When I was a boy, I spent a good bit of my time by myself. I became comfortable being alone. And when I wasn't wandering the woods and fields near where we lived, I was curled up with a book reading - Robert Louis Stevenson, Dumas, and Poe. Now, as I enter the twilight of my life, I find I want to go back to that routine, take long walks, and read books that transport me elsewhere than where I find myself.
Frank, we share the twilight. In my reading now I turn more and more to the books I read in the dawn of my years. Partly because so many of them were/are good, though I didn't realize just how good at the time I was gulping them down, but more, I think, in an attempt -- vain, I know -- to recapture something of the past. Somewhat in the way that C.S. Lewis tried to revive that stab of understanding that he first felt on reading Norse literature and that he described in "Surprised by Joy."
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