618
PARTISAN REVIEW
rested on the safe side of its logical end. The result, in the Middle East,
is an extraordinary intellectual sterility. There are, properly speaking,
no great passions of thought, no profoundly assumed attitudes. All ideas
are reduced to the same distressing shallowness. Even the Lebanon, with
its almost total literacy and ancient respect for learning, has failed to
produce a single cultural hero of international importance. ... The sad
proof of my point came always on the heels of this challenge. The an–
swer, invariably, was Gebrane Khalil Gebrane!
Now, as the Conference drew to an end, one tried to forget that one
could not hold the world close enough. Rheumatic professors made hasty
trips to the ancient cities: Tyre and Sidon, Baalbek, Byblos, Palmyra;
and climbed sheer slopes to reach the Krak of the Crusading Knights.
The blind old poet, Taha Hussein, came down from Cairo to explain
how the Arabs had fallen heir to Hellenism, a thousand-odd years ago.
He also resembled my father. ... Something was slipping away from us,
half felt, half understood. Even the members of our mission, fatigued
functionaries, were filled with the anguish of the Middle East.
What was one to do? I kept thinking of my father. How can one
ever leave this obsessive land? I look up at the ancient Mountain, which
rises straight from the sea: beyond, on all sides, lies
dar~el-Islam,
which
means the land of submission to the will of Allah. On this side, a strong–
hold of unsubmissiveness:
dar-el-harb,
land of war.
It .is Riachy who pronounces the words for me, in his beloved lan–
guage. We are talking, as usual, of the problem of the Mountain, which
once sent its sons to colonize Carthage, and almost conquered Rome.
Today, the Lebanese colonize Africa again, and America, whence
Riachy concludes that nothing has changed. I tell him how my father,
in his very great age, left my mother and my sisters in New Jersey and
set out for Texas, where he proposed to build a new life. Every–
one tried to prevent this folly, my mother wept, old friends came in dele–
gations, begging him not to go. But my father refused to believe that he
was too old to conquer Texas.
Riachy is arucious to know my father's age, which I tell him. This
fills him with fury.
"Old! You call that old! I pity thy father for having spawned
such a blockhead! Old!"
He has promised, this Sunday morning, to take me to a nearby
village, where the ancient Astarte cults have left-he swears-an ex–
traordinary eroticism in the air. But he has spent the night gambling at
his club and it is already late. His house is swarming with his children,
all talking, quarreling and asking for money at once. Colette, his rav-
