Religion played an inordinately important role in shaping this sensibility from the beginning.
By the time he signed up for the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia in 1978, this sensibility was already ingrained enough for course tutor Angela Carter to describe his work as "very grown-up for a young lad".
(There's a taste of this sensibility in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind").
The presence of this sensibility in the sports pages, on the other hand, helps me to feel far more connected to the men and women who populate our playing fields and courts.
And in fairness, it's hard to avoid this sensibility in a play in which a life-size (and visible) human anatomy chart and a statue of an angel named Eternity are the central symbols.
The show is steeped in that gushing awe that tends to afflict fictional studies of famous lives in proximity (such as Alan Rudolph movies like "The Moderns"), a phenomenon I identify with excited sentences along the lines of, "Look, isn't that Ernest Hemingway standing at the bar?" (Woody Allen made this sensibility charming in "Midnight in Paris," but that's an exception).
In the Broadway incarnation, this sensibility is turned into a case for having your beefcake and cheesecake and forsaking it, too.
He owes this sensibility in part to several formative collaborations with interior designers, including the late Belgian decorator Jean de Meulder, who taught Van Duysen what he calls "l'art de vivre".
She distilled this sensibility in columns she wrote for The Delineator, one of the turn-of-the-century "pattern sheets" that evolved into the genre known as the ladies' magazine.
When I described this sensibility in Skyfaring, my book about flying (I wanted to put it in the first main chapter, as it's a feature of flying almost as astonishing to me as getting off the ground in the first place), I couldn't find the right word for it.
We see a reflection of ourselves in that sensibility.
