lI — Il

Six years, 2,000 hours listening to expensive middle-aged know-it-alls, some measure of yellowed faux-parchment just as pricey, about 100 square feet of books stacked to the ceiling, and me, hot on the trail of an idea shifting through the dark alleys of the unwritten white of the page; five long years of shuffling things in and out of the articulation register with dexterity enough to knock out anyone short of a hot-headed jaw-wagger like me; countless nights of eyelids jammed open by black java leaving their charge to dessicate before acrid fumes of burning insecticides, and I find it about four fifths of the way through a second-rate crowd-pleaser with a catchy title and the recommendation of bohunks and church-mothers alike, a book I swore I'd die before I read, and in the time it takes me to come up for air, in the hotel bar of a two-and-a-half star Holiday Inn in Skokie, Illinois, I've unlocked the Secret of the Universe, and it's one . . . bloody . . . word, refusing to admit an admission that this word carries an assumption with it that divides the subject from the object, in quiet rebellion against those forces which take Man from his element, stopping him asking "how?" and "why?" and only "how high?" putting the old knows-it-all in their place as needing separate that which is here unified in order to suggest some semblance of meaning in the practise of making a living speaking live to a captive audience and sending them home with a purported appraisal of their quickness of mind.

One word. All of man's hopes, dreams, fears, loves, aims; the single, unyielding, flagrant idea of the good and the haggard and sinewy spectre of the perverse; the course of history and its destination are in this word, and once you hear it as the answer to "what comes before all things?" there is quite simply no turning back, no further questions to answer, and you may as well develop an interest in Dan Brown, or Robert Ludlum, or somebody, because you'll simultaneously want to revisit all of the philosophers of the east and the west very much and not at all, and if you're not careful, you'll end up in the middle of the desert dead, crazy, or both.