Innocence Ends When One Is Stripped Of

It Is Impossible To Think Of Howard Hughes Without Seeing The Apparently Bottomless Gulf Between What We Say We Want And What We Do Want, Between What We Officially Admire And Secretly Desire, Between, In The Largest Sense, The People We Marry And The People We Love. In A Nation Which Increasingly Appears To Prize Social Virtues, Howard Hughes Remains Not Merely Antisocial But Grandly, Brilliantly, Surpassingly, Asocial. He Is The Last Private Man, The Dream We No Longer Admit.

To Shift The Structure Of A Sentence Alters The Meaning Of That Sentence, As Definitely And Inflexibly As The Position Of A Camera Alters The Meaning Of The Object Photographed.

Right There Is The Usefulness Of Migraine, There In That Imposed Yoga, The Concentration On The Pain. For When The Pain Recedes, Ten Or Twelve Hours Later, Everything Goes With It, All The Hidden Resentments, All The Vain Anxieties. The Migraine Has Acted As A Circuit Breaker, And The Fuses Have Emerged Intact. There Is A Pleasant Convalescent Euphoria.

What's So Hard About That First Sentence Is That You're Stuck With It. Everything Else Is Going To Flow Out Of That Sentence. And By The Time You've Laid Down The First Two Sentences, Your Options Are All Gone.

Strength Is One Of Those Things You're Supposed To Have. You Don't Feel That You Have It At The Time You're Going Through It.