....his silence he has indicated that he is willing. He hasn't the strength any more, the excess vitality, for an affair — its danger, its demand per… - John Updike

..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."

Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.

Heade’s calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God’s grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by the small sedentary or plodding foreground figures that appear uncannily at peace as the clouds blacken and the lightning flashes.