From the character’s point of view this breaking, in my opinion, represents a point in life where the past falls away and the character must, in order to go on living, fling himself upon the face of the formless night and create a world, a new world, in which to live. To me—rightly or wrongly—the hallmark of good writing resides precisely in this sense of creating the new, the freedom and the need and the desire to create this new.

Obviously, such opportunities do not come often to us who live in this slow, real, hard world of ours. Change comes slowly. But in art we may reap our share of change—in as real a sense as we get it in life—in a few hours. Why is this? Maybe it is to prepare us for changes when they come in life? Maybe it is to compensate? Maybe it is to simply exercise ourselves in enjoyment? I don’t know and I don’t think it’s important to find an answer. We have the freedom to make of it what we will.

In The Man Who Lived Underground the spot where improvisation takes place is the sewer. Here, in the underground, Fred Daniels comes across a wide variety of images and symbols whose reality came entirely from the original false accusation of murder. Hence, what Fred Daniels sees underground is overdetermined; they are things seen through a magnifying glass of such strength that they take on new meaning. Little events which perhaps we all see each day take on an entirely different significance. Emotion charges them so that they glow red-hot and are fused with everything that happens in the world. Meanings slide together. Events are telescoped. What happens is this: The world is attacked, is acted upon by a personality.

I imagine primitive people must have devised some such scheme for their religious rituals. Maybe magic is not so far removed from our daily modern lives as we are prone to imagine. To a lesser and weaker degree the same thing happens at a prizefight, a baseball game, a political meeting. That which is understood, that which is taken for granted, is the tradition, the convention; the many little experiences of each individual are pooled and each person agrees to accept what the other brings as his own. Intensity is collective, even when it seemingly manifests itself in a lone personality. Tradition is a dream, and he who does not dream cannot feel his own past, and he who does not feel the past cannot feel the need for the future. A dream is tense and tension is the prelude to action.