"And this was Dow Day here in Madison, a protest against Dow Chemical, whose recruiters were
active on campus and whose products included a new and improved from of napalm with a
polystyrene additive that made jellied matter cling more firmly to human flesh. "
I had in mind to do something big, and I did. To tell the truth, you have to do something good good or bad bad to remembered at all. I climbed as high as they told me and I did everything they told me, but soon enough we all realized that wasn't enough.
I don't mean bombs and missiles
alone but more or less everything
microwaves, electrical insulation etc.
He said it so completely I was astonished:
"Well-behaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings
seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life;
and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation
in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty,
its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work."