I'm So Used To Being Misunderstood.

One Day I Was Living Silently In A Personal Hell, Without Anyone To Tell What I Felt, Without Even Knowing That The Feelings I Had Were Possible To Have; And Then One Day I Was Not Living Like That At All. I Had Begun To See The Past Like This: There Is A Line; You Can Draw It Yourself, Or Sometimes It Gets Drawn For You; Either Way, There It Is, Your Past, A Collection Of People You Used To Be And Things You Used To Do. Your Past Is The Person You No Longer Are, The Situations You Are No Longer In.

I Was Given A Dictionary When I Was Seven, And I Read It Because I Had Nothing Else To Read. I Read It The Way You Read A Book.

Had The Holocaust Happened In Tahiti Or The Congo, As It Has; Had It Happened In South America, As It Has; Had It Happened In The West Indies, As It Has - You Must Remember That Within Fifty Years Of Columbus's Arrival, Only The Bones Remained Of The People Called The Arawaks, With One Or Two Of Them In Spain As Specimens. Had The Holocaust Committed Under The Nazis Happened Somewhere Else, We Wouldn't Be Talking About It The Way We Talk About It.

Gardening Is Really An Extended Form Of Reading, Of History And Philosophy. The Garden Itself Has Become Like Writing A Book. I Walk Around And Walk Around. Apparently People Often See Me Standing There And They Wave To Me And I Don't See Them Because I Am Reading The Landscape.

But Some Natives--most Natives In The World--cannot Go Anywhere. They Are Too Poor. They Are Too Poor To Go Anywhere. They Are Too Poor To Escape The Reality Of Their Lives; And They Are Too Poor To Live Properly In The Place Where They Live, Which Is The Very Place You, The Tourist, Want To Go--so When The Natives See You, The Tourist, They Envy You, They Envy Your Ability To Leave Your Own Banality And Boredom, They Enjoy Your Ability To Turn Their Own Banality And Boredom Into A Source Of Pleasure For Yourself.