Why my father moves:
His childhood was a period of frenetic transition, wartime and and this had infected him with the strangeness of things. Faces and names blurred. So his memory was smooth. Although he could never pinpoint anything exactly, he always had a correlative. His mind worked through connections, metaphors, similarities, webbing out, never defining. To define something was a brutal curiosity, tearing off all the feathers simply to see the yellow puckered skin. He moves constantly even now. If he stayed in any room for more than a few months, he would become depressed. He would move around the furniture to create a different effect. He tried different heights and found that he liked the impersonality and anonymity of highrises the best. He could see the shore from the balcony. Beneath him, the world was small and distant; its passing away could not affect him. No sound reached him. Now he lives on the forty-second floor, watches the cars and the people below, miniscule, moving.