After a hearty New England breakfast, I weigh two hundred pounds this morning. Cock of the walk, I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky future grow familiar in the pinched, indigenous faces of these thoroughbred mental cases, twice my age and half my weight. We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.
-- Robert Lowell, from "Walking in the Blue,'' inspired by Lowell's stay in McLean Hospital, the famous psychiatric institution in Belmont, Mass.
