By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (ed. New York Review of Books, 2012) - ISBN: 9781590175446