"It's little by little," he said, stumbling to explain his compulsion.
Mr. Lindsey's productivity was a source of as much admiration as curiosity in the music press, and he was often asked to explain his compulsion to create so much music so quickly.
In his book "Blitt," which comes out in October, from Riverhead Books, he explains his compulsion to inject humor into conversations: "I was born a smart aleck.
Six months later, in a bylined column headlined "Why I Go to Mississippi," Mr. Lieberman explained his compulsion to join other Yale students who had traveled to Indianola, Miss., to assist in a mock election of a black man prohibited by state law from running for office.
Lavery does little to explain Ralph's compulsion, except to have him reveal, during one of his unbearably intense monologues, that his father beat him when he was a child.
Di Matteo, so cool in the pressure cooker, so honest in the locker room, still found the words to explain soccer's compulsion: "Football and life," he said while players in red and blue lay elated or destroyed around him, "is sometimes unpredictable and crazy.
Did Mantle's history explain his sexual compulsions, from voyeurism to exhibitionism? (As a young reporter, I saw Mantle ostentatiously display scratch marks on his nude body to teammates, who mostly cheered his escapades).
He is one of the greatest living mathematicians, with a sly sense of humour, a polymath's promiscuous curiosity, and a compulsion to explain everything about the world to everyone in it.
"Family members — mothers, fathers — whose children may have been killed ten, twenty, fifty years ago show up to these events... and feel this compulsion to explain that what's going on is wrong and that justice has not been served," Berman said.
Hindsight in the wake of a 60percentt Nasdaq correction is easy, of course, and there has already been much finger-pointing amid the popped-com compulsion to explain a market bubble that, however briefly, valued Amazon over Barnes & Noble, eToys over Toys RR" Us and Palm Computing over its venerable parent, 3Com.
Whether we are talking about killer or a CEO who was managing an enterprise when conditions turned sour, the compulsion to explain and to differentiate wickedness from misfortune is intense and unrelenting.
