Scenes from Life

Scenes from Life is a collection of stories and vignette set in a variety of countries. They describe encounters with people and with the often strange worlds they —and we— inhabit. Some of those brushes are the stuff of adventure.Two involve the authors close encounters with death. There are tales of human kindness, but also of cruelty. One is a narrative told to the author by a survivor of the Holocaust. All accounts in the collection are true in that they are taken from life and are a record of memory and occasional field notes. As many truths exist as there are people to express them. They are ways of being in and seeing the world. Had someone else encountered the experiences and the characters that appear in this book, they would have written them differently, or perhaps not written them at all and either consigned them to capricious anecdote or to oblivion. So the sense in which these tales are true is necessarily the authors. They are offered to you, the reader in the hope that you will find in them some meaning of your own. As Thoreau observed: "Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts." We are alien first to ourselves.