The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward.

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.

As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.

I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

The summer of 1943 at Exeter was as happy a time as I ever had in my life.