If I'm remembered for having done a few good things and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty.

But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don't have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps unsanitized-and therefore supposedly more "authentic"-perspective ofthe Third World. Very simply, this is because that "other" world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I came

In America, it is difficult to be your own man.

I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.

As a man, I've been representative of the values I hold dear. And the values I hold dear are carryovers from the lives of my parents.

I have a kind of respect - a worshipful attitude, even - for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons.

If I'm remembered for having done a few good things and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty.