I am pleased to share with you an intimate interview with my dear friend Cam Neufeld, Canadian fiddle master, teacher of string instruments, founder of The Gadjo Collective and itinerant researcher of world music, who visited me in Val Pellice in November. I asked the questions and he kindly answered them as if we were talking for the first time which resulted in this long overdue piece peppered with video footage and dedicated to our friendship of nearly two decades. 

Hande Eagle: I’ve known you for a long time but maybe you want to tell us a bit about your background. You were telling me earlier today about your grandparents. Let’s start from there.

Cam Neufeld: They were part of the Mennonite community in Orenburg, which is very close to the Kazakhstan border. They managed to leave in 1926, sailed to Montreal and then travelled to Saskatchewan by train. They eventually bought land in Alberta in the Rosemary area. That’s where my parents grew up and met. Then my parents homesteaded in the semi-arid desert area of southern Alberta. That’s where I grew up on a homestead on the prairie. Our closest town was Seven Persons, with the closest major town being Medicine Hat. I stayed there until I was sixteen. Mostly working on the farm and riding horses. I spent a lot of my childhood riding on the open plains to the south, towards the US border which is about 50 miles away. It’s deceptively flat and empty but when you get into it, there are little creeks and bushes.

H.E:  And are you the only musician in your family?

C.N: Yes.

H.E. So how did that happen?

C.N: I’m not sure how that happened. When I was fourteen I just started playing the guitar.

H.E. How did you come about a guitar?

C.N: I think I was in Grade 8 and my language and arts teacher was selling a guitar he had. I bought it from him. It was pretty much unplayable, but I did. I started learning on that. I was interested in playing rock guitar. So I begged my parents for an electric guitar and lessons. They humoured me, they didn’t think it would go anywhere. There was a funny thing that happened when I was first taking lessons. I had a teacher working out of a Mel Bay book, we had an A-chord in one bar and in the next bar was a D-chord, and in my mind, I thought this was an implausible task because how could you fill an entire bar with A and instantaneously go to D. There isn’t time. It was just a weird quirk of my mind because he hadn’t explained that I just had to anticipate when to switch. So I got stuck on that A and I couldn’t do it. So finally he said, maybe you should study with Howard. Howard was an electro guitar player, a road musician, he had just injured himself, and he was just teaching until he recovered. He taught me how to play lead guitar from records by Shuggie Otis, who was a 14-year-old blues whiz kid. I learnt it all by ear. Then I went to boarding school, we started a little band, but I didn’t know any chords.

H.E: Why did you go to boarding school?

C.N: It was a Mennonite boarding school and my parents had gone there. I always knew I would go there. So in Grade 11 I went there, and I was happy to go. It gave me a lot of freedom, in a way, from my parents. There was dorm for girls and a dorm for boys. There was a lot of obvious fun to be had. [Chuckles]

We started this little rock band; we met some other musicians. All I did was play lead guitar. I still couldn’t play a single chord. I was still stuck on one chord. Just like BB King. He doesn’t play any chords; he just plays lead. Eventually I was watching the rhythm guitar player and basically, I had to learn how to play chords from him. There was a teacher at the boarding school, who showed me lots of nice jazz chords. So that’s where my whole harmony thing came from. And later on, with the band, I went into playing acoustic music. There was an album called Will The Circle Be Unbroken by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and it had all these luminaries from the blue grass world, Doc Watson, Vassar Clements. At first I actually didn’t like the album, because it felt like corny country music, and I grew up with that, so I wanted to distance myself from it. When I really listened to it, all of a sudden, I thought this is really cool. So I bought an acoustic guitar, and I started learning all the fiddle tunes that Doc Watson played flat-picking. I learned a whole bunch of his stuff from those. At some point, I decided I would try to learn on the fiddle.

H.E. How old were you when you started learning the fiddle?

C.N. Twenty. I’d been playing guitar for a long time, and I knew all these tunes flat-picking. For some reason, I thought it might be fun to try on the fiddle. So I bought myself a fiddle. By this time, I was in Winnipeg. I found an old-time fiddle teacher. So I tried to translate some of these fiddle tunes I knew how to play on the acoustic plus the new ones I was learning. I got kind of obsessed with it. It was actually really hard for me to play the fiddle.

H.E. Most people who play the violin start at a much younger age. You know, they say you must start the violin at age 5. If not, you’ve missed the boat. It seems you missed the boat by 15 years. That’s quite a challenge to take on, isn’t it?

C.N. [Chuckles] If there’s something I can’t do at all, it’s compelling for me to try to do it. So then, I spent the rest of my life trying to learn to play the fiddle. And shortly after that, I joined a band in Saskatoon. [In that band] I was playing other string instruments, the banjo, the mandolin, and the guitar. They needed dance fiddle tunes as part of the band. So anything I would learn on the fiddle, I would immediately play in the band. It was probably terrible. But it was a really intense learning experience. We rehearsed every night. We played on the weekends. I was playing all the time, while presumably going to university. But I dropped out. I just wasn’t going to any classes. [Chuckles]

H.E. Which university?

C.N. University of Saskatchewan.

H.E. What were you studying at the time?

C.N. I was studying Philosophy, Anthropology, the Humanities.

H.E. Was it a diversion? Did you want to escape from the religious aspects of your life in a Mennonite family? To find something else? Or was it more of an unconscious decision?

C.N. In Winnipeg, I was in a Mennonite college, I was studying Philosophy and Religious Studies, and I really enjoyed that. I wasn’t religious in any way.

H.E. But your family were…

C.N. Yeah, but they weren’t really hardcore. In the Mennonite world, there is a vast scale between the super-religious and the more relaxed. We were probably on the more liberal side, my family valued education very highly. My way of thinking was that free thought was really part of being, that we should investigate the truth as much as we could. And my truth was basically to reject, I wasn’t a believer in the sense that most Mennonites were. Though, I didn’t feel that that prevented me from being a Mennonite.

H.E. Do you still identify as Mennonite?

C.N. It’s more of a cultural thing. I’m more of a cultural Mennonite than a religious Mennonite. [Chuckles] There’s a group called Marginal Mennonites. So I am a Marginal Mennonite. I still respect some of the values, but I am not religious in the sense of a believer.

H.E. Which values?

C.N. Service to humanity, pacifism, community-minded endeavours. I am just not a believer in a deity.

H.E. Your travels – at the very least in the last twenty years I have known you – have taken you to various countries in Europe to Turkey across the Balkans, to India. You also visited some of the Baltic states, you were in Estonia and Latvia. But you keep going back to Canada.

C.N. I like where I live. It’s a nice place to leave your things. It’s funny… Of all the places I’ve never really come across anywhere that I thought I would really love to give up living in Canada and come to live. I really enjoyed a lot of places, but I prefer to be a visitor. Except for one place, also in Canada, way up in the north, it’s called Yellowknife. The reason is that there, people don’t really have many rules. It’s a society that’s less governed by rules. People have the freedom to do what they like to do. That’s very appealing to me, so I could probably live there. Other than that, I am happy to travel to particular places and then to return. And partly because, in Edmonton, the music community is very strong.

H.E. You’re 65 now and you’ve been in music for quite some time. Alongside the music, you’ve held several different jobs for an income. Being able to carry on doing the music alongside the jobs that you do for financial reasons. It’s quite astonishing, because a lot of people think, “Right, if I am not going to make money of my art, and I have to go and work in another job, doing something completely unrelated, I don’t want to continue”. A lot of people just want to do music and make money of it. A lot of people who don’t manage to earn a living out of music quit the scene. It happens to a lot of musicians. How did you manage this?

C.N. It’s a dedication to a life of poverty.

[Roaring laughter]

I know a lot of musicians who cobble together a livelihood from performances and other short-term jobs. For about the last 25 years I haven’t had any other job than doing gigs and teaching. Once I started teaching, I didn’t have to do anything else. I just had private students. That was sufficient to live reasonably frugally. And then, performances. Sort of about half and half.

H.E. So, it goes back to the idea that what feeds your soul is at times much more important than what feeds your stomach.

C.N. Sure, you know it’s easy to just give up and choose financial security. The music that I make, and how I make a living out of it… There are no guarantees. Sometimes, you look at your book and it’s empty and you think “That’s it, my career is over”. And then, strangely, it starts to fill up and you might get super busy. I have at least 5 or 6 ongoing projects all the time. And hopefully, I don’t get double-booked. Sometimes you take a booking, and then a really nice gig just comes along. The rule I have tried to follow really hard is whatever gig you take first that’s the one you need to stick with. If something else comes along, you have to turn it down, even if it’s a better gig. When you make a commitment to someone for a gig, you have to keep it. I know musicians who will take on a better paying gig. In fact, I actually did that when I was booked for some festivals. A once in a lifetime opportunity came along, and I had to cancel the festivals. The people I was playing with, they understood. Then we went on this amazing trip to Taiwan for three weeks.

H.E. When was that?

C.N. In 2014 or 2015. Eight or nine years ago. It was three weeks playing at a ghost festival, in Jilong [Keelung City], in northeastern Taiwan.

H.E. What were your impressions of Taiwan?

C.N. It’s not a place I would have ever gone out of my way to visit but it was really interesting. In one sense it was easy because everything was arranged, the flight, the hotels. I was on this weird schedule… I would wake up at 3 am, because of the time change. I was wide awake, and I would walk around the city. It was very safe. Never once got hassled for anything, which is kind of unusual. People were so helpful, so friendly. I rented a scooter, and I rode up into the mountains pretty much every day, to these little villages. Some of them seemed like they hadn’t seen any strangers from the West. They would stare at me a fair bit, but they were very polite. The music was really fun, I was working with dancers. We had a nice little trio. Strangely, we were playing Turkish music in Taiwan and none of us were Turkish. This dance troupe, the woman who organised it, they were performing dances from all around the world. And they’d travelled across Anatolia and collected all these dances, so they knew all the folkloric music. That’s how we connected because I’d been to Turkey a few times. They needed musicians, I learned all the pieces they needed. It was a super-fun three weeks.

H.E. And into this musical odyssey, you also managed to fit in a family life. When people have children their expectations and what’s expected of them changes. It can be quite hard, especially in the arts.

C.N. Sure, I wouldn’t say it’s been easy. There’s a financial reality when you have kids. But at the same time we lived very frugally. I think we still provided all the opportunities that our kids needed. We also home-schooled our kids until they were in Grade 7. They were at home; I’d set them up with schoolwork and I’d be practicing. Kids were coming in and out. It was very chaotic.

H.E. How did the decision to home-school come about? If they had been in school it would have been easier in some ways, I suppose.

C.N. We had freedom, we didn’t have to stick to any kind of school schedule. We could go places if we needed to, I could take the kids with me to gigs.

H.E. You must have had some really well-behaved kids.

C.N. I don’t know… There was just chaos. If we had rehearsals we didn’t worry about noise ever with the kids. They’d have to adjust. We’d have music parties late into the night, we never worried about the noise. When they were tired they’d just go to bed and get used to sleeping with the noise. They adapted. I think it was probably good for them.

H.E. In fact, your daughter - who goes by the pseudonym Billie Zizi - is also a musician.

C.N. She became a musician and is doing really well. In fact, she was one of the reasons why I started travelling. She’d gone to Vietnam and Thailand with a friend. At some point, she lost her credit card, but they wanted to go to India because they were tired of the food. [Chuckles] And, she couldn’t book a flight so she phoned me and said, “Can you book a flight to Delhi?” So I booked her a flight. They went to Delhi, she travelled to Rajasthan and bought a ravanahaththa, which is like the oldest form of violin. She came back with that. I tried to play it and found it quite difficult. In my mind, I thought, “Maybe I should go to India and learn how to play it”. So that’s what I did. I didn’t really have any money, but I thought, “Well, I’ll figure it out.” A friend of mine threw a going away party and organised a fundraiser. So she raised some money for me. So I had a little bit of money through that. I thought, “I’ll just pay off the credit card when I get back”. That was in 2010, my first big trip. I actually found the guy who built that ravanahaththa, I hung out with him for a week, just playing. He was playing on the street. I found him, just by walking. I heard the sound of the ravanahaththa, and there he was. I went up to him and asked him if he was Krishna Ram Bopa, and sure enough he was. I told him my daughter bought this ravanahaththa. I would study with him every day for about an hour. It was really nice. Then I flew to Istanbul.

H.E. When you came to Istanbul you were busking. Those were the days when everything was much simpler. And during your travels in Turkey, you were learning the maqam. So, it’s what you do isn’t it? You go to place and study its music. That must broaden your horizon so much. There are so many styles of music, so many different instruments. If you were to think about Cam Neufeld, as a little boy, horse-riding in the plains, and you think about Cam Neufeld today… How does all this knowledge and experience you acquired make you feel?

C.N. I remember as a kid, we’d go for Sunday drives. I’d always ask my dad, “Drive over that hill, I want to see what’s on the other side”. I always had this curiosity about what was over there. I think that just translated into musical curiosity as well. Turkish music was so different. I wondered how do people make those sounds? I couldn’t make them. The different time signatures, the rhythms, the tones… When I can’t do something at all, it becomes compelling. There are certain limitations, it’s too much to learn everything. I’ve limited it to a swathe of music, that comes from India through Persia into Turkey and then into the Balkans, and then it starts blending into more European sounds. Except flamenco which is more Arabic influenced. It has a different tonality. That’s why I guess I have that interest in flamenco as well.

H.E. Many of the musicians who learnt these kinds of music learnt it by ear. For example, Selim Sesler, he had learnt everything by ear. They are not formally trained at music schools. They don’t have a methodical approach to their instruments. There is a lot of intuitive learning that happens, learning through motions and emotions. That must be quite interesting for you too, because of how you learnt.

C.N. Yeah, it’s very similar. I learnt entirely by ear. I didn’t read music. I learned later because I thought it would be useful tool to be able to read and write down music. At some point, I decided to go to the jazz college in Edmonton, that’s how I ended up there. I needed to be able to read music in order to get into the programme, so I crammed a little bit and learned enough to get into the school. But it was still a struggle, I didn’t read music the way people who grew up with it did.

H.E. Do you think that someone who’s learnt an instrument by ear has more creative freedom than someone who was classically trained?

C.N. I would say it’s a mix. Probably 80% of the world’s musicians don’t read music. The other 20%, musicians who are more academic, can read and write music. There’s an advantage to being able to read and write music, especially if you are writing very complex forms of music and you need to be able to communicate those forms. However, in the traditions I’m interested in, for example, Indian classical music, nobody reads, it’s all internalised. There are so many brilliant players, who are high-level creatives within a tradition where reading music would probably be a detriment. On the other hand, when it comes to Ottoman classical music, all its musicians read and write music. However, for all the folk traditions in the world, music reading is not an important element at all.

H.E. We were talking about whether music is a universal language yesterday. You’re a bit torn over that aren’t you?

C.N. People who say that music is a universal language may not be aware of how many various forms of music there are. I was a reasonably good musician playing jazz and blues, but I had no idea how to play Turkish music. I was completely lost. I was reasonably accomplished and yet, my language was really different than say, the language of a Turkish musician. I needed to learn that language. So, that’s where the universality breaks down a bit. It’s universal in the sense that every culture has its own music but not everybody can work together. There are ways of improvising, ways of perceiving the form of a specific style music. Here is an interesting example. I was in Istanbul and playing with these guys. I was trying to learn what they were doing. They, in turn, wanted to learn how to play the blues. Okay, I know the blues, so I suggested playing a 12-bar blues, but they couldn’t do it. They could not stay in the form. For them, it was a foreign structure. As accomplished as they were, great Turkish musicians, they couldn’t play the blues. So is music a universal language? I think there are hundreds of musical languages.

H.E. Most recently you went to Spain to attend WOMEX. This was your second time, wasn’t it?

C.N. I went maybe 10 years ago when I was in Thessaloniki. I had a banjo student who ran a magazine called Penguin Eggs. He convinced me that going to WOMEX was a good idea. He went every year for his magazine - a world folk magazine that he published. That’s why I went there the first time. And I decided to go back this year. I needed some inspiration, I hadn’t travelled for a few years because of the pandemic. This was the first major trip that I’d made. With WOMEX being in Spain this year, I thought I could go to Andalusia and see what the flamenco scene is like and see if I can absorb something. It was very interesting; I saw many great bands. I was there as an observer but then I ended up playing with a lot of people. There was a lot of jamming.

H.E. So is your interest in flamenco recent?

C.N. No, I’ve been interested in flamenco for many years. The first big trip I made in 2010, I saw Paco de Lucia in Samois-sur-Seine, at the Django Reinhardt Festival, and I’d been somewhat familiar with flamenco before then. I’d never been to Andalusia, the birthplace of flamenco. I just thought it would be a way to deepen my understanding of flamenco just by being immersed in it. I think it was reasonably successful, seeing it performed in its natural environment with people playing, singing, and dancing to flamenco music in the streets.

H.E. So now you have some new improv pieces inspired by your travels in Andalusia?

C.N. I have a number of pieces in the works. They start off as improv pieces and then I try to define the melody as I go along. Then the improv develops into something more concrete and then I’ll write it down as a distinct melody.

H.E. Do you think you’ll make a flamenco-inspired album?

C.N. Probably. [Chuckles] I hope so. I started thinking about that a little while ago. As an improviser, I’m mostly interested in the improvisational ethos of that style. I always think about the people playing that specific music, what’s the modality and tonality of it. I am more interested in how people improvise within a particular idiom than learning specific melodies. I want to be able to use those sensibilities, and being able to have that as a tonal palette of my own that I can access. For example, with Hot Club music – the music of Django Reinhardt – for a long time, I thought how it would sound if Reinhardt was Balkan. I think I’m reasonably successful in being able to weave different styles together.

H.E. What you do requires a lot of mental agility. The ability to be flexible in your ways of thinking and learning. Many musicians just do one kind of music. They usually don’t learn different forms of music. But you go above and beyond that… You learn about the people, the culture, the language.

C.N. In a way, it might be a curse, mentally, to not to stick with one thing for very long. I think there’re those musicians who are laser-focused on a particular style and I admire that. It means that they can absorb the entirety of that tradition and possibly become an innovator in it. Though, it has its limitations too because you’re only doing this one thing. Then there’s the other kind of musician, more like me, where you try to listen to a lot of different things and glean inspiration from it. You know, try to have a breadth of understanding, almost a global sense. I limit what I am trying to study by region. There’s all kinds of music and while it’s all very interesting, I just choose to leave it alone.

H.E. For now at least…

C.N. For now… [Chuckles] I mean, who knows what the next obsession will be. You kind of have to be obsessed with it. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of flamenco. Recently, I’ve just been trying to absorb everything flamenco. It’s my current obsession.

H.E. So, when you go back to Canada, are you going to teach all the people in your collective [The Gadjo Collective] how to play flamenco music?

C.N. Yeah, probably.

[Roaring laughter]

H.E. How long does it take for them to learn a new form of music?

C.N. I actually had written a couple of pieces in a flamenco-ish style. We do those in the band. I pick musicians for their ability to be musically flexible. They are all really great musicians so whatever I bring to the band it doesn’t take long at all. For example, I was really obsessed with the music of Esma Redžepova and so, the only person I could think of who had a voice even close to that was, Lisi [Sommer], I gave her all these songs in six different languages. I said to her, “We have this show coming up, here are the songs. Can you learn these?” Three weeks later we did a show, and she knew all these songs. However, she had had opera training, and she knew how to sing in different languages. She has this amazing voice.

H.E. What are the chances of The Gadjo Collective doing a tour of Europe?

C.N. I would love to do that, but I am not a very good promoter… [Chuckles] When it comes to the business side of things or organising a tour… I need a manager who is totally behind the project. That’d be super fun though.

H.E. By the way, do you still busk? Did you busk in Spain?

C.N. I did in Barcelona. I met this Brazilian percussionist – who goes by the nickname El Gato - on a train. It’s actually illegal to busk throughout Spain. You have to have a licence. So he invited me to come and play with him. He said he knew how to handle the police. We went to a little outdoor restaurant, and we played four tunes. We went around and collected some money, then we went to the next place. He was a really good percussionist.

H.E. Off the top of your head, how many pieces of music would you say you have in your repertoire?

C.N. A thousand. If I count all the Irish fiddle tunes, Canadian and American fiddles tunes, the jazz… Probably close to a thousand.

H.E. So, between all the travelling, shows and teaching, you are also writing a memoir?

C.N. I’ve been working on that for quite a while, and I’ve written a lot. It’s still a work in progress. It’s a recollection of my travels since 2010. There is also a video component. A week before I started on this trip, we did a video shoot. There’s a film organisation that received quite a substantial grant to film music and the guy chose our band, our show, The Road to Django. He wanted to film that show. It was short notice, and amazingly eleven of us were available for the shoot. We went in and it was a much bigger deal than I imagined. Eight cameras, they had a massive stage, a crew of about fifteen people. We spent the entire day from 1 pm to 10 pm shooting this 45-minute show. We shot it twice. I just got all the raw footage back. They are going to edit it, but I have some say over what happens.

H.E. So it’s going to a documentary about you and The Gadjo Collective.

C.N. I’m hoping to include the video in the book. It’ll be a DVD of The Road to Django. A travelogue musical which starts in India and ends up with the music of Django Reinhardt. The book will be more like vignettes, it will incorporate anecdotes from the trips together with photos. The music of Django Reinhardt, and extrapolating backwards all the way to India, the origin of Romany people. You could say that the music of Reinhardt is not directly related to the music of India, but there is a connection.

H.E.  Many of your travels were funded by the grants you received. Is there something you would like to say about the importance of grants for artists such as yourself?

C.N. I think it’s amazing to have these grant organisations that will support somebody doing what I do. I’ve been pretty lucky to receive grants from the Edmonton Arts Council. They’ve been really generous. I also had a patron for a while, who was a reasonably wealthy oil guy, who took lessons from me. I would just tell him about the trips I wanted to do, and he’d give me some money towards the costs.

H.E. I didn’t know about this! This is disgraceful! How can you say this in this interview? I am all about sustainability and you’re telling me you got funded by an oil baron?

C.N. [Chuckles] He lost all his money, so he can’t fund me anymore. He funded me twice and it was a nice thing to have some financial support from a student. In any case, when it comes to the grants, I never knew whether I would get them before my travels. In fact, one time, I was in Istanbul. It was close to the end of my trip and all of a sudden I got a grant from Canada Council for the Arts. I thought, “Wow! All of a sudden I have some money”. You never really know whether you have written a good grant application.

H.E. That in itself is a job… Grant applications.

C.N. It takes a lot of time. It’s easy to get discouraged. I wrote them for 15 years without ever receiving a single grant. I should say at this point that having the support and encouragement of my wife Marianne Watchel, who is a wonderful and inspiring visual artist, was essential for all the years of travelling I did. 

H.E. One last question… As someone who travels quite a bit, what are your opinions about the climate crisis we are facing. What do you think we need to do?

C.N. I think it’s the single greatest challenge we face. I see places where there’s heavy industrial pollution, in India for instance. It appears to be pretty unregulated and there’s a huge population. I think we have to fight it on so many different fronts. Finding cleaner energy sources is probably number one as there doesn’t seem to be any impulse to lower energy consumption.

H.E. Of course, wars also play their role in the crisis.

C.N. The wars contribute massively to the climate crisis and somehow that’s never really talked about. The amount of energy expended in war is so massive that everything else almost pales in comparison.

H.E. Besides the devastating loss of human life, war also contributes to the destruction of nature and wildlife.

C.N. I think there are multiple solutions, but I am not so sure that there is the political will. On a personal basis, there are many things we can do to reduce consumption. I planted a million trees in my lifetime. I calculated it once, the carbon offset in a million trees…. Comparing the number of trees I planted to the amount of flying I’ve done; my carbon offset is pretty low.

H.E. But I wonder how many of the million trees have survived…

C.N. I would guess a pretty high percentage of them would have survived. I don’t know if that’s a valid way of looking at it. For the most part, because of my fairly frugal lifestyle, there’s not a lot more I can do on a personal level. But there needs to be the political will in government. There are some really good examples of how government intervention can have a dramatic impact. One of them was acid rain in Canada. It was killing all the maple trees. If it continued, there would be no more maple syrup, which is quite a big industry. They put in some regulations, the factories cleaned up their emissions, and all of a sudden the acid rain disappeared, and the maple trees recovered.

H.E. To wrap it up, any advice for the youths?

C.N. I don’t like to advise people.

[Laughter]

H.E. That’s what they all say…

C.N. I believe in freedom. People need to follow their own path to freedom. I’ve tried to live a free life in the ways that I felt possible. If there’s something you would like to do, you just have to do it. People sometimes seem afraid to do that. Figure it out as you go along. It’s part of an improvised life. You have to improvise your life. Everything can’t be all planned out because you don’t know what’s going to happen. On my journeys, I never know what’s going to happen. You put yourself out there and you have certain impulses as to what you want to happen. You put yourself in situations where something interesting could happen, but you don’t know. Nothing might happen…

H.E. You have to do things for the pleasure of doing them.

C.N. I don’t know if pleasure comes into it that much.

[Laughter]

H.E. No, it’s mostly sufferance.

C.N. Yes, you have to learn to love to suffer. Maybe then you’ll have some pleasure in the midst of all the suffering.

H.E. Once a year!

C.N. Yeah, so anyway. Try not to suffer too much.

H.E. You too. Well, it’s been a pleasure.

C.N. Yeah, it’s been a real pleasure.

[Laughter]