When I Discover Who I

Every Serious Novel Is, Beyond Its Immediate Thematic Preoccupations, A Discussion Of The Craft, A Conquest Of The Form, A Conflict With Its Difficulties And A Pursuit Of Its Felicities And Beauty.

Who Knows But That, On The Lower Frequencies, I Speak For You?

For, Like Almost Everyone Else In Our Country, I Started Out With My Share Of Optimism. I Believed In Hard Work And Progress And Action, But Now, After First Being 'for' Society And Then 'against' It, I Assign Myself No Rank Or Any Limit, And Such An Attitude Is Very Much Against The Trend Of The Times. But My World Has Become One Of Infinite Possibilities. What A Phrase - Still It's A Good Phrase And A Good View Of Life, And A Man Shouldn't Accept Any Other; That Much I've Learned Underground. Until Some Gang Succeeds In Putting The World In A Strait Jacket, Its Definition Is Possibility.

The Blues Is An Art Of Ambiguity, An Assertion Of The Irrepressibly Human Over All Circumstance Whether Created By Others Or By One's Own Human Failings. They Are The Only Consistent Art In The United States Which Constantly Remind Us Of Our Limitations While Encouraging Us To See How Far We Can Actually Go. When Understood In Their More Profound Implication, They Are A Corrective, An Attempt To Draw A Line Upon Man's Own Limitless Assertion.

It Goes A Long Way Back, Some Twenty Years. All My Life I Had Been Looking For Something, And Everywhere I Turned Someone Tried To Tell Me What It Was. I Accepted Their Answers Too, Though They Were Often In Contradiction And Even Self-contradictory. I Was Naive. I Was Looking For Myself And Asking Everyone Except Myself Questions Which I, And Only I, Could Answer. It Took Me A Long Time And Much Painful Boomeranging Of My Expectations To Achieve A Realization Everyone Else Appears To Have Been Born With: That I Am Nobody But Myself. But First I Had To Discover That I Am An Invisible Man!