California and Other States of Grace [antikvár]

I have made several attempts to describe this book, only to find that the descriptions stood somewhere between a meaningless abstraction and every book that has ever been published. Then I thought of a story which seemed like a metaphor for the book itself, so I am going to introduce the book by indirection. Several years ago, I flew with my children back home to California. The afternoon of our arrival, we went for a walk along the Carmel beach. It was sunset, the beach was particularly sharp with color, and the sun hung like a fiery communion wafer on the horizon, its last rays laying a track of gold across the water to the edge of the wet sand where I stood. Seized with the desire to impress this scene upon my children, who were skittering like sandpipers at the ocean's edge, I gathered them together and showed them how to make a frame out of their fmgers to capture the sunset like a picture. They were only mildly interested in this instant photography, and after several moments they broke away to run up and down the beach again. "Well," I thought, retreating to a sand dune and sittirig down alone, "so much for a mother's metaphysics." But then 5