My chief occupation for the past six summers has been as a fire lookout in the Black Range District of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. For ten of every fourteen days I sit and watch for smoke from a mountain ten-thousand feet high. From my tower I can see at least fifty miles in each direction—on clear days nearly a hundred.

S-Z-C-Z-U-C-Z-Y-N. I can’t pronounce the name of the town my mother’s mother’s from. But Natata, who is from Warsaw and was in my Hebrew class in Jerusalem, and who helped me without knowing it to forget about someone back in New York, tried to teach me. 

My birthday falls on June 16, which on the Chinese lunar calendar is an auspicious date. It was the date when Guan Yin, the bodhisattva who possessed the power to relieve the masses of their sufferings, became enlightened. Things didn’t quite turn out to be auspicious for me.

Gustave flaubert’s niece, Caroline Franklin Grout, once made note of a habit he had “of writing out his most profound impressions for himself alone, at the moment of experiencing them, then placing them in sealed envelopes.” He did this, she recalled, at the deaths of his friends Alfred Le Poittevin and Louis Bouilhet, and perhaps also at the death of his sister. 

When I went to work at the Polish Press Agency in 1958, the world presented itself to me as something impossible even to begin to comprehend, let alone master. And all the more so because, given my work, I had so little time to devote to it. All day long, dispatches arrived in my office from various countries, which I had to read, translate, condense, edit, and send on to newspapers and radio stations. 

In early spring of 1952, one William Styron, sallow, dark-haired, in his mid-twenties, bearing a scrawled note of introduction, turned up on the landing of the top-floor cold-water walk-up at 14 rue Perceval in Montparnasse that was to serve as the first home of a new and as yet unnamed literary review.

Oh where oh where is the underdog gone
Oh where oh where can he be
That I always lavished my sympathies on

I met Chekhov in Moscow at the end of 1895. At that time we saw each other only in passing, and I would not even bring up those encounters except to recall several of his characteristic phrases.

“Do you write a great deal?” he once asked me.

HIS FATHER called him Sunday, for the day he was born. But he hated the name, thought it churchy and effeminate, and as soon as he was old enough, he became someone else. That was his way. At the time when we were friends, before distance and hardship and repulsion intervened, he called himself Wilson Obote. He had spent most of the first half of his life in combat, as a fighter of shifting allegiances—sometimes a government soldier, sometimes a rebel—in his country’s civil wars.

ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2005, the mayor of New Orleans called on the people of his city to evacuate voluntarily ahead of Hurricane Katrina. The governor of Louisiana and the president of the United States had already declared a state of emergency, and by midday on Sunday, the mayor made his evacuation order mandatory. When the storm hit shortly before dawn on Monday, however, many people remained behind, some by choice and some because they had no choice.