Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content...

Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy...

We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then,...

You were young, I thought, not once but always before, always always, every day before the day just passed. You were young only minutes ago.

I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn’t ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn’t it? We would train...