My mum had a huge chest freezer in the kitchen for over fifty-five years full of things she had cooked and frozen. A few years ago it finally broke and, when she defrosted it, I asked if she’d found a leg of dodo at the bottom! They don’t make appliances like they used to, that’s fo’ sure. She eats Jamaican food most days. Even when she comes to my house she brings her own food, not because I can’t cook but because she knows I like her cooking better.

What if you are so terrified of your own thoughts that you ripped the pages of your journal into tiny pieces? When the pieces still felt too big, did you rip them up even more, picking up each piece individually and tearing it in half with the tips of your fingers? When you threw the even tinier pieces into the garbage can in your room, could you still hear them talking to you? Did you have to fish the pieces out of the garbage can—every last one? (Did you make sure you got every last one?) Did you put the pieces into a sandwich bag? Did you dispose of that sandwich bag in a garbage can down the street so the words on the pieces could be drowned out by banana peels and half-drunk sodas? If you did that, does it mean that you are mad? If so, is there a name for that kind of madness? Is there a cure?

A few pages later Eiseley describes a dinner with W. H. Auden, an admirer of his work. The dinner goes badly. By his own admission, he has been feeling uncomfortable with the great poet, diminished somehow in his presence. Auden, aware of the stiffness between them, is chatting to set them at ease. He asks Eiseley, who is exactly his age, to name the earliest public event he remembers, and mentions, briefly, that in his case it was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Eiseley replies by falling into an extended reverie over a prison break (also in 1912) that took place near his home, letting his voice go self-consciously “poetic” as he speaks (“He blew the gates with nitroglycerin. I was five years old … already old enough to know one should flee from the universe but I did not know where to run … There was an armed posse and a death … We never made it”). The tale is long, self-dramatizing, and unmistakably competitive. Yet we are touched, not embarrassed, by it because we’ve already been given a taste of the rawness inside the man.

To a considerable degree, the entire book is an ever-deepening clarification of these two passages, each in its own way harrowing: the one a transparent denial of pain everlasting, the other of a longing akin to the pain that dare not be addressed openly. Chapter headings may read “The Rat That Danced,” or “Toads and Men,” or “The Coming of the Giant Wasps,” but we are engaged by the man who told us more than he meant to tell himself when he rapped out “Nothing, do you understand?” and then related the story of his dinner with Auden. What that man is grappling with is the experience this memoir is wanting to shape.

If you’ve got a list of twelve options, cross out seven, then rewrite your list with just the remaining five on it, and go to step three. Most of our students and clients freak out at this idea.

“You can’t just cross options off!”

“What if I cross out the wrong one?”

We understand. But we’re not kidding—you just cross them off. Remember, if you’ve got too many options, you really don’t have any, so you’ve got nothing to lose. And you won’t cross off the wrong one. We call this the Pizza-Chinese Effect. We’ve all experienced it. Ed sticks his head in your office and says, “Hey, Paula—we’re going out for lunch. Wanna come?”

“Sure!”

“We’re choosing between pizza and Chinese food—got a preference?”

“Nah—whatever’s good!”

“Okay—we’re getting pizza.”

“No, wait. I want Chinese!”

In that situation, when you gave your first answer (“whatever’s good”), you thought you meant it. You didn’t know that you had a preference until an unwanted decision occurred as a fait accompli.

We spent a lot of time in our manager meetings talking about how to make this more efficient. We ended up stealing a solution from baseball, where the catcher has to communicate with a pitcher sixty feet away: sign language.

After the host brought you to the table, the captain would hand you menus and ask about your water preference. Moments later, and without any visible communication—often before the captain had even left the table—your server would be at the table, pouring your preferred water choice.

It wasn’t magic; the captain had discreetly signaled your preference to one of their colleagues using a hand gesture (wiggled fingers for bubbles, a straight chop for still, and a twist of the fist for ice) behind their back. Another issue was that the room felt busy. It took a lot of people to execute hospitality at this level, but too many bodies moving swiftly around a room—even one as big as the dining room at EMP—can feel chaotic. In a bustling brasserie, servers zigzagging through the room lends an exciting energy; in a fine-dining setting, the commotion feels disruptive.

So we established traffic patterns for the staff like the ones on city streets, though they were imperceptible to our guests. Corners had invisible stop or yield signs. Most of the room was one-way only, and the traffic moved clockwise. In a two-way corridor, you hugged the wall to the right, as you would if you were driving.