A village in southern Italy

I remember when I first moved to San Francisco, and how many pictures I took: my iPhone couldn't keep up with them. Everything I saw looked interesting--street corners, the signs above little markets, neon light in the window of a bar. I'd go to dinner, eat and have a drink, come out of the restaurant and instantly see something I'd want to remember--and take a picture of it.

I took this picture two weeks ago in a village in southern Italy. I can't remember the name of the village, only that it was in the Campania region and that I thought the composition said a lot about the way people actually live, what they value. Toward the top of the picture you can see the satillite tv dish, toward the bottom the notices that are still posted on village news--births, deaths, anniversaries.

I don't remember why I took the picture, but I'm glad I did. Taking a picture is a way of remembering without having to write anything down.

I remember a time that I couldn't wait for a book to be over, even a classic. I'd read and read and the more I wanted it to end the longer and longer it went on.

I first noticed this in France, reading Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot." I bought the book in Clermont-Ferrand in a bookstore that only had a handful of titles in English.I was living a tiny house in a tiny village in France, the ideal place to read. There was no tv, no distractions. I devoured the first 300 pages, transfixed, in less than a day. Then the story started to overwhelm me, as Dostoyevsky can, with murder and insanity and no end in sight. I had to keep reading as if my life was on the line, and I did.

For two of three years, every great novel I read caused this sensation: the feeling at some point that I couldn't wait for it to end. And the more I couldn't wait for it to end the longer the story became so that it would never end unless I continued to read. The act of reading itself, and not the book I was reading, became the crises.

The crises has passed and I can read fiction once again with pleasure, even giving up a book in its midst if it doesn't please me. I take far fewer pictures in San Francisco, though the city continues to amuse and delight me I no longer need to commit it to memory.