After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes. One's daydreams intended to be Tarzanish post-puberty (physical strength and freedom) and Martian post-puberty (exotic worlds and subtle combinaziones to be worked out). Sometimes I used the master's material, but more often I adapted it freely to suit myself. When he went to the center of the earth a la Jules Verne (much too fancy a writer for one's taste), I immediately worked up a thirteen-part series, with myself as lead, and various friends as guest stars. I used Burroughs as a source of raw material. At any one time, I had at least three serials going as well as a number of old faithful reruns. My own inner storytelling mechanism was vivid. When I was growing up, I read all twenty-three Tarzan books, as well as the ten Mars books. I state all this with perfect authority because I have just finished reading several books by the master of American daydreamers, Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose works today, as anyone who goes into a drugstore or looks at a newsstand can see, have suddenly returned to great popularity. 'Captain, the time-warp's been closed! We are now trapped in a parallel world, inhabited entirely by women, with three breasts.' Though from what we can gather about these imaginary worlds, they tend to be more Adlerian than Freudian: The motor drive is the desire not for sex (other briefer fantasies take care of that) but for power, for the ability to dominate one's environment through physical strength. Clad in tights, rapier in hand, the daydreamers drive their Jaguars at fantastic speeds through a glittering world of adoring love objects, mingling anachronistic histories worlds with science fiction. Although this sort of Mittyesque daydreaming is supposed to cease in maturity, I suggest that more adults than we suspect are bemusedly wandering about with a full Technicolor extravaganza going on in their heads. Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.

and becomes a handsome demigod moving through splendid palaces, saving maidens from monsters (or monsters from maidens: this is a jaded time). For instance, how many adults have an adventure serial running in their heads? How many consciously daydream, turning on a story in which the dreamer ceases to be an employee of I.B.M. Fascinated as we all are to know what our countrymen think of great issues (approving, disapproving, 'don't-knowing,' with that same shrewd intelligence which made a primeval wilderness bloom with Howard Johnson signs), the pollsters never get around to asking the sort of interesting personal questions our new-Athenians might be able to answer knowledgeably.

There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.

Tarzan book series books