404
PARTISAN REVIEW
from all that prevents him from seeing. We must liberate him
from these economic facts which impede his thinking and from
those sexual matters which prevent his thinking.
It
is here I think
that the doctrine of Freud can be very useful. I see in Freud a
genial detective - a man who has opened one of the greatest do–
mains in psychology, and at the same time a disastrous philoso–
pher.
AM:
But, do you think that humanity, once liberated from reli–
gious, national or social mobilization, will accept acting instead of
thinking? Will not death encounter resistance?
L T:
I think that death above all is a product of use. On the one
hand, use of the body; on the other, use of the spirit.
If
it were
possible that this using up should be carried on with harmony ,
both of body and of spirit, death would be a very simple phe–
nomenon. Death would meet with no resistance.
He was sixty years old and gravely ill. "Death would meet with
no resistance."
*
*
I write this on my return from a popular gathering at which we
saw a film on the latest celebrations in Moscow . On the wide ex–
panse of Red Square, with arms brandishing oars, virile young
women pass before the tribune from which all the leaders of the
U.S.S.R., dwarfed by two gigantic portraits of Lenin and Stalin,
watch the procession. The multitude applauds as multitudes always
do; less as a sign of enthusiasm than of approbation. How many
among them thought of you? Many, certainly. Before the projection
of the film, speeches had been made for Thaelmann in particular.
The speaker who would have dared to speak of you would have been
quickly attacked, after the first moment of uneasiness, by bourgeois
hostility and by orthodox prudence at the same time. This multitude
that is silent about you is as troubled by you as it is by a bad con–
science. I know the multitude. I have met it at all the meetings. I still
hear its muted "Internationale" which ascended as a ground tone
from the vast hall of Luna Park, as I was leaving and saw rising , ap–
proaching the height of the sidewalks, as in the cinema, the hoofs of
the horses, the breast, the hostile head of the constabulary, almost
lost in the night, in the parallel reflection of the electric lights over
the helmets. They are the same who tirelessly come to listen to all
speakers, who speak in the name of Sacco and Vanzetti, of Torgler
