When I was pretty little—five or six or so, I think—I used to have a ritual I’d engage in that was designed to fill me with a powerful and uncanny sense of how big and wild and swarming the world was. Now and again, when I was out in a crowded public place with my mother or my father, I’d pick a person among the strange throngs who surrounded me. I’d focus all my attention on them. I’d stare and stare for several minutes (or as long as I could, before they moved beyond my sight or a parent’s hand beckoned me away), trying to memorize their face and their clothing. I remember particularly doing this once from an upper level of a shopping center, sticking my head through the railing that overlooked the lower atrium and watching a man reading a newspaper on a round bench. Then I’d hold the image of the stranger in my mind’s eye, imagining what they’d done that morning, last night, last week, to lead them to this moment in which I was watching them so intently. Who were they? What were their lives like? Where did they come from, and where would they go next?

I’d keep their faces with me for later, and then—home in my bed, or wandering the balcony of my apartment, I’d call them up again, and this was when I’d get the real thrill, the real surreal shiver I was looking for. I cannot explain how bizarre it seemed to me, and how amazing, to contemplate the fact that the random person I’d fixated on earlier in the day still existed right now, going about their private business, even though neither I, nor anyone else, perhaps, was looking at them. They had a whole complicated existence as real as my own, and I couldn’t know a thing about it, but it was out there in the universe nonetheless. It was a staggering thought. And if I wanted to multiply my delicious incredulity even further, I’d remind myself that all this impossible existence wasn’t just true of the single person I’d watched that day, it was also true of all the other people I hadn’t watched—all the people in the world. They all, every one of them, had differentiated lives as full and intricate and palpable as my own (though I may not have given them credit for being as fascinating).

I gotta tell you, for a small egocentric being who hadn’t yet fully developed a theory of mind, the whole thing was pretty much a beautiful mind-fuck.

Coming home from Argyle on the train today, I thought about this for the first time in a long time, and tried to recreate the observance. It was much harder than it used to be. I was still interested in the people I was looking at, but it’s a funny thing, I guess; the more strangers you get to know in your life, the less sublimely separate from each other they seem.

• The other morning I began my day in a most delightful way: I read a deft and satisfying story in my current copy of the Virginia Quarterly Review. You can currently find the story in its entirety online; I recommend it, even though it did delay my shower, and consequently the productive start of my morning, by a good twenty minutes. I even found myself wanting to write to its author, a man named Peter Walpole. According to his VQR biography, Walpole “has worked as a letter carrier for the US Postal Service for the past twenty years.” (He is in good company.) Though I am often so charmed by a piece of writing that I—taking a leaf out of A.’s book—kiss its cover upon having finished its final word, I don’t often want to say anything in particular to writers. This time, though, I did. I quite wanted to tell Mr. Walpole that he had captured most handily the rhythm of dispute between people who know each other well, and to say that even a young woman who finds herself in an altogether joyful, harmonious, and mutually affectionate marriage can recognize (especially if she is a certain kind of young woman) the truth in a sentence like the following: “He did not sigh, having finally absorbed in the course of their marriage that sighing was, in Margaret’s book, a deeply problematic thing for him to do.” I was unable to private-eye my way to Mr. Walpole’s email address, so say so I did not. But I thought it.
• This evening we attended, quite on the spur of the moment, a play at an excellent theater company located not 10 minutes walk from our apartment. The play itself was not what Ross and I had imagined it would be, since we had not read its description with sufficient attention before leaping upon the moment’s spur. Still, Radio Macbeth was—I thought—extremely effective: it was a dark and authoritative staging of Macbeth, built upon the conceit of a group of radio actors meeting in an old building late at night to rehearse their performance. Walking home, I was very grateful that I happened to remember the details of the play surprisingly well from my reading of it in school 15 years ago (!). Ross felt less fortunate, and our post-play conversation included a meditation on how terribly incomprehensible some bits of Shakespeare are unless you have help. (But then again, the sense of other speeches sounds, even with no preparation, as clear as a bell.) Apropos of which, Ross told a story about how when he was in 7th grade he decided to read Hamlet on his own, not understanding about the phenomenon of Shakespearean language. He says he labored for quite some time under the impression that he must be very dumb indeed to find the play so difficult. My poor Ross. Still, I’m sure the fact that by this time he was writing his own computer programs went some way towards making up for his feelings of inadequacy.
• Do you find that, when you are sleepless in the middle of the night, the plans and ambitions you form for yourself are far grander than usual, and your sense of confidence about fulfilling said plans and ambitions is far greater?

I do.

It is a wintry November Sunday in Kenwood, and Paul Durica is wearing a brown knit cap, a well-worn pair of good black shoes, dark gray jeans, and a long double-breasted herringbone tweed coat from whose bottom hem a few stray threads can be seen to escape. The coat has an elegant shape and hangs beautifully, emphasizing the lanky frame of its wearer, but its right belt loop—Durica does not wear a belt—is hanging loose, one of its eight buttons is missing, and another remains unfastened. The almost chin-length sideburns that make their way down Durica’s handsomely bony face are dark and reddish, streaked by several graying hairs. He steps from shoe to shoe and rubs his hands together as he speaks.

In totality, his appearance lends Paul Durica a somewhat professorial air that is at once reinforced by his occupation (English PhD student) and the subject of his discourse (history), and belied by the marvelously unsavory nature of the precise event he is conducting. Durica is the sole proprietor of the recently founded Pocket Guide to Hell Tours, and on this day he is leading a small mob of deeply interested people on a 90-minute walking tour of the architectural sites associated with the planning, execution, and aftermath of the brutal 1924 murder of 14-year old Bobby Franks by two teenage University of Chicago students: Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and Richard A. Loeb.

Two of the deeply interested people hanging on Durica’s every word happen to be me and Ross. The tour is—let me be frank—extraordinarily entertaining. Durica speaks without notes, but with his hands (despite the fact that they turn ever more red with cold each time he removes his gloves so he can gesture more theatrically). He inhabits the skin of his characters like a true obsessive (but analyzes their behavior like a literary theorist). And he perfectly paces the revelation of each bizarre detail: the strange substance the police found on Bobby’s naked body, the typewritten ransom note whose text was stolen from the pages of a detective novel, the chisel thrown out of the window of a moving car.

Apart from anything else, Durica is having fun. His voice, always rich with pleasure in his tale, often rounds with laughter—and his delight legitimizes our own. We are, the lot of us, like children at a campsite fire, leaning forward to catch the darkest detail of the horror story we aren’t supposed to hear. I am reminded of how I used to feel when I read Agatha Christie novels back to back at the age of thirteen, shivery and captivated and thrilled by the meticulous imagination of the murderous mind.

Paul Durica says he is planning at least three other tours on different topics, slated to appear in the spring and summer months of 2009: none of them, he promises, will rise above the seedy underbelly of Chicago’s history.

Did you say you yet needed another reason to come and see me soon here in this city? Now you have one.

I’ve really been meaning to catch up on posting and emails and picture-taking, but I’ve been working really hard on writing something that’s taking most of my energy and attention, so that’s all going to have to wait just a little longer. The good news—and it is good news—is that the writing is pleasant, satisfying, and energizing.

Well, mentally and emotionally energizing, anyway. Physically it has kind of pooped me out. Of course, it is also possible that I am simply suffering a blood sugar crash after having consumed half a slab of Ritter Sport yogurt chocolate.

Therefore, forgive me for the lapse, and know that if you, yourself, consume half a slab of Ritter Sport yogurt chocolate tonight, and be sure to tell me if half an hour later your eyelids begin to feel like lead weights, you will be doing a great service by adding to my set of experimental data.

Das ist alles.