Today there's a writer in Chechnya writing about the influence of, well...Chechnya on his body of work. And he's writing the same sort of things I’ve written, or better things. Good, l say. For if all these years of being an American have only readied me to realize my likeness, my kinship, my collegiality with someone I’ll never know, made me able to live literature's most precious wisdom―then being an American, and a writer no less, has served me very well indeed.