While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us.

In Portnoy’s Complaint, Portnoy says that underneath their skirts girls all have cunts. What he didn’t say—and this was his trouble, his real complaint—was that underneath their skirts they also had souls. When they were undressed, I saw their souls as well as their cunts. They wore their souls like negligés that they never took off. And one man in

They were more real than anything I had ever known, real as only imagined things can be, real as dreams that seem so unbearably actual because they are cleansed of all irrelevances. These uncles, these books, moved into the vacuum of my imagination.

Until we became sophisticated about it, sex was everything Freud said it was.

For young people who had just left home to go live in the Village, books were like dolls or teddy bears or family portraits. They populated a room.

But I was like an immigrant who goes from a poor country to a rich one and can’t quite believe in his new prosperity. I distrusted my happiness—it seemed too easy and I was afraid it might be simply a failure of consciousness. My imagination itched and I had nothing to scratch.

Besides, he talked so well—it would be like punching literature in the mouth.

I hadn’t yet realized that loneliness was not so much a feeling as a fate. It was loneliness that walked the streets of the Village and filled the bars, loneliness that made it seem such a lively place.

The bed called to me from the other room. How small it was for all the distances we had traveled in it. We had been like angels dancing on the head of a pin. Leaning on the doorjamb, I gazed at the bed as you gaze in museums, from behind a tasseled cord, at the curtained four-posters of kings and queens.