we have one word for Love?

It seems to me that it would be better to have hundreds of words that describe every kind of love that a person can experience in a precise detail as possible.
That would be a sensible way for us to understand this mysterious thing.

THREE: How Many Words Should We Have For Love?

It might seem simple to have one word to talk about a big thing…Peace, Earth, the Universe, Life.

Love doesn’t benefit from such a definite approach.

You see, Love isn’t anything without having reciprocal parties, and it is only what those reciprocal parties make of it.

The Love we have for God?  And that God has for us?  I’ll talk about that later.  The thing about the Love you experience for and from God is that there isn’t going to be any confusion.  God won’t turn around n the middle of folding the laundry and say, “I don’t love you anymore.”

Your wife might.  Or your husband.  Or your mother.  Or your boyfriend.  Or your oldest child.  Or your sister.

The problem with having one word for Love is that it makes us think that there is one way to think about Love.

It’s made everyone of us think that if we can figure out what the word means and how to feel it, we’re home free.

How can one word cover how I feel about my wife, my dog, my children, Granny Smith apples, Almonds and the New York Football Giants?

Doesn’t it seem that we are asking too much from the word Love?

*   *   *

By the time I got to the end of section three my mind was mush and I was bored silly.  How does someone write a book like this?

Then I thought that if you wanted to write a book like this, you needed structure.  So I laid out the chapters.

FOUR: Love Taxonomy for the New Age

FIVE: Boxing Gloves Keep You From Hurting Your Hands

SIX:  Smile Break

SEVEN: :  Easy to Love The Big Things

EIGHT: Why Does Everyone Keep Singing About Love?

NINE: I’m in Love

TEN: Love Bum

ELEVEN: Spy In the House of Love

TWELVE: That Was Love & I Didn’t Know It

THIRTEEN: The Story I Tell About Love

FOURTEEN: The 10 Clues That Will Help You Find Love

15–25

TWENTY-SIX: The 5 Principals That Will Help You Stay in Love

27–32

THIRTY-THREE: The One Rule

THIRTY-FOUR: Love is an Action

I had the outline.

And I had my answer.

I’d rather tell a story about Love.  I wasn’t going to cut it writing a self-help book.  I’ve got a lot of respect for the writers who can make it simple, interesting and universal.

This is part of how it works when you write: the ideas come in fragments, start to form into people, places, stories. You take notes on your imagination and then start writing it out. Sometimes the story flows and stops and sometimes you feel your way into it.

I was cleaning up my hard drive and came across these notes. They are from six months ago. I can’t start anything new until I finish the book I am working on, but I can’t get this guy out of my mind.

You’ll see.

* * *

Dave Anderson. 53 years old. Newspaper reporter and editor. Working on a small weekly newspaper. Community newspaper. In a New England town? Or put him in California, like the original model.

Regardless, he’s morbidly obese. He drives a little car. He’s been unsuccessful in love. Kids like him, especially teenage girls. He took working on a newspaper seriously.

Lives in a garage apartment. On a private piece of property? Or what about the little hunting cabin I almost rented off the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club?

(talked him thru with T. at dinner — he doesn’t sound like he would in Greenwich. Obesity would keep him out of the social flow. Newport is a better place for them to be.

The problem with Newport is you don’t get the same intense social imprinting that happens in Greenwich. He could be out in the Hamptons. Both places have seasons and don’t have youth that are in one class and encounter problems that have them slipping down to another. Which is better?)

Yes, the cabin comes with the job. He’s been hired to start up a new weekly just focused on Greenwich. A hedge fund manager who has had some investment in media companies and made a bunch of money playing the distressed debt of newspaper companies. He’s seen how the local paper has cut way back, because it’s part of the old Tribune chain. The daily has virtually no character but has increased advertising rates significantly. The Greenwich Weekly is designed to take advantage of that.

Anderson has come back from the coast. He had a long stretch in Eureka working on the paper there. He worked all the local beats — crime, politics, business — and did a stint in Sacramento as the state political correspondent for the three papers that were jointly owned up the coast.

He had a chance to join the Times-Mirror chain, and they talked about sending to Washington if a key CA political figure won a national election, but he’d met the woman that he was going to marry, and they had put a deposit down on a space in Eureka where she was going to start a yoga studio.

The marriage lasted for four year — the middle of his 50s. She was 12 years younger than him. She lost interest when the health kick and spiritual awareness that he’d gone on during their courtship had fallen ton pieces, and when they discovered that his sperm didn’t have sufficient motility to make a baby.

Dave had always been heavy and the passage into obese was easy enough to bear. He wasn’t part of the generation of news guys who were going to make it in electronic media. He was the sweaty, sloppy big guy who could crunch a lede and craft a hed without thinking twice about it, who could get in, get the facts, write pretty much any story you needed so you’d feel good reading it, never feel very confused or inspired or in awe of the work. Just solidly informed.

The motility was a problem because he didn’t want to stop smoking dope. He always had.

When he got laid off from the paper, he didn’t have anywhere to go. It had never been a union shop, he didn’t have much stashed away to retire, he couldn’t see himself setting up a shop on eBay, or blogging for companies, or doing pr work, or much of anything that you could do around Eureka. So he cleared out the apartment, loaded up the miniCooper and headed back to (Newport/Southampton/WestHampton Beach?) to visit his mom. It was the first time he had been back since 1984.

That absence hadn’t been intentional. His father had died when he was in college, his sister lived close to their mother, and he’d grown up in a time when flying across the country wasn’t something that you just did, and his job didn’t give him an opportunity to run up frequent flyer miles, and when you got down to it he didn’t have a lot of desire to go back anyway. He had moved away. It was that way for a lot of newspapermen that he knew — you went to where the job was, immersed yourself in a place and maintained a professional skepticism about the people you met and the things you learned. Look at the world that way and it’s hard to make the trek back to the cradle of your consciousness.

There might have been other issues too, but Dave wasn’t given to introspection. He’d been trained to observe, question, take information in and then represent it in a way that was clear, conscise and easy to understand. He was good at his job in a professional, matter-of-fact way and he didn’t need to think much about himself in the middle of it all. And when he was idle, he was getting high and mellowing out, or watching movies and listening to music he’d found on bit-torrent streams. Sometimes he would read, especially if one if the news hounds he’d crossed paths with over the years had a new one come out. He watched a lot of public television. He didn’t keep up with the current news dialogue like he had used to. Once he thought he would always have the latest scoop and all the angles on what was going down in Washington, where the hot political races were, what the DNC or RNC was doing that was strategic and what they were doing that was underhanded. Now he didn’t care much. He had a paper to get out, a locality to cover, some political news to chase, and no one was trying to get his job, no one knew just how much he had mastered his craft, and no one was going to be putting his work up for awards. There wasn’t anyone to show his craft off too.

Southampton.

Concept: modern life hasn’t equipped us with the stamina to stick with the hard choices that we have to make between what is right and what is wrong.

Theme: too much easy access to the things that are distraction — drugs, porn, entertainment, travel — and too little value placed in doing the right thing by other people.

Story: Dave Anderson is a smart man who’s lived a low-key cynic’s life, stayed on the outside, created a bunch of rationalizations and excuses that keep him feeling ok about the choices that he’s made. The center of his life is vacant, doesn’t have much energy.

He moves to Southampton to from the west coast. Prompted to come back because of a health scare? Visits his mother in Greenwich and then goes to Southampton, where he’s offered a job to resuscitate a new local paper. (office at the zabriskie air field?)

Why put him in the center of wealth? Because he’s really in the center of the people who are the foundation in a resort/ summer community.

What is the catalyst that makes him confront the hard choice and then live with it?

The fight between the town and the Jews over the enclosed space.

Anderson writes about it. Is supportive of the Jews. But then he comes across a young girl — 9 or 10 years old — who’s been aggressively accosted by one of the leaders of the Jewish community for something that she did unwittingly but that was imagined to be desecrating. She’s the daughter of the girl Dave scores his weed from.

He stands up for the girl and finds himself in the middle of a big cause, where he’s become the firebrand for sensible people who can’t stand what is going on.

There’s another character in this, someone who appears to be taking the easy choice, but who is really doing something very hard and private. Imagine that the woman who runs the WHB Performing Arts Center, and that she was having an affair and then left her husband and got pregnant and make her life over.

When Anderson comes to town, she’s just left her husband. Her story is a counterpoint to his,because she appears to have no problem navigating through her challenges, even though she’s deep in the center of the town.

The story takes place over two years: begins in the early winter, just after the New Year, and then cycles through to Christmas of the following year…that’s where it ends?

A gentle slope drops from the back of our house to an old stone wall, and beyond, a pond surrounded by high trees.  The pond was a limestone pit once; the still surface mirrors the darkness below.  An oak tree fell into the shallow south end and in the warm months a slender grey heron spends his days on the branches that stick up from the water.

I look for the heron when I walk down to the pond.  This is not as frequently as I would like.  I’ll stand at the north edge and wait for my eyes to adjust to the shadows.  The heron’s shape is like an inadvertent ink stroke on a busy page.

When I look at the heron I want to feel its stillness, but even as I wait for my eyes to focus, I fight the impulse to move on, to walk up the hill, into the woods, to keep the images dancing, to make my heart pump.  I disappoint myself.

*

One day I discovered the photos of a man called Ichiro Kishimi.

When he walks the world stills.

I can not know the noise that his mind makes, but imagine it is steady and muted.  My mind is like the roaring rapids.

He studied Greek philosophy and taught in a language that I can not understand. He is a student of the school of Alfred Adler, who believed that we reward our nature by growth and inflict pain by seeking perfection. He has written books on the principal of happiness and has focused energy on the education of children.

This may be a wise man that divined from his own desires the dark tentacle of disappointment that drowns a man in feelings of discontent.

But I can not know anything of that man, who has lived beyond my reach in place, thought, sentiment and time.

*

I know the man who walks along the river and through fields in a perpetual spring.

I met him first when he was walking to the hospital where his father lay in decay, his mind untethered and eroded. I wondered at the love this son felt for his father, the sorrow that lay in the uncoupling of their intellects, the worrisome reminder that mortality is a word that signals the final succumbing to the constant hazard of life, not an emphatic end point like the iron trestle marking the terminus of rail line.

He took photographs when he walked of simple and delicate things. A thrush; a heron; a petal; a flower; a cluster of grass.

*

This is what each photograph did:

Because I think I know him, I discover something of myself.

Take the heron. It is still, captured in profile, the white of its coat outlined with the precise bands of ink-black that only nature can achieve.

I don’t look at the heron with a critical eye, however. I am arrested by it. I experience it with the intense energy of my shadow neurons.

I can not see a heron this way.

Kishimi helps me see something that I don’t see.

*

What I see invades me and in an instant I am given a fleeting glimpse of another me, and I know what it is to still myself, to be present and bear witness to a thing with insistent focus, calm and uncritical, free from interpretation. I know what it is to suspend the narrative, to arrest the impulse to fill in the missing pieces, to relinquish the what-was and what-will-be.

I can feel what I felt when I saw the heron. I can embrace its essence unironically. As the heron balanced its weight effortlessly, the wind fell away, the heat, worry, the city, the refuse tangled in the water weeds at the muddy shore.

How can I accept that I did not see the heron? What do I make of the truth that even though I see this way, I can not see this way? So I ruminate about Kishimi, this philosopher-saint from Kyoto; I reflect on his serenity. I admire his hopefulness, his completeness, his ability to connect with all of the beauty that is around him.

But I am avoiding my Self by making believe.

*

I don’t know this man. I can’t know this man.

Whatever I know of this man is a gift he has given me of discovering something new in myself.

If I am able to see the heron in the photo, I must be able to see the heron in life. The clues are in those qualities that I attribute to Kishimi, those attributes that I experience in me through his photo.

I can see because I believe I know a man I don’t know, so I must be knowing a man I can be.

I can only hope that the man who took this photo, and all the hundreds others I have looked at, feels contentment and happiness. That is why I go to read Adler, to look at pictures of Kyoto…to discover what he might have learned.

The photos are a signal that Kishimi might understand what makes our experience in the world complete.

A man who wrote a book on happiness must either feel peace or despair. I hope that life has given him the gift of peace.

I suspect that he would want me to feel the same thing, and to return to my pond to see my heron with the gift of my own eyes.

This blog is an inadvertent place, neither commonplace book nor publishing platform, disorderly in approach but earnest in intention, a balance of self provocation, hopeful proclamation and intermittent distraction.

Despite its irresolute intent, drmstream[writing] frames a relationship for a kind-of writer and a kind-of audience.  There is a group of you — a few hundred or so– who track what happens here with courteous interest and occasional passion.

This is what we accomplished together in the past year.

I posted on drmstream[writing] 68 times.

There were 7705 visitors who came 10,157 times and viewed 14,304 pages.  Three-quarters of those visitors came for the first time and very few came more than once.

Six cities drove the most visits:  New York, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Dublin and London.

I’ve shared in the past why work ends up here: this is a place where I am forced to stay accountable to my creative temper.  I’ve shared the circumstances when that temper has cooled, and how, as I’ve progressed in life, I’ve come to understand that those periods of cooling are the root of a non-specific but insistent discontent.  Each time I post on this site,  I’m stoking the flickering flames of creativity.

More often than not the pieces here are fragments, unworked and incomplete.  If I post too much, I lose track of the work that I am doing privately.  If I post too little, I lose confidence and start to hear things like the throw-away judgment my mother once rendered, saying “You don’t have the makeup to be an artist.”  Those are the little splashes of doubt that can easily quench the flames of confidence.

Sometimes I manage to string together a series of words that resonate for Google, and a lot of the people who end up on this site come to one of  a handful of posts that appear prominently in Google searches:

Snow was general all over Ireland (published March 18, 2010) is a little rumination on the language used in the last paragraph of James Joyce’s The Dead, one of my favorite pieces of elegiac writing ever.  I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world  (published September 4, 2010) is an appreciation of a Frank O’Hara poem.  The three other posts that get a lot of Google hits are More on the uncanny valley; The wire spool table; and, The story behind the baby with the cigarette and the monocle.

Over the past year, there were five posts that attracted a larger than normal readership.  When I went back to look at each, I could see three themes that resonated:  the search for identity, the intensity of love, and the simple power of a vivid image.

Here are the five posts:

The boy who became a pastor

The graveyard

Recognizing someone is complicated a conversation about love

To leave a signal a message of my own

The seeing of not seeing from Alison Jardine

Outing

The last post was in many ways the most personal.  After two years of anonymity, I shared my real identity.  The act felt more momentous to me than it was to anyone else, but I guess that’s always the way of uncovered secrets.

I’ve said this before, but I owe the few hundred of you who read these short pieces regularly a great debt of gratitude.  You provide me that validation that I struggle to provide myself: that my creative work is a worthy venture, that I can work at Art with confidence that it is true to myself, and that I can sometimes hit on something that will move a reader.

When I was young I used to play my saxophone on the street.  When people stopped to listen I knew that I was making something more than noise.  drmstream[writing] is that street corner and when you stop by, I can remind myself that it is good to write, that I am made to do it, and that whatever comes from it will be a bonus.

When I walked outside the wind was racing through the trees and I thought to myself, This is alive.

This is alive, the wind, the sky, the air.

This is alive, me in this moment, my foot sinking into the ground.

This is alive.

The moment passed as quickly as it manifested.

Later I took a walk and everything was still.  I took a picture of a tree against the blue sky.  When I looked at it later I wondered what it was that kept my heart from quickening.  Had I lost something, or was I just lucky to have caught a glimpse of something that we don’t often get to see?

She’s getting carried off to the evil witch, captured by her demon monkeys who were sent out to collect the innocent intruder.  Look at the Tin Woodman doffing his cap, Dorothy sitting at the edge of her seat like a little girl at the movies, and the winged monkeys wide-eyed and intent.

Where’s the fear?

There’s terror lurking in the dark edges of The Wizard of Oz: the story begins with death and destruction, and throughout the little girl is under assault, protected only by a motley, impaired ragtag of friends and allies.

That’s how art can help children make sense of life, by making the terrors of the unknown known.  The Brothers Grimm knew that.

But what frightens in words can scar in images — our imagination manages the power of fearful images when they are left abstract, spoken.  An illustration makes the image separate from our imagination and structures it into difference.  When the image is terror, and married to words, it can haunt someone for ever.

So, when Baum’s illustrator sat down, he took that first step to diluting the wizardry of the Wizard of Oz, the modern fairytale that was loyal to the Brothers Grimm.  Maybe an editor told him to take the edge off the scary image.  Maybe he didn’t have the true sense of terror in his fingers.

Dorothy would be stark with terror being carried off into the unknown.  A child would understand that terror and take comfort in knowing that it could be spoken, be heard and be tolerated.  Bearing fear is a critical step to walking confidently into the uncertain future.  And, the only thing that we all share is an uncertain future: it’s at the essence of the human condition.

An image was stuck in my head. I saw a single tree in the distance. A dog stood beneath it. The vista was all greys and whites and blacks. The dog and the tree were solitary but separate. The image evoked something necessary and almost forgotten.

I went to Flickr and typed in the phrase “faraway tree with dog next to it.” I did the same search on Google.

Hundreds of thousands of images populated the tiny mosaic of my screen. I skimmed them.

I look for an image that externalizes the sensations I feel when I first recognize my mental image.  When I find it, I write.

Sometimes, to my dismay, there is no image lodged in the mammoth indexes of Google or Flickr that aligns with the shadows in my imagination.  Sometimes I find an image that leads me to another facet of feeling that I am led to explore.

And there are the magical times when I see an image that is so distinct, fresh and strong that it takes me hostage.

That happened to me recently when Alenka Sotter’s lyric vision of a woman-tree and a dog was served up in my search.

This illustration is nothing like the internal archetype I was exploring. My vision was still and remote. The imagination-dog sits on its haunches looking directly at us. The tree was bare of leaves. It feels like winter. The trunk and branches are ink black and stained with hoar frost. The terrain is endless.

Sotter’s woman is a tree, but not quite a tree, in a world filled with waves that are not quite waves.  A small dog looks out at us from the base of the slender woman-tree.  The light gathers in the center of the image-space with contradictory energy that could be interpreted as a light moment in the midst of a storm or as the clearing that emerges from a dusty dawn.

As I browsed the other images on Sotter’s web site, I learned she is Slovenian and has illustrated more than 40 books for children and adults.  Her vision is simple and gentle, but never shirks the murky mysteries of the soul.  We are immersed in the fantastical, the normal juxtaposed with the unknown, guided confidently by a woman who has her eye glued to the world and who is capturing moments that might easily flicker past.

I’m realizing more and more that when you encounter an artist with a distinct and personal vision on the web, the experience is intense and transforming.  The community I share on the web through Facebook, Twitter, Google and myriad RSS feeds provides a constant stream of images.  When one point of view stands out, the stream freezes and everything that I have seen, that I’m filtering, that I understand, that I’m sorting out, that I’ve wondered about, that I want to try to do is, brought into focus and re-calibrated.

I look.  I appreciate.  I remark to myself.  Then I move back into the stream and watch for the next elegant surprise.

You can share the particular pleasure that comes with discovering Sotter’s work at her web site here.

Detective Sunderson walked backward on the beach glancing around now and then to make sure he wasn’t going to trip over a piece of driftwood. The wind out of the northwest had to be over fifty knots and the blowing sand stung his face and grated his eyes. It was below freezing and the surf at the river mouth was high and tormented where Lake Superior collided with the strong outgoing river. The wind and surf were deafening and Sunderson reminded himself how much he disliked Lake Superior other than something admirable to look at like an attractive calendar. He had been born and raised in the harbor town of Munising and two of his relatives who were commercial fishermen had died at sea back in the fifties bringing grief and disarray to the larger family. The most alarming fact of prolonged local history was the death of 280 people at sea between Marquette and Sault Ste. Marie. How could you like a killer? In his soon-to-end career with the Michigan St. Police he had never met a killer he liked. His ex-wife who had loved even the crudest manifestations of nature thought his feelings about Lake Superior reprehensible but then she had never been held tightly by a sobbing aunt at a funeral. With two sons and two daughters his mother had only room to hold his crippled brother Bobby who had lost a foot in the rail yard of the local pulp mill.

The Great Leader, Jim Harrison

It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by Jim Harrison. This paragraph made me remember how intimidated I was when I read Wolf: A False Memoir. I was a kid who wanted to be a writer, and Harrison swaggered around in his novel like a man who never worried about what a kid worried about. Experience was declarative and unswerving in his writing. I got dizzy trying to follow the structure of every sentence through to the intention of the piece and the story of the moment.

This time my reading was different. I wrote this paragraph down after I finished it. It deserved some extra time. The choice of words was confident. Each sentence in the paragraph carried its own weight so that it stood independently like a column. It tells us something of the man who is walking. He is solid and committed to each thought. He spans time so that his memory and his attention progress from one idea to the next.

I liked the way that Harrison consigned the inner workings to the middle of each sentence without relying on too much subordination or spinning out.

When I was a boy I felt like I was being beat around the head by his writing. My style was looping, each image coming into focus as the words circled in an ever-tightening spiral, and I had trouble keeping one idea in mind as I worked my way to the next, but what I knew that I wanted was for a reader to feel the click-jump that the moment of internal recognition would bring when they saw the image and surrendered to the words that surrounded them.

Time smooths out worry, I guess. Everyone tries to get where they are going in their own way. I was reading a confident and good writer, who likes the way that words work, and I particularly appreciated what he’d done in this one passage. It’s probably the best paragraph in the book, and it’s a book that holds your attention at the beginning and the end, and that you’ve got to work through some slow stuff about two-thirds through, but if you don’t, you’re not going to appreciate Sunderson’s conclusions. You’ll think about passion, about blind faith, about charlatans and violence, the desire to be close to someone, the embarrassment of seeing our weaknesses, the peaceful surrender of fear. Those are good things to think about. Harrison wrote a book that can keep your interest without making you too aware of the loftier themes.

I’d feel silly being intimidated by that.

I know I have the life I have because of T.  Not just the things around me, but the way I see them.

She gets the first Thanks.

My children who have shown me that life is fueled by unsquashable optimism get the second Thanks.

My family who has provided the foundation of memory that forms the way that I go out into the world, regardless of what I’ve experienced in the world since, gets the third Thanks.

Each of you who has spent time reading my work sometime leaving comments and always letting me be a writer who holds you for a moment: you get the public Thanks.  Our relationship was something that was unexpected and has added richness to my world.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Writing practice keeps your brain awake and alive; it improves your ability to concentrate.  Whether or not you ever publish a thing, regular writing practice will give you skills you can use in your work and your personal life, and make you feel more empowered.  It will improve your ability to communicate, stimulate your curiosity, and make you more aware of the world around you and the world of your imagination.

How To Be A Write: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice, by Barbara Baig

I love quotes like this. I want to plaster them all over the place. I want to set up a table at a busy street corner and hand out small notebooks with this quotes printed on the cover. I’d give people nubby pencils that are worn dull so that the points didn’t stick in the paper. I’d get excited when they stopped a little ways away and wrote something down. They would bump into each other. They wouldn’t get angry, though. They would smile.