PARTISAN REVIEW
the sick man passes the long hours at home alone with
his
inexorable
fever, which batters at
his
face, keeps battering at him, rending him
as
if
taking advantage of
his
solitude.
His wife returns and he asks her if she brought anything from
the landlady's house.
"Nothing," says his wife.
She always brings nothing.
"But why don't you at least go and pick some wild vegetables?"
he
asks.
"Where?" says she.
She walks down the lanes and goes to the park. Grass grows
on the fields, green foliage on the trees. Vegetables! She tears out
some grass, tears out branches of firs and pines. She goes to the
gardens and plucks some flowers and returns home with vegetables-–
the leaves and flowers hidden in her breast. She flings all this on
the sick man, and he lies with flowers strewn over
him.
"There you are," says his wife. "Vegetables!"
I knew all this, and more besides. I could understand the misery
of a sick man of the human race of toilers and of his family around
him. Does not every man know it? Cannot every man understand
it? Every man is
ill
at once, halfway through
his
life, and knows
this strange evil thing that is inside
him,
knows his own helplessness
against it. Thus every man can understand his fellow....
But perhaps every man is not a man: and the entire human
race is not human. That is a doubt that arises on a rainy day, when
a man's shoes are tattered and water seeps into them: when his
heart is no longer captive to anyone in particular, when he no longer
has a life of his own, when there is nothing accomplished or to be
accomplished, nothing to fear, nothing to lose, and there, outside
himself, are being perpetrated the massacres of the world. One man
laughs and another cries: both are human, the one who laughs has
also been
ill,
is ill: yet he laughs because the other cries. He is a
man who persecutes and massacres: and whoever, in his hopeless–
ness, sees him laugh at the newspaper headlines and the placards,
does not seek his company but that of another who cries. Not every
man, then, is a man. One persecutes and another is persecuted: not
all the human race is human, but only the race of the persecuted.
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