Goodbye, my friends -- it's been a delightful, bookish decade

On Books

What do I love? Besides the most important people in my life? Above all, the beauties and excitements of the human mind at work -- exploration, discovery, the confrontation of pieties and certitudes. Artfulness. Only one explanation of the purpose of art has ever seemed sensible to me: Art forces the observer to perceive differently. The rest is ornamentation or entertainment, at best. Great paintings leave viewers seeing as they never did before. Artful literature makes its reader's mind work as it never did before. What you read is who you are. And, however old -- or young -- who you are is the future.

So lest I atrophy, I shall go on reading, though perhaps with a little lighter load. And I will be writing, certainly. In the few relatively brief times in my life when my days have not included writing seriously, I have never felt quite comfortable. Writing just what, I am not sure, though a half-dozen book ideas are rattling around in my head, and inescapably there will be controversies that will drive me to rage and to scribbling.

Watch out. I may come your way.