dreams

Internationally, writers announced the end of history, the ascendance of free markets and liberal democracy, the replacement of old hatreds and wars between nations with virtual communities and battles for market share. And then, on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.

the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear

understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still.

the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.

e the underlying struggle-between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us-is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.

I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world, working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world’s economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren.

I might have written a different book-less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.

I won’t try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

If I’ve been able to fight off cynicism, I nevertheless like to think of myself as wise to the world, careful not to expect too much.

they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose-the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.

well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns.

An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here.

Finally, there are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work: the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one’s experiences hold for others, selective lapses of memory.

a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.

“Now there’s something you can learn from your dad,” he would tell me. “Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.”