“I am a patriot-of the Fourteenth Ward, Brooklyn, where I was raised. The rest of the United States doesn’t exist for me, except as idea, or history, or literature…But I was born in the streets and raised in the streets…To be born in the streets means to wander all your life to be free. It means accident and incident, drama, movement. It means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a metaphysical certitude. In the streets you learn what human beings really are; otherwise or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open streets is false, derived, that is to say literature… Like a monomaniac we relive the drama of youth. Like a spider that picks up the thread over and over and spews it out according to some obsessive, logarithmic pattern”
(Henry Miller en Black Spring)
