Oliver has compiled a very good selection of essays about favorite writers (Poe, Whitman, Wordsworth), favorite places (Provincetown), nature (owls, the pine woods of the Cape), and aging.  My favorites were the literary ones, especially those about Whitman whom Oliver, like so many modern critics, credit with being the major force for change in American poetry.  Leaves of Grass and Song of Myself, read in a graphic poetry book two years ago, come in for special praise, and I totally agree.  Oliver also gave me a precious addition to my annual question of “Why read?” when she stated “The second world—-the world of literature—offered me, besides the pleasure of form, the sustentation of empathy…..I stood willingly and gladly in the characters  of everything—other people, trees, clouds.  And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty, and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”  Sustentation of empathy—what a glorious phrase!  In another essay she talks about beauty:  “Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives and at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine.  Nothings outside ourselves makes us desire to do so; the questions, and the striving toward answers, come from within.”  Finally, “Man finds he has two halves to his existence—leisure and occupation—and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world.  In leisure he remembers radiance; is labor he looks for results.”  No better description of the beauty of retirement!