The Hand of Time

He has been unhappy with it in every one of his more than 20 books, including his latest, "A Man Without a Country," a slim nonfiction compilation published in September.

In it, he asserts that the subject of all great books is "what a bummer it is to be a human being."

There's not the slightest reason to doubt the sincerity of his unhappiness. This is a man who not only has killed off the human race in his fiction -- in "Cat's Cradle," by means of ice-nine, a scientific breakthrough designed to make life mud-free for the U.S. Marines -- but who has tried for decades to kill himself by smoking unfiltered Pall Malls. Periodically, he threatens to sue the cigarettes' makers because he is still breathing.

In 1984, he essayed a more direct method, pills and alcohol. He wasn't crying out for help, he told an interviewer some years after he was rescued and pumped out. He'd simply had enough.

Yet here he still is, still smoking, still angry, still grasping at stray reasons to live.

"Great works of art, I was so grateful for them," he says, beginning to enumerate those reasons. He mentions Picasso's "Guernica," the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, the movie "Casablanca." Leaning forward, he quotes loosely from memory:

" 'Tell me, Meezter Rrrrick, what brought you to Casablanca?'

" 'I came here for my health, for the waters.'

" 'But Meezter Rrrrick, there are no waters in Casablanca.'

" 'I was misinformed.' "

An almost silent laugh. Then: "Such a wonderful word -- 'I was misinformed .' "

Beyond art, he says, he lives for what he calls "mini-epiphanies -- very nice events that last maybe 10 minutes."