You who would be alive, check out the striking story in Sept. 8 NYer: "The Brief History of the Dead" by Kevin Brockmeier. The interest in this panoptic piece comes from many sources. The preciously-fine imagination of it ("she began to snow—four words") and the gracious way the people's various occupations are treated ("The girl who liked to stand beneath the poplar tree in the park...") are charming beyond measure. That alone reserves the story a permanent place in my library.

It might be mistaken for an enlightened multiculturalist vision, but that's only a veneer: on the one hand "They came from all over the world," but on the other, "The bad guys used to be Pakistan, and then they were Argentina and Turkey," and although not everyone in the city is religious, those that are are either with the Church of the Sacred Heart or the Methodists.

Like a Borges or a Calvino piece, it takes an overhead, surveying view, as opposed to a more narrative mode (close readers of the Letters will remember that I like this approach, because it gives my mind more chance to wander).

Consider, then, this paragraph: "Andreas Andreopoulos, who had written code for computer games all forty years of his adult life, remembered leaping to pluck a leaf from a tree, and opening a fashion magazine to smell the perfume inserts, and writing his name in the condensation on a glass of beer. They preoccupied him—these formless, almost clandestine memories. They seemed so much heavier than they should have been, as if that were where the true burden of his life's meaning lay. He sometimes thought of piecing them together into an autobiography. . . . He would write it by hand on sheets of unlined notebook paper. He would never touch a computer again."

Since that hallowed incident of my youth when I discovered that my dreams were, to others, petty, I've been harrowed by the exhortation that life lies in sensuous details, and in the act of piecing them together—and decidedly does not lie in the act of crafting software. This bias (nay, ideology!) lurks everywhere in the modern world: so much so that in many circles, "software craftsman" is simply synonymous with "dork," "loser," "pedant," or with one who wastes his life dibbling pointlessly with machines—an escapist, they'd call him—rather than, you know, piecing together the sensual details of one's life into an autobiography.

But how can we spend every minute of every day memorizing such things as, say, the scattering of heavy white snow over a white spotted dog one early morning in a small town—the shovelman grinning? Or say, the brief release to early childhood, one night at eighteen, swinging madly on a swingset with two friends; the chomping of a solitary cigar one afternoon on a small apartment balcony looking down on a little house rented by peers I might have been friends with... How can I be expected to live a life obsessing over such sensations? The smell of the threshold to the pool at the high school, those days when the outer door was propped open and the myth-makers, the swimmers, moved inside? And that dress, that red dress.

No! "We must live, the rusting chestnut tells us" (Zagajewski tells us). Why is it wrong to spend a life making things, building things? To let "building" be one's destination, and let these aromas limn the path. Mother, schoolmates, Brockmeier, I reject you! Craftsmanship is acceptable! The burst of leaf-piles at my weight—that is the view, but this, this making, this is the journey.