“When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.”

faraway and dim, and stared straight across the court. She was being watched. Intently. By the young man in the seventh-floor window across from her own apartment. Steadily, he was looking at her. Through the strange fog with its

You see before you the last of the cynics, the last of the misogynists, the last of the bitter men. I look out on a

As the time passes for men and women, so does it pass for gods, for they are made viable and substantial only through the massed beliefs of masses of men and women. And when puny mortals no longer worship at their altars, the gods die.

and

I despise Bourbon Street. The strip joints, with the pasties over nipples, the smell of need, the dwarfed souls of men attuned only to flesh.

to a party. He went because they asked him. He paid a dollar at the door: a woman who had her left breast removed for what he found out later were non-carcinogenic reasons, took the money. She was topless;

have fantasized that he now saw the world through the eyes of some special beast. But he was not a man of images. The house in which his family had lived for sixteen years was empty. There was a realtor’s FOR SALE sign on the unmowed

is a little book they sell, a guide to manners and dining in New Orleans: I’ve looked: nowhere in the book do they indicate the proper responses to a ghost. But then, it says nothing about the wonderful cemeteries of New Orleans’ West Bank, or Metairie. Or the