And because Fulbright was the chairman of the committee he had an automated — some sort of automated device that allowed the Pentagon to send him, every day, a list of the people who’d been killed in Vietnam from Arkansas. So I would go check it every day. Four of my high school classmates were killed, including, as I said, the son of my guy who was my Sunday school teacher for nine years. And I also knew, because I had to carry the stuff around, that not everything the government was claiming about the progress on the battlefield was true, and it’s kind of a crazy burden for a kid my age. I felt guilty I wasn’t there, and it felt futile to go. It was an awful feeling.

So it affects my work in the sense that now I’ve been kidnapped twice. So now when I’m working in a place like Iraq — even if it’s northern Iraq and someone who hasn’t survived those two things would just drive on these roads and say, like, “Oh, this is great” — but of course, for me, all I see is ISIS around every corner. Or I envision the road filling up with insurgents because I’ve seen that, and I’ve been in that situation. So it affects my work in that sense, that I’m more paranoid than I ever was, certainly than I was in my 20s.

The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom. My inspiration was a 1934 article by Viktor Hamburger reporting on the effects of limb extirpation in chick embryos. My project had barely started when Giuseppe Levi, who had escaped from Belgium invaded by Nazis, returned to Turin and joined me, thus becoming, to my great pride, my first and only assistant.

Thank God I found sobriety. I could sustain myself with my work, my reading, the movies, my friends. And walking, walking, walking. Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job. ... I can't remember the last time I felt bored. I can't eat, drink or talk, and yet I have so many other resources to keep myself entertained. I think I must be a case study.

Oh God, there are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready. ... And I don't know whether I'll do another book or not. I might. It doesn't matter. I'm a happy old man. But I will cry my way all the way to the grave.

Yes. Of course. And since I don't believe in another world, in another life, that this is it. And when they die they are out of my life. They're gone forever. Blank. Blank. Blank. And I am not afraid of death. And I begin to - as maybe a good many elderly people do. Who knows? When I did "Bumble-ardy" I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and my partner, was dying here in the house while I did "Bumble-ardy." And I did "Bumble-ardy" to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

You are the only person I have ever dealt with in terms of being interviewed or talking to who brings this out in me. There's something very unique and special in you, which I so trust. ... And almost certainly, I'll go before you go, so I won't have to miss you. ... I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life.

I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... And so it's what I dread more than anything is the isolation.

Yes. I'm not unhappy about becoming old. I'm not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me and life is emptied. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. ... But, you know, there's something I'm finding out as I'm aging that I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they're beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.