The summer of a dormouse. -BYRON Letters & Journals The great thing about the dead, they make space. —John UPDIKE Rabbit Is Rich Patch grief with proverbs. -MIGUEL DE CERVANTES WHEN did their present troubles begin? Have you ever noticed that the contemporary antihero or antiheroine always asks this early in the narrative, for there can be no story without troubles. And the troubles are always the same. Perched as we are on the very ledge of doom, two minutes on the clock before nuclear devastation, we still cry about sex and death. We still moan about loves and moneys lost. We do not cry about the coming conflagration because we cannot even comprehend it. The wars get worse each decade. Somewhere in the world, each moment, someone is already falling off the ledge of doom. Isadora listens to eighteenth-century music while she writes so as not to think of the stopped screams in Argentina, the starving babes in Africa, the tinderbox of the Middle East, the moaning of the hordes of India, the hands and heads lopped off in Islam.
