Just Go On Dancing With Me Like

I Think We Rarely Recognize The Fifth Business In Our Lives At The Time Those People Are Changing Us.

What If There Were No Grownups? Suppose The Whole Idea Of Grownups Was An Illusion? What If Their Money Was Really Just Playground Marbles, Their Business Deals No More Than Baseball-card Trades, Their Wars Only Games Of Guns In The Park? What If They Were All Still Snotty-nosed Kids Inside Their Suits And Dresses? Christ, That Couldn't Be, Could It? It Was Too Horrible To Think About.

For A Moment Everything Was Clear, And When That Happens You See That The World Is Barely There At All. Don't We All Secretly Know This? It's A Perfectly Balanced Mechanism Of Shouts And Echoes Pretending To Be Wheels And Cogs, A Dreamclock Chiming Beneath A Mystery-glass We Call Life. Behind It? Below It And Around It? Chaos, Storms. Men With Hammers, Men With Knives, Men With Guns. Women Who Twist What They Cannot Dominate And Belittle What They Cannot Understand. A Universe Of Horror And Loss Surrounding A Single Lighted Stage Where Mortals Dance In Defiance Of The Dark.

An Idea Is Like A Cold Germ: Sooner Or Later Someone Always Catches It.

The Good Folks Mostly Win, Courage Usually Triumphs Over Fear, The Family Dog Hardly Ever Contracts Rabies: These Are Things I Knew At Twenty-five, And Things I Still Know Now, At The Age Of 25 X 2. But I Know Something Else As Well: There's A Place In Most Of Us Where The Rain Is Pretty Much Constant, The Shadows Are Always Long, And The Woods Are Full Of Monsters. It Is Good To Have A Voice In Which The Terrors Of Such A Place Can Be Articulated And Its Geography Partially Described, Without Denying The Sunshine And Clarity That Fill So Much Of Our Ordinary Lives. (viii)