We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderhead… - Norman Mailer

However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered.

I find it’s more fun to write about something that you don’t know completely and that you will discover on route. A dear friend of mine...once said: 'The only time I know anything is when it comes to me at the point of my pen.' So I think that if you start to write about things that you know half well, that you’re fascinated by, that you sense you have an appreciation of that others might not have, but you do have to acquire the knowledge as you go, you discover a great many things at the point of a pen. And it keeps the writing alive in itself in a way.
(in an interview with Martin Amis, 1991, see YouTube)

If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men?