red

My understanding of the human condition is something like this: there was this mud, this substance. It somehow came into existence. Over a period of millennia, it became conscious of itself. It stood up on legs and started walking around, and talking and thinking and having aspirations of one kind or another. Now this is a miracle, that the very mud of the earth could somehow come to consciousness. There is some kind of positive significance there. In what I write, I try to be aware of that, and that’s why I think I’m not pushing a message of despair, because I try to have everything happen in these books against the background of that miracle. That’s an unspoken positive dimension. We are just mud, finally, that has become conscious of itself. That’s a tough condition.

—Robert Stone