"One passes imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. Suddenly, walking down a street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and will live on only in memory; and then the memory turns inward with a strange, clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a wo/man, while reading a book, while talking with a stranger... suddenly but always with terrific insistance and always with terrific accuracy,these memeories intrude, rise up like ghosts and permeate ever fiber of one's being. henceforward everything moves on shifting levels- our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drop from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforward we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect with a hundred feet, a centapede with soft-stirring fee that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into a music of sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness. All things, as we walk, splitting with us into a myriad of iridecent fragments. The great fragmentation of maturity. The great change. In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: they fused into one, as our walking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day."
- Henry Miller: Black Spring, Grove press; 1963
