[I]f once you're started in living, you're born into sin, then? And how do you atone? By locking yourself up in remorse for what you might have done? Or by living it through. By locking yourself up in remorse with what you know you have done? Or by going back and living it through. By locking yourself up with your work, until it becomes a gessoed surface, all prepared, clean, and smooth as ivory? Or by living it through. By drawing lines in your mind? Or by living it through. If it was sin from the start, and possible all the time, to know it's possible and avoid it? Or by living it through. I used to wonder how Christ could really have been tempted, if He was sinless, and rejected the first, and the second, and the third temptation, how was He tempted? ... how did He know what it was, the way we do, to be tempted? No, He was Christ. But for us, with it there from the start, and possible all the time, to go on knowing it's possible and pretend to avoid it? Or ... to have lived it through, and live it through, and deliberately go on living it through.

- You listen to me. I've just taken a lot from you. I've taken a lot from people just like you. Just like you. That's tough, isn't it, just like you, that this town is loaded with people just like you, the world is loaded with people just like you. The honest men who are too good to fit anywhere. You're one of the people, aren't you. Look at your hands, have you ever had a callus? You don't get them lifting glasses. Who are you, to be so bitter? Have you ever done one day of work?
- Look
- And now I understand. And you talk to me about life, about real life, about human misery, Benny went on. He was not speaking loudly, nor fast, still the cold but vehement and level tone of his voice drew several people to turn around, and listen and watch. The other sat his ground with a patient sneer. - I offered you work, and you were too good for it. We buy stuff from guys like you all the time, writing under pen names to protect names that are never going to be published anywhere else, but they keep thinking they'll make it, what they want to do, but never quite manage, and they keep on doing what they're too good for. It's a joke. It's a joke, Benny repeated, and it was now that his voice began to rise.
-I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal, . . . spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard. Benny started to laugh.