The Keeper on the Inexhaustible Preserves who will set infinite game before my arrow in the Happy Hunting. Chairman of the Greens Committee of the Elysian Fields. The Sublime Pander who will fit an houri to me on the hour, each hour, and I shall be the Paramour of Paradise. The Universal Usher who will take the stub of my ticket and lead me to my seat in the Reserved Section at the Right Hand. What asinine measurements of man are furnished by his Heavens! My own opinion of the Functions of the Ghoul is different, as I am gradually trying to imply here. And I am certain, furthermore, no one really believes, in his heart, that such heavens be. His mouth says it, his cortex confirms it, and his heart gives him the lie; so he has his Hell. For how could Nature come to as tawdry an end as Heaven? Even human nature? I told the Ghoul, after this sweating, to get behind me, like Satan, while I cut my serial. 4 This is the way of it. You take out an adjective here, an adverb there, a prepositional phrase yonder--and so gain a line. You make the first mark on a tally sheet. When you have four marks set parallel, you cross them with the fifth. When you have a row of twenty-eight marks, you have removed one page. When you have forty of these, you have completed the task--provided they are distributed through the installments in such a fashion that each part will be tailored to the desired length. It was a story of manners--a light thing, with a plot. I had enjoyed writing it. I did not enjoy the cutting. Every syllable scratched out is likely to take away some quality of a character upon which a subsequent event will turn. It is necessary to remember to the last detail what is removed and what remains. The elimination of a noun in the first installment may reduce the impact of a scene in the last. The contraction of a scenic description may ruin the comprehensibility of the hero's actions later on in the tale. And, when the most careful economy has been achieved, the goal of decimation may still be at a distance so that the writer is obliged to select this situation, that dialogue, yonder tender scene, and recast the whole in briefer compass, the while omitting no cogent phrase or fact, however trifling. It is a big puzzle and a hard job. It took me, I should think, another quarter of an hour to stow away my Ghoul completely, divert attention from the prick in my throat, and become immersed in the running words. My editors say I am a good professional. And that, my liberal-intellectual critics add, is all: a capable hack. O liberals. O cognoscenti. O critics. I give you my death-wish--and the atom bomb for its consummation. Why didn't you study it sooner? You copied into your literature whatever you saw on washroom walls--and little else--while brighter boys copied Bohr's equations from blackboards. Both were true. Both were real. One was old. The other new. And where are you tomorrow?