The high priest of flippancy and mocking laughter has set himself suddenly and shockingly against shallowness; he is desperately hurt and wounded, but he is still in command of his sentences, their structure and their sweep. In the dim light of the prison cell and with the memory of his suffering fresh, it was as though he sought a new sort of tension in his writing between breathlessness and breath-control. He writes long and highly wrought sentences, loving lists of adjectives and clever, Latinate diction and elaborate punctuation. To be followed by a pure, plain statement, full of the
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