PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!

Willie was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life?. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake.

Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that's how you build a future.

There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.

Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.

Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit