(This is certainly true for everything but the condoms, but I'm an egoist and, as with any piece of literature, I'm trying to sell myself to the reader. Here I am saying that I'm a highly desirable, adequately sexed young man in the city. Truth, thankfully, is a topic best left to philosophers and since I am a something else, let's say that everything is true for a little while and we can all leave each other a little more satisfied.)

Sometimes the train pass, the book and the condoms work magnificently together, as they did one spring day, but it was my book that really did it, I think. Thank you, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. You may be an insane, pessimistic and dirty Frenchman, but carrying your book got me laid and for that I'm willing to someday try to finish it -- maybe, if there is nothing better to read.

Anyway, it was the first day of my second spring in the city. The wind was blowing warmly, and I felt a little bit like a Disney cartoon as I walked to the train on a Saturday morning, with a book in my hand and a smile on my face. Everything was beautiful in the bright sunshine, with women walking around not wearing much, or wearing tight shirts. And though the wind was warm, it was still a bit chilly, so all around the city young women were displaying the full curves of their breasts and the outline of their erect nipples.

People like to pretend that we're more than monkeys, but that's a lie. It's just that we demonstrate the glory of our reproductive organs in other ways than the redness of our baboon ass or the musty smell of our crotch.

And then I was on the train. I was standing, smiling because there were so many mostly naked women about my age looking around and smiling, and I would try to read my book. But sometimes -- no, I'm sorry, most times in the springtime and also the rest of the year -- the curve of a woman's body is infinitely more sublime than words strung together by a foul-breathed writer who's far away and probably dead. For instance, I, as a young writer, could write at length about the beauty of a girl's skin in the sunlight, soft and glowing, curved like the landscape, the color of wheat in the fall, or the color of a plum, dark and soft but also hard, or like that of coffee with cream, or all of those colors. And then it is pink and then it is red. I could write and I could maybe write a beautiful sentence, something that swoops down like the plunge of a woman's back arched in, let's say, the blue light from a street lamp. But it would be just a sentence, a construction of syllables far less melodious to the eyes than the viewing of the swerves and curves of a woman alive and before you.

So I would look at my book, "Journey to the End of the Night," and I would read some sentence about something, just trying to, I don't know, conceal my glee or hide behind furtive glances, and also kind of enjoying the book, in a sort of roundabout kind of way. So I was standing and reading and looking when one of the women came and asked me many questions, concealed as a simple one.

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