I don't know where my romanticism comes from. My mom and dad would read to me a lot. 'Treasure Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' tales of chivalry and knights, things like that. Those are the stories I loved growing up.
Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
In Soviet times the border was closed so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.
There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No-it is Robinson Crusoe.
Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.
The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)
No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.
