"Just before she meets with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Alice enters the wood-of-no-names and encounters a fawn. Neither the fawn nor Alice can remember their names. No matter. They walk a ways together, 'Alice with her arms clasped lovingly around the neck of the fawn', until they come to the edge of the wood. Once there, the fawn suddenly remembers its name and looks at Alice with horror. 'I'm a Fawn!' it cries out, 'and dear me! you're a human child!' Terrified, it runs away.
"As a child, I spent many summers alone on a deserted beach on Long Island, gathering shells, digging for little clams, leading a far different life than the city life I led the rest of the year. Day after day, I watched everything, developing an eye for change in all its subtlety. The rest of the year in New York City, I did not look directly at anyone I did not know and did not talk to strangers.
"There was great peace in those summers and a new ability to be without people and yet not alone... Every morning the sea would wash up new treasures-- pieces of wood from sunken boats, bits of glass worn smooth as silk, the occasional jellyfish. Once I even found a pair of glasses with only one lens left in them. Some of the most vivid of these moments concerned the beautiful white birds that flew constantly overhead. I remember how their wings would become transparent when they passed between me and the sun. Angel wings. I remember how I followed them and how much I too wanted wings to fly."
