In his Enemies of Promise Cyril Connolly said of Proust: "His hatred and contempt for the life of action suited the war-weary and disillusioned generation he wrote for, his own snobbery offered him both a philosophy and a remunerative career, he believed also in art for art's sake." Had I Proust's genius, this judgment would fit what I have become in the past two or three years very well, and certainly, like Proust's, mine is a war-weary and disillusioned generation.

Until rather recently I was Major Josiah Bunting, United States Army. I ran very hard on the bureaucratic and careerist treadmill that the officer corps of the Army has very largely become. After five or six years I found that I had come to dešpise it and what it was doing to me and what it had helped to do to this country, and jumped off.