I ripped some muscles in my thighs and was paralyzed for half an hour with the intense pain." He recovered physically and went on to become an outstanding high-school athlete, but from the day of that fall he describes himself as becoming introverted. Indeed, this incident helps to explain a preoccupation which he attributes to one of his created alter egos, Timothy Howller in "After King Kong Fell" (1973): "Since he had been thirteen, he had been trying to equate the great falls in man's myths and legends and to find some sort of intelligence in them. The fall of the tower of Babel, of Lucifer, of Vulcan, of Icarus, and finally of King Kong. But he wasn't equal to the task; he didn't have the genius to perceive what the falls meant...."
Whether the cause was this fall or some earlier forgotten trauma, as he speculates in The Dark Design (1977) in the form of Farmer alter ego Peter Jairus Frigate, he developed internal conflicts which have remained with him. Though he broke world broad jump records in high-school practice, he could never do so in official meets.
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