But at the same time you can’t assume that making a difference 20 years ago is going to allow you to sort of live on the laurels of those victories for the rest of your life.
Going
All men have one entrance into life, and the like going out.
We are washed both on coming into the world and on going out of it, and we take no pleasure from the first washing nor any profit from the last.
There are books all around me… I don’t read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.
I do think that some of us began to realize that this was going to be a long struggle that was going to go on for decades, and you’d have to knuckle down. A lot of people in our generation did that. They didn’t drop out and run away.
We all know we’re going to die one day, but who wants to think about it? What’s sustainable is joy, pleasure and freedom.
I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn’t seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right – it does look like that.
And if we don’t have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?
It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.