Last of the inkblots

 The most cutting criticism spoke to the Rorschach’s great selling point: that the results depended on who you were, not on how you were trving to present yourself. The Rorschach was an X-ray, the test that couldn't be faked any more than a slide could fool a slide projector. By 1960, though, studies were showing that examiners could consciously or unconsciously influence the results and that test takers modified their responses depending on why the test was being given, what the examiner thought of them, or just the examiner’s personal style. While some saw the interpersonal aspect of the test as part of its power, this did make the test less objective. 

What psychological testers liked to call “clinical validity”—the fact that a skilled interpreter could use the Rorschach to gain insights that worked in practice and that could then be confirmed with the patient or checked against other sources—was starting to look very different to skeptics. They described these so-called insights as a combination of confirmation bias (overvaluing, even overperceiving, information one already agrees with), illusory correlations (deciding a connection exists that isn’t there), and the kinds of techniques used by fortune-tellers and psychics (unconsciously using contextual information, making statements true of almost everyone but felt to be insightful, offering “push” predictions subtly modified or even totally reversed in followup questions, and so on). 

Blind diagnosis eliminated some of these issues but by no means all. The test still had to be administered by someone in contact with the test taker. Any verification of the diagnosis required checking it against the judgments of someone like the subject’s regular therapist, whic only replicated the problem. Besides, for psychological truths, it ) hard to say what outside confirmation could look like. Ifa clinician a patient both felt that a description of the patient was true, what e. was there? But these feelings would not satisfy a demand for hard proof. 

Few claimed that Rorschach testers were consciously cynical frauds or quacks. Then again, a fortune-teller surrounded by customers amazed at the accuracy of his mind-reading might start to believe in his own astounding abilities, too—and some of the most forceful critics of the Rorschach drew just this analogy. At the very least, they ex pressed dismay at a “Rorschach culture” of orthodoxy, arguments from authority, and antiscientific bias. 

Such criticisms, appearing in professional publications, had little effect on the Rorschach, which was in widespread use and central to che self-definition of clinical psychology. There was too great a demand for the access to the personality that the inkblots claimed to provide. 

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The Cold War was running at its hottest in the sixties, demanding total ideological clarity in the battle between communism and capitalism, and there were moments when the fate of the world quite literally depended on how ambiguity was interpreted. In October 1962, President Kennedy was handed photographs of Cuba taken from America’s most advanced U-2 spy plane, which either did or didn’t show a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile launch site, and either were or weren't reason to start a nuclear war. 

JFK saw “a football field” in one picture; RFK saw “the clearing of a field for a farm or the basement of a house.” Even the deputy director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center—there was such a thing, established in 1961—admitted that the president would have to take “on faith” what the pictures showed. But what was needed was certainty. When JFK delivered a televised address to the nation on October 22, he called the photographs “unmistakable evidence” of aSoviet missile site; when they were reproduced around the world, the public found them just as unmistakable. 

The combination of real ambiguity and an overwhelming need for Visual and ideological certainty produced what has been called a “Cold War crisis of images” affecting both sides of the Iron Curtain. Capitalists and communists alike went looking for secret messages behind tverything, and insisted they had found them. A new word for hiding specific meanings in material that seemed random and intentionless “encryption’—entered Webster's Dictionary in 1950. US Customs officials were confiscating abstract paintings sent from Paris because they thought the images contained communist messages. Ambiguities like the inkblots’ now tended to be thought of no longer as fruitful methods for exploring individual personalities but as codes to be deciphered, 

Efforts to read minds were inseparable from attempts to control them—a link clearest in the research and debates on so-called “brain. washing” that rocked American behavioral sciences around the time of the Korean War. (These were the techniques immortalized in popular culture by The Manchurian Candidate: novel 1959; movie 1962.) The US government heavily promoted efforts to plumb the recesses of “the Soviet mind,” “the African mind,” “the non-European mind,” and so on, both in anthropology and more generally. It funded ventures like the Fulbright Fellowship, promoting cultural exchange and infiltration, and the creation of Area Studies (“Latin American” or “Far East” departments in prominent universities). 

Psychology was seen as intrinsically linked to national security and the cause of democracy, and even outside of specific hotspots like Latin America or the Soviet mind, the inkblots were widely deployed to penetrate foreign psyches. Bleuler’s Moroccan farmers, Du Bois’s Alorese, and Hallowell’s Ojibwe had been just the beginning. Scholar Rebecca Lemov has counted five thousand articles published between 1941 and 1968 in what she calls the “Projective Test Movement”: research using Rorschachs and other projective methods on peoples from the Blackfoot Indians in the American West to every last Ifalukan living on coral islands in Micronesia totaling half a square mile. These studies, too, were well funded by the government. “Cold War-era look-insideyour-head fantasies flourished,” Lemov remarks. 

In this technocratic context, the collected information was likely to end up as enormous stockpiles of data in archives and university libraries. The Vicos Collection at Cornell documented how the university leased a Peruvian village in 1952, expropriated it to the sharecroppers, and managed its transition into modernity, studying it and its inhabitants with projective tests every step of the way. The Microcard Publications of Primary Records in Culture and Personality in Wisconsin, known as the “database of dreams,” contained thousands of miniaturized Rorschach protocols and life histories, slices of life such as the 

Rorschach responses of one hard drinking Mcnomince Indian from gortheastern Wisconsin who had run aground on the transition to mojecnity. Card VI, he said, “és dike a dead planet. It seems to tell the story of d pene onx great, who have lost... like something happened. All that's left is phe ambol.” 

Another Menominee, a peyote worshipper, found the inkblots more comforting: “You know, this Rorschach. . . is something like peyote in , way. It looks into your mind. Sees the things that aren’t out in the open. It is like that with peyote. At a meeting you get to knowa man in , few hours better than you would get to know him in a lifetime otherwise. Everything about him is right there for you to see.” 

Perhaps the low point of Cold War ambitions for psychology came when ARPA, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, sent teams of psychologists into the war-torn jungles of Vietnam. They tested more than a thousand peasants with a modified TAT (uncaptioned pictures, redrawn from the Harvard originals by a Saigon artist), looking for the values, hopes, and frustrations that motivated them. They then met with military and civilian officials eager to “convert a war of devastation into a ‘welfare war’” that would bring “peace, democracy, and stability” to the region, and wanting to tailor their counterinsurgency propaganda to win over the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese. As one historian puts it: “The Vietnamese psyche was a crucial policy target.” 

Simulmatics Corporation was a for-profit research company originally founded in 1959 to computer-simulate voter behavior before the 1960 presidential election. It had since branched out, and in 1966 it sent Walter H. Slote, a Columbia University lecturer and psychotherapist, to Saigon for seven weeks. His mission: uncover “the Vietnamese personality.” He believed that one life could reveal the forces that shape others—the “deeper” a single person’s motivation, “the more likely it is to represent universals”—and so he drew his conclusions from four people. After duly conceding that the sample was too small to generalize from, he generalized away. 

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Precisely when Dr. Brokaw was taking his shirt to the people, the Rorschach was becoming a symbol in real life for anything that elicited different, equally valid opinions. In 1964, a reviewer confronted with ten books about New York summed up: “Composing a New York City book is a kind of projective psychological test, a Rorschach, say; the five boroughs are only a stimulus to which the observer responds according to his personality.” In the New York Times at least, this was the first of thousands of Rorschach clichés to come. Charles de Gaulle would soon be “a Rorschach test” for biographers; the loose plot ends of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: .A Space Odyssey were a Rorschach test too. 

In a culture-wide crisis of authority, it was easier for arbiters to stop claiming authority at all. Opinions differed, and calling something “a Rorschach test” meant there was no need to take a side and risk alienating anyone. Journalists and critics no longer saw it as their job to tell readers which possible reaction to New York City or 200z was correct: everyone had the right to their own opinion, and an inkblot was the indispensable metaphor for that freedom. 

A resonant metaphor alone, though, would not have been enough to save the Rorschach as an actual psychological test. The fact had to be addressed that, by this point, there was no such thing as “the” Rorschach test at all. 

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As early as 1964, four years after the term data science was coined, researchers had run the Rorschach responses of 586 healthy Johns Hopkins medical students through an early computer-indexing program and produced a 741-page large-format concordance. By the mid-1980s this corpus, plus the life histories available from long-term follow-ups with the test takers, made it possible to sidestep traditional Rorschach interpretation altogether. Computers simply counted up every occurrence of every word spoken in the tests and went looking for correlations between answers and later fates. An unnerving article from 1985, “Are Words of the Rorschach Predictors of Disease and Death?” claimed that those who mentioned “whirling” in any of the ten cards were five times as likely to commit suicide as those who didn’t, and four times as likely to have died of other causes. Exner brought computers into his own methodology as well. Beginning in the mid-1970s, he explored ways to “increase computer uti~ lization as an aid in interpreting the test,” eventually resulting in the 1968 survey of academic clinical psychologists, while showing that the Rorschach was still widely used, found that more than half the respon. dents felt that “objective,” “non projective” methods were increasing in use and importance. One of these methods, in particular, was rapidly gaining ground. 

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, fire published in 1943, pulled ahead of the Rorschach in 1975. It consisted og $04 statements—567 statements in the modified MMPI-2—that sub. jects were asked to agree or disagree with, ranging from the apparently trivial (“I have a good appetite”, “My hands and feet are usually warm enough”) to the obviously alarming (“Evil spirits possess me at times’, “I see things or animals or people around me that others do not see”), It could be administered to a group by a clerical worker and was easy to score. Each MMPI scale—the Depression Scale, the Paranoia Scale~ had two lists of question numbers associated with it: the number of items from the first list that had been answered True, plus the number from the second list marked False, was the result. It was quick and ix was “objective.” 

Technically, this meant only that it was not “projective.” A person's True/False answer to “Some people think it’s hard to get to know me,” “1 have not lived the right kind of life,” or “A large number of people are guilty of bad sexual conduct” could not be objective in any meaningful sense. People are not willing or able to evaluate themselves objectively—self-descriptions were often found to correspond only partially, at best, to what friends and family said about the test taker, or to what their behavior showed. Answers were not even meant to be taken at face value: Responding “True” to a lot of depressing statements and “False” to a lot of happy statements didn’t necessarily mean a person was depressed. There were scales to measure whether a person was likely to be exaggerating or lying; there were other ways one scale could affect the others. Interpreting MMPI results, too, was an art, requiring subjective judgment. But the slanted terms odjectsve and prejecttve certainly helped the MMPI’s fortunes. 

In the decade after 1975, the Rorschach fell from being the second most commonly used personality test in clinical psychology to fifth. It was now behind both the MMPI and several other projective tests: 

REN SZ en oP ont) Human Figure Drawing (used primarily with children), Sentence Completion, and the House-Tree-Person Test. 

Results from these more limited tests were relatively self explanatory. Drawing a human figure with a big head might suggest arrogance. Leaving out key body parts was a bad sign. Completing sentences with hostile, pessimistic, or violent words: not good. These tests were thus more vulnerable to “impression management”—subjects could know how to stage the impression they wanted to make, present themselves as they wanted to be seen. One New York City cop, given the House-Iree-Person Test during his hiring process, said that his buddies had told him beforehand: “The house has to have a chimney with smoke coming out, and whatever you do, make sure you put leaves on the tree.” That’s what he did. Whatever their weaknesses, though, these tests were quick and cheap, and so increasingly preferred. Popularity rankings among tests, usually based on sporadic survevs with small and unrepresentative samples, are not as precise or reliable as they sound. But the trend lines were clear—the ink was on the wall. 

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After all, over the course of a century spent looking at the inkblots, spent tallying, categorizing, and reframing what people see, everything you can imagine and quite a lot you can’t—one truth has remained unassailable: Card V looks like a bat. Or maybe a butterfly. 

In Rorschach tests given between 2000 and 2007 to six hundred nonpatient Brazilian men and women, 370 of those people saw a bat in Card V; most of the others saw a butterfly or moth. There were, as usual, a lot of bears in Card II. In fact, out of roughly fourteen thousand total responses, there were only 6,459 different responses, and a small pool of thirty answers were common enough to be given by fifty or more people. The inkblots objectively do look like certain things, while they also invite interpretation. It wouldn’t be much of a test if everyone saw something totally different, or if almost everyone saw the same thing. In these six hundred tests, the long tail of personal variation consisted of about a thousand answers given by two people each, and fully 4,538 answers each given only once, including the “tragically misunderstood piece of cauliflower” seen by one depressed farmer. 

If you graph the responses, the near vertical line on the Jeft shows he inkblots’ conrmon ground the obvious hats and bears while the horizontal line shows the lceway for personal idiosyncrasy. Meyer -alled this the Rorschach test’s structure and latitude. The graph alsa veils a More specific pattern: the most common answer is twice as <ommon as the second most frequent, three times as common as the chird most frequent, all the way down. 

This is what’s known as a Zipf distribution, one of the mathematical ordering principles that structure the world. Other patterns are better known—the Fibonacci sequence in a nautilus shell, the bell curve of a random distribution—but the Zipf describes phenomena from earthquake size (there are very few huge ones and lots of little ones) to city populations, sizes of businesses, and word frequencies: in English “the” is twice as common as “of,” three times as common as “and,” on down to “cormorant” and “methylbenzamide.” Rorschach answers in a large sample will follow the same pattern. The bat on Card V is the “the” of the Rorschach. 

A single test also yields more than one data point. A person typically gives twenty, thirty answers over the course of the test, and a healthy test result won't be stuck on either side of the Zipf curve. Only obvious answers would suggest you're pretty guarded or rigid, or uninterested in the task, or boring, while too many unusual or bizarre answers might mean you have a poor grip on reality, or mania, or maybe youre a rebel trying to be different. 

Finally, the Rorschach yields multiple data points in a sequence. The test is a fixed series of ten cards, but test takers have the freedom to give multiple answers per card in any order. A given person's answers move up and down the Zipf curve, so to speak, a movement that itself has structure and latitude. Do your answers fall apart in the colored cards at the end of the test, or come together? Do you start with Something obvious on every card and then get quirky, or do you arrive at popular, common answers only gradually? [ven if two test takets Somehow gave exactly the same answers to each card, but in a different Order, maybe only one of them would have a rigid compulsion to give One kind of answer first and another last on every card, a pattern meaningful to a sensitive examiner. 

Using nothing but intuition, artistic skill, trial and error, and a few ideas about the power of symmetry, Hermann Rorschach createy a set of pictures as inherently organized yet flexible as natural language or earthquakes. In this regard it is hard to imagine them bettereg_ psychologists have designed alternate series of inkblots over the yea, but all fell more or less quickly by the wayside. Rorschach’s inkblot, are like the act of seeing, which itself has both structure and latitude There’s something really there, but not anything that constrains y, completely. The visual nature of the world is objectively in thing, but we see it there; we subjectively impose our view of the world onty things, but only if that view fits what we see. We're all looking at the Same thing, even when we see it differently. 

Rorschach’s blots are unique in more than shape. The colors elicit emotion, even override the shapes, sometimes but not always. Put. ting movement into a still image is not easy—it takes an artist with real skill and, in Rorschach’s words, “spatial rhythm” (like a Michelangelo, unlike a Futurist). It is even harder to potentially convey a sense of movement, to some people and not to others. Almost anyone will See movement in pictures like Rorschach’s man struggling with a can (page 97), but, as Rorschach wrote in 1919, “A key point is that the experiment is set up to make Movement responses difficult. If you show someone good pictures, then everyone, even the intellectually disabled, will seem to be a movement type.” 

The symmetry of the blots, as Rorschach acknowledged, makes people see “disproportionately many butterflies etc.,” but he was also right that “the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.” The blots’ horizontal symmetry helps people connect with them, even identify with them. The blots are not mathematically symmetrical—they have variations in tiny protuberances, streaks, and shading—but neither are animals or people, which is precisely why the blots are seen as balanced and alive. In addition, since groups of people we encounter in real life are next to each other, not on top of each other, horizontal symmetry creates a “social” connection between the two sides of any image. It makes different parts of the inkblots interact, like pairs of people or other creatures. The inkblot test wouldn’t have worked without horizontal symmetry: the blots wouldn’t have been personal, psychological, 

The Moon and Sixpence

The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs and arrests. The time has passed when he was an object of ridicule, and it is no longer a mark of eccentricity to defend or of perversity to extol him. His faults are accepted as the necessary complement to his merits. It is still possible to discuss his place in art, and the adulation of his admirers is perhaps no less capricious than the disparagement of his detractors; but one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius. To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults. I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one’s admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of his soul like a standing sacrifice. The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the esthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer. The most insignificant of Strickland’s works suggests a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex; and it is this surely which prevents even those who do not like his pictures from being indifferent to them; it is this which has excited so curious an interest in his life and character. 

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She was very unhappy but to excite my sympathy she was able to make a show of her unhappiness. It was evident that she had been prepared to weep, for she had provided herself with a sufficiency of handkerchiefs; I admired her forethought, but in retrospect it made her tears perhaps less moving. I could not decide whether she desired the return of her husband because she loved him, or because she dreaded the tongue of scandal; and I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid to my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness in the reprobate. 

But there was something of an adventure in my trip, and my spirits rose as I approached Paris. I saw myself, too, from the dramatic standpoint, and I was pleased with my role of the trusted friend bringing back the errant husband to his forgiving wife. I made up my mind to see Strickland the following evening, for I felt instinctively that the hour must be chosen with delicacy. An appeal to the emotions is little likely to be effectual before luncheon. My own thoughts were then constantly occupied with love, but I never could imagine connubial bliss till after tea. 

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I had said all I had to say on the subject that had brought me to Paris, and though I felt it in a manner treacherous to Mrs. Strickland not to pursue it, I could not struggle against his indifference. It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest. I solaced myself by thinking that it would be useful for me to find out what I could about Strickland’s state of mind. It also interested me much more. But this was not an easy thing to do, for Strickland was not a fluent talker. He seemed to express himself with difficulty, as though words were not the medium with which his mind worked; and you had to guess the intentions of his soul by hackneyed phrases, slang, and vague, unfinished gestures. But though he said nothing of any consequence, there was something in his personality which prevented him from being dull. Perhaps it was sincerity. 

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he was like a wrestler whose body is oiled; you sould not get a grip on him; it gave him a freedom which was an outrage. I remember saying to him: 

‘‘Look here, if everyone acted like you, the world couldn't go on.”’ 

“‘That’s a damned silly thing to say. Everyone doesn’t want to act hike me. The great majority are perfectly content to do the ordinary thing.’’ 

And once I sought to be satirical. 

‘You evidently don’t believe in the maxim: Act so that every one of your actions is capable of being made into a universal rule.’’ 

‘‘I never heard it before, but it’s rotten nonsense.”’ 

‘Well, it was Kant who said it.”’ 

‘I don’t care; it’s rotten nonsense.”’ 

Nor with such a man could you expect the appeal to conscience to be effective. You might as well ask for a reflection without a mirror. I take it that conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation. It is the policeman in all our hearts, set there to watch that we do not break its laws. It is the spy seated in the central stronghold of the ego. Man’s desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd. It will force him to place the good of society before his own. It is the very strong link that attaches the individual to the whole, And man, subservient to interests he has persuaded himself are greater than his own, makes himself a slave to his taskmaster. He sits him in a seat of honour. At last, like a courtier fawning on the royal stick that is laid about his shoulders, he prides himself on the sensitiveness of hig conscience. Then he has no words hard enough for the man who does not recognise its sway; for, a member of society now, he realises accurately enough that against him he is powerless. When I saw that Strickland was really indifferent to the blame his conduct must excite, I could only draw back in horror as from a monster of hardly human shape. The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were: ‘Tell Amy it’s no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn’t be able to find me.”

 ‘My own impression is that she’s well rid of you,” I said. My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent.” 

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I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with Blanche Stroeve. I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure—if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence. These were not traits which 1 could imagine in Strickland. Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion. and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than rea ity. It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that infirmity of any man I have known. I could not believe that he would ever suffer that possession of himself which love is; he could never endure a foreign yoke. 

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‘“Why do you seek my acquaintance?’’ I asked him. ‘‘You know that I hate and despise you.’’ 

He chuckled good-humouredly. 

Your only quarrel with me really is that I don’t care a twopenny damn what you think about me.’’ 

I felt my checks grow red with sudden anger. It was impossible to make him understand that one might be outraged by his callous selfishness. I longed to pierce his armour of complete indifference. I knew also that in the end there was truth in what he said. Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence. I suppose it is the bitterest wound to human pride. But I would not let him see that I was put out. 

“is it possible for any man to disregard others entirely?’’ I said, though more to myself than to him. ‘‘ You’re dependent on others for everything in existence. It’s a preposterous attempt to try to live only for yourself and by yourself. Sooner or later you’ll be ill and tired and old, and then you’ll crawl back into the herd. Won’t you be ashamed when you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and sympathy? You’re trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity.’’ 

**Come and look at my pictures.”’ 

**Have you ever thought of death?”’ 

‘Why should I?"

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“I wonder if you haven't mistaken your medium,” I said. 

‘What the hell do you mean?” 

“I think you’re trying to say something, I don’t quite know what it is, but I’m not sure that the best way of saying it is by means of painting.” 

When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely increased the astonishment with which he filled me. I was more at sea than ever. The only thing that seemed clear to me—and perhaps even this was fancifulwas that he was passionately striving for liberation from some power that held him. But what the power was and what line the liberation would take remained obscure. Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of: the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house. 

The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied, must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me. It was evident that colours and forms had a significance for Strickland that was peculiar to himself. He was under an intolerable necessity to convey something that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone. He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to himself. It was as though he had become aware of the soul of the universe and were compelled to express it. Though these pictures confused and puzzled me, I could not be unmoved by the emotion that was patent in them; and, I knew not why, I felt in myself a feeling that with regard to Strickland was the last I had ever expected to experience. I felt an overwhelming compassion. 

“I think I know now why you surrendered to your feeling for Blanche Stroeve,”’ I said to him. 

“Why?” 

“I think your courage failed. The weakness of your body communicated itself to your soul. I do not know what infinite yearning possesses you, so that you are driven to a perilous, lonely search for some goal where you expect to find a final release from the spirit that torments you. I see you as the eternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does not exist. I do not know to what inscrutable Nirvana you aim. Do you know yourself? Perhaps it is Truth and Freedom that you seek, and for a moment you thought that you might find release in Love. I think your tired soul sought rest in a woman’s arms, and when you found no rest there you hated her. You had no pity for her, because you have no pity for yourself. And you killed her out of fear, because you trembled still at the danger you had barely escaped.”’ 

He smiled dryly and pulled his beard. 

“You are a dreadful sentimentalist, my poor friend.”’ 

A week later I heard by chance that Strickland had gone to Marseilles. I never saw him again. 

Penguin Island

 “An audacious spirit unceasingly disquieted him, and his mind harboured great thoughts, but alas! his rudeness and ignorance displayed the triumph of barbarism. He knew neither poetry, nor science, nor even the tongue of the Greeks, and he was ignorant, too, of the ancient traditions concerning the origin of the world and the nature of the gods. He gravely repeated fables which in my time would have brought smiles to the little children who were not yet old enough to pay for admission at the baths. The vulgar easily believe in monsters. The Etruscans especially peopled hell with demons, hideous as a sick man’s dreams. That they have not abandoned their childish imaginings after so many centuries is explained by the continuation and progress of ignorance and misery, but that one of their magistrates whose mind is raised above the common level should share these popular illusions and should be frightened by the hideous demons that the inhabitants of that country painted on the walls of their tombs in the time of Porsena—that is something which might sadden even a sage. My Etruscan visitor repeated verses to me which he had composed in a new dialect, called by him the vulgar tongue, the sense of which I could not understand. My ears were more surprised than charmed as I heard him repeat the same sound three or four times at regular intervals in his efforts to mark the rhythm. That artifice did not seem ingenious to me; but it is not for the dead to judge of novelties. 

Hollywood

 Oral History

HAL MOHR: You couldn’t dream about being in a business that didn’t exist yet. 

TAY GARNETT: As a matter of fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to anybody that the movies would ever be a business. 

LEO MCCAREY: I planned to be a lawyer. I even practiced. I started out very young, and they mistook me for the office boy. I wae a very poor lawyer. A discouraging factor in my legal career is that I lost every case. One day a client was chasing me down the street. I saw a friend of mine who called out, “What are you doing, Leo?” And I said, still running, “Practicing law.” 

RAOUL WALSH: I was an actor. I was terrible. Just terrible. It’s a wonder I wasn’t shot. 

CHARLES LEMAIRE: I was a song plugger. I was a soda jerk. I did all kinds of things. 

GERTRUDE ASTOR: I was kind of silly when I was young. I learned to play the trombone, first on a valve trombone and then on a slide trombone. And then I was told by everyone that ladies didn’t do that. Ladies didn’t play, you know, wind instruments, or they weren’t ladies. « 

HENRY HATHAWAY: To think about being in movies, first you had to see a movie. My mother sang for illustrated slides in Sid Grauman’s first theater in San Francisco. If they had slides with river scenes and riverboats, for instance, she'd sing “Down upon the Swanee River.” Sometimes she went out on the road, and once she was in San Diego with some company and they went broke and she was on her own with no way to get home. That was in about 1908. She looked in the want ads and saw an ad for a motion picture company that was forming. She applied for the job and got it. It was working with Broncho Billy [Anderson] . . . he was making those westerns, so my mother was suddenly in the movies, and the first motion picture that I ever saw was down on what they called the Promenade in Long Beach. They had two theaters there. There was a concession on that you paid a nickel or a dime to go into, and there was a little platform that resembled the observation car on a train. And it had a fence, and you're sitting on the chairs like on the rear end of train . .. you know, on the back end they had an observation car where you could sit and look at the scenery. There were eight chairs, and you went into the little theater and sat in those chairs. You were facing a screen in front of you, about eight feet across. You kind of sat up close to it. From behind you they projected on the screen a train trip. So you're sitting there on the observation train, and you're seeing a shot they took of going through woods and going through trees and going through gullies and going through gaps. You're sitting on the train watching what’s going away from you as you pass by. And they had the sound of clicketyclack. J don’t know how they got it, cause they didn’t have sound in those days, of course. That was the first motion picture I ever saw. 

HAL MOHR: The first movie I ever saw was a shot of a railroad train coming towards the camera and passing the camera. Now, I was twelve years old, and I'd had magic lanterns and all that sort of thing, and I was an inquisitive kid, J wanted to know how everything worked. So when I saw this magic lantern on the screen and saw the train actually coming by with smoke coming out of the smokestack and everything, that was a miracle 

SIDNEY FRANKLIN: In those days, you didn’t have doubles, Any star did what they were told. They were obedient in those days. It wasn’t like to day, where the star tells the director what to do. But when I think of wha we did with some of those people! We were all young and foolish, and we didn’t think. HOOT GIBSON: I became a western star because I could ride and rope and do stunts. in fact, I was the first stuntman in California. I doubled the stars, rode for them, and when we played Indians, why we’d put a feather im our wig on our head, and we'd put the makeup all over us with a breechcloth ea—we'd play Indian in the morning. We got two and a half dollars for falling off a horse, if we got shot off one playing an Indian. In the afternoon, 4 we'd put our western clothes on, became cowboys, and chase ourselves all afternoon, and if we got shot off of a horse in a saddle, that was five dollars, because it was harder to fall out of a saddle. That’s how I became the first stuntman in Hollywood—or at that time Edendale. They hadn't gotten to Hollywood yet. 

We used to have real cowboys as western stars. I was a rodeo champion. They stick a big hat on anybody today and an old pair of run-down miner's boots instead of cowboy boots on them, and boy, they’re cowboys. Most of them won't get on a horse. That’s your difference in the TV cowboy of today and the western star of yesterday. If you want to see some jokes, they've got ‘em on TV. 

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WALTER PLUNKETT: At the door of the stage, we had to take off our shoes l like entering the door of a Japanese temple and put on felt things to walk in. We stood there trembling for fear we'd sneeze and there would be some kind of a sound. We couldn't move a muscle. The jewelry we made for actors to wear—a lot of the jewelry had to have net wrapped around it, backed with velvet, so that it wouldn’t be heard moving against the fabrics. Fabric! Taffeta was out almost completely. Oh, the rustling, rustling sound of that fabric. The early hoopskirts that we made, which should have had crinoline underneath, had, as I recall, felt petticoats instead because felt was the only thing that would deaden the sound of those starched dresses, Dance costumes all were made of soft fabric, 

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GEORGE SEATON: When I was an innocent beginning screenwriter, I was working with a bunch of writers, sitting around in a motel, although they f_ didn’t call them motels in those days. It was a little bungalow court. M room cost $5 a week. But a big screenwriting problem came up, and in my innocence I said it wasn’t that big a problem and I’d think about it. So 1 did and came up with two solutions and brought them to the team. When I told the first one, Herman Mankiewicz, God bless him, said, “That’s it” 

Everybody agreed, so they took it to Selznick. (By the way, it was a forgot. ten film called Meet the Baron. The picture was miserable.) Selznick calleq me in to talk to me, and he said, “Young man, do you know the reason you got the solution?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “Because you didn’t know how difficult it was.” I thought that was a pretty silly statement at the time, but over the years I’ve learned he was absolutely right. You can get yourself so involved with the don’ts of writing a screenplay . . . until somebody comes along with a very simple solution. Of course, the picture was horrible, but Mr. Selznick was right. 

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LEONARD ROSENMAN: When I first started in films, I worked at Warner Bros., and at that time their films had wall-to-wall music. If the film wag an hour and a half long, the score was an hour and a half long. If you see an old Warner Bros. movie like Anthony Adverse with wall-to-wall music, after a while you're saying “Stop the music!” Historically this came from silent films, where the function of music was to add sound effects and also cover up all kinds of realistic sounds in the theater, like popcorn, the toilet flushing, the projection machine, and so on. The music helped remove the idea of reality so the audience would be able to suspend disbelief. Jack Warner evidently felt that music had this magical mystery power to make people feel things or make something palatable which didn’t seem palatable. Basically they knew nothing about whether the music was good or bad, so they began to use it indiscriminately. 

Through the thirties and forties there was a transition whereby you had a film with sound, dialogue, special effects, and everything else, but the filmmakers weren’t quite sure about the role of music. It seemed to work in silent films in a certain fashion, with wall-to-wall music, so they just continued to do it. They didn’t realize that diminishing returns set in, and if you had music from frame alpha to frame omega, people wouldnt listen to it after a while. It was like an enema in the Jewish family traditica. The idea was that it couldn’t hurt you. 

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MITCHELL LEISEN: Cutting is of vital importance. Six frames in a cut can make a great deal of difference, whether the film is smooth or jerky. You must always cut on a movement, not a static scene. I mean, cut on a movement of the person you're cutting away from to the other person you're cutting to. It need only be the lift of an eyebrow or a suspended motion, but as long as there is movement going on, you are less conscious of the cut. Directors need to know this, and you’d be surprised how many don’. But editors know it. They’re there to help. The old system gave the producer or director editors to help you, to carry out what you'd planned. 

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GORE VIDAL: You tell me somebody’s favorite actor when they were ten years old, and I’ll tell you who they are. Could Norman Mailer have existed without John Garfield? He’s been playing Garfield ever since. And he doesn’t really know it, but it’s part of him. I’ve been doing George Arliss ever since. You know, you get hung up with an image. Now, it’s interesting that your generation has come along and you’ve been brought up on ninety-second TV commercials. Now, what kind of images are Boing t come out of that I don’t know. I can suddenly see twenty years from now some girl breaking down and really discovering that she’s a Salem commercial at heart. Or a detergent. 

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ROBERT ROSEN: I mean, one may be shooting in Italy, immediately afrer the war; and obviously have difficulties getting hold of soundstages and good film stock and a range of other things. You’re shooting in a way that’s quick and dirty. And you have that grainy quality to the film. Here, the logic of production led to a particular product. But then that particular product becomes emblematic for a certain kind of reality. And so, then, we’ve changed our film language. And now one strives for, for example, some of those quick-and-dirty techniques and that grainy look as a way to convey the meaning of a certain kind of realismf! the dialectic between industrial conditions and a change in [film] language. 

More Greenblatt

 COMPULSIVE REMEMBRANCE 

Such compulsion was difficult for Renaissance theorists of memory to explain naturalistically, that is, without recourse to a notion of supernatural agency. Plato and Aristotle had set the principal terms for understanding memory, but those terms focused on sor. age and search functions, not on involuntary hauntings. Plato's most influential metaphor for memory was that of wax in which an impression is left. The metaphor expresses beautifully the way in which the mind can keep the image of something that is no longer present. It conveys, too, subtle variations, gradations, and effacements of impressions, some cut deeply, virtually perma nently, into the medium of memory, some others only lightly, most slowly losing their original distinctness of outline and eventually fading altogether. There are variations as well, as the metaphor suggests, in the medium itself: in some people memory is like warm wax, barely holding any impression at all; in others it is hard and dry, difficult to imprint but, once imprinted, remarkably stable; in still others, it is a well-tempered medium between these extremes. 

But the unwilled, ghostly return and renewal of an old impression cannot be easily accommodated to this scheme—how could the impression be renewed without a material body to reinscribe it in the wax?—nor does it fit comfortably with Plato's other great metaphor for memory, the aviary. To be sure, we can imagine ghosts flitting and swooping, like birds in a huge cage, but the metaphor, as it is developed in the Theaetetus, is not about uncanny returns from oblivion but about frustrating evasions. Plato evidently felt obliged to supplement his primary image of the wax in order to convey what that image conspicuously misses: the sense that memories often seem alive, fluttering, and elusive. The aviary metaphor keeps a notion of storage—there is a particular place, a container, for those things that are recalled—but it eschews any notion of systematicity, the sense (later developed by Saint Augustine and others) that memory is like a treasure-house or strongbox with distinct compartments where one can look for particular objects. In the aviary, one must grope after memories that seem anxiously determined to fly out of one’s grasp. 

For Aristotle it is the possibility of making a deliberate search whether we think of it as lunging about in an aviary or reading wax tablets or sorting through the compartments in a strongbox—that distinguishes the memory of humans from those of all other animals capable of remembering. Any animal, Aristotle observes, that perceives time can have memories, but among those animals with memories, only humans have the power of recollection. This is because recollection is a “mode of inference,” and inference involves deliberation, and deliberation implies reason, and reason is uniquely human. These incisive reflections enable Aristotle to explain, for example, why “things arranged in a fixed order, like the successive demonstrations in geometry, are easy to remember, while badly arranged subjects are remembered with difficulty” (718). But they seem to make his account of memory even less compatible than Plato’s with any notion of haunting. 

Yet Aristotle—who observes that the moving force of recollection is particularly powerful in “persons of melancholic temperament” (720)—comes closest to the central issue immediately raised by the ghost in Hamlet, an issue inseparable from the ghost as memory and memory as ghost: the perception of likeness. For Aristotle this perception is the way one knows, when one is contemplating a mental image or phantasm that it is in facta memorythe remembrance of something that belongs irrevocably to the past—and not something that fully exists in the present. The mind is aware of a ratio between what is imagined and what actually once existed: a memory is grasped as a likeness, as he puts it, “re” something else” (716). To be sure, this likeness also not our babbling dreams affright our souls” (5.6.98). So, too, in Julius Caesar Brutus is horrified by the “monstrous apparition” in his tent, but a moment later he too recovers his poise: “Why, I will see thee at Philippi then.” The contrast to Hamlet, where there is no rallving of spirits and no recovery of poise, is extreme; indeed, in the case of Jultus Caesar, the contrast seems deliberate. Polonius memorably recalls that he once played Caesar and was killed in the Capitol, and Horatio invokes Caesar’s assassination just after the first apparition of the ghost: 

A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, 

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead 

Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. 

In 1769 Lady Mary Wortley Montague speculated that by these allusions Shakespeare intended “to captivate our attention by demonstrating that the poet was not going to exhibit such idle and frivolous gambols as ghosts are by the vulgar often represented to perform.”’° This may well be true, but Shakespeare seems also to be emphasizing the particular horror and intensity of the apparition in Hamlet, in contrast to his own depiction of Brutus’s stoical response to Caesar’s ghost. The soldiers Marcellus and Barnardo are “distilled / Almost to jelly with the act of fear” (1.2.204-5), and Hamlet vows to wipe away “[a]ll saws of books, all forms, all pressures past” from his mind. 

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On Hamlet

 Harold Bloom

Swinburne observed that “the signal characteristic of Hamlet’s inner nature is by no means irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather the strong conflux of contending forces.” I think that is a clue to Hamlet’s charisma, to his highly individual power over change and the final form of change—that is to say, over nature and death. Hamlet discovers that his life has been a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity. This truth, intolerable to any of us, helps turn Hamlet into an angel of destruction. Contending with unknown powers within his own self, the prince seems to struggle also with the spirit of evil in heavenly places. 

Greenblatt

For the fourth time in some fifteen lines, the likeness to the dead Hamlet is reiterated, now by Marcellus: “Is it not like the King?” ‘ Horatio’s words in response—“As thou art to thyself” (1.1.57| ,8)—are an emphatic confirmation, but a strange one. The strangeness —if one stops to reflect upon it—has to do with an erasure of the sense of difference that enables one to distinguish between likeness and identity: Marcellus is not “like” himself; he is himself. Since Horatio does not seem to be saying that the apparition is the old king—for by the sensible and true avouch of his own eyes he knows that the old king is dead and buried—his words “As thou art to thyself” have a different implication: they raise the possibility of a difference between oneself and oneself. The possibility will not be fully explored until much later in the play, where Ophelia is “[d]ivided from herself” (4.5.81) and Hamlet “from himself be ta’en away” (5.2.171). But the issue is already latent in the opening moments, when the sentinel calls out in the darkness, “[IJs Horatio there?” and Horatio replies, “A piece of him” 

Hamlet is a play of contagious, almost unive sel estrangement. 

But the question of the apparition’s uncanny likeness to the king is a special one, as the nervous repetitions of the same observation suggest. Marcellus should look like himself, but nothing should any longer look like “buricd Denmark.” For the trembling witnesses all know what they do not need to say: that the corpse of “the King that’s dead” can no longer resemble the king that they all saw when he was alive. The king’s actual body, were they to exhume it, would bear the signs and the smell of decay.' They are seeing something else, then, something perhaps that the Catholic Pierre Le Loyer, in a 1586 book on apparitions, calls a “phantasmal body”: It is certain that Souls cannot return in their body, which lies in the grave, reanimating it and giving it the movement and life it has lost. And hence, if they return perchance to this world by the will of God and appear to us, they take not a real but a phantasmal body. And those who believe that they return in their true body deceive themselves greatly, for it is only a phantom of air that they clothe themselves in, to appear visibly to men." 

Horatio seems to be getting at this sense of the phantasmal (as distinct from merely fantastic) status of the apparition when he pleads with it to remain—“Stay, illusion” (1.1.108)—and he seems to confirm this status when, trying to strike at it with his partisan, he finds that it is “as the air invulnerable” (1.1.126). But what is the nature of this “illusion”? 

“Illusion” marks a difference between what they are all witnessing and what they know to be reality—in this case, the decaying corpse, There is nothing imaginary about that corpse, even if they do not see it before their eyes; they know that it is the inevitable consequence of death. What they are seeing is nat physical reality, however lifelike the resemblance: instead, as their responses suggest, the apparition on the battlements is a kind of embodied memory.’* It has, Horatio immediately observes, usurped a particular form, the form in which the king “did sometimes march.

Legal quotes

 INCOME TAXES In my own case the words of such an act as the Income Tax, for ex. ample, merely dance before my eyes in a meaningless procession: cross-reference to cross-reference, exception upon exception—couched in abstract terms that offer no handle to seize hold of—leave, in my mind only a confused sense of some vitally important, but successfully concealed, purport, which it is my duty to extract, but which is within my power, if at all, only after the most inordinate expenditure of time. I know that these monsters are the result of fabulous industry and ingenuity, plugging up this hole and casting out that net, against all possible evasion; yet at times I cannot help recalling a saying of William James about certain passages of Hegel: that they were no doubt written with a passion of rationality; but that one cannot help wondering whether to the reader they have any significance save that the words are strung together with syntactical correctness. 

—HAND, Learned, in Dilliard, Irving, The Spirit of Liberty 

LAW 

A colleague of mine at the Harvard Law School with whom I got into a tangle about some question of law once chided me, indeed, closed a contentious argument between us by saying, “You take law awfully seriously.” 

I said, “That’s one accusation against which I plead guilty without reservation.” 

I am bound to say hardly another member of the Harvard Law faculty would have thought of making an accusation. I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalized medium of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling. 

—FRANKFURTER, Felix, in Phillips, Harlan B., Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (New York: Reynal and Company, 1960), p. 189. 

Aaron Burr:

Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. 

Francis Bacon:

Laws are like cobwebs where the small flies were caught and the great break through

In Search of JDS

 Ian Hamilton 

Salinger, it seems, had begun to have doubts, solemn doubts, about the whole business of authorship, doubts which were to prove crucial later on. What did it mean to bring a character to life?

From the start Salinger had shown himself to have a proprietorial, almost parental, attitude toward the people in his stories—he'd wanted to be Jameson onstage. This would intensify later on; indeed, it would swell into a damaging obsession. At the moment, though, it manifests itself as a mild, nagging doubt. Is there not a kind of sadism, an ugliness, in creating characters simply in order to arrange, readably, for their suffering and destruction? Ought not the author to behave more kindly, more protectively, toward these children of his imagination? 

Later, Salinger will favor fictional techniques that give him the illusion of having, as it were, delivered his characters’ destinies into their own keeping: the interior monologue, the letter, the long telephone call—these are all ways of making it seem that the “I” figure is in control of what is happening to him, that the parent of his tale, the author, has granted him full independence. Of course, if the characters are meant to believe in their own freedom from authorial designs, it need be no surprise if the author himself begins to partake of some similar delusion, begins to think of his characters as if they were his “real children”—creatures who have been imagined into “life,” who must be looked after, sheltered from the hurtful scrutiny of critics, the casual deconstructions of the academics, the editorial intrusions of magazine editors and publishers. And of biographers who want to take them back to where they came from. 

In 1942, none of these thoughts had taken shape. Salinger’s unease then was much more to do with the authorial detachment he himself had been guilty of so far. He suspects that he might simply have been using fiction as a means of handing out punishments he would wish to see inflicted in real life. His changed situation—the patriotism aroused by Pearl Harbor, the camaraderie he feels with his new army buddies, the whole atmosphere of crisis and self-sacrifice—seems to have encouraged him to ponder his motives in this way. 

E Finch

  There is a lofty incredulity 2 Julian's attitude. How can a religion based among the poorer castes of society and without a true civilisation behind it, have come to conquer the GraecoRoman world—declining as it was—in such a short time, and with such a deleterious effect? Especially when the laws of government, the form of tribunals, the economy and beauty pertaining to cities, the increase of disciplines and the exercise of the liberal arts, were only evident among the Hebrews in a miserable and primutive state? Part of the answer was just that: Judaeo-Christianity was not a civilisation with a religion, but an oppressive religion with little of a civilisation to back it up. Juban underestimated how this might be one of Christianity’s unique selling points. “Civilisation” could come later, if at all; their religion was their civilisation. It was freestanding, therefore absolutist and—inevitably—monopolistic. 

It was obvious to Julian that the adherents of such a religion shouldn’t be allowed to teach Hellenistic philosophy. “If a man thinks one thing, and teaches another contrary to what he thinks, in what respect does this differ from the conduct of those mean-spirited, dishonest and abandoned traders, who generally affirm what they know to be false, in order to deceive and inveigle customers?” Further, those parvenu Galileans displayed a hysterical nature, as shown in their taste for martyrdom, which, as Julian puts it, “make[s] them think death desirable, that they may fly up to heaven, after having forcibly dislodged their souls.” 

Finally, the Apostate is baffled by Christianity’s sheer lack of sophistication, its refusal to acknowledge experts, its preterence for lauding the fool and the simpleton over the scribe and the wise man. Thomas Taylor, Julian’s English translator of 1809 and himself a “philosophic polytheist,” expatiated enthusiastically on this: 

[Jesus] also seems chiefly delighted with little children, women, and fishermen; carefully recommended folly to his apostles, but cautioned them against wisdom; and drew them together by the example of little children, lilies, mustard seed, and sparrows, things senseless and inconsiderable, living only by the dictates of nature, and without either craft or care ... In scripture there is frequent mention of harts, hinds, and lambs, than which creature there is not anything more foolish, if we may believe that proverb of Aristotle, sheepish manners, which is taken from the foolishness of that creature, and is usually applied to dull-headed people, and lack-wits. And yet Christ himself professes to be the shepherd of his flock, and is himself delighted with the name of a Lamb! 

It’s worth pointing out that recent scientific studies have demonstrated that, contrary to age-old received opinion, sheep are in fact highly intelligent and emotionally complex animals, with good memories, the ability to form friendships and to feel sadness when their companions are sent to slaughter. 

Publicly, Julian was opposed to violent measures. “I have resolved,” he wrote, “to employ gentleness and humanity towards the Galileans; I forbid any recourse to violence ... It is by reason that one must convince and instruct men, not by blows, insults and torture.” Further, “One should feel pity more than hatred for people so unfortunate as to be mistaken in matters so important.” 

This was principle, but also pragmatism. Miracles and martyrdom were the two great selling points of early Christianity. You died for your religion and gained eternal life: the notion still inspires some today. But Julian declined to persecute them. 

Q. What happens (in the minds of men and women) when a god is no longer worshipped? Does he cease to exist? Or does he continue to circle the earth like another piece of space junk, beeping hopefully on a dead wavelength? 

What was left, apart from the example of his life, was his famous last stand against Christianity—the more famous because, for Gibbon, it was always doomed: 

The genius and power of Julian were unequal to the enterprise of restoring a religion which was destitute of theological principles, of moral precepts, and of ecclesiastical discipline; which rapidly hastened to decay and dissolution, and was not susceptible of any solid or consistent reformation. Julian had dismissed the corrupt and venal court eunuchs when he came to power, just as he had dismissed the preposterous number of barbers. He might himself have given an example of austerity and simplicity, but that example wasn't followed by even those closest to him. 

But these deaths are just precursors to Sebastian’s own. Like the best martyrs, he first escapes several attempts to kill him. The most famous of these pre-death deaths is when the emperor Diocletian orders him to be tied to a tree and used for archery practice: “They hit him with so many arrows that he looked like a hedgehog” (aha, I thought, remembering EF’s notebook—and here is a confirmatory tick in the margin) “and they left him there for dead.’ The scene is familiar from many art galleries, and I have always assumed—as did Diocletian’s archers—that their arrows were the actual cause of death. In fact, St. Sebastian survived this hedgehoggery, and his gateway to martyrdom consisted instead of being beaten to death with clubs and thrown into a sewer. 

Karnow on the French

 The longer I remained in France, the more its intricacies daunted me. But I derived some consolation from observing that the French themselves—philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, poets, journalists and just ordinary folk—-seemed to be just as bewildered as they constantly sought to define their society. Though emblematically une et indivisible, France was riddled with baffling and often incomprehensible contradictions. The French were simultaneously sophisticated and parochial, methodical and anarchistic, individualistic and conformist, flexible and stubborn, liberal and antediluvian, prudent and rash, puritanical and wanton, logical and wildly irrational. While espousing the principles of the Revolution- liberté, égalité, et fraternité—they recoiled from performing the most elementary civic duties. They combined tolerance with bigotry, kindness with malice, elegant taste with appalling vulgarity. Politeness ranked high on their list of virtues, yet they could be uncommonly rude, not only to foreigners but to each other. Beneath their exterior of lighthearted gaiety, the “ooh-la-la” stereotype that attracted tourists, they were frequently morose—a trait dramatized in films about tragic love triangles and the desolation of provincial life. 

Their cavalier “je m’en foutisme” also veiled their perpetual paranoia, To hear them tell it, they were forever under siege—by everyone from their mother-in-law and the tax collector to the neighbor’s snarling dog. Their standard reply to the greeting “Comment ca va?” was a shrug and a grunted “Je me défends.” 

Yet another incongruity was the contrast between their contempt for government and their veneration for the state, a perplexing notion for an American accustomed to authority vested in a constitu. tion that could be amended. But, to the French,  l'etat was the durable, indestructible entity that assured France’s immortal continuity. This concept, which preceded the idea of nationhood, developed from the efforts of successive monarchs to centralize their sovereignty and operated through a permanent civil service that regulated the country’s essential institutions—judicial, economic, fiscal and educational. The apparatus was refined during the eighteenth century by Louis XIV, the divine incarnation of letat, and his minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, one of the architects of modern France. It evolved over the years into an elite corps rigorously trained at the three grandes écoles: the Polytechnique, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Locked into generations of tradition, functionaries were still confined after World War II to antiquated offices without typewriters or adding machines, consulting dossiers tied with ribbons. They were responsible only to their hereditary hierarchies and stood aloof from the wrangles of ephemeral politicians. Like Chinese mandarins, they owed their positions to stiff examinations; appointed for life, they could hire or dismiss officials, and even revise parliamentary decisions merely on the grounds of “raison d’état.” In short, they were supreme—or, as the cliché put it, France “was administered rather than governed.” 

Whatever their differences, the French fundamentally shared the ambiguous yet pregnant vision of Jules Michelet, the distinguished nineteenth-century historian, that France was “une personne.”

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But, though it introduced the beginnings of democracy to France, the Revolution was never entirely consummated. The bourgeois classes, while pledging allegiance to its egalitarian tenets, arrogated to themselves the power and privileges of the Neanderthal ancien régime nobility they had supplanted. From the early nineteenth century onward, with the complicity of an entrenched bureaucracy determined for its own sake to preserve the status quo, they supported any government that furthered their narrow interests. Their unbridled greed and venality provoked a series of financial swindles, stock market crashes, and huge scandals involving senior officials. They conspired to discourage competition, artificially curbed production as a device to keep prices high and, to protect their domestic markets, overvalued the currency, imposed quotas and erected tariff barriers against imports. Calculated to promote stability, these and other such policies propelled France into stagnation and decay. 

By the early 1950s, the economy had made practically no headway in four decades. Meanwhile, the population had been steadily dwindling, the result of the carnage of World War I and a consequent decline in marriages, exacerbated by inheritance laws that deterred families from having large numbers of children. The population would have fallen even more had not France, suffering from a severe labor shortage, brought in multitudes of immigrants from Poland, Italy and elsewhere to work in its mines and factories. In 1935, for the first time in history, deaths exceeded births, and the lopsided demographic pyramid augured danger for the nation’s destiny. Politicians, military strategists and foreign diplomats all recognized as World War II approached that the French were too exhausted to confront a German onslaught, but, driven by hubris, they plunged into the abyss. 

The years of sclerosis had left a widening gap between rich and poor that triggered strikes, boycotts and bloody riots as the dispossessed struggled for social justice. The chronic strife polarized France into the forces of order and the forces of change, reactionary and radical, royalist and republican. During my first days in Paris, the ideological pendulum was still swinging from one extreme to the other. The war had recently ended, and the French were squabbling over whether the Resistance had been justified in summanily executing Vichyites and other pro-German collaborators. An estimated ten thousand were shot, chiefly on the eve of the Allied landings, when rival cliques began to jockey for the roles they would play following the Liberation. The vast majority of those killed undoubtedly deserved to be punished, though many of them were the victims of personal vendettas. Under the pretext of purging traitors, the Communists went on a rampage, exterminating anyone they believed capable of frustrating their future political aspirations. After the fierce factional splits that had fragmented the Underground, it was understandable that the orgy of vengeance would spark controversy. But it amazed me that the French should have, with the same fervor, continued to debate issues as obsolete as the Dreyfus case and state subsidies to Catholic schools. Deploring their divisions, de Gaulle re. marked, “How can you govern a country with three hundred varieties of cheese?” 

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Before embarking on Curnonsky’s excursion, I consulted my dossier on the history of Paris restaurants. The earliest on record was started on the rue des Poulies near the Louvre in 1765 by a certain Boulanger, undoubtedly a baker. His fortifying dishes, he guaranteed, would cure, or restaurer, intestinal ailments, liver trouble and other complaints—thus the genesis of the term. Twenty years later Antoine de Beauvilliers, formerly steward to the Comte de Provence, the future Louis XVIII, opened La Grande Taverne de Londres on the rue de Richelieu. As its title implied, it resembled a traditional English tavern by providing both food and drink. Its success spawned imitators like Le Café Mécanique, named for its intricate system of pulleys and dumbwaiters, and La Galerie de Valois, where enlightened intellectuals congregated to debate the issues of the day. At first, however, few Parisians ate out. Common folk lacked the money, while the nobility and wealthy bourgeoisie maintained 1mmense staffs capable of preparing splendid meals at home. But then the Revolution ravaged the upper crust, leaving scores of chefs idle; and several of them, known as fraiteurs, founded restaurants. A coffee merchant bought Le Café de Chartres, which was concealed in the arcaded courtyard of the Palais-Royal, and sold it to Jean Véfour, who converted it into Le Grand Véfour. Its regulars were to range from Bonaparte and Josephine to Victor Hugo, Colette, Jean Cocteau and legions of French dignitaries. 

By the tum of the nineteenth century, Paris counted more than five hundred restaurants, and they rapidly became an institution. The most popular of them were bargain bistros, a term of ambiguous etymology. According to one version, the uncouth Cossacks who rode into Paris 

with the Russian Army after Napoleon’s downfall in 1815 would storm into cafés and demand instant attention by shouting “d7stro”—Russian for “quick.” Another interpretation was that the word stemmed from Bistreax, a cheerful innkeeper. As the town expanded, restaurants proliferated. Patrician dandies and bourgeois playboys whooped it up with actors, actresses and pricey cocottes at Tortoni, La Maison d’Or, Le Café Riche and Le Café de Paris, on the boulevard des Italiens, and Le Café Anglais, with its notorious Chambre Seize. Ideological distinc. tions blurred at La Grille, where leftists and conservatives mingled over veal patties or pickled pork An enterpnsing butcher named PierreLouis Duval launched an eatery called Le Bouulon, which provided the hoi polloi with inferior cuts of boiled beef—and was the precursor of the fast-food outlet. When France was compelled to cede AlsaceLorraine to Germany following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Alsatian refugees flooded Paris, opened brasseries and bequeathed the city choucroute garnie. 

Restaurants swiftly spread across the Seine to the Left Bank. Situated on the quai de la Tournelle opposite Notre-Dame cathedral, the Tour d’Argent had been a sixteenth-century hostel before it was transformed into a restaurant in 1790. It was subsequently bought by Frédéric Delair, whose device for numbering his innovation, canard au sang, enabled him to identify precisely which duck was eaten when by luminaries like the maharajah of Jaipur, the emperor of Ethiopia, the president of Argentina and Charlie Chaplin. Another Left Bank landmark, Lapérouse, accommodated gentlemen with secluded salons decorated with risqué engravings and plush divans for their diners intimes with compliant ladies—and dishes that purportedly stimulated the libido. At Brasserie Lipp, in Saint-Germaindes-Prés, politicians, bureaucrats and journalists would huddle on banquettes beneath beveled mirrors, consuming such spécialités as cervelas rémoulade, téte de veau vinaigrette and huge schooners of beer called distingués. The literati ate, drank and argued far into the night amid the foliage of La Closerie des Lilas, which also lured expatriate Russian revolutionaries, among them Lenin, who played chess when he was not conspiring. 

Voguish Right Bank restaurants included Lucas-Carton, in the Place de la Madeleine, and Prunier, which carried the finest fish in Paris. The advent of the railway age spurred the erection of mammoth stations with turrets, clock towers and allegorical statues representing the cities on the line. Each had its restaurant—the most ostentatious of them, in the Gare de Lyon, ornamented with gilded panels, brocaded tapestries, precious bibelots and pastoral scenes of France. Called Le Train Bleu, it was the kind of place to which a proper husband might take his wife for their anniversary. But no respectable lady would dare be seen inside Maxim’s, whose Art Nouveau interior was the nightly venue for les grandes horizontales and the millionaire noblemen and businessmen who kept them. Fueled by champagne, they went berserk—smashing glasses, juggling dishes, climbing onto tables, swaying from chandeliers, leaping into the fountains in the nearby Place de la Concorde. They flung money around with reckless abandon. James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the Paris Herald Tribune, once handed a flower girl five hundred francs for a bunch of violets, while another American tossed out gold coins to the waiters as though they were pennies. For sheer profligacy, however, nobody matched the visiting Russian boyars; the Grand Duke Serge presented a courtesan with a twenty-thousand-franc pearl necklace neatly laid out on a platter of oysters. The doorman, Gérard, was able to retire to a chateau in the Pyrénées on his tips. 

&

France’s two hundred thousand cafés—one for nearly every thirty adults—-were an entrenched institution. In dreary provincial towns and villages, which shut down after dark, they were social centers for shopkeepers, peasants and bored adolescents. For Parisians k café du coin provided a convenient escape from their cramped apartments—places where they could gather with friends and colleagues for conversation, the national diversion. Cafés were venues for young lovers and illicit couples; pimps and prostitutes operated out L of cafés. Books had been written, music composed and revolutions plotted in cafés. Many of them catered to distinct clienteles, for whom going elsewhere would have been treason. Or as the fin de sitcle playwright Georges Courteline once observed, “A Frenchman may change his religion, but never his café.” 

The intelligentsia, genuine and counterfeit, assembled at Le Flore and the Deux Magots, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, oblivious to the tourists craning their necks for a glimpse of “les existentialistes.” Another watering hole for the smart set was the snug bar of the nearby Hétel Pont-Royale. Politicians and journalists with fat expense accounts met to swap information at Chez Lipp, a belle époque brasserie, also in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Expatriate artists congregated at Le Sélect, Le Déme, La Rotonde and La Coupole, on the boulevard du Montparnasse. Farther up the boulevard stood La Closerie des Lilas, a rendezvous for the upper crust. Sorbonne students loafed on the terrace of Chez Dupont, in the Latin Quarter; playboys, couturiers, mannequins, aspiring actresses and dem1mondaines on the make frequented chic powder boxes on the streets off the Champs-Elysées. The rich sipped whiskey sur les rocks and champagne cocktails in the bars of such fashionable hotels as the Crillon, the Ritz and the Bristol, while, in the sooty industrial suburbs, workers spent their evenings playing belote at le plus proche, the neighborhood pub. 

When All the World

... Was Young... Barbara Holland

We sang the praises of our fighting men. However flawed they may have been in civilian clothes, once in uniform they were covered by a national blanket of love and admiration, and I was jealous. I wanted to be a soldier, loved and important, accepted among comrades, and learn to shoot guns and save the world. On the other hand, though it was unpatriotic to think so, soldiers might possibly be shot at instead of doing all the shooting themselves. They might get killed. Apparently they did get killed. It was part of being a man. Nobody killed women, not on purpose; who would bother? 

There were advantages to being female. Girls were required only to be mannerly, clean, and obedient, and our rules weren’t as binding; if we did run and shout and dirty our clothes, as in certain girls’ books, we would be scolded and punished and then forgiven. 

Boys’ rules were harder, and involved always being brave, never crying, and never refusing a fight or a dare, however dangerous. Mothers sometimes begged them to act like gentlemen, but Fathers told them to act like men, which was quite different, and ifa boy broke the code of boyhood with tears or cowardice, he slid far down in the world and might never recover face with his peers or his father. A father whose son fell from grace might struggle forever with the cold misgivings in his heart. 

I didn’t have all this spelled out at the time, but I did see that it was safer to be female, simply because we didn’t much matter. You could tell just listening: the very word “man” had a weight and solidity to it, an echo like the resonant clang of an anvil struck with a hammer, a bronze finality. The word “woman” was a wisp of a sound, like an apron on a clothesline. You could blow the whole word away with a breath, like a dandelion puffball. An elusive target, which was safer. 

&

Sometimes I was deputized to take him down to Chevy Chase Circle, a longish walk, for a haircut. The barber shop was on the same street as the library, a proper, men-only barber shop, and I waited embarrassed and dwarfed in one of the huge black leather chairs, Fathers’ chairs. It was unseemly for a woman of any age to sit on leather, and almost indecent for a girl. Nobody there ever smiled, least of all Nick, who perched on a board laid across the arms of the barber chair, engulfed in a black cape, while Andrew J. Bible, a very solemn man, solemnly cut his hair, and ran the clippers up the back of his head and around his ears, and anointed him with manly and powerful perfumes. 

All little boys and many big ones wore Army-style crew-cuts, and a fresh one prickled deliciously under the hand like a baby hedgehog. When we got home, Nick went ritually around the family presenting his head to be touched and smelled. Men and boys got haircuts; Mother cut the female hair, including her own. She liked cutting hair, and long after we were grown she stalked us, clicking the scissors, anxious to take off just a little, Just to get it out of our faces. 

&

We made butter. It was Winnie’s and Izzy’s idea. Butter was severely rationed or perhaps just not to be had, and the patriotic were told of the joys of margarine instead. The butter people wouldn’t let the margarine people sell it colored yellow, so it came white, with a capsule of coloring included, and it was some child’s duty to mash the stuff long and hard with a wooden spoon to spread the coloring through it. This never worked. It was always streaky, and never tasted like butter anyway, or felt like it in the mouth. Judith once found and ate a quarter-pound stick of real butter, probably the entire family’s ration for a week. She wasn’t scolded because, Mother said, she couldn’t have known it was precious, but it seemed to me that nobody who didn’t know it was valuable would bother to chew down a whole stick of butter like a banana. 

The Poisonwood Bible

 People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through il those conditions unchanged. The Bantu speak of “self” as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die. The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. It is a ride on the power of nommo, the force of a name to call oneself. Nommo rains from a cloud, rises in the vapor fom a human mouth: a song, a scream, a prayer. A drum gives hommo in Congo, where drums have language. A dance gives nommo Where bodies are not separate from the will that inhabits them. In that other long-ago place, America, I was a failed combination of too-weak body and overstrong will. But in Congo I am those things perfectly united: Adah, 

&

I'm losing my family, piece by piece. Father is lost, wherever he. is. Rachel I could only despise more if I knew for sure which way to direct my ire, presumably South Africa, where I guess she’s finally hit paydirt with her exceeding whiteness and mercenary husband. I can’t reliably get a letter to Mother or Adah. Mobutu’s chief postal minister, a relative of Mobutu’s wife, stopped paying all the post workers for the last year so he could use the money to build himsef a mansion in Thysville. Now it takes a huge bribe or a person contact to get mail out of the country, and the letters incoming] can only suppose are piling up somewhere in Léopoldville, beng sniffed for money or valuables. 

If people are shocked by these unexplained losses—the post, thet salary, a friend walking home on the road—they don’t mention it What do people here know but forbearance? They take one look a the expensive, foreign-made uniforms of Mobutu’s police and know to keep their thoughts to themselves. They know who stand behind Mobutu, and that in some place as far away as heaven, where the largest rules are made, white and black lives are different kind: of currencies. When thirty foreigners were killed in Stanleyville, each one was tied somehow to a solid exchange, a gold standard like the hard Belgian franc. But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant’s hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It’s dawning on me that I live among men and women who’ve simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me. 

&

 “What is that, Aunt Adah? And that?” their Pascal asks in his wide-eyed Way, pointing through the aisles: a pink jar of cream for removing hair, a can of fragrance to spray on the carpet, stacks of lidded containers the same size as the jars we throw away each day. “They're things a person doesn’t really need.” “But, Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn't really need?” 

Todd Mc

 Cary Grant's Suit

20k Leagues Under the Sea - This is the kind of thing that happened to you if you grew up in the 1950s: you were turned into an enemy agent, acting against your own family, by the manufacturers of Robot Commando and Frosted Flakes. They fed you with endless movie and comic book versions of the world war that had just ended. And you got what Rossini you could from Bugs Bunny. 

We frequented the public library in the next town, because it had a charming room just for children, complete with murals and tile pictures round a fireplace. As a Californian kid I always took an interest in fireplaces because I didn’t know what they were for. In this library I discovered an illustrated book based on the Walt Disney movie of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. So for a while the central text of my existence was an abridged and otherwise distorted, and drawn, version of a motion picture adaptation of a novel. We should call the Fifties the Age of Adaptation — did a single one of us experience the original of anything? 

O, I was a submerged little fellow, submerged by worry ~ adult worries. THE BOMB - these frightening drills at school. When you’re a boy and you think no one likes you, you get submerged in antagonism too. Boys are apt to want REVENGE -it’s a very popular idea. Girls just go quietly insane. But this submergence in your own submergence, this is the very idea of Captain Nemo, whose very motto, 

MOBILIS IN MOBILI 

moving in the moving element, showed his original and vengeful power, his love of freedom. This is not so different from James Bond stuff (from which my parents always protected me) ~ Ian Fleming probably owes Jules Verne a lot — but Bond is extremely adolescent, the good guys and the bad guys. To have a CONTROL PANEL from which you can wreak havoc on everybody that annoys you in seventh grade — that is what James Bond is about. Can you imagine what an insipid, leering old drunk Jan Fleming must have been? What a namby-pamby? I keep him on the same detestable shelf in my mind as Tolkien, the shelf of really fouledup English people who unleashed torrents of bullshit on the world from which we will never recover. 

Yes, okay — of course there’s some kind of phallus trouble going on when you build a cigar-shaped boat with a spike on the end of it and RAM other ships. But Captain Nemo did it in a good way. He was making war on war. If you have a splendid logically twisted idea like that you just have to run with it. At least in the movies. And of course we got it, on some level, that James Mason was having some kind of Weirdo orgasm when he came to the engine room for collision speed

&

There is something strangled going on about Germans in White Christmas. Is Danny Kaye wearing a German field cap in the hospital? Traitor. Why does Bing suddenly start talking in a German accent when he comes at Rosemary with a tray of sandwiches? Does that make the sandwiches more attractive? The inn is, as Mary Wickes says, a “Tyrolean haunted house’. Why is there a guy with a German accent amongst the US Army buddies attending the tenth reunion? Is he a spy? Is he an offering of postwar reconciliation? 

The Romantic Glue of the Sandwich The scene with Bing and the sandwiches, the prelude to the ‘Count Your Blessings’ number, is attractive for two reasons. First, the Fifties sandwiches, stuck with Fifties toothpicks and Fifties olives. The large stone pitcher of cool buttermilk and the beer taps at the bar. Inspired, Bing comes out with his unique sandwich theory: the kind of sandwich you eat at bedtime determines what kind of women you will dream about. It’s not clear if Rosemary wants or expects to dream about women, but she’s all smiles. She’s supposed to be all smiles. In my stateless, anguished period I did like seeing this: it reminds me of many autumn and winter afternoons in many American houses, having a ham sandwich superfluous to my needs, and gazing out at a leaf strewn yard. Bing says to Rosemary Let's gather around the fire. I snap to attention. The Columbia Inn is very stylish in gust that early Fifties way — there’s a lot of fieldstone, a large open hearth designed to be sat around by the guests, surmounted by a sleek copper flue.

A Handful of Dust

 Later in the nursery, while he was having supper, John said: “I think Mr. Beaver’s a very silly man, don’t you?” 

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said nanny. 

“I think he’s the silliest man who’s ever been here.” 

“Comparisons are odious.” 

“There just isn’t anything nice about him. He’s got a silly voice and a silly face, silly eyes and silly nose,” John’s voice fell into a liturgical sing-song, “silly feet and silly toes, silly head and silly clothes . . .” 

“Now you eat up your supper,” said nanny. 

&

The vicar climbed, with some effort, into the pulpit. He was an elderly man who had served in India most of his life. ‘Tony’s father had given him the living at the instance of his dentist. He had a noble and sonorous voice and was reckoned the best preacher for many miles around. 

His sermons had been composed in his more active days for delivery at the garrison chapel; he had done nothing to adapt them to the changed conditions of his ministry and they mostly concluded with some reference to homes and dear ones far away. The villagers did not find this in any way surprising. Few of the things said in church seemed to have any particular reference to themselves. They enjoyed their vicar’s sermons very much and they knew that when he began about their distant homes, it was time to be dusting their knees and feeling for their umbrellas. 

.... And so as we stand here bareheaded at this solemn hour of the week,” he read, his powerful old voice swelling up for the peroration, “let us remember our Gracious Queen Empress in whose services we are here and pray that she may long be spared to send us at her bidding to do our duty in the uttermost parts of the earth; and let us think of our dear ones far away and the homes we have left in her name, and remember that though miles of barren continent and leagues of ocean divide us, we are never so near to them as on these Sunday mornings, united with them across dune and mountain in our loyalty to our sovereign and thanksgiving for her welfare; one with them as proud subjects of her sceptre and crown.” 

(“The Reverend Tendril ’e do speak uncommon high of the Queen,” a gardener’s wife had once remarked to Tony.) 

&

The vicar preached his usual Christmas sermon. It was one to which his parishioners were particularly attached. “How difficult it is for us,” he began, blandly surveying his congregation, Who coughed into their mufflers and chafed their chilblains under their woollen gloves, “to realize that this is indeed Christmas. Instead of the glowing log fire and windows tight shuttered againse the drifting snow, we have only the harsh glare of the alien sun; instead of the happy circle of loved faces, of home and family, we have the uncomprehending stares of the subjugated, though no doubt grateful, heathen, Instead of the placid ox and ass of BethJlehem,” said the vicar, slightly losing the thread of his comparisons, “‘we have for companions the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant .. .” And so on, through the pages of faded manuscript. The words had temporarily touched the heart of many an obdurate trooper, and hearing them again, as he had heard them year after year since Mr. Tendril had come to the parish, Tony and most of Tony’s guests felt that it was an integral part of their Christmas festivities; one with which they would find it very hard to dispense. “The ravening tiger and the exotic camel’ had long been bywords jn the family, of frequent recurrence in all their games, 

These games were the hardest part for Brenda. They did not amuse her and she still could not see Tony dressed up for charades without a feeling of shyness. Moreover she was tortured by the fear that any lack of gusto on her part might be construed by the poor Lasts as superiority. These scruples, had she known it, were quite superfluous for it never occurred to her husband’s relatives to look on her with anything but cousinly cordiality and a certain tolerance, for, as Lasts, they considered they had far more right in Hetton than herself. Aunt Frances, with acid mind, quickly discerned the trouble and attempted to reassure her, saying, “Dear child, all these feelings of delicacy are valueless; only the rich realize the gulf that separates them from the poor,” but the uneasiness persisted and night after night she found herself being sent out of the room, asking or answering questions, performing actions in uncouth manners, paying forfeits, drawing pictures, writing verses, dressing herself up and even being chased about the house, and secluded in cupboards, at the will of her relatives. Christmas was on a Friday that year, so the party was a long one from Thursday until Monday. 

A Burnt-out Case

 ‘Have you been married long ?’ 

‘Two years. I brought her out after my last leave. In a post like this it’s necessary to have a companion. You married ?’ 

‘Yes - that is to say I have been married.’ 

‘Of course I know you are thinking that she 1s very young for me. But I look ahead. If you believe in marriage you have to look to the future. I’ve still got twenty years of — let’s call it active life ahead of me, and what would a woman of thirty be like in twenty years? A man keeps better in the tropics. Don’t you agree >’ 

‘I’ve never thought about it. And I don’t yet know the tropics.’ 

‘There are enough problems without sex I can assure you. St Paul wrote, didn’t he, that 1t was better to marry than burn. Marie will stay young long enough to save me from the furnace.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I’m only joking. We have to joke, don’t we, about serious things. At the bottom of my heart I believe very profoundly in love.” He made the claim as some men might claim to believe in fairies. 

&

"You can take my torch.” The morning would be better, the man repeated, and Querry saw that he was scared. ‘If I go with you, will you come ?’ ‘ The man shook his head, so Querry went alone.

 He could not blame these people for their fears: a man had to believe in nothing if he was not to be afraid of the big bush at night. There was little in the forest to ln appeal to the romantic. It was completely empty. It had never been humanised, like the woods of Europe, with t witches and charcoal-burners and cottages of marzipan; no one had ever walked under these trees lamenting lost love, nor had anyone listened to the silence and communed like a lake-poet with his heart. For there was no silence; if a man here wished to be heard at night he had to raise his voice to counter the continuous chatter of the insects as in some monstrous factory where thousands of sewing-machines were being driven against time by myriads of needy seamstresses. Only for an hour or so, in the midday heat, silence fell, the siesta of the insect. 

But if, like these Africans, one believed in some kind of divine being, wasn’t it just as possible for a god to exist in this empty region as in the empty spaces of the sky where men had once located him ? These woody spaces would remain unexplored, it seemed likely now, for longer than the planets. The craters of the moon were already better known than the forest at the door that one could enter any day on foot. The sharp sour smell of chlorophyl from rotting vegetation and swampwater fell like a dentist’s mask over Querry’s face. 

&

By the time the Ryckers came to go — they had to wait a long time for Mme. Cassin — Rycker had drunk to the margin of what was dangerous; he had passed from excessive amiability to dissatisfaction, the kind of cosmic dissatisfaction which, after probing faults in others’ characters, went on to the examination of his own. Marie Rycker knew that if he could be induced at this stage to take a sleeping-pill all might yet be well; he would probably reach unconsciousness before he reached religion which, like the open doorway in a red-lamp district, led inevitably to sex. 

&

‘Father Thomas, when you have been in Africa a little longer, you will learn not to ask an African a question which may be answered by yes. It is their form of courtesy to agree. It means nothing at all.’ 

‘I think after two years I can tell when an African is lying.’ 

‘Those are not lies. Father Thomas

&

Even in those early days he had known how to alter the direction of a woman’s need to love. Woman ? She was not even as old as the architectural student whose name he couldn’t now remember ~ an ugly name like Hoghe. Unlike Marie Morel the former student was probably still alive, building in some suburb his bourgeois villas — machines for living in. Querry addressed him from the bed. ‘I am sorry. I really believed that I meant you no harm. I really thought in those days that I acted from love.’ There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself.