For HARLAN ELLISON, who has heard the song,
And for KAREN and JANE,who are my other voices.
" . . . there is a darkness. It is for everyone . . . Only some
Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friend
ship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly
divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still
they are the admiration of the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed,
street-pounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly,
grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some
under a coal-sucking
Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving
Calcutta midnight,
who very well know where they
are."
— Saul Bellow
"Why, this is Hell; nor am I out of
it."
— Christopher Marlowe