1
Throw that flower in the waste basket, it’s faded. And keep an eye to
your shoes and fingernails. The fool you once laughed at has made a
fortune! There’s small help in a clutter of leaves either, no matter how
they gleam. Punctillio’s the thing. A nobby vest. Spats. Lamps carry far,
believe me, in lieu of sunshine!
* * * * *
_Despite vastness of frontiers, which are as it were the fringes of a
flower full of honey, it is the little things that count! Neglect them
and bitterness drowns the imagination._
2
The time never was when he could play more than mattrass to the pretty
feet of this woman who had been twice a mother without touching the
meager pollen of their marriage intimacy. What more for him than to be
a dandelion that could chirp with crickets or do a onestep with snow
flakes? The tune is difficult but not impossible to the middle aged whose
knees are tethered faster to the mind than they are at eighteen when any
wind sets them clacking. What a rhythm’s here! One would say the body
lay asleep and the dance escaped from the hair tips, the bleached fuzz
that covers back and belly, shoulders, neck and forehead. The dance is
diamantine over the sleeper who seems not to breathe! One would say heat
over the end of a roadway that turns down hill. Cesa!
* * * * *
_One may write music and music but who will dance to it? The dance
escapes but the music, the music—projects a dance over itself which the
feet follow lazily if at all. So a dance is a thing in itself. It is the
music that dances but if there are words then there are two dancers, the
words pirouetting with the music._
3
One has emotions about the strangest things: men—women himself the most
contemptible. But to struggle with ants for a piece of meat,—a mangy
cur to swallow beetles and all—better go slaughter one’s own kind in
the name of peace—except when the body’s not there maggots swarm in the
corruption. Oh let him have it. Find a cleaner fare for wife and child.
To the sick their sick. For us heads bowed over the green-flowered
asphodel. Lean on my shoulder little one, you too. I will lead you to
fields you know nothing of. There’s small dancing left for us any way you
look at it.
* * * * *
_A man who enjoyed his food, the company of his children and especially
his wife’s alternate caresses and tongue lashings felt his position
in the town growing insecure due to a successful business competitor.
Being thus stung to the quick he thinks magnanimously of his own methods
of dealing with his customers and likens his competitor to a dog that
swallows his meat with beetles or maggots upon it, that is, any way so he
gets it._
_Being thus roused the man does not seek to outdo his rival but grows
heavily sad and thinks of death and his lost pleasures thus showing
himself to be a person of discernment. For by so doing he gives evidence
of a bastard sort of knowledge of that diversity of context in things
and situations which the great masters of antiquity looked to for the
inspiration and distinction of their compositions._