One morning at breakfast he decided he did not like the notion that he was stewing in his own juices. How can the self measure the self? his ethics professor had questioned so many years back. What a turmoil his mind had been in those years, say from fifteen to twenty-two, and when he had tried to share this turmoil with parents and friends they had failed him with banal accusations such as “you think you’re smart.” After all, the most obnoxious young people are those who read Thomas Wolfe and take that great burly oaf to heart. In the following generation Kahlil Gibran and Hermann Hesse were to cause fewer problems, albeit their brand of pap seemed to cause early senescence among the young. He had noted this tendency at a convention of wood stove dealers, yet another of his hesitant forays into individual capitalism in the past year.