Reverie.

We talked a lot about what we were reading. Jim was just a remarkable reader. One thing that Jim had going for him — and I knew him as a young man and as an old man — was that he was really, really, really smart. And he had an extraordinary commitment to the idea of being an artist and what that meant. Seems a little bit old fashioned these days. And, in fact, I didn’t always agree with him that we belonged to a separate society with separate rules. But it was a pure flame for him, and I still look at it with a real respect. He was one of a kind, and one of the things that I envy most about Jim was he was really independent in some remarkable ways. He did lots of things that you really had to not give a shit to be able to do. When I think of somebody else who was as radical a personality, I think of Hunter Thompson. However, I think Thompson really had one eye on the audience when he was pulling his antics. Much more than Jim. Jim did what he felt like doing and waited for somebody to throw a drink in his face to come out of the reverie.

Thomas McGuane