The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
🎧 642: What a Piece of Work I Am
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🎧 642: What a Piece of Work I Am

Dedication and Epigraphs, read by the author
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Dedication

For Mad

Epigraphs

Let not the reader be scandalized by this gravity amid the frivolous; let him rather recall that there is a grandeur in all follies, an energy in all excess.
— Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (translated by Jonathan Mayne)

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat; . . .
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the bong-tree grows; . . .
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
— Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”

Each cell is an island:—the inhabitants, shipwrecked mariners, cast ashore upon it by the adverse blasts of fortune: partners in affliction, indebted to each other for whatever share they are permitted to enjoy of society, the greatest of all comforts.
— Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, the Inspection-house; Postscript, Part I

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
— Emily Dickinson

Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.
— Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

[to be continued]

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The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
The entire Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, read by the author. "A masterpiece of American humor." Los Angeles Times