HERE I AM, 57 years old, 5'10" tall and 240 pounds, regrettably. A high school graduate, I have worked at many odd and boring jobs, traveled to exotic places, seen many people killed and maimed and so on. I've never understood what life is all about but I have never told anyone that I do. I've never been interested in intellectual work; it takes too long. My lack of faith in information would wring the heart of the most advanced computer. Experience and sensibility are easier for me. I have always taken the easy way, though to others it must appear to have been torturous and circumscribed. I discovered long ago that my character is made up in part of all the bigotries and prejudices that have been identified and catalogued by the best people in the worst. I never fell for the tyrant's tune, however, never fell in with the left -- or the right. I've been writing for 35 years, unsuccessfully. I don't seem to have minded, an example perhaps of ambition flawed beyond repair, an excessive enjoyment of process. I live with a wife, a mother, two children and two cats. As I write these lines a spider with a turquoise ass is stalking across the bookshelf behind the typewriter and I suppose that I have been living with him as well. Or her. Spiders look cruel to me, in an inhuman way, and that is why I see them as masculine. It's been my experience to never have seen women doing the killing or the rest of it. Always men. Women have their own failings. I began to write because I wanted to be conscious of what I was feeling. I still do. I agree that we choose our work out of our weaknesses, an inherent drive toward balance. Self-regarding from beginning to end, I have always wanted to hand myself over, the mind, the heart, the fly open to the breeze and the light. Not a program for others, but my own desire. I have no program for others. My program for myself is to reveal how I feel and what I think, a modest endeavor. In order to be able to do that I need to live among a people who sense the significance of the ideal of free expression. Free intellectual expression. The others can say it or they can keep it to themselves. My sense of things is that I should say it -- openly, clearly, accurately. With good will. None of us knows what the answer is, but that's no reason to suppress a free exchange of ideas. No reason to censor the press. It's no reason to despise those who express doubt about what others believe.