There is the river, over I must—across I’ll go. For the vision burns away like cold blown breath; and when I look again it will have vanished away.

Christy make us real, make us hard and real in our lives: we who walk up and down in this autumn, trying to make ourselves real. We are involved, we are involved; and we cannot break away. All the history that we saw on the map in the kitchen pours into us and we contain it, we display it like a map for others to look at and be history; and the song of the girl on the world sings through us to be sung into others: Go into the world, go build cities, go discover countries; go spread love, go give, go make magnificence, get and give light, save and join and piece together (as you did the bits of string and cloth and whittled wood to make your ship) and show a whole and put it, combined and formed and shaped, into the world like a bottle with a ship in it. Gather the broken pieces, connect them: these are the only things we have to work with. For we have been given a broken world to live in—make like a map a world where all things are linked together and murmur through each other like a line of whispering people, like a chain of whispers a full clear statement, a singing, a round, strong, clear song of total meaning, a language within language, responding each to each forever in the memory of each man.

And then I said, “I will get up now and go now, where I belong, and be what I must be.”

I went to the bus station and really waited for a bus this time, and took it, and the next morning I knew it was no spell when I heard them calling all the names of the little forgotten towns, Normangee, Sweetwater, Cheetah, and I saw the live oak trees like old kinfolks in the fields.

Then, after a while, I was in the road going to the house and looked up and there it was, on the little rising piece of land, waiting for me. Through the mist that lay between us it seemed that the house was built of the most fragile web of breath and I had blown-it-and that with my breath I could blow it all away. (The House of Breath)

I thought I was going to die in the war. I was on a terrible ship. It was the Casablanca, the first baby flattop. There were always holes in it, and people dying and it was just the worst place for me to be. I really was desperate. I just wanted to jump off . I thought I was going to die anyway, be killed, and I wanted to die because I couldn’t endure what looked like an endless way of life with which I had nothing to do—the war, the ship, and the water. . . . I have been terrified of water all my life. I would have fits when I got close to it. Suddenly—it was out on a deck in the cold—I saw the breath that came from me. And I thought that the simplest thing that I know is what I belong to and where I came from and I just called out to my family as I stood there that night, and it just . . . I saw this breath come from me and I thought—in that breath, in that call, is their existence, is their reality . . . and I must shape that and I must write about them—The House of Breath. (The Paris Review interview 1976)