AT THE STOA

Perhaps I am reading the wrong sort of books. Only a less sane person can even contemplate that, and a far lesser one to actually see the sense of that contemplation.  I, however, am the sort of person who sees the same thing in the books that I read, who lays over them a veneer of my own character, stifling them even before they can truly teach  me anything.  But then what it is that they can truly teach me would have been lost to me.  I will still be laying that veneer if I attempted to answer that question, anyway.  It is perhaps creditable to my dominance over anything I come across, a dominance built on instability and misplaced passion, like a youth overcompensating for his awkwardness by being too passionate, too loud, in the perfectly wrong circumstance.  I seem to be doomed to be this awkward youth, regardless of how many books I – rightly or wrongly – read. Give me an Irving, or more recently, a Bellow; give me Camus or a Pratchett, it is all the same to me.  It is a

It's the second time that I will have read this book, having underappreciated it the first time.  I find that there are some books which takes a while to lovingly thwack you in the face, sometimes waiting for a precise moment in your life to do it.  And, having done that, these books stay with you for a long, long time. Vanishing and Other Stories  by Deborah Willis is very aptly titled, and leaves you with a  slightly haunted feeling of having lost something solid of yourself in its pages.  You feel you are all of the characters inside these stories, while denying that same confession to the world, lest you lose more.  Among other things, the book speaks of a writer whose vanishing from his blameless family becomes, inexplicably, the cleverest thing he ever did.  A city girl who will no longer sleep over her only friend's house after, again quite inexplicably, sleeping with her aging cowboy of a father.  A recent widower whose life, and that of his aquarium, slowly vanishes

It was a windy day, with the sun out and the rains happily blessing places somewhere else.  They tell me Lake Caliraya is a man-made lake, and, being inept at both geology and engineering I could only gulp amazement.  We noticed the soil was moist and rich, keeping with the story that the Americans dammed an existing river somewhere in the area and allowed the water - and the seeded fish population - to flourish. Run by very hospitable people and a happily energetic dog (that grew larger than its city-dwelling brothers), the resort in which our party stayed sits atop a slope spotted with a curious mix of trees.  There were cypresses, and pine trees - the kind which grow in Baguio, and a host of other trees I cannot identify.  Some of them are flowering, even - what I thought was an overfed giant of a beetle turned out to be a bumblebee enjoying blooms, or perhaps terrorizing small birds.    The resort also offered water sports activities and extremely scrumptious food,