ABSTRACT
The sensibility of the writer is free where it is most humane, where it seeks to apprehend and re-enact the marvelous variety, complication and resilience of life by means of words as scrupulous, as personal, as brimful of the mystery of human communication, as the language can yield. The mechanics of orgasm imply fairly rapid exhaustion and frequent intermission. What emerges when one reads some of the classics of erotica is the fact that they too are intensely conventionalized, that their repertoire of fantasy is limited, and that it merges, almost imperceptibly, into the dream-trash of straight, mass-produced pornography. Sexual relations are, or should be, one of the citadels of privacy, the night place where we must be allowed to gather the splintered, harried elements of our consciousness to some kind of inviolate order and repose.
