The body, she says, is subject to the forces of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.

Man’s life is not a business.

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn’t come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

I am money’s medium. It passes through me— taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty.

What 1 seem to do, thought Herzog, is to inflame myself with my drama, with ridicule, failure, denunciation, distortion, to inflame myself voluptuously, esthetically, until I reach sexual climax. And that climax looks like a resolution and an answer to many “higher" problems.

She transformed his miseries into sexual excitements and, to give credit where it was due, turned his grief in a useful direction.

For when will we civilized beings become really serious? said Kierkegaard. Only when we have known hell through and through. Without this, hedonism and frivolity will diffuse hell through all our days.

It all goes back to those German existentialists who tell you how good dread is for you, how it saves you from distraction and gives you your freedom and makes you authentic. God is no more. But Death is.

To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.