Too many people, for one thing, when they get to dying, want to top Jesus. Wanting that, inevitably, they want to kill as many others as possible by Christlike torture-- forgetting that even He had his legs broken as a method of mercy killing. My apologies, then, for not entering this note sooner. I sat at the window and I could have pulled out my own hair, or wept, (or roared with laughter) on account of Paul. I knew Paul pretty well, and loved him. And I did not believe he was enough of a realist or a humorist to marry a harlot and prosper in his soul. Whoever she was, she would eat him away altogether, or eat away years of him. When he found himself out--that he could not accept himself with her--it might be too late. He was stubborn. The ordeal would continue--brave front and eroding guts. What should a man do? _I am not my brother's keeper._ How often that wretched phrase has been used as the alibi for vicious neglect! How rarely has it served in the intended sense. It is but a warning to Peeping Toms, to Meddlesome Matties and Interfering In-Laws, Overweening Do-gooders, Paul Prys, the Rabble of the Self-righteous. Would God the Peepul understood the Words of Jesus had one meaning, always, and often the opposite of the convenient, accepted interpretation; that their Christ appreciated how nothing can be truly said of the Father that does not make a suitable apothegm for Beelzebub! Who asked them to _interpret_, anyway? He told them to _act_. _I am not my brother's keeper._ The Holy Writ that John Sumner never comprehended, or Anthony Comstock, old Cotton Mather, and a dozen billion more. What man, seeing even a pig caught under a fence, does not pull it out, although it might be the Sabbath? Which is germane to the circumstance? What of the Good Samaritan? I left the sunset hanging over the gray composite of the roofs--the willow trees in penthouse gardens, the chimneypots that twirled with supper cooking, and the fly-eyed walls, the thousand-lenses, the bloodshot windows staring at New Jersey--staring from the square sides of skyscrapers that towered around me in stiff, unplanned attention, waiting for night, waiting with God knew what stony thoughts and brickish resignation--doubtless for Soviet rockets. I pushed down my shorts, kicked them onto a bed as Paul had kicked his jacket, and turned on the water in the tub. I lay down there, donning the warm garment gradually, the wet, the clean, the only other that fits as perfectly as the grave. I turned off the tap with my foot. I looked at my skin, which was still fairly smooth, for all the long time I'd worn it, weathered it, and given it unnatural chores of excretion. Good-bye to All That. Good-bye Mr. Chips. And Miss Chippies.