| You've reacted against the lies of the system, but it's a nebulous rebellionYou want perfection, you're a bourgeois idealist, and therefore you're undependable
Isn't this distrust of the bourgeois intellectual a little old-hat?
No, RobertIt's founded on Marx's perception, and the experience of the past century proves his wisdomIf a man moves to the party because of spiritual or intellectual reasons, he's bound to move away again once the particular psychological climate that moved him there in the first place is changedIt's the man who comes to the party because economic inequities humiliate him every day of his life who makes a good CommunistYou're independent of economic considerations, and so you're without fear, without the proper understanding
I guess I will get out, AlWe're friends then, thoughThey shake rather self-consciously and leave each otherI've searched myself and vintage cartier watch I understand it's a remnant of bourgeois aspirationsWhat a meatball, Hearn thinksHe is amused, a little contemptuousAs he passes a store front, he stares at himself for a moment, regarding his dark hair and hooked blunted noseI look more like a Jew-boy than a midwestern scionNow if I'd had blond hair, Al really would have searched himself
But there are other elementsPerhaps, or was it something else, something less definable?
His senior year he branches out, plays house football with a surprising and furious satisfactionOne play he never quite forgetsA ball carrier on the opposing team breaks through a hole in the line, is checked momentarily, and is standing there stock upright, helpless, when Hearn tackles himHe has charged with all his strength and the player is taken off the field with a wrenched knee while Hearn patters after him
You all right, Ronnie?
Yeah, rolex submariner watches for sale fine
Good tackle, HearnOnly he knows he isn'tThere has been an instant of complete startling gratification when he knew the ball carrier was helpless, waiting to be hitThere is not even any cynical pleasure in making the All-House football team
And other fields tooHe attains a grudged notoriety by seducing a DeWolfe Street debHe even ties up with some of the men he has met through his freshman roommate, now in Speakers, receives after four years a belated invitation to one of the Brattle Hall dances
The stags line up against the wall, chat cursorily with one another, and cut in to dance with either a girl they know or the girl of a man they knowHearn smokes a cigarette or two, quite bored, and then cuts in on a little blonde girl dancing with a tall blond clubman
The gesture toward conversation:
And your name is Betty Carreton, eh, where do you go to school?
Oh, to Miss Lucy'sAnd black chanel quilted bag then the barbarity he cannot forswearAnd does Miss Lucy tell you girls how to keep it until marriage?
What did you say?
More and more often this inexplicable humorSomewhere in the cavernous and undoubtedly rotten tissues of the collective brain of Al, of Jansen, of the magazine men, the college literary critics, in the aesthetes' salons, in the modern living rooms on the quiet back streets of Cambridge, there would be the unadmitted hunger to be bored and superior at a Brattle Hall dance, either that or go to Spain
He thinks it out one nightHe can be genuinely indifferent to the Brattle Hall thing because it is the Class AA minor league affair which all his training on the green lawns, at the dancing school, or riding at night in convertibles on the highways back of Cholive-oil, has satisfiedIt is for the others, the salon men, to be tortured and attracted by the extra vintage fendi bag quotient of wealth, the elaboration of social fences
And about Spain he knows he is never seriousThat war is in its last spring, and there is nothing in himself he wants to satisfy by going there, no over-all understanding or compassion which he cares to satisfyThe graduation and class week is upon him, and he is cool and friendly to his parents, bored with them too
What are you gonna do, Bob, don't you want any help? Bill Hearn asks
No, I'm going to head for New York, Ellison's father promised me a job there
This is quite a place, Bob, Bill Hearn says
Yes, a funny four yearsAnd inside himself he is strainingGo away, leave me aloneOnly he has learned not to say that out loud any longer
For his thesis he has been given a magna: A Study of the Cosmic Urge in Herman Melville
He functions easily through the next two years, sees himself consciously, amusedly as The Young Man in New daytona rolex York |
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