soul is in need of a dead language. That way I can talk to myself.” This was a new Jim. He studied until 11 at night when the study hall lights turned off. He didn’t date. “Emotional doors would be closing as intellectual ones opened .... He had hit bottom.” His reading hunger enveloped him and a few gifted teachers encouraged his catholic curiosity and his Catholic faith. His temper and his libido softened, as did his language. His freshman year in college reflected a swirl of new thoughts and resolutions. At the end of the summer, following a construction job with good pay and isolation from his hell-raising high school buddies, Jim fell in love with the Broadway
stage. Summer ended and he was off to a college in the Midwest, closer to his grandmother, matriarch of the family in Chicago. A brief reunion with his aunts and cousins and he enrolled at Bradley, a small college in Peoria. Still monk-like in his application to study, “his mind was bubbling with ideas.” Christmas vacation took him b ack t o s u b u r b an Lo n g I s l a n d with his head filled with voracious reading. The Romantic poets (his teacher was “as dusty looking as if she’d spent her life as a bookmark,”) sent him reeling into a love of nature, and later, Melville and Henry James, thence forward in time to the moderns, where
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Chris Young 111 E. Dover Street Easton, Maryland 21601 410-310-4278 · 410-770-3600 chrisyoung@mris.com 155