July 8, 2001 We Are All Tourists One afternoon, when I had been
reading Elizabeth Bishop for several hours, I wrote two words
down on a piece of paper: ''birthright'' and ''sightlines.''
What was her birthright? Well, she was born in Worcester, Mass.;
her father died when she was 8 months old, and when she was 5,
her mother entered a mental institution. She was reared by two
sets of grandparents: the first, more loving ones were in Nova
Scotia; the second, both wealthier and chillier, took her back
to Massachusetts.  Bishop described her birthright at its
bleakest in the autobiographical story ''The Country Mouse,''
where, days before her seventh birthday, she stares at three
grown strangers in panic and thinks: '' 'You are you and you are
going to be you forever.' It was like coasting downhill, this
thought, only much much worse, and it quickly smashed into a
tree. Why was I a human being?''  What about her sightlines,
then, the spaces she lived in as a writer and what she could see
there: Were things clear