Alone on the mountain, with the laconic crackling voices that came over the fire lookout’s radio as disembodied human contacts, Jack was prepared to grapple once and for all with the sense of mortality that overwhelmed him periodically, the awful knowledge we’re-all-gonna-die which could be crowded out by movement or sex or wine or the frantic conviviality of poets and intellectuals in cities or by his own huge efforts to remember, to get it all down lest it vanish without a trace —
