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The angrier, more powerful ghosts used the trolley to find new hosts: tired, unsuspecting bodies to possess for a little while, warmth to steal from cheeks and other exposed skin, and ill tempers to stoke.

Such a choice almost certainly would have ended in death, either from starvation, exposure or from the ill temper of another grizzly.

Brimming with regret and felled by his own ill temper, Springsteen’s narrator hits rock bottom — quite literally — with “Stones.”

Eerily, they were given a precise phenotypic marker, a blemish above the left eyebrow, and were given, too, the ill temper associated with age.

Part of the ill temper was produced by the death of Bobby Kennedy only two and a half months earlier.