God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.