You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler. you created it, you nurtured it, you made it your own. nobody on the faculty of any college or university in thus part of the country can so much as utter the word Hitler without a nod in your direction, literally or metaphorically. this is the center, the unquestioned source. He is now your Hitler, Gladney’s Hitler. it must be deeply satisfying for you. the college is internationally known as a result of Hitler studies. it has an identity, a sense of achievement. You’ve involved an entire system around this figure, a structure with countless subcultures and interrelated fields of study, a history within history. I marvel at the effort. it was masterful, shrewd and stunningly preemptive. it’s what I want to do with Elvis.

You feel sorry for yourself. You think you’re missing something and you don’t know what it is. You’re lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you’re a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination.