But this is omitting intrinsic stresses in the human condition--you foresee things, for example, you foresee your own death.

You have really been locked out of the animal paradise of unthinking natural reflex.

You are born into one political contract or another, whose terms, though they sit very lightly at first, in the form of the draft, or taxes, eventually begin to make very real demands on you. The general social contract--living with other people, driving cars on highways--all this is difficult, it's painful. It's a kind of agony really--the agony vents itself in ulcers internally, rage externally...

In short, all of our institutions, of marriage, the family. Your driver's license, everything is kind of precarious, and maintained at a cost of tension.

Q: Easy humanism, then, lies in the belief that these individual problems can be ignored for the sake of larger panaceas...

A: Or who even take humanity as some kind of moral index. who say that to be human is to be good and our problems all arise from not being human enough. I think I take a rather darker view. We must of necessity lose our humanity all the time.

When asked about what my philosophy was I tried to write it down in Midpoint in handy couplets and discovered that of all my books it is the least read, and it was hardly reviewed at all. I concluded that nobody really cared what my philosophy was--I think that's right--the novelist is of interest only for what he does through empathy and image-producing, image-arranging: the more consciously a theorist he is the more apt he is to become impotent or cranky or both. Like Harry, I try to remain kind of open. Revolt, rebellion, violence, disgust are themselves there for a reason, they too are organically evolved out of a distinct reality, and must be considered respectfully...I try to love both the redneck and the anarchist bomb-thrower. I think they're both anarchists.

People are basically very anarchistic. Harry's search for infinite freedom--well, he's been kind of ground down, he's never really been answered.

Q: At the end of Rabbit Redux, Rabbit talks of going back to a farm...Are you thinking of bringing him back again?

A: I kind of left the book open, I even mounted a few threads that could be picked up. Janice talks about how he never should have had that awful indoor job. I even had a title about Rural Rabbit--that's going to be their next stage. I couldn't write that book now. Maybe in 1979 enough will have happened to both him and me that I can, but if it doesn't that's all right. Maybe I should stop while I'm-ahead-at least as far as the New York Times goes.

These two complement each other well enough. Anybody who really cared could get some interesting formal things out of the two books together. You never know how this works out in terms of flesh and blood. But certainly Janice bringing Stavros back to life is some kind of counterweight to the baby's death in the first book. She too had to make a passage--go through something to return--to get back into bed with him. All that's there, I'm not sure that a third book could do it again--it would have to be a different kind of a book--a short book, a pastoral book, an eclogue.

Q: There seems to be great nostalgia for the farm running through your books. Is the bucolic life an ideal one for you?

A: No, I think for Rabbit it is--remember, he is an animal...in the first book he was happy brainlessly working in Mrs. Smith's garden. Yes, he does pine after an animal existence.

A lot of men like him really do--I'm constantly surprised at the amount of men who get up at 4 in the morning in the hunting season and go out with a gun in the miserable weather and try to kill some harmless bird. What is this but some very deep need to get one with nature somehow, something that's remotely denied all of us.

I have few illusions of farm life. It's a good life, but I think it has much of the drudgery of industrial existence without some of the compensations. It's a brutal life. I lived on a farm, but am really not myself a rural creature. I really love New York City...at any rate I'm not sure that rural life or a big commune is an answer...The earth and agriculture are an index of something we need and are rapidly losing, the human animal is geared to interlock with all kinds of raw natural environments. The coming civilization--that doesn't mean just here, but worldwide--must accomodate people, it's a commonplace, I guess, ecology.