The intellectual, I deplore--scholar, economist, sociologist, big literary man. The sorry lot have spent half the twentieth century admiring the engines of their minds and not bothering to feed knowledge into them or raw materials; now, with the gauges falling, they have nothing to say excepting only to repeat their proud, intellectual admission of obsolescence. The critic, I deplore; he sits upon his flagpole with his radio, his sandwiches and his displayed latrine, handing down opinions of what is happening under the earth, from which he sees an occasional man emerge whom he invariably deduces to be a Troglodyte or a Morlock. The philosopher of modern times is my favorite joke; he stands at the head of the Faculty--without faculties of his own; he sums up the wisdom of the mind without appreciating he no longer understands what his own mind is. Were he even as honest as the psychiatrist he disdains, he would get his psyche analyzed before he undertook to forward the discussion of awareness. But what philosopher ever consented to an effort at learning something of himself before pontificating upon the All of everybody else? That still, small science of psychology, which he elbows behind his panoply of classic names, has turned him into a quack--an astrologer among astronomers and the barker for a medicine show at a convention of true physicians. The preacher--dressed in the anonymous odds and ends of all the instincts of the animal kingdom and holding this shoddy surplice to be a white and spotless raiment--the one, true robe for Ascension--is my jester, for being mad and comical and also for speaking so much wisdom and for his good heart, when he has one. This is what I believe about them-- and they are what I am: Intellectual, critic, philosopher, and preacher. Hoist by my own plutonium petard. For all my data have, still, an inadequate access to my heart. It laughs and weeps too often without consulting the encyclopedia in my head or the new Book of Rules I have commenced there. I saw Excalibur and could not wrench it from the sea, Touched the Grail--and could not swallow, Wandered the far mountains, came upon a new Decalogue, and could not lift the tablets to bring them down. Prophet, maybe. Pilgrim, perhaps. But only in the intellectual, critical, philosophical, evangelical senses.... Happy? The ego was often happy--his big ego. At Peace? He had tranquillity where other men did not and joy where they were only confused; but, in their simple pleasures, it was he who felt confusion, he who too frequently was but a spectator, he who failed with his blood to pursue the truth his brain so lucidly, so uselessly delineated.