"... I certainly do envy you... The thing I'll always remember about this fellow" -- he looked from one to the other with a melting glow -- "is his inextinguishable gaiety. I don't think I've seen him depressed more than once or twice in all the time I've known him. As long as there's food and a place to flop... isn't that it?" He turned his gaze on me with unmingled affection. "Some of my friends -- you know the ones I mean -- ask me occasionally if you aren't just a bit touched. I always say, 'Certainly he is ... too bad we're not all touched in the same way.' And then they ask me how you support yourself--and your family. There I have to give up..."
We all began to laugh rather hysterically. Ulric laughed even more heartily than the rest of us. He laughed at himself -- for raising such silly issues. Mona, of course, had a different reason for laughing.*
"Sometimes I think I'm living with a madman," she blurted out, tears in her eyes.
"Yes?" said Ulric, drawing the word out.
"Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and begins laughing. He's laughing about something that happened eight years ago. Something tragic usually."
"I'll be damned," said Ulric.
"Sometimes he laughs that way because things are so hopeless he doesn't know what to do. It worries me when he laughs that way."
"Shucks," I said, "it's only another way of weeping."
-- Henry Miller, Plexus
* Miller's wife June -- "Mona" in the book -- supported them by gold-digging.
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