SOURCE: "Henry and June," in American Film, Vol. XV, No. 12, September 1990, pp. 22-29, 46-48.

[In the following essay, Klinger talks with some major players in the production of the film Henry and June, the screenplay of which was adapted from an excerpt from Nin's Diary.]

How would you react if you found out your wife was having sex with another man? Would it make any difference if she were only doing it for the money? What if the two of you were broke and starving? Or suppose you were an artist, and your wife's belief in your talent was so unrelenting that her adultery was a purely selfless act? Would you try to stop it? Would you look the other way? Or could you watch as it happens?

On a winter afternoon in Paris, a heavy snow is about to fall. Well, not exactly snow, but pounds of white, lighter-than-air guck (ground-up plastic foam, confetti, soap suds and mousse foam) with a half-life of around a century. And it isn't actually going to fall but, instead, will soon be blown blizzard-like out of air cannons across a dark Brooklyn rooftop. Not the real Brooklyn, but a detailed replica of a neighborhood that a young and unpublished writer named Henry Miller called home. This flash-back Brooklyn stands inside a soundstage at the Studios Eclair on the outskirts of Paris, where writer-director Philip Kaufman is shooting Henry & June.

Kaufman and his French crew wait behind a video monitor on the roof for a fairly simple shot: Fred Ward, who plays Miller, will scurry across the roof and down the fire escape, where he'll look in on his unfaithful bride, June (Uma Thurman). Kaufman, in old tennis shoes, jeans and a dark jacket, opens a small umbrella over his shoulder-length, graying hair and says, "Action."

The snowstorm blasts the roof; Ward crosses, head down, and lowers himself onto the fire escape. The whole thing takes about 10 seconds, then it's, "Cut." When the snow settles, Kaufman folds the umbrella. He smiles and looks pleased. But as a director whose offbeat sense of humor permeates even his most somber films, it's not clear whether he's happy about the scene or the fact that he's the only person on the roof who doesn't appear to be dusted with toxic levels of powdered sugar.

The film is based on the book Henry & June, culled from previously unpublished sections of The Diary of Anaïs Nin. When her diary was first published in 1966, Nin chose to edit out references to her personal life in order to protect her husband, Hugh Guiler. After Guiler's death, it was Nin's wish that the unexpurgated journals, written from October 1931 through October '32, be published. In 1986, Rupert Pole, the executor and trustee of Nin's estate, edited the material to focus on her relationships with Henry and June Miller and, with the publication of Henry & June, revealed the story that had been kept secret from the world for more than 50 years—that Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller had been lovers.

"They had a literary relationship that lasted a lifetime," says Kaufman. "It was really extraordinary to realize that they had this wild, passionate love affair, and that they chronicled it—the idea that the two most prominent writers who wrote about sexual freedom turned out to have been lovers."

The film's story, then, is really Nin's story, a journey of sexual awakening, liberation and experimentation. Happily married for seven years, Nin lives a comfortable life in suburban Paris. Then into her world steps Henry Miller, and within a year, all of their lives would be dramatically altered. "The whole film is about writers and writing and the creative urge," explains Kaufman, "The connection between their creative urges and sexual urges. In a way, it's an adventure story, an exploration. Three people who went on a creative adventure together."

Further complicating matters, before embarking on her odyssey with Miller, Nin becomes intrigued by the character he was writing about—his wife, June. When June arrives from New York, Nin soon finds herself uncontrollably drawn to June as well, setting the stage for an emotional love triangle.

In a way, the film becomes the story of two writers who are writing about the same woman—their stories revealed through the telling of the story of June. "These are two writers who, the great bulk of their writing was about the same woman," says Kaufman. "The one year that June entered both of their lives [1931–32] affected them for the rest of their lives…. June was their muse and their fixation. And a real troublemaker."

Wind whips the circus tent that serves as the crew's mess hall. I'm seated at a lunch table with Phil, his wife, Rose (with whom he cowrote the screenplay), and their son Peter, who's producing. As screenwriters, the Kaufmans have mastered the art of adapting impossibly complex and literate books into accessible mainstream films. But their previous experience, translating The Wanderers, The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the screen, didn't prepare them for the challenge of adapting a diary. The biggest problem was finding a way to dramatize events as they happened, moment to moment, without the analysis and reflection that comes when those events are described hours afterward in a diary.

"Nin's analysis tends to dehydrate things in some way," Phil admits. "And putting the juice back into the events was difficult. The way you do it is, you just sort of inhabit the atmosphere [of the book] and start dreaming about what's in there. You need to take three or four years between movies, and that's all you do, work on one movie."

But the idea of working on a single screenplay for several years sounds like heresy at a time when studio executives expect scripts in a matter of weeks.

Kaufman shakes his head. "You don't get to make that many films. That's part of the Hollywood syndrome, really—everyone is just pumping away and pumping away, and most of the films never have that sense of being lived in. There's nothing authentic about them." He pauses, then dovetails this position to the subject at hand. "Somewhere you have to make the decision to step aside, and that's what interests me about Henry Miller: He burned his bridges. He was 40 years old and unpublished. When I was younger and struggling and trying to be a writer, just the existence of that fact was a great thing. There was something about Henry's enthusiasm and energy that was encouraging and inspiring, that said you have to live with a different rhythm and a different sensibility."

Step aside. Live with a different rhythm. Life lessons Philip Kaufman learned early and well. Raised on the north side of Chicago, he attended the University of Chicago (class of '58), where he met Rose. They have a marriage as well as a working partnership—she has been intimately involved in most of his films and shares writing credit on two of them. "I'm with Rose all the time," he confesses. "We're always reading and talking about things."

Kaufman entered Harvard Law School but was so seduced by the liberating spirit of Miller's books, he dropped out and moved to Mill Valley, California, where he delivered mail and started work on a novel. During this period, the Kaufmans made a pilgrimage to Miller's home in Big Sur and spent an inspiring evening with the somewhat fragile, 68-year-old author. Shortly thereafter, the Kaufmans took off for Europe.

They hitchhiked around the continent while Phil taught at American schools in Greece and Italy, drove a tractor on an Israeli kibbutz, and kept at his novel. But his head was turned again, this time by the emergence of New Wave cinema, particularly the first films of Godard, Truffaut and Pasolini. In 1962, he returned to Chicago with aspirations of becoming a filmmaker.

Later that year, Anaïs Nin came to the University of Chicago to promote her husband's experimental film, and Kaufman was introduced to another of his literary heroes. "I was very moved by Anaïs when I met her," he says. "I was just a guy struggling to make his first film. She'd never read anything I'd written, and yet she spent hours and hours talking to me and encouraging me."

Duly inspired, Kaufman—all of 26—wrote and directed two films on shoe-string budgets. Goldstein won the Prix de la Nouvelle Critique at the Cannes Film Festival; Fearless Frank, a comic-book satire starring Jon Voight, won Kaufman a contract with Universal Studios as a member of its young directors program. The Kaufmans moved to Los Angeles for what might best be described as a decade of discouragements.

In '68, Kaufman wrote the brilliant, revisionist Western, The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, then carried on a four-year fight with the studio to get it made and released. The White Dawn (1974), an Eskimo adventure shot on location in the Arctic, went unnoticed. He wrote The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) but was replaced as the director by the film's star, Clint Eastwood. Scarred by the experience, to this day Kaufman avoids working with stars. "I'd rather work with actors who will stimulate me and be stimulated by me, and, unfortunately, I think most stars remove themselves from that interplay with the director. It has something to do with [stars'] salaries now—everyone's a millionaire."

Worse was yet to come. Kaufman spent eight months developing the first Star Trek movie, only to have a top Paramount executive tell him that there was no future in science fiction—a remark that predated the release of Star Wars by a few weeks. Around the same time, he bought the rights to Richard Price's teen novel The Wanderers and wrote the screenplay; the project was initially turned down everywhere on the belief that an audience for teen comedies was nonexistent.

Feeling trapped, the Kaufmans decided to return to the San Francisco Bay area, and, almost immediately, their luck changed. His next film, the darkly satiric, stylish remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), shot in San Francisco, became his first box-office hit. On the heels of that success, he got The Wanderers made in 1979, then cowrote the story for Raiders of the Lost Ark with George Lucas. Next came the Oscar-winning astro-epic The Right Stuff (1983) and then his erotic tour-de-force, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. By leaving L.A., remaining true to his iconoclastic tastes, and refusing to sell himself short for a check, he'd become an Oscar-nominated, A-list writer-director.

The most emotionally ambitious film Kaufman's ever attempted, Henry & June further explores the thematic terrain of Unbearable—the sexually charged interpersonal dramas between man and woman, woman and woman, husband and wife. The more deeply involved the characters become sexually, the deeper the film delves into the meaning of innocence. The moral outlook isn't that anyone who has sex loses innocence. It's not a film that takes place within a traditional morality. Kaufman once said, in reference to Unbearable, that love, sex, ecstasy and the links between them should be film's real subject.

Of Henry & June, he says, "That's exactly what this film is about. It's much more of an exploration into eroticism, love, marriage, literature."

I am trapped between the beauty of June and the genius of Henry. I am devoted to both, a part of me goes out to each of them. Are we three immense egos fighting for domination, or for love, or are these things mixed?

—Anaïs Nin

When you set out to make a movie that will serve as a personal payback for a lifetime of inspiration, finding the right actors to portray your heroes takes on a higher importance than usual. For Kaufman, casting Henry & June was a long, arduous process. He saw half the actresses on two continents in his search for Anaïs Nin, among them French star Isabelle Adjani. Hollywood's flavor-of-the-year, Alec Baldwin, was actually cast as Henry Miller, then backed out for personal reasons. Ultimately, Kaufman fell back on his career-long pattern of casting lesser-known performers.

To play Nin, he chose Maria de Medeiros, a young Portuguese actress with a hot theater reputation but no film work, and the buzz on the set was that he'd struck gold. "I was hoping she'd be good, but she was beyond any hopes I had. Maria is a genius…. She really became Anaïs Nin. She's an idea actress—she only would try to do what I really was after. She speaks four languages fluently, and in English, she could match Nin's accent exactly." And not that it necessarily mattered, but she happens to be a dead ringer for the petite, saucer-eyed diarist.

Kaufman surprised a lot of people by going against type when he cast Fred Ward as Miller. "Fred's an old friend of mine, and those of us who know him know that Fred has a literary side. He's a serious poet. During The Right Stuff [he played Gus Grissom], he'd always be the guy reading books between takes. [For months] he'd been writing me in Paris, saying how much he wanted to play Henry Miller—he lived in Big Sur, he's knocked around, he's lived the life."

Ward is virtually unrecognizable. More compact in person than he appears in the movies, with shaved head, glasses and period costume, he bears ample resemblance to Miller. Those on the set say that he perfected Henry's gruff, Brooklyn accent.

Though she is only a supporting character, the casting of June Miller was crucial. As the pivotal beauty who brings the two writers together and fuels their adventure, whoever got the part had to capture the innocence and deceit, the quirkiness and mystery that is June.

When Kaufman met Uma Thurman, who was impressive in supporting performances in Dangerous Liaisons and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, she was a risky choice—an actress significantly younger than the character, with limited experience. But she made the decision easy for him. "Uma has an amazing quality," he says. "We couldn't find anyone who had that quality—that haunting, wonderful thing June had."

But when asked how she's doing in the film, Kaufman's voice becomes subdued. "Uma is a very good actress, and I'm very pleased by her. I think she gives a wonderful performance."

Back on the set, Ward has gone to the airport to meet his wife, and the actresses have the day off. A couple of crew guys are 50 feet up on a portable scaffold, adjusting equipment for what will amount to a four-second reverse angle from Henry's point-of-view, looking down from the fire escape. They're an hour away from completing the set-up, so Kaufman offers an impromptu tour.

The production design by Guy-Claude Francois was inspired by photographs of that period, especially a collection by Brassai titled The Secret Paris of the '30s. In some instances, sets have been decorated and lit in order to re-create a specific Brassai still.

Kaufman shows me his "Brassai wall"—a block-long exterior facsimile complete with cobblestone street—built with a downward slant to increase its illusion of depth. The same care was paid in re-creating Miller's squalid Paris apartment. Unwashed dishes, empty bottles, peeling wallpaper, bricks coming through worn-out linoleum floor (a detail unlikely to ever show up on film), and a desk with pages of longhand writing and pictures of June and Anaïs taped to the wall.

Kaufman takes great joy in getting the details right. Although it isn't necessary to know anything about Miller or Nin to follow their story in the film, the more you know about them, the more you'll appreciate the attention to authenticity. "There are so many things planted for you to see," says Kaufman. "These are the real metal boxes that Nin kept her journals in, sent to us by Rupert Pole. Nobody would have known that, but it gives the film the right feeling.

"We've shot quite a few sex scenes on that bed," he quips, gesturing at the dilapidated bunk in Miller's shabby bedroom. Asked if he is concerned about the possibility of an X rating, his voice grows a little tense. "Let's just say, I'm contractually bound to deliver an R."

"It was very painful writing this screenplay," he confesses later that day. "It took us well over a year. We had to go through not only Henry & June but the matching journal, which has the other half of the story. We read all the diaries, her novels, Miller's novels and their correspondence."

The production office bookcase bears him out. It's jammed with every conceivable book relating to Miller, Nin and Paris in the '30s, their pages marked with Post-its and 3-by-5 cards, painstakingly cross-referenced. The Kaufmans more likely spent years, not months, saturating themselves in the source material. "There's a scene in the film where Henry and Anaïs are going over each other's work and arguing about it," he says. "Rose and I had a similar experience writing this."

A publicist summons Kaufman to the set. The famous European producer Serge Silberman has come to Paris to have lunch with Uma Thurman. Thurman, in turn, has brought Silberman to the set to meet her director. The publicist informs me that this is not the right moment to meet Thurman. She'll be available later.

Stephen Frears, her director on Dangerous Liaisons, once remarked that he was amazed by her steady stream of visitors. "She seemed to have the most wonderful life going on. People would pass through Paris and see the Eiffel Tower and Uma."

Piles of black-and-white prints taken by the production's still photographer attest to the effectiveness of Kaufman's recreation of "wild Paris of the '30s," The mysterious neo-Brassai night scenarios, hundreds of semi-nude extras, freaks in a dark cold rain, a carnival of the absurd. Then come pictures of Uma Thurman, which call to mind one of Nin's descriptions of June Miller:

A startling white face, burning eyes…. As she came toward me from the darkness … I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth…. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything for her, anything she asked me…. She was color, brilliance, strangeness.

"We needed a goddess," Rose Kaufman says as I set down the pictures, "and we got one."

"People come in with their projection of who you are, and they expect you to match it," says Uma Thurman, explaining on the phone why she dislikes being interviewed. "It's entirely uncomfortable, top to bottom, and it all seems sort of irrelevant."

It is a rainy night in New York almost five months after Paris, and we are having our first conversation. We're setting up a time to meet for an interview, and although her voice is calm and polite, the wariness comes through loud and clear. With the release of Liaisons the year before, she experienced her first go-round with the entertainment press and was caught off guard.

"I mean, I was 18. It's an awkward position to be in, when you're still sort of discovering yourself, and to have, at the same time, serious people asking you serious questions.

"Basically, a lot of my attitudes about a lot of things were very adolescent—and probably still are. I learned that I get flippant, that I say foolish things. I learned that irony doesn't play in print particularly well."

Without the cachet of a major acting role or a previous incarnation as a supermodel, she landed the cover of Rolling Stone's 1989 "Hot Issue" and was named one of Us magazine's "10 Most Beautiful Women." Mademoiselle dubbed her "the thinking man's sex symbol." This kind of pop-culture attention seems to vaguely embarrass her.

I suggest we meet the next day and go for a walk around the Village. No serious questions.

No tape recorder in her face.

"Great," she says conspiratorially. "Instead of doing an interview, we'll just get together and talk off the record."

I order room service. A few minutes later, the phone rings. It's Thurman. "Hi. What are you doing right now?"

"Watching Twin Peaks."

"Everyone's watching Twin Peaks! I don't have television. Listen. Why don't you meet us in about a half-hour at Chelsea Billiards? We'll shoot pool, then afterwards go to a wrap party for my roommate's movie. This'll all be off the record, OK?"

I take a chair along the back wall under a photo-portrait of Minnesota Fats and wait for them to show. I expect to see someone like the voluptuous, oval-faced Venus of Munchausen or the hypnotic Cecile from Liaisons. A girl with loose bales of blonde hair, innocent gray-blue eyes and a tall neck, colorless as a milkwood vase. When she finally arrives, it's a different Uma Thurman.

Dressed in an ankle-length, loose silk over-coat, she arrives as unnoticed as any five-11 blonde can, cutting through rows of tables and low overhead lights. She hurries downstairs to a less crowded room and takes a table in the back corner, where, for the next two hours, no one will bother her, her boyfriend or her best friend and roommate, Galaxy Craze (a fellow actress and undergrad at Barnard).

Thurman opens a felt case and removes a beautiful new cue stick—a birthday gift of the week before, when she had officially escaped teenager status. Under her coat, she wears a loose black cashmere sweater tucked into black jeans. Black flats. Three loops of century-old steel beads from Ethiopia. No lipstick to draw attention to her full, pouty mouth. No makeup to hide the dark circles under her eyes. The glorious Uma hair chopped to shoulder-length, part of a recent effort, she explains, to downplay the sex-star thing, to try to avoid future appearances in such places as Playboy's list of one-night-stand fantasies of the decade. She buys coffee (cream, no sugar) from a machine and lights the first of a chain of Marlboro Lights (in the box), then stretches her long-stemmed frame across the felt for a bank shot. She has a great stroke.

One thing you should know about Uma Thurman is that she's American. Because her two breakthrough films were mounted in Europe, there's a popular misconception that she's Scandinavian. And then there's the name: Uma Karuna Thurman. Her father, an Eastern Religions scholar and professor at Columbia University, took the name from Hindu mythology. Uma is a word that has meanings in Japanese, Sanskrit and Tibetan, but it doesn't mean a thing in Peoria.

An Uma-nescent dossier: born in Boston in 1970; grew up in New England and Woodstock, New York; her mother, a former model once married to acid guru Timothy Leary, is a psychotherapist in New York; has three brothers; attended Northfield Mount Hermon boarding school; moved to New York at 16 and lived alone in Hell's Kitchen; modeled to make ends meet; studied acting and auditioned relentlessly; appeared in the films Kiss Daddy Goodnight, Johnny Be Good and Where the Heart Is; lives in a duplex in Greenwich Village, but may soon move to the country; loves a cold bottle of beer.

What's the point of denying it? Hanging out with Uma Thurman is a blast. She is bright, frequently hilarious, intense and impossibly charming. She has a great group of loyal friends who are also fun to be around. She loves to talk (off the record) and will speak at length on an assortment of subjects, from religious iconography or architecture to Shakespeare. ("Don't say I'm reading Hamlet! It sounds like I'm promoting myself as an actor.") And when she's not carefully editing every thought, she's inclined to say something unpredictable. For instance, when the subject of her nude scenes in Dangerous Liaisons comes up, she remarks, "I don't know why it's so sensationalized. We're living in a country where 55 percent of the people think they've had a personal conversation with God—but that's not considered insane! So there's sex in a movie. What's the big deal?"

When she's completely at ease, her voice dissolves into a soft teenage purr, and she sounds like the archetypal Sensitive Girl from your high-school class. At such moments, she is most apt to describe one thing or another as "my very favorite thing"—as in, "Dreaming is my very favorite thing." Over two days, she labeled each of the following as her "very favorites": cooking for friends at her house, backgammon ("the Thurmans are very big on board games," says a close friend), reading, her industrial-strength juicer ("the one thing I'd save in a fire"), having Galaxy for a roommate, and the view of the trees in her backyard.

A movie goddess is often made up of disparate parts, qualities that might go unnoticed if you passed her on the street. Thurman is a good example. Her body doesn't go with her face; her nose isn't thin or perfect; she lacks the classic, neatly framed cuteness. But magnified a hundred times on the screen, these parts don't just work together, they work wonders.

The quality Kaufman and other directors talk about when they talk about Thurman is hard to describe, but they know it's there. It's the quintessence of what we stand in line and pay $7 to see in a theater. So, while she optimistically searches for the next worthy project, she tries to discount the fear that, in some measure, her early success is based on ethereality—more on a body than a body of work.

One famous actor who's worked with her notes, "The recognition of great talent isn't as easy to see without the body of work. With Uma, it hasn't come yet, so people look for a way to define what they're attracted to; they scrutinize what isn't there yet. The whole thing starts to become kind of sexist—defining her success in terms of body parts."

She settles into an easy chair in her living room, sips coffee from a crystal goblet and talks about how she prepared to play June Miller. She hired a dialect coach and worked on a Brooklyn accent months before leaving for Paris, while spending hundreds of hours studying Nin's diaries and a half-dozen of Miller's novels.

"I want to qualify this by saying that I'm not a great authority on Miller, but in reading those books for the purpose of trying to excavate June, I found a tricky and dangerous path. I felt that Henry boxed her into his projections.

"Phil once said that people attack Henry Miller for being a narcissist. Well, it's very hard for a narcissist to deal with uncontrollable love for someone besides himself; it's hard for him to be at someone's mercy on an emotional level. In a lot that he wrote about her, there was the strange tone of a desperate need to capture her, tie her down to paper. His life's work.

"This is my belief, the thing that lead me in playing the character: I don't think either of them could ever take from her what she had. I believe she had a magic in life that couldn't be described or encapsulated."

Her wide eyes mist over, and she momentarily looks away. Her voice drifts off to a whisper filled with emotion. "June needed a great deal. She was sort of an unquenched thirst. She had a great longing and a painful self-reliance. She was a tragic character.

"I don't know if it comes off, 'cause I haven't seen the film, but I know June Miller put a knife in my heart. I know that through my empathy for June, I despised Anaïs Nin. I thought she was full of shit."

Counting down to the summer movie season, two topics—money and sex—are being debated on car phones all over L.A. The talk is about which pictures in a crowded field of action blockbusters and can't-miss sequels will ride to glory in the box-office sweepstakes, and about what's going on with the MPAA ratings board, which had recently slapped an X on four controversial but high-minded films.

These subjects haven't escaped the attention of Kaufman, looking rested and relaxed in the office of his postproduction center in the North Beach district of San Francisco. The irony is bittersweet: For nearly 30 years, Henry Miller's books were labeled obscene and banned from circulation in this country. Kaufman himself had smuggled a few of Miller's novels through customs on his return from Europe in '62. Now once more, the specter of censorship is looming over the passions of Miller's world.

The board's reasoning seems so subjective, its decision is impossible to predict. "I think it is censorship, and it's a dangerous thing," says Kaufman. "Our film is stimulating. It sets the mind working. But those are the areas of the mind that I feel should be stimulated. I think that the expansion of the libidinous side of our brain is somehow connected with the creative [process].

"I don't know what's going to happen. Supposedly, this is a new [ratings] board, but I'm against that form of censorship." He stops to laugh. "I mean, I'd like to see some standards applied to stupidity…. There's an hysteria loose in Hollywood—connected with money—that no one has fully been able to analyze. It defies analysis, because it's so boring."

This may look patronizing in print but, coming from Kaufman, it sounds funny. It's the same mocking sense of humor that shows up in his films and undoubtedly helps carry him through the years of intense work he puts into each project. But what's no laughing matter to him is the industry's obsession with profits.

"The thing that money creates is a separateness from society. It's a tragedy, and it happens to directors and writers and producers as well. Making money becomes an excuse for all sorts of bad movies—'I took the job because I had to support the house.' It used to be that those justifications didn't count."

He gives me a tour of the shop. Wide-open rooms with lots of windows peering down on tree-lined streets and aromatic Italian restaurants. It's a refreshing environment for work that is often tedious, and the editors I'm introduced to appear to appreciate their situation.

"I try to avoid working with people who become perverse," explains Kaufman. "I think the atmosphere comes through in the project. If there's an ornery atmosphere in the cutting room, you may not give something to the scene that's there. If you're angry, anger takes the magic out of things."

Outside, the noonday sidewalks, brimming with people, attest to the vitality of the community that surrounds. "You don't get this in Los Angeles," Kaufman observes. "Here, it isn't people isolated in cars, with their car phones. That's such a tense environment.

"Life is difficult enough, but the film business is tremendously difficult for everyone involved. There are a few people who have stunning early successes, but even they learn that this business is a battleground. It's important that we know how to revive ourselves and keep our innocence. That we have a freshness."

Kaufman, no doubt, has found his way. As someone who holds a spiritual kinship with Henry Miller—an artist who valued individuality and the indulgence in one's passions over the brace of conformity, who, above all, celebrated life—it's as simple as walking down the street and replenishing himself in this momentary nexus with humanity.