I Have Spent My Life Going From

I Like To Watch People. Sometimes I Ride The Subway All Day And Look At Them And Listen To Them. I Just Want To Figure Out Who They Are And What They Want And Where They're Going.

Shut The Door, They're Coming Through The Window, Shut The Window, They're Coming Through The Door," Are The Words To An Old Song. They Fit My Lifestyle With Newly Arriving Butcher/censors Every Month. Only Six Weeks Ago, I Discovered That, Over The Years, Some Cubby-hole Editors At Ballantine Books, Fearful Of Contaminating The Young, Had, Bit By Bit, Censored Some 75 Separate Sections From The Novel. Students, Reading The Novel Which, After All, Deals With Censorship And Book-burning In The Future, Write To Tell Me Of This Exquisite Irony.

You're Peculiar, You're Aggravating, Yet You're Easy To Forgive. You Say You're Seventeen?..how Odd. How Strange. And My Wife Thirty And Yet You Seem So Much Older At Times. I Can't Get Over It.

Sometimes I Think I Understand Everything. Then I Regain Consciousness

Everyone Must Leave Something Behind When He Dies, My Grandfather Said. A Child Or A Book Or A Painting Or A House Or A Wall Built Or A Pair Of Shoes Made. Or A Garden Planted. Something Your Hand Touched Some Way So Your Soul Has Somewhere To Go When You Die, And When People Look At That Tree Or That Flower You Planted, You're There.