Hopscotch - pg. 8

As for me, I'm already used to the fact that quietly exceptional things happen to me, and I don't find it too horribe when I go into a dark room looking for a record album and fell in my hand the wriggling form of a centipede who has chosen to sleep in the binding. That sort of thing. Or finding great gray or green tufts in a pack of cigarettes, or hearing the whistle of a locomotive coincide, ex officio in time and pitch with a passage from a symphony by Ludwig van, or going into a pissotiere on the Rue de Medicis and seeing a man apply himself to his urination and then step back from the urinal towards me as he holds in the palm of his hand as if it were a precious liturgical object a member of incredible colors and dimensions, and my realizing at that moment that this man is the replica of another (although they are not the same one) who twnety-four hours before in the Salle de Geographie had been lecturing on totems and taboos and had held up carefully in the palm of his hand ivory sticks, lyrebird feathers, ritual coins, magic fossils, starfish, dried fish, photographs of royal concubines, offering of hunters, enormous embalmed beetles which made the inevitable ladies present quiver with startled delight.