PAR TIS A N REV lEW
39
cablegram and setting fire to it in an ashtray. . cleansing fire, as
Heraclitus also of Ephesus knew.
Why, I suddenly wonder, is the legend of Herostratus so ap–
pealing? Because it is the destructive side of the Shakespearean proud
boast
to make a lover immortal with a line of words? Or
is
it that
we come from fire and shall end in fire when the sun flares, and
the universe falls back upon itself, as the cycle of creation prepares
to begin again (what a splendid image Calvino makes of this in
Cosmicomics) .
Fire was our beginning and still bemuses us even though we
ourselves are a heavier, duller element, oblongs of soft skin contain–
ing scarlet sea water held upright by a fibrous contraption more suit–
able for a vegetable than for such a proud sentiency as man.
Recently I dreamed of my father who died and was cremated
last winter. He was seated in some sort of a funicular car moving
slowly opposite to me.
As
we came abreast of one another, I saw
with dull horror that he was dead and where his eyes should have
been there were bright flames. Ultimate fate of watery creatures in
a fiery universe.
* * *
The attraction of old movies is not so much the pleasure one
gets in seeing long dead actors come alive as in the glimpses one
gets of
real
things: an actual street scene of fifty years ago, with
real people hurrying about their business, unaware of the camera,
not knowing or caring perhaps that long after they are dead, shadows
of themselves at a given time and place can be watched by those
who were not even born at that selected moment when Forty-Sec–
ond Street was so urgently crossed at the lunch hour, and preserved
on celluloid.
A few years ago I wandered into a Translux newsreel theater
just as an old
March of Time
was being shown. The year was 1935.
I watched without much interest until I saw a familiar building:
the Department of Commerce in Washington. Then my father ap–
peared on the screen, and I had the sense of sinking without sup–
port into the past, nothing to hold onto, like that constant recurring
nightmare of being back at school or in the army and no one
will
believe that one has meanwhile grown up, become a civilian.
