There Is A Close Relationship Between Flowers

Though They May Not Always Be Handsome Men Doomed To Evil Posses The Manly Virtues.

They Remain Dead, The People I Try To Resuscitate By Straining To Hear What They Say. But The Illusion Is Not Pointless, Or Not Quite, Even If The Reader Knows All This Better Than I Do. One Thing A Book Tries To Do, Beneath The Disguise Of Words And Causes And Clothes And Grief, Is Show The Skeleton And The Skeleton Dust To Come. The Author Too, Like Those Of Whom He Speaks, Is Dead.

Repudiating The Virtues Of Your World, Criminals Hopelessly Agree To Organize A Forbidden Universe. They Agree To Live In It. The Air There Is Nauseating. They Can Breathe It.

Excluded By My Birth And Tastes From The Social Order, I Was Not Aware Of Its Diversity. Nothing In The World Was Irrelevant: The Stars On A General's Sleeve, The Stock-market Quotations, The Olive Harvest, The Style Of The Judiciary, The Wheat Exchange, Flower-beds. Nothing. This Order, Fearful And Feared, Whose Details Were All Inter-related, Had A Meaning: My Exile.

Slowly But Surly I Want To Strip Her Of Every Kind Of Happiness As To Make A Saint Of Her.