The only
time his conversation ever rose superior to these muddled clauses, with
which he interpreted the most rococo happenings in a life that had been
more than usually eventful, was when he got down to the detailed
discussion of his most animal existence: he knew, to a subtlety, the
foods, the liquor, and the women that he preferred.
He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of
civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city
street--and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero
of a thousand romances of life and art--and he was a virtual moron,
performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely
astounding epics over a span of threescore years.
With such men as these two Anthony Patch drank and discussed and drank
and argued. He liked them because they knew nothing about him, because
they lived in the obvious and had not the faintest conception of the
inevitable continuity of life. They sat not before a motion picture with
consecutive reels, but at a musty old-fashioned travelogue with all
values stark and hence all implications confused. Yet they themselves
were not confused, because there was nothing in them to be
confused--they changed phrases from month to month as they
changed neckties.
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