Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit, lofty and spare.  At the edge of large cities, where streetlamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses you mount till you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood; up into cheap studios with symbolic decorations, where solitary and rebellious artists, inwardly consumed, hungry and proud, wrestle in a fog of cigarette smoke with devastatingly ultimate ideals.  Here is the end:  ice, chastity, null.  Here is valid no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values.  Here the air is so rarefied that the mirages of life no longer exist.  Here reign defiance and iron consistency, the ego supreme amid despair; here, freedom, madness and death hold sway.