New Orleans

In the spring of 1988, I returned, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long-lost pe

dead bride crowned with orange flowers

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and mal-administrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists . . . but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to

Keep always this dim corner for me, that I may sit while the Green Hour glides, a proud pavine of Time. For I am no longer in the city accursed, where Time is horsed on the white gelding Death, his spurs rusted with blood. There is a corner

lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you’d be able to tour the city by gondola

Blessed be these people. They know how to play. They are truly a people of culture . . . putting the joy of living above the much less subtle and . . . altogether more stupid joy of growth and achievement.

I found the kind of freedom I had always needed, and the shock of it—against the Puritanism of my nature—has given me a subject, a theme, which I have never ceased exploiting.

at first sight a very imposing and handsome appearance, beyond any other city in the United States in which I have yet been. Mud, mud, mud. This is a floating city, floating below the surface of the water on a bed of mud.