the fuming acid of change

(...)

Billy tells me hat one of his best friends is going through a period of great upset --just as himself was ten days ago, except that in his friend's case the circumstances themselves are painful (the end of an affair). The symptoms and the disease are the same --terror when confronted by loss, doubt at one's reality, a sense of terminal failure, chronic ignorance of what one wants in the midst of the fuming acid of change. "Nothing will ever be the same", except oneself, and who wants to rely on that pathetic little monster?

New York, 4/25/83

Harry Mathews
20 lines a day