The large, loose, knuckle-jointed, work-roughened hands of his father lying for a rare moment passive on dungareed knees or lap, filled him with terror and yet a strange burning un-nameable longing; he imagined those hands alert and agile with the bricklayer's trowel and chisel, flashing in the weak mocking winter sunshine on scaffolding high above the city, piling brick upon brick with brisk brave strokes, the sinewy wrist moving subtly, magically moulding a patchwork pyramid of cemented rectangles to enclose the lives, loves, labours, passions, despairs of innumerable strangers; those master-craftstman's hands turning deserts of empty spaces into jungles of human dwellings, offices, stores, theatres, churches, schools, hospitals, fun palaces, the desparate disarray or organized chaos and convoluted canyons, where men and women worked, made love, bore children, longed for heights and strange lands and slowly ceased to dream through a myriad profusion of cement-dry days and nights punctuated by traffic screams and the wail of ships' sirens from the foggy river and feeling again with the far-off shrill of a train in the dark morning the loneliness of being on earth….

This is a quote from Bert Facey's 'A Fortunate Life' published by Penguin, at p.317 of the paperback. 'My experience in the first world war and now the second world war changed my outlook on things.It is hard to believe there is a God.I feel that the Bible is a book written by man, not for the good of man, but for the purpose of preying on a person's conscience, and to confuse him.Anyone who has taken part in a fierce bayonet charge (and I have) , and who has managed to retain his proper senses, must doubt the truth of the Bible and the powers of God, if one exists.And considering the many hundreds of different religions there are in this world of ours, and that fact that many religions have caused terrible wars and hatreds throughout the world, and the many religions that have hoarded terrific wealth and property while people inside and outside religion are starving, it is difficult to remain a believer.No sir, there is no God, it is only a myth.

Your readers might be interested to know where Jim got the words, not to touch the earth, not to see the sun; you will find it in Frazer 's The Golden Bough, paperback, Macmillan Papermac P54, at chapter 9, and the words refer to human deities being carried always so as not to touch the earth, and not being able to be outside, not to sese the sun. Now as for Waiting for the Sun, Jim picked that up from the Popul Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G Morley, University of Oklahoma Press. Whereas T.S. Elliot put the Wasteland out with all the literary references at the back to impress the uninitiated, Morrison, in modesty left it to the reader's intelligence to figure his work out, at whatever level gave them meaning. He was indeed a voracious and eclectic reader. This information would enlighten some of the academic theses being written about his work which to date only scratch the surface.