My memory is getting worse. In Exit Ghost the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, talks in loving terms about his secluded house in the Berkshires somewhere near Lenox, and describes himself — to himself and others — as a recluse. Among its other benefits, Zuckerman claims that reclusivity is particularly good for listening to willfully difficult music with something like the proper attention; he mentions by way of example (and here is where memory cannot confirm the exact page), a Bartok quartet.

A couple of times a week I go down the mountain into Athena, eight miles away, to shop for groceries, to get my clothes cleaned, occasionally to eat a meal or buy a pair of socks or pick up a bottle of wine or use the Athena College library. Tanglewood isn't far away, and I drive over to a concert there some ten times during the summer. I don't give readings or lectures or teach at a college or appear on TV. When my books are published, I keep to myself. I write every day of the week—otherwise I'm silent. I am tempted by the thought of not publishing at all—isn't work all I need, the work and the working?

The farther along life's road I am, the more I find myself looking up to the hills, wondering whether the retreat is some kind of — perhaps the only kind of — victory. A place and time when we will finally be able to listen to Bartok's quartets without the background noise of life, buzzing and hashing and whining its way into our ears.

I remember in an interview a few years back Maurice Sendak mentioning that he was becoming more and more of a recluse, adding that the desire to retreat was increasing as he got older. He said this is a tendency usual to recluses. Several parts of this were comforting. That it's all right for writers for young people to want to get the heck away from the world. That there are tendencies usual to recluses, as if it is a state that can be . . . studied. We joke, my wife and I, that I am less a recluse than a reclusionist — a practitioner of reclusionism. What's comforting about this is that practice might make perfect. Or perhaps it's reclusionisme. The practice does have a vaguely Continental sensibility, an allure of Gallic superiority.

All of this on the eve of a book release. Actually two books. On Tuesday, the first two volumes of a new series, Goofballs, are released, both raucously hilarious and both as far from silent hilltops as I can imagine. I will go out and booster them on streetcorners, at railway stations, in bars and restaurants, because I love the books so.

There's more to say, but right now I have to practice.