today I started to read, for the first time … just a few days short of my 71st birthday … Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. My immediate reaction was … or you poor naive romantic. But I realized that my comment was directed to my younger self and not to the author.

I don’t, yet, understand the thread of Goodman’s argument but I think I’ll spend the next few weeks trying to follow it. And I suspect that in the process I’ll find a clue to what happened between 1959 and 1980 — when dusk fell on [the United States of] America.