ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
527
of the house were alive with every murderous sleep it had ever suf–
fered: it was the kind of house in which the dogs barked insanely
in bad weather, and the nurse could not rest, and the baby awoke
in
hysterical terror at one in the morning while the mother would
feel dread at the hundred rages of her husband restless beside her
in
marriage sleep, and the house shifted and swayed to the wind
like a ship in North Atlantic seas, yes it seemed to contain every emo–
tion which had died a frustrated death in its rooms and walls through
a hundred New England winters, each ghost of emotion waiting to
seize the storm feelings of the present;
it
was a house which had
the capacity to set free, one upon the other, the dank sore-rotted as–
sassins in the dungeons of a family's character. A storm at the wrong
time .came on with the horror that this was the night-and indeed
there had been one killing there, an unexplained nineteenth-century
crime, an old ship captain's widow who had worn
<Ii
rectangular
trough in the planks on the widow's walk at the ridgepole center of
the steep roof. She was found dead on a late February night after
three days of rain, the wind howling like a wounded shrew.
Now I know it is not in the mode of our pompous obliteration–
haunted years to encourage such pathetic fallacies as the animism
of the wind and an old house, but since (be I ghost,
geist,
demiurge,
dog, bud, flower, tree, house, or some lost way-station of the divine,
looking for my mooring in the labial tortures and languors of words)
be I whatever, it must be evident that I am existentialist and would
propose that when the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to
human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some
part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's
rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of in–
sensate molecules. Yes, if I were to meet that saint with the body
of an ox, St. Thomas Aquinas, a gentleman with whom I agree about
very little, I would still be obliged to nod in obligation to his excep–
tional phrase, "the authority of the senses," exactly because I now
feel the frustration of a wind which knows so much and can tell your
ears so little.
As
our century moves toward its death, and the death
of all of us, so our senses die first, and who has ears to hear the wind
when the smoke of mutual hatred is thick on commuter trains, and
the subway rails of an evening's television batter into stupidity the
sense of the sensual, leaving us null and dumb to the almost ineffable
