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PARTISAN REVIEW
way o f life whi ch I am still trying to describe and about which I have
rewriuen man y times without ever being satisfi ed that I have quite got
it out of m y sys tem. My own call ousness - cocktails first-returns with
all the scenes. The las t time I tri ed to rewrite the story was on a night
before I left London for Barce lona. I was in a hurry
to
fini sh the lates t
version and mail it to a fri end . I was afraid th a t if I did no t fini sh the
story it might h ave h aunted me during the journ ey. For some unknown
and poss ibl y unreason abl e cause, the story comes back
to
me with a
piece o f a p oem I once wrote and whi ch I did not include in a book
because it was a bad poem . T he pi ece, fi ve stanzas, returns with its same
bad poetry but heavy rh ythm :
"Do you think contemporaries n ever age?
But sit w ith memor ies of glory
T urning fear into a funn y story
For sisters, son s, wi ves or mOlh ers
And forgotten faces of battered brolh ers . . ."
I kept the deaths list for many months.
It
became the onl y reliable
record o f its kind up to the end of 1975, when I stopped keeping track.
Members of militant groups came to take copies for their own reference
or for publica tion . As the number of pages grew, those I trusted
borrowed the orig inal cop y, the onl y one I kept. They copied it and
return ed it.
I was terrified one day when my list was mentioned in a p aragraph
of some outrageous po litical commentary in a guerrill a-funded maga–
zine. I kn ew it was m y list because some of the transposed da tes on my
list were reproduced transposed . And later, at a fri end 's home, reading
his accumulated po litical p amphl ets and un aware of his political
responsibilities, I found a circul ar which gave m y name as the author
o f a valuable contribution to the cause. I had the circul ar and copies
des troyed , but I shiver a little a t th e memory of tha t p aragraph.
Th e alternative
to
li ving with fear is to express shock, as the
community at large does, and
to
rea lize tha t th e shock is the res ult of
rea lizing that we are no t shocked enough. Nowadays it seems that no
incident is sufficientl y indecent aga inst humanity to provoke suffi cient
aversion . And the words begin to ring falsely too. That must be the
ultima te fear-that words will SLOp meaning a feeling.
