extremophile

Like the materials used in a collage, these pieces of evidence have different textures: here a fragment of hard metal, there a scrap of faded newspaper, there again a wisp of cotton wool. Reporters, investigators and historians will compose widely varying collages from the same box of scraps, and further change the picture with the oil pains or watercolors of their own imagination. But there are special truth tests to which their pictures, unlike the poet’s or the novelist’s, must always submit. These tests apply to every line I write. That is what makes it so difficult.