Lesson 1: Rock Superstars: What Do They Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society?

Rock is the music of teenage rebellion.

--- John Rockwell, rock music critic

By a man’s heroes ye shall know him.

--- Robert Penn Warren, novelist

It was mid-June, 1972, the Chicago Amphitheater was packed, sweltering, rocking. Onstage, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was singing “Midnight Rambler.” Critic Don Heckman was there when the song ended. “Jagger,” he said, “grabs a half-gallon jug of water and runs along the front platform, sprinkling its contents over the first few rows of sweltering listeners. They surge to follow him, eager to be touched by a few baptismal drops”.

It was late December, 1973, Some 14,000 screaming fans were crunching up to the front of the stage at Capital Center, outside Washington, D.C.Alice Cooper, America’s singing ghoul, was ending his act. He ends it by pretending to end his life – with a guillotine. His “head” drops into a straw basket. “Ooh,” gasped a girl dressed in black. “Oh, isn’t that marvelous?” Fourteen-year-old Mick Perlie was there too, but his parents weren’t. “They think he’s sick, sick, sick,” Mike said. “They say to me, ‘How can you stand that stuff?’”

It was late January, 1974. Inside the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, Bob Dylan and The Band were tuning for a concert. Outside, in the pouring rain, fan Chris Singer was waiting to get in. “ This is pilgrimage,” Chris said, “I ought to be crawling on my knees.”

How do you feel about all this adulation and hero worship? When Mick Jagger’s fans look at him as a high priest or a god, are you with them or against them? Do you share Chris Singer’s almost religious reverence for Bob Dylan? Do you think he – or Dylan – is misguided? Do you reject Alice Cooper as sick? Or are you drawn somehow to this strange clown, perhaps because he acts out your wildest fantasies?

These aren’t idle questions. Some sociologists say that your answers to them could explain a lot about what you are thinking and about what your society is thinking – in other words, about where you and your society are. “Music expressed its times,” says sociologist Irving Horowitz. Horowitz sees the rock music arena as a sort of debating forum, a place where ideas clash and crash. He sees it as a place where American society struggles to define and redefine its feelings and beliefs. “The redefinition,” Horowitz says, “is a task uniquely performed by the young. It is they alone who combine invention and exaggeration, reason and motion, word and sound, music and politics.”

Todd Rundgren, the composer and singer, agrees. “Rock music,” he says, “is really a sociological expression rather than a musical force. Even Elvis Presley wasn’t really a great musical force. It’s just that Elvis managed to embody the frustrated teenage spirit of the 1950s.” Of course Presley horrified adult America. Newspapers editorialized against him, and TV networks banned him. But Elvis may have proved what Horowitz and Rundgren believe. When he appeared on the Ed.Sullivan Sunday night variety show in front of millions, a kind of “debate” took place. Most of the older viewers frowned, while most of the younger viewers applauded.

Between Elvis and Alice, rock critics say, a number of rock stars have helped our society define its beliefs and attitudes. Bob Dylan touched a nerve of disaffection. He spoke of civil rights, nuclear fallout, and loneliness. He spoke of change and of the bewilderment of and older generation. “Something’s happening here,” he sang. “You don’t know what it is, do you, Mr.Jones?”

Others entered the debate. The Beatles, Horowitz said, urged peace and piety, with humor and maybe a little help from drugs. The Rolling Stones, arrogant street-fighting men, demanded revolution. The Jefferson Airplane’s “We Can Be Together” and Volunteers (Got a Revolution)” were two further statements of radical youth.

But politics wasn’t the only subject debated in the hard rock of the sixties. Feelings, always a part of any musical statement, were a major subject. Janis Jophin sang of her sadness. The Beatles showed there were a range of emotions between love and hate. Then came The Band, mixing the more traditional ideas of country and western music into the more radical ”city” ideas of the hard rock. This country element, Horowitz feels, helped its audience express an urge to “get away from it all,” to “go back to the old day.” One of the best current examples of what Horotwitz is talking about is John Denver. His most notable songs – “Sunshine on My Shoulders”, “Rocky   Mountain High”, and “Country Road” – combine the musical drive and power of folk rock, while the lyrics celebrate the simple joys of “the good old days.”

The list could go on and on. Like all artists, these rock musicians mirror feelings and beliefs that help us see and form our own.

What do we give them in return? Applause and praise, of course. In one 1972, national opinion poll, more than 10 percent of the high school boys and 20 percent of the girls said their hero was a rock superstar. We also give them money. “The fastest way to become a millionaire these days,” says Forbes, a business magazine, “is to become a rock ‘n’ roll star.”

Today’s heroes – some of them, anyway – tell us they enjoy their rewards. “And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies. Who never conceived of us billion-dollar babies.” The particular “culture here” who sings that is Alice cooper.

The big question remains: Why is he a culture hero? What does he – or any other current rock success – tell us about his fans? About ourselves and our society? Where it is, where it was, where it’s heading?

Lesson 2: Four Choices for Young People

Shortly before his graduation, Jim Binns, president of the senior class at Stanford University, wrote me about some of his misgivings. “More than any other generation,” he said, “our generation views the adult world with great skepticism… there is also an increased tendency to reject completely that world.”

Apparently he speaks for a lot of his contemporaries. During the last few years, I have listened to scores of young people, in college and out, who were just as nervous about the grown-p world. Roughly, their attitude might be summed up about like this: “The world is in pretty much of a mess, full of injustice, poverty, and war. The people responsible are, presumably, the adults who have been running thing. If they can’t do better than that, what have they got to teach our generation? That kind of lesson we can do without.”

There conclusions strike me as reasonable, at least from their point of view. The relevant question for the arriving generation is not whether our society is imperfect (we can take that for granted), but how to deal with it. For all its harshness and irrationality, it is the only world we’ve got. Choosing a strategy to cope with it, then, is the first decision young adults have to make, and usually the most important decision of their lifetime. So far as I have been able to discover, there are only four basic alternatives:

1. 1.       Drop Out

This is one of the oldest expedients, and it can be practiced anywhere, at any age, and with or without the use of hallucinogens. It always has been the strategy of choice for people who find the world too brutal or too complex to be endured. By definition, this way of life is parasitic. In on way or another, its practitioners batten on the society which they scorn and in which they refuse to take any responsibility. Some of us find this distasteful – an undignified kind of life. But for the poor in spirit, with low levels of both energy and pride, it may be the least intolerable choice available.

2. 2.       Flee

This strategy also has ancient antecedents. Ever since civilization began, certain individuals have tried to run away from it in hopes of finding a simpler, more pastoral, and more peaceful life. Unlike the dropouts, they are not parasites. They are willing to support themselves and to contribute something to the general community, but they simply don’t like the environment of civilization; that is, the city, with all its ugliness and tension.

The trouble with this solution is that it no longer is practical on a large scale. Our planet, unfortunately, is running out of noble savages and unsullied landscaped; except for the polar regions, the frontiers are gone. A few gentleman farmers with plenty of money can still escape to the bucolic life – but in general the stream of migration is flowing the other way.

3. 3.       Plot a Revolution

This strategy is always popular among those who have no patience with the tedious working of the democratic process or who believe that basic institutions can only be changed by force. It attracts some of the more active and idealistic young people of every generation. To them it offers a romantic appeal, usually symbolized by some dashing and charismatic figure.

It has the even greater appeal of simplicity: “Since this society is hopelessly bad, let’s smash it and build something better on the ruins.”

Some of my best friends have been revolutionists, and a few of them have led reasonably satisfying lives. These are the ones whose revolutions did not come off; they have been able to keep on cheerfully plotting their holocausts right into their senescence. Others died young, in prison or on the barricades. But the most unfortunate are those whose revolutions have succeeded. They lived, in bitter disillusionment, to see the establishment they had overthrown replaced by a new one, just as hard-faced and stuffy.

I am not, of course, suggesting that revolutions accomplish nothing. Some (The American Revolution, the French Revolution) clearly do change things for the better. My point is merely that the idealists who make the revolution are bound to be disappointed in either case. For at best their victory never dawns on the shining new world they had dreamed of, cleansed of all human meanness. Instead it dawns on a familiar, workaday place, still in need of groceries and sewage disposal. The revolutionary state, under whatever political label, has to be run-not by violent romantics-but by experts in marketing, sanitary engineering, and the management of bureaucracies.

For the idealists who are determined to remake society, but who seek a more practical method that armed revolution, there remains one more alternative.

4. 4.       Try to Change the World Gradually, One Clod at a Time

At first glance, this course is far from inviting. It lacks glamour. It promises no quick results. It depends on the exasperating and uncertain instruments of persuasion and democratic decision making. It demands patience, always in short supply. About all that can be said for it is that it sometimes works – that in this particular time and place it offers a better chance for remedying some of the world’s outrages that any other available strategy.

So at least the historical evidence seems to suggest. When I was graduating from college, my generation also found the world in a mess. The economic machinery had broken down almost everywhere: In this country nearly a quarter of the population was out of work. A major was seemed all too likely. As a college newspaper editor at that time, I protested against this just as vehemently as student activists are protesting today.

At the same time, my generation was discovering that reforming the world is a little like fighting a military campaign in the Apennines, as soon as you capture one mountain range, another one looms just ahead. As the big problems of the thirties were brought under some kind of rough control, new problems took their place – the unprecedented problems of an, affluent society, of racial justice, of keeping our cities from becoming uninhabitable, of coping with war in unfamiliar guises. Most disturbing of all was our discovery of the population explosion. It dawned on us rather suddenly that the number of passengers on the small spaceship we inhabit is doubling about every forty years. So long as the earth’s population keeps growing at this cancerous rate, all of the other problems appear virtually insoluble. Our cities will continue to become more crowded and noisome. The landscape will get more cluttered, the air and water even dirtier. The quality of life is likely to become steadily worse for everybody. And warfare on a rising scale seems inevitable if too many bodies have to struggle for ever-dwindling shares of food and living space.

So Jim Binns’ generation has a formidable job on its hands. But not, I think, an insuperable one. On the evidence of the past, it can be handled in the same way that hard problems have been coped with before-piecemeal, pragmatically, by the dogged efforts of many people.

Lesson 3: The Use of Force

They were new patients to me, all I had was the name, Olson. “Please come down as soon as you can, my daughter is very sick.”

When I arrived I was met by the mother, a big startled looking woman, very clean and apologetic who merely said, Is this the doctor? And let me in. In the back, she added. You must excuse us, doctor, we have her in the kitchen where it is warm. It is very damp here sometimes.

The child was fully dressed and sitting on here father’s lap near the kitchen table. He tried to get up, but I motioned for him not to bother, took off my overcoat and started to look things over. I could see that they were all very nervous, eyeing me up and down distrustfully. As often, in such cases, they weren’t telling me more than they had to, it was up to me to tell them; that’s why they were spending three dollars on me.

The child was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes, and no expression on her face whatever. She did not move and seemed, inwardly, quiet; an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance. But her face was flushed, she was breathing rapidly, and I realized that she had a high fever. She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion. One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets and the photogravure sections of the Sunday papers.

She’s had a fever for three days, began the father and we don’t know what it comes from. My wife has given her things, you know, like people do, but it don’t do no good. And there’s been a lot of sickness around. So we tho’t you’d better look her over and tell us what is the matter.

As doctors often do I took a trial shot at it as a point of departure. Has she had a sore throat?

Both parents answered me together, No…No, she says her throat don’t hurt her.

Does your throat hurt you? Added the mother to the child. But the little girl’s expression didn’t change nor did she move her eyes from my face.

Have you looked?

I tried to, said the mother but II couldn’t see.

As it happens we had been having a number of cases of diphtheria in the school to which this child went during that month and we were all, quite apparently, thinking of that, though no one had as yet spoken of the thing.

Well, I said, suppose we take a look at the throat first. I smiled in my best professional manner and asking for the child’s first name I said, come on, Mathilda, open your mouth and let’s take a look at your throat.

Nothing doing.

Aw, come on, I coaxed, just open your mouth wide and let me take a look. Look, I said opening both hands wide, I haven’t anything in my hands. Just open up and let me see.

Such a nice man, put in the mother. Look how kind he is to you. Come on, do what he tells you to. He won’t hurt you.

As that I ground my teeth in disgust. If only they wouldn’t use the word “hurt” I might be able to get somewhere. But I did not allow myself to be hurried or disturbed but speaking quietly and slowly I approached the child again.

As I moved my chair a little nearer suddenly with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively for my eyes and she almost reached them too. In fact she knocked my glasses flying and they fell, though unbroken, several feet away from me on the kitchen floor.

Both the mother and father almost turned themselves inside out in embarrassment and apology. You bad girl, said the mother, taking her and shaking here by one arm. Look what you’ve done. The nice man…

For heaven’s sake, I broke in. Don’t call me a nice man to her. I’m here to look at her throat on the chance that she might have diphtheria and possibly die of it. But that’s nothing to her. Look here, I said to the child, we’re going to look at your throat. You’re old enough to understand what I’m saying. Will you open it now by yourself or shall we have to open it for you?

Not a move. Even her expression hadn’t changed. Her breaths, however, were coming faster and faster. Then the battle began. I had to do it. I had to have a throat culture for her own protection. But first I told the parents that it was entirely up to them. I explained the danger but said that I would not insist on a throat examination so long as they would take the responsibility.

If you don’t do what the doctor says you’ll have to go to the hospital, the mother admonished her severely.

Oh yeah? I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of her terror of me.

The father tried his best, and he was a big man but the fact that she was his daughter, his shame at her behavior and his dread of hurting her made him release her just at the critical times when I had almost achieved success, till I wanted to kill him. But his dread also that she might have diphtheria made him tell me to go on, go on though he himself was almost fainting, while the mother moved back and forth behind us raising and lowering her hands in an agony of apprehension.

Put her in front of you on your lap, I ordered, and hold both her wrists.

But as soon as he did the child let out a scream. Don’t, you’re hurting me. Let go of my hands. Let them go I tell you. Then she shrieked terrifyingly, hysterically. Stop it! Stop it! You’re killing me!

Do you think she can stand it, doctor! Said the mother.

You get out, said the husband to his wife. Do you want her to die of diphtheria?

Come on now, hold her, I said.

Then I grasped the child’s head with my left hand and tried to get the wooden tongue depressor between her teeth. She fought, with clenched teeth, desperately! But now I also had grown furious-at a child. I tried to hold myself down but I couldn’t. I know how to expose a throat for inspection. And I did my best. When finally I got the wooden spatula behind the last teeth and just the point of it into the mouth cavity, she opened up for an instant but before I could see anything she came down again and gripped the wooden blade between her molars. She reduces it to splinters before I could get it out again.

Aren’t you ashamed, the mother yelled at her. Aren’t you ashamed to act like that in front of the doctor?

Get me a smooth-handled spoon of some sort, I told the mother. We’re going through with this. The child’s mouth was already bleeding. Her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild hysterical shrieks. Perhaps I should have desisted and come back in an hour or more. No doubt it would have been better. But I have seen at least two children lying dead in bed of neglect in such cases, and feeling that I must get a diagnosis now or never I went at it again. But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her, my face was burning with it.

The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one’s self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end.

In the final unreasoning assault I overpowered the child’s neck any jaws. I forced the heavy silver spoon back of her teeth and down her throat till she gagged. And there it was – both tonsils covered with membrane. She had fought valiantly to keep me from knowing her secret. She had been hiding that sore throat for three days at least and lying to her parents in order to escape just such an outcome as this.

Now truly she was furious. She had been on the defensive before but now she attacked, Tried to get off her father’s lap and fly at me while tears of defeat blinded her eye.

Lesson 4: Die as You Choose

The need for laws on euthanasia cannot be dodged for much longer.

In one of the world’s smaller countries, mercy-killing is accepted by the medical establishment and openly practiced a few thousand times each year. In one of the world’s biggest countries, euthanasia is condemned by the medical establishment, secretly practiced many times more often, and almost never comes to light. Which of these countries has a mercy-killing doctor now languishing in its jails? It is the small one, Holland, which has rules for euthanasia and so can police it effectively. The Dutch doctor broke his country’s rules. There is a moral here for all the countries, and not just for the big death-forbidding country, America. Right now it is going over the arguments about euthanasia once again.

In January the Journal of the American Medical Association published a bizarre letter, in which an anonymous doctor claimed to have killed a 20-year-old cancer patient at her own request. This started a debate that will rumble on into the autumn, when Californians may vote on a proposed law legalizing euthanasia. The letter was probably written for polemical impact. It is scarcely credible. It’s author claims that he met the cancer patient for the first time, heard five words from her – “Let’s get this over with” – then killer her. Even the most extreme proponents of euthanasia do not support such an action in those circumstances.

Yet medical monstrosities that are hardly any better undoubtedly continue, almost as a matter of macabre routine, in America, Britain and many other countries. It is disturbingly easy to find doctors who will say, in private, that they sometimes kill patients on purpose. Most say that know somebody else who does. But because they can rarely discuss euthanasia openly with patients – even when those patients beg them for it – doctors tend to kill only when the dying are too far gone to consent. Thus, because voluntary euthanasia is taboo, a doctor makes the decision himself – and the patient is killed involuntarily in the night with a syringe. That is one price of keeping euthanasia secret.

If all forms of mercy-killing are wrong, they should remain taboo. But are they? Because many people accept that it is sad, undignified and gruesome to prolong the throes of death will all the might of medical technology, passive euthanasia – letting patients die – is widely accepted. Most American states have “living – will” legislation that protects doctors from prosecution if they do not try to save someone who has said he does not want life prolonged. Active euthanasia – killing – remains controversial. How long can the distinction between killing and letting die hold out?

Just as there can be culpable omissions, so too can there be blameless acts. Suppose – to take an example from the moral philosophy books – that a man stands to gain from the death of a certain child. The child strikes his head in the bath and falls unconscious. The man sits down and watches him drown. The fact that the man has performed no action does not excuse him. Similarly, suppose that a doctor does no wrong by withholding some treatment in order that death should come sooner rather than later. Is he then necessarily wrong if he administers enough painkillers to kill? Does the fact that the doctor performed an action, rather than an omission, condemn him?

Many doctors working on the battlefield of terminal suffering think that only squeamishness demands a firm difference between passive and active euthanasia on request. Their argument for killing goes like this: one of a doctor’s duties is to prevent suffering; sometimes that is all there is left for him to do, and killing is the only way to do it. There is nothing new in this view. When Hippocrates formulated his oath for doctors, which explicitly rules out active killing, most other Greek doctors and thinkers disagreed with his ban.

Let the past be a guide.

Some people believe that the time of death is appointed by God and that no man should put the clock back on another. Yet if a patient’s philosophical views embrace euthanasia, it is not clear why the religious objections of others should intrude on his death. Another worry is that a legal framework for euthanasia, permitting a doctor to comply with a dying man’s request in a prescribed set of circumstances, might pose dangers for society by setting a precedent for killing. That depends on the society. Holland, arguably, is ready for it. It is probably no coincidence that it was Dutch doctors who most heroically resisted pressure to join in the Nazi medical atrocities that have given euthanasia its worst name. The same tenacious respect for individual liberty that stopped them killing healthy people, who did not want to die, now lets them help dying people who do.

West Germany, by contrast, will not be able to legalize any form of euthanasia for a long time to come. Opposition is too fierce, because of the shadow of the past. Countries with an uninterrupted recent libertarian tradition have less to fear from setting some limited rules for voluntary euthanasia. By refusing to discuss it, they usher in something worse.

Lesson 5: I’d Rather Be Black than Female

Being the first black woman elected to Congress has made me some kind of phenomenon. There are nine other blacks in Congress; there are ten other women. I was the first to overcome both handicaps at once. Of the two handicaps, being black is much less of a drawback than being female.

If I said that being black is a greater handicap than being a woman, probably no one would question me. Why? Because “we all know” there is prejudice against black people in America. That there is prejudice against women is an idea that still strikes nearly all men – and, I am afraid, most women – as bizarre.

Prejudice against blacks was invisible to most white Americans for many years. When blacks finally started to “mention” it, with sit-ins, boycotts, and freedom rides, Americans were incredulous. “Who, us?” they asked in injured tones. “We’re prejudiced?” It was the start of a long, painful reeducation for white America. It will take years for whites – including those who think of themselves as liberals – to discover and eliminate the racist attitudes they all actually have.

How much harder will it be to eliminate the prejudice against women? I am sure it will be a longer struggle. Part of the problem is that women in America are much more brainwashed and content with their roles as second – class citizens than blacks ever were.

Let me explain. I have been active in politics for more than twenty years. For all but the last six, I have done the work – all the tedious details that make the difference between victory and defeat on election day – while men reaped the rewards, which is almost invariably the lot of women in politics.

It is still women – about three million volunteers – who do most of this work in the American political world. The best any of them can hope for is the honor of being district or county vice-chairman, a kind of separate-but-equal position with which a woman is rewarded for years of faithful envelope stuffing and card-party organizing. I n such a job, she gets a number of free trips to state and sometimes national meetings and conventions, where her role is supposed to be to vote the way her male chairman votes.

When I tried to break out of that role in 1963 and run for the New York State Assembly seat from Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, the resistance was bitter. From the start of that campaign, I faced undisguised hostility because of my sex.

But it was four years later, when I ran for Congress, that the question of my sex became a major issue. Among members of my own party, closed meetings were held to discuss ways of stopping me.

My opponent, the famous civil-rights leader James Farmer, tried to project a black, masculine image; he toured the neighborhood with sound trucks filled with young men wearing Afro haircuts, dashikis, and beards. While the television crews ignored me, they were not aware of a very important statistic, which both I and my campaign manager, Wesley MacD. Holder, knew. In my district there are 2.5 women for every man registered to vote. And those women are organized – in PTAs, church societies, card clubs, and other social and service groups I went to them and asked their help. Mr. Farmer still doesn’t quite know what hit him.

When a bright young woman graduate starts looking for a job, why is the first question always: “Can you type?” A history of prejudice lies behind that question. Why are women thought of as secretaries, not administrators? Librarians and teachers, but not doctors and lawyers? Because they are thought of as different and inferior. The happy homemaker and the contented darky are both stereotypes produced by prejudice.

Women have not even reached the level of tokenism that blacks are reaching. No women sit on the Supreme Court. Only two have held Cabinet rank, and none do at present. Only two women hold ambassadorial rank. But women predominate in the lower-paying, menial, unrewarding, dead-end jobs, and when they do reach better positions, they are invariably paid less than a man for the same job.

If that is not prejudice, what would you call it?

A few years ago, I was talking with a political leader about a promising young woman as a candidate. “Why invest time and effort to build the girl up?” he asked me. “You know she’ll only drop out of the game to have a couple of kids just about the time we’re ready to run her for mayor.”

Plenty of people have said similar things about me. Plenty of others have advised me, every time, I tried to take another upward step, that I should go back to teaching, a woman’s vocation and leave politics to the men. I love teaching, and I am ready to go back to it as soon as I am convinced that this country no longer needs a women’s contribution.

When there are no children going to bed hungry in this rich nation, I may be ready to go back to teaching. When there is a good school for every child, I may be ready. When we do not spend our wealth on hardware to murder people, when we no longer tolerate prejudice against minorities, and when the laws against unfair housing and unfair employment practices are enforced instead of evaded, then there may be nothing more for me to do in politics.

But until that happens – and we all know it will not be this year or next – what we need is more women in politics, because we have a very special contribution to make. I hope that the example of my success will convince other women to get into politics – and not just to stuff envelopes, but to run for office.

It is women who can bring empathy, tolerance, insight, patience, and persistence to government – the qualities we naturally have or have had to develop because of our suppression by men. The women of a nation mold its morals, its religion, and its politics by the lives they live. At present, our country needs women’s idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.

Lesson 6: A Good Chance

When I got to Crow Creek, Magpie was not home. I talked to his wife Amelia.

“I need to find Magpie,” I said. “I’ve really got some good news for him.” I pointed to the briefcase I was carrying. “I have his poems and a letter of acceptance from a University in California where they want him to come and participate in the Fine Arts Program they have started for Indians.”

“Do you know that he was on parole?”

“Well, no, not exactly,” I said hesitantly, “I haven’t kept in touch with him but I heard that he was in some kind of trouble.” She smiled to me and said, “He’s gone a lot. It’s not safe around here for him, you know. His parole officer really watches him all the time and so sometimes it is just better for him not to come here. Besides, we haven’t been together for a while. I hear he’s in town somewhere.”

“Do you mean in Chamberlain?”

“Yes, I live here with his sister and she said that she saw him there, quite a while ago. But Magpie would not go to California. He would never leave here now even if you saw him and talked to him about it.”

“But he did before,” I said, “He went to the University of Seattle.”

“Yeah, but…well, that was before,” she said, as though to finish the matter.

“Don’t you want him to go?” I asked.

Quickly, she responded, “Oh, it’s not up to me to say. He is gone from me now. I’m just telling you that you are in for a disappointment. He no longer needs the things that people like you want him to need,” she said positively.

When she saw that I didn’t like her reference to “people like you”, she stopped for a moment and then put her hand on my arm. “Listen,” she said, “Magpie is happy new, finally. He is in good spirits, handsome and free and strong. He sits at the drum and sings with his brothers: he’s okay now. When he was saying all those things against the government and against the council, he became more and more ugly and embittered and I used to be afraid for him. But I’m not now. Please, why don’t you just leave it alone now?”

I was sitting at the café with Salina. Abruptly she said, “I don’t know where Mapie is. I haven’t seen him in four days.”

“I’ve got his poems here with me,” I said. “He has a good change of going to a Fine Arts school in California, but I have to talk with him and get him to fill out some papers. I know that he is interested.”

“No, he isn’t,” she broke in. “He doesn’t have those worthless, shitty dreams anymore.”

“Don’t say that, Salina. This is a good chance for him.”

“Well, you can think what you want, but have you talked to him lately? Do you know him as he is now?”

“I know he is good. I know he has such talent.”

“He is Indian, and he’s back here to stay this time.”

“Would you drive into Chamberlain with me?” I asked.

She said nothing.

“If he is Indian as you say, whatever that means, and if he is back here to stay this time and if he tells me that himself, I’ll let it go. But Salina,” I urged, “I must talk to him and ask him what he wants to do. You see that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said finally. “He has a right to know about this, but you’ll see…”

Her heels clicked on the sidewalk in front of the café as we left, and she became agitated as she talked. “After all that trouble he got into during that protest at Custer when the courthouse was burned, he was in jail for a year. He’s still on parole and he will be on parole for another five years – and they didn’t even prove anything against him! Five years! Can you believe that? People these days can commit murder and not get that kind of a sentence.”

Elgie was standing on the corner near the Bank as we drove down the main street of Chamberlain, and both Salina and I knew without speaking that this man, this good friend of Magpie’s, would know of his whereabouts. We parked the car, Elgie came over and settled himself in the back seat of the car. A police car moved slowly to the corner where we were parked and the patrolmen looked at the three of us intently and we pretended not to notice. The patrol car inched down the empty street and I turned cautiously toward Elgie. Before I could speak, Salina said, “She is got some papers for Magpie. He has a chance to go to a writer’s school in California.”

Always tentative about letting you know what he was really thinking, Elgie said, “Yeah?”

But Salina wouldn’t let him get away so noncommittally, “Elgie,” she scoffed. “You know he wouldn’t go!”

“Well, you know,” Elgie began, “one time when Magpie and me were hiding out after that Custer thing, we ended up on t Augustana College Campus. We got some friends there. And he started talking about freedom and I never forget that, and then after he went wants to be free and you can’t be that, man, when they’re watching you all the time. Man, that freak that’s his parole officer is some mean watch-dog.”

“You think he might go for the scholarship?” I asked, hopefully.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

There was a long silence. Then Elgie said at last, “I think it’s good that you’ve come, because Magpie needs some relief from this constant surveillance, constant checking up. In fact, that’s what he always talks about. ‘If I have to associate with the whites, then I’m not free: there is no liberty in that for Indians.’ You should talk to him now. He’s changed. He’s for complete separation, segregation, total isolation from the whites.”

“Isn’t that a bit too radical? Too unrealistic?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Damn if I know.”

“Yeah,” said Salina, “Just what do you think it would be like for him at that university in California?”

“But it’s a chance for him to study, to write. He can find a kind of satisfying isolation in that, I think.”

After a few moments, Elgie said, “Yeah, I think you are right.” Soon he got out of the back seat and said, “I’m going to walk over the bridge . It’s about three blocks down there. There is an old, whit two-story house on the left side just before you cross the bridge. Magpie’s brother just got out of the Nebraska State Reformatory and he is staying there with his old lady, and that’s where Magpie is.”

At last! Now I could really talk to him and let him make this decision for himself.

“There are things about this though,” Elgie said. “Magpie shouldn’t have been there, see, because it’s a part of the condition of his parole that he stays away from friends and relatives and ex-convicts and just about everybody. But Jesus, this is his brother. Wait until just before sundown and then come over. Park your car at the service station just around the block from there and walk to the back entrance of the house and then you can talk to Magpie about all this.”

Salina was talking, telling me about Magpie’s return to Crow Creek after months in exile and how his relatives went to his sister’s house and welcomed him home. “They came to hear him sing with his brothers, and they sat in chairs around the room and laughed and sang wit him.”

Several cars were parked in the yard of the old house as we approached, and Salina, keeping here voice low, said, “Maybe they are having a party.”

But the silence which hung about the place filled me with apprehension, and when we walked in the back door which hung open, we saw people standing in the kitchen. I asked carefully, “What’s wrong?”

Nobody spoke but Elgie came over, his bloodshot eyes filled with sorrow and misery. He stood in front of us for a moment and then gestured us to go into the living room. The room was filled with people sitting in silence, and finally Elgie said, quietly, “They shot him.”

“They picked him up for breaking the conditions of his parole any they put him in jail and … they shot him.”

“But why?” I cried. “How could this have happened?”

“They said they thought he was resisting and that they were afraid of him.”

“Afraid?” I asked, incredulously. “But…but…was he armed?”

“No,” Elgie said, seated now, him arm on his knees, his head down. “No, he wasn’t armed.”

I held the poems tightly in my hands pressing my thumbs, first one and then the other, against the smoothness of the cardboard folder.”

Lesson 7: Miss Brill

Although it was so brilliantly fine – the blue sky powdered with gold and the great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques – Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting – from nowhere, from they sky. Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! I t was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box tat afternoon, shaken out the moth-powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes. “What has been happening to me?” said the sad little eyes. Oh, how sweet it was to see them snap at her again from the red eiderdown! …But the nose, which was of some black composition, wasn’t at all firm. It must have had a knock, somehow. Never mind – a little dab of black sealing-wax when the time came – when it was absolutely necessary. … Little rogue! Yes, she really felt like that about it. Little rogue biting its tail just by her left ear. She could have taken it off and laid it on her lap and stroked it. She felt a tingling in her hands and arms. But that came from walking, she supposed. And when she breathed, something light and sad – no, not sad, exactly – something gentle seemed to move in her bosom.

There were a number of people out this afternoon. far more than last Sunday. And the band sounded louder and gayer. That was because the Season had begun. For although the band played all the year round on Sundays, out of seaon it was never the same. It was like someone playing with only the family to listen; it didn’t care how it played if there weren’t any strangers present. Wasn’t the conductor wearing a new coat, too? She was sure it was new. He scraped wit his foot and flapped his arms like a rooster about to crow, and the bandsmen sitting in the green rotunda blew out their cheeks and glared at the music. Now there came a little “flutey” bit – very pretty! – a litter chain of bright drops. She was sure it would be repeated. It was; she lifted her head and smiled.

Only two people shared her “special” seat: a fine old man in a velvet coat, his hands clasped over a huge carved walking-stick, and a bid old woman, sitting upright, with a roll of knitting on her embroidered apron. They did not speak. This was disappointing, for Miss Brill always looked forward to conversation. She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting in other people’s lives just a minute while they talked round her.

She glanced, sideways, at the old couple. Perhaps they would go soon. Last Sunday, too, hadn’t been as interesting as usual. An Englishman and his wife, he wearing a dreadful Panama hat and she button boots. And she’s gone on the whole time about how she ought to wear spectacles; she knew she needed them; But that it was no good getting any; they’d be sure to break and they’d never keep on. And he’d been so patient. He’d suggested everything – gold rims, the kind that curved round your ears, little pads inside the bridge. No, nothing would please her. “They’ll always be sliding down my nose!” Miss Brill had wanted to shake her.

The old people sat on the bench, still as statues. Never mind, there was always the crowd to watch. To and fro, in from of the flower-beds and the band rotunda, the couples and groups paraded, stopped to talk, to greet, to buy a handful of flowers from the old beggar who had his tray fixed to the railings. Little children ran among them, swooping and laughing; little boys with big white silk bows under their chins; little girls, little French dolls, dressed up in velvet and late. And sometimes a tiny staggered came suddenly rocking into the open from under the trees, stopped, stared, as suddenly sat down "flop," until its small high-stepping mother, like a young hen, and rushed scolding to its rescue. Other people sat on the benches and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday alter Sunday, and—Miss Brill had often noticed—there was some-thing funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms or even—-even cupboards!

Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky gold-veined clouds.

Tum-tum-tum tiddle-um! Tiddle-um! Turn tiddley-um turn ta! Blew the band.

Two young girls in red came by and two young soldiers in blue met them, and they laughed and paired and went off arm in arm. Two peasant women with funny straw hats passed, gravely, leading beautiful smoke-colored donkey. A cold, pale nun hurried by. A beautiful woman came along and dropped her bunch of violets, and a little boy ran after to hand them to her, and she took them and threw them away as if they'd been poisoned. Dear me! Miss Brill didn't know whether to admire that or not! And now an ermine toque and a gentleman in grey met just in front of her. He was tall, stiff, dignified, and she was wearing the ermine toque she'd bought when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same color as the shabby ermine, and her hand, in its cleaned glove, lifted to dab her lips, was a tiny yellowish paw. Oh, she was so pleased to see him—delighted! She rather thought they were going to meet that afternoon. She described where she'd been— everywhere, here, there, along by the sea. The day was so charming—didn't he agree? And wouldn't he, perhaps?…But he shook his head, lighted a cigarette, slowly breathed a great deep puff into her face and, even while she was still talking and laughing, flicked the match away and walked on. The ermine toque was alone; she smiled more brightly than over. But even the band seemed to know what she was feeling and played more softly, played tenderly, and the drum beat "The Brute! The Brute!" over and over. What would she do? What was going to happen now? But as Miss Brill wondered, the ermine toque turned, raised her hand as though she'd seen someone else, much nicer, just over there, and pattered away. And the band changed again and played more quickly, more gaily than ever, and the old couple on Miss Brill’s seat got up and marched away, and such a funny old man with long whiskers hobbled along in time to the music and was nearly knocked over by four girls walking abreast.

Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who could believe the sky at the back wasn’t painted? But it wasn’t till a little brown dog trotted on solemnly and then slowly trotted off, like a little “theatre” dog, a little dog that had been drugged, that Miss Brill discovered what it was that made it so exciting. They were all on the stage. They weren’t only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn't been there; she was part of the performance, after all. How strange shod never thought of it like that before! And yet it explained why she made such a point of starting from home at just the same time each week—so as not to be late for the performance—and it also explained why she had quite a queer, shy feeling at telling her English pupils how she spent her Sunday afternoons. No wonder! Miss Brill nearly laughed out loud. She was on the stage. She thought of the old invalid gentleman to whom she read the newspaper four afternoons a week while he slept in the garden. She had goy quite used to the frail head on the cotton pillow, the hollowed eyes, the open mouth and the high pinched nose. If he'd been dead she mightn't have noticed for weeks; she wouldn't have minded. But suddenly he knew he was having the paper read to him by an actress! "An actress!" The old head lifted; two points of light quivered in the old eyes. "An actress—are ye?" And Miss Brill smoothed the newspaper as though it were the manuscript of her pan and said gently: "Yes, I have been an actress for a long time."

The band had been having a rest. Now they started again. And what they played was warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill— a something, what was it? —not sadness—no, not sadness—a something that made you want to sing. The tune lifted, lifted, the light shone; and n seemed to Miss Brill that in another moment all of them, all the whole company, would begin singing. The young ones, the laughing ones who were moving together, they would begin, and the men's voices, very resolute and brave, would join them. And then she too, she too, and the others on the benches—they would come in with a kind of accompaniment—something low, that scarcely rose or fell, something so beautiful—moving…and Miss Brill's eyes filled with tears and she looked smiling at all the other members of the company. Yes we understand, we understand, she thought—though what they understood she didn't know.

Just at that moment a boy and a girl came and sat down where the old couple had been. They were beautifully dressed; they were in love. The hero and heroine, of course, just arrived from his father's yacht. And still soundlessly singing, still with that trembling smile, Miss Brill prepared to listen.

"No, not now," said the girl. "Not here, I can't."

"But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?" asked the boy. "Why does she come here at all—who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?"

"It's her fu-fur which is so funny," giggled the girl. "It's exactly like a fried whiting."

"Ah, be off with you!" said the boy in an angry whisper. Then: "Tell me, ma petite chere—"

"No, not here, “said the girl. "Not yet."

On her way home she usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker's. It was her Sunday treat. Sometimes there was an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny present—a surprise—something that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the almond Sundays and .struck the match for the kettle in quite a dashing

But today she passed the baker's by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room—her room like a cupboard—and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the neck let quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.

Lesson 8: A Lesson in Living

For nearly a year, I sopped around the house, the Store, the school and the church, like an old biscuit, dirty and inedible. Then I met, or rather got to know, they lady who threw me first lifeline.

Mrs. Bertha Flowers was the aristocrat of Black Stamps. She had the grace of control to appear warm in the coldest weather, and one the Arkansas summer days it seemed she had a private breeze which swirled around, cooling her.

Her skin was a rich black that would have peeled like a plum if snagged, but then no one would have thought of getting close enough to Mrs. Flowers to ruffle her dress, let alone snag her skin. She didn't encourage familiarity. She wore gloves too.

She was one of the few gentlewomen I have ever known, and haw remained throughout my life the measure of what a human being can be.

She appealed 'to me because she was like people I had never met personally. Like women in English novels who walked the moors (whatever they were) with their loyal dogs racing at a respectful distance. Like the women who sat in front of roaring fireplaces, drinking tea incessantly from silver trays full of scones and crumpets. Women who talked over the "heath” and read morocco-bound books and had two last names divided by a hyphen. It would be safe to say that she made me proud to be Negro, just by being herself.

One summer afternoon, sweet-milk fresh in my memory, she stopped at the Store to buy provisions. Another Negro woman of her health and age would have been expected to carry the paper sacks home in one hand, but Momma said, "Sister Flowers, I'll send Bailey up to your house with these things."

"Thank you, Mrs. Henderson. I'd prefer Marguerite, though." My name was beautiful when she said it. "I've been mean-ins to talk to her, anyway." They gave each other agegroup looks.

There was a little path beside the rocky road, and Mrs. Flowers walked in front swinging her arms and picking her way over the stones.

She said, without turning her head, to me, "I hear you’re doing very good school work, Marguerite, but that it's all written. The teachers report that they have trouble getting you to talk in class. We passed the triangular farm on our left and the path widened to allow us to walk together. I hung back in the separate unasked and unanswerable questions.

"Come and walk along with me, Marguerite." 1 couldn't have refused even if I wanted to. She pronounced my name so nicely. Or more correctly, she spoke each word with such clarity that I was certain a foreigner who didn't understand English could have understood her.

“Now no one is going to make you talk—possibly no one can. Bui bear in mind, language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.” That was a totally new idea to me, and I would need time to think about it.

"Your grandmother says you read a lot. Every chance you get. That's good, but not good enough. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning. "

I memorized the part about the human voice infusing words. It seemed so valid and poetic.

She said she was going to give me some books and that I not only must read them, I must read them aloud. She suggested that i try to make a sentence sound in as many different ways as possible.

"I'll accept no excuse if you return a book to me that has been badly handled." My imagination boggled at the punishment 1 would deserve if in fact I did abuse a book of Mrs. Flowers'. Death would be too kind and brief.

The odors in the house surprised me. Somehow I had never connected Mrs. Flowers with food or eating or any other common experience of common people. There must have been an outhouse, too, but my mind never recorded it.

The sweet scent of vanilla had met us as she opened the door.

"I made tea cookies this morning. You see, I had planned to invite you for cookies and lemonade so we could have this little chat. The lemonade is in the icebox."

It followed that Mrs. Flowers would have ice on an ordinary day, when most families in our town bought ice late on Saturdays only a few times during the summer to be used in the wooden ice-cream freezers.

"Have a seal, Marguerite. Over there by the table." She carried a platter covered with a tea towel. Although she warned that she hadn't tried her hand at baking sweets for some time, I was certain that like everything else about her the cookies would be perfect.

As I ate she began the first of what we later called "my lesson in living." She said that must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.

When 1 finished the cookies she brushed off the table and brought a thick, small book from the bookcase. I had read A Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and 1 heard poetry for the first time in my life.

"It was the best of times and the worst of times. . ." Her voice slid in and curved down through and over the words. She was nearly singing. I wanted to look at the pages. Were they the same that I had read? Or were there notes, music, lined on the pages, as in a hymn book? Her sounds began cascading gently. I knew from listening; to a thousand preachers that she was nearing the end of her reading, and I hadn't really heard, heard to understand, a single word.

"How do you like that?"

It occurred to me that she expected a. response. The sweet vanilla flavor was still on my tongue and her reading was a wonder in my ears. I had to speak.

I said, "Yea, ma'am." It was the least I could do, but it was the most also.

'There s one more thing. Take this book of poems and memorize one for me. Next time you pay me a visit, I want you to recite.”

I have tried often to search behind the sophistication of years for the enchantment I so easily found in those gifts. The essence escapes but its aura remains. To be allowed, no, invited, into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance lo exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist. When I said aloud, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…" tears of love filled my eyes at my selflessness.

On that first day, I ran down the hill and into the road (few cars ever came along it) and had the good sense to stop running before I reached the Store.

I was liked, and what a difference it made. I was respected not as Mrs. Henderson's grandchild or Bailey's sister but for just being Marguerite Johnson.

Childhood's logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute). 1 didn't question why Mrs. Flowers had singled me out for attention, nor did it occur to me that Momma might have asked her to give me a little talking to. All I cared about was that she had made tea cookies for me and read to me from her favorite book. It was enough to prove that she liked me.

Momma and Bailey were waiting inside the Store. He said. "My, what did she give you?" He had seen the books, but I held the paper sack with his cookies in my arms shielded by the poems.

Momma said, "Sister, I know you acted like a little lady. That do my heart good to see settled people take to you all. I'm trying my best, the Lord knows, but these days…" Her voice trailed off. "Go on in and change your dress.”

Lesson 9: The Trouble with Television

It is difficult to escape the influence of television. If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television. You can add 10,000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age of 20. The only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.

Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours. Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate spends working on a bachelor's degree. In 10,000 hours you could have learned enough to become an astronomer or engineer. You could have learned several languages fluently. If it appealed to you, you could be reading Homer in the original Greek or Dostoyevsky in Russian. If it didn't, you could have walked around the world and written a book about it.

The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on anything. But Television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant gratification. It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.

Television's variety becomes a narcotic, nor a stimulus. Its serial, kaleidoscopic exposures force us to follow its lead. The viewer is on a perpetual guided tour: 30 minutes at the museum, 30 at the cathedral, 30 for a drink, then back on the bus to the next attraction—-except on television., typically, the spans allotted arc on the order of minutes or seconds, and the chosen delights are more often car crashes and people killing one another. In short, a lot of television usurps one of the most precious of all human gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender it.

Capturing your attention—and holding it—is the prime motive of most television programming and enhances its role as a profitable advertising vehicle. Programmers live in constant fear of losing anyone's attention—anyone's. The surest way to avoid doing so is to keep everything   brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement. Quite simply, television operates on the appeal to the short attention span.

It is simply the easiest way out. But it has come to be regarded as a given, as inherent in the medium itself; as an imperative, as though General Sarnoff, or one of the other august pioneers of video, had bequeathed to us tablets of stone commanding that nothing in television shall ever require more than a few moments' Concentration.

In its place that is fine. Who can quarrel with a medium that so brilliantly packages escapist entertainment as a mass-marketing tool? Rut I see its values now pervading this nation and its life. It has become fashionable to think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving, impatient public.

In the case of news, this practice, in my view, results in inefficient communication. I question how much of television's nightly news effort is really absorbable and understandable. Much of it is what has been aptly described as "machine-gunning with scraps." I think the technique fights coherence. I think it tends to make things ultimately boring and dismissible (unless they are accompanied by horrifying pictures) because almost anything is boring and dismissible if you know almost nothing about it.

I believe that TV's appeal to the short attention span is not only inefficient communication but decivilizing as well. Consider the casual assumptions that television tends to cultivate: that complexity must be avoided, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, that verbal precision is an anachronism. It may be old-fashioned, but I was taught that thought is words, arranged in grammatically precise

There is a crisis of literacy in this country. One study estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are "functionally illiterate" and cannot read or write well enough to answer the want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle.

Literacy may not be an inalienable human right, but it is one that the highly literate Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or even unattainable. We are not only not attaining it as a nation, statistically speaking, but we are falling further and further short of attaining it. And, white 1 would not be so simplistic as to suggest that television is the cause, 1 believe it contributes and is an influence.

Everything about this nation—the structure of the society, its forms of family organization, its economy, its place in the world— has become more complex, not less.   Yet its dominating communications instrument, its principal form of national linkage, is one that sells neat resolutions to human problems that usually have no neat resolutions. It is all symbolized in my mind by the hugely successful art form that television has made central to the culture, the 30-second commercial: the tiny drama of the earnest housewife who finds happiness in choosing the right toothpaste.

When before in human history has so much humanity collectively surrendered so much of its leisure to one toy, one mass diversion? When before has virtually an entire nation surrendered itself wholesale to a medium for selling?

Some years ago Yale University law professor Charles L. Black. Jr., wrote: "... forced feeding on trivial fare is not itself a trivial matter-" I think this society is being forced-fed with trivial fare, and 1 fear that the effects on our habits of mind, our language, our tolerance for effort, and our appetite for complexity are only dimly perceived. If I am wrong, we will have done no harm to look at the issue skeptically and critically, to consider how we should be residing it.   I hope you will join with me in doing so.

Lesson 10: The Tenth Man

It was at three the next afternoon (alarm clock time) that an officer entered the cell; the first officer they had seen for weeks – and this one was very young, with inexperience even in the shape of his ache which he had shaved too much on the left side. He was as embarrassed as a schoolboy making his first entry on a stage at a prize-giving, and he spoke abruptly so as to give the impression of a strength he did not possess. He said, "There were murders last night in the town. The aide-de-camp of the military governor, a sergeant and a girl on a bicycle." He added, "We don't complain about the girl. Frenchmen have our permission to kill Frenchwomen." He had obviously thought up his speech carefully beforehand, but the irony was overdone and the delivery that of an amateur actor: the whole scene was as unreal as a charade. He said, "You know what you are here for, living comfortably, on fine rations, while our men work and fight. Well, now you've got to pay the hotel bill. Don't blame us. Blame your own murderers. My orders are that one man in every ten shall be shot in this camp. How many of you are there?" He shouted sharply, "Number off," and sullenly they obeyed, "... twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty." They knew he knew without counting. This was just a line in his charade he couldn't sacrifice. He said, "Your allotment then is three. We are quite indifferent as to which three. You can choose for yourselves.   The funeral rites will begin at seven tomorrow morning.”

The charade was over: they could hear his feet striking sharply on the asphalt going away. Chavel wondered for a moment what syllable had been acted—"night,""girl,""aside," or perhaps "thirty," but it was of course the whole word—"hostage. "

The silence went on a long time, and then a man called Krogh, an Alsatian, said, "Well, do we have to volunteer?"

"Rubbish," said one of the clerks, a thin elderly man in pince-nez, "nobody will volunteer. We must draw lots." He added, "Unless it is thought that we should go by ages—the oldest first. "

"No, no," one of the others said, "that would be unjust. "

"It's the way of nature."

"Not even the way of nature," another said. "1 had a child who died when she was five..."

"We must draw lots," the mayor said firmly. "It is the only fair thing.” He sat with his hands still pressed over his stomach, hiding his watch, but all through the cell you could hear its blunt tick lock tick. He added, "On the unmarried. The married should not be included. They have responsibilities…

“Ha, ha,” Pierre said, “we see through that. Why should the married get off? Their work’s finished. You, of course, are married?”

“I have lost my wife,” the mayor said, “I am not married now. And you…”

“Married,” Pierre said.

The mayor began to undo his watch; the discovery that his rival was safe seemed to confirm his belief that as the owner of time he was bound to be the next victim. He looked from face to face and chose Chavel, perhaps because he was the only man with a waistcoat fit to take the chain. He said, “Monsieur Chavel, I want you to hold this watch for me in case…”

The elderly clerk spoke again. He said, "I'm married. I've got the right to speak. We are going the wrong way about all this. Everyone must draw lots. This isn't the last draw we shall have, and picture to yourselves what it will be like in this cell if we have a privileged class—the ones who are left to the end. The rest of you will soon begin to hate us.   We shall be left out of your fear. . . "

"He's right," Pierre said.

The mayor refastened his watch. "Have it your own way," he said. "But if the taxes were levied like this…" He gave a gesture of despair.

"How do we draw?" Krogh asked.

Chavel said, "The quickest way would be to draw marked papers out of a shoe. . ."

Krogh said contemptuously, "Why the quickest way? This is the last gamble some of us will have. W_e may as well enjoy it. I say a coin.”

"The only way is to draw," the mayor said.

The clerk prepared the draw, sacrificing for it one of his letters from home. He read it rapidly for the last time, and then tore it into thirty pieces. On three pieces he made a cross in pencil, and then folded each piece. "Krogh's got the biggest shoe," he said. They shuffled the pieces on the floor and then dropped them into the shoe.

"We'll draw in alphabetical order," the mayor said.

"Z first," Chavel said. His feeling of security was shaken. He wanted a drink badly. He picked at a dry piece of skin on his lip.

"As you wish," the lorry driver said. "Anybody beat Voisin? Here goes. “He thrust his hand into the shoe and made careful excavations as though he had one particular scrap of paper in mind. He drew one out, opened it, and gazed at it with astonishment. He said, "This is it.” He sat down and felt for a cigarette, but when he got it between his lips he forgot to light it.

Chavel was filled with a huge and shameful joy. It seemed to him that already he was saved—twenty-nine men to draw and only two marked papers left. The chances had suddenly grown in his favor from ten to one to—fourteen to one: the greengrocer had drawn a slip and indicated carelessly and without pleasure that he was safe. Indeed from the first draw any mark of pleasure was taboo: one couldn't mock the condemned man by any sign of relief.

Again a dull disquiet—ii couldn't yet be described as a fear—extended its empire over Chavel's chest. It was like a constriction: he found himself yawning as the sixth man drew a blank slip, and a sense of grievance nagged at his mind when the tenth man bad drawn—it was the one they called Janvier—and the chances were once again the same as when the draw started. Some men drew the first slip which touched their fingers; others seemed to suspect that fate was trying to force on them a particular slip and when they bad drawn one a little way from the shoe would let it drop again and choose another. Time passed with incredible slowness, and the man called Voisin sat against the wall with the unlighted cigarette in his mouth paying them no attention at all.

The chances had narrowed to one in eight when the elderly clerk—his name was Lenotre—drew the second slip. He cleared his throat and put on his pince-nez as though he had to make sure he was not mistaken. "Ah, Monsieur Voisin," he said with a thin undecided smile, "May I join you?" This time Chavel felt no joy even though the elusive odds were back again overwhelmingly in his favor at fifteen to one; he was daunted by the courage of common men. He

wanted the whole thing to be over as quickly as possible: like a game of cards which has gone on too long, he only wanted someone to make a move and break up the table. Lenotre, sitting down against the wall next to Voisin, turned the slip over: on the back was a scrap of writing.

"Your-wife?" Voisin said.

"My daughter," Lenotre said. "Excuse me." He went over to his roll of bedding and drew out a writing pad. Then he sat down next to Voisin and began to write, carefully, without hurry, a thin legible hand. The odds were back to ten to one.

From that point the odds seemed to move toward Chavel with a dreadful inevitability: nine to one, eight to one; they were like a pointing finger. The men who were left drew more quickly and more carelessly: they seemed to Chavel to have some inner information—to know that he was the one. When his time came to draw there were only three slips left, and it appeared to Chavel a monstrous injustice that there were so few choices left for him. He drew one out of the shoe and then feeling certain that this one had been willed on him by his companions and contained the penciled cross he threw it back and snatched another.

"You looked, lawyer," one of the two men exclaimed, but the other quieted him.

"He didn't look. He's got the marked one now."

"No," Chavel said, "no." He threw the slip upon the ground and cried, "I never consented to the draw. You can't make me die for the rest of you. . . "

They watched him with astonishment but without enmity. He was a gentleman. They didn't judge him by their own standards: he belonged to an unaccountable class and they didn't at first even attach the idea of cowardice to his actions.

"Listen," Chavel implored them. He held out the slip of paper and they all watched him with compassionate curiosity. "I'll give a hundred thousand francs to anyone who'll take this."

He took little rapid steps from one man to another, showing each man the bit of paper as if he were an attendant at an auction. "A hundred thousand francs," he implored, and they watched him with a kind of shocked pity: he was the only rich man among them and this was a unique situation. They had no means of comparison and assumed that this was a characteristic of his class, just as a traveler stepping off the liner at a foreign port for luncheon sums up a nation's character forever in the wily businessman who happens to share the table with him.

Lesson 11: On Getting Off to Sleep

What a bundle of contradictions is a man! Surety, humour is the saving grace of us, for without it we should die of vexation. With me, nothing illustrates the contrariness of things better than the matter of sleep. If, for example, my intention is to write an essay, and 1 have before me ink and pens and several sheets of virgin paper, you may depend upon it that before I have gone very far I feel an overpowering desire for sleep, no matter what time of the day it is. I stare at the reproachfully blank paper until sights and sounds become dim and confused, and it is only by an effort of will that I can continue at all. Even then, I proceed half-heartedly, in a kind of dream. But let me be between the sheets at a late hour, and I can do anything but sleep. Between chime and chime of the clock I can write essays by the score. Fascinating subjects and noble ideas come pell-mell, each with its appropriate imagery and expression. Nothing stands between me and half-a-dozen imperishable masterpieces but pens, ink, and paper.

If it be true that our thoughts and mental images are perfectly tangible things, like our books and pictures, to the inhabitants of the next world, then I am making for myself a better reputation there than I am in this place. Give me a restless hour or two in bed and I can solve, to my own satisfaction, ail the doubts of humanity. When I am in the humour I can compose grand symphonies, and paint magnificent pictures. I am, at once, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michael Angelo; yet it gives me no satisfaction; for the one thing I cannot do is to go to sleep.

Once in bed, when it is time to close the five ports of knowledge, most folks I know seem to find no difficulty in plunging their earthly parts into oblivion. It is not so with me, to whom sleep is a coy mistress, much given to a teasing inconsistency and for ever demanding to be wooed—"lest too light winning make the prize light". I used to read, with wonder, those sycophantic stories of the warlike supermen, the great troublers of the world's peace, Cromwell, Napoleon, and the like, who, thanks to their "iron wills", could lie down and plunge themselves immediately into deep sleep, to wake up, refreshed, at a given time. Taking these fables to heart, I would resolve to do likewise, and, going to bed, would clench my teeth, look as determined as possible in the darkness, and command the immediate presence of sleep. But alas! The very act of concentration seemed to make me more wakeful than ever, and I would pass hours in tormenting sleeplessness. I had overlooked the necessity of having an "iron will", my own powers of will having little or none of this peculiar metallic quality. But how uncomfortable it must have been living with these ironwilled folks! Who would want to remonstrate and argue with them? It would be worse than beating an anvil with a sledge hammer. I must confess that I always suspect the men who boast that they unvaryingly fall asleep as soon as they get into bed— those "as soon as my head touches the pillow" fellows. To me, there is something inhuman, something callous and almost bovine, in the practice. I suspect their taste in higher matters. Iron wills apart, there must be a lack of human sympathy or depth in a man who can thus throw off, with his clothes, his waking feelings and thoughts, and ignore completely those memories and fancies which

...will sometimes leap,

From hiding-places ten years deep.

To share a bedroom with one of these fellows is to lose one's faith in human nature, for, even after the most eventful day, there is no comparing notes with them, no midnight confidence, no casting up the balance of the day's pleasure and pain. They sink, at once, into stupid, heavy slumber, leaving you to your own mental devices. And they all snore abominably!

The artificial ways of inducing sleep are legion, and are only alike in their ineffectuality. In Lavengro (or is it Romany Rye?) there is an impossible character, a victim of insomnia, who finds that a volume of Wordsworth's poems is the only sure soporific; but that was Borrow s malice. The famous old plan of counting sheep jumping over a stile has never served my turn. I have herded imaginary sheep until they insisted on turning themselves into white bears or blue pigs, and I defy any reasonable man to fall asleep while mustering a herd of cerulean swine.

Discussing the question, some times ago, with an old friend, she gave me her never-failing remedy for sleeplessness, which was to imagine herself performing some trivial action over and over again, until, her mind becoming disgusted with the monotony of life, sleep drew the curtain. Her favourite device was to imagine a picture not hanging quite plumb upon the wall, and then to proceed to straighten it. This I tried—though putting pictures straight is no habit of mine—but it was of no avail. I imagined the picture on the wall without difficulty, and gave it a few deft touches, but this set me thinking of pictures in general, and then I remembered an art exhibition I had attended with my friend T. and what he said, and what I said, and I wondered how T. was faring these days, and whether his son was still at school. And so it went on, until I found myself meditating on cheese, or spiritualism, or the Rocky Mountains—but no sleep! Somewhere in that limbo which Earth describes in Prometheus Unbound, that vague region filled with Dreams and the light imaginings of men, is the dreary phantom of an unstraightened picture upon a ghostly wall. And there it shall stay, for I have no further use for it.

But I have not yet given up all hope of finding some way of hastening the approach of sleep. Even yet there is a glimmer, for rereading (not for the first, and, please Heaven! not the last time) Lamb's letters, I came upon the following, in a note to Southey; "But there is a man in my office, a Mr. H., who proses it away from morning lo night, and never gets beyond corporal and material verities! . . . When I can't sleep o'nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H. , upon a given subject, and go prosing on in fancy with him, nil I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it answer. . . “There is promise in this, and we all have our Mr. H. whose talk, bare of anything like fancy and wit, acts upon us like a dose of laudanum . This very night I will dismiss such trivial phantasies as jumping sheep and crooked pictures, and evoke the phantom of a crushing, stupendous Bore.

Lesson 12: Why I Write

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to adandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight- For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and 1 think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with [he feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that 1 had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could gel my own back for my failure

. . . As a very small child 1 used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more find more a mere description of what T was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: "He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf," etc., etc. This habit continued till 1 was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The "story" must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i, e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Last —

"So hee with difficulty and labour hard

Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee,"

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling "hee" for "he" was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in—at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own—but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(1) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. , etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. . .

(2) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed…

(3) Historical impulse. Desire to see things, as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(4) Political purpose—using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature—taking your "nature" to be the state you have attained when you are first adult—I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age! might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism; but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.

The Spanish war and other events in 1936 - 1937 turned the scale and thereafter I know where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art. " I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as J remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. . .

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. 1 will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what 1 was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

…Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Lesson 13: Work

Whether work should be placed among the causes of happiness or among the causes of unhappiness may perhaps be regarded as a doubtful question. There is certainly much work which is exceedingly irksome, and an excess of work is always very painful. I think, however, that, provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness. There are in work all grades, from mere relief of tedium up to the profoundest delights, according to the nature of the work and the abilities of the worker. Most of the work that most people have to do is not in itself interesting, but even such work has certain great advantages. To begin with, it fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what one shall do. Most people, when they are left free to fill their own time according to their own choice, are at a loss to think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they decide on, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have been pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level. Moreover the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome. Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to be told what to do at each hour of the day, provided the orders are not too unpleasant. Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as the price of their freedom from drudgery. At times they may find relief by hunting big game in Africa, or by flying round the world, but the number of such sensations is limited, especially after youth is past. Accordingly the more intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if they were poor, while rich women for the most part keep themselves busy with innumerable trifles of whose earth-shaking importance they are firmly persuaded.

Work therefore is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of boredom, for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is as nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days. With this advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes holidays much more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to work so hard as to impair his vigor, he is likely to find far more zest in his free time than an idle man could possibly find.

The second advantage of most paid work and of some unpaid work is that it gives chances of success and opportunities for ambition. In most work success is measured by income and while our capitalistic society continues, this is inevitable. It is only where the best work is concerned that this measure ceases to be the natural one to apply. The desire that men feel to increase their income is quite as much a desire for success as for the extra comforts that a higher income can procure. However dull work may be, it becomes bearable if it is a means of building up a reputation, whether in the world at large or only in one's own circle. Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men this comes chiefly through their work. In this respect those women whose lives are occupied with housework are much less fortunate than men, or than women who work outside the home. The domesticated wife does not receive wages, has no means of bettering herself, is taken for granted by her husband (who sees practically nothing of what she does), and is valued by him not for her housework but for quite other qualities. Of course this does not apply to those women who are sufficiently well-to-do to make beautiful houses and beautiful gardens and become the envy of their neighbors; but such women are comparatively few, and for the great majority housework cannot bring as much satisfaction as work of other kinds brings to men and to professional women.

The satisfaction of killing time and of affording some outlet, however modest, for ambition, belongs to most work, and is sufficient to make even a man whose work is dull happier on the average than a man who has no work at all. But when work is interesting, it is capable of giving satisfaction of a far higher order than mere relief from tedium. The kinds of work in which there is some interest may he arranged in a hierarchy. I shall begin with those which are only mildly interesting and end with those that are worthy to absorb the whole energies of a great man.

Two chief elements make work interesting: first, the exercise of skill, and second, construction.

Every man who has acquired some unusual skill enjoys exercising it until it has become a matter of course, or until he can no longer improve himself. This motive to activity begins in early childhood: a boy who can stand on his head becomes reluctant to stand on his feet. A great deal of work gives the same pleasure that is to be derived from games of skill. The work of a lawyer or a politician must contain in a more delectable form a great deal of the same pleasure that is to be derived from playing bridge. Here of course there is not only the exercise of skill but the outwitting of a skilled opponent. Even where this competitive element is absent, however, the performance of difficult feats is agreeable. A man who can do stunts in an aero-plane finds the pleasure so great that for the sake of it he is willing to risk his life. I imagine that an able surgeon, in spite of the painful circumstances in which his work is done, derives satisfaction from the exquisite precision of his operations. The same kind of pleasure, though in a less intense form, is to be derived from a great deal of work of a humbler kind. All skilled work can be pleasurable, provided the skill required is either variable or capable of indefinite improvement. If these conditions are absent, it will cease to be interesting when a man has acquired his maximum skill. A man who runs three-mile races will cease to find pleasure in this occupation when he passes the age at which he can beat his own previous record. Fortunately there is a very considerable amount of work in which new circumstances call for new skill and a man can go on improving, at any rate

until he has reached middle age. In some kinds of skilled work, such as politics, for example, it seems that men are at their best between sixty and seventy, the reason being that in such occupations a wide experience of other men is essential. For this reason successful politicians are apt to be happier at the age of seventy than any other men of equal age. Their only competitors in this respect are the men who arc the heads of big businesses.

There is, however, another element possessed by the best work, which is even more important as a source of happiness than is the exercise of skill. This is the element of constructiveness. In some work, though by no means in most, something is built up which remains as a monument when the work is completed. We may distinguish construction from destruction by the following criterion. In construction the initial state of affairs is comparatively haphazard, while the final stale of affairs embodies a purpose. In destruction the reverse is the case; the initial stale of affairs embodies a purpose, while the final state of affairs is haphazard, that is to say, all that is intended by the destroyer is to produce a state of affairs which does not embody a certain purpose. This criterion applies in the most literal and obvious case, namely the construction and destruction of buildings. In constructing a building a previously made plan is carried out, whereas in destroying it no one decides exactly how the materials are to lie when the demolition is completed. Destruction is of course necessary very often as a preliminary to subsequent construction, in that case it is part of a whole which is constructive. But not infrequently a man will engage in activities of which the purpose is destructive without regard to any construction that may come after. Frequently he will conceal this from himself by the belief that he is only sweeping sway in order to build afresh, but it is generally possible to unmask this pretense, when it is a pretense, by asking him what the subsequent construction is to he. On this subject it will be found that he will speak vaguely and without enthusiasm, whereas on the preliminary destruction he has spoken precisely and with zest. This applies to not a few revolutionaries and militarists and other apostles of violence. They are actuated, usually without their own knowledge, by hatred: the destruction of what they hate is their real purpose, and they arc comparatively indifferent to the question what is to come after it. Now I cannot deny that in the work of destruction as in the work of construction there may be joy. It is a fiercer joy, perhaps at moments more intense, but it is less profoundly satisfying, since the result is one in which little satisfaction is to be found. You kill your enemy, and when he is dead your occupation is gone, and the satisfaction that you derive from victory quickly fades- The work of construction, on the other hand, when completed, is delightful to contemplate, and moreover is never so fully completed that there is nothing further to do about it. The most satisfactory purposes are those that lead on indefinitely from one success to another without ever coming to a dead end; and in this respect it will be found that construction is a greater source of happiness than destruction. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that those who find satisfaction in construction find in it greater satisfaction than the lovers of destruction can find in destruction, for if once you have become filled with hate you will not easily derive from construction the pleasure which another man would derive from it.

Lesson 14: I Would Like to Tell You Something

I would like to tell you something about what veterans are doing in this country, and about our feeling now that we’ve come back from a war we didn't really want to fight.

A little over a week ago w_e held an investigation in Detroit where over 150 honorably discharged veterans, many of them highly decorated, testified to war crimes committed in Indochina—not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

The investigation was not staged so that veterans could spill out their hearts or purge their souls; it was done to prove that the policy of the United States in Indochina is tantamount to genocide, and that not only the soldiers are responsible for what is happening, but that everyone here in America who has allowed the brutalization and de-personalization to go on is responsible. It was done also to show that you don't start making things right by prosecuting William Galley, no matter how guilty he may be; you also prosecute the men who encouraged the situation. It was done to show that there is not just one Mylai but countless Mylais and they are continuing every single day. There was an almost total press blackout on the testimony of those veterans.

But this isn't new to those of us who were in the war. I can remember traveling to Saigon and trying to talk to the admiral who commanded the naval forces to tell him that what we were doing was wrong. I remember going to a writer for a national magazine and telling him this was a story the American people should hear. He agreed, but said it would never get by his desk because the Army would rescind the magazine's accreditation to cover the war, and if you don't cover the war you don't sell magazines, and if you don't sell magazines then nothing happens because that’s the American way.

But the press isn't the only party in this country that's guilty of this rampant insensitivity. When I went to the chairman of the board of a large New York-based firm and asked him for money to help us get transcripts of the testimony to present to each member of Congress so that we can press our demands for open hearings, 1 was told in seriousness: "I don't think you can market war crimes—it s a marketing question, you know.” And then in the next breath to his executive vice-president: "Hell, we used to do that in World War II. Christ, what's new?"

We all know that this de-sensitizing started a long time ago in this country, but it is carried out in a far more vicious way with the soldier. At boot camp he's presented with a poster in his barracks of a crucified Vietnamese and underneath it says, "Kill the gooks." The message begins to sink in. During training, calisthenics are done to a four-count, and at the end of the four-count everybody jumps up and yells "Kill!" For the Marines at Camp Pendleton, before they depart for Vietnam, there's a very special treat; the sergeant takes a live rabbit and skins it, tearing it open, pulling out the entrails to throw at the assembled soldiers, saying, "That's how it's done in Nam; go get'em. Marines!

And so we're suddenly faced with a sickening situation in this country. There's no longer any moral indignation. And if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted from past indignities inflicted on them. The country seems to be lying down and accepting something as serious as Laos, just as before we dismissed the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all time. Well, I think we're in the midst of the greatest disaster of all time right now, because they are still dying over there every day. And I don't just mean American boys.

And the mass of people in this country literally don't give a damn. After all, you can switch off the TV news and put on Dick Van Dyke. We're not on food rationing; people can still charge prostitutes on credit cards; so what if a few lives are used to save American face in an unsaveable situation? It should not be hard for people in this country to admit there is no difference between a ground troop and a helicopter troop; yet we have accepted a differentiation fed us by the Administration. No ground troops are in Laos, so it's all right to kill Laotians as long as it's done by remote control. Believe me, the helicopter crews fill the same body bags as the ground troops, and they do the same damage to the Vietnamese countryside and the Laotian people. It's absolutely incredible that this country is ready to accept this kind of hypocrisy.

But what this country doesn't know is that America has created a monster in the form of millions of fighting men who have been taught to deal in violence, and who have been given a chance to die for the biggest nothing in history. We have returned to this country with a sense of anger and betrayal which nobody has yet grasped. We're angry about the same things you are in terms of policy—a little angrier because our lives were the things used to test those policies.

But we're angry also because of statements like the one Vice President Agnew made when he spoke at West Point in 1970. He spoke of how some people glamorize the criminal misfits of society while the best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedoms that those misfits abuse. Support the boys in Vietnam. But for us, those boys in Vietnam whom the country is supposed to support, this is a terrible distortion from which we draw only the deepest revulsion.

It's a distortion because we in no way considered ourselves the "best men" in this country, because those he called misfits were standing up for us in a way nobody else in this country dared to, because we know that so many who died would have come back to join the misfits, and because so many of us have actually returned to this country to demand an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. And because so many of those "best men" have returned as amputees and quadraplegics to lie in rancid hospitals which fly the flag that Mr. Agnew holds so close.

And one can't consider us "best men" when we were ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Asia. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos or anywhere in Indochina, or anywhere in the world, or even here in America, by saying that that kind of loss of life is linked to the preservation of freedom, is to play exactly the kind of criminal hypocrisy that has torn this country apart.

Our anger goes beyond the simple policy matters. It goes into the fact that all the things we were told about Vietnam we found untrue when we got there. We found that too often American men were dying in those rice paddies from want of support from our so-called allies. We saw first hand the money—your taxes—squandered by a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that Agnew had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties.

We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions and by Viet Cong terrorists, and we listened while America blamed it all on the Viet Cong. We watched while we rationalized destroying villages to save them, while we saw America lose her sense of morality as she coolly accepted a Mylai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers handing out chewing gum and chocolate bars.

We watched while pride allowed unimportant battles to be escalated into the most important stands of the war—because we couldn't lose and we couldn't retreat and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were provided to prove that point. Now we are told that we have to watch quietly while the American, lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

The problem of the veteran doesn't just end with his anger. One out of every 10 of the unemployed in this country today is a Vietnam veteran. That's 22.5 percent of all the veterans who are unemployed. 33 percent of these are black. We have veterans who practically have to sue the Veterans Administration to get their artificial limns. 57 percent of those entering hospitals have thought about suicide and 27 percent have tried it. 68 percent of the troops in Vietnam arc on dope,   and the addicts who return receive little if any care.

We're going to do something about this situation. On April 19, members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now numbering 7 .000 men and growing, are marching on Washington—in uniform, wearing medals. We are paying homage to the dead in Arlington, We arc then marching with veterans of other wars, with families of the deceased, families of prisoners of war, whoever will join us, on the Capitol.   And we are camping and we are staying there to demand that our needs be met. But more important, we won’t move until they set a date for withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.

We will also be returning our war medals to Congress and be demanding that the judiciary of this country rule on the Massachusetts hill which calls for the declaration that the Vietnam war is unconstitutional. We are asking for the support of all sections of the peace movement because we do not feel that this is a time to be dormant. The war is part and parcel of everything that we are trying to communicate to people of this country. The problem of Vietnam is not just the problem of war and diplomacy; it's a problem of the very basic American idealism that we are trying to question.

All American Indian friend of mine, a veteran, a member of the Indian Nation of Alcatraz, put it to me very succinctly: he told me how, as a boy on the Indian reservation, he had watched television and cheered the cowboys who killed the Indians in an ambush. Then suddenly one day he woke up in Vietnam and he found himself doing to the Vietnamese exactly what had been done to his people and what he had been conditioned by America to applaud. I think that says ii all. The veteran has been used horribly.

But now he's going to do something about it. He's going to take all the goodness of his uniform, all the apple pie and motherhood and medals in the service of his country, and he's going to place it before the people of this country, telling it like it really is.

Lesson 15: The Beauty Industry

The one American industry unaffected by the general depression of trade is the beamy industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the slump—about three million pounds a week. These facts and figures are "official", and can he accepted as being substantially true.

Reading them. I was only surprised by the comparative smallness of the sums expended. From the prodigious number of advertisements of aids to beauty contained in the American magazines, I had imagined that the personal appearance business must stand high up among the champions of American industry—the equal, or only just less than the equal, of bootlegging and racketeering, movies and automobiles. Still, one hundred and fifty-six million pounds a year is a tidy sum. Rather more than twice the revenue of India, if I remember rightly.

I do not know what the European figures are. Much smaller undoubtedly- Europe is poor, and a face can cost as much in upkeep as a Rolls-Royce. The most that the majority of European women can do is just to wash and hope for the best. Perhaps the soap will produce its loudly advertised effects; perhaps it will transform them into the likeness of those ravishing creatures who smile so rosily and creamily, so peachily and pearlily, from every hoarding. Perhaps, on the other hand, it may not. In any case, the more costly experiments in beautification are still as much beyond most European means as are high-powered motor-cars and electric refrigerators. Even in Europe, however, much more is now spent on beauty than was ever spent in the past. Not quite so much more as in America, that is all. But, everywhere, the increase has been undoubtedly enormous.

The fact is significant. To what is it due? In part, I suppose, to a general increase in prosperity. The rich have always cultivated their personal appearance. The diffusion of wealth—such as it is—now permits those of the poor who arc less badly off than their fathers to do the same.

But this is, clearly, not the whole story. The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function (in the mathematical sense) of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hardly hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have seen, they have not suffered. Women are retrenching on other things than their faces. The cult of beauty must therefore be symptomatic of changes that have taken place outside the economic sphere. Of what changes? Of the changes, I suggest, in the status of women; of the changes in our attitude towards "the merely physical."

Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hitherto reserved to the male, but also freer to exercise the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. They have the right, if not to be less virtuous than their grandmothers, at any rate to look less virtuous. The British Matron, not long since a creature of austere and even terrifying aspect, now does her best to achieve and perennially preserve the appearance of what her predecessor would have described as a Lost Woman. She often succeeds. But we are not shocked—at any rate, not morally shocked. Aesthetically shocked—yes; we may sometimes be that. But morally, no. We concede that the Matron is morally justified in being preoccupied with her personal appearance. This concession depends on another of a more general nature—a concession to the Body, with a large B, to the Manichaean principle of evil. For we have now come to admit that the body has its rights. And not only rights—duties, actually duties. It has, for example, a duty to do the best it can for itself in the way of strength and beauty. Christian-ascetic ideas no longer trouble us. We demand justice for the body as well as for the soul. Hence, among other things, the fortunes made by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the vendors of rubber reducing belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.

What are the practical results of this modern cult of beauty? The exercises and the massage, the health motors and the skin foods—to what have they led? Are women more beautiful than they were? Do they get something for the enormous expenditure of energy, time, and money demanded of them by the beauty-cult? These are questions which it is difficult to answer. For the facts seem to contradict themselves. The campaign for more physical beauty seems to be both a tremendous success and a lamentable failure, It depends on how you look at the results.

It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. "Old ladies" are already becoming rare. In a few years, we may well believe, they will be extinct. White hair and wrinkles, a bent back and hollow cheeks will come to be regarded as medievally old-fashioned. The crone of the future will be golden, curly and cherry-lipped, neatankled and slender. The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indistinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrait of the Artist's Daughter. This desirable consummation will be due in pan to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, in part to improved health, due in its turn to a more rational mode of life. Ugliness is one of the symptoms of disease, beauty of health. In so far as the campaign for more beauty is also a campaign for more health, it is admirable and, up to a point, genuinely successful. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of health is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakeable for the real thing. The apparatus for mimicking the symptoms of health is now within the reach of every moderately prosperous person; the knowledge of the way in which real health can be achieved is growing, and will in time, no doubt, be universally acted upon. When that   happy moment conies, will every woman be beautiful—as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features, with or without surgical and chemical aid, permits?

The answer is emphatically: No. For real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self. Thy beauty of a porcelain jar is a matter of shape, of colour, of surface texture. The jar may be empty or tenanted by spiders, full of honey or stinking slime—it makes no difference to its beauty or ugliness. But a woman is alive, and her beauty is therefore not skin deep. The surface of the human vessel is affected by the nature of its spiritual contents. I have seen women who, by the standards of a connoisseur of porcelain, were ravishingly lovely. Their shape, their colour, their surface texture were perfect. And yet they were not beautiful. For the lovely vase was either empty or filled with some corruption. Spiritual emptiness or ugliness shows through. And conversely, there is an interior light that can transfigure forms that the pure aesthetician would regard as imperfect or downright ugly.

There are numerous forms of psychological ugliness. There is an ugliness of stupidity, for example, of unawareness (distressingly common among pretty women). An ugliness also of greed, of lasciviousness, of avarice. All the deadly sins, indeed, have their own peculiar negation of beauty. On the pretty faces of those especially who are trying to have a continuous "good time," one sees very often a kind of bored sullenness that ruins all their charm. I remember in particular two young American girls I once met in North Africa. From the porcelain specialist's point of view, they were beautiful. But the sullen boredom of which I have spoken was so deeply stamped into their fresh faces, their gait and gestures expressed so weary a listlessness, that it was unbearable to look at them. These exquisite creatures were positively repulsive.

Still commoner and no less repellent is the hardness which spoils so many pretty faces. Often, it is true, this air of hardness is due not to psychological causes, but to the contemporary habit of over-painting. In Paris, where this over-painting is most pronounced, many women have ceased to look human at all. Whitewashed and ruddled, they seem to be wearing masks. One must look closely to discover the soft and living face beneath- But often the face is not soft, often it turns out to be imperfectly alive. The hardness and deadness are from within. They are the outward and visible signs of some emotional or instinctive disharmony, accepted as a chronic condition of being. We do not need a Freudian to tell us that this disharmony is often of a sexual nature.

So long as such disharmonies continue to exist, so long as there is good reason for sullen boredom, so long as human beings allow themselves to be possessed and hagridden by monomaniacal vices, the cult of beauty is destined to be ineffectual. Successful in prolonging the appearance of youth, or realizing or simulating the symptoms of health, the campaign inspired by this cult remains fundamentally a failure. Its operations do not touch the deepest source of beauty—the experiencing soul. It is not by improving skin foods and point rollers, by cheapening health motors and electrical hair-removers, that the human race will be made beautiful; it is not even by improving health. All men and women will be beautiful only when the social arrangements give to every one of them an opportunity to live completely and harmoniously, when there is no environmental incentive and no hereditary tendency towards monomaniacal vice. In other words, all men and women will never be beautiful. But there might easily be fewer ugly human beings in the world than there are at present. We must be content with moderate hopes.

Lesson 16: A Job Interview

The senior partner studied the resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper. He had the brains, the ambition, the good looks. And he was hungry; with his background, he had to be. He was married, and that was mandatory. The firm also frowned heavily on divorce, as well as womanizing and drinking. Drug testing was in the contract. He had a degree in accounting and wanted to be a tax lawyer, which was of course a requirement with a tax firm. He was white, and the firm had never hired a black. He was male, and there were no women in the firm.

He looked good on paper. He was their top and only choice for this year.

The managing partner, Royce McKnight, studied a dossier labeled “Mitchell Y. McDeere—Harvard." It had been prepared by some ex^-CIA agents in a private intelligence outfit. They learned, among other things, that he was holding three job offers, two in New York and one in Chicago. He was in demand. Also he owed close to $ 23,000 in student loans. He was hungry.

McKnight smiled. McDeere was their man.

Lamar Quin was thirty-two and not yet a partner. He had been brought along to look young and act young and project a youthful image for Bendini, Lambert & Locke, which in fact was a young firm, since most of the partners retired in their late forties or early fifties with money to burn.

Precisely at two-thirty someone knocked on the door. Lamar opened the door.

"Mitchell McDeere?" he asked with a huge smile and a hand thrust forward.

"Yes." They shook hands violently-"Nice to meet you, Mitchell. I'm Lamar Quin."

"My pleasure. Please call me Mitch." He stepped inside.

"Sure, Mitch." Lamar grabbed his shoulder and led him across the spacious room, where the partners introduced themselves.   They were exceedingly warm and cordial. McDeere was now a seasoned veteran in the search of employment. He relaxed. With three job offers from three of the most prestigious firms in the country, he did not need this interview, this firm. He was there out of curiosity. And he longed for warmer weather.

“Are you tired of interviewing?” asked Oliver Lambert, the senior partner who was in charge of the recruiting.

"Not really.   It's part of it."

Yes, yes, they all agreed.

"May 1 ask a question?" Mitch asked.

"Certainly."

"Why are we interviewing in this hotel room? The other firms interview on campus through the placement office. "

"Good question, Mitch," said Royce McKnight, the managing partner. "You must understand our firm. We are different, and we take pride in that. We have forty-one lawyers, so we are small compared with other firms. We don't hire too many people; about one every other year. We offer the highest salary and fringes in the country, and I'm not exaggerating. So we are very selective. We selected you. The letter you received last month was sent after we screened over two thousand third-year students at the best schools. Only one letter was sent. We don't advertise openings and we don't solicit applications.   We keep a low profile,   and we do things differently. Thai's our explanation.

"Fair enough. What kind of firm is it?"

"Tax. Some securities, real estate and banking, but eighty percent is tax work. That's why we wanted to meet you, Mitch. You have an incredibly strong tax background. "

"Why'd you go to Western Kentucky?" asked Oliver Lambert.

"Simple. They offered me a full scholarship to play football. Had it not been for that, college would've been impossible. "

"Mitch, our firm is in Memphis," Lamar said. "Does that bother you?”

"Not at all. I'm not fond of cold weather. "

"Have you ever been to Memphis?"

"No."

"We'll have you down soon. You'll love it."

Mitch smiled and nodded and played along. Were these guys serious? How could he consider such a small firm in such a small town when Wall Street was waiting?

"How are you ranked in your class?" Mr. Lambert asked.

"Top five." Not top five percent, but top five. Thai was enough of an answer for all of them.   Top five out of three hundred.

"Why did you select Harvard?"

"Actually Harvard selected me. I applied at several schools and was accepted everywhere. Harvard offered more financial assistance. I thought il was the best school. Still do. "

"You made extremely high grades in your tax and securities

"Thai's where my interest lies."

"Now, Mitch, tell us about your wife," Royce McKnight said. It was a standard, nonsacred area explored by every firm.

"Her name is Abby. She has a degree in elementary education from Western Kentucky.   For the past three years she's taught at a private kindergarten near Boston College. "

"And is the marriage—"

"We're very happy. We've known each other since high school. "

"I don't imagine Western Kentucky is much of an academic school," Lamar blurted with a stupid grin, and immediately wished he could take it back.

"Sort of like Kansas State," Mitch replied. All the three people froze, and for a few seconds stared incredulously at each other. This guy McDeere knew Lamar Quin went to Kansas State. He had never met Lamar Quin and had no idea who would appear on behalf of the firm and conduct the interview. Yet, he knew. He had checked them out. He had read the biographical sketches of all of the forty-one lawyers in the firm, and in a split second he had recalled that Lamar Quin had gone to Kansas State. They were impressed.

"I guess that came out wrong," Lamar apologized.

"No problem," Mitch smiled warmly. It was forgotten.

Oliver Lambert cleared his throat and. decided to get personal again. "Mitch, our firm frowns on drinking and chasing women. We put business ahead of everything. We keep low profiles and we work very hard. And we make plenty of money."

"I can live with ail-that."

"We reserve the right to test any member of the firm for drug

"I don't use drugs."

"Good. The reason why we ask these questions is because we want stable families. Happy lawyers are productive lawyers.'"

Milch smiled and nodded.   He had heard this before.

The three looked at: each other, then at Mitch. This meant they had reached the point in the interview where the interviewee was supposed to ask one or two intelligent questions. Mitch crossed his legs. Money, that was the big question, particularly how it compared to his other offers. But, he knew, like all the other firms they had to shadowbox around the issue until things got awkward and it was apparent they had discussed everything in the world but money. So hit them with a soft question first.

"What type of work will 1 do initially?"

They nodded and approved of the question. Lambert and Mcknight looked at Lamar. This answer was his.

"We have something similar to a two-year apprenticeship, although we don't call it that. We'll send you all over the country to tax seminars. If you want to pursue a master's in taxation, we'll pay for it. As far as practicing law, it won't be very exciting for the first two years. You'll do a lot of research and generally boring stuff. Bui you'll be paid handsomely. "

"How much?"

Lamar looked at Royce McKnight, who eyed Mitch and said, "We'll discuss the compensation and other benefits when you come to Memphis. "

"I want a figure or I may not come to Memphis. "He smiled, arrogant but cordial. He spoke like a man with three job offers.

The partners look at each other, and Mr. Lambert spoke first. "Okay. A base salary of eighty thousand the first year, plus bonuses. Eighty-five the second year, plus bonuses. A low-interest mortgage so you can buy a home. Two country club memberships. And a new BMW. You pick the color, of course. "

"That's incredible," he mumbled.

"Plus a few fringes we'll be glad to discuss in Memphis."

Suddenly he had a strong desire to visit Memphis. Wasn't it by the river?

The smile vanished and he regained his composure. "Tell me about your firm.”

"Forty-one lawyers. Last year we earned more per lawyer than any firm our size or larger. That includes every big firm in the country. We take only rich clients—corporations, banks and wealthy people who pay our healthy fees and never complain. We've developed a specialty in international taxation, and it's both exciting and very profitable. We deal only with people who pay."

"How long does it take to make partner?"

"On the average, ten years, and it's a hard ten years. It's not unusual for our partners to earn half a million a year and most retire before they are fifty. You've got to pay your dues, put in eighty-hour weeks, but it's worth it when you make partner. "

"How many partners are there in the firm?"

"Twenty, active. We try to keep a ratio of one partner for each associate. That's high for the industry, but we like it. Again, we do things differently."

"All of our partners are multimillionaires by the age of forty-five," Royce McKnight said.

"All of them?"

"Yes, sir. We don't guarantee it, but if you join our firm, put in ten hard years, make partner and put in ten more years, and you're not a millionaire at the age of forty-five, you'll be the first in

"That's an impressive statistic."

"It's an impressive firm, Mitch," Oliver Lambert said, "and we're very proud of it. We are small and we take care of each other. We're very careful whom we hire, and our goal is for each new associate to become a partner as soon as possible. It is a rare, extremely rare occasion when a lawyer leaves our firm.   It is simply unheard of. We want our people happy. We think it is the most profitable way to operate."

They watched him carefully lo make sure all of this sank in. They explained as best they could, for now. Further explanation would come later.

"Would you like to come to visit us?" asked Oliver Lambert.

"When?" asked Mitch, dreaming of a black 318i with a sunroof.