Well, Quirk just goes on and on.
And then I had the writing problem
of how to end this thing, take him through various phases
and so forth and at one point in a fit of sort
of elaborate gloom and also a lack of creative juice,
I just had him end up living happily ever after in an insane
asylum, where he'd been sent after trying
to make a speech in a park and causing a good deal of trouble
in courtroom and so forth.
And then my friends at that point who read it said,
look, I mean, that's just really a cop out.
All really modern books of this kind, this
is partly satirizing, all of these end
up with the character in the insane asylum
and they say, oh man, that's existentialism, and all that.
And that really wasn't--
wasn't what I had in mind.
So I'm trying to figure out some way
to end it and I remember Tom Terrific.
I wondered why if a man could change himself into anybody,
he couldn't really push his art to further limits
and change himself into anything.
And there's a sense that this is possible
and we opened the last chapter then
and we have a possible ending for him with Quirk.
We just last saw him in his journal thinking
about this possibility, why couldn't I be a fire hydrant?
Why couldn't I be a bicycle?
Why can I be anything?
And he's gone and we come to the Chapter 15 just a couple
of little pieces out of this.
Frankly, nobody has a clue what finally became of Jacob Quirk.
Or to put it another way, nobody knows what he
became if he became anything.
I ought to remind you as we go into the topical things that
some of this was written a few years ago and some of these
things sound, others don't.
But some sound like they came directly out of today's
headlines as we go into them.
We still have his crazy journal of course.
That is we will have it in due time and due course.
It is presently reported to be safe in the National Archives.
Safe and classified where there seem
to be some items in it which concerned
the national security.
Perhaps, why not.
At some stage of his earlier career
during the human transformation stage,
he could have turned himself into some politician
or diplomat.
Even, and let us admit this possibility and all the dangers
of it, into the President of the United States
and/or his rivals.
It would require only one caper of this kind
to cause a great deal of mischief
perhaps on a global scale.
And we have to allow for the possibility of such a thing
could have happened.
And so do our allies, and so do our enemies.
There have been many strange turns and counter turns
in our political and social life over the past few years.
It would be easy to blame Jacob Quirk for all of them.
Still, maybe not consider that he
could have been at least responsible for some
of the weirdo strange old things that our leaders have
been doing.
Sooner or later that journal will be declassified
and then we can satisfy our curiosity.
Well, the next move is a little talk
about a former psychiatrist.
I just mentioned him because we have a moment.
There was a missing bed in the hospital
where he was for a while.
This psychiatrist, I've just mentioned him
in passing because my psychiatrist friends didn't
think he was funny.
Chief psychiatrist is a white haired rosy cheeked jolly
smiling Santa Claus gent with a cute German accent who
never seems to lose his authentic old world charm
or blow his cool.
Except when somebody is dumb enough or rude enough
to bring up the years of the 1940s which he argues
most persuasively never really happened.
In his brilliant contribution to revisionist history,
the lost decade of the '40s a study in mass hallucination.
The chief psychiatrist Dr. Smartheim
argues that Jacob Quirk too was merely under hallucination.
An experiment as it were carefully
devised and perpetrated upon highly suggestible
criminal nuts in his charge.
He's got a point.
The only people in the asylum who
still claim to have seen Jacob Quirk are the patients.
The success of the Quirk experiment as Smartheim
calls it, see his report in modern lunacy
14 to pages 113 to 26.
It's a preliminary indication, initial evidence
of the hypothesis that a great many public figures are only
mass hallucinations, products of the corrupt, and decadent mass
consciousness of our times.
He may be right too.
Jacob Quirk could have told him that way back
when he was performing in nightclubs.
Anyway, it goes ahead and you various problems such as--
nevertheless, there are some curious incidents which though
not really directly in any tangible way
linked to Jacob Quirk, reality or fiction,
are necessary to report and to consider.
I mention them here not out of a desire
to make a case one way or the other,
or out of any interest in blatant sensationalism,
but chiefly out of deference to a considerable number of people
Quirk jerks as Dr. Smartheim calls
them, who seem to believe that Jacob Quirk is for real.
Far be it from me to fly in the face of any consensus, even
a minority opinion.
People point to any number of inexplicable incidents
and events as frequent and debatable as the sighting
of UFOs in our skies as proof.
Indeed, some of the Quirk jerks believe
Quirk is a UFO thus solving two problems at once
with neatness and dispatch.
However, most of the things cited
by these obsessed believers in the Quirk myth
have some logical explanation.
A distinguished commission appointed by the president
and composed of scientists, judges, shipping magnates,
steel tycoons, labor and civil rights leaders, movie stars,
preachers, priests, rabbis, and the family
and relatives of members of Congress,
has been in almost continuous session for some time,
sifting the evidence as they prepare a major report which
may someday be made public.
Their final conclusions and judgment
must remain a matter of conjecture
until that happy day.
But even now through entirely reliable than necessarily
anonymous sources, it's possible to report
on some of their findings.
First, practically all of these odd incidents
have some satisfactory explanation
in no way connected with Jacob Quirk.
99 out of hundreds of them conservatively
may be dismissed out of hand.
Such ludicrous and celebrated examples as the dirty talking
taxicab of New York City, the obscene neon sign which
appeared briefly on the Golden Gate Bridge,
the champagne which suddenly filled
the pipes of the public water system of Temperance, Iowa.
And there was just as suddenly replaced
by noxious and sulfurous artesian brew.
The Spanish fly which was somehow
bottled in the Pepsi Cola served in the machines
at Vassar College and caused all that unfortunate excitement.
The showing in Cherokee, North Carolina, of the film
The Sound of Music during which the principals appeared
to the stunned audience at least,
completely in the nude and performing lewd
and indecent acts.
The nationally televised appearance
of the New York City ballet company during which
millions of viewers claimed to have
seen a macabre and grotesque encounter by a group
equally divided between cannibals and vegetarian
victims.
All these and others of their ilk
have some kind of explanation and can
be discarded here now and forever as not having
any significance whatsoever.
It's one little leftover from the Elizabethan thing.
In large part, these and other absurdities
the committee report will state to quote,
"Are what may be called statistical aberrations.
After all, statistically, if millions and millions
of monkeys were placed before millions and millions
of typewriters, sooner or later, one of them
would inevitably type out the complete works
of William Shakespeare, which is not
to imply that the plays of Shakespeare
were written by a monkey.
However attractive that thought may be to some,
there is irrefutable evidence before this committee
that Shakespeare's plays represent
a rare collaboration between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke.
In any case, though there were a good many monkeys
in Elizabethan England, there is no evidence
that a sufficient number of them existed
for there to be the optimum conditions
of statistical probability.
Moreover, lacking any real notion of progress
or any real desire for technical improvements,
those underdeveloped people of that era had not
imagined let alone invented the typewriter," end quote.