a dance performed by the Mongoloid Ballet of the United Insane Asylums of New Jersey;

plus, as already agreed, the publisher has announced a

Comic Strip Version

even for the further diffusion of this monumental intellectual work, which is not easily accessible to people of all educational backgrounds (to be syndicated in more than one hundred and seventy-six leading dailies in fifty-eight countries simultaneously)—

!!!ATTENTION!!!

fan clubs, autograph collectors, organizers of culture conventions, cocktail-party hostesses, advertising specialists!!!

As is well known, the author, who lives in extreme isolation on his mountain farm near Gstaad (and is now on safari in East Africa), avoids any kind of publicity; requests for social events, television appearances, round-table discussions, and commercials are to be directed to the publisher. For information on background and foreground, physical statistics, skull formation, palm lines, sexual habits and proclivities, horoscope, hobbies, etc., please consult the life story penned by Bill Pepper with the personal cooperation of the author:

The Working Beast

(airtight information on all the links between biography and fiction!! The complete key to the characters, places, episodes!!! Also see the in-depth psychological study by Dr. Hertzog!!! As well as the monograph put out by the same publisher: Aristides par lui-même! A Portrait in His Own Words, profusely illustrated with previously unpublished material, including rare photographs of the author with Louis Armstrong, Gina Lollobrigida, Dr. Barnard of the Groote Schur Hospital, Moshe Dayan, and many others. In paperback for only five ninety-five!!!)—

•

but until then, we’ll live on advances, comrade! Both financially and morally (as if this weren’t the same thing for Christa and associates). We are living toward a promise—

living as sheer abstractions: anticipating a future that hovers before us like the proverbial carrot before the donkey’s mouth—

and thus the procession winds up without much ado. Ferme le pot de confiture, as Gaia would say; the audience disperses—

only you and I, brother Life-Dreamer, jog along undaunted behind ourselves: always on the same gray mount of a present that will be no different tomorrow from today; always a new day in which we await ourselves the next day; always a new loan of twenty-four hours on a property that may contain only twenty-three—

hours that we let wane by serving the piglets, pouring swill into their troughs and then consuming what they leave over for us; hours of frittering and, of course, also hours of desperate wishful thinking: fallen angels from imagination’s realm—

which make the mark of Cain on our foreheads light up when the urgent pleading appears in our eyes:

You who are entangled in the chaos of our life and fear being throttled in it—be patient for just a bit longer: we are not lying when we say:

I have only to doff my gray coat in order to be king.

And you who think you have seen through our con, you who hate us, despise us, want to shrug us off, ignore us contemptuously—just wait:

The day will come!

And you who love us—oh, do not torture us. The day will come, it will come for sure, it may come tomorrow—