Camel, Lion, Child

A camel kneels to be loaded, a lion fights a dragon called Thou Shalt, and a child plays a game that means nothing beyond itself. Zarathustra's first speech is a fable of three transformations, and Martin reads it as autobiography: the devout boy who devoured the mystics, the liberated man whose freedom curdled in the jewelry business, and the revaluation that arrived in early sobriety, after the second divorce, when he finally saw where his meaning had been sitting all along. The fable saves its strangest requirement for last. The child's whole power is forgetting, and Martin has watched a master of it eat breakfast.