The Gift of Lack

About the Book

This need is our gift, this lack is our gain. It's the light on our path. For we lack what we have, as a seed lacks a tree. It isn't just the problem that's born into us. The resolution is too. The urge is the urge to come into our own, our own as this uniquely-endowed life form on this uniquely endowed pellet of cosmic dust. We can move out of these rented lodgings as more and other than when we moved in. We've been invited to transcendence. And what other short convention of cells, what other brief candle of sentience, has received such an invitation? . . . We're not obliged to accept it. We're free to say no, another great privilege extended to us . . . how those of us who refuse our invitation to humanity are actually dealt with by the universal economy I certainly don't know. Wiped out, chastised, recycled? I haven't the slightest notion. Or curiosity. Such information is beside the point, my point, our point, irrelevant to my need to be what the facts of my life beckon me to be. To be—to the best of my inability — a human being.

About the Author

Robert Granat is the author of two novels, The Important Thing and Regenesis, and numerous short stories and other writings, a selection of which are collected for the first time in this book. A long-time resident of northern New Mexico, he and his wife Carolyn now live in Santa Fe.