The Path Back Down When you are on an uphill path, even though you might stop now and then to look around and get your bearings, it seems that most of the time you're focused on the path right in front of you. Your whole visual field is filled with the earth closest to you. One foot in front of the other, on and on, until you reach the top. Coming back down is different. The perspective is altered profoundly. Your field of view is much larger, more distant. In fact, it's harder to keep your eyes on the path; it's much more tempting to stop and just take in the view. A lot of these essays, like those in my previous book, Dreams of Home, feel like journal entries to me. When I go back and read them, I can often touch again the psychological places I was in when I wrote them. A few are memoirs, and those take me back even further in my life. All of them grew out of that need to make sense of my life and my world. If the earlier ones now seem naive to me, it's because since then I've had other thoughts. Just as someone once wrote about our debt to history, "we stand on the shoulders of giants," my views today owe a lot to the process marked by those naive insights. No doubt in another twenty years, should I still be around then, I'll read my thoughts of today and smile indulgently. For it's never finished, this process. Riding off into the sunset is a movie cliche to cover up the reality of life: that it's a slow-motion marathon, each of us carrying the baton for a while then passing it off to the next person, never to know how the story turns out in the end."