I understood Eitel even less when he told me these stories. I had always thought that to know oneself was all that was necessary, probably because I didn’t know myself at all. I did not see how Eitel could talk about himself so clearly, and be able to do nothing with it. I even wondered why he didn’t mind that I told him nothing further about me, and I had the feeling that our friendship was of very small size. Often, after I left him and went back to the house I rented on the edge of the desert, I would leave off thinking about Eitel, and I would be stuck in my own past. I wanted to talk to him, to try to explain things I could not explain to myself, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t remember ever talking about the orphanage, at least not since I went into the Air Force. I had such a desire to be like everybody else, at least everybody who had made it, and to make it, I boxed my way into the middleweight semi-finals of an Air Force enlisted man’s tournament, and when that gave me the chance to go to flying school, I studied hours at night to pass the pre-flight examinations. Until I graduated, nothing seemed so important as to get my wings.