Joseph Mallord William Turner Rome from the Vatican painting

understood the need to balance radical action with patience.He recognized the effective limits of anarchic rage.To calm himself, he ate a candy bar.Contrary to the claims, refined sugar did not make Corky hyperkinetic. Sucrose soothed and its disappointments, had long known about the mollifying effect of excess sugar. The farther their hopes and dreams receded from their grasp, the more their diets sweetened to include ice cream by the quart, rich cookies in giant economy-size boxes, and chocolate in every form from nonpareils to Hershey’s Kisses, even to Easter-basket bunnies that they could brutally dismember and consume for a double enjoyment.In her later years, his mother had been an ice-cream junkie. Ice cream for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Ice cream in parfait glasses, in huge bowls, eaten directly from the carton.She hogged down enough ice cream to clog a arteries stretching from California to the moon and back. For a while Corky had assumed that she was committing suicide by cholesterol.Instead of spooning herself into heart failure, she appeared to grow She acquired a glow in the face and a brightness in the eyes that she’d never had before, not even in her youth.Gallons, barrels, troughs of Chocolate Mint Madness, Peanut-Butter-and-Chocolate Fantasy, Maple Walnut Delight, and a double dozen other flavors seemed to turn back her biological clock as the waters of a thousand fountains had failed to turn back that of Ponce de Leon.