I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And ‘flesh and blood’ in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny. I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can
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