We Live In An Age In Which

Actually The Action Called A Kiss Represented Nothing More For Me Than Some Place Where My Spirit Could Seek Shelter.

Living Is Merely The Chaos Of Existence.

I Had Long Since Insisted Upon Interpreting The Things That Fate Forced Me To Do As Victories Of My Own Will And Intelligence, And Now This Bad Habit Had Grown Into A Sort Of Frenzied Arrogance. In The Nature Of What I Was Calling My Intelligence There Was A Touch Of Something Illegitimate, A Touch Of The Sham Pretender Who Has Been Placed On The Throne By Some Freak Chance. This Dolt Of A Usurper Could Not Foresee The Revenge That Would Inevitably Be Wreaked Upon His Stupid Despotism.

This Is A Photograph, So It Is As You See: There Are No Lies And No Deceptions. One Can Detect Here, Elevated To An Incomparably Higher Level, The Same Pathetic Emotional Appeal That Lies Concealed In Every Fake Spiritualist Photograph, Every Pornographic Photograph; One Comes To Suspect That The Strange, Disturbing Emotional Appeal Of The Photographic Art Consists Solely In That Same Repeated Refrain: This Is A True Ghost... This Is A Photograph, So It Is As You See: There Are No Lies, No Deceptions.

Was I Ignorant, Then, When I Was Seventeen? I Think Not. I Knew Everything. A Quarter-century's Experience Of Life Since Then Has Added Nothing To What I Knew. The One Difference Is That At Seventeen I Had No 'realism'.