WHEN I FINISHED, I said, “I would like to say a little something about getting caught up in one’s own work, something I sometimes call the art of self-deception. I think it’s something that I’ve always aspired to — or, to consider it from another point of view, possibly the point of view of my long-suffering wife, have fallen victim to. The camouflage of the cave was only one of many examples I could cite, but I’m not sure that in ‘Refinements and Improvements’ I’ve managed to convey how obsessive I was about the work I did. I worked on camouflaging that cave all the time. If I wasn’t actually out there in the back yard reshaping a mound or changing the inclination of a transplanted birch sapling, I was thinking about doing so, or I was in the library, browsing through books and magazines for photographs of woodland scenes in the Adirondacks and Appalachians. No matter how much I did, I could never escape the feeling that I’d left something undone, and that feeling kept me going, pursuing some eternally elusive horizon of perfection, like the hiker who comes upon a lovely spot for a picnic and immediately has the uneasy feeling that just over the next little hill is a better spot, and so pushes on and never gets to settle down and eat his lunch. I was determined that if the FCC inspectors came around, looking for the source of the signal they’d picked up on their receiving sets in their unmarked vans with the circular antennas on the roof, they would find in my back yard nothing but the ideal picnic spot, that they would abandon their search, settle down, and eat their lunch, but the real truth was that I wished I could complete the job and then somehow forget it, forget it so completely that when one day I happened to be rambling in that corner of my own back yard I would see it as if for the first time, recognize it as the ideal picnic spot but not as my own work, abandon my rambling, settle down, and eat my lunch.”
[to be continued]
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