From "The Chipped Wall"

 Dear René

I am sitting here in that very walled-in garden you have recommended. 

The enormous sun looks over my shoulder paternally.  It is morning, amazingly early in the morning for me to be so awake and alive.  I feel, with your permission, rather like an hibiscus unrolling itself open, fused through with light.  The sky is brilliant beyond the white walls of the garden.  The sea is brilliant too.  I saw it from the top of the villa earlier.  The water in the fountain sliding over tile makes a marvelous sound I hear clearly.  I have eaten fresh bread, hot from the oven.  Every object stands out so sharply one can almost see around it.  Shadows are for the old people in black, inside the houses. 

I cannot thank you enough for having sent me here to Eden.  It is as if I had not been fully awake for years and years, nor seen anything before, nor heard anything before.  Even the language of the people here, which I do not understand, is a parade of bright vowel sounds, white vowels all, and their voices have a vibrancy and sharpness that also seems to be fed by this amazing daylight. 

At the moment a little fine-haired donkey has begun to bray in a way that shakes all the innocent bright air of this Eden by the sea.  The donkey is building up a momentum in its braying, as if sawing back and forth on a great log, and the noise is growing in intensity as the donkey, for reasons beyond understanding of men, becomes entirely a soundbox that no earthly force can hold down.  Even the donkey seems unable to stop himself, and must wait it out, like the rest of us.  He may well be in a prophetic seizure. 

The sun seems very near us here.  It gives life to everything with its warm rays, even this poor, dead-limbed, overworried tourist, who has oversmoked indoors away from Eden far too many years.  Everything is full of sun, the local Divinity, it would seem, here in this garden.  In my New England, as for you in Paris, the sun is very small and far away.  I explain our theological histories in terms of the distance of the sun from us.  I cannot imagine a flock of Unitarians native under this sun. 

Is it that the eye of God is the sun, making us come to life with its gaze, or is it that God, rather than having an eye with which he watches us who are made in his image and semblance, has only a boiling sun instead, into which we cannot look for long because of the blinding whiteness? As you can see my mind has begun to race with this sort of consideration as if there were a great hurry here.  There isn’t, of course, is there?

At the bottom of the garden the wall is chipped.  Chest high, I note.  Is this where the killings took place? I suspect not, since your modestly brief description of the events indicated to me that they were done very heatedly and quickly, without the drawn-out formalities of a firing squad.  A firing squad, after all, takes considerable social organization, unlike an impromptu expression of the Vox Populi, which is the Voice of God as we all know.  I look upon all those   happenings in Paradise as if they were symbols in a book, and I suspect I am merely in the presence of an erratum in the chips off the wall.  Being a good scholar I attempt to check with sources, and among them, what better than yourself, before interpreting the text further. 

What about you in the cold moisture of a sunless winter in Paris? It appears very tomblike from this shore.  I pay lip service to mourning for you, as befits the living when thinking of those in the kingdom of the Shades, and now proceed to forget all about you and go into town with my children, at least until I hear from you next. 

Now a lizard in the sun of Eden,

Perry

Dear Perry:

Please do not forget me entirely.  How unclouded Eden shines, with all the white houses on the hillside caught between the mirrors of the sky and sea! I envy you, and feel like the king of the Shades who said he’d rather be the lowest man on earth than what he was now.  And I do feel like the king of the Shades, Perry.  It rains, Paris is gray.  The corridors of the Sorbonne have sorrowful, muffled sounds.  In the halls students listen to me lecture through loudspeakers.  Or, so they did until a few days ago. 

I’m afraid my popularity has dropped markedly among them.  I am not even king of the Shades now.  It happened Wednesday, I believe.  I was lecturing for the first time in a very long time here.  They crowded the corridors, those who bothered to come that close to an actual classroom.  They murmured among themselves as I spoke of the enormous stupidity of Michelet, who discovered Vico only to taint the mature genius of Vico’s vision of history with the dreadful Romantic Zeitgeist.  As my voice declaimed electrically in the hall through the loudspeaker I could almost feel, like a fevered wind, the rushing doubts and suspicions that swept through them: “He does not believe in Progress! He thinks Vico was able to think more dearly as a baroque Catholic than Michelet as a post-Revolution Frenchman! He says Michelet had more naiveté from the Revolution clogging his mind than Vico from Christianity! He does not believe in Progress! He’s a…no…he’s a Christian! Could it be?”

What disillusionment, Perry! I am sure they half feared I was joking at first.  Half feared, and half hoped.  Until finally, my intellectual prestige, or should I say stock, crashed at their feet.  And they thought I was an Existentialist! But I had deceived them.  My lecture seemed to touch on an enormous, unconscionable heresy.  You may now say to students there is no God, but…how can one say that there is no Progress? No.  Even if you think that perhaps there is no Progress, keep it from the children.  There is not only technical progress, as evidenced in the physical sciences, but there is PROGRESS, wherein lies the path of our Salvation.  And if you do not believe it, how can you possibly not despair, and, seeing no hope of salvation through Progress, how can you not commit suicide.  Or at least, with no Progress to judge you, not be politically evil?

I know all is lost in this moist city now.  You see, I have been approached by a Catholic magazine.  I, who was once quite chic, am now in such disrepute that I can be approached by a group of bourgeois formula thinkers, if the word thinkers is applicable, who are to philosophy, even political philosophy, what graffiti are to literature. 

And through all this early afternoon darkness, through the rain and stupidity, and through all the years that separate me from where you are, I still see, as if through an impregnable glass, all the sun and tile floors of your Eden, which was once my earth, mine more than France could ever be…in fact, I see the red tile roofs, and palm trees, and the still pervading memory of Islam in the occasional horseshoe arches of the turrets, and the white buildings, all descending down like steps to the beach and the fishermen’s cottages. 

You are quite right about the voices of the people there.  I say this even though I cannot hear them through the impenetrable glass that keeps me out.  Those voices, and the white vowel sounds that ring like coins and sometimes like trumpets in the sun, are indeed fed by the sun. 

I envy you, Perry.  But, do not forget: you are a tourist.  I was not.  It was mine, and still is though I am in exile.  You are Orestes before, and I am Orestes after.  I tell you this in no uncertain terms so you will remember that you are merely my guest there, and should not start acting as if you were one of the household.  I’m sorry, particularly at this moment, that I ever recommended your going there. 

I will write a more hospitable letter soon.  I must now leave this window through which I look at Earth, not Eden for me, and go look long and objectively in the mirror.  I know I am gray, thin, and somewhat nervous in my hand movements.  But do I suddenly look like a Frenchman old enough to be a Catholic again?  Am I wrong?  Are they right?

If the inspection of the Lecturer in the mirror goes badly, then perhaps I will become a Catholic again.  I have now and again thought of it, since my departure from the flock at thirteen, but every time I looked in the mirror to see if I could at least impersonate a Catholic with a straight face, I found it impossible. 

But all is not lost.  The very same students, had they expected me to sound like Mauriac pere, might have come out saying “He’s a Catholic, but he’s an Existentialist,” which is somehow more palatable to them than “He’s an Existentialist, but a Christian. ”  Perhaps next year I will be chic again.  If only this were England, where apparently such a posture is not totally devoid of intellectual respectability!

Forgive me.  I have taken myself by surprise. 

Write me again soon from Paradise, a better world really than your Eden or my Earth.  I will try to think of the name of someone there to see if anyone in Paradise still recalls my name, or if I am indeed lost forever among the twittering shadows. 

Yours,

René

Dear René:

Please do give me the names of any people here you remember.  And if they do not remember you (after all, if they are not at all given to reading French, they might not have realized they once were in such a distinguished presence as yours) shall I write you back and tell you the truth?

Were I to stay in this sun for very long I would probably forget everything myself. This morning I again woke very early and was persuaded, after more coffee and fresh bread on the terrace overlooking the sea, to join my son and daughter on the beach.  The sky was an easy, adolescent blue.  The sun was still gentle as a spring lamb, and I went.  Jerry is undergoing delusions of being a champion swimmer.  Since he swims alone, racing only against his memory of a less athletic self, Jerry feels very olympic and triumphant.  Heather, who incidentally does remember you and seems to find you chic, is just as narcissistic as Jerry, though less athletic. 

She takes books to the beach, and after rubbing herself with oils, believes not only that she is becoming lovelier every minute under the ravages of the now enormous sun on her body, but is also convinced she is in the process of reading.  Her book lies on the blanket as she faces up to the sun which presses down upon her.  Currently you may be pleased to know, she is under the impression she is beautifying her soul with some poems of yours.  Fittingly enough, they are from your flamingly hedonistic period in Algeria where the sun, if you’ll recall, plunged his golden hands (forgive the poor translation) into the earth, which in turn became golden, as no doubt Heather will. 

I sat beside Heather, and was unable to read.  I watched Jerry plunging into the waves and swimming with absolute confidence as if he intended to vanish into the horizon.  I did become alarmed.  Jerry isn’t really a champion swimmer.  However, being afraid in a most cowardly way of recriminations, I stopped myself from calling out to him to be careful.  That is, I stopped myself from doing it a second time.  The first time, unable to read, and with no one to talk to, since Heather lay absorbing like a hermetic orange with her eyes closed (though she looked more like hot new bread), I called out Jerry’s name.  Heather said something testy to the overcautious father, and my son waved a shining arm and swam on with no idea, apparently, that I was feeling over-protective.  Had he known, or chosen to acknowledge it, he would have found me a bore, I suppose.  In any case, he would have paid no attention unless I insisted.  Heather, without opening her eyes, told me that it was shallow for hundreds of yards, and that Jerry would be able to stand up whenever he wanted to and walk ashore. 

I’m afraid, René, I’m not yet used to the sun.  After watching Jerry for a while longer, intending at any moment to demand he come closer to the shore, I soon was watching him with nothing at all in mind, having forgotten what it was I was about to say.  I felt over-warm, and a little dizzy, so I retreated to the shadows of my room.  There I found I not only had a slight headache, but that the morning had slipped completely away into early afternoon. 

I had not only intended to write to you early, as is my custom, but to do a good deal of reading which I must do.  I will—this afternoon.  In the walled-in garden, under a parasol, I now write to tell you that I am not alone with the trickling fountain and the ominous and intriguing chipped wall (about which you have not replied). 

There are many people here. Many tables. Many parasols. It is now a cafe The En Hora Buena Café, to be exact.  Quite different, I am sure, from the days when you were here.  It is predominantly patronized by locals, and some retired Englishmen who seem to come from a trailer camp nearby.  The sound of the water sliding down from the fountain is somehow very reassuring to me, and so I gravitate here while my children, in retrograde evolution descend the streets to the water. 

Perhaps by tomorrow I will learn like my children to surrender to the sky and the sea and the beach.  If I do, you may never hear of me again.  You will be quite forgotten except as an occasional daydream from a totally incomprehensible past, where people are small, gray figurines, diabolically possessed, scuttling about cement structures like mechanical dolls with the springs gone berserk. We here, with the sun only a head taller than ourselves, feel very large.  Heather does.  Jerry does of course, and so do I, though as you say, I am a tourist here still.  I am certain, incidentally, that neither my children nor my wife will feel as if they have ever been anywhere else by tomorrow, or certainly by the day after.  They acclimate to this place very easily, and no longer seem emotionally fit for American urban life. 

Hastening to assure you that Progress is a preposterous idea, at least here on the subcontinent where History is something funny, if dirty, they do on the continent,

Perry

Dear Perry:

Is that how we seem to you here, mechanical dolls with the springs gone berserk? It recalls Bergson’s theory of humor in Le Rire. A mechanical act or continuation in a situation that no longer fitted it was a mainspring of laughter.  For example, the dehumanized mechanical act of walking off a high diving board as if there were anything but empty air ahead.  I confess, you have a point.  I suppose looking down at us with the sun only a head taller than you, we here are comical.  But you sound as if we were the ones under glass, and not you! I had expected, with the light of the Mediterranean filling your world and luxuriating in your heads like splendid beer, you would be the subject of our observation.  You and your Heather and Jerry, fresh baked loaves out of the stuff of Eden, were to be innocent of reflection in your bliss.  While you were hot and live I would be homo sapiens long after the Fall, growing colder like the moon.  Well, there you are. 

Your insistently reflective nature in such a setting is not only ugly, but edges toward the obscene.  You are not following the noble example of your children.  You are resisting, spending too much time in the shade.  Obviously you are the sort that gets thrown out of Paradise.  I recommend without reservation that you give in to the commands of the local divinity.  Seek no other light than the one you arrogantly describe as being only a head taller than you.  Accept the light that fills the world and obscures all others, especially the one inside you. 

I only wish such a thing were possible for me now, here, where the sun is very small, and remembered rather than felt.  For the purposes of the Kingdom of the Shades electricity is not only equal, but preferable to sunlight. 

Here, under glass, I am frustratingly comical these days.  Everything I say, once it is outside me and my good intentions floating loose out in the public air, instantly becomes a slanderous caricature of me—like the preposterous electric version of my voice which I hear in the corridors outside my class.  I present a false picture, I am misunderstood.  All I have to do is say a word and instantly it is something other than what I mean, slanderous for its closeness.  And if every word and every impression I give in the public air automatically distorts like a stick seen through water, God only knows how horrible further mutations these things undergo once they have entered the students’ minds! And then, oh God! What happens once they enter their memories?

I looked in the mirror as advertised to inspect the Lecturer, to see if he could at least look like a Catholic, and I regret to report that while it is not entirely impossible that he might be tempted to return desperate and lost to the fold (he does look the type), he could not possibly find the fold, no longer having a clear idea of what Catholicism consists of. He does, you understand, congratulate the liberality of the Faith for making it so much easier to defend, but regrets the total impossibility of joining it. 

Recently the Lecturer enjoyed a little joke.  Approached by a group of neatly dressed, young middle class Catholics of the progressive sort, the Lecturer with enormous pleasure announced that he was shocked to discover the Church had drifted considerably to his left.  The anecdote, publicized initially by the Lecturer, instantly received some circulation, only to have a variety of interpretations suddenly link him with, among others, some neo-fascistoid groups.  He has ceased to enjoy the joke, and as for myself, I want public time to plead my own case and disassociate myself. I will have to re-examine the Lecturer because, while I know much of what he is not, I grow less and less certain of what he is.  You understand, I would go to his classes, but I cannot bear to watch anyone posture and moan for an hour anymore; and as to reading his books, there is so much left unsaid, and there have been so many changes, experiences, and re-definitions, that it is pointless to try to understand him there.  At best, I assure you, one would get an incomplete and misleading picture. 

Of course, I should not worry so.  Already I am giving you an incorrect idea of what is happening here.  For one thing, the loudspeaker has not been necessary since the fourth day of my lectures.  The reverberations of my electric voice in the empty halls were too comic and embarrassing, and it has been disconnected.  I am not “chic” (that dreadful word again).  Paris is Paris, the Vatican of Intellectual Haute Couture.  Hence we Parisians are Parisians, and I the worst offender of all in this original sin.  Now even the Catholic review which approached me so hopefully. My is having nothing to do with me.  I said something much more flippant than I really meant, even if I am not at all interested in them.  They too have gone away. 

I don’t mind that, but they have misunderstood me.  I gave them some mechanical gyration, possibly one I always meant to give their like, and it worked out awfully.  I confess to you, and I am most heartily sorry, not because I fear the pains of hell but because I have offended myself i.e. , I fear the pains of hell.  (I can imagine you nodding, priest-like while you read my confession: “How many times?”) I confess that I have been a comical mechanical doll. 

Having made what I hope is a good confession to you, I feel better.  Incidentally, do not listen to what Heather told you about the shallows and the sand bars.  Jerry could very easily find himself in Italy, fished up by strange nets.  There is often a ferocious undertow there.  Do warn him.  I know someone who drowned there; a smiling rich boy from Madrid.  He has remained impregnably young, but I do not recommend this secret of eternal youth for Jerry. 

I admonish you not to describe my Algeria poems as hedonistic.  They were not.  In those days I was, like so many others, rejecting books, trying to join the splendor of this earth and think with my body.  I abandoned this exercise because while it is almost possible in the glories of North Africa with the Mediterranean to our heads and Africa to our feet, it was hardly practicable in Paris, if you recall the weather.  For good or evil, I have found myself here, and have therefore had to resort to thinking with my head. 

Tell Heather I find her “chic” and please do not concern yourself further with the regrettable chipped white wall. In every green pastoral setting, or its equivalent arcadias, there is, de rigueur, a blood red flower without which the total harmony of the setting would be incomplete—I think.  In any case it is a long story. 

Would you look for a lady called Consuelo B.  de L. ? I do hope she remembers me.  I’m certain she will. 

 Writing to you has a cathartic effect these days. I feel much better having admitted my inherent comic behavior. Nevertheless, do not presume to be so insulting as to mention it to me again without my permission.

Your superior as ever,

René