At first it seemed the bookstore years were wasted, but I soon realized the value of that catholic and serendipitous reading as a preparation for this time. I was momentarily disappointed that there was no one at the haven to whom I could turn for that personal, face-to-face, student-teacher relationship on which I’d set so great a store, but if there was no historical scholar among the fellows to tutor me, I was surrounded by those who had learned the discipline of study. There was none to discuss the details of the industrial revolution or the failure of the Ultramontane Movement in Catholicism and the policies of Popes Adrian VII, VIII and IX, but all could show me scheme and method. I began to understand what thorough exploration of a subject meant as opposed to sciolism, and I threw myself into my chosen work with furious zest. I also began to understand the central mystery of historical theory. When and what and how and where, but the when is the least. Not chronology but relationship is ultimately what the historian deals in. The element of time, so vital at first glance, assumes a constantly more subordinate character. That the past is past becomes ever less important. Except for perspective it might as well be the present or the future or, if one can conceive it, a parallel time. I was not investigating a petrification but a fluid. Were it possible to know fully the what and how and where one might learn the why, and assuredly if one grasped the why he could place the when at will. During that winter I read philosophy, psychology, archaeology, anthropology. My energy and appetite were prodigious, as they needed to be. I saw the field of knowledge, not knowledge in the abstract, but things I wanted to know, things I had to know, expanding in front of me with dizzying speed while I crawled and crept and stumbled over ground I should have covered years before. Yet if I had studied more conventionally I would never have had the Haven or Barbara. Novelists speak lightly of gusts of passion, but it was nothing less than irresistible force which drove me to her, day after day. Looking back on what I had felt for Tirzah Vame with the condescension twenty-four has toward twenty, I saw my younger self only as callow, boyish and slightly obtuse. I was embarrassed by the torments I had suffered. With Barbara I lived only in the present, shutting out past and future. This was only partly due to the intensity, the fierceness of our desire; much came from Barbara’s own troubled spirit. She herself was so avid, so demanding, that yesterday and tomorrow were irrelevant to the insistent moment. The only thing saving me from enslavement like poor Ace was the belief, correct or incorrect I am to this day not certain, that to yield the last vestige of detachment and objectivity would make me helpless, not just before her, but to accomplish my ever more urgent ambitions.