Summer has faded away, though warm days still linger, and I find myself marking how fresh figs, peaches, plums and nectarines vanish from the market. Of these I miss figs the most, their season is so short, and the dried version of a fig is such an inadequate substitute—it’s almost a slur on the original. Yet thanks to California and Florida, as well as some far-flung regions of the world, oranges will always be with us.

In the morning, in the absence of summer fruits, I begin to fully appreciate an orange cut in quarters beside a piece of toast and a cup of coffee. Or if not an orange itself, then a small glass of orange juice, part of an ideal breakfast. But as John McPhee, in his book titled simply Oranges, reminds us:

Bolivians don’t touch orange juice at breakfast time, but they drink it steadily for the rest of the day.

McPhee’s book is, as the title suggests, all about oranges, and the first few pages take the reader on a breath-taking tour around the world, elaborating on the various ways an orange can be enjoyed:

In the principal towns of Trinidad and Tobago, oranges are sold on street corners. The vendor cuts them in half and sprinkles salt on them.

Salt! I never would have thought of doing that (still haven’t tried, either). But why not? Meanwhile, at the other end of the taste bud spectrum,

The Swiss sometimes serve oranges under a smothering of sugar and whipped cream.

Like some sweet glacier atop the Alps, it seems, dessert as a geographical metaphor. In Ireland, oranges serve as an unlikely (to us) snack food:

Irish children take oranges to the movies, where they eat them while they watch the show, tossing the peels at each other and at people on the screen.

What must Irish movie theaters smell like, by the end of the film? A tropical plantation, perhaps, the scent—as well as those flung peels—adding its own commentary to the goings-on flashing across the screen. It seems there’s no end to the human imagination, always on the lookout to transform the potential in anything ordinary, even a piece of fruit:

Norwegian children like to remove the top of an orange, make a little hole, push a lump of sugar into it, and then suck out the juice.

When I lived in the villages of the Beng people of Ivory Coast in West Africa, I was stunned at first by the local way of drinking orange juice. With a sharp, short knife, a Beng child (usually surprisingly young) would pare the rind off an orange carefully, so as not to nick the whitish skin beneath, but also swiftly—there seemed to be a certain amount of pride connected with this. After the orange had been shorn, a complete rind would fall to the ground, like some colorful Mobius strip.

Once I picked up one of those rinds and held it tentatively back together, though now it circled air, only the idea of an orange. Anyway, when the orange had been sheared like a sheep the thirsty child would cut off a thin slice from the top, exposing the moist fruit within. Head raised and holding the top to her mouth, she’d squeeze the orange until the juice poured out—instant orange juice from an all-natural cup. Once done, the scrunched orange would be discarded on the spot, having served its function, where the nearest hungry goat would snap it up.

In time, I managed to learn how to strip the rind off an orange, though painstakingly slowly, and I never managed to slice it to a single unbroken curlicue. I also nicked the pulpy skin often enough to make for a messy experience when I finally squeezed that orange for the juice. Some people just shouldn’t be trusted with a knife.

I think the prize for the most inventive use of an orange must go to the Saramaka people of Suriname in South America. The Saramaka are the descendants of slaves who escaped into the interior of Suriname three hundred years ago and forged a rich amalgam of culture out of their mixed-ethnic African heritages. The Saramaka are famous for making art out of anything: intricate architectural features on their buildings and doors, delicate patterns baked into cakes, elaborately designed decorations on chairs, combs, even bodily scarification marks. And the children can peel an orange into a very cool, sci-fi looking mask:

So that quotidian orange you and I enjoy for breakfast has a shape-shifting pedigree, a transformative potential that won’t easily fit in a juice glass. Add the salt, pour the cream, fling the rinds, and strap on yer goggles!

Saramaka boys photo courtesy of Sally and Richard Price, Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest.

The vast majority of the world in which we live is invisible, I believe. Every object around us was initially conceived and shaped by an unseen complex of synaptic connections in someone’s mind, and nearly every conversation we conduct is guided not so much by the words we speak but by the vast stretch of words we don’t allow ourselves to speak. Everyone we pass by on a sidewalk contains years into decades of memories, feelings and beliefs to which we have no easy access. And for all of us, the past is not some distant country but our next-door neighbor, and an incident from, say, fifteen years ago is the secret force behind a sudden anger or a tender gesture, like the dark matter of the universe tugging at stars.

Perhaps that’s why I still enjoy paging through Studs Terkel’s Working, originally published in 1974. For this book Terkel interviewed a wide range of people about their jobs, what a working day was like for a strip miner, a dentist, a book binder, a piano tuner, a jazz musician, and so on. One of my favorite entries features a hockey player, Eric Nesterenko, who once played for the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Chicago Black Hawks.

Now, hockey is not my game. Whenever I watch I can never follow the damn puck, can only glean its existence by the shifting strategies of the players on the ice. The entire experience feels to me like trying to find a tiny Waldo who’s traveling at warp speed. But reading Nesterenko’s description of what it’s like to hurtle across the ice, I’m willing to reconsider:

“You can wheel and dive and turn, you can lay yourself into impossible angles you never could walking or running. You lay yourself at a forty-five degree angle, your elbows virtually touching the ice as you’re in a turn. Incredible!”

And another point, Nesterenko describes a favorite photo of him playing in a game, and here he shifts from angles and diving to the poetry of the world within:

“I’m leaning into a turn. You pick up the centrifugal forces and you lay in it. For a few seconds, like a gyroscope, they support you. I’m in full flight and my head is turned. I’m concentrating on something and I’m grinning. That’s the way I like to picture myself. I’m something else there. I’m on another level of existence, just being in pure motion. Going wherever I want to go, whenever I want to go. That’s nice, you know. (Laughs softly.)”

Inspired by Working, in 2000 a set of editors released a book that served as an homage and update of Terkel’s book: Gig, Americans Talk About Their Jobs. The folks here include a crime scene cleaner, a video game designer, a plastic surgeon, and a flight attendant (who offers a hilarious account of a flying hamburger). Again, I have my favorite, the very first entry: a Wal-Mart greeter.

I suppose we’ve all walked past a greeter while on the way to our desired shopping experience, and perhaps we’ve all, to be honest, felt a little tug of contempt for the person standing there in that dead-end job, welcoming us as if we were long-lost friends. Well, no longer for me. Because after reading Jim Churchman’s account of his job, I can see past the goofy uniform:

“I guess they gave me the greeter job because they like the way I deal with people. At Wal-Mart, they observe how you work with everybody, even when you’re just stocking or pulling freight. They look to see if you have people skills, to see if you like people.

“And I do like people. I’m a retired educator, I worked as a schoolteacher and principal for a long time and I guess I’m good with folks. I taught school in University City, Missouri—that’s a suburb of St. Louis County—and lots of other places in Missouri and Illinois. I started off in a self-contained classroom and then I went on to become a principal. I got my master’s and then my doctorate in education and I taught fifth and sixth grade for a long time. I liked that a lot. I like kids that age. They’re still pretty nice and don’t know everything yet. I like this job a lot, too.”

If you had given me a typewriter and all eternity, I never would have written the words “Ph.D.” and “Wal-Mart greeter” together. Probably because my imagination is no match for the vast store of secrets the invisible world contains. And Churchman’s surprises don’t stop there. His wife is fighting cancer, and so he keeps his hours to a half day; he plays the guitar, and at times, some of his fellow Wal-Mart colleagues who are also musicians converge at his home for a jam session.

We feel the pull of dark matter’s gravity, and we contain dark matter ourselves, and even a Wal-Mart greeter, with the proper nudge, can alter what we too easily assume about a stranger, even as we head, distracted, for the aisle where a suspiciously inexpensive blouse or baseball glove or table cloth awaits us.

When the celebrated film editor Walter Murch was working on the movie adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he would receive dailies from the director, Phil Kaufman, every two weeks. Murch made a series of photographic stills from the various filmed scenes sent him, in an attempt to locate what he considered the decisive emotional moment.

As he recounts in his book In the Blink of an Eye, Murch regarded those stills gathered together as “hieroglyphs for a language of emotions,” but a language that didn’t necessarily include any known words.

“What word expresses the concept of ironic anger tinged with melancholy?” Murch asks, describing a scene featuring the actresses Lina Olin and Juliette Binoche, and then answers himself, “There isn’t a word for it, in English anyway, but you can see that specific emotion represented in this photograph. Or the photo may represent a kind of nervous anticipation: The character is scared and lustful at the same time, and yet she is confused because that lust is for another woman. And that woman is sleeping with her husband. So what does that mean?”

Murch used those stills to locate for the director the emotional complexity a given scene needed to be built upon, a complexity that can be seen but not necessarily be easily expressed in words: “If you can simply point to an expression on an actor’s face, you have a way around some of the difficulties of language in dealing with the subtleties of nameless emotions.”

Are they so nameless, though? When writers dig deeply into their imagined characters, that route offers branching possibilities and a call for a more careful attention.

José Saramago, speaking in an authorial sotto voce in his novel The Double, identifies what he calls “subgestures”:

“People say, for example, that Tom, Dick or Harry, in a particular situation, made this, that or the other gesture, that’s what we say, quite simply, as if the this, that or the other, a gesture expressing doubt, solidarity or warning were all of a piece, doubt always prudent, support always unconditional, warning always disinterested, when the whole truth, if we’re really interested, if we’re not to content ourselves with only the banner headlines of communication, demands that we pay attention to the multiple scintillations of the subgestures that follow behind a gesture like the cosmic dust in the tail of a comet, because, to use a comparison that can be grasped by all ages and intelligences, these subgestures are like the small print in a contract, difficult to decipher, but nonetheless there.”

Of course single words can never express the full range of our reactions–they conceal as much as they reveal. Writers who don’t yet understand this settle for presenting a reader with the “banner headlines” of their characters’ inner lives. How much more difficult to locate, in ourselves as well as in our creations (because the interior drama of our lives is a well from which we draw), the fine print of emotions. How much of my anger contains fear, which is laced with envy and the shame that envy brings? How much of my joy contains relief, a certain smug self-satisfaction, and a touch of regret I can’t quite place? Squinting at fine print like this can edge us closer to naming the unnameable.

Photo credit: Undead Backbrain.

A favorite among the books I’ve read this summer is the novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano. The narrative follows the entwining lives of an Italian girl and boy, Alice and Mattia, from childhoods marked by unexpected trauma to the unfolding consequences of those events into their early adulthood.

Through their separate traumas, Alice and Mattia become akin to prime numbers, divisible only by themselves, alienated from family, possible friends or lovers. When they meet as adolescents, they sense the depth of their individual isolations, are attracted to each other because of it, and yet they cannot quite, as “prime numbers,” make connection. This essential dilemma, of attraction and repulsion, fuels the forward motion of Giordano’s novel.

I’m especially intrigued how Giordano depicts ephemeral emotional landscapes through metaphor. In one passage, Denis, a tag-along friend of Mattia’s who wishes for more than friendship, suffers this unrequited attraction to the point where “he had learned to respect the chasm that Mattia had dug around himself. Years previously he had tried to jump over that chasm, and had fallen into it. Now he contented himself with sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into the void.”

Denis, labeling Mattia’s emotional distance as a chasm, finally imagines himself at its border, and by accepting its imagined reality, dangling his metaphoric legs over the metaphoric edge, manages to claim a small version of intimacy.

In another passage, Alice, now an adult and still pining for Mattia, who has somehow escaped her, is coming to the end of her brief marriage with Fabio and realizes that she can recall only a few of her husband’s many kindnesses: “there had been an infinite number of which Alice no longer remembered, because the love of those we don’t love in return settles on the surface and from there quickly evaporates.”

Giordano works a lovely magic here (and in many, many more passages such as this). He understands that metaphor isn’t a trick–or if a trick, it’s a transcendent one. The metaphors we create for ourselves can illuminate a brief patch of what roils hidden within, can provide a GPS for navigating private geographies.

Photo, “”Rising Mist,” by Jane Voorhees

With my second cataract operation behind me, I’m amazed at how much my sight has improved (and I’m also adjusting to my new cyborg self, now that I host a plastic lens in each eye). For a while, though, I found it difficult to read, with most texts looking like this

unless I closed one eye. I found this a bit of a trial, until I realized that I could easily super-size the fonts on my iBook and Kindle apps so that reading once again became a breeze. Large print editions, on demand!

Though the e-book revolution is often touted as the domain of the young, who have grown up at ease with reading from a screen, my recent experience makes me think that the e-book will soon become a haven for the older reader, a Boomer Book Bonanza. As our eyes (and the rest of us) slowly slip into that good night, personalized, adjustable font size will ensure that reading remains a pleasurable obsession.

And yet. Gazing on my shelves of hardcover and paperback books, I can recall so many specific moments when I read a particular novel or story collection, and those copies have aged with me, some warped from a dunk in the Yukon River or scented with African dust, as I mentioned in my previous post. A print book absorbs the warmth of a hand, might be dappled with coffee stains, has a wrinkled spine—the world works upon a print book, as it works upon us.

And yet. I can morph an e-book’s format to my need, I carry the equivalent of over thirty books without strain, and I can download a necessary book on the instant.

I’m reminded of the first week or so after that first cataract operation, when if I closed one eye I’d have far-sighted vision, and if I closed the other eye, near-sighted vision. With both eyes open, the world turned fuzzy. My book allegiances are fuzzy now, too: I appreciate a print book’s solid self and an e-book’s digital adaptability. I blink back and forth, wishing in vain for resolution.

Now that I’m recovering from cataract surgery, I find that I can’t read for more than short stretches of time, and I’m reminded of how essential to my day are the acts of reading and writing. I’m the sort of person who carries a book along wherever I go, on the chance that I’ll find a moment or two to plunge back into the unfolding world of a novel or short story. I carry a notebook as well, to capture whatever small patch of inspiration I might stumble across. These days my iPad often doubles as book and notebook.

So, sitting here at home on the couch, impatiently letting my eyes rest before I try a little more reading, I’ve been thinking back to the unusual settings I’ve carried the companionable presence of a book. When I was nineteen I canoed for about 400 miles on the Yukon River one stretch of a summer, and I can remember reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse while sitting by the edge of the water after a long day of paddling. I don’t understand now why in the world I thought this novel would be a proper fit with a place so wild that we could travel for days without seeing another soul, where we could turn a corner and surprise a moose into disappearing up the riverbank and into the forest. But I do recall the exhilaration of reading the passage where Mr. Ramsey’s “splendid mind” has reached the Q of knowledge but cannot move further to R, while before me the midnight sun slipped briefly behind the peaks of the Canadian Rockies. I still have my copy of the book, a bit waterlogged from a tumble into white water.

I’ve lived in small villages in the West African country of Ivory Coast, where my wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, has conducted her research on the culture of the Beng people, and of course I brought along a pile of books for those long journeys. In the photo below, I’m sitting before our two-room mud-brick house in the village of Kosangbé, writing in a notebook, perhaps inspired after reading from one of the two books beside me. The book on the top is The Voice that Is Great within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth. I still have that copy too, rich with the scent of African dust.

Two stories of reading in Africa most stand out in my memory. The first goes back to 1980, when I read Njal’s Saga, perhaps the greatest of the medieval Icelandic sagas, filled with blood feuds that last generations, punctuated by complex legal maneuverings between the aggrieved parties at a formal gathering called The Thing. Again, I wonder, what possessed me to bring such a book to a tropical country? (I also read a great deal of African literature while living in Ivory Coast, including Okot p’Bitek’s magnificent Song of Lawino). But this particular story of my reading comes right after I finished the book, sitting in that same palm rib chair pictured above, and realizing as a chill swept through me that once again malaria had come my way.

It was the most serious attack I ever endured, and deep in the night, with my temperature stuck at an alarming 106 degrees, my wife made a re-hydration drink for me in another room while I lay beneath mosquito netting, listening to the clank of her metal spoon stirring against a metal cup. That clanking transformed, in my fevered mind, into the sound and sight of two ghostly Viking warriors—right out of Njal’s Saga—standing beside the bed and striking at each other’s sword and shield. A memorable moment in my history of reading, but I do not recommend anyone seeking out malaria for a similar experience.

The second memory also involves illness, unfortunately. In 1993, near the end of a summer’s stay in the Beng village of Asagbé, I came down with pneumonia, and spent the good part of two weeks knocked out in bed. By that time I’d gone through nearly all the books I brought along to the village. Only one was left, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and what an unsettling fit that was, as I hacked away painfully beneath mosquito netting while reading about the doomed coughing patients of an isolated tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.

On the other hand, reading Miguel Torga’s Tales & More Tales from the Mountain while exploring the wild northern ranges of Portugal with my family a few years ago helped me to better understand the cunning behind this medieval stone-walled wolf trap we came upon.

I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has found a sometimes incongruous fit between the outer world of travel and the inner travel of reading. If anyone out there also has a strange or oddly fitting mix of book and place, feel free to leave a comment!

When I was a college student I used to work as a cab driver in New York City.

My first week on the job was a disastrous time. Every single cab I’d been assigned had broken down: the first night, a tire blew out; the second, the engine overheated, steam rising from under the hood in the middle of an intersection; the third, the horn wouldn’t stop blaring; the fourth, my taxi stopped and started unpredictably—a mysterious mechanical hiccup that chased every passenger away after a few blocks; and at the beginning of a thunderstorm on the fifth night I discovered that only one windshield wiper worked—the one on the passenger side, of course.

I eventually discovered why all those taxis broke down on me. By the start of my second week on the job I was afraid to answer to my name when the taxi dispatcher called it out in the waiting room, and I had a long time to wait and worry, because it seemed I was always the last one assigned a cab.

I remember sitting there beside one of the guys I had categorized in my mind as a lifer—a man with an unshaven, pockmarked face, a gut and greasy uncombed hair. Someone my young self couldn’t imagine becoming, was afraid of the very thought, but he was friendly, complaining about the weather, wishing me good luck for the night while he waited, so I found myself pouring out to him the disasters of my first few days on the job.

He nodded sympathetically through it all, and then simply offered, his voice lowered, this advice: “You got to take care of your people, if you want them to take care of you.”

I nodded my head, as if I understood. Soon the dispatcher called him, then a few more guys were called, and two of them had reported to the waiting room after me. Why was I always one of the last drivers given a cab?

Idiot. Of course—I checked my wallet, to see what sort of bills were there, how many people I could afford to take care of–who, as it turned out, were the dispatcher, the guy in the lot who chose the cabs, and the two workers who checked the water, the oil, the tire pressure, the wipers.

“You got to take care of your people, if you want them to take care of you.” Ethical questions of bribery aside, sometimes I think this is the best writing advice I’ve ever received. Isn’t it the web of our relationships that gives us a center of gravity, that gives our interior landscapes the context of others? And as writers, we employ what we’ve learned of ourselves, of our relationships in order to create the breathing space of difference for our characters, to help us imagine their own particular realities.

One of the best examples I’ve ever seen of this aspect of the writing process is in James Baldwin’s novel Another Country. One of his characters, Vivaldo, is a budding novelist struggling with the characters he’s created:

“On a Saturday in early March, Vivaldo stood at his window and watched the morning rise. The wind blew through the empty streets with a kind of dispirited moan; had been blowing all night long, while Vivaldo sat at his worktable, struggling with a chapter which was not going well. He was terribly weary—he had worked in the bookstore all day and then come downtown to do a moving job—but this was not the reason for his paralysis. He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they did not themselves move. He put words into their mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender up to him their privacy. And they refused—without, for all their ugly intransigence, showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell the truth. Then, they seemed to be complaining, they would give him all he wished for and much more than he was now willing to imagine.”

Much more than he was now willing to imagine. A beautiful phrase. If you take care of your people–your characters–by offering the truth of yourself as you understand it, then they just might take care of you with their own hidden truths. It’s not so simple to accomplish, though. We all have our own personal histories to unravel, knots inside ourselves that it sometimes seems no untying can manage. But believe me, you do not want your cab to break down five nights in a row.

Blinded by an accident when he was six years old, the French memoirist Jacques Lusseyran learned to prefer his blind life over his previous sighted experience. “I no longer saw faces, and knew in all probability I should go through life without seeing them,” he wrote of those early sightless days, in his book And There Was Light.

Lusseyran’s greatest challenge wasn’t the lack of sight, but a world of confounding new messages encoded in sound. Without the distractions of vision, he could now hear what sighted people couldn’t. “People were not at all what they were said to be, and never the same for more than two minutes at a stretch. Some were, of course, but that was a bad sign, a sign that they did not want to understand or be alive . . . not having their faces before my eyes, I caught them off guard. People are not accustomed to this, for they only dress up for those who are looking at them.”

Sound changed for Lusseyran, forcing him, at first against his will, toward a secret entry into the world: “How should I explain to other people that all my feelings toward them, feelings of sympathy or antipathy, came to me from their voices? I tried to tell a few people it was so, that they could do nothing about it and neither could I. But soon I had to stop because it was clear that the idea was frightening to them.”

This hard-won ability to navigate the hidden psychological landscape of voices led him, at the age of 17, to become the leader of one of the largest French resistance organizations during the Nazi occupation of Paris. He was present at every recruiting interview because he alone could determine who could be trusted to join the cell, as he writes in his essay collection What One Sees Without Eyes: “Each new applicant was introduced to me, and to me alone. It was much easier for me than for anyone else to strip him of all pretenses. His voice betrayed his inner being, and sometimes it betrayed him. Finally I could make use of that inner life which fate had forced me to discover so early and so thoroughly.”

Only once was he overruled, and when that new conscript betrayed the underground cell Lusseyran and his comrades were sent to Buchenwald. Where, remarkably, he—a blind man—survived. In his essay “Poetry in Buchenwald” he explains that he did so by reciting aloud, from memory, poetry, and teaching others to do so as well. “Poetry chased men out of their ordinary refuges, which are places full of dangers. These bad refuges were memories of the time of freedom, personal histories. Poetry made a new place, a clearing . . . I learned that poetry is an act, an incantation, a kiss of peace, a medicine. I learned that poetry is one of the rare, very rare things in the world which can prevail over cold and hatred. No one had taught me this.”

Over the years I’ve found that I keep coming back to Lusseyran’s writing, for the particular mix of clarity and spirituality that marks his vision of the world, and his simple but powerful credo of paying attention. When Lusseyran could summon his concentration, he could, sightless, identify nearby trees, even small details of the landscape around him. “Being attentive unlocks a sphere of reality that no one suspects . . . the seeing commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes . . . permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew.”

This sort of deep attentiveness is a discipline a writer can direct not only outward, but inward as well. In creative non-fiction, in memoir, you write about what has happened to you, and how you have happened to others, but that is only the merest beginning. What is most important in non-fiction is how you tell what happened. And that brings us to voice, the creative nonfiction coin of the realm.

Voice is, in many ways, the written equivalent of your speech patterns, or the shifting landscape of your thought, or some combination thereof. One way to discover your own pattern would be to close your eyes, though not to imagine what it would be like to be blind. Instead, imagine what someone who is blind and attentive, like Lussreyran, might hear in your voice. Try listening, when you speak, to what your voice reveals and tries to conceal of what you know of yourself. If Jacques Lusseyran were listening to you, what do you think he would hear?

We all know just how messy it is to write, how much guessing, and chance, and simple due diligence through an intractable problem will get us to where we need to go. But through all the joyful and painful mess of creation, structure somehow does get its say. Patterns do begin to emerge, and it’s good to know what to look for, and what is possible, when those larger units of meaning need to be paid attention to as our writing progresses.

Out of chaos does come order. An interesting way to think about this process is to examine the work of the English mathematician Michael Barnsley. He studied the “patterns generated by living organisms,” which he called “the global construction of fractals by means of iterated function systems.” Barnsley also called this “the chaos game.”

Here’s how it’s played, and I’m quoting from James Gleik’s book Chaos: Making a New Science: “To play the chaos game quickly, you need a computer with a graphics screen and a random number generator, but in principle a sheet of paper and a coin work just as well. You chose a starting point somewhere on the paper. It does not matter where. You invent two rules, a heads rule and a tails rule. A rule tells you how to take one point to another: ‘Move two inches to the northeast,’ or ‘Move 25 percent closer to the center.’ Now you start flipping the coin and marking points, using the heads rule when the coin comes up heads and the tails rule when it comes up tails. If you throw away the first fifty points, like a blackjack dealer burying the first few cards in a new deal, you will find the chaos game producing not a random field of dots but a shape, revealed with greater and greater sharpness as the game goes on.”

This is something you actually can try at home. The results can be pretty freaky, and remember, as Barnsley says, “if the image is complicated, the rules will be complicated.” While Barnsley’s game does depend on a formula of advance planning, the process looks remarkably like what we all go through as we write and revise, write and revise, as what seems obscure at first becomes clearer and clearer with each successive draft. Structure is what you make it, and the structures you choose (or choose to discover) become embodied by the individuality of your creative vision.

I read, and read obsessively, in search of transformation, of following any author’s eyes to a new angle on the world–for me, that’s entertainment.

One author who does this consistently is Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist who won the 2005 Man Booker International Prize and is year after year shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sometimes, when I wax too poetic about his genius displayed in novels such as Broken April, The General of the Dead Army, The Palace of Dreams or Chronicle in Stone, a listener will offer a quizzical look, as if to say, What could be so great about a novelist from Albania, of all places?

Well, why read the stories of a blind librarian from Buenos Aires, or the poems of an unmarried recluse in Amherst? The specific moment of creation, if powerful enough, extends far past its geographical–and temporal–origin.

Kadare’s novel The Pyramid takes place 4,600 years in the past, during the building of the pyramid of the pharaoh Cheops, and whether you’ve been to Egypt or not, you’ve certainly seen this enormous structure’s image.

It’s one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Kadare, however, wants you to look closer, wants you to see the hidden stories of its construction, stone by stone, in the chapter “Daily Chronicle: Right Hand Face, Western Arris”:

“The eleven thousand three hundred and seventy-fourth stone was laid during the second moon after the eclipse. It took a little more time to install than the previous one but caused fewer deaths. As if it had nothing more urgent to do than to fulfill the quota of corpses spared by its predecessor, the eleven thousand three hundred and seventy-fifth stone wrought havoc among its carriers. That is how the stonemasons Mumba, Ru, and Thutse fell, along with nine other nameless workmen; Astix the Cretan was struck down by apoplexy; and when the stone slipped back without warning, all the Libyans in the crew, as well as the Tur-Tur brothers, fourteen people in all, were squashed to pulp. Even when the stone was firmly in place and the series of deaths seemed to have come to an end, the deputy foreman died, followed by three Nubian sculptors. They had laid down on the masonry to rest a little, and it was only realized that they had stopped breathing when the supervisor came up with his whip to punish them for taking too long a break. The eleven thousand three hundred and seventy-sixth stone . . . ”

The narratives of this short chapter–only ten pages–continue to the eleven thousand three hundred and ninety-ninth stone, highlighting by implication all the stones that came before, and projecting into the future all the stones that have yet to arrive at the growing pyramid. Kadare’s remorseless accretion of deadly detail is balanced by an implicit sympathy for those forgotten fates, as if each description is an act of reclamation. After reading merely this one chapter from Kadare’s novel, one will never be able to see an image of the great pyramid without remembering that slow, relentless placement of each stone, and how each is storied with a terrible human cost.

Yet Kadare’s larger point doesn’t rest on a single pyramid. Behind what can be read of course as a blunt political statement, Kadare also seems to be saying that even the most glorious achievements of the human imagination can be laced with cruelty and tragedy. And so we move from a single architectural monument to a deeper understanding of the act of creation itself, how the impulse behind invention is far more complex, far more problematic than we might like to believe.