Character: Michael Noonan

And time is also a thin film.

This is the past, this is the country of the past, and here the sins of the fathers fall on the children, sometimes even in the seventh generation, which is not yet in sight.

- ... and the past dies slowly in them.

We all line up: we live for today, at any given moment we are engaged in one particular thing: we eat, we get sick, we breathe. Dentists fill only one root canal, shipbuilders work on only one ship. If your job is to write books, you write one specific page. We turn away from everything we know and fear. We study catalogs, watch football matches, choose between Sprint and ATT [the largest telephone companies in the United States, fiercely competing with each other. - explanation in the book]. We count the birds in the sky and turn away from the window if we hear footsteps in the corridor behind us; we say, yes, I agree, clouds often look like something: fish, unicorns, horsemen - but in reality they are just clouds, and we switch our attention to the next dish, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. That's how we are made.

I thought about how important it is for a child to have a tin like this. You can store the things dearest to your heart in it: your favorite toy, a lace napkin, your first piece of jewelry. Or maybe a photograph of his mother.

She evoked strange feelings at that moment. It seems to be pity, but not compassion. It seemed as if her heart had been ripped out of her, and sadness remained just another ghost, a memory of love on the bones of hatred.

In the city, parties begin with greetings at the door, collecting coats, light or air kisses (and where did all these strange things come from?). In nature, everything starts with work. You bring something, drag something, look for something, for example, iron tongs or grill grates. The hostess asks the men to move the table to another place, then decides that the previous one was better, and the men drag the table back. And at some point you realize that you can find pleasure in this too.

To overcome your own fears, you need to face them and recover.

I found myself in serious trouble, my life was falling apart, and the inability to write was only part of my troubles. I didn't rape minors or run around Times Square with a megaphone calling for world revolution, but something terrible happened to me. I lost my place in the world order of things and could not find it again. No wonder: after all, life is not a book.

I recognized the irony of the situation, maybe even the moral. For many years I avoided the problems of the real world, escaping to the Narnias created by my imagination. Now the real world was closing in on me, I was surrounded by mysterious creatures, some of them far from harmless, and the closet closed in front of me.

On the way from the meadow to the house, I tried not to think about anything. My first editor liked to say that eighty percent of what goes through a novelist's head has nothing to do with his work, but I never believed that this applied only to writers. And the so-called sublime thoughts, to put it mildly, are greatly overrated. When faced with a problem and something needs to be done, I firmly believe that the best solution is to step aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. This is hard physical work, the lot of blue collar, non-unionized guys with huge biceps and a scattering of tattoos all over their bodies. They act guided by instinct, and turn to those above them for advice only as a last resort.

- No, the world is wide and huge, but the town is small.

If there was life here, it was not very interesting. This is understandable: I saw the past of that present, which had already become the past. That's the way it is in this world.

No two dreams repeat each other in the smallest detail. In the same way, the image of a thing created by the imagination and the thing itself, created by hand, do not coincide, despite all our attempts to make them identical. Because we ourselves change from day to day, even from minute to minute.