I did not know yet that I was made of light, of star carbon and molecules. But I gravitated always toward my source. I was always hurrying outside in the early morning to watch the light filter down through the trees. Birds would call, robins and raucous blue jays, and, always, the long low notes of the mourning doves. People died suddenly back then, without warning, quickly left us, heart attacks, pneumonia, snakebite, drownings. We were aware of our mortality and the suddenness of leaving. The finality, the possibility of loss was always with us, even in the hot heart of summer. North Alabama, 1955, as the century took shape and began to grope toward its meaning. As the World Turns was all the rage. We stared into the fat thick television screens and began to imagine the world spinning through space, began to sense our daily lives meant something, were full of drama, illusion, change. Up until then our main metaphor had been the cross. A man nailed up to die on wooden two-by-fours.

I was reading Durrell that summer. I had read a review of Mountolive in a British newspaper my English teacher showed me and gone immediately downtown to a bookstore to find out how to get a copy. There were quotations in the review, brilliant descriptions of interior states. I drew in my breath while reading them. I had never encountered such writing, except in poetry. A month later the bookstore owner called me.

“You’re in luck,” he told me. “I had a friend coming this way and he brought them to me. Come and pick them up.” I cut my afternoon lab and went downtown to pick up the books. Justine and Mountolive. That had been in April. Now at last it was summer and I had time to read them. I started Justine one morning right after breakfast. It seemed very complicated and turgid in the beginning. Then I got to a sentence, almost an aside, in which Durrell mentions that Justine is looking for her lost child in the brothels of Alexandria. Then I was reading like mad, caught up in the drama of the search.

At ten that morning I was still reading as I drove to the country club to go swimming. Keeping the book on my lap and reading at stoplights. There was so little traffic back then and we were innocent of cars. As soon as I got to the country club I settled myself on a chair to read. “These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one’s life which is writing. One can debauch them with words but one cannot spoil them.”