James Dickey - Page 9-10 lyrics

But Lewis and I were different, and were different from each other. I had nothing like his drive, or his obsessions. Lewis wanted to be immortal. He had everything that life could give, and he couldn't make it work. And he couldn't bear to give it up or see age take it away from him, either, because in the meantime he might be able to find what it was that he wanted, the thing that must be there, and that must be subject to the will. He was the kind of man who tries by any means --- weight lifting, diet, exercise, self-help manuals from taxidermy to modern art -- to hold on to his body and mind and improve them, to rise above time. And yet he was also the first to take a chance, as though the burden of his own laborious immortality were too heavy to bear, and he wanted to get out of it by means of an accident, or what would appear to others to be an accident. A year or two before, he had stumbled and crawled for three miles to get out of the woods and back to his car and then driven it home using a stick to work the gas because his right ankle was so painfully broken. I visited him in the hospital mainly because he had asked me to go to the woods with him and I hadn't been able to go, and I asked him how he felt. "It's luxury," he said. "For a while I don't have to lift weights, or work out on the bag."