Free Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

afterward by saying, "I know it's no comfort, but you're not alone—this disease has reached epidemic proportions in America. Your struggle is shared by many others. In your case, it's just too bad that I couldn't have made the diagnosis ten years from now," suggesting that the impotence brought on by the removal of the prostate might by then seem a less painful
loss. And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking thirty-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.

2 Under the Spell
    O N THE WALK from my hotel up to West 71st Street I stopped at a liquor store to buy a couple of bottles of wine for my hosts and then proceeded quickly on my way to watch the election results of a campaign that, for the first time since I was made aware of electoral politics—when Roosevelt defeated Willkie in 1940—I knew barely anything about.
    I had been an avid voter all my life, one who'd never pulled a Republican lever for any office on any ballot. I had campaigned for Stevenson as a college student and had my juvenile expectations dismantled when Eisenhower trounced him, first in '52 and then again in '56; and I could not believe what I saw when a creature so rooted in
hisruthless pathology, so transparently fraudulent and malicious as Nixon, defeated Humphrey in '68, and when, in the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a "great communicator" no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide. And was there ever an election like Gore versus Bush, resolved in the treacherous ways that it was, so perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizen's naivete? I'd hardly held myself aloof from the antagonisms of partisan politics, but now, having lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century, I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child—the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult. At least not so long as I holed up in my cabin, where I could manage to remain in America without America's ever again being absorbed in me. Aside from writing books and studying once again, for a final go-round, the first great writers I read, all the rest that once mattered most no longer mattered at all, and I dispelled a good half, if not more, of a lifetime's allegiances and pursuits. After 9/11 I pulled the plug on the contradictions. Otherwise, I told myself, you'll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman, the village grouch, manifesting the syndrome in all its seething ridiculousness: ranting and raving while you read the paper, and at night, on the phone with friends, roaring indignantly about the pernicious profitability for which a
wounded nation's authentic patriotism was about to be exploited by an imbecilic king, and in a republic, a king in a free country with all the slogans of freedom with which American children are raised. The despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious citizen in the reign of George W. Bush was not for one who had developed a strong interest in surviving as reasonably serene—and so I began to annihilate the abiding wish
to find out.
I canceled magazine subscriptions, stopped reading the
Times,
even stopped picking up the occasional copy of the
Boston Globe
when I went down to the general store. The only paper I saw regularly was the
Berkshire Eagle,
a local weekly. I used the TV to watch baseball, the radio to listen to music, and that was it.
    Surprisingly, it took only weeks to break the matter-of-fact habit that informed much of my nonprofessional thinking and