Why does man crave self-abasement? Pascal is an example. Caesar wept when, after watching a ballet of beautiful girls dance, he saw them killed. But he didn't weep from pity, but with ecstasy because of their beauty. The aesthetic temperament. Love is not a sentiment, it's a sensation. The Japanese know that. An orchestra of sensations in which the silences are sonorous. What an Iliad of Imbecility is the history of mankind. My idealistic anxiety over my affairs is proof positive of their pettiness. We never escape the prison of self, though we attempt to project our personality into the thoughts of another; this process is called sympathy. But a thought and a thing are identical. There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, says William James. We can never know anything outside of ourselves. Oh! the sour hair, the dark breath of these psychologists! In the cuisine of love there are flavours for all tastes. Else ugly women wouldn't be sought after. Are there any ugly women? my brother Oswald used to say that once a pillow over their face all women were alike to him. Discriminating person, Oswald. His mind must be a slop-jar of the infinite. How mirific to mingle our essences. What immaculate perception is required to pick the precise woman with whom to "amalgamate our sublimes." The vagabondage of my soul through the universe, fluid, profound, and choral, is a gift denied most men and women. Yet it is at my threshold for the asking. My conceit is character--I think; yours is merely apoplectic. The lassitudes of love are divine. The human plant does not best flourish in the sunlight of success; it needs darkness, sin, sorrow, crime, to bring it to a rich maturity. The ignoble dung of miseries demands the spade of adversity. And Flaubert has said that the ignoble is the lower slope of the sublime. Which is consoling. As Rabelais would remark: I am an abstractor of quintessences.