henry miller, part deux
"Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And that's just what the bastards don't want you to do-- to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable. That's intelligent. If I were running the boat, things wouldn't be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn't have to shit your pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn't be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million billion varieties, maybe there wouldn't even be glass in the windows, maybe you'd have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn't be French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other because their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn't be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn't be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because there wouldn't be any goddamn laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months and years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn't need a visa or a carte d'identité because you wouldn't be registered anywhere and you wouldn't bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn't make any difference since you wouldn't own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?"