Life Was An Impenetrable Mystery Cloaked In

In My Early Twenties, That's When I Really Began To Write. Before That, I Was Too Busy Working, Keeping Myself Going.

My Life Was Incoherent To Me. I Felt It Quivering, Spitting Out Broken Teeth.

People Steal Into One's Consciousness And Occupy What Seems, In Retrospect, To Have Been Their Place All Along.

And What Movies We Saw! All The Actors And Actresses Whose Photographs I Collected, With Their Look Of Eternity! Their Radiance, Their Eyes, Their Faces, Their Voices, The Suavity Of Their Movements! Their Clothes! Even In Prison Movies, The Stars Shone In Their Prison Clothes As If Tailors Had Accompanied Them In Their Downfall.

A Year And A Half After The End Of The War And The German Occupation, Paris Was Muted And Looked Bruised And Forlorn. Everywhere I Went, I Sensed The Tracks Of The Wolf That Had Tried To Devour The City. But Paris Proved Inedible, As It Had Been Ever Since Its Tribal Beginnings On An Island In The Seine, The Ile De La Cité.