Oliver Lange, “Defiance”

He was in a fine mood, pleased by the formidable impression he imagined he would have made on any stranger who met him on the trail.

What is lacking in this country is a climate of unrest. A certain air of mewling discontent does exist, but it is too similar to the affectionate bickering young lovers indulge in as they jockey for the role identities that will endure between them for the rest of their married lives. Except for your criminal elements, who through circumstance or choice are the pariahs of any society, I defy you to find nowadays any of the implacable ferocity that must have been extant in the Jacobin, Cromwellian, pre-Revolutionary American and Czarist-ruled societies.

He wondered if he would have been more complete if as a young man he’d lost himself in something other than art. Law had always fascinated him, as had sociology. Certainly, at twenty, the huge energies he knew he had at his disposal should have suggested something more than this, nearly three decades of creative mediocrity. Did that explain his years of growing hostlity? The self-lubricated withdrawal that become hostile isolation? The increasing inability to discover anything gratifying in contemporary life? Did it explain the years of heavy drinking? The self-destructiveness? The fits of depression that became almost suicidal? Was it the loss of one wife by incompatibility and another by death? Was it the special hunch he’d had about himself when younger, that he was good enough to win at anything he tried?