From The Cincinnati Review:
The rocking chair looked comfortable enough when I decided to sit here and read, but I find myself shifting, distracted. I keep looking up to watch people passing on the sidewalk, following them until they disappear from sight. I seem to be looking for distractions, looking for ways to avoid what I should be doing –reading. The book on my lap is Herzog, by Saul Bellow. I know it’s a good book, an important book, one that I want to read, should read, but I’ve been struggling to finish it for a week now, trying to find a way into it, around it, through it.
It’s here on the porch that I realize why I am putting it off, putting it down, putting it away. The book, not the rocking chair, is making me uncomfortable. It’s not the discomfort of a novel poorly written, but the opposite. My discomfort is that of a child holding the pieces of a broken vase in front of his mother. Of a woman standing nearly naked in a dressing room and asking a salesperson on the other side of the door for a larger size. It’s the uneasiness of someone driving alone with the gas gauge light on and no service station in sight. Herzog is making me nervous.
More here.