I thought that winter must be his season

You use a completely different set of words and phrases. Then you transform your mind into a ruthless instrument. You teach yourself to reject certain categories of thought." "Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore?" "I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt." "What guilt?" "The guilt of being innocent victims." "Let's change the subject." "Also the predicate and the object," he said. He did not modify his expression. He seemed sublimely sad, a man engaged in surviving persistent winters at some northernmost point of the compass. I thought that winter must be his season, as it was mine, and it did not seem strange that we had come to this place. Even now, long before the snows, there was some quality of winter here, converse seasons almost interspersed, a sense of brevity, one color, much of winter's purity and silence, a chance for reason to prevail. "Anatole, do you ever think of playing pro ball?" "I'm not quick enough. I don't have quick feet. Tweego keeps after me about my feet. He says I'd be the best passblocker in the country if I had quick feet." "I'd like to play pro ball," I said. "That would really be tremendous." "You could make it, Gary." "I don't have the speed. I'll never be big enough to go inside tune after time, twentyfive or thirty times a game. And I don't have the speed to turn the corner. Up there you need overdrive. It would be tremendous if I could make it. It's tremendous just thinking about it." "There are Jews in those big cities," Bloomberg said.