Then Why Do You Want To Know?"

There Is A Constant In The Average American Imagination And Taste, For Which The Past Must Be Preserved And Celebrated In Full-scale Authentic Copy; A Philosophy Of Immortality As Duplication. It Dominates The Relation With The Self, With The Past, Not Infrequently With The Present, Always With History And, Even, With The European Tradition.

I Should Be At Peace. I Have Understood. Don't Some Say That Peace Comes When You Understand? I Have Understood. I Should Be At Peace. Who Said That Peace Derives From The Contemplation Of Order, Order Understood, Enjoyed, Realized Without Residuum, In Joy And Truimph, The End Of Effort? All Is Clear, Limpid; The Eye Rests On The Whole And On The Parts And Sees How The Parts Have Conspired To Make The Whole; It Perceives The Center Where The Lymph Flows, The Breath, The Root Of The Whys.

The Postmodern Reply To The Modern Consists Of Recognizing That The Past, Since It Cannot Really Be Destroyed, Because Its Destruction Leads To Silence, Must Be Revisited: But With Irony, Not Innocently. I Think Of The Postmodern Attitude As That Of A Man Who Loves A Very Cultivated Woman And Knows He Cannot Say To Her, I Love You Madly, Because He Knows That She Knows (and That She Knows That He Knows) That These Words Have Already Been Written By Barbara Cartland. Still, There Is A Solution. He Can Say, As Barbara Cartland Would Put It, I Love You Madly.

To Establish What Is True Is Very Difficult. Frequently It Is Easier To Establish What Is False. And, Passing Through The False, It's Possible To Understand Something About Truth.

I Love The Secrecy Of Writing Fiction. When I Write A Novel, I Don't Tell Anybody What I'm Doing. I'm Living In My Private World. And It's A Great Sensation.