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Show 175 don't know what to do when you get passionate - like at certain times." And so Hunt was doing without; he was setting loose just as many pieces of his life as would be freed. It was discipline. It was a lesson. It was Proof, or wanted to be. He would will a kind of pyschic surgery on his excess. He would learn. Give up. The trail climbed steeply now. A lodgepole, felled by wind, presented a barrier; Hunt scaled it. Thoughtlessly unseasonal in levi shorts, he felt the fang of a broken branch bite a length of his flesh along his thigh. He looked down. Blood rose dimly to the surface of his skin, a line against the falling snow. Curiously, it please5'Hunt, made him feel more ascetic. He made a list of what he could be without - and it was considerable. He could be without his car. He could be without most clothes. He could be without the pool, without the house he now lived in. He could be without food - at least in the way he had relished it for years and years. And he could be without alcohol. Thirty pounds lighter, only rarely drinking, now the evidence was there! His body was hard. And he could be without a great deal of human contact! He could let his sons find their own lives without the excess of his intervention. He could let Leah be the person who she, most comfortably, was. He could not want. He could restrain himself. He could give up every tube of oil color for his painting but jnx_- He could give up a lot of what he was sure must be pressures on Leah. And he could give up his friend. Hunt would free himself. He had been a Realist; he would become a Minimalist. He had it all written down in a journal, explained to himself. He would free all others in his life from him. And thereby - ergo, g.e.d., whatever - he would free himself! And his art, his painting, would surely |