A thanks for listening, and comment on the writing of Hope: A Fable.

“Look,” I said and pointed to my left. The sun was swollen. It sat atop the highest mountain visible to us, and it was drawing all the colors of the desert into the west. We watched, one sunset for three people. I

Works:

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

William Langewiesche, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I read once about a pilot who loved the desert. Flying over it at night, looking up from his cockpit, he saw meteors streaking across a moonless sky, like fiery sparks swept along in a gust of wind.

Works:

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

William Langewiesche, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

He did write at least one lengthy letter, however. He composed it on the night before he was to set out on his return trip.

Works:

Novalis, Das allgemeine Brouillon

Caspar David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

Virginia Garland, “Light and Shadow in the Park,” in Arthur Adelbert Taylor, California Redwood Park

Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring

Virgil, Georgics

“I loved your grandmother, and she loved me. Still, I think you know how unlike we were. When I was a girl, I didn’t want anything to do with books. History bored me. The two of you shared that, and I’m glad."

Works:

Novalis, Das allgemeine Brouillon

Caspar David Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

Virginia Garland, “Light and Shadow in the Park,” in Arthur Adelbert Taylor, California Redwood Park

Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring

Virgil, Georgics

Fall gave way to winter. On that Sunday morning before Christmas, I rose before dawn to creep out of the house and make for the river.

Works:

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

James Joyce, “The Dead”

James Dickey, Deliverance

I ran away from home when I was twelve.

Works:

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

James Joyce, “The Dead”

James Dickey, Deliverance

Andrea was the name of the veteran who lived under the bridge. She spoke in a whisper, never looking in my direction. Sentences came to me broken into bits, in shards of thought that I had to gather up and fit together.

Works:

Descent of Inanna

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Gilgamesh

Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

Brooke King, War Flower: My Life After Iraq

I remember the gleam of cold starlight on black iron. Ahead lay two ribbons of steel curving into a jagged wall of trees. The train passed through one moonlit town after another, with their houses of weary clapboard and weed-choked yards.

Works:

Frank R. Linderman, Plenty Coups: Chief of the Crows

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

Edmond Jabès, “Drawn Curtains”

With me in the hospital burn unit was an inmate from a nearby prison. There had been a riot. A control system had failed. Or a guard had been bribed. Nobody was entirely sure.

Works:

Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand

Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, translation by Constance Garnett

Hesiod, Works and Days