582
PARTISAN REVIEW
The driver lingers on for a second. At the far end of the street stand,
with their necks stretched, hundreds of people whose heads are turned
toward an invisible spot. He turns the wheel wi thout a sound, driving
slowly, as if only now, as he is diverted from his course, the barriers of opti–
mism are dissipating.
"A slaughter. .." the passengers repeat to each other in a compassion–
ate, bewildered voice.
The day before, at a cafe, a thin man came from a distant table, touched
the device above your table, and after the pictures appeared on the screen,
asked, "It's not bothering you?"
"It does bother me! I threw the television out of my house twelve
years ago!"
"What do you mean you threw the television out, you want to detach
yourself from reality, to shut yourself up, not to know about the world,
about anything? This is the Journalists' House here."
"I want to know reality without any mediators."
"You can't know everything on your own!"
He looked above his white mustache into the inside of your plate, and
said, "Can you eat only eggplants all the time?"
"I can't climb the Everest either."
"I'm not interested in climbing the Everest. How can you be without
television? I come home I have to watch the news every day. I want to
know what's going on in the world. You're running away from reality. If
you saw over there in the courtyard," he pointed at the lawn resting sleepy
in the sun, "If you saw two people fighting over there, you wouldn't go and
watch?"
"I wouldn't go and watch-I would go and break it up. I am not a
spectator, and without the television I have much more time to do things."
The man said in a sarcastic voice, "Well bravo to you, but you would
go and watch, wouldn't you? No?"
"I'm not interested in seeing. I'm interested in doing."
The man cried, "What do I have to do?" and you said, "What's your
dream?"
"It's not my dream to climb the Everest. It's very boring to climb the
Everest, just snow and whiteness. I enjoy watching nature movies in color
on television, about places I will never go to."
And you said, "Why wouldn't you go there?"
"Because I wouldn't have the time!" he cried, exasperated, and point–
ed at the people sitting by a distant table: "Do you see the man over there
in a stripy shirt with his back to us, an important man, a Nobel Prize nom–
inee, professor Rechav'am Israeli. If you watched television, you would
know!"
