To Hell With Being Ashamed

Every Serious Novel Is, Beyond Its Immediate Thematic Preoccupations, A Discussion Of The Craft, A Conquest Of The Form, A Conflict With Its Difficulties And A Pursuit Of Its Felicities And Beauty.

I Suddenly Recall The Arpeggios Of Laughter Lilting Across The Tender, Springtime Grass-gay-welling, Far-floating, Fluent, Spontaneous, A Bell-like Feminine Fluting, Then Suppressed; As Though Snuffed Swiftly And Irrevocably Beneath The Quiet Solemnity Of The Vespered Air Now Vibrant With Somber Chapel Bells.

I Am Invisible, Understand, Simply Because People Refuse To See Me. Like The Bodiless Heads You See Sometimes In Circus Sideshows, It Is As Though I Have Been Surrounded By Mirrors Of Hard, Distorting Glass. When They Approach Me They See Only My Surroundings, Themselves Or Figments Of Their Imagination, Indeed, Everything And Anything Except Me.

For, Like Almost Everyone Else In Our Country, I Started Out With My Share Of Optimism. I Believed In Hard Work And Progress And Action, But Now, After First Being 'for' Society And Then 'against' It, I Assign Myself No Rank Or Any Limit, And Such An Attitude Is Very Much Against The Trend Of The Times. But My World Has Become One Of Infinite Possibilities. What A Phrase - Still It's A Good Phrase And A Good View Of Life, And A Man Shouldn't Accept Any Other; That Much I've Learned Underground. Until Some Gang Succeeds In Putting The World In A Strait Jacket, Its Definition Is Possibility.

I Denounce Because Though Implicated And Partially Responsible, I Have Been Hurt To The Point Of Abysmal Pain, Hurt To The Point Of Invisibility. And I Defend Because In Spite Of It All, I Find That I Love.