Individuality Is Freedom Lived.

The People Of The United States Have Been Fortunate In Many Things. One Of The Things In Which We Have Been Most Fortunate Has Been That So Far, Due Perhaps To Certain Basic Virtues In Our Traditional Ways Of Doing Things, We Have Managed To Keep The Crisis Of Western Civilization, Which Has Devastated The Rest Of The World And In Which We Are As Much Involved As Anybody, More Or Less At Arm's Length.

Men Who Have Lost Their Conviction Of What Is Good And What Is Bad Find Themselves Without A Sextant To Check Their Position By. We Are In The Position Of A Man With An Elaborate Camping Kit Who Finds Himself Lost In The Woods Without His Matches; To Kindle A Fire He Has To Resort To The Stratagems Of The Caveman. We Fall Back Through Generations Into The Oldest Terrors And Confusions Of The Race.

The Man Who Invented Eskimo Pie Made A Million Dollars, So One Is Told, But E.e. Cummings, Whose Verse Has Been Appearing Off Andon For Three Years Now, And Whose Experiments Should Not Be More Appalling To Those Interested In Poetry Than The Experiment Of Surrounding Ice-cream With A Layer Of Chocolate Was To Those Interested In Soda Fountains, Has Hardly Made A Dent In The Doughy Minds Of Our So-called Poetry Lovers.

Remember That It's Never A Crime In The Face Of Humanity And Enlightenment To Distribute The Works Of The Great Humanists Among The Merchants And Moneychangers Of This Godforsaken Country... You Better Slip Me The Dough.

There Is A Part Of Me In Every Character, Naturally. That's Why Novelists Rarely Write Good Autobiographies. You Start One And It Becomes Another Novel.