“I thought I recognized in him a certain kind of man, a man who is damaged and yet unflinching. I’ve met a few. Because he has taken pain, such a man knows he can take more. In fact, he expects it; suffering, so far as he sees, is in the order of things, the logic of the universe. Usually such men are hard, even self-punishing workers, capable of long periods of isolation or aloneness, and suffer bouts of crippling melancholy. They refuse to take antidepressants, they refuse to talk too much; instead they wait and wait, with the patience of a cat, for the mood to turn. They drink coffee alone in the morning, they smoke cigarettes on the porch… Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he’d better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him – the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream. Yes, let me say it again. Quiet men with dreams can be dangerous.”
~ Colin Harrison, ‘The Havana Room’
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