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PARTISAN REVIEW
as Greek columns. But if he happens to have helped build so much
as a summer shack upon the beach he will not feel inferiority, even
if he does not understand in the aggregate the entire meaning of a
Doric temple. The baseless shaft, the capital, and the lower fascia,
that would connect the columns, at least become clear. The shaft was
analagous to the cedar piles that they had sunk into the hardpan.
Capitals they had achieved without meaning to, solely because it
would turn out that a pile had unintentionally been sunk 'too deep
for the stringer and the post to be square, so between the stringer
and the post they would insert a block. The wooden stringer, say
a 2 or 3 inch plank, corresponded to the lower fascia, though if one
had been completely successful the stringer would rest directly upon
the post: thus, the capital, as something deliberate, perhaps had no
function, and was the result of an original disharmony, when people
built with wood; someone had decided, perhaps on some occasion
when a mistake on one side had been balanced by a similar mistake
on the other, that it was an aesthetic improvement. These curious
thoughts occurred to Roderick as, bent over his camera, he was
try–
ing to get Tansy and the guide, who were having a conversation
over by the Temple of Apollo, into focus, for the light from the
slowly westering sun was good now and the ruins were full of inter–
esting, if pretty obvious, shadows. Ridiculous and far-fetched though
it might sound, what he had been thinking gave Roderick, finally,
a certain kinship with the builders of Pompeii. . . . But these Pom–
peiians-what had they built for? What was this instinct that made
man herd together like partridges, like sardines in tomato paste, this
cowardly dependence on the presence of others?
Suddenly he thought he knew what was wrong. This-in Pom–
peii, in Naples-this had happened to him, to Roderick McGregor
Fairhaven, the visitor from Ultima Thule. What it amounted to was
a feeling that there was not going to be time. Did you want to har–
row yourself looking at what had been only temporarily spared, at
what was finally doomed? And Roderick could not help but wonder
whether man too was not beginning to stand, in some profound in–
explicable sense, fundamentally in some such imperfect or dislocated
relation to his environment as he. Man once stood at the center of
the universe, as Elizabethan poets stood at the center of the world.
But the difference between the man-made ruins and the ruins of
