By dealing with matters that move and trouble me, these essays are personal without being, except incidentally, autobiographical. I write of my own life only when it seems to have a larger bearing on the lives of others. Thus I tell what it was like to grow up in a military arsenal because I am convinced we all now live in an armed camp. I tell of my father's death because it focused for me lessons about the virtue and fragility of human skill. I tell of puzzling over what it means to be a "man" because the spectacle of women waking to their own full powers has pushed—or should have pushed—all men to such puzzling. I tell of sitting as a juror in a drug trial because the experience made me realize how we are bound to err in our judgments of one another. Mostly, however, I write in a personal voice about the impersonal, the not-me, for the world is a larger and more interesting place than my ego. Put another way, these essays are my effort at remembering where we truly live—not inside a skull, a house, a town or nation, not inside any human creation at all, but in the creation.
- Introduction to The Paradise of Bombs
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