The particular pleasure a day like that gave me, the freedom from all concern I felt, and the lightness of spirit which followed; the sense that my life lay wholly inside me where I hoped it would redouble itself and resound like music in a church; that it could not, in such sacred circumstances, be harmed or hampered; that the hours ahead of me were mine the way my breath was, and consequently had to be sweet and fulfilling beyond any other’s; and that my companions (my walk, my malt, my movie, my paperback book) had been thoroughly tested and could be counted on absolutely, inasmuch as I needed them—needed them mightily—since I opened the world and went in naked when I took my stroll, watched the screen, entered O. Henry or the life of Cellini (#42); and because my friends would not fail me any more than Virgil would have forsaken Dante (why should they? those chunks of chocolate had no better mouth), I could pass through the furnace and come away unscathed; life could be lived from the inside out as it ought to be, and savored, witnessed, even saved, no matter what otherwise it was: these youthful feelings, these exhilarations, are really gone for good, and cannot even be represented now; for now I know too much; now I know precisely how momentous, how right, how rare, yet how ill-fledged and formed of illusion, they were; how Spinoza would have regarded my tawdry little props, my shallow pleasures, as negations, as fears, as pure passivities, and replaced them with a much more phallic and constructive love, a love for thought, for relevant theory; no resplendent tower of oil for him, or dreams confined in sausage skins, but ideas resembling a regiment in review; I know how Rilke, who also understood the importance of ponds and blue days, who had felt the tug of a balloon at its string, the ever-so-sweet ice melting slowly in the mouth, would have agreed about the way the balloon brings that terror and its relief together in one fragile sphere of lightness, and in his dark punctilious garb and girlish mind, I know how he would have grieved for the agreement; yet these magical moments of complete release were burst almost as soon as they were shaped; they were never bees, and there is no map for their return, not even as Ulysses, so that a song-abandoned book might smell a welcome-home in childhood hands again; nevertheless, though presently as flat and ready for the sink as the dregs of a party, these emotions were powerful and plentiful then, as the first f^izz is consequently, when I got home and went to my room to read (#20 that day in my catch like a fine fish), I was carried past my aunt’s offer of taffy in unremovable wrappers, my mother’s worried questions (what have you got there? did you enjoy your day? will you be down for dinner?), and my father’s complaints (what did that cost? you’ve been out of the house all day! I thought I asked you to cut the grass), by the continuous uprush of my passion toward its fated pop; and then until dinner I would die down, as no lover would later let me, in the language and lap of Shakespeare or Carlyle or Mann or Cervantes.