The Garden and the Pale Criminal

Most of gardening is pruning, Martin says, because a happy plant wants the whole garden. That is his way into the first of today's two speeches, where your passions, tended, become your virtues, and the virtues promptly go to war over you. He has lived that war; his own writing once turned and bit him, and it took his wife's plainest advice to break the spell. Then The Pale Criminal, the darkest speech so far, a portrait of a man no longer equal to his own deed, which Martin reads through the first divorce he still regrets. He ends by refusing to make the book safe, and telling you why.