Sublime

She may agree with the poet Mary Oliver that “creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration. . . . It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching,” or with Gertrude Stein, who warned, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

For his bold judicial opinion he received bushels of letters threatening to kill him and telling him he’d burn in hell for eternity. Kramer had to live with twenty-four-hour police protection and wear a bulletproof vest under his judicial robes. He also strapped on a gun.41