In Tom Wolfe's 1998 novel A Man In Full, big-time real estate developer Charlie Croker becomes a religious evangelical as his once-vast wealth dissolves. The same thing seems to be happening to Bear Stearns chairman and former CEO James Cayne, who played golf and bridge and maybe smoked pot as his firm crumbled, and whose horde of Stearns shares is now worth maybe one-twentieth its value a year ago. Cayne is selling all those shares. Like Croker, he considers such worldly possessions baggage and, to hear the Times tell it, is on the verge of some kind of spiritual awakening:

People who have spoken with Mr. Cayne say that he, like everyone at Bear, was stunned by the firm’s precipitous collapse and the rock-bottom price of its sale. In the past weeks, together with his wife, Patricia Cayne, who is a student of Jewish religious traditions, Mr. Cayne has spent considerable time searching for comparable events in religious history to see what lessons can be learned from the collapse of his firm, said a person who has spoken to him recently...

While Mr. Cayne has not publicly said why he sold his shares, people who know him say that it suggests a need to separate himself, emotionally as well as financially, from the firm that for so long had been part of every fiber of his being and that now had become a source of pain and disappointment.

Here's a taste of Wolfe's Croker, from A Man In Full, after his corporate meltdown and religious conversion:

"...You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you. 'You have priceless silver and goblets of gold,' said the philosopher, 'but your reason is of common clay.' As of this morning, I am as rich as the richest of you, for I am hereby handing over anything I own, the Croker Global Corporation, every last branch of it..."

"I don't know what you're like," Croker was saying, "but if you're like most uv'us here is Atlanta, you're driving yourself crazy over possessions. Just think about that for a second..."

"I can tell you that the only real possession you'll ever have is your character, that and your 'scheme of life,' you might say. The Manager has given every person a spark from His own divinity, and no one can take that away from you, not even the Manager himself, and from that spark comes your character. Everything else is temporary and worthless in the long run..."

"But you say, 'I'd rather die than sit down beside the road with a Dixie cup, begging.' Do you realize what you're really saying? You're saying, 'It ain't what I'm gonna eat or where I'm gonna stay I'm worrying about, it's saving face, it's what everybody in Buckhead's gon' think about me..."

Times: Down $900 Million or More, the Chairman of Bear Sells