„I had plenty of time on my hands and not a sous to spend. Two or three hours of conversational lessons a day, and that was all. And what use was it, teaching these poor bastards English? I felt sorry as hell for them. All morning plugging away on John Gilpin’s Ride, and in the afternoon coming to me to practice a dead language. I thought of the good time I had wasted reading Virgil or wading through such incomprehensible nonsense as ‘Hermann und Dorothea’. The insanity of it! Learning, the empty breadbasket! I thought of Carl praising the shit out of his immortal, incorruptible Goethe. And yet he hadn’t sense enough to take on a rich cunt and get himself a change of underwear. There’s something obscene in his love of the past which ends in breadlines and dugouts. Something obscene about his spiritual racket which permits an idiot to sprinkle holy water over Big Berthas and dreadnoughts and high explosives. Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”

Henry Miller (1889-1980): “Tropic of Cancer” (1934), S. 221