Tom and I debated the modernist subject of the century, to answer the question on each civilized man’s mind: nature or nurture? We were not so much debating the question, I assume, as only science can answer it, but I was telling Tom it will be the philosophical backdrop for Ophelia’s Love. Freud armwrestling Darwin, Sartre headbutting Ayn Rand. It is hard for me to conclude different than to see modern man as a softspoken, eloquent man to whom manhood is a recent discovery, in whom civilization is a state of constant repression, a waste product of a civic education that mediates and pacifies his aggression into sublime formulas of intellect and acceptable norms of politeness.