"supped silently on sunlight" does all kindsa good things to my brain.
Glad you liked it. TS has a wonderful way with words, and his short stories especially pack an emotional punch that no one else can match, I think. I almost shared this quote, from later in the same story.A filthy place, Terra. There is nothing, he thought, like the conservatism of license. Given a culture of sybaritics, with an endless choice of mechanical titillations, and you have a people of unbreakable and hidebound formality, a people with few but massive taboos, a shockable, narrow, prissy people obeying the rules—even the rules of their calculated depravities—and protecting their treasured, specialized pruderies. In such a group there are words one may not use for fear of their fanged laughter, colors one may not wear, gestures and intonations one must forego, on pain of being torn to pieces. The rules are complex and absolute, and in such a place one's heart may not sing lest, through its warm free joyousness, it betray one.