This curiosity, this puzzlement about our own existence and the lives of other people, is not an idle thing. The cat may not die from curiosity but without it, the cat will likely perish. If we cannot concede that we are born into this world with a capacity for cruelty, we cannot act against it. We need not forgive what is vile in ourselves, but we must try to understand what is vile. I thought: I could have been the victim, and I could have been one of the mob. Once, years ago, I had a fleeting notion while I was reading a news story about a man pursued by a mob which intended to hang him. Thought and feeling and recognition are the fruits of effort, and some of them are bitter. And if we have not experienced the ultimate shame and anguish of captivity, of utter helplessness, we have experienced - at some time in our lives - something approximate to it, something from which we can construe a sense of what it is like to be other than ourselves. And if in one instance we do not persecute, in another we will. Once we accept the responsibility of our connection with others, we must accept that we are like them even in our differences and if in one instance, we are not a victim, we can be in another. We must make our way towards them as best we can, try to find what is similar, try to understand what is dis similar, try to particularize what is universal. Once set on that path of recognition, we cannot forswear our integral connections with other people. It is painful but if we are to be come human, we cannot abandon it.

This effort to recognize is an effort to connect ourselves with the reality of our own lives. It is an effort carried out against formidable enemies: habit inertia the fear of change and what it will entail the wish to preserve our idiot corners of safety, of being 'right' and self righteousness - the most dangerous enemy of all, full of a terrible energy that would turn us away from pondering the mystery of existence towards its own barren pleasures. In this sense, thought is the effort to recognize. By thought, I mean that preoccupation with what we feel and why we feel it, and the enormous effort we must make to educe from a tangle of impressions and fleeting images the nature of those feelings. All such victories are, I believe, transient. Because a major effort of writing is reflection, which is silent and solitary, I place thought under the heading of the experiences I had while I was writing The Slave Dancer.īy thought, I do not mean the marshalling of one's intellectual forces to refute an argument or to bring about a temporary victory over what agitates and bewilders us. And the original intention - that first sudden stirring of one's imagination - is made up of many small, almost always humble, things. Nearly all the work of writing is silent.

The slave dancer