therein lies what I think of now as the asymmetry of mastery: we overrate masters and underrate mastery.

Dan Rocker’s hard-to-learn lesson—that no one really notices even eccentric behavior, that you can mostly follow your star, or your zipper, without raising the eyebrows or attention of the Others, who are following their own—was true here, as it is everywhere.

But, and this is a truth that must be said, over and over: suffering is intrinsic to the human condition, and so we cannot grade it on any kind of absolute scale. What we feel is what we feel, and though it may be true that we cry when we have no shoes until we meet a man with no feet, the larger truth is that having no shoes is our only way of

Keyser Söze

What we call genius is most often inspired idiosyncrasy, and sometimes even inspired idiocy. Bob Dylan started off as a bad musician, and then spent 10,000 hours practicing. But he did not become a better musician. He became Bob Dylan.

Sung words belong more fully to the world of ritual and routine, of incantation and mothers’ murmurings, than to the fully lucid and well-lit world of argument and dramatic advance. They work, or not.

three themes seem to spiral out, educating me as they emerged. First, again, that the flow is always a function of fragments, fluid sequences are made of small steps. Separate, discrete actions learned by effort and then put together give not just the illusion of unity but the fact of mastery.

By far the best account of Benny Leonard, both of his mystique and of his fighting style, I discovered, is by Budd Schulberg in one of his collections of boxing pieces. Schulberg, to my mind, may be the most underrated of all American authors, the author of the best firsthand account of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his novel The Disenchanted, and the

the greatest card manipulator of our own time, Steve Forte,