Arnaud, my friend, saw nothing strange whatever about having breakfast in a bathrobe on the Champs-Elysees. “They can see that you’ve had an accident,” he said. “The bathrobe is full of blood.”
“That makes it all right, does it?” I asked.
“It’s all right with me,” he said. “As for them, je m’en fous!!”
-Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, published 1945
This is what is wrong with the world today. We have no characters. They’re not allowed. Everything is sterile: the coffee shops, the streets, the people. A little dirt, a few “drugs”, a bit rough around the edges protruding into the soul wouldn’t kill us, wouldn’t hurt us.
