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has understood more and practiced more inversion than anyone else in my book. In, short I am a Sodomite, and my struggle with the agony and inspiration of that destiny is the fundamental basis of my art.

p 220

They would take a wife, keep mistresses, and establish residence in other cities where they could find all the distractions they require. They would go to Sodom only on "days of supreme necessity when their own city was empty, in times when hunger forces the wolf to come out of the woods.

p 223

In A la recherche the Sodomites live on, love on, and elude their enemies and oppressors just as they did when they originally escaped the fire from heaven. And Sodom itself rises from its ashes to be continually reborn in different forms. "For the two angels who had been placed at the gates of Sodom to find out if all the inhabitants ... had done the things about which the cry had risen to the Eternal had been, and one can only rejoice at this fact, very badly

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chosen by the Lord who should have assigned this task only to one of the Sodomites,

p 225

"The author wishes to emphasize how disappointed he would be if the reader took offense at such strange portrayals ... to say that this sort of thing is alien to us and that poetry should be derived from truths which are familiar to us would be a serious ... objection if it were justified. There is, indeed, a type of art based on the most familiar reality, and its domain is perhaps the largest. But it is also true that great interest, and sometimes beauty, can issue from actions which stem from a turn of mind so remote from everything we feel, from everything we believe, that we are not even able to bring ourselves to understand them, that they unfold before us like a spectacle without a cause."

p 241-2

In writing his book he will have to "bear it like a fatigue, accept it like a rule of life, construct it like a church, follow it like a regimen, vanquish it like an obstacle, conquer it like