“Well, I don’t know how the comment was intended, but I can tell you it puffed me with pride. For years after, I considered never missing a trick to be the highest form of intelligence. Later, I came to realize the cost of believing so fully in one’s powers of perception. In my daily life, at work on the committee, I swing between states of anxious hypervigilance and fantastical egoism. But at night, you see, I find myself incapable of self-delusion, incapable, even, of simple escape, so I drink and drink and still miss nothing. Only I find moments of mercy in the drink, usually around dusk,
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