I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing, patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast--you will be there, and you should also carry a pail of tears. Phil Wylie Some give money some give work but if you give the person brother, you're a jerk. It didn't do me any good ... for ... If you try to tell the truth there's only you telling it. 2 It was a hell of a morning. 3 From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial. You wouldn't be interested. We'll go on, anyway. What the hell else can a man do? 4 Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous. The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway. It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning--the creation of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id, meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All these, and countless other "punishments"--which change with changing social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and differ from one home to another and one culture to another--set up such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate indignities. Add to this the regimentations of school--the musts and must nots of classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in the passing years, fold in the Law--cop, truant officer, and prison bars--sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed, or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations), and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the adolescent, the adult. Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence. Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze--at the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped. Detach him, that is to say, from Nature--deprive him of its experiences and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never know a spring's taste.