When we were kids, the attendant at the man-made river in the amusement park put us in bright blue inner-tubes and sent us down a waterfall and down we would go, spinning, bounding, eyes open, mouth open. But that wasn't the best part. The best part was when you'd hit the bottom of the waterfall, and you would look and see that there was a bend in the river. A bend in the man-made river. What lay around that bend? What promise? What sense of progress?

A bend in the river -- always something that purports to give us something more. Not only our own rivers, but the older rivers, the Yangtze, the Congo, the Thames, all leading people somewhere new, somewhere different. Perhaps somewhere better. America is a bend in the river. A place arrived at by water that was supposed to give us equality, freedom, things that were part of a better life. We as a species are supposed to move around a bend in the river.

So why is it about a year ago, I stood on a yellow bridge that spanned that Kagera River between Tanzania and Rwanda, and looked down at the waterfall, not man-made, and saw bodies rise above the waterfall? This was no amusement park. The victims of the Hutu murderers, Tutsies and some Hutus who had sympathized with the Tutsies, their bodies rising over the waterfall and coming down. When they hit the bottom, some of the bodies would get stuck in pools, and some would get stuck on rocks, and others might make it around a bend in the river. If they made it around the bend in the river, they would head toward Lake Victoria. You remember Lake Victoria -- one of the spots where civilization was said to begin? You remember civilization?

I don't know why I should have been surprised to see all that death. We recollect from Biology One that we are a slow-evolving species, that it will be eons upon eons before we learn to get along in groups. The debate about the nature of man was always between reason and passion, between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century said that men were to be reasonable. The nineteenth century said that men were to reach for the stars, that people could, in fact, touch God. Three cheers for reason, three cheers for passion.

But what I began to think about in Rwanda is that all this reason versus passion business was bunk. A game. The nature of man lies under the river. Under the Kagera River or all rivers, sort of like an eel. An eel so long that it traverses the entire river. So long it does not have to move to be wherever it wishes to be. It is in all places. Norman Maclean said: "All things merge into one, and a river runs through it." I don't know much about rivers, but I had a sense of the eel. I had a sense of the monster.

So the question is, in my case and in the case of many of you here: Why write? Why tell stories? The reason I tell stories is to stay on top of the river, to stay afloat and to tell others to stay afloat, to reach for them, to keep us all afloat. Because, for the monsters, there will be once in a while, a spark, a gleam, some light under the dark water. That will be a story, too, and we will tell that story.

Ray Bradbury wrote a story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," about nuclear annihilation. The title of the story comes from a poem by Sara Teasdale on the same subject. If one actually believes that all are going to be annihilated, why write?

Because we have to. Because the thing is in us. It's like a biological fact. We are the stories ourselves, telling one another to one another about one another.

There are good, sound reasons for writing. We learn what we think when we write. It's an odd process, a mysterious process. The sheer play of language, the sheer sound of language: "there will come soft rains."

The hilarity of language. God, I miss George Bush. Bush once said that he admired Vaclav Havel "for living or dying -- whatever -- for freedom." On the 1988 elections, he predicted "the undecideds could go one way or the other."

We also write to undertake a journey, to create an adventure from the past into the future. We move around the bend in the river. Anticipation is all. The vehicle of that journey is the sentence. The single sentence.

Interesting word, "sentence." There is a finality to it. One is sentenced to death. One is sentenced to watch the O.J. trial. Sometimes one is sentenced to life, which is a nice contradiction in terms.

But for a writer a sentence doesn't achieve finality until the end, and up to that point the sentence is a bend in the river. You begin to write the sentence. You do not know where it will end. Where it will lead. The amazement of this process is that the reader, when he or she reads that sentence, cannot know where it ends either.

And when the sentence comes to a dot, it is strangely both conclusive and unsatisfying. You don't want it to end. At one's best, one writes to find God in the sentence. But God is always in the next sentence. How like her.

The main reason for writing is to call out to others, to make contact with others, to break the silence, which is our most monstrous threat. The force under the river is silent. u

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