“It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours.”

“…(my father) would say nothing,And I could not find a silenceAmong the one hundred Chinese silencesThat would fit the one he createdEven though I was the one Who had just made up the businessOf the one hundred Chinese silences-The Silence of the Night Boat. And the Silence of the Lotus, Cousin to the Silence of the Temple BellOnly deeper and softer…”

“GraveWhat do you think of my new glassesI asked as I stood under a shade treebefore the joined grave of my parents,and what followed was a long silencethat descended on the rows of the dead and on the fields and the woods beyond, one of the one hundred kinds of silenceaccording to the Chinese belief,each one distinct from the others,but the differences being so faintthat only a few special monks were able to tell them apart.They make you look very scholarly,I heard my mother sayonce I lay down on the groundand pressed an ear into the soft grass.Then I rolled over and pressed my other ear to the ground,the ear my father likes to speak into,but he would say nothing,and I could not find a silenceamong the 100 Chinese silencesthat would fit the one that he createdeven though I was the onewho had just made up the businessof the 100 Chinese silences - the Silence of the Night Boatand the Silence of the Lotus,cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bellonly deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.”

“But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest. ”

“Dancing Towards BethlehemIf there is only enough time in the finalminutes of the 20th century for one last danceI would like to be dancing it slowly with you,say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.My palm would press into the small of your backas the past hundred years collapsed into a pileof mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,just as the floor of the 19th century gave wayand disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.There will be no time to order another drinkor worry about what was never said,not with the orchestra sliding into the seaand all our attention devoted to hummingwhatever it was they were playing. ”

“Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -that kind of thing.I remember once looking up from my reading,my thumb as a bookmark,trying to imagine what the person must look likewho wrote "Don't be a ninny"alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.Students are more modestneeding to leave only their splayed footprintsalong the shore of the page.One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.Another notes the presence of "Irony"fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,Hands cupped around their mouths.Absolutely," they shoutto Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation pointsrain down along the sidelines.And if you have managed to graduate from collegewithout ever having written "Man vs. Nature"in a margin, perhaps nowis the time to take one step forward.We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownand reached for a pen if only to showwe did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;we pressed a thought into the wayside,planted an impression along the verge.Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated their page-anonymous men catching a ride into the futureon a vessel more lasting than themselves.And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,they say, until you have read himenwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.Yet the one I think of most often,the one that dangles from me like a locket,was written in the copy of Catcher in the RyeI borrowed from the local libraryone slow, hot summer.I was just beginning high school then,reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,and I cannot tell youhow vastly my loneliness was deepened,how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,when I found on one pageA few greasy looking smearsand next to them, written in soft pencil-by a beautiful girl, I could tell,whom I would never meet-Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”

“The whole idea of it makes me feellike I'm coming down with something,something worse than any stomach acheor the headaches I get from reading in bad light--a kind of measles of the spirit,a mumps of the psyche,a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.You tell me it is too early to be looking back,but that is because you have forgottenthe perfect simplicity of being oneand the beautiful complexity introduced by two.But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.At four I was an Arabian wizard.I could make myself invisibleby drinking a glass of milk a certain way.At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.But now I am mostly at the windowwatching the late afternoon light.Back then it never fell so solemnlyagainst the side of my tree house,and my bicycle never leaned against the garageas it does today,all the dark blue speed drained out of it.This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,time to turn the first big number.It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I could shine.But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,I skin my knees. I bleed.”