Happy and sad are words we mistake for facts.

                  That’s the problem with words. They parade as definite when they’re only approximations, gradations on a scale. When does light turn to dark, day to night? It depends, right? What does one mean by dark?

                  Am I happy? Sad? Well, yes, both, neither, it depends. My spirits heave like the tide throughout the day. Reading the news, I grieve; reading a well-wrought paragraph, I grin. To banish gloom I summon my grandkids to mind. Composing a threnody, I rejoice in its cadence.

                  We dodge such discriminations as inconvenient. Typically, the first question to a friend is “How are things?” The typical answer – “Fine.” “Great.” “Couldn’t be better” – is seldom frank. I have health worries – but who wants to hear about those? I’m enraged by the decline of my nation and my impotence. But then, twenty thousand people yesterday read my words – almost twenty-one thousand – and dozens sprinkled me with praise. And I just read this amazing poem. And Jane and I heard this gorgeous opera that’s still singing in our ears. And Henry – our jester…

                  The sweetest music is not the jolliest. Insistent jollity comes to feel like idiocy. The most memorable melodies involve us in a contradiction. Is Mozart’s aria “Porgi amor,” say, glad or sad? Well, yes, both, neither, it depends.

                  We are taught to say what we mean: “Get to the point!” I am forever groping my way to a point, as if I knew what my point was. My point is, well, jeez, I don’t really have one, except to be together, smile and sigh together, savor our hour. Is my point, then, lollygagging and wool-gathering? What’s the good of that!

                  All the good in the world.

                  Love, come to think of it, is my point. Loving, I’m living. Making love I’m making sense. Carnally, yes, that’s dandy, but verbally, amiably, mindfully. Typing these sentences gladdens, feeling you reading them, but maybe you’re not reading them, I’m just fooling myself. The poems of Emily Dickinson couldn’t be sadder – or gladder – gleaming – but for nobody’s eyes but her own!

                  The writing I treasure is never too sure of itself. Inside a stout “yes” one can feel “but” gnawing like a carpenter ant. “The trouble with the world,” wrote Bertrand Russell gnomically, “is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Yeats saw the same, that

“To know for sure,” was my way of putting it, “is to quit thinking.” Most sentient humans sense this – yet shy from saying it – for it feels squishy, indecisive, even whiny. Don’t ask me how I am if you really want to know for the truth is… I have no idea.

                  I enjoy indeterminacy. Iffiness commandeers my thoughts so they’re not nosing elsewhere. I doubt I’d enjoy doubt so much if writing weren’t my gig. When Montaigne asked famously, “Que sais-je? – What do I know?” he was both speaking his mind and elevating himself to hero of his tale, for if he did not know, it was incumbent on him to keep scribbling to find out. No writer is humble, demanding your attention as if we deserved it. Our humility is vanity.

                  The goal of language is to simplify existence, so it seems to make sense. Name a thing and you possess it, place it in your scheme. A peach is a peach, a dog a dog. Thinking dissolves definitions. Posing a question is like flying into a cloud, seemingly so firm from afar.