“For almost a month I did practically nothing but labor from sunup to sundown, just to maintain the road in the state it had been in when I'd taken over, and the more I worked, the more I saw that the maintenance of this road was the maintenance of my own life, which now, when I looked back on it, seemed to have happened to someone else. My life to this point seemed like a novel, a book written by a stranger even though I alone had the key to it, I alone was a witness to it, even though my life too was constantly being overgrown by grass and weeds at either end. But as I used a grub hoe and a shovel on the road, I used memory to keep the road of my life open into the past, so I could take my thoughts backward to where I wanted to begin remembering.”