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PARTISAN REVIEW
discomfort of exile, and fear of tomorrow's scarcities. Those who
are capable of being genuinely moved for intellectual reasons,
of suffering from non-material lacks, are very rare. And perhaps
it is better that this should be the case.
One needs a good deal of imagination-and that of the rarest
kind, the reasoning kind-to visualize the remote consequences
of a defeat, and the ways in which each person may suffer under
it. Solidarity among all the citizens of a country is still rather
wobbly, in France at any rate, and not
felt
much; it remains
something abstract; and to very many people it has very little
actuality. It would have been a question, not of creating it exactly,
but of inculcating a sense of it in the populace and the school·
children; but teachers had other programs, and were themselves
much more interested in the "class struggle," which, from the
selfish point of view, apparently
yi~lded
results that were more
immediate, surer, and more "obvious"-or so it seemed.
A retrogression, an effacement or at least an escape into
mysticism, into lofty values-this, I fear, we shall have to witness.
It will be at once the most burdensome and the most imperceptible
item in the "account rendered."
Moreover, patriotic emotion is no more constant than
our
other loves-which, on certain days, if one is to be quite honest
about it, amount to very little indeed; but one seldom dares to
acknowledge the littleness of the place they hold in our hearts
on such occasions.
"And the resurrection of the body," says the Church, which
knows how deeply the soul needs to fall in love, and that
if
the
Word had not been "made flesh" it would have few adoren.
Imagine them prostrate before a triangle! We are ineluctably
sunk in matter, and even our most mystical loves cannot dispense
with material images. The contemplation of the Virgin supports
and provokes the ecstasy which would relapse without some con·
crete sign to hold on to. We need symbols-monuments, statues,
flags-to give some foothold to emotion, perches where that may
come to rest which soars in our hearts but could not keep flying
long. We can no more do without them than language can do
without metaphors. Pious emotion invents or adopts a gesture
to express itself; then it slips away from under the gesture, and
