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PARTISAN REVIEW
were related to interior life. And yet, I told myself, there had
to be a doubt. There were human lives organized around these
ways and houses and that they, the houses, say, were the
analogue, that what men created they also were, through aome
transcendent means, I .could not bring myself to concede. There
must be a difference, a quality that eluded me, somehow, a
difference between 'things and persons and even between acts
and persons. Otherwise ·the people who lived here were actually
a reflection of the things they lived among. I had always striven
to avoid blaming them. Was that not in effect behind my daily
reading of the paper? In their businesses and politics, their
·taverns, movies, assaults, divorces, murders, trials in court, I
tried continually to find clear signs of their common humanity.
It
was undeniably in my own interest, too. Because I was
involved with them to no inconsiderable extent; because whether
I liked it or not they were my generation, my society, my world.
We were figures in a common plot. I was aware, also, that
their existence, just as it was, made mine possible and that we
were eternally fixed together. And if, as was often said, this
portion of a century was approaching the nether curve in a cycle
then I too would remain on the bottom and there, extinct, merely
add my body, my life, to the base of a coming ·time. This would
probably be a condemned age. But ... it might be a mistake
to think of it in that way. Mists faded and spread and faded on
the pane as I breathed. Perhaps a mistake. And when I
thought of the condemned ages and those unnamed, lying in
their obscurity, I wondered.... But how did we know how it
was? In all principal ways the human spirit must have been
the same. Good leaves fewer traces than bad. We knew now
we had misjudged whole epochs. Besides the giants of the last
century had their Liverpools and Londons, their Lilies and
Hamburgs to contend against as we have our Chicagos and De–
troits. And there might be a chance that I was misled, even
with these ruins before my eyes, sodden, themselves the color
of the fateful paper that I read daily.... The worlds we !!Ought
were never those we saw; the worlds we bargained for were
never the worlds we got. • • •
