ABSTRACT
I write to find my way. My signposts are words – those of my patients and my friends, and those of writers whose extraordinary talents teach us how words work and about their capacity to hold and communicate meaning and to make us feel less alone. My method is defended by Walter Benjamin:
Learning was a form of collecting, as in the quotations and excerpts from daily reading which Benjamin accumulated in notebooks that he carried everywhere and from which he would read aloud to his friends. Thinking was also a form of collecting, at least in its preliminary stages. He conscientiously logged stray ideas; developed mini-ideas in letters to friends. 2
