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THE SHORT, HAPPY HISTORY OF A WRITING LIFE :

Reading is a defense against the palling claws of the nightmare days. The cynical, nihilistic, dumb and dumber all have their secret but transparent codes. Let them go. Be utterly aware of them because they will try and pull you from the fount as soon as they see you get near it.

The seed of a great American myth: "Make it new but know all that has gone before." And the two sides must be joined together. If it is only one thing or the other then it results in lies and fanaticism.

The shadows of even those we think we know can throw us into a deep shadow ourselves.

The writer tries to protect two distincitve areas: language and imagination. He can't say everything there is to say about them; he knows when they are strong and when they are weak. Anything that overpowers the individual weakens the ability of both language and/or imagination to tell the truth, to be courageous, to have vision, to root-down into the supple Earth.

We don't have tyranny, yet, here in the West.

Writing is an act of individuality. It is a mark of a particular individual. Most people are exposed early on to a mass culture that teaches very powerful techniques and so on. It reinforces some popular wisdom. And it does so at the moment the educational system is at its weakest. It's much more likely a culture of this type will produce a huge, grey slagheap and frightened children who are commanded by smart guys then that you will produce a culture of individual people who love the culture, it's history, yet maintain a very critical view of power. And who continually grow and develop and support their sensibility as free liberal democratic citizens.

Power, itself, is an enemy of language and imagination.

The writer has to be courageous enough to build outside the walls of power.

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A TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is it that desires to dance around the terrible facts of the world?

Life immense and free. Yet, demanding to be reduced down to a fragment..

Alone with champagne the waitress has flaccidly spoken of her contempt of strangers. The almond eyed, in all the grace of her age, lays quiet in the voiceless ground.

Once upon a time in a time that should perhaps be buried under stones of impunity, two people came together to mate and when the mating had been done they moved away from each other like strange ships in the harbor.

Simplicity! How they misconstrue your deliberate symbol! You rise out of the worlds fat and sour resistance. Simplicity says, move the many to the few. Simplicity says that when a structure believes it is eternal it is about to collapse. Simplicity says that all things begin and end in dream; gird, then, for the meanwhile between.

When the year 1984 rolled around he decided to take up the novel by Orwell and read it cover to cover as he had done 20 years before. He had felt the oppressive sense of silence in the soul that happens when television or modern contraptions begin to dominate consciousness.