Life won't let you get away with that.  It's all right with me, but don't think you can do that in Life.        

            Mom and Dad both spoke with grudging reverence about Life, warned us about it, as something beyond their control, beyond the perimeters of the Henry sanctuary.  Jack had gone out into it; Chuck sallied into it; then Judy: and they were sallies, in a sense, both to test each fledgling adult, and to bring back reports from the hinterlands of chance, wrong values, anarchy‑‑the destructive/creative element that had been so carefully excluded from our territory.  No wonder Dad patrolled its borders with both pride of proprietorship and vigilance.

            Life as they spoke of it was not God, or even Nature, but something realer and more immediate, involving the interplay of self (and the constituting forces, strengths and weaknesses of self) with social forces and realities, with Nature, with History.  If we had household gods, and in a deep sense, I think we did really, Life was the most powerful.  Harsh, sacred, precious, cruel, dangerous, tricky and inscrutable, impersonally judgmental, all at once.

            This had, of course, nothing to do with the magazine, except that those grand abstractions, Life and Time, had their salience at mid‑point in such a century, such lives.