IDIDN’T WANT TO think of it as “stillville,” but the name forced itself on me. I found a little house and started living here. Even though I worked a town away, I chose to live here. Even though the house was more expensive and less convenient than an apartment near my place of work would have been, I chose the expense and the trouble. The price had not been especially high, but it was dear at my income. The house was not entirely sound when I bought it either. I knew nothing of home repair at the time. Living here compelled me to learn. I patched up the leaks in the roof. I replaced the windows in the back. I had to tear everything out of the backyard. For a time, it wasn’t clear whether or not I could keep the garage. In the end, I did. It’s standing out there now. I can see it through the rear window. When I turn my head, I can see the street out the front window. There’s the house across the street, the tree, the parked station wagon, centered between the mailbox on one side and the driveway cut on the other side. It’s as reliable as a painted mural. Above the street, the daytime sky alternates with the nighttime sky, and clear skies alternate with cloudy skies. Lights are turned on and off, but otherwise the scene is the same. Sometimes the station wagon is gone, sometimes there are no leaves on the tree. The stillness that brought me here never wavers, though. When I go to work, driving into that other town, I can see right away that the buildings and streets, parked cars and trees, aren’t really still. They aren’t incapable of motion. They only withhold their motion. They are trembling coils, poised with the momentary immobility of a snake about to strike. There’s no peace in that merely temporary motionlessness, any more than there is in the brief pause before the roller coaster drops down its incline. The town I work in vibrates incessantly, especially at quitting time. Then everyone is rushing to change into another self and wring a little pleasure from life. People hurry themselves along like their own slave drivers, laying in supplies for the weekend. Pedestrians spray from the buildings like bullets. The clock fires its artillery over the rooftops. The tension varies over these volleys of hours without ever slackening. I’ve never visited that town at night, but I doubt it would be much different then. I imagine the wary unserenity of the street where I work under a blue night sky. The buildings would look like howling faces and glassy headstones.

My town at noon is quieter than that town would be at four in the morning, I’m sure. Moving here, for all the difficulties that it entailed, was exactly what I wanted. Nothing is ever going to happen to me here.