PARTISAN REVIEW
205
writer. Now we begin to have a diversity of culture to begin to
match our different realities, values, lives.
Yes, the world was a dead egg. I felt impacted. Nothing
would ever move or change. All that could be imagined was slip–
ping off somewhere special like near Sartre, where things were
obviously more vital; or wriggling through the cracks, surviving in
the unguarded interstices. There was no support for opting out of
the rat race or domesticity. On the other hand, it was easier in
some ways to get by; i.e., shoplifting was pitifully easy in the
fifties, with none of the organized and increasingly mechanized
war between stores and customers that goes on now, only store
dicks and a few mirrors. What people conceived of as possible for
them to do was small: the possible lives seemed only two or three,
like the differences between men's sport jackets or suits. Marry or
die! The painfully slow process of work in communities that has
produced a smattering of free clinics, drop-in centers, women's
centers, hot-lines, abortion referral services, pregnancy counseling,
law communes, food co-ops, switchboards, alternate schools,
wasn't even a gleam in an organizer's eye.
If
you got sick, suicidal,
depressed, in trouble, pregnant, hungry, you were on your own. I
remember eating flour and water for four days during vacation in
the university town, trying to pry my paycheck loose. Now there
would always be someplace I could get a meal. Kids take slightly,
slightly more care of each other; the subculture trains folks to
pretend at least to care.
There was, I think, more general sense of intellectual adven–
ture in the fifties, for books were one of the only escapes to
Otherwise. About the only perspectives available for projecting a
reality alien to Plainfield U.S.A. came from steeping oneself in
Alexandrian Neoplatonists or the habits of the army ant. When I
was nineteen, some of the most alive people I met were university
types, giving off an intellectual electricity. I would never make
that judgment now. That perspective lent to purely verbal or men–
tal adventuring a glamour it no longer has for me. For if you
cannot conceive of doing anything to alter your world, you reserve
your admiration for manipulating concepts about those who have
done something, or even for those who manipulate concepts about
others who have manipulated concepts. I was particularly fasci-
