The main thing in life is to leap to every possible conclusion on every possible occasion. For the fact is that individuals are always right – and the masses always wrong. But we should be careful not to attempt to base any rules for behaviour on this – there is no need for rules to be written down before we follow them. Only two things really matter – there’s love, every kind of love, with every kind of pretty girl; and there’s the music of Duke Ellington, or traditional jazz. Everything else can go, because all the rest is ugly – and the few pages which follow as an illustration of this draw their entire strength from the fact that the story is completely true since I made it up from beginning to end. Its material realization – to use the correct expression – consists basically of a projection of reality, under favourable circumstances, on to an irregularly tilting, and consequently distorting, plane of reference. Obviously it is a method, if there ever was one, that can be readily divulged.