In the early 20th-century illustrations of Future Cities, amidst the gleaming towers and the lights that make day out of night, among the sweeping motorways full of countless automobiles as they wind through the vast manmade canyons -- you do not see a single train track.

You will see depictions of personal aircraft-automobiles in lanes of the sky, or, in works of a slightly earlier era, small lone prop airplanes. All manner of personal conveyance. But not one train track.

Plenty of space for automobiles! All the space, really, nothing left for anything else -- but think about what all that implies. That travel through this glorious shining city becomes crushingly lonely. Each individual is forced to navigate this maze alone, separated from every other by walls of steel and glass

I am coming to realize that my behaviors as a young child resembled that of cats in ways too numerous to call coincidence.

It is not simply that I was aloof, or even that I hated the idea of needing to work with other people for anything. It is that I would routinely hide in closets, hide under tables, crawl under beds, make little caverns out of the fold-out foam seat portions of the cheap couches and hide in those, hide under blankets --

I had a copy of "Mason & Dixon", by Thomas Pynchon, for over 10 years. I got it for free or very cheap from a library surplus sale, and I carried the hardback book around with me, from place to place, for years. I had it in a box of "must reads" in storage. And after a decade, I finally decided to dive in. The only other book by Pynchon I had read, 20 years previously, was "The Crying of Lot 49". Well, the only book I read successfully, I had tried Gravity's Rainbow but never finished it.