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Acknowledgments

Conversation has always been my magic elixir, the substance that brings moments of emotional and conceptual clarity to the otherwise inchoate mass of feelings and thoughts I so often carry inside me. And since writing is, at its core, about trying to capture such epiphanies, this book owes its existence to those friends who, in the spirit of love, companionship, or at times I suspect, mere forbearance, have helped me to “knead the dough” over and again during our many encounters. To all of you (and you know who you are!), I am very, very grateful.

I’d like to give special thanks to a number of people in this group. I am very grateful that Jim Barrett, true friend, incandescent spirit and wordsmith extraordinaire, encouraged me to make my private musings on American culture available to a larger audience and that, further down the road, Carme Manuel was willing and able to help turn Jim’s vision into a reality.

I am indebted to Tom Walsh for demonstrating time and again over many years the immense grace and power of a life and a pen that draws from the head and the heart as opposed to just the former.

Similar gratitude flows to Tim Sciarillo who’s been tenaciously needling me into ever-greater levels of consciousness and critical awareness since the day many years back when fate (and the Dean of Housing) first brought us together.

I feel only mystery and wonder (if there any more sublime expression of gratitude?) before the fact that Itamar Even-Zohar, a true visionary and a polyglot of the type that this world may never see again, decided for some strange reason two decades ago to begin sharing his cosmic levels of knowledge and humor with me.

I would be a very different thinker and writer without my dialogues with Gustavo Remedi who, during our 15 years spent working together, constantly and joyfully challenged me to consider new things in completely new ways.

But I fear I might not have been able to listen to either of these extraordinary people had my Galician “brother” Alberto Sacido, not previously showed me the importance of coming to the table, in good times and bad, to feed the body and renew the mind through shared words.

I cannot imagine my life today without the many gifts bestowed on me by Pau Estrada, Jaume Subirana and Josep Maria Solé Sabaté who, by handing me the keys to so many fascinating rooms and spaces within Catalan life, forever changed my way of looking at the world as well as my place within it.

I would be similarly adrift without my sister Christine, whose fearsomely well-organized intellect is only superseded in power by the ever-mindful love and care she bestows on those lucky enough to form part of her world.

And then there’s Kathy, who counts among her many, many loving gifts the rare ability to combine gracious, open-ended listening with timely, specific and ever-incisive questioning. During these last few years, no one has been more central to the process of turning notions into ideas, and ideas into essays, than she.

But at the root of my gratitude before life is the dialogue—which sometimes takes place in words but even more often, as luck would have it, in other much more powerful and ineffable codes—with my children Sophia, Lily and Luke. It is the need to honor their lives, both their miraculous present and promising future, that keeps the search for clarity and truth, and yes, laughter and joy, at the forefront of my vital concerns.