A literary interlude.

Perhaps it was the know­ledge that no one heard him, or per­haps it was to make a sort of amends for his former fear, or simply the hope that if they should tune him in now, at the top of his form, they would for­get who it was that had driv­en them away from their sets in the first place and would place a new and stronger con­fid­ence in him. At any rate, using the name Dick Gibson, he spoke dur­ing this res­pite with a sil­ver tongue, lips that were sweeter than wine, a golden throat. He was in a state of grace, of clas­sic second chances. The more it galled him that no one heard him, the bet­ter he was. The weath­er had turned bad and there was a thin film of unseason­able ice along Route 33; yet he hoped that someone passing through might be listen­ing. It could make a dif­fer­ence between one concept of the place and anoth­er. Such a stranger might think, for as long as the sig­nal las­ted, that he had entered a Shangri-La, crossed a bor­der more telling than the Iowa-Nebraska one, and come into—despite the flat­ness stretch­ing bey­ond and before him—a sort of val­ley, still unspoiled, unmarked per­haps on maps. To stay with­in range of the signal—never strong and now dam­aged fur­ther by the invol­un­tary surges and slack­en­ings of an incon­stant electricity—the stranger might slow down (it would have noth­ing to do with the ice) and Dick would guide him, pre­serving him on the treach­er­ous road as art pre­serves, as God does work in mys­ter­i­ous ways. The stranger might even pull over to the side. Dick pic­tured the fel­low, his sales­man’s wares piled high in the space from which he had removed the back seat, sit­ting there, his appoint­ments for­got­ten, time itself for­got­ten, pre­oc­cu­pied, listen­ing with a recovered won­der unfa­mil­i­ar with child­hood, in a state of grace himself. 

—Stanely Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show, 1970