In Order To Travel Far You Have

All Novels Are About Certain Minorities: The Individual Is A Minority. The Universal In The Novel-and Isn't That What We're All Clamoring For These Days?-is Reached Only Through The Depiction Of The Specific Man In A Specific Circumstance.

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.

The Blues Is An Impulse To Keep The Painful Details And Episodes Of A Brutal Experience Alive In One's Aching Consciousness, To Finger Its Jagged Grain, And To Transcend It, Not By The Consolation Of Philosophy But By Squeezing From It A Near-tragic, Near-comic Lyricism. As A Form, The Blues Is An Autobiographical Chronicle Of Personal Catastrophe Expressed Lyrically.

Life Is As The Sea, Art A Ship In Which Man Conquers Life's Crushing Formlessness, Reducing It To A Course, A Series Of Swells, Tides And Wind Currents Inscribed On A Chart.

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.