I return to them regularly in essays and stories in order to clarify or explain abstractions or to strike contrasts. I find the myriad relationships in that universe comforting. If I were to try to explain the process of becoming a writer, I could begin by saying that the comforting intimacy I knew in that California valley erected in me a kind of story I wanted to tell, a pattern I wanted to evoke in countless ways. It's relatively easy to say why animals might seem magical. Spiders and birds are bound differently than we are by gravity.
Many wild creatures travel unerringly through the dark.
And animals regularly respond to what we, even at our most attentive, cannot discern. It is harder to say why language seemed magical, but I can be precise about this. The first book I read was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . I still have the book. I myself was learning to make these same marks on ruled paper.