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PARTISAN REVIEW
row." But the noise, after approaching a while, went away, as though
it had changed its mind or just passed by without noticing him.
Now, his youth gone, he blames himself for the laziness and im–
providence of it.
He is like the old men who regret the carefree happiness of their
boyhood when they could have been working to pad themselves
against the fears and insecurity of age, and who wrangle with their
sons to make them do better.
What, after all, could they have done against the hydrogen
bomb? A neat bank account, some solid investments, a good suburban
house, the business ready to be turned over to well-trained heirs-–
all this against the explosion of the world.
He is like the miserable little woman who, with a kind of in–
sanity:. is always hiding herself and her belongings from a burglar–
murderer whom she momently expects to break into her apart–
ment. She has double locks and chains on her doors, bars over her
windows, several kinds of theft and life insurance, and secret under–
standings with the elevator man and house superintendent. She hears
noises at night and is obsessed with the sense of someone sneaking
around. She is always locking her little things in trunks and cupboards
and hiding the keys. Standing in the hallway, she repeats to her
neighbors in a whisper the latest burglary account in the newspaper.
Nobody ever comes to cut her throat or steal her precious teacups
and furs and silverware that she cares so much about. Then maybe
one day she is struck by lightning on the telephone while she describes
some new murder to a friend.
But they might as well be providing themselves with life insur–
ance, these people, as to be doing anything at all.
If
they were not
doing that, what else would they do? It is not easy to find out how
not to waste one's life.
The pitiful thing about them is not that they will, after all their
slavery to security, inevitably be destroyed, but that they were, pre–
ceding their inevitable destruction, slaves to security. Surely the little
creature in his burrow has wasted his life and will go on wasting
it to the end. The time of
his
youth that he regrets is probably the
only time in which he ever did anything that was not wasted, for
all the rest was in preparation to deny death, and death
will
come
anyway. There is nothing effective that he can do against this big
