A man whose books receive mediocre reviews informs me that to be considered a professional writer one must eschew inspiration, must view its whims and ebbs the way a stone cold atheist views the vengeful fire breathing God of Edwards or bin Laden: a plebian fantasy, a myth for the pacified masses. Habit, he told me, and rigorous discipline, are the hallmarks of the true writer, He who unlocks secrets.

So I am thinking of rituals, and the circularity of the seasons and how most experience is really a synthesis of stimuli, the immediate then the personal histories then the cultural histories. Mostly I think of sports. I think of autumn coming and how I anticipate its arrival with dreams about pellucid days of thin warmth followed by those incisive and brisk evenings of American lore: hickory smoke and cedar and a hint of cinnamon in the air (cinnamon for my grandmother), a biting and aggrieved wind coming through the drying and dying tree leaves, their skeletons beginning to show their knobby and arthritic forms. Football lights always somewhere distant, a town communing under drum beats (does anyone ever remember one specific moment from these nights the minute after they lapse?), joints passed between high school kids in the woods and precocious glances at the immense sky, Have you ever thought what might be, you know, out there? How damn small we are?, girls in tights and skirts and thigh high boots so tantalizing and austere (yes, this is the image of America they hate, girls with wind-red cheeks in leather), and I am young and what is responsibility or death? and I am fucking my girlfriend in the backseat of her parents’ Volvo, a ’97, deep green, and the point is that it does not matter whether any of this happened. I carry it and you carry it and when the Towers fell this is what we recognized in each other: the idea of football on Friday nights, how it comes back to us in the waning days of summer, one vast and irretrievable moment in our lives that we can’t quite believe we inhabited. Our rituals – a baseball catch in the gloaming, those ethereal stadium lights in the dark, the wave of heat from a gymnasium that hits you as you step in from the cold (so many collected bodies all seeking refuge) – they are not intended to sever the quotidian rhythms but to reinforce them, those beautiful forgotten moments where we can extrapolate our neighbor’s life because we see him in line buying hot cocoa for his daughter and wife.

These rituals being the reason American writers struggle so mightily to create convincing Islamic characters in their novels. So you have the immediate (August, sultry nighttime, the summer of heat waves and Russian fires and Kashmirian floods, within the year of earthquakes and oil spills). So you have the personal history (invent a life, it’s not hard; really, just try: a few women lost, some humiliation of childhood, some tragedy of adolescence, some dream never pursued). So you have the cultural history (and here, the authors furrow their brows). So you have the cultural history (still furrowing). So finally you abandon the diffuse specificity and give us two solid strokes in the middle of a pointillist painting: the stoic jihadist or the clandestine heretic (how do we know he is a heretic? how do we know he is like us? Because he likes jacking off in the lonely hours of night).

So what secrets can I unlock?

I will tell you this: inspiration is like love, which I’ve been told is like God. What happens is simultaneous - an attenuation of every soul that has ever lived into my body, and the concurrent expansion of these new languages, all of them trying, in their own tongues, to find a few sentences in which to capture their life. Its wonder and its fear. And within this nearly infinite whorl of voices, my own heart concedes it will never find the proper words. It will never know for certain if there is a God or if we are an aberrant and random collection of atoms. It will never know how this universe began or how it will end. It will never know what it was like to be in the cockpit of those planes with New York screaming by, a vestigial streak of stone and steel. It will never find the precise words to capture the immensity and sadness and complexity and beauty of this contingent world.

But – and here, I would like to address this to the professional writer whose books receive mediocre reviews, He who believes that the secrets of this world rest in its patterns, in its orderly cadences, that if He can write three pages by lunch, and two more by dinner, and that if He can structure each line in dactylic hexameter the terror of existence will dissipate, He who has tried to eradicate magic and transcendence from this world – though my heart will fail, though its language is insufficient, my God, will it still search, incoherent and rapt with wonder.