The problem I have with tattoos is that I would be unable to decide on the design. Reading Inheritance, I was almost jealous of the way Dani Shapiro memorialized the life event that is the basis of her book. It was properly symbolic and fittingly permanent. I can't seem to settle on anything.

Time is constantly forward moving. Write a history of something and within your own life, revisionist historians can change the conclusion you came to. Maybe it's built upon. Maybe it's torn down.

Has it ever scared you how some people hold on to a thing? Like say your dad always lied and so you've committed yourself to always telling the truth, and it's become the cure for the difficulties in your childhood and the pain you've worked through in young adulthood and now you tell everyone you know the importance of truth-telling. You tell your children, you enforce your rule with friends, you marry a blunt but sincere person. But sometimes you hurt people, because your conviction is not theirs, or rather, it doesn't take into account the delicacy of their situation and you never realize how you lost sight of the balance required by love. And then you're eighty years old and your children and grandchildren gather around and they say, "grandpa always told the truth" in the way that people who look for qualities say things about dying people that also mask a familiar pain.

I worry about that. I worry about holding on to a thing so tightly that I lose the ability to let go and reach for the next thing.