My Life Was Incoherent To Me. I

I've Always Known A Lot Of Very Bad People, Destructive, Brutes Of A Certain Kind. Then I've Seen These Lovely Impulses And What Not, And They've Stayed With Me And Comforted Me.

Labels Not Only Free Us From The Obligation To Think Creatively; They Numb Our Sensibilities, Our Power To Feel. During The Vietnam War, The Phrase Body Count Entered Our Vocabulary. It Is An Ambiguous Phrase, Inorganic, Even Faintly Sporty. It Distanced Us From The Painful Reality Of Corpses, Of Dead, Mutilated People.

My Father Brought Me A Box Of Books Once When I Was About Three And A Half Or Four. I Remember The Carton They Were In And The Covers With Illustrations By Newell C. Wyeth.

There Was No Way To Grasp The Reality Of The Present Which Slid Away Each Second, Invisible As Air; Reality Only Existed After The Fact, In One's Vision Of The Past.

There's A Certain Amount Of Tyranny In All Of Us To Some Extent, And In Some People It's Much More Developed Than In Others. It's A Different Balance Which Makes Us All Different.