From the very first line Michaux warns the reader to prepare for combat, a bodiless, abstract combat learned by daydreaming. He hectors, cajoles, encourages, and entertains us like a grumbling pedant-uncle: "Communicate? You too would like to communicate? Communicate what?... You're not yet intimate enough with you, poor fool, to have something to communicate." At the same time, he challenges us to be filled with the adventure of life: "However weighed down, washed-up, bullied you may be, ask yourself regularly - and irregularly - 'What can I risk again today?'"
From the very first line Michaux warns the reader to prepare for combat, a bodiless, abstract combat learned by daydreaming. He hectors, cajoles, encourages, and entertains us like a grumbling pedant-uncle: "Communicate? You too would like to communicate? Communicate what?... You're not yet intimate enough with you, poor fool, to have something to communicate." At the same time, he challenges us to be filled with the adventure of life: "However weighed down, washed-up, bullied you may be, ask yourself regularly - and irregularly - 'What can I risk again today?'"