600
PARTISAN REVIEW
sippi or Arkansas or Texas Universities, vended tiny Confederate battle
flags among the thronged Saturday afternoon ramps of football stadia;
one world: the tank gun: captured from a regiment of Germans in
an African desert by a regiment of Japanese in American uniforms,
whose mothers and fathers at the time were in a California detention
camp for enemy aliens, and carried (the gun) seven thousand miles
back to
be
set halfway between, as a sort of secondary flying buttress
to a memento of Shiloh and The Wilderness; one universe, one cos–
mos: contained in one America: one towering frantic edifice poised
like a card-house over the abyss of the mortgaged generations; one
boom, one peace: one swirling rocket-roar filling the glittering zenith
as with golden feathers, until the vast hollow sphere of his air, the
vast and terrible burden beneath which he tries to stand erect and
lift his battered and indomitable head-the very substance in which
he lives and, lacking which, he would vanish in a matter of seconds–
is murmurous with his fears and terrors and disclaimers and repudi–
ations and his aspirations and dreams and his baseless hopes, bouncing
back at him in radar waves from the constellations;
And still-the old jail--endured, sitting in its rumorless cul-de-sac,
its almost seasonless backwater in the middle of that rush and roar
of civic progress and social alteration and change like a collarless
(and reasonably clean: merely dingy: with a day's stubble and no
garters to his socks) old man sitting in his suspenders and stocking
feet, on the back kitchen steps inside a walled courtyard; actually
not isolated by location so much as insulated by obsolescence: on the
way out of course (to disappear from the surface of the earth along with
the rest of the town on the day when all America, after cutting down
all the trees and leveling the hills and mountains with bulldozers, would
have to move underground
to
make room for, get out of the way of,
the motor cars) but like the track-walker
in
the tunnel, the thunder
of the express mounting behind him, who finds himself opposite a
niche or crack exactly his size in the wall's living and impregnable
rock, and steps into it, inviolable and secure while destruction roars
past and on and away, grooved ineluctably to the spidery rails of its
destiny and destination; not even-the jail-worth selling to the United
States for some matching allocation out of the federal treasury; not
even (so fast, so far, was Progress) any more a real pawn, let alone
knight or rook, on the County's political board, not even plum in
true worth of the word: simply a modest sinecure for the husband
