MOST WRITERS my age have to come to grips with one persistent problem: they have to find something to write about that interests them enough to make the investigation worth it. This priority is usually experienced by writers with a long trail of books behind them, as I have.
The book I was working on at this time was a strange half-autobiographical piece called Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen . It was at the local Dairy Queen, a few blocks below the mansion I had just acquired, that I first began to read Walter Benjamin, particularly his thoughts about storytelling, actually a study of Nikolai Leskov, but more general than that sounds. The small-town Texas Dairy Queens at that time functioned, as I explained, much like community centers, and were exactly the kind of places that storytellers—unconscious that that is what they were—would gossip and joke and pass on what local lore might have survived from earlier times. (Very little has.)
Walter Benjamin argues that storytelling is a vanishing practice; vast changes in world culture have to a degree made it obsolete.
At the time I had done an imperfect job of digesting Walter Benjamin—I laid the project aside, and aside it waited for some twenty years. It hovered there, for two decades, never moving entirely out of sight. By the time it was finally finished I had had a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in Baltimore. I became a different person, but one of the few things I kept with me from what had come to seem like a former life was Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen , the storytelling and the stories that I personally might have to tell.