"You talked to me of being young," I said to Jake, "you talked this evening on the bridge of losing something I would never understand. Don't you see what all that has meant to me? I was a boy without the life of a boy. Being young means bondage to me, it means a gaping sepulcher of a house smelling of dust and decay, it means people I have never loved living apart from me in a world of their own where there's no time, it means the stifling personality of my father crushing the spirit of his son, it"