UNLIKE THE SPRAWLING VILLAGES OF most colleges, LAAC was a single, bulging hive. Centrality and connection defined the architecture. Our drive into the parking lot today revealed the college in glimpses—a long white walkway here, a shaded patio there, the wavy roof of the new music theater. At LAAC, you could stroll the entire campus without leaving a building, without breaking free of the school’s humming activity. Along the way, the ghostly tracks of its illustrious alumni crisscrossed your path—this was a MacArthur Fellow’s studio once; that was the stage where an Oscar winner had made his debut. Every doorknob on campus had been touched by someone famous.

LAAC was a pressure cooker, an incubator, and a chrysalis. Although my young alumni friends ranged in personality and background, they all had one thing in common: they questioned everything but the value of art. If they’d arrived at the school with faith in some other higher purpose—honoring God, their parents, their culture, money, love—they left the school with that certitude in tatters. Instead, art sewed their existence together. For this conversion, they’d gained a tremendous education and an ability to see into our culture, to dismantle it, to find the reasons behind the reasons. In conversation, they could unravel an average person like me. Yet the change came at a cost. An ordinary life—working at any dull or obligatory job, marrying, buying a house, raising kids, even wanting wealth at all—was, for an LAAC grad, no longer acceptable as a means for happiness. You could do it, but you might betray your true nature. Far better to starve and self-deny than to yield to a life of quiet desperation. This transformation was Hal’s real legacy. His masterpiece. It’s one thing to influence culture with your paintings or sculptures, but to transform hundreds of young men and women, one by one, into new creatures in your own image? That is the work of a Creator.

Janis was waiting in the parking lot with her driver. She hopped out as soon as we pulled up. She did not look ill. In fact, she looked like she was refusing to look ill, all wound up in her blue pantsuit and huge round sunglasses. Yet the sight of her stabbed me.