Rock's enduring wild man was emerging from self-imposed retirement and his return to action had been marked by the launch of his official website.
In his darkest days, he said, he was buoyed by reading Viktor E. Frankl's enduring book, "Man's Search for Meaning," the perspective of a Holocaust survivor.
He is already enduring the man in a wheelchair, buying nothing but time, and the wobbly banter and rants of people plunking down coins for lottery tickets and single cigars that they convert into joints, and his patience must last until sunrise.
Other weighty topics that are floated within both book and film include the contemporary relevance of the myths and practices of the ancients, the iniquity of the powerful, the excesses of the rich, the exploitation of the poor, celebrity culture and man's enduring inhumanity to man.
At its best, Mason's novel, with its yearning parade of "nostoi", or homecomings, reminds us of the indeterminacy of stories, the play between fate and free will, and the enduring power of that cool tactician, that teller of tales, that master of exploits, that long-enduring man, Odysseus.
During the cold war the Directorate of Operations was, in effect, America's Department of the Third World -- a cadre who spent careers in the backwaters of a troubled developing world, spoke the languages and built enduring relationships with men who ran the countries, as well as those who would, from time to time, overthrow them.
They are heroes in their villages, but in Mumbai they are invisible men, enduring the callousness that comes with being an accessory to other people's lives.
He paid a price after the trial, enduring "hard stares, men who refused to shake my hand," and electoral defeat in a run for state appeals court, as he wrote in his memoir of 2001.
He also forms no enduring relationships with men who might become lovers (and, carefully eliding spoilers, sacrifices his chance at doing so in order to maintain his connection with his homophobic buddies).
