IN PRAISE OF COLDNESS If you wish to move your reader, Chehkov wrote, you must write more coldly. Herakleitos recommended, A dry soul is best. And so at the center of many great works is found a preserving dispassion, like the vanishing point in a quattrocento perspective, or the tiny packets of dessicant enclosed in a box of new shoes or seeds. But still the vanishing point is not the painting, the silica is not the blossoming plant. Chekhov, dying, read the timetables of trains. To what more earthly thing could he have been faithful? Scent of rocking distances, smoke of blue trees out the window, hampers of bread, pickled cabbage, boiled meat. Scent of the knowable journey. Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.