“A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.”

Companionship treated as a physical necessity, not a luxury · Autobiographical prose

• Companionship
• Conversation
• Solitude

“In mature years I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life.”

Friendship framed as the heartbeat of ethical existence · Autobiographical prose

• Friendship
• Morality
• Society

“Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: Once upon a time.”

A remembered deprivation of story and play in a severely religious upbringing · Father and Son

• Childhood
• Family
• Imagination