“A little beyond looms the face of the beloved. Ever larger, ever fuller, ever clearer it grows: a moon-glow that saturates an empty sky. Slowly, slow as claustral fever, the nebulae arrive. Little medallions constellate the panic that clouds the orifices of fright. Intaglio depths gleam from the precipitious walls of new world hearts. Through the laughing mouth oceans leap in to being and pain still-born is cried down again. The marvels of emptiness parade their defilement, the embryonic unsheath their splendor. Echolalia mounts her throne. The web stretches tighter, the ravisher is ravished. A slat gives way, an axe falls; little children drop like flowers on the burnished hearth beneath the open door. It is the morning of the day after the night before on the threshold of unsubjugated repetition. It fits like a silver-studded bracelet on a warm wrist.”

—Henry Miller, from The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945.