I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end… - Iris Murdoch

Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist.

A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime.

He also wanted to destroy something, everything, perhaps himself.