we are hustled by the police, we are despised by all men. If you offer
us drink, and stop to gossip with us for a moment, you only do so to
please yourselves with the spectacle of our infamy, our infirmity, our
incongruity. We have lost all hope, all self-respect. We are ships
that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go
down. Yet we are not altogether to be pitied: we know life. To the
respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world,
decently attired: we know her at home in her nudity. For him she has
manners, a good behaviour, a society smile; with us she is frankly
herself--brutal, if you please, corrupt with disease and vice, sordid,
profane, lascivious, but genuine. She is kind to him, but
hypocritical, affecting scruples, modesties, pieties, a heart and
conscience, attitudinising, blushing false blushes, weeping crocodile
tears; she is cruel to us, but sincere. She is at her ease with
us--unashamed. She shows us her thousand moods. She doesn't trouble to
keep her secrets from us. She throws off the cloak that hid her
foulness, the boot that constrained her cloven hoof. She gives free
play to her appetites. We know her.

'Here is the fruit of the tree of life,' he went on, extending his
open hand. 'The respectable man but smells its rind; I eat deep, taste
the core. The smell is sweet, perhaps; the taste is deathly bitter.
But even so? He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the
vision of the gods. He gazes upon the naked face of truth. I don't
pretend that the face of truth is beautiful. It is hideous beyond
imagination. All hate, all savagery, all evil, glare from it, and all
uncleanness is upon it. But it is the face of truth; the sight of it
gives an ultimate, a supreme satisfaction.

'Say what you will, at the end of life the important thing is to have