Условия: It was no mystery to me any longer why he and
others (Dante, Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to
Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the
hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here,
at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most
impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here
that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new
meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he
is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold,
indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade
away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughter-house that it is.
The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down
tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing. The air is chill
and stagnant, the language apocalyptic. Not an exit sign anywhere; no issue
save death. A blind alley at the end of which is a scaffold. Henry Miller
