We rarely need reminders of what we've lost. But curiously, we always seem to need reminders of what we have.
Found this tidbit in an interview with him on the Onion AV Club:
"As an outsider, I look on the human race as highly flawed. My feeling is that any species that can paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling and write Moby Dick and put someone on the moon does not have to settle for McDonald's toadburgers, novels by Judith Krantz, and American Idol. I get very annoyed at the potential that is in everybody, and how little people will settle for, and how easily they are turned away from their true purposes that can enrich them, by the most transitory silliness! Whether it's Paris Hilton or KFC food!"
I think it's funny he considers himself outside the human race ;)
Together we will observe
the slender bough of a new Autumn twilight
(black ink on black water)
tremble silently with each bird alighting
or leaf falling, shudder
with each new belief we
heap upon the branches,
accreting like snow—
and we too will bend
with the weight of our
own hands upon ourselves,
and our stone eyes
drawing down the trees
of a new Autumn twilight,
as dusk gave way to dark,
as stone gave way to dust,
as the black leaves gave way
to a kinder earth.
--Brooklyn, June 6th, 2008
"I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why writing presents itself to me as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it." --Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, p.172