poetic regularity. It was after reading Nietzsche that I decided to quit
my stupid, sinful ways. Yes, you may smile! It was Nietzsche who
converted me. I left the old crowd, the old life in Paris, went to
Brittany, studied new rhythms, new forms, studied the moon; and then
people began to touch their foreheads knowingly. I was suspected simply
because I did not want to turn out sweet sonnets about the pretty stars.
Why, man, I have a star in my stomach! Every poet has. We are of the
same stuff as the stars. It was Marlowe who said, 'A sound magician is a
mighty god.' He was wrong. Only the mentally unsound are really wise.
This the ancients knew. Even if Gerard de Nerval did walk the boulevards
trolling a lobster by a blue ribbon--that is no reason for judging him
crazy. As he truly said, 'Lobsters neither bark nor bite; and they know
the secrets of the sea!' His dreams simply overflowed into his daily
existence. He had the courage of his dreams. Do you remember his
declaring that the sun never appears in dreams? How true! But the moon
does, 'sexton of the planets,' as the crazy poet Lenau called it--the
moon which is the patron sky-saint of men with brains. Ah, brains! What
unhappiness they cause in this brainless world, a world rotten with
hypocrisy. A poet polishes words until they glitter with beauty,
charging them with fulminating meaning--straightway he is called mad by
men who sweat and toil on the stock exchange. Have you ever, my dear
Quell, watched those little, grotesque brokers on a busy day? No? Well,
you will say that no lunatic grimacing beneath the horns of the moon
ever made such ludicrous, such useless, gestures. And for what? Money!
Money to spend as idiotically as it is garnered. The world is crazy, I
tell you, crazy, to toil as it does. How much cleverer are the apes who
won't talk, because, if they did, they would be forced to abandon their
lovely free life, put on ugly garments, and work for a living. These
animals, for which we have such contempt, are freer than men; they are
the Supermen of Nietzsche--Nietzsche whose brain mirrored both a