In Praise of Cycles

. . . As for me, I cannot live without variety, and I can take in nothing new if I am not alone somewhere I would want to be alone forever.

It's as much a love of liberty as a love of bicycles. It's not so much a hatred or derision of the bicycle that I come up against as it is an indifference. Or more accurately, a real atrophy of any feeling for individuality or freedom. And more ominously, for nature—the nature of shrubbery and beasts as much as human nature. And it's not that I want to put city life on trial. This would be an unlikely place to do so. But it does seem to me that only gossip and mockery count in Paris. As well as, and everlastingly, courtesy. Those teensy courtesies that orbit being and nothingness and waste hysterical energy. We would be so much better off without them . . . Not everyone in France is preoccupied with nonsense. Let those who are not occupy themselves with bicycles.

It is just this point I wish to make: the bicycle is not unworthy of a poet. It's an inspiration. Beautiful, firstly, the bicycle is itself poetic. Its handles are wrapped in yellow and black—which glow—and russet tape. He who condescends to cycles fidgets when art is spoken of. Greek tragedy is not worth his time.

You must love its wheels, its rims, love the steel and the ennobling authenticity of its forms. The cycle is what literature ought to be like, literature as Jarry understood it. He would say metal extension of our skeleton. I do not believe that you could better express the poetic, the eternal, significance of the bicycle. Let them laugh, the gentlemen who set the fashion for men's collars in the capitals of Europe. The complete man rides a bike. The extension of his skeleton is restored, it restores his steel, allows him to roll, a movement more natural to us by far (we who "in the beginning" were winged or crawling) than walking is.

Now, let's discuss utility. The bicycle permits you simply stunning things to do. Like leave for Basel—though by train, of course—wanting no more to do with murk and drudgery and vulnerability and lifelessness and invective and discouragement and frustration. You can take yourself to the Alps in no time, and it's one of the virgin places of the earth. You need a change of—everything, of air and faces, customs and centuries. It seems impossible. You'd think only the Himalayas would do . . . But don't be fooled . . . You've gone Paris-Troyes-Basel before you have time to think. Then quickly, here's Lucerne; and then you climb, the train climbs. You hear German or Hoch Deutsch spoken, the gibberish of who knows what vale or canton. Be comforted. First, however splendid the locale and the denizens viewed through the windows, it won't last. After Göschenen, there is a tunnel, the Gothard, and then, on the other side of it, on the other slope, where the dwellers are already Italian but only in language (they are and remain Swiss), Airolo, a sublime if small city, full of zinc palms and stone chamois and stone telegraph poles and bars where southern peoples or modern Iberians, South Americans, shout for drinks. It is here that all begins and ends, including grain and incense, somewhat finer than in churches. The bells, too, articulate differently, or begin to—their speech much more tender, and worn in lozenges of stone that portray hippogriffs and lions.

The air is inexpressibly brisk and you are up very high, though not at the highest point in the Alps (that peak's had a tunnel dug through it). High enough, though, for your purposes.

It's here the bike becomes once more appreciable, and supremely. You have nothing but to let yourself descend, a long...