Sophie's Choice

Oh, but somehow I got sidetracked. I think it was the long years of editorial work, especially of a rather technical nature. I got sidetracked into dealing with other people’s ideas and words rather than my own, and that’s hardly conducive to creative effort.

consummating the sale,

Yet I need not have worried at all, for in a couple of days I was to receive a windfall which would rescue me—for the immediate future, at least.

Although, as I said, I was without real fear in my plight, I could not help feeling a trifle insecure, especially since the prospects of getting another job were next to zero.

AFTER MY SOLITARY that evening at the Longchamps restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue, I counted my money and reckoned my total worth at something less than fifty dollars.

Meanwhile, I only knew that I would go down for the last time from the twentieth floor, riding the aseptic green elevator to the chaotic Manhattan streets, and there celebrate my deliverance with expensive Canadian ale and the first sirloin steak I had eaten since coming to New York.

Nor did I then realize that my voyage of discovery would also be a journey to a place as strange as Brookly

from which I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation.

It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death.

but for some reason Farrell’s story had struck so deeply at my heart that for the first time in my life I was aware of the large hollowness I carried within me.