This isn’t just an epigram⁠—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

I was rather literary in college⁠—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News⁠—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.