Whatever the tests that broke me and in time strengthened and led me to an even more secure sense of my own integrity, they were not pursued out of a need for the affirmation of others. Rather, those confrontations were dictated by one abiding hunger in me: the need to know. And someone else’s knowledge, I found, was never my own, for the crucible is the experience. There is no knowledge of the flame, even if you lie with the mutilated who has arisen from the flame, unless you pluck up your courage and give yourself to the flame also. If you do reach that point at the edge of the blaze, you can never know beforehand if you will emerge or be destroyed. But to hold back in fear of that possible consummation is the greater destruction—for you continue to live, unscarred, but you know to the depths of your being that the knowledge you draw from and bring forth is someone else’s knowledge, and that in truth you still do not know.

    Those who wish to pilot the great machines of society and country and socialism and capitalism, fueled by those man-made ethers of sacrifice and sin and duty and so on, conceive of their vehicles with one vast all-encompassing seat back there in the passenger section, for “The People.” And they dream and preen and preach and plot and even kill for The Good of The People. But this elaborate contrivance of theirs is but falsehood based on myth which is manufactured and fed back into the atmosphere to feed the lie that is the wheels and wings of their wondrous conveyance—an extravagant monstrosity which merely provides the fellas up front with seats of their own. And try as you might to define this “people” they speak of and you invariably discover only countless individual creatures who identify themselves by their own hungers and fears and wisdoms and evasions, with perhaps their own driver’s licenses to someday pilot their own such vehicles, insignificant on a single retread or colossal too with a thousand beating wings.

     There is no ascension unless you have persisted in the mud and clinging clay to finally fashion the wing that is fine enough to carry you aloft. Is it not easier to cry for the lepers of the world, even to spend the time of your life trying to lessen their pain, if you do so from that unvoiced part of you that would dabble in someone else’s travail rather than confront some basic lacking in yourself and deal with that impoverishment until you have found its source and gained enough wisdom and courage in that quest to turn that deficiency into a wealth? If the ripple of that discovery in the solitary pond of your own soul ever does reach the leper you yearn toward, then that spark of enlightenment will do far more than all your conspicuous ministrations, but the effect will probably never be perceived and you will pass on, not knowing that in some cosmic way your being has made a difference.

    The power is not in The People. The power is in each bare integer, each fraction of the whole—so that the drunkard who dies in his vomit on 42nd Street, and the senator who dies in his blood on the hotel kitchen floor, and the Viet Cong who dies blown to pieces in a Delta rice-paddy, are no lesser for their deaths than you or I or the Collected Media of the World’s designated Human-of-the-Century. And who’s to say that that well-applauded person ever would have come to the realizations that allowed him (or her) to visibly touch the world’s collected media unless he had witnessed Danny, his high school chum, dying with gritted teeth in a fleshless face that had been the darling of all who knew him of cancer at 17, or happened on the photograph in the Washington Post or the Bombay Journal of a fat man in Tuscaloosa blowing life back into some little black kid pulled from a segregated swimming pool in Alabama. Maybe it’s Danny and the little black kid who deserve the medal, for having made the statesman.

    If you are concerned with humankind, you must rightly perceive the object of your concern elementally. The properties of silver have never been altered, for any changes derive some alloy that is no longer silver. The antelope responds today precisely as his grandfather did a thousand years ago, the eagle reacts as her great-grandmother did when her young are threatened, and man clothed in bison hide or a business suit tastes the same bitter wash of fear when he’s frightened, knows the same acid-taste of covetousness when he sees someone with something that he feels he must have, be it fire or real estate. There is no revolution in species or ideas, there is only evolution. Man has always acted as he does now, and as long as he survives, he always will act as he does—as Man. If Man evolves into a wiser kinder creature, it will be another species at the top of the tree. It will not be the animal man, it will be the animal that grew from man.