Professor of literature, Palermo

It's like everything in life's stopped.

When everything stops it's difficult for a person who always felt a flow to his life, who looked at all of life as something that flowed from one thing to another.

Perhaps I was in Palermo too long, perhaps it made too much of an impression so that when I arrived back in San Francisco I felt as if I was still in Palermo, a feeling that lasted at least two weeks.

I can't remember what I've written. Perhaps that's what it means to be a writer--to render the present so presently that it feels so lived in that there's no reason to remember it.

Rather than trying to call the present up and wait for it to come and expect it be called beautiful or heartwarming or any of that other stuff writers expect to hear from their readers, a real writer wouldn't write. He or she might write but leave it behind for others to decide what to do with their writing.

Real writing only exists in the present. Once it's written it loses energy moment by moment, unless you're in Palermo listening to the Professore read The Leopard aloud in his broken English, so lovingly, as if he'd written it.