My everyday self that casually speaks to this or that person is nothing like this book. My absorbed self that writes a letter to an intimate acquaintance is not like this book. My heartfelt self that deeply loves a friend, and gives of its depths, and thrills answeringly to other depths, is not like this book. This book is my mere Hidden Self--just under the skin but hid away closer than the Thousand Mysteries: never shown to any other person in any conversation or any association: never would be shown: never could be. How Another, any Other, would come out: what Another would show: photographed Beneath the Skin--what do I know? Perchance ten times more trivial and inconsequent and mad than Me. If Another thinks Me someway mad, let him look at Himself Just Beneath the Skin. Perchance Another every day as he thanks a janitor for holding open a door, would much prefer to drive a long rusty brad-nail deep into the janitor’s skull. Perchance Another has a brain like Goethe, a Soul like a humming-bird, a Heart like a little round nutmeg. What do I know? I know what I am. Another may know what he is. But I can’t tell Me to Another and Another can’t tell Himself to Me. I can tell Me to myself and write it. Another if he reads will see Me: but not as I see Me. Instead, through many veil-curtains and glasses, very darkly. _God’s kindly caprice_ To-morrow For twenty-five cents and one hour and twelve minutes one may get in this present detailed world a bit of unforgettable complete enchantment. So I found to-day in a moving-picture theater. A Carmen, the real Carmen of Prosper Mérimée glowed, vibrated, lived and died with passion on a white screen. Of all prose writers I know Prosper Mérimée is the one--(intimate and sensitively alive as if I had lain against his shoulder as I read ‘La Guzla’ and ‘Venus d’Ille’--he melts into my veins--)whom I would most eagerly see interpreted. Of all fiction characters--if she is fiction--the poignant Carmen is the one I would most eagerly see realized. Carmen is one of those fictions which are truer to life than life is. Such fiction-things are all around, touching everybody: the spoken truths which grow false at being spoken: the thought lies which turn to truths the moment they touch words. I have heard Carmen sung and seen her filmed by the lustrous Farrar, and I have seen her play-acted by some lesser lights. But Bizet’s opera, a sparkling music-storm, creates a sonant objective Carmen, a beautiful bloody lyric, remote from Mérimée who made a Carmen intensely peculiar to his own subjective art. And the stage-Carmen has always been a stage-Carmen waiting in dusty, draughty wings for her cues. It remained for the cinematograph, which is a true literal mirror of human expression, to make Carmen burst into violent physical life.