Terrible Sanity

"Terrible Sanity is wondrous sanity. Pickering''s essays are acetaminophen for hippish days. "Life doesn''t have a neat beginning and a tidy end," Roger, a character in V. S. Naipaul''s Half a Life, says. "Life is always going on." In this collection, Pickering depicts the joy and sadness of life''s going on. He observes that great knowledge often brings small pleasure while the small knowledge that all people experience brings great pleasure. A dental hygienist tells him that every day patients greet her on the street and in stores. "Their faces are always unfamiliar, and I never recognize them," she says, "but if they opened their mouths wide, I''d know them immediately." For the record she also volunteers that in twenty years of tooth-scrubbing, she had only been bitten once"--