Sublime

(liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion).

Having a child, a son, Felix M——had thought would settle him and end his wandering habits: his endless circuitous perambulations penetrating certain dives and dens of depravity which are all but unknown and invisible to the general culture.

Updike’s “A&P”