What did I want from Morris Binkel? The man was practically a sociopath. He had been in New York so long, had ingested there so many values that he at heart despised, that he knew to be false and cruel, that, in angrily rejecting them, he felt also the extent to which he was beholden to them, and grew angrier still. He could no longer read five pages of anything without losing his temper, without clutching his chair in rage. Surely he’d be dead by forty. And yet the great ones were like this. And Morris, I think, had greatness in him, even if he squandered it. His anger at his era rose like vomit to his throat.

I was twenty years old. When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four, what you want from people is that they tell you about you. When you are twenty, and twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, you watch the world for the way it watches you. Do people laugh when you make a joke, do they kiss you when you lean into them at a party? Yes? Aha—so that’s who you are. But these people themselves, laughing and not-laughing, kissing and not-kissing, they themselves are young, and so then you begin to think, if you’re twenty or twenty-one, when you are young, that these people are not to be trusted, your contemporaries, your screwed-up friends and girlfriends—that it’s not because of you that they kissed you, but because of them, something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea. This is why it’s so important to meet your heroes while you are young, so they can tell you. When I met Morris Binkel I wanted merely for him to say: Yes. I see it in you. You can do with it what you will, but you’ve got it. You can be like me, if that’s what you want.