Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

As the novelist has said, “We all have to have in some degree what Keats called negative capability, the capacity to make ourselves at home in other skins.”

Look. I like privacy, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like noise, I don’t like anarchy, I don’t even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation–not better, different.