By twenty-five
New Yorker, Dec. 20 and 27, 2004. Winter Fiction issue.
Aside one. Jeffrey Toobin's "High Tea" is worth sticking around to the end.
Aside two. W.G. Sebald writes "An Attempt at Restitution," about life in Germany after World War II, especially life in Stuttgart.
Local Pulitzer winner Edward P. Jones adds "Adam Robinson." The man whom the story surrounds thinks about the city's trees, especially the ones that don't get the love of the cherry blossoms. As someone who grew up under a Washngton oak tree, I appreciate his thoughts.
And then there's a sampling of Robert Lowell's letters to Elizabeth Bishop.
"All the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing-I suppose that's what vocation means-at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I'm thankful, and call it good, as Eliot would say."
