Vol. 17 No. 8 1950 - page 789

THE TRIP TO GALENA
789
But the next conduct will have to come from the heart, from attach–
ment to life despite the worst it has shown us, and it has shown us
just about everything. We expected everything, so
it
has shown us
everything in instances passing the billions and more lavish colors
than church glass. Cruelty? Crime? Vanity? You name it. Is it mil–
lions shot, blasted, gassed, buried, burned? We have it. Is it others
putting on their shoes, hats, skirts, socks, and garter-belts? We have
that, too. Now look here, Mr. Scampi, if a woman puts on the garter–
belt of a woman that way murdered, and if it becomes the comfort of
her body, and that is a smooth, comfortable, and even beautiful
body, you can't reproach the body for being what
it
is or ask why
it lacks the germ of justice. You say, 'That is what humankind is.
That is what it is, and let's have the truth about it and not assume
what confidence in conduct insists we assume.' What say? Your feet
have the habit of shoes; your lords and masters give you a pair taken
from a man who died under the impression that he was going to get
a shower-bath. You have the shoes two days and they're the darlings
of your feet. What's that, treachery from the feet? What do you
want? They're not the Michelangelo feet of Evangelists or of the
saints treading the air to Paradise, but the street-formed feet of an
ordinary, humble, lousy Darmstadt meter-reader with yolky bun–
ions and bursitis bumps. You can't expect the meter-reader to take
the burden of the world and imitate Jesus or walk his way into the
communion of saints. No, but to cover his mouth when he coughs
in the bus, to take his hat off to the ladies and keep those feet off
the table."
Much of this, the shoes, the garter-belts, did not make full sense
to Scampi. It issued, it smote him, the power and horror of it, brutal,
great, that of a primitive breaker that the civilized bather is finally
too fragile for, and under the actual weight and height of it, the roar
of universal need, Weyl himself seemed taken backward in form and
voice, difficult to hear and see. When this sank down he still could
not see that there was any normal connection between Weyrs per–
sonal history and the feet and belts. Then what was the outcry about.
"Why does he mix it all together?" Scampi asked himself as he felt
the tips of his damaged fingers with the sound ones. "What can it
really be to him?" and he felt that Weyl had assigned himself some
great, unnecessary, far too difficult labor. "He's not everyone, he's
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