in view was a renaissance; shall I say the contrary? The sediment of the river which encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used
to it, it may remain there; do away with it and I am myself done away with, for the patina of circumstance can but enrich what was
there to begin with. This elephant skin which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of the coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light
can filter—cut into checkers by rut upon rut of unpreventable experience— it is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
hairy toed. Black but beautiful, my back is full of the history of power. Of power? What is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never
be cut into by a wooden spear; through- out childhood to the present time, the unity of life and death has been expressed by the circumference
described by my trunk; nevertheless, I perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after all; and I am on my guard; external poise, it
has its centre well nurtured—we know where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where? My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of
the wind. I see and I hear, unlike the wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear;
that tree trunk without roots, accustomed to shout its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact by who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that