Once, long years ago, a gentleman visited me in jail—for I had an office, then, in what had formerly been a village jailhouse—for the purpose of launching a certain venture. During the course of our talk the name of a brother journalist came up, a man whose brain seemed to me rather on the thin side, a brain airy, light, full of trills and sudden high notes. I remarked that I had always thought of him as a sort of soprano intellectual.
That stopped the conversation. The gentleman’s eyes grew wide, his jaw sagged, he stared at me in what I took to be a confusion of delight and disbelief, and, upon regaining his voice, he exclaimed, “Did you just make that up, right now?”
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