THE SUNDERING
919
came impossible, then literature, then Classics, and everything else
by revulsion, except medicine, and it's too late for that. It's certain,
it must be, that I am unlike my fellows: in Sanskrit, the philologists
furrowing grammars into their cerebrum, the Esoteric Buddhists; in
Chinese, the admirers of Art (Dorothy doted on Chinese trinkets) and
the proconsuls of the New Empire doing it along with Russian and law
for High Office in the Far East. It is relevant to say that I am
anxious, that the languages are plate after plate of armor against the
hate of the world and the possibility always of finding myself before
a machine pushing cans along an assembly line. The same reason I
hoard my pennies, like my father- though it does me no good. I
could not rest easy to take a Christmas vacation now after what I
spent last year. So I will stick around, work a little, and meditate in
the vacant apartment. Two or three times Bill Barker, poor, violent,
and sterile, will drop around for dinner and blow off about his play.
Which he might get started
if
he took off for Chicago this week and
abandoned this bog of doubt and fatigue.
If
I had to work now, things might be different.
It
is my money
status, the backlog of three more years' GI Bill, that gives me my
detachment toward the past, my lack of ambition toward my present
studies, my languid unconcern for the future. Like the student in
Dostoevsky's story who lives on a small inheritance, the paucity of
my money makes me a pariah, albeit if I wished I could cultivate
the shabby gentility to which my fellow students take like ducks to
water. And that the money is gained without work from remote cof–
fers (in the case of Dostoevsky's student, from a dead relative; in
mine, from the anonymous State on whose conveyor belt I was
joggled for three years) makes me objective without creation , an
unspeaking observer of all passers-by, an incurious dabbler in ori–
entalia, the underground man of intellectual life who stomps through
books as T. E. Lawrence through training in the Royal Air Force. I ,
am less free of money than ever now, which will be the stamp of my
failure as I grow older. Money, money, money! My Sanskrit and
Chinese won't help me there; the only road would be academic pomp,
which I loathe. They will only make me the curiosity of some branch
office in an exporting company, the dead end of my apathy.
Dorothy at least showed no concern for money. Like most mid–
westerners, she took it for granted that I'd earn a living some way, and
