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hippopotamus sweats? If offered a cherry or a strawberry, which do you take?
    If you had enough money to live on, could you see retiring to a small village in France and never being heard of or from again, and not speaking French when there, mostly because you can’t, but also because you have nothing to say and you’d have no one to say it to if you had something to say, and mostly just sleeping in your quaint medieval stone cottage? Could youmake do with a little exercise once in a while and a piece of Beaufort of very high quality? And maybe a look-in on the pigs? What if the cartoonist R. Crumb were your neighbor? Would you sleep better, or worse, or the same knowing R. Crumb was your neighbor in the next quaint stone medieval cottage in the south of France? Would life go on, or would you have to move to another village, or would you have to abandon the idea of retiring to France altogether realizing R. Crumb had done it and that he was the tip of an iceberg going back through hundreds of persecuted sensitive American martyrs, from the Josephine Bakers and James Baldwins and Paul Robesons to the precious Fitzgeralds all the way up even to profane California cartoonists—wouldn’t you just be so yanked out of the frame that you’d feel it would be better to move not to gentle France but to, say, Burma where like Jeffrey Dahmer in prison you could be killed almost instantly when you set foot there? Wouldn’t it be better to have a Muslim in Burma put a cobra in your suitcase on day two than go through the long pleasant sunset desuetude of retiring silently in France? Would it, in fact, not be better were you to assassinate ten or so pleasant silent American retirees on your way out ofsunny France en route to your rude and immediate fatal neurologic toxic death in Burma? Would there not be cause for wild cheer among a certain kind of depression-suffering person who reads the headline “Suspected Slayer of Cartoonist R. Crumb Victim of Cobra in Burma”? Would it be the worst thing said of you that your last act was expended on behalf of the depressed? Do you want something said of you, or nothing said of you, when you go?
    Do you recall that the milk in bottles delivered unto the stoop that we miss so badly sometimes turned to a clabber so heavy and yellow and thick that it could not be forcefully shaken from the bottles? Was your looking into this clabber—as rococo as bread pudding, as weird as a preserved calf—not unlike looking into your own crystal ball?
    Do you like bright steel with a sheen of oil on it? Do you have any of those old pot holders made of colorful woven cotton loops? Have you ever contributed to a children’s hospital or to an orphanage? Do you prefer a claw or a rip hammer, and do you know your weight, or are you hammer dumb—that is, is one hammer the same as another? Can you form in your mind the image of the slenderest person you have ever seen? Ifyou were offered for free a rustic, comfortable house on stilts in a vast swamp, would you move in happily, or with reservations, or not at all? If I say to you that in my view all people fall into two camps, those fundamentally afraid of things and those fundamentally not afraid of things, would you think me radically overstating or oversimplifying? What is the largest number of people with whom you will do something as a group? Are you much of a cook? Are you partial to goat’s milk? If you could be in a civil war, would you prefer to be there as a native partisan or as a foreigner not targeted by either side and free to witness the mayhem?
    Those stamps I have asked you about before, surely—were they not called “trading stamps,” and was “green stamps” not just a local more or less trivial name because S&H stamps happened to be green? Did you have that kind too? Did they accumulate in drawers? Do you have any idea what S&H referred to? Do you want to be buried beside your parents? Do you use perfumed boutique candles or utilitarian