…I think this is perhaps the essence of modernity: that there is an aspirin somewhere for every conceivable problem; that if you just look hard enough in your medicine cabinet, it really is there; that unhappiness has no value, that you have to get rid of it right away. People are embarrassed to be ill, embarrassed to be unhappy, embarrassed not to have the right solution immediately. And it’s part of the marketing process of solutions for minor things, and so we are educated, I think—particularly in this country, and perhaps others—as consumers rather than thinkers. We look for the single solution, not ambivalence and uncertainty and knowing that there are no packages available all tied up with the answer. But it seemed to me, as a writer, that the absence of the final answer or the only answer was what was exciting. That’s why life was original. That I was not a cabbage, totally predestined for the short life. Because things changed, I changed, and I didn’t know.

Everything I have ever written in my life has always been about my interest in what would happen if…. Suppose it’s not this way, suppose it doesn’t close the way you turn off a knob on a television set. The open quality, the porousness of life, and its enormous doubt. But the doubt was not depressing. The doubt was not, “Oh my God, what shall I do?” The doubt was the flexibility, the creativity, the possibilities, the fluidity of what was available to me as a writer and as a human being. And it is precisely that quality that, it seems to me, we ought to try to restore in some way as the living-ness and the livability of life: the fact that it is minus certain kinds of pat answers.