I replied, That he was a very unworthy man, if it were true, to speak slightingly of a family, which was as good as his own, bating that it was not allied to the peerage […].

CN also included a mock spread titled “Heterosexuality in America,” campily dismissing and rejecting the power of LIFE to depict their lives.

For anybody, though, not part of it all (which was obviously Ishmail's plight), that world was nothing but a smooth, cyclical continuum, without a fold in it, without any form of articulation, as compact as stucco or staff, as putty or portland; an imbrication of nights without adjoining days, a total lapidification, a flat, hard, constant, monotonous uniformity in which all things, big or small, smooth or lumpish, living or not, form a solitary, global unit.

The brokeback bridges in the hills sadden me: this place used to be beautiful.