Quite Possibly There's Nothing As Fine As

I Am Religious By Nature, I'm Not A Nihilist. I Don't Follow, I Don't Even Know What The Tenets Of Things Like Deconstructionism Are, And All Those Schools That Come Up And Their Way Of Looking At Things That People Strive To Incorporate Into What They Write. I Don't Even Know What They Are. Because I Sense From A Distance That I Don't Want To Know. And Therefore Even If I Had No Politics, Actual Politics, My Cultural Point Of View Is Hopelessly Out Of Date With The Modern Literary Sensibility. Which Is Nihilistic, And Ironic, Detached, Cool, And Cowardly.

Then The Bow Orchestra Began To Play An Apocalyptically Beautiful Canon, One Of Those Pieces In Which, Surely, The Composer Simply Transcribed What Was Given, And Trembled In Awe Of The Hand That Was Guiding Him.

I Made A Boy's Mistake, Common Enough, Of Thinking That Real Life Was Knowing Many Things And Many People, Living Dangerously In Faraway Places, Crossing The Sea, Or Starting A Power Company On The Columbia River, A Steamship Line In Bolivia.

I Have Always Thought Limousines Make Me Dreadfully Uncomfortable, Just The Way That Suits Do. When I Wear A Suit, I Feel Like Ants And Termites Are Crawling All Over My Body. It's Really, Really Uncomfortable. People Put Themselves In A Kind Of Prison. It's Like The World Of The Embassies.

That's What The Left Is Always Doing. They Have An Ideal, And They Want People To Conform To It. When People Don't Conform To It, They End Up Being Beaten Into The Mold. And Beaten Sometimes Hard Enough So That If They Don't Fit, Then They Kill Them. That's What Happened In The Soviet Union And China.