12
PARTISAN REVIEW
bad news and "console" one with their moaning, as N. did,
it
only
irritates me. Why do those who are my nearest friends still know me
so little, and hold me in such poor esteem? Don't they understand that
the best and most delicate thing one can do in such a situation is to
say simply and straightforwardly: he is dead.... That wounded me.
But let's not say any more about it.
. . . How I regret the months and years that I pass here. How
many lovely hours we could have lived together, in spite of all the
frightful events that are going on now in the world! You know, Sonit–
schka, the longer it lasts and the more the infamy and atrociousness
of things surpass all bounds and all dimensions, the quieter and
more unshaken I become. I tell myself that we cannot apply moral
standards to an element, a hurricane, a flood, an eclipse of the sun,
but must accept them as something given and use them as objects
of investigation and knowledge.
Certainly, from an objective point of view, these are the only
possible courses of History, and we must follow History without losing
sight of the main line. I have a feeling that all this mud that we are
wading through, this huge lunatic asylum in which we live, could be
transformed overnight, as by a magic wand, into their opposite, into
something great and heroic, and that if the war lasts a few years more
this change must take place ... inexorably. Read
The Gods are Athirst
bv Anatole France.
It
is a piece of work that I admire, above all be–
cause the author, with the intuition of a genius into all that is uni–
versally human, seems to be telling us: "Look, it
is
out of personalities
like these, out of such daily pettiness, that at a given moment in His–
tory are born the most sublime deeds and the most gigantic events."
One must accept everything that happens in society, just as in private
life, calmly, one must see things in their larger meanings and take
them with a smile. I firmly believe that at the end of the war every–
thing will turn for the better, but it seems to me obvious that we must
pass first through a period of the most dreadful human suffering.
By the way, what I have just written reminds me of something
I want to tell you, because it seems to me touching and full of poetry.
I read recently in a scientific work on the migrations of birds-a phe–
nomenon that up to now has been rather enigmatic-that the follow–
ing observation has been made on the subject: at the time of the great
voyage toward the seas in the South, a hundred different kinds of
birds, that are usually in a state of rabid war and devour each other
reciprocally, cross the seas side by side in the most perfect understand–
ing. Thus, in the great flocks of birds on the way to Egypt, blackening
the sky as they rise into the air, you can see flying in absolute trust
in the midst of birds of prey that ordinarily pursue them-hawks,
