716
PARTISAN REV1EW
to feel at once desolate and lost.
We are designed for pain. It's not a welcome notion in this
precinct, but it's something I believe, that beauty is what we ab–
sently gaze at, having first taken care to shut our thoughts' green door
on the clustered committee in session. And now I realize that within the
walls, or rather the nonwalls, of this school (Learning Center, I think it
calls itself), human achievement comes as a surprise. Not a surprise
drenched with delicious awe, but a dreary stirring of wonder that we
could ever have managed to accomplish so much.
Quaint and irrelevant - whatever it is, it has all been done. From
Chartres to quarks, structures and discoveries lie behind us - or not so
much behind us as in limbo, flashed on a screen for instant reference, but
not anything that concerns us. Picturesque, irrelevant, imposing, beautiful
- the words we might come up with hardly matter. Maybe that's the
point: that there is no proper response. Curtseying to the world, and
yawning, the children assimilate the artifact and move on to the next
in–
scrutable subject. Rather, they do not move on; it is trundled in to them.
Hasn't the Head told us that since all knowledge is becoming out–
dated even as we speak, we have to learn the principle of action, not the
minutiae of the product? Squeezed among their fellows in the kinds of
knots people form in too-large spaces, often sitting on the floor because
someone thinks chairs are retrograde, how tired these children look -
though not quite so tired as their teachers or, presumably, we sober, still
silent pack of parents. I haven't needed to look at my husband again. I
am suddenly so exhausted I want to renounce the world of effort and
hope, and sit down against a wall in some green place where a
Ptolemaic sun sails across a sky
all
but close enough for me to touch.
