What a difference thirty five years can make! 

  Last time in Paris I was lost, utterly lost. I had dropped out of school, both engineering which came easy and I fell into unquestioningly, and then the Liberal Arts College which I thought after reading for a couple of years might be my path. 

  It wasn’t. After only a couple of months of my first semester I was faced with a difficult decision: clamp down, follow the course syllabus and get that all important piece of paper, or follow the illustrious souls I had lit upon, the Giants of the Human Spirit as I would one day label them. It wasn’t a hard decision for me. School was dull and dead and I was seething with a desire for growth and experience. 

  Not long after that I raised a little money and flew to Paris where my favourite writer at the time, Henry Miller, had nearly starved but by hook or crook had come into his own. I would follow in his footsteps, I vaguely thought! 

  But of course you cannot do such a thing. In this crazy confused Life you must find your own unique path. No one really tells you so much. You have to figure it out for yourself. 

  What a long, many times lonely, difficult and joyous path it has been! 

  And here I am, thirty-five years later, strolling the boulevards, streets, and ‘passages’ of Paris with a cosmically foolish grin on my face.