"Let's use our imaginations. It means that one human being has determined to extinguish the life of another human being. It means that two people are engaging in dialogue with eternity. Now if the brute does it and at the last moment likes the man he is extinguishing then perhaps the victim did not die in vain. If there is an eternity with souls in that eternity, if one is able to be born again, the victim may get his reward."
-- Norman Mailer, 1961
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Did you ever see the 60 Minutes episode, after the murder, when Mailer is barking at reporters? He said something like,
“”The United States, in order to save its honor and pride, holds the world hostage to nuclear destruction! Correct? Correct? Then how can I not, at some risk to certain parts of society, save a doomed man’s talent, when the United States, for its power and pride, holds this world, this universe, this earth, over the brink of total annihilation!”
That’s a paraphrase, so what he said verbatim might be even dopier.
He was an important New York writer, so the New York literary media whooped him up into a national figure. Kinda like how the NYC press covered an explosion in a building one day to exhaustion, while ignoring an almost identical happenstance out in the Great Plains the same day.
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