As A Teacher At Princeton, I'm Surrounded

The Great Menace To The Life Of An Industry Is Industrial Self-complacency.

As A Child. I Grew Up On A Small Farm, So I Did A Lot Of Drawings Of Animals, Chickens And People. At The Bottom Of Every Page, I'd Put A Strange Scribble. I Was Emulating Adult Handwriting, Though I Didn't Actually Know How To Write.

The Television Screen, So Unlike The Movie Screen, Sharply Reduced Human Beings, Revealed Them As Small, Trivial, Flat, In Two Banal Dimensions, Drained Of Color. Wasn't There Something Reassuring About It! -- That Human Beings Were In Fact Merely Images Of A Kind Registered In One Another's Eyes And Brains, Phenomena Composed Of Microscopic Flickering Dots Like Atoms. They Were Atoms -- Nothing More. A Quick Switch Of The Dial And They Disappeared And Who Could Lament The Loss?

I Come From People Who Did Not Go To College. They Didn't Even Finish High School. People Who One Might Call Ordinary Americans Who Are Very Hardworking.

I Read Books. Avidly, Ardently! As If My Life Depended Upon It.