ONE SUNDAY MORNING, I climbed up to the light from a weighty and complicated dream, nothing of it left but a ringing in my ears and the ache of something slipped from my grasp and fallen into a crevasse where I would not see it again. Yet somehow--in the midst of this profound sinking, snapped threads, fragments lost and untrackable--a sentence stood out, ticking across the darkness like a news crawler at the bottom of a TV screen: