No one can live like this, I repeated in my mind. And yet, in a sense, as I was increasingly to discover over the next few months, I, too, had lived like “this”: a man who found it hard to express his emotions; who focused on the minutiae of social life and often lost track of its overall design; who relied on others to direct his responses to life because he could not trust his own sense of the way it really worked—a man whose son was perhaps only the deeper, darker shadow of himself.
