Absolute perfection. All atmosphere—one of anguish, of the frozen inability to let your body slip into that painful freefall: Risk, Love, Beauty, Change—call it what you will. Lord knows we've spent ages trying to figure out whatever the hell it is—and we *still* haven't gotten to the bottom of it. It's about radically staking out that Truth (you know the one) which is all we long for in this world, but of which we are terminally afraid, and which (James suggests) we will all go to our graves having neither exhausted nor known.

"There was something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not to speak the wrong word; that would make everything ugly."

To make love, to make art, to write a novel—these are really all the same project: the doomed-to-fail search of "the lost stuff of consciousness," around which we're all fated to swirl. James's anguish is like on another dimension; how much this man must have suffered. . .