I waited a while before I decided to respond to your kind remarkss. This is the sort of comment that kicks off al sorts of agonizing reappraisal.

One of the advantages (?) of growing older is you have both the experience and the wisdom (and the leisure) to re-evaluate your life, to review what you've done with your time and to re-examine your motives for doing so. There's a lot of things I've done which I now regret bitterly, they were just not right. But they all do seem to have one thing in common: when I was doing them, I had convinced myself that my actions were justified. No, I'm not beating myself up about the past, I have just come to realize that we all tend to find ways to justify our actions to ourselves. No one thinks he's a bad person, not Hitler or Stalin or even Ronald Reagan. We all sincerely believe we're doing the right thing for the right reasons. It's just human nature I guess.

Maybe when you're in your sixties it finally dawns on you that you no longer have to prove anything to anybody, that you can afford to be honest with yourself, and if even if only as an intellectual enterprise, you have to go back and try to make some sense of it all. I wrote my memoirs too, a great exercise that helps get this whole exercise started and puts things in context within the time-line of your life.

When you're a complete materialist as I am, morality and ethics are not a transaction negotiated with the Almighty, an adherence to some petty rule book of punishments and rewards. You have to make your own decisions and committments about what integrity and honesty are, as well as good and evil.

Your comments are appreciated, but I don't really know if I deserve them. You see, I don't know now any better now than when I was a youth whether or not I am a good man. If I've made any progress as a human being, it is only in realizing that at least now I have the courage and the self-knowledge to admit to myself that I really don't know.