c: It all becomes wind at some point. Or earth, or fire, or water. And you will miss many details and how they matter until much much later. And that will be alright. A deep breath in the face of all things. And you were going to be this and you were going to be that. Shh. Shh. Shh. Aren't the flowers beautiful?

Underworld by Don Delillo . . ."If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity." This is THE book. I don't like to say something is the best anymore, the biases runs so deep now that I'm all ablur in the categories, but the scope and depth and breadth and ghostly interconnectedness of this . . .the pain unspoken and the alienation rising like gooseflesh, the way it says almost absolutely nothing and thus says everything. The way I didn't want to care and did anyway. The way time moves through it instead of the other way. . .this is what I'm trying to write. The Americans: The Colonial Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin . . .A sudden fascination with early American history struck me some 16 months ago and this was the best of the books that came my way. Thorough-going and reliable, and yet not without heart--this is the razor-blade walk of good History Writing. If you want to know who we are, what America is, this is the place to start. All those dreams and misconceptions and plans. This is not the story of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. This is the story of Cotton Mather and Roanoke and a hundred thousand forgotten people for reals trying to breathe free. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson . . . "Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones." Unfortunately titled mini-masterpiece that knows loneliness and family and time the way I think I do. As different as our spheres may be. There is something of a rediscovered archetype in the sisterhood at the novel's core. And there is something somehow supernatural in a starving shiver across a railroad bridge that crosses to another realm neither life or death or wholly concerned with either. The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene . . . ". . . it suggests, remarkably, that all we experience is nothing but a holographic projection of processes taking place on some distant surface that surrounds us. You can pinch yourself, and you feel will be real, but it mirrors a parallel process taking place in a different, distant reality." We are living in a multiverse of some kind (or many kinds). This is not stoner philosophy or assumption-soaked mathematics. This seems to be the only conclusion one can make. To be read by all who think there is some chance we've figured out everything, to be read by those who assume we know anything at all. The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright . . . "Over the years the westering impulse, as persistent and irresistible as sexual desire, had come to assume an almost physical presence, the neglected, unkempt urchin at Potter's side as loyal as a favorite revolver." The unvaunted Stephen Wright writes sentences as well as anyone alive. Here, he uses them to wrench a subtly weird Civil War from the things we already know and sort of seem to know now that we've read them.  At once beautiful and hilarious and disturbing, with a kind of golden vein of restlessness at its heart. Every book by Stephen Wright is something to be envied, misunderstood, and flipped from hand to hand in surprise at its slight weight. The Jungian Tarot and Its Archetypal Imagery by Robert Wang . . . "It may be said that the person who has an outward appearance, a Persona, of reason and intellectuality will usually have an inner personality which is quite the opposite, one which may be quite irrational and emotional." The partial text of this book as passed through my head three or four times now and was instrumental in the early development of my personal understanding of the Tarot. More on Tarot in a forthcoming, lengthy essay. I highly recommend this succinct book to anyone interested in knowing the second and third layers of the Tarot, though it is not for beginners. A passing knowledge of Jungian ideas is helpful and a fawning respect for the weird potency of the Tarot is a must.

Sometimes I tune the gadget to a dead station and let the static play in my ears. White noise a perennial catalyst for focus, for drowning out, and of course it does these things, but just as often I catch myself truly listening to it. Observing the way the signal shifts and serpentines when I move my head, slip the gadget into my pocket or onto the writing desk. Listen to that roar when I lean forward, note the slight whine in its background when I stand from the chair. Stay very calm, listen intently—treat it like some bearer of codes whose every phoneme could mean your life, could mean gold—and you'll hear things there. The way the mind prints images on a darkened screen.

We project feelings of loneliness on people living like that, discomfort, but also feel there's something truer in a life where all the stressors are primal and organic. And the word about these types of people from those who've seen it first hand is that they are happy. And this, of course, refutes so much of how we live our lives. It mocks all our glass and steel and nylon and silicon. All our spreadsheets and deadlines and monthly bills. Our arguments and solipsism and begrudging. It is a road, if all lives are roads, that seems to lead in the opposite direction of our own—and this map is so goddamned big it sparks goosebumps to think of the vast tracts we cannot know. We see that they are us—no difference in essence, only circumstance—and so it cannot but force you to close your eyes in refusal or admit to a glimpse at some aspect of us—buried deep beneath the sediment of our own context piling rapidly, ossifying, taking chaotic shape in the wind. What is their love, blanched of romcoms and Rube Golderbergian hierarchies and divorce court. And what is their sense of loss minus compound interest and funeral costs and car wrecks. Do they talk of mere gossip in the night, or is it all too known? What do their children ask them when the torches have been snuffed for the night?

The downside: Without something to hang on to, you'll be scattered to the winds. You'll static out like a dead TV channel. It used to be, when the brains we've got now we're taking their current shape, that you lived in a group bigger than your family and smaller than your neighborhood, and you spent your entire life among this clan and its sub-groups (out on the hunt, foraging for tubers in the brush) and you faced the same threats and shared the same victories living under the same trees, drinking the same water. It forged a common worldview, this kind of life, and even if you were a shaman and your little brother was a deadly hunter, you knew mostly the same things. You made all your decisions from the same framework, changed it ever-so-slightly to stimulii around you. You were not the same person, but a simple enough questionnaire and no one could tell who was who. Now we're all radically identified. Even the stump-simplest of the sheepliest people have a dossier of ideas and tastes and experience as unique as a fingerprint. I think this is a step in the right direction. I think, too, that it is along a rope bridge across a precipice.