But If I Must Be Alone, I

I Sat In The Gradually Chilling Room, Thinking Of My Whole Past The Way A Drowning Man Is Supposed To, And It Seemed Part Of The Present, Part Of The Gray Cold And The Beggar Woman Without A Face And The Moulting Birds Frozen To Their Own Filth In The Orangerie. I Know Now I Was In The Throes Of Some Small Glandular Crisis, A Sublimated Bilious Attack, A Flick From The Whip Of Melancholia, But Then It Was Terrifying...nameless...

Almost Any Normal Oyster Never Knows From One Year To The Next Whether He Is He Or She, And May Start At Any Moment, After The First Year, To Lay Eggs Where Before He Spent His Sexual Energies In Being Exceptionally Masculine.

I Believe That One Of The Most Dignified Ways We Are Capable Of, To Assert And Then Reassert Our Dignity In The Face Of Poverty And War's Fears And Pains, Is To Nourish Ourselves With All Possible Skill, Delicacy, And Ever-increasing Enjoyment.

Life Is Hard, We Say. An Oyster's Life Is Worse. She Lives Motionless, Soundless, Her Own Cold Ugly Shape Her Only Dissipation.

One ... Aspect Of The Case For World War Ii Is That While It Was Still A Shooting Affair It Taught Us Survivors A Great Deal About Daily Living Which Is Valuable To Us Now That It Is, Ethically At Least, A Question Of Cold Weapons And Hot Words.