There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament, came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal. While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning--the meaning of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea--but the felt significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process completed itself in that instant--a change came in the endocrines. Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite--the yin-yang--and hence, sometimes, joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along. I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then, and all its other meanings. And that was that. I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea. That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as usual. Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea. My shoulder was disjointed and full of slime. Certainly. My left leg was also paralyzed. I was ankylosed and calcified and atrophied. But of course. Agony--_sic_. What was left of me might be a stumblebum but the outside part could somewhat swim still and the inside part could fly. My brother was dead. There was work to do. To hell with Dr. Jerkski, great man of the Institute. I would frustrate every specialist in Poland. Take up your bed and totter, Wylie. It required a year for the doing--in Warsaw and Paris, Manhattan, Connecticut, and California. Then I had entirely recovered. Trauma excepted. Now that is what I thought of in the space of time it took to smoke a cigarette on my divan at the Astolat--that, and several thousand more items. That is why, so to speak, I had nodded courteously at the Ghoul. He is always hanging around. One has only to turn one's head fast enough--and there he is. Most people, by the cortico-schizoid mechanism I have described a few pages back, partition him off. He is not behind me, they convince themselves. But he is. There are always exactly enough Ghouls to go round. Billions of people apply the blindfold technique in another way: He is not a Ghoul, they say, but the God of Heaven. The Eternal Grocer, who will dole out milk and honey forever. The Great Conductor whose baton will direct my Everlasting Harp.