PARTISAN REVIEW
seriously and not merely as a way of flirting with current fashions.
The archaism explicit
in
Goldberg's philosophy of myth, and
latent
in
the so nebulous conservative nostalgia for it, weakens the
foundations of culture and threatens to usher in that
tabula rasa
of
civilization for which conservatives today like to blame the "tyranny
of progress." Mythology after Socrates remains illusory. Goldberg's
philosophy can only assert that we would have to eat again from the
tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence.
Such
is
the law of the irreversible process of the history of con–
sciousness.
Barbara Guest
AFTER THE CENTURY
Recognizing the marvelous conditions
Which prepare us for the interior,
Why should I be surprised
At a little of Vuillard
in
my house?
That presently my friends
Will see I have grown older
Is merely the device of men
To disturb the photograph after the wedding.
In silence then, reconsider your heretic's
Dislike of impassioned discovery,
Threatened by the automatic whim,
The viceroy's choice when beholding India
He claimed an empire before the fair
Himalayan night had been cleared
Into a bestiary for explorers, who might
Someday find they had not lost themselves, at all.
That the receipt was there, and the peak
Had already succumbed, like any luncheon,
Like any room
in
which a woman sits waiting,
Like any picture Vuillard ever painted.
