Our conversation begins to look like the last scene in Eugene O'Neill's great family drama, Long Day's Journey Into the [sic] Night. Sitting together in a dwindling pool of light, the family talks on. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters are trying to explain: not understanding, but comprehending; loving one another, but hating and hurting each other; tangling and untangling like badly cast fishing lines, a group of inviolate, wounded selves. O'Neill's characters, like the rest of us, are speaking about the family in order to explain their attitudes toward life itself.
