"Trying to get another start, I circled back to general resolutions I had made to myself about getting old. I kept returning to my seventieth birthday, seventy seemingly being what man has been given as his biblical allotment on earth. I sat in my study making clear to myself, possibly even with gestures, my homespun anti-shuffleboard philosophy of what to do when I was old enough to be scripturally dead. I wanted this possible life extension to be hard as always, but also new, something not done before, like writing stories. That would be sure to be hard, and to make stories fresh I would have to find a new way of looking at things I had known nearly all my life, such as scholarship and the woods. If you think vividly enough about your general resolutions, sometimes your consience will furnish the particulars to exemplify them. . . ."


-----Norman Maclean, "Young Men and Fire"