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Walt Whitman’s poems Leaves of Grass left me with an unfinished, fragmented feeling. I ached for his inability to stay focused on any one thing for any period of time. Siri Hustvedt, on the other hand, wrote a more complete set of thoughts and feelings in her book The Sorrows of an American.  On page 276 she writes “We want a coherent world, not one in bits and pieces.” I wholly agree with this comment but even she wrote with some amount of bits and pieces when developing the characters and their story lines in this piece. Perhaps my inability to appreciate fully either the writing style of Whitman or that of Hustvedt is because of where I personally fall on the 'timeline of life.' My beginning and middle have already been experienced and recorded in the anals of my life. Hopefully I will live another 30 or 40 years or more,but no matter how you look at it, I'm in the last third of my life therefore I am in the process of understanding, experiencing and writing my end.