Vol. 16 No. 5 1949 - page 502

502
PARTISAN REVIEW
other.... I believe there wasn't a moment when I didn't long to get
away from myself.
Hymnis:
You always had it too easy. Have you ever been beaten
up? Have you in your whole life, I wonder, known real hunger?
Laidion :
I can imagine a girl who is beaten up and is blissfully
happy. And you can lie in shadow and be hungry and feel hap–
pier than an Indian prince. But to lie there in the world like Argus
and be covered with eyes, an eye always open: to be in the arms of a
man who loves you, whom you think you love, and at the same time
with your whole soul to listen for the indifferent murmuring of wa–
ter nearby, to have to listen because something forces you, something
holds you like a vise, is it yearning, is it fear ... as if with this mur–
muring your whole life were running out of your veins. Or they
have invited you to a country house, and you are riding along on a
mule and should be gay and not think of anything but that you are
young and that more than one would be glad to stand all night long
by your door, but there, all of a sudden, under your eyes, stand the
trees on the highway like menacing messengers, the mountains in the
distance like a judge, as if your lost life were at stake and you sit in
guilt and pain tied down to the animal, like one led to a place of exe–
cution, and your hundred eyes miss nothing, neither the beetle which
crawls past in the dust, leaving you to your fate, nor the bird in the
air, singing high above you, leaving you to your fate.
Hymnis:
What are you talking about, Laidion? You have never
been dragged on a mule to a place of execlltion.
Laidion:
It doesn't need a mule, nor a tribunal. My foot touches
a dry branch, Hymnis, and its miserable existence enters into me,
like the beauty of violets and roses it enters into me through the eyes
and makes me its slave, and at night I must lie with open eyes and
think of this accursed piece of wood and be at its mercy, and must
imitate its twisted body with crooked rigid limbs, so that a nightbird
watching me would take me for a Thessalian witch or one possessed
-does one not then have cause for fear? Has one not cause for fear
when in the morning the sun is so small, when sometimes in the morn–
ing it hangs like something childish strung up by children in the
branches of the figtree, and then climbs up? But what, after all, is not
fearful? And what could it be that makes us dance if not fear?
It
holds
the strings up there, fastened to the centers of our bodies, and pulls
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