henry devlin , psychiatrist and onetime author of a paper about the hemingway solution , a man who had once been a virgin boy and who was now a tall and geeky fellow whose glasses always slid down to the tip of his nose , whose hair was going gray , whose friends were either dead , fled , or changed , this man stood in the open gate of a place to which he would never come again , stood on skis , stood eating snow like a kid eating a sno-cone at the shrine circus , stood and watched the last really good place in his life bum .