I’ve never understood about fishing and buffalo stomachs. I admit it freely. I am no cannibal. But there are connections between me and the world. I’m not a cog. I’m a bolt. People who know me find me reasonable —neither gluttonous nor profligate. It is only my wife who thinks I devour without permission and eschew what I should eat.

Only yesterday, for example, just back from vacation, I was driving across the city, the water glittering in the lake on one side of me, skyscraping apartment buildings —clean steel Mies —glittering on the other side, Bach’s “Air on the G String” on the radio. I soared. The road was newly paved and the high places were long, the dips so smooth and quick the nose of my little car never turned down, just fell for a second vertically and rose again, me with it. Two birds pumped upward in the distance and then a perfectly proportioned curve in the road —a classical Grecian curve —turned me to see an airplane, barely moving, opposite the birds but on the same …