[...] I was trying to assign Wallace to myself as a kind of coach who might be able to help me work through these straits and thus finally, narrowly escape a recurring self-centered bitteredness I was only too eager to leave behind but which I constantly felt was simply and inevitably in my blood. The infamous 27 had come and gone with little to no anxiety for me, but 46 was and still is an entirely different, much larger and darker, bear in the woods.

A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno.