So when I borrowed Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life from the municipal library of the seventh arrondissement in Paris (more specifically, its annex in the Latour-Maubourg district), I may have been aged twenty-six, but equally possibly twenty-five, or twenty-seven. In any case, this is very late in life for such a major discovery. At the time, I already knew Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Lautréamont, Verlaine, almost all the Romantics; a lot of science fiction, too. I had read the Bible, Pascals Pensées, Clifford D. Simaks City, Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain. I wrote poems; I already had the impression I was rereading, rather than really reading; I thought I had at least completed one period in my discovery of literature.
And then, in a few minutes, everything dramatically changed.
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