700
PARTISAN REVIEW
As
for the peoples, some were winning, others dying, but all remained
bound up in a misery which encircled the earth.
The race of Wisdom was not spared.
Trapped unawares, they fought year after year, their millennial pa–
tience tried by an extra hard test.
The Predestined people, too, suffered, and first of all. They were
bereft of everything even their shirt. People laughed at them
and turning round, accused them of being the origin of mis–
fortunes.
The people of perfect Temples had everything taken, even their
olives.
Heads were stuffed with folderol.
As
the sea never wearies of pounding the shore with useless waves, so
this great battle pushed ever forward in fresh ranks.
Faltering advances which advanced to nothing, staggering retreats
which stopped at the void.
No one had ever seen so many sword blows in water.
The reins of humanity were floating haphazardly about, but still,
but everywhere, under the various faces, was the Father, the
chief, when his authoritarian life
sinks
like an oar into his family
which says nothing.
Third Canto
The year was like a wall in front of the race of men.
The earth was milt to the top, and you could not manage to bring
your head out from it.
And yet people were working and working as they had never worked,
without looking at the sun, without looking at their time which
was flowing inexorably, and were working harder, were being
pushed to work harder, shoveling, shoveling unceasingly under
the gigantic hemorrhage; and death was coming casually to an
end like a worn-out cloth, like a worn-out cloth being unravelled
or like a bill that you had forgotten which somebody hands you
just as you open the door.
The storekeeper civilization was stubborn. It was said to be cracking
up. But while cracking up it was stubborn.
Meanwhile this statistical century was counting, counting, counting
