To think,” as the Master used to say, “is to deal in simples.” And that means with an eye single to the altogether.

This is, I believe, the single secret of simplicity: that we may truly regard nothing at all as simple in itself. I believe that no one thing in itself is ever so, but must achieve simplicity — as an artist should use the term — as a perfectly realized part of some organic whole. Only as a feature or any part becomes harmonious element in the harmonious whole does it arrive at the state of simplicity. Any wild flower is truly simple but double the same wild flower by cultivation and it ceased to be so. The scheme of the original is no longer clear. Clarity of design and perfect significance both are first essentials of the spontaneous born simplicity of the lilies of the field. “They toil not, neither do they spin.” Jesus wrote the supreme essay on simplicity in this, “Consider the lilies of the field.”

Five lines where three are enough is always stupidity. Nine pounds where three are enough is obesity. But to eliminate expressive words in speaking or writing — words that intensify or vivify meaning — is not simplicity. Nor is similar elimination in architecture simplicity. It may be, and usually is, stupidity.

In architecture, expressive changes of surface, emphasis of line and especially textures of material or imaginative pattern, may go to make facts more eloquent — forms more significant. Elimination, therefore, may be just as meaningless as elaboration, perhaps more often is so. To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity — toward ultimate freedom of expression.

As for objects of art in the house, even in that early day they were bȇte noires of the new simplicity. If well chosen, all right. But only if each were properly digested by the whole. Antique or modern sculpture, paintings, pottery, might well enough become objectives in the architectural scheme. And I accepted them, aimed at them often but assimilated them. Such precious things may often take their places as elements in the design of any house, be gracious and good to live with. But such assimilation is extraordinarily difficult. Better in general to design all as integral features.

I tried to make my clients see that furniture and furnishings that were not built in as integral features of the building should be designed as attributes of whatever furniture was built in and should be seen as a minor part of the building itself even if detached or kept aside to be employed only on occasion.

But when the building itself was finished the old furniture they already possessed usually went in with the clients to await the time when the interior might be completed in this sense. Very few of the houses, therefore, were anything but painful to me after the clients brought in their belongings.

Soon I found it difficult, anyway, to make some of the furniture in the abstract. That is, to design it as architecture and make it human at the same time — fit for human use. I have been black and blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too intimate contact with my own early furniture.

Human beings must group, sit or recline, confound them, and they must dine — but dining is much easier to manage and always a great artistic opportunity. Arrangements for the informality of sitting in comfort singly or in groups still belonging in disarray to the scheme as a whole: that is a matter difficult to accomplish. But it can be done now and should be done, because only those attributes of human comfort and convenience should be in order which belong to the whole in this modern integrated sense.

Human use and comfort should not be taxed to pay dividends on any designer’s idiosyncrasy. Human use and comfort should have intimate possession of every interior — should be felt in every exterior. Decoration is intended to make use more charming and comfort more appropriate, or else a privilege has been abused.

As these ideals worked away from house to house, finally freedom of floor space and elimination of useless heights worked a miracle in the new dwelling place. A sense of appropriate freedom had changed its whole aspect. The whole became different but more fit for human habitation and more natural on its site. It was impossible to imagine a house once built on these principles somewhere else. An entirely new sense of space values in architecture came home. It now appears these new values came into the architecture of the world. New sense of repose in quiet streamline effects had arrived. The streamline and the plain surface seen as the flat plane had then and there, some thirty-seven years ago, found their way into buildings as we see them in steamships, airplanes, and motorcars, although they were intimately related to building materials, environment and the human being.

But, more important than all beside, still rising to greater dignity as an idea as it goes on working, was the ideal of plasticity. That ideal now began to emerge as a means to achieve an organic architecture.

Plasticity

Plasticity may be seen in the expressive flesh covering of the skeleton as contrasted with the articulation of the skeleton itself. If form really “followed function” — as the Master declared — here was the direct means of expression of the more spiritual idea that form and function are one: the only true means I could see then or can see now to eliminate the separation and complication of cut-and-butt joinery in favor of the expressive flow of continuous surface. Here, by instinct at first — all ideas germinate — a principle entered into building that has since gone on developing. In my work the idea of plasticity may now be seen as the element of continuity.

In architecture, plasticity is only the modern expression of an ancient thought. But the thought taken into structure and throughout human affairs will re-create in a badly “disjointed,” distracted world the entire fabric of human society. This magic word “plastic” was a word Louis Sullivan himself was fond of using in reference to his idea of ornamentation as distinguished from all other or applied ornament. But now, why not the larger application in the structure of the building itself in this sense?

Why a principle working in the part if not living in the whole?

If form really followed function — it did in a material sense by means of this ideal of plasticity, the spiritual concept of form and function as one — why not throw away the implications of post or upright and beam or horizontal entirely? Have no beams or columns piling up as “joinery.” Nor any cornices. Nor put into the building any fixtures whatsoever as “fixtures.” Eliminate the separations and separate joints. Classic architecture was all fixation-of-the-fixture. Yes, entirely so. Now why not let walls, ceilings, floors become seen as component parts of each other, their surfaces flowing into each other. To get continuity in the whole, eliminating all constructed features just as Louis Sullivan had eliminated background in his ornament in favor of an integral sense of the whole. Here the promotion of an idea from the material to the spiritual plane began to have consequences. Conceive now that an entire building might grow up out of conditions as a plant grows up out of soil and yet be free to be itself, to “live its own life according to Man’s Nature.” Dignified as a tree in the midst of nature but a child of the spirit of man.

I now propose an ideal for the architecture of the machine age, for the ideal American building. Let it grow up in that image. The tree.

But I do not mean to suggest the imitation of the tree.

Proceeding, then, step by step from generals to particulars, plasticity as a large means in architecture began to grip me and to work its own will. Fascinated I would watch its sequences, seeing other sequences in those consequences already in evidence; as in the Heurtley, Martin, Heath, Thomas, Tomek, Coonley, and dozens of other houses.

The old architecture, so far as its grammar went, for me began, literally, to disappear. As if by magic, new architectural effects came to life — effects genuinely new in the whole cycle of architecture owing simply to the working of this spiritual principle. Vistas of inevitable simplicity and ineffable harmonies would open, so beautiful to me that I was not only delighted, but often startled. Yes, sometimes amazed.

I have since concentrated on plasticity as physical continuity, using it as a practical working principle within the very nature of the building itself in the effort to accomplish this great thing called architecture. Every true aesthetic is an implication of nature, so it was inevitable that this aesthetic ideal should be found to enter into the actual building of the building itself as a principle of construction.

But later on I found that in the effort to actually eliminate the post and beam in favor of structural continuity, that is to say, making the two things one thing instead of two separate things, I could get no help at all from regular engineers. By habit, the engineer reduced everything in the field of calculation to the post and the beam resting upon it before he could calculate and tell you where and just how much for either. He had no other data. Walls made one with floors and ceilings, merging together yet reacting upon each other, the engineer had never met. And the engineer had not yet enough scientific formulas to enable him to calculate for continuity. Floor slabs stiffened and extended as cantilevers over centered supports, as a waiter’s tray rests upon his upturned fingers, such as I now began to use in order to get planes parallel to the earth to emphasize the third dimension, were new, as I used them, especially in the Imperial Hotel. But the engineer soon mastered the element of continuity in floor slabs with such formulas as he had. The cantilever thus became a new feature of design in architecture. As used in the Imperial Hotel at Tokyo it was the most important of the features of construction that insured the life of that building in the terrific temblor of 1922. So, not only a new aesthetic but proving the aesthetic as scientifically sound, a great new economic “stability,” derived from steel intension, was able now to enter into building construction.

Now, on the question of Birth Control, his Beatitude left the faithful in no doubt as to where their duty lay. As head of the Established Church he called a conference which was attended by the Chief Rabbi, the Mormon Elder and the chief representatives of all the creeds of the Empire; only the Anglican Bishop excused himself, remarking in a courteous letter of refusal, that his work lay exclusively among the British community who, since they were already fully informed and equipped in the matter, could scarcely be injured in any way by the Emperor’s new policy; he wished his Beatitude every success in the gallant stand he was making for the decencies of family life, solicited his prayers and remarked that he was himself too deeply embroiled with the progressive party, who were threatening the demolition of his Cathedral, to confuse the issue with any other cause, however laudable it might be in itself.

As a result of the conference, the Patriarch composed an encyclical in rich, oratorical style and dispatched copies of it by runners to all parts of the island. Had the influence of the Established Church on the popular mind been more weighty, the gala should have been doomed, but, as has already been mentioned, the Christianizing of the country was still so far incomplete that the greater part of the Empire retained with a minimum of disguise their older and grosser beliefs, and it was, in fact, from the least expected quarter, the tribesmen and villagers, that the real support of Seth’s policy suddenly appeared.

This development was due directly and solely to the power of advertisement. In the dark days when the prejudice of his people compassed him on every side and even Basil spoke unsympathetically of the wisdom of postponing the gala, the Emperor found among the books that were mailed to him monthly from Europe a collection of highly inspiring Soviet posters. At first the difficulties of imitation appeared to be insuperable. The Courier office had no machinery for reproducing pictures. Seth was contemplating the wild expedient of employing slave labour to copy his design when Mr Youkoumian discovered that some years ago an enterprising philanthropist had by bequest introduced lithography into the curriculum of the American Baptist school. The apparatus survived the failure of the attempt. Mr Youkoumian purchased it from the pastor and resold it at a fine profit to the Department of Fine Arts in the Ministry of Modernization. An artist was next found in the Armenian colony who, on Mr Youkoumian’s introduction, was willing to elaborate Seth’s sketches. Finally there resulted a large, highly coloured poster well calculated to convey to the illiterate the benefits of birth control. It was in many ways the highest triumph of the new Ministry and Mr Youkoumian was the hero. Copies were placarded all over Debra Dowa; they were sent down the line to every station latrine, capital and coast; they were sent into the interior to vice-regal lodges and headmen’s huts, hung up at prisons, barracks, gallows and juju trees, and wherever the poster was hung there assembled a cluster of inquisitive, entranced Azanians.

It portrayed two contrasted scenes. On one side a native hut of hideous squalor, overrun with children of every age, suffering from every physical incapacity —crippled, deformed, blind, spotted and insane; the father prematurely aged with paternity squatted by an empty cook-pot; through the door could be seen his wife, withered and bowed with child-bearing, desperately hoeing at their inadequate crop. On the other side a bright parlour furnished with chairs and table; the mother, young and beautiful, sat at her ease eating a huge slice of raw meat; her husband smoked a long Arab hubble-bubble (still a caste mark of leisure throughout the land), while a single healthy child sat between them reading a newspaper. Inset between the two pictures was a detailed drawing of some up-to-date contraceptive apparatus and the words in Sakuyu: WHICH HOME DO YOU CHOOSE?

Interest in the pictures was unbounded; all over the island woolly heads were nodding, black hands pointing, tongues clicking against filed teeth in unsyntactical dialects. Nowhere was there any doubt about the meaning of the beautiful new pictures.

See: on right hand: there is rich man: smoke pipe like big chief: but his wife she no good; sit eating meat: and rich man no good: he only one son.

See: on left hand: poor man: not much to eat: but his wife she very good, work hard in field: man he good too: eleven children: one very mad, very holy. And in the middle: Emperor’s juju. Make you like that good man with eleven children.

And as a result, despite admonitions from squire and vicar, the peasantry began pouring into town for the gala, eagerly awaiting initiation to the fine new magic of virility and fecundity.

Yet Jacob, though nearer to us, is no ordinary fellow. He is more than complicated; he is comprehensive. Jacob is, first of all, a man of uncommon cunning and cleverness, a man of many turns and many ways, the biblical counterpart of Odysseus. Like Odysseus Jacob lives after the Age of Heroes (Achilles; Abraham); like Odysseus he lives largely by his wits; like Odysseus he is made to travel far in order to learn the ways of men and God and thereby earn the day of his homecoming. Though he is from time to time in touch with the divine, Jacob is mostly on his own, relying on his own powers and devices. Artfulness is his trademark, not only in speech but also, quite literally, in craft. Though to begin with a dweller in tents, he builds a house, the first in the new way. Like Cain and his descendents, he brings art to bear on nature, most notably in his “magical” breeding techniques. Like the builders of Babel, he — quite literally — dreams of reaching heaven, in his case with a ladder. Jacob, more than Abraham or Isaac, is the rational man at work.

But Jacob is not only the book’s most rational and resourceful character; he is also the most passionate. He displays lust for gain and righteous anger, he enjoys big dreams and suffers great sorrows, and he is the first to spontaneously experience the passion of awe. Most impressive is Jacob’s erotic nature: Jacob is the first biblical character who clearly falls in love. It is thanks to his erotic adventures (and misadventures) that he comes to be the father of a clan. Jacob is also tenacious and long-suffering; though very little comes easily to him, he endures and prevails. Owing to his persistent striving with God and man, he comes famously to bear the name of Israel. Jacob, both in powers of soul and in conduct of life, offers an enlarged picture of the distinctly human at work.

This means, of course, that Jacob must solve, at the highest level of complexity, the fundamental human difficulties illustrated in the pre-Abrahamic chapters of Genesis: difficulties caused by the troublesome elements of soul (freedom and reason; pride; greed; lust and eros; blood lust; excess love of one’s own; and the penchant for self-sufficiency) and difficulties relating to family members, neighbors and strangers, and God. In finding his place in the world, Jacob must deal with nature’s indifference to human merit (the problem of birth order). In his striving with his brother, Esau, Jacob must avoid being either Cain or Abel. In relation to his father from whom he steals his brother’s blessing, he must avoid being like Ham, a man who sees his father’s nakedness and refuses to cover it up. He must, despite his artful nature, avoid the pride of the builders of Babel. He must, despite his erotic nature, acquire the proper attitude toward women, marriage, and procreation. He must, despite entanglements with foreign peoples, avoid the temptations of imitation, assimilation, and idolatry. And above all, precisely because of his enormous talents and self-reliance, he must avoid the all-too-human propensity to ignore or forget about God, to regard himself as his own self-sufficing source.

As was the case with Abraham, the adventures of Jacob constitute his education — though, it should be confessed at the start, it will prove harder than it was with his grandfather to say just what it is that Jacob learns and how, precisely because he is such a complicated character. Like his grandfather, Jacob travels far and wide, and he dwells not only in Canaan but also in two other lands — Mesopotamia and Egypt — that offer the leading alternatives to the emerging biblical way of life. In his adventures, Jacob struggles with many vexing human relationships, familial, tribal, and international. He has troubles with his twin brother, his father, and his mother’s brother. He has complicated erotic and marital relationships, faces horrible difficulties as a father (including the rape of his daughter and fratricidal struggles between his sons), and he confronts peoples of different and threatening ways: Arameans, Shechemites, Egyptians. Throughout his trials, Jacob repeatedly struggles to acquire a proper relationship both with men and with God.

It was like Nixon not to have told them I’d resigned. On the other hand, it was like him to sense that I might make something of the U.N. After his election he had asked Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to take the post, and McCarthy had accepted on condition that the Republican governor of that state appoint a Democrat to succeed him in the Senate. The governor declined, and the appointment did not go through, but the President kept looking for a person who could acknowledge our own moral failings and yet make no apologies to our moral inferiors. Nixon understood more about liberals than liberals ever understood about him. He took it as given that we had a role in the scheme of things — a tolerance not always reciprocated.

In the end, I stayed in the White House longer than a month. Summer passed, the second without violence. The Southern schools were at long last integrated. The President asked once again that I go to the United Nations; this time I agreed. In September he took me on a trip around Europe: “To strengthen the structure of peace,” as it was billed. In that I was a member of the Cabinet, protocol provided that I step out of Air Force One behind the President and ahead of Kissinger, who was also on the journey. Somehow Kissinger invariably reached the ground ahead of me.

It was his obsession that no one ever should appear to be closer to the President than he, while neither should anyone be seen to hold this President in greater contempt. This was so much a preoccupation as to be, in a way, impersonal. It was not the usual White House style. Presidential aides do not succeed Presidents, and so, in the main, despite the conflicts within any such court, its members do not much conspire. But then, Kissinger did not operate in the usual style of a presidential aide. It was his view, and he did not conceal it, save possibly from the President, that Richard Nixon did not deserve to be President.

Kissinger’s own style was that of the Politburo, and indeed in time, in a sufficient sense, he did succeed his master. For most of the two Watergate years, during which civil war, as he thought of it and as he described it, raged in the country, Kissinger was able to perform the duties of President in foreign affairs. It was an act of courage and of daring beyond anything seen in our time. One’s only reservation is that he helped bring on that civil war, and, had he been in an actual Politburo, would have done so deliberately.

I waited at the bus stop outside the church beside two nuns identically buried within the coarse heavy cloth of those voluminous black habits that I’d never had a chance to study as I did that day. Back then, a nun’s habit reached to her shoes, and that, along with the brilliant white, starched arc of cloth that starkly framed her facial features and obliterated all lateral vision — the stiffened wimple that hid scalp, ears, chin, and neck and was itself enfolded in an extensive white headcloth — made of the traditionally dressed Catholic nuns the most archaic-looking creatures I had ever seen, far more startling to behold in our neighborhood than even the creepily morticianlike priests. No buttons or pockets were visible, and thus there was no way to figure out how that sheath of thickly gathered curtaining got hooked up or how it was taken off or whether it ever was taken off, given that overlaying everything was a large metal cross suspended from a long cord necklace, and strung beads, big and shiny as “killer” marbles, that dangled several feet down from the front of a black leather belt, and, secured to the headcloth, a black veil that broadened at the back and fell straight to the waist. Other than within the naked little region that was the wimpled, plain, unornamented face, no nap, no softness, no fuzziness anywhere.

I assumed these were two of the nuns who supervised the lives of the orphans and taught in the parochial school. Neither looked my way and, on my own, without a wisecracking sidekick like Earl Axman, I didn’t dare to look at them other than in stolen glances, though even while I stared at my own two feet, the clever child’s capacity for self-censorship deserted me and I confronted the mysteries again and again, all the questions concerning their female bodies and its lowliest functions, and all tending toward depravity. Despite the seriousness of the afternoon’s secret mission and everything that rode on its outcome, I couldn’t manage to be anywhere near a nun, let alone a pair of them, without a mind awash in my none-too-pure Jewish thoughts.

The nuns took the two seats behind the driver and, though most of the seats farther to the rear were empty, I sat down across the narrow aisle from the two of them, in the seat just back from the turnstile and the fare box. I’d had no intention of sitting there, didn’t understand why I was doing so, but instead of moving off to where I could be out from under the sway of unfettered curiosity, I opened my notebook to pretend to do my schoolwork, simultaneously hoping and dreading that I’d overhear them say something in Catholic. Alas, they were silent, praying I supposed, and no less spellbinding for doing it on a bus.

Some five minutes from downtown, there was a musical clack of rosary beads as together they rose to disembark at the wide intersection of High Street and Clinton Avenue. On one side of the junction there was an auto dealer’s lot and on the other the Hotel Riviera. As they passed, the taller of the nuns smiled down at me from the aisle and, with a vague sadness in her quiet voice — perhaps because the Messiah had come and gone without my knowing it — commented to her companion, “What a well-scrubbed, cute little boy.”

She should have known what I’d been thinking. Then again, maybe she did.

The plane made a big curve out over the sparkling blue Pacific and then swept round across Hollywood and gained height so as to make the Cajon Pass through the great golden cliff of the High Sierras.

Bond caught a glimpse of endless miles of palmlined avenues, of sprinklers whirling over emerald lawns in front of gracious homes, of sprawling aircraft factories, of the outside lots of film studios with their jumble of gimcrack sets — city streets, Western ranches, what looked like a miniature motor-racing track, a fullsize four-masted schooner planted in the ground — and then they were in the mountains and through them and over the interminable red desert that is the backstage of Los Angeles.

They flew over Barstow, the junction from which the single track of the Santa Fe strides off into the desert on its long run across the Colorado Plateau, skirting on their right the Calico Mountains, once the borax centre of the world, and leaving far away to the left the bonestrewn wastes of Death Valley. Then came more mountains, streaked with red like gums bleeding over rotten teeth, and then a glimpse of green in the midst of the blasted, Martian landscape, and then a slow descent and ‘please fasten your seat belts and extinguish your cigarettes’.

The heat hit Bond’s face like a fist, and he had begun to sweat in the fifty yards between his cool plane and the blessed relief of the air-conditioned terminal building. The glass doors, operated by seeing-eye photo-electric cells, hissed open as he approached and slowly closed behind him, and already the slotmachines, four banks of them, were right in his path. It was natural to bring out the small change and jerk the handles and watch the lemons and the oranges and the cherries and the bell fruits whirl round to their final click-pause-ting, followed by a soft mechanical sigh. Five cents, ten cents, a quarter. Bond gave them all a try, and only once two cherries and a bell fruit coughed back three coins for the one he had played.

As he moved away, waiting for the baggage of the half-dozen passengers to appear on the ramp near the exit, his eyes caught a notice over a big machine that might have been for iced water. It said: OXYGEN BAR. He strolled over to it and read the rest: BREATHE PURE OXYGEN, it said. HEALTHFUL AND HARMLESS. FOR A QUICK LIFT. EASES DISTRESS OF OVERINDULGENCE, DROWSINESS, FATIGUE, NERVOUSNESS AND MANY OTHER SYMPTOMS.

Bond obediently put a quarter into the slot and bent over so that his nose and mouth were enclosed in a wide black rubber mouthpiece. He pressed a button and, as instructed, breathed in and out slowly for a full minute. It was just like breathing very cold air — no taste, no smell. At the end of the minute there was a click from the machine and Bond straightened himself. He felt nothing but a slight dizziness, but later he recognized that there had been carelessness in the ironical grin he gave to a man with a leather shaving kit under his arm who had been standing watching him.

The man smiled briefly back and turned away.

The loudspeaker asked passengers to collect their luggage and Bond picked up his case and pushed through the swing doors of the exit into the red-hot arms of noon.

‘You for the Tiara?’ said a voice. A chunky man with large, very direct brown eyes under a chauffeur’s peaked cap shot the question at him from a wide mouth from which a wooden toothpick jutted.

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Let’s go.’ The man didn’t offer to carry Bond’s suitcase for him. Bond followed him over to a smartlooking Chevrolet with a lucky raccoon tail tied to its chrome naked-lady mascot. He threw his suitcase into the back and climbed in after it.

The car moved off and out of the airport on to the parkway. It crossed into the far lane and turned left. Other cars hissed by. Bond’s driver kept to the inside lane, driving slowly. Bond felt himself being examined in the driving mirror. He looked up at the driver’s identification tag. It said, ‘ERNEST CURED. N02584’.

And there was a photograph whose eyes also looked levelly at Bond.

The cab smelled of old cigar smoke and Bond pressed down the switch of the power-operated window. A furnace-blast of air made him close it again.

The driver half turned in his seat. ‘Don’t want to do that, Mister Bond,’ he said in a friendly voice. ‘Cab’s conditioned. May not seem so, but it’s better’n outside.’ ‘Thanks,’ said Bond, and then: ‘I believe you’re a friend of Felix Leiter.’

‘Sure,’ said the driver, over his shoulder. ‘Nice guy.

Told me to watch out for ya. Be glad if I can do anything while ya’re here. Staying long?’

‘I can’t say,’ said Bond. ‘Few days anyway.’

‘Tell ya what,’ said the driver. ‘Don’t think I’m trying to gyp ya, but if we’re going to do some work together and ya got some dough, mebbe ya better hire the cab by the day. Fifty bucks, but I got to make a living. It’ll make sense to the front boys at the hotels and so on. Don’t see otherwise how I’m to keep close. Like that they’ll understand me hanging about waiting for ya half the day. They’re a suspicious lot of bastards on the Strip.’

‘Couldn’t be better.’ Bond had at once liked and trusted the man. ‘It’s a deal.’

‘Okay.’ The driver expanded a little. ‘Ya see, Mister Bond. The folks round here don’t like anything out of the ord’nary. What I say. They’re suspicious. I mean. Ya look like anything ‘cept a tourist who’s come to lose his wad and they get a bad case of nose trouble. Take yaself. Anyone can see ya’re a Limey even before ya start talking. Clothes and so forth. Well, what’s a Limey doing here? And what sort of a Limey is this? He looks kind of a tough guy. So let’s just take a good look at him.’ He half turned. ‘Did ya see a feller hangin’ around the terminal with a leather shaving kit under his arm?’

Bond remembered the man who had watched him at the Oxygen Bar. ‘Yes, I did,’ he said, and it was then he realized that the oxygen had made him careless.

‘Bet ya life he’s looking at ya pictures right now,’ said the driver. ‘Sixteen-millimetre camera in that shaving kit. Just pull down the zip and press y’arm against it and off it goes. He’ll have taken fifty feet. Straight and profile. And that’ll be with Mug Identification at Headquarters this afternoon, with a list of what ya got in ya bag. Ya don’t look as if ya’re carryin’ a gun. Mebbe it’s a flat holster job. But if ya’re, there’ll be another man with a gun alongside all the time ya’re in the rooms. Word’ll be sent down the line by this evening. Better watch out for any fellow with a coat on. Nobody wears’ em here save to house the artillery.’

‘Well, thanks,’ said Bond, annoyed with himself. ‘I can see I’ll have to keep a bit wider awake. Pretty good machine they seem to have here.’

The driver grunted affirmatively and drove on in silence.

They were just entering the famous ‘Strip’. The desert on both sides of the road, which had been empty except for occasional hoardings advertising the hotels, was beginning to sprout gas stations and motels. They passed a motel with a swimming pool which had builtup transparent glass sides. As they drove by, a girl dived into the bright green water and her body sliced through the tank in a cloud of bubbles. Then came a gas station with an elegant drive-in restaurant. GASETERIA, it said. FRESH-UP HERE! HOT DOGS! JUMBOBURGERS!! ATOMBURGERS!! ICE COOL DRINKS!!! DRIVE IN, and there were two or three cars being served by waitresses in high-heeled shoes and two-piece bathing suits.

The great six-lane highway stretched on through a forest of multi-coloured signs and frontages until it lost itself downtown in a dancing lake of heat waves. The day was as hot and sultry as a fire opal. The swollen sun burned straight down the middle of the frying concrete and there was no shade anywhere except under the few scattered palms in the forecourts of the motels. A glittering gunfire of light-splinters shot at Bond’s eyes from the windscreens of oncoming cars and from their blaze of chrome styling, and he felt his wet shirt clinging to his skin.

‘Coming into the Strip now,’ said the driver. ‘Otherwise known as the “Rue de la Pay”. Spelt p.a.y. Joke. See?’

‘Got it,’ said Bond.

That November, Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, issued the declaration bearing his name. It was far more supportive of Zionism than Cambon’s letter. The British government, Balfour wrote, was in favor of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. With 150,000 soldiers fighting the Turks to France’s 800, the British were able to propose and dispose. On Christmas day 1917, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem with Georges-Picot in his entourage. At a picnic, the latter suggested setting up the civil administration he thought he had negotiated with Sykes. Also present was Lawrence of Arabia, and his description of Allenby’s scornful response is one of the more famous passages in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

In December, a French diplomat in the embassy in London reported that, although wealthy English Jews were hostile to the Balfour Declaration, the enthusiastic view of poor and immigrant Jews was that “the Israelite race was superior to all others; it possessed colonies in all the countries and one day it shall dominate the world.” An unsigned position paper from around the same time suggested that Zionists, who drew their strength from the mysticism of Russian-Polish Jewry, were trying to spread their nefarious ideas to Jews in Algeria and Morocco, thereby seeking “to exploit great-power rivalry.” The author had some classic advice: “Our Jewish policy in North Africa is necessarily linked to our Muslim policy. We have to avoid Jewish nationalism, as also pan-Islamism or pan-Arabism, by favoring a slow and careful evolution in the direction of our civilisation.”

On January 15, 1919, Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon instructed Paul Cambon to alert the British government to the Zionist danger, lest it become a cause for international trouble in the Middle East. “The Zionists must understand once and for all that there can be no question of constituting an independent Jewish state in Palestine, or even forming some sovereign Jewish body.” Three days later Cambon reported back. He could hardly believe the conversation he had just had with Balfour. In his usual dilettantish manner (Cambon wrote), Balfour had said that “it would be interesting to be present at the reconstitution of the [ancient] Kingdom of Jerusalem.” When Cambon protested that, according to the New Testament book of Revelation, such an event would signal the end of the world, Balfour rejoined: “It would be still more interesting to be present at the end of the world.”

Charles Darwin

Dogs after voiding their excrement often make with all four feet a few scratches backwards, even on a bare stone pavement, as if for the purpose of covering up their excrement with earth, in nearly the same manner as do cats. Wolves and jackals behave in the Zoological Gardens in exactly the same manner, yet, as I am assured by the keepers, neither wolves, jackals, nor foxes, when they have the means of doing so, ever cover up their excrement, any more than do dogs. All these animals, however, bury superfluous food. Hence, if we rightly understand the meaning of the above cat-like habit, of which there can be little doubt, we have a purposeless remnant of an habitual movement, which was originally followed by some remote progenitor of the dog-genus for a definite purpose, and which has been retained for a prodigious length of time.

Dogs and jackals take much pleasure in rolling and rubbing their necks and backs on carrion. The odour seems delightful to them, though dogs at least do not eat carrion. Mr. Bartlett has observed wolves for me, and has given them carrion, but has never seen them roll on it. I have heard it remarked, and I believe it to be true, that the larger dogs, which are probably descended from wolves, do not so often roll in carrion as do smaller dogs, which are probably descended from jackals. When a piece of brown biscuit is offered to a terrier of mine and she is not hungry (and I have heard of similar instances), she first tosses it about and worries it, as if it were a rat or other prey; she then repeatedly rolls on it precisely as if it were a piece of carrion, and at last eats it. It would appear that an imaginary relish has to be given to the distasteful morsel; and to effect this the dog acts in his habitual manner, as if the biscuit was a live animal or smelt like carrion, though he knows better than we do that this is not the case. I have seen this same terrier act in the same manner after killing a little bird or mouse.

Dogs scratch themselves by a rapid movement of one of their hind-feet; and when their backs are rubbed with a stick, so strong is the habit that they cannot help rapidly scratching the air or the ground in a useless and ludicrous manner. The terrier just alluded to, when thus scratched with a stick, will sometimes show her delight by another habitual movement, namely, by licking the air as if it were my hand.

Horses scratch themselves by nibbling those parts of their bodies which they can reach with their teeth; but more commonly one horse shows another where he wants to be scratched, and they then nibble each other. A friend whose attention I had called to the subject observed that when he rubbed his horse’s neck the animal protruded his head, uncovered his teeth, and moved his jaws, exactly as if nibbling another horse’s neck, for he could never have nibbled his own neck. If a horse is much tickled, as when curry-combed, his wish to bite something becomes so intolerably strong, that he will clatter his teeth together, and though not vicious, bite his groom. At the same time from habit he closely depresses his ears, so as to protect them from being bitten, as if he were fighting with another horse.

A horse when eager to start on a journey makes the nearest approach which he can to the habitual movement of progression by pawing the ground. Now when horses in their stalls are about to be fed and are eager for their corn, they paw the pavement or the straw. Two of my horses thus behave when they see or hear the corn given to their neighbours. But here we have what may almost be called a true expression, as pawing the ground is universally recognized as a sign of eagerness.

Cats cover up their excrements of both kinds with earth; and my grandfather saw a kitten scraping ashes over a spoonful of pure water spilt on the hearth; so that here an habitual or instinctive action was falsely excited, not by a previous act or by odour, but by eyesight. It is well known that cats dislike wetting their feet, owing, it is probable, to their having aboriginally inhabited the dry country of Egypt; and when they wet their feet they shake them violently. My daughter poured some water into a glass close to the head of a kitten; and it immediately shook its feet in the usual manner; so that here we have an habitual movement falsely excited by an associated sound instead of by the sense of touch.

Kittens, puppies, young pigs and probably many other young animals alternately push with their forefeet against the mammary glands of their mothers to excite a freer secretion of milk or to make it flow. Now it is very common with young cats, and not at all rare with old cats of the common and Persian breeds (believed by some naturalists to be specifically extinct), when comfortably lying on a warm shawl or other soft substance, to pound it quietly and alternately with their fore-feet; their toes being spread out and claws slightly protruded, precisely as when sucking their mother. That it is the same movement is clearly shown by their often at the same time taking a bit of the shawl into their mouths and sucking it; generally closing their eyes and purring from delight. This curious movement is commonly excited only in association with the sensation of a warm soft surface; but I have seen an old cat, when pleased by having its back scratched, pounding the air with its feet in the same manner; so that this action has almost become the expression of a pleasurable sensation.

But even with a guard it was a work of trouble to sketch in Tirana; for it was a market or bazaar day, and when I was tempted to open my book in the large space before the two principal mosques (one wild scene of confusion, in which oxen, buffaloes, sheep, goats, geese, asses, dogs and children were all running about in disorder) a great part of the natives, impelled by curiosity, pressed closely to watch my operations, in spite of the Kawas, who kept as clear a space as he could for me; the women alone, in dark feringhis, and ghostly white muslin masks, sitting unmoved by their wares. Fain would I have drawn the exquisitely pretty arabesque-covered mosques, but the crowds at last stifled my enthusiasm. Not the least annoyance was that given me by the persevering attentions of a mad or fanatic dervish, of most singular appearance as well as conduct. His note of ‘Shaitán’ was frequently sounded; and as he twirled about, and performed many curious antics, he frequently advanced to me, shaking a long hooked stick, covered with jingling ornaments, in my very face, pointing to the Kawas with menacing looks, as though he would say, “Were it not for this protector you should he annihilated, you infidel!” The crowd looked on with awe at the holy man’s proceedings, for Tirana is evidently a place of great attention to religion. In no part of Albania are there such beautiful mosques and nowhere are collected so many green-vested dervishes. But however a wandering artist may fret at the impossibility of comfortably exercising his vocation, he ought not to complain of the effects of a curiosity which is but natural, or even of some irritation at the open display of arts which, to their untutored apprehension, must seem at the very least diabolical.

The immediate neighbourhood of Tirana is delightful. Once outside the town and you enjoy the most charming scenes of quiet, among splendid planes and the clearest of streams. The afternoon was fully occupied on the road from Elbasán, whence the view of the town is beautiful. The long line of peasants returning to their homes from the bazaar enabled me to sketch many of their dresses in passing; most of the women wore snuff-coloured or dark vests trimmed with pink or red, their petticoats white, with an embroidered apron of chocolate or scarlet; others affected white capotes; but all bore their husband’s or male relative’s heavy black or purple capote, bordered with broad pink or orange, across their shoulders. Of those whose faces were visible—for a great part wore muslin wrappers (no sign hereabouts of the wearer being Mohammedan, for both Moslem and Christian females are thus bewrapped)—some few were very pretty, but the greater number had toil- and careworn faces. There were many dervishes also, wearing high white felt steeple-crowned hats, with black shawls round them.

No sooner, after retiring to my pigsty dormitory, had I put out my candle and was preparing to sleep, than the sound of a key turning in the lock of the next door to that of my garret disturbed me, and lo! broad rays of light illumined my detestable lodging from a large hole a foot in diameter, besides from two or three others, just above my bed; at the same time a whirring, humming sound, followed by strange whizzings and mumblings, began to pervade the apartment. Desirous to know what was going on, I crawled to the smallest chink, without encountering the rays from the great hiatus, and what did I see? My friend of the morning—the maniac dervish—performing the most wonderful evolutions and gyrations; spinning round and round for his own private diversion, first on his legs, and then pivot-wise, sur son séant, and indulging in numerous other pious gymnastic feats. Not quite easy at my vicinity to this very eccentric neighbour, and half anticipating a twitch from his brass-hooked stick, I sat watching the event, whatever it might be. It was simple. The old creature pulled forth some grapes and ate them, after which he gradually relaxed in his twirlings and finally fell asleep.

Caligula and he greeted each other with great affection after their long absence from each other and Herod brought with him great chests full of gold and jewels and other precious objects. Some came from his own treasury, some from that of Antipas, and the rest had, I believe, been part of an offering made him by the Jews of Alexandria.

Herod invited Caligula to the most expensive banquet that had ever been given in the city: unheard­-of delicacies were served, including five great pasties entirely filled with the tongues of tit­larks, marvellously delicate fish brought in tanks all the way from India, and for the roast an animal like a young elephant, but hairy and of no known species — it had been found embedded in the ice of some frozen lake of the Caucasus, and brought here packed in snow by way of Armenia, Antioch and Rhodes. Caligula was astonished by the magnificence of the table and admitted that he would never have had sufficient ingenuity to provide such a display even if he had been able to afford it. The drink was as remarkable as the food, and Caligula became so lively as the meal went on that, deprecating his own generosity to Herod in the past as something hardly worth mentioning, he now promised to give him whatever it lay in his power to grant.

“Ask me anything, my dearest Herod,” he said, “And it shall be yours.” He repeated: “Absolutely anything. I swear by my own Divinity that I will grant it.”

Herod protested that he had not provided this banquet in the hope of winning any favour from Caligula. He said that Caligula had done as much for him already as any prince in the world had done for any subject or ally of his in the whole panorama of history or tradition. He said that he was far more than content: he wanted absolutely nothing at all but to be allowed in some measure to show his gratitude. However, Caligula, continuing to help himself from the crystal wine ­decanter, kept on pressing him: wasn’t there something very special that he wanted? Some new Eastern kingdom? Chalchis, perhaps, or Iturea? Then it was his for the asking.

Herod said: Most gracious and magnanimous and divine Caesar, I repeat that I want nothing for myself at all. All that I can hope for is the privilege of serving you. But you have already read my mind. Nothing escapes your astonishingly quick and searching eyes. There is indeed something that I do really desire to ask, but it is a gift that will directly benefit only yourself. My reward will be an indirect one—the glory of having been your adviser.

Caligula’s curiosity was excited. “Don’t be afraid to ask, Herod,” he said. “Haven’t I sworn that I will grant it, and am I not a God of my word?” “In that case, my one wish,” said Herod, “is that you will no longer think of dedicating that statue of yourself in the Temple of Jerusalem.”

A very long silence followed. I was present at this historic banquet myself and never remember having felt so uncomfortable or so excited in my life as then, waiting to see the result of Herod’s boldness. What in the world would Caligula do? He had sworn by his own Divinity to grant the boon, in the presence of many witnesses; yet how could he go back on his resolution to humble this God of the Jews Who alone of all Gods in the world continued to oppose him?

At last Caligula spoke. He said, mildly, almost beseechingly, as though he counted on Herod to help him out of his dilemma: “I don’t understand, dearest Herod. How do you suppose that the granting of this boon will benefit me?” Herod had worked the whole thing out in detail before ever he sat down to table. He replied with seeming earnestness: “Because, Caesar, to place your sacred statue in the Temple at Jerusalem would not redound to your own glory at all. Oh, quite to the contrary! Are you aware of the nature of the statue that is now kept in the innermost shrine of the Temple, and the rites which are performed about it on holy days? No? Then listen and you will at once understand that what you have regarded as wicked obstinacy among my co­religionists is no more than a loyal desire not to injure your Majesty. The God of the Jews, Caesar, is an extraordinary fellow. He has been described as an anti­-God. He has a rooted aversion to statues, particularly to statues of majestic bearing and dignified workmanship like those of the Greek Gods. In order to symbolize His hatred for other divinities He has ordered the erection, in this inner shrine, of a large, crude and ludicrous statue of an ass. It has long ears, huge teeth and enormous genitals, and on every holy day the priests abuse this statue with the vilest incantations and bespatter it with the most loathsome excrement and offal and then wheel it on a carriage around the Inner Court for the whole congregation to abuse similarly; so that the whole Temple stinks like the Great Sewer. It is a secret ceremony. No non­-Jews are admitted to it and the Jews themselves are not allowed to speak about it under penalty of a curse. Besides, they are ashamed. You understand everything, now, don’t you? The leading Jews are afraid that if your statue were erected in the Temple it would cause profound misunderstandings; that in their religious fanaticism the common people would subject it to the gravest indignities, while thinking to honour you by their zeal. But, as I say, natural delicacy and the holy silence imposed on them has prevented them from explaining to our friend Petronius why they would rather die than allow him to put your orders into execution. It is lucky that I am here to tell you what they are unable to tell. I am only a Jew on my mother’s side, so that perhaps frees me from the curse. In any case I am risking it, for your sake.’

Caligula drank all this in with perfect credulity and even I was half-convinced by Herod’s gravity. All that Caligula said was, “If the fools had been as frank with me as you have been, my dearest Herod, it would have saved us all a lot of trouble. You don’t think that Petronius has yet carried out my orders?”

“I hope for your sake that he has not,” Herod replied.

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world;

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people;

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law;

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations;

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom;

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms;

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge;

Now, therefore, the General Assembly proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their Universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4. No one shall beheld in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6. Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7. All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8. Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9. No one shall bc subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10. Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence. No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right may not he invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15. Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall he arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Dearest Celia, How marvellous of you to get the brandy and send it off on your own initiative. I enclose cheque for £9-15-0. I hope you weren’t put to any other expense about it—if so please let me know.

I forgot to say, I think one or two of the titles (of pamphlets and so on) in the Swift essay are incorrect, as I was quoting them from memory, but so long as I see a galley proof it will be easy to put this right.

I am sorry you are pining away in London. It must be lousy being there at this time of year, especially if you have been having such marvellous weather as we have had here for the last week or two. I still haven’t done any work to speak of, there always seems to be so much to do of other kinds, and the journeys one makes are quite astonishing.

Susan’s child came up here yesterday, and I was supposed to go to Glasgow to meet her. I set out the day before yesterday morning, but punctured my motor bike on the way and thus missed the boat. I then got a lift first in a lorry, then in a car, and crossed the ferry to the next island in hopes there would be a plane to Glasgow, however the plane was full up, so I took a bus on to Port Ellen, where there would be a boat on Friday morning.

Port Ellen was full to the brim owing to a cattle show, all the hotels were full up, so I slept in a cell in the police station along with a lot of other people including a married couple with a perambulator.

In the morning I got the boat, picked the child up and brought her back, then we hired a car for the first 20 miles and walked the last five home. This morning I got a lift in a motor boat to where my bike was, mended the puncture and rode home—all this in 3 days.

I think we are going to get a motor boat, i.e. a boat with an outboard engine, as it is the best way of travelling here when the weather is decent. At present we have only a little rowing boat which is good for fishing but which you can’t go far out to sea in. We go fishing nearly every night, as we are partly dependent on fish for food, and we have also got two lobster pots and catch a certain number of lobsters and crabs. I have now learned how to tie up a lobster’s claws, which you have to do if you are going to keep them alive, but it is very dangerous, especially when you have to do it in the dark.

We also have to shoot rabbits when the larder gets low, and grow vegetables, though of course I haven’t been here long enough to get much return from the ground yet, as it was simply a jungle when I got here.

With all this you can imagine that I don’t do much work however I have actually begun my new book and hope to have done four or five chapters by the time I come back in October. I am glad Humphrey has been getting on with his—I wonder how The Heretics sold? I saw Norman Collins gave it rather a snooty review in The Observer.

Richard now wears real shorts, which another child had grown out of; and braces, and I have got him some real farm labourer’s boots. He has to wear boots here when he goes far from the house, because if he has shoes he is liable to take them off, and there are snakes here.

I think you would like this place. Do come any time if you want to. But if you do, try and let me know in advance (it means writing about a week in advance, because we only get letters twice a week here), so that I can arrange about hiring a car. Also, don’t bring more luggage than, say, a rucksack and a haversack, but on the other hand do bring a little flour if you can. We are nearly always short of bread and flour here since the rationing. You don’t want many clothes so long as you have a raincoat and stout boots or shoes. Remember the boats sail on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and you have to leave Glasgow about 8 am. I expect to be here till about the 10th of October.

With love
George

PS. You might ask Freddie [A. J. Ayer] from me, now that he has a chair in Mental Philosophy, who has the chair in non-mental philosophy.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom. The man who begins by asking you how many brothers and sisters you have is never a sympathetic character, and if you meet him in a year’s time he will probably ask you how many brothers and sisters you have, his mouth again sagging open, his eyes still bulging from his head. It is difficult to be friends with such a man, and for two inquisitive people to be friends must be impossible. Curiosity by itself takes us a very little way, nor does it take us far into the novel—only as far as the story. If we would grasp the plot we must add intelligence and memory.

Intelligence first. The intelligent novel-reader, unlike the inquisitive one who just runs his eye over a new fact, mentally picks it up. He sees it from two points of view: isolated, and related to the other facts that he has read on previous pages. Probably he does not understand it, but he does not expect to do so yet awhile. The facts in a highly organized novel (like The Egoist) are often of the nature of cross-correspondences and the ideal spectator cannot expect to view them properly until he is sitting up on a hill at the end. This element of surprise or mystery—the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called—is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it occurs crudely, as in “Why did the queen die?” and more subtly in half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead. Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence. To the curious it is just another “and then—” To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.

That brings us to our second qualification: memory.

Memory and intelligence are closely connected, for unless we remember we cannot understand. If by the time the queen dies we have forgotten the existence of the king we shall never make out what killed her. The plot-maker expects us to remember, we expect him to leave no loose ends. Every action or word ought to count; it ought to be economical and spare; even when complicated it should be organic and free from dead-matter. It may be difficult or easy, it may and should contain mysteries, but it ought not to mislead. And over it, as it unfolds, will hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind of which intelligence is the bright advancing edge) and will constantly rearrange and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect, and the final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues or chains, but of something aesthetically compact, something which might have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it straight away it would never have be~ come beautiful. We come up against beauty here for the first time in our inquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it. I will conduct beauty to her proper place later on. Meanwhile please accept her as part of a completed plot. She looks a little surprised at being there, but beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face, as Botticelli knew when he painted her risen from the waves, between the winds and the flowers. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

More than most poets you rely on spinning a narrative thread in your poems, a sort of story that unwinds itself. I presume that is deliberate?

Thread, yes. I prefer an attenuated narrative, an interrupted, delayed narrative. Narrative, I believe, is indispensable to the lyric; it’s what makes it move instead of spinning its wheels. It’s what motivates the poem to turn, to go on, continue, rather than simply returning, over and over. Narrative provides the major formal tension to the lyric stability in a poem. It’s what causes the line to turn the corner. What is a “story” anyway but someone speaking, drawing a line that assumes a shape, a shape that becomes a figure But a line too straight is uninteresting; that’s why the “narrative” must break, bend, meander; that’s why indirection and juxtaposition are so important to maintaining the intensity, the surprise all art needs to keep the music going, the line moving. It’s the strength Keats at his best that he depends, even in the odes, on a narrative base-line; it’s what brings his lyric drama to life. It’s the weakness of Shelley that he too often substitutes the didactic in his nature for the implicit drama; whatever the narrative spine, it seems to exist in order to promote an opinion. When Keats advises Shelley to load every rift with more ore, he’s not talking decoration but narrative. Even metaphor, announced or otherwise, is an implicit narrative: “like a patient etherized upon a table” (T. S. Eliot); “Loneliness leapt in the mirrors, but all week/I kept them covered like cages” (W. S. Merwin). The subtext of narrative is time, the subtext of time is mortality, the subtext of mortality is emotion. Try to remove the narrative sense of things and you take out the heart, the cause of the effect.

Two questions about style. First, in a poem like “Hedgerows,” you utilize the definite article over and over again, nearly fifty times in fifty lines. Some critics have suggested that when a poet overuses the definite article that he or she intends to exert exclusion, to refer to things or events which the poet finds more familiar than the reader does.

“Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the,” says Wallace Stevens. I don’t believe the the is exclusionary as much as it’s denominational. Critics who suggest exclusion as a motive need to look at context. The context of “Hedgerows” — nominationally and musically — is naming, specifying, nailing down the actual. Any straying from the particulars, the the-ing, and the poem might have turned into one more pastoral glib moment. The definite article, as a separator, could become merely rhetorical — I can see that in certain poems. But in “Hedgerows” the use of the is intuitive not inventive, especially since the poem’s narrative course follows a fairly blind path (in Devon, on a one-lane two-way road between giant hedgework). For me, the definite article in the poem is a way of including the reader more directly in the literal nature of the experience. It’s part of the texture.

You have written a lot of prose about poetry, both to assess the poets of your own generation and to explore the nature of English and American poetry. In your prose I have noticed you depend heavily on the verb “to be,” as though you were writing notes toward the definition of definitions. Your prose style is quite different from that of your verse. Why?

If I may say so, this is a remarkable observation — precisely on the point. Definition is what nearly all my prose writing has been about, even the more lyrical analytical pieces. There must be a legion of reasons why my poems put different pressure on the language compared to my prose. Different parts of the brain? Obviously different purposes. Prose, critical prose, examines and explains; its thrust is expository. Poetry dramatizes; its thrust is to present. But the secret of good prose is not that far from the secret of poetry, which is narrative. When Pound says that poetry ought to be at least as well written as prose, he’s clearly talking about language, but I think he means the language of the experience, a language tied directly to some kind of grounding. In prose, however, the connective tissue is allowed to show; in poetry it is subverted, subtracted, made invisible, suggested. I think my prose enjoys the space it’s been offered, the cubicle volume. My penchant in my poems is to describe, if not complete, a circle; to bend the line severely. Prose is a way of creating so much circumference that the curve of the thinking and telling is disguised, though the good reader will ultimately see it if the good writer has written well enough to satisfy unity. Prose, for me, is exploratory too” notes toward.” I like the idea of finding my way. Thus if the lyric poem is a path, prose is a road somewhere.

As for the verb “to be”, I loathe the creative writing notion that verbs necessarily need to act, to juice the pale nouns and poor modifiers. Verbs are part, only part, of the voice of all the words. Perhaps, for me, state of being verbs are faster or more direct means between the subject and the complement. I don’t know, except that is verbs are quieter, more given to silence. Or perhaps, in my mind, all verbs are state of being, depending on what state of things, active or still, the writing is calling for.

Let me add that writing criticism, review-essays and whatnot, is one kind of prose; writing about Whistler or nature or Keats is an entirely different kind. The first is thankless, the second thankful and a lot more fun. I think I got into the criticism business in the first place because I had, and have, strong feelings about distinctions of generations. Which, like narrative, is the subject of mortality.

It was a record run. Each day for fourteen days they had averaged forty miles. For three days Perrault and Francois threw chests up and down the main street of Skagway and were deluged with invitations to drink, while the team was the constant center of a worshipful crowd of dog busters and mushers. Then three or four Western bad men aspired to clean out the town, were riddled like pepperboxes for their pains, and public interest turned to other idols. Next came official orders. Francois called Buck to him, threw his arms around him, wept over him. And that was the last of Francis and Perrault. Like other men, they passed out of Buck’s life for good.

A Scotch half-breed took charge of him and his mates, and in company with a dozen other dog teams he started back over the weary trail to Dawson. It was no light running now, nor record time, but heavy toil each day, with a heavy load behind; for this was the mail train, carrying word from the world to the men who sought gold under the shadow of the Pole.

Buck did not like it, but he bore up well to the work, taking pride in it after the manner of Dave and Sol-leks, and seeing that his mates, whether they prided in it or not, did their fair share. It was a monotonous life, operating with machinelike regularity. One day was very like another. At a certain time each morning the cooks turned out, fires were built, and breakfast was eaten. Then, while some broke camp, others harnessed the dogs and they were under way an hour or so before the darkness fell which gave warning of dawn. At night, camp was made. Some pitched the flies, others cut firewood and pine boughs for the beds, and still others carried water or ice for the cooks. Also, the dogs were fed. To them, this was the one feature of the day, though it was good to loaf around, after the fish was eaten, for an hour or so with the other dogs, of which there were five score and odd. There were fierce fighters among them, but three battles with the fiercest brought Buck to mastery, so that when he bristled and showed his teeth they got out of the way.

Sometimes as he crouched there, blinking dreamily at the flames, it seemed that the flames were of another fire, and that as he crouched by this other fire he saw another and different man from the half-breed cook before him. This other man was shorter of leg and longer of arm, with muscles that were stringy and knotty rather than rounded and swelling. The hair of this man was long and matted, and his head slanted back under it from the eyes. He uttered strange sounds, and seemed very much afraid of the darkness, into which he peered continually, clutching in his hand, which hung midway between knee and foot, a stick with a heavy stone made fast to the end. He was all but naked, a ragged and firescorched skin hanging partway down his back, but on his body there was much hair. In some places, across the chest and shoulders and down the outside of the arms and thighs, it was matted into almost a thick fur. He did not stand erect, but with trunk inclined forward from the hips, on legs that bent at the knees. About his body there was a peculiar springiness, or resiliency, almost catlike, and a quick alertness as of one who lived in perpetual fear of things seen and unseen.

At other times this hairy man squatted by the fire with his head between his legs and slept. On such occasions his elbows were on his knees, his hands clasped above his head as though to shed rain by the hairy arms. And beyond that fire, in the circling darkness, Buck could see many gleaming coals, two by two, always two by two, which he knew to be the eyes of great beasts of prey. And he could hear the crashing of their bodies through the undergrowth, and the noises they made in the night. And dreaming there by the Yukon bank, with lazy eyes blinking at the fire, these sounds and sights of another world would make the hair to rise along his back and stand on end across his shoulders and up his neck, till he whimpered low and suppressedly, or growled softly, and the half-breed cook shouted at him, “Hey, you Buck, wake up!” Whereupon the other world would vanish and the real world come into his eyes, and he would get up and yawn and stretch as though he had been asleep.

And every single time that I hit a certain high note on that flute, the tom turkey who lived in the yard of my next door neighbour would let out a single resounding gobble. It was positively uncanny. It was as if the turkey had found its own place in each song, and then joined in right on cue.

So, the third or fourth time this happened, I ventured next door to meet this very musical turkey face to face. There it stood, fat and brown, red skin drooped over its nose, tail spread wide like a fan. When I began to play the song, the turkey first stared, then dropped its wings right into the dirt. Then it shook its wings vigorously, raising a small cloud of dust, and began advancing step by haughty step in my direction. Four steps forward, then four steps back. Every so often, the red wattles on its throat would suddenly turn a deep blue color. And then, just as quickly, they would return to red again. And every single time I hit that certain high note at the end of the song’s third measure, the turkey would let out a gobble.

Over the next month, I spent about an hour a day playing strange songs and stranger sounds with that turkey. I learned very quickly that the bird was not actually singing with me, but was, rather, responding to the intensity of the notes. Intensity meant a relation between a high pitch and a loud volume. But this relationship between volume and pitch was never constant, and would some days differ quite dramatically from what I called the ‘trigger note’ of the day before. I speculated that the change was due to a blend of weather conditions, and the turkey’s own composure. When it was hot, the bird gobbled sooner and more often. Neither was the response directly related to musical sounds. One day a truck sans muffler drove up the street, waking me up from a blissful siesta. From next door I heard the turkey go into one of its gobbling tantrums, like a hysterical woman unable to stop crying.

Despite the bird’s apparent indifference to the source of any sound, it would, nevertheless, allow itself to be carefully programmed into the body of a particular song. All I needed to do was properly accentuate certain key notes by pitch or volume: ta ta ta ta TA (gobblegobble gobble) ta ta ta. And there was method to this madness. If I accented too many notes in quick succession, hoping for a crescendo of gobbles, the turkey soon reached his own breaking point, and trotted off in either fright or disgust, as quickly as his two plump legs could carry him. The first time this occurred, a fat woman, with small child under tow, rushed out of her house to scold me in quicksilver Spanish for upsetting her pet. After all, she was fattening the bird for an upcoming Faster dinner, and could not stand by while my frenetic style caused her turkey to lose weight. For my own part, it was a rude awakening to learn that my playing companion would soon be served up in the traditional sauce of chocolate and chile.

Upon further questioning, the woman confessed to me that turkeys like to be serenaded the same way that cows do. “Ride the turkey energy,” she advised. “Ride the energy the same way a surfer rides a wave.” With that bit of information she gathered up her dirty-faced little son, and so waddled back to her house. But if to the uninitiated her suggestion seems overly esoteric, I myself had a vague idea what she meant. This business was not only about dropping the correct pitch here, the proper volume there. It was also about getting down into the dirt and becoming a turkey. Looking that bird right in the eye. Granted, if this had been a dolphin, a humpback whale, or a wolf no one would have had any trouble understanding this change in attitude. But this was a gobbling tom turkey, and the entire process had a slightly ludicrous ring to it. In a way, becoming ‘like a turkey’ was every bit as challenging as becoming like any of the other, more celebrated, animal communicators. At that moment I ceased to experiment on the turkey, and instead, began to play with it.

Now, I rarely brought out the clay flute without first checking to see if the turkey was in the yard. I noticed that his attitude towards me had become much more active. He spent much of his yard time browsing right up against the barbed wire fence, right next to where I had laid a rug to sit on while I played. One day I invited an interested musician to drop by and play with the turkey and me. I taught her a simple made-up canon, a ‘round’ on the order of ‘row, row, row your boat’. Just at that point where the first part ends its first phrase, signalling the second part to enter; I accented the key transition note with a slightly louder volume. Of course, at that precise moment, the turkey gobbled. The gobble itself added a third harmony to the two human parts to the developing canon. In other words, the three of us were singing a canon with a harmony that would have done justice to Bach. The three of us sat at eye level to one another singing the canon over and over again for at least ten minutes.

The problem with most modern liberal democracies is that they cannot take their cultural preconditions for granted. The most successful among them, including the United States, were lucky to have married strong formal institutions to a flexible and supportive informal culture. But nothing in the formal institutions themselves guarantees that the society in which they exist will continue to enjoy the right sort of cultural values and norms under the pressures of technological, economic, and social change. Just the opposite: the individualism, pluralism, and tolerance that are built into the formal institutions tend to encourage cultural diversity, and therefore have the potential to undermine moral values inherited from the past. And a dynamic, technologically innovative economy will by its very nature disrupt existing social relations.

It may be, then, that although large political and economic institutions have long been evolving along a secular path, social life is more cyclical. Social norms that work for one historical period are disrupted by the advances of technology and the economy, and society has to play catch-up in order to establish new norms.

Since the 1960s the West has experienced a series of liberation movements that have sought to free individuals from the constraints of traditional social norms and moral rules. The sexual revolution, the feminist movement, and the 1980s and 1990s movements in favor of gay and lesbian rights have exploded through the Western world. The liberation sought by each of these movements has concerned social rules, norms, and laws that unduly restricted the options and opportunities of individuals — whether they were young people choosing sexual partners, women seeking career opportunities, or gays seeking recognition of their rights. Pop psychology, from the human-potential movement of the 1960s to the self-esteem trend of the 1980s, sought to free individuals from stifling social expectations.

Both the left and the right participated in the effort to free the individual from restrictive rules, but their points of emphasis tended to be different. To put it simply, the left worried about lifestyles and the right worried about money. The left did not want traditional values to unduly constrain women, minorities, gays, the homeless, people accused of crimes, or any number of other groups marginalized by society. The right, on the other hand, did not want communities putting constraints on what people could do with their property — or, in the United States, what they could do with their guns. Left and right each denounced excessive individualism on the part of the other: those who supported reproductive choice tended to oppose choice in buying guns or gas-guzzling cars; those who wanted unlimited consumer choice were appalled when the restraints on criminals were loosened. But neither was willing to give up its preferred sphere of free choice for the sake of constraining the other.

As people soon discovered, there are serious problems with a culture of unbridled individualism, in which the breaking of rules becomes, in a sense, the only remaining rule. The first has to do with the fact that moral values and social rules are not simply arbitrary constraints on individual choice but the precondition for any kind of cooperative enterprise. Indeed, social scientists have recently begun to refer to a society’s stock of shared values as “social capital.” Like physical capital (land, buildings, machines) and human capital (the skills and knowledge we carry around in our heads), social capital produces wealth and is therefore of economic value to a national economy. But it is also the prerequisite for all forms of group endeavor that take place in a modern society, from running a corner grocery store to lobbying Congress to raising children. Individuals amplify their own power and abilities by following cooperative rules that constrain their freedom of choice, because these also allow them to communicate with others and to coordinate their actions. Social virtues such as honesty, reciprocity, and the keeping of commitments are not worthwhile just as ethical values; they also have a tangible dollar value and help the groups that practice them to achieve shared ends.

At the time I established myself in Pennsylvania, there was not a good bookseller’s shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston. In New York and Philad’a the printers were indeed stationers; they sold only paper, etc., almanacs, ballads, and a few common school-books. Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books from England; the members of the Junto had each a few. We had left the alehouse, where we first met, and hired a room to hold our club in. I proposed that we should all of us bring our books to that room, where they would not only be ready to consult in our conferences, but become a common benefit, each of us being at liberty to borrow such as he wished to read at home. This was accordingly done, and for some time contented us.

Finding the advantage of this little collection, I proposed to render the benefit from books more common, by commencing a public subscription library. I drew a sketch of the plan and rules that would be necessary, and got a skilful conveyancer, Mr. Charles Brockden, to put the whole in form of articles of agreement to be subscribed, by which each subscriber engaged to pay a certain sum down for the first purchase of books, and an annual contribution for increasing them. So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able, with great industry, to find more than fifty persons, mostly tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum.

On this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending to subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observed by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of same rank generally are in other countries.

When we were about to sign the above-mentioned articles, which were to be binding on us, our heirs, etc., for fifty years, Mr. Brockden, the scrivener, said to us, “You are young men, but it is scarcely probable anv of you will live to see the expiration of the term fixed in the instrument.” A number of us, however, are yet living; but the instrument a few years rendered null by a charter that incorporated and gave perpetuity to the company.

The objections and reluctances I met with in soliciting the subscription made me soon feel the impropriety of presenting one’s self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be supposed to raise one’s situation in the smallest degree above that of one’s neighbors, when one has need of their assistance to accomplish that project. I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading. In this way my affair went on smoothly, and I ever after practised it on such occasions; and, from my frequent successes, can heartily recommend it. The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid. If it remains a while uncertain to whom the merit belongs, some one more vain than yourself will be encouraged to claim it, and then even envy will be to do you justice by plucking those assumed feathers, and restoring them to their right owner.

The library afforded me the means of improvement by constant study, for which I set apart an hour or two each day, and thus repaired in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me. Reading was the only amusement I allowed myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolicks of any kind; and my industry in my business continued as indefatigable as it was necessary. I was indebted for my printing-house; I had a young family coming on to be educated, and I had to contend with for business two printers, who were established in the place before me. My circumstances, however, grew daily easier. My original habits of frugality continuing, and my father having, among his instructions to me when a boy, frequently repeated a proverb of Solomon, “Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men,” I from thence considered industry as a means of obtainin wealth and distinction, which encouraged me, tho’ I did not think that I should ever literally stand before kings, which, however, has since happened; for I have stood before five, and even had the honor of sitting down with one, the King of Denmark, to dinner.

Israel would cede day-to-day administration and police functions to Jordan while remaining responsible for overall security. Twenty years later, that concept was to become the basis of the Oslo accords. The major trouble with the soon-to-be-famous Allon Plan was that his colleagues within the troika running overall strategy did not agree with it. Rabin believed that only an agreement with Egypt would give Israel the breathing space it needed. Shimon Peres — the defense minister and later the Labor Party’s leading dov — was at that point its most prominent hard-liner and opposed to any interim agreement. Peres argued in favor of a comprehensive solution.

The Israeli cabinet navigated between these incompatibilities by the device of not arming Allon with any formal mandate; whatever propositions he advanced to me had merely an “exploratory,” “personal” status, hence they were entirely subject to being disavowed. The cabinet had made one decision, however. On the Jordanian front, Allon argued, there was no space for partial withdrawal; any retreat would have to be to a permanent line. This doomed my Camp David dialogue with Allon from the start because Hussein had already rejected a permanent settlement based on the concept of Jordanian administration under Israeli military occupation. This had happened in secret talks with the Israelis, of which both sides had kept us informed — Jordan somewhat more fully than Israel.

That the Israeli cabinet could be very precise — indeed, exuberently so — when it chose became readily apparent when Allon turned to Israel’s military requirements. To facilitate Arab-Israeli negotiations, the United States had accompanied each disengagement agreement with a “memorandum of understanding” with Israel outlining American attitudes toward various contingencies. After the Syrian disengagement, the United States had agreed to study sympathetically Israel’s additional security needs, especially with respect to the next generation of advanced aircraft. In previous cases, these statements of general intent had been treated as expressions of good faith for the necessary technical follow-on negotiations. The new Israeli cabinet interpreted them as a legal commitment to a gigantic request for a ten-year authorization of $40 billion (in 1974 dollars) to be put to the American Congress on Israel’s behalf.

No such long-term military request had ever been made by any administration on behalf of any foreign country. In his last month in office, Nixon had refused to authorize even a study of the Israeli request. When Allon argued that his enormous shopping list was a precondition for continuing the peace process, Nixon was so annoyed that, three days before the end of his presidency, he ordered a halt to the entire exercise. The transition to the new President rendered that decision moot.

How to deal with the Israeli aid request thus became the first decision on the Middle East to be put before Ford. Though still a novice in the intricacies of Middle East diplomacy, Ford was extremely well versed in the intricacies of the congressional budgetary processes. Twenty-four hours after Ford took the oath of office, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger used the first NSC meeting of the new presidency to ask for guidance regarding Israel’s aid request.

The meeting went badly. Ford was unfamiliar with Israeli negotiating methods, which reject the biblical assurance that the meek shall inherit the earth, and he grew even more restless when he discovered that the Israeli request would draw down the reserve stocks of the American military and hence affect the readiness of American armed forces:

SCHLESINGER: To the extent we provide some of the equipment that they have asked for, we must take it away from the U.S. forces with the result that those forces will be much less ready.
FORD: Do they understand that that is the case?
SCHLESINGER: Yes, sir, but they consider that their needs take priority.
FORD: That certainly is an unselfish attitude.

Despite this uncharacteristically caustic remark, Ford two days later decided not to begin his presidency with a controversy with an old friend. He approved the NSC study memorandum Nixon had rejected, thereby launching the Israeli arms request into the bureaucratic machinery. It was also a skillful maneuver to delay any immediate decision, showing that Ford knew his way around Washington:

I think we should hold them off until we see their attitude. That is a hole card we control. I am not sure Congress would jump at something like this with the current inflation…

Western Civilization looks to mythology in the Book of Genesis as the account of its beginning. The essential elements of the Adam and Eve story are that Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, ate the forbidden fruit (the apple), had sexual intercourse, became ashamed of their nakedness and were chased from the Garden of Eden.

My decoding of that fundamental mythology and symbolism for Western civilization is as follows: Adam and Eve are the symbolic figures of the early albino mutants produced by Black parents; the Garden of Eden is Africa, the place where all knowledgeable anthropologists and paleontologists are informing us that human life began (and that the first human beings were black-skinned); the apple eaten by Adam and Eve is the presumed, orally ingested poison, looked upon as the cause of the mutation to albinism; this ingestion was followed by the act of sexual intercourse, which is also viewed as being responsible for the mutation to albinism and, therefore, the original sin; Adam and Eve’s shame for their nakedness indicates their rejection and shame of their pale white bodies – colorless or naked – when compared to the black- and brown-skinned normals; their use of fig leaves to cover their genitals (as they are depicted) implies the shame and rejection of their genital apparatus, including their genes; their expulsion from the Garden of Eden represents the isolation of the albino mutants away from the skin-pigmented normals and their voluntary or involuntary migration out of Africa, northward into Europe.

Westem culture goes further in the symbolism of its religious philosophy to pinpoint the eating of the apple by Adam and Eve, followed by their act of sexual intercourse, as “the act of original sin.” Because of this act, Western culture conceives of all its people as being “born in sin’ and in need of being “born again.” Similarly, there are several other biblical references to skin-color change through God’s punishment and leprosy, wherein the skin is described as becoming “white as snow” (2 Kings 5: 27). Of course, the further implication is that the skin originally must have been black, meaning melanin pigmented. Otherwise, how could it turn white? Numbers 12:10 states:

And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and behold, she was leprous. And Aaron said unto Moses, Alas, my lord, I beseech thee, lay not the sin upon us, wherein we have done foolishly, and wherein we have sinned.

Contrary to this Western philosophy, there are no accounts of skin-pigmented peoples, in their basic religious and/or philosophical texts, conceiving of themselves as being born in sin or viewing their genital apparatus (and therefore their genes) as the basis of sin and evil.

Further, Western civilization’s religious and secular philosophy pinpoints the activity of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as the point of “the fall of man.” “The fall” is the symbolic expression for the genetic mutation to albinism and the negative projections regarding the white-skinned self in a global population where the norm was black or brown skin color.

George Lazenby, the second actor to play James Bond for Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, was 25 years old when he entered the modelling profession. An Australian, he had come to England in 1964 after a couple of successful years selling cars in his own country. Tipped off by fashion photographer Chard Jenkins that he could make more money as a model than as a salesman, Lazenby soon progressed from thirty pounds a week selling Mercedes sportscars to five hundred a week modelling orlon fabrics and appearing in advertisements for British Petroleum. On the prompting of his agent, who knew about the search for a new Bond, Lazenby suggested himself for the role to Harry Saltzman, who was impressed by the Australian’s looks and physique.

By April, Broccoli and Saltzman had narrowed the field down to five actors. Besides Lazenby, they were considering John Richardson, who had recently starred alongside Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., and three young English actors, Anthony Rogers, Robert Campbell and Hans de Vries.

Elaborate action tests began in April 1968 when the full crew was assembled. Both producers were already aware that United Artists wanted to see some fighting footage of the Bond applicants. The archetypal Bond fight is spectacular and, although over in seconds, it is generally choreographed like a ballet, with shots of stuntmen and stars intermixed, and edited tightly. His performance in the test fight won Lazenby the role of Bond.

To choreograph the key battle, Peter Hunt hired George Leech, this time as chief of stunts, and the pair picked a sequence from the script where Bond is surprised by a would-be assassin in a hotel bedroom on the Portuguese coast. For the test, Leech asked the former wrestler Un Borienko to double the villain, a Union Corse gunman.

Uri Borienko had little experience in film fighting, and Lazenby had even less. Leech instructed both of them in the basic mechanics. Lazenby was good, physically, Leech remembers, so he could learn how to punch easily enough, but his main problem was learning not to flinch when a punch came his way.

Both producers considered that Lazenby was the perfect replacement. United Artists in New York agreed and plans were immediately finalised to sign up George Lazenby for shooting in the autumn.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the best of Ian Fleming’s later novels, had been postponed as a film project several times since its original publication in 1963. Originally, it was intended to follow Goldfinger, but when Kevin McClory came on the scene in 1964 with his Thunderball project, Secret Service was promptly shelved. When Thunderball was finished, it was felt that Secret Service was too similar (“a Thunderball on skis”) since it took place primarily in the snows of Switzerland.

Yet Secret Service was much more than this. It was an emotional story that revealed more of the world of James Bond. It starts with Bond ready to resign from the Secret Service rather than keep up his frustrating search for the elusive Blofeld. However, with the help of a Union Corse Cap named Marc-Ange Draco, Bond eventually finds the head of SPECTRE in the Alps, where he is plotting germ warfare against the United Kingdom. It is Draco’s daughter though, the ravishing Tracy, who makes this book much more than the average Fleming adventure.

Bond intends to marry Tracy once Blofeld is destroyed. Unlike Bond’s one dimensional girlfriends, Tracy is a fully developed character whose murder by Blofeld in the book’s closing pages leaves the reader distressed.

Once again scriptwriter Richard Maibaum was signed to adapt the story to the screen. Originally, it was planned to open the film in an English hospital where Bond is undergoing plastic surgery to change his face — a strategy designed to outwit his many enemies and to introduce Lazenby. It was an idea that everyone hated immediately and Maibaum was happy to throw it out. The plastic experimentation idea, however, was to resurface at the beginning of the next Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, in which Blofeld creates duplicates of himself to confuse the British.

Maibaum finally decided that Lazenby would be introduced in a normal way, in the new film’s teaser, in which, on the beach in Portugal, he rescues Tracy (Diana Rigg) from the ocean. Concluding the teaser, he added a little humour to ease the transition. After Lazenby disposes of the thugs on the beach, only to find Tracy running off in her car, Lazenby picks up her lost shoe and turns to the camera, saying in perfect seriousness, “This never happened to the other guy.”

The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity.

The priestly-noble mode of valuation presupposes, as we have seen, other things: it is disadvantageous for it when it comes to war! As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies — but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred.

The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness. Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have introduced into it — let us take at once the most notable example.

All that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the rulers,” fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness.

It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying “the wretched alone arc the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone — and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!”

One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation . . .

But you do not comprehend this? You are incapable of seeing something that required two thousand years to achieve victory? There is nothing to wonder at in that: all protracted things are hard to see, to see whole. That, however, is what has happened: from the trunk of that tree of vengefulness and hatred, Jewish hatred — the profoundest and sublimest kind of hatred, capable of creating ideals and reversing values, the like of which has never existed on earth before — there grew something equally incomparable, a new love, the profoundest and sublimest kind of love — and from what other trunk could it have grown?

One should not imagine it grew up as the denial of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is true! That love grew out of it as its crown, as its triumphant crown spreading itself farther and farther into the purest brightness and sunlight, driven as it were into the domain of light and the heights in pursuit of the goals of that hatred-victory, spoil, and seduction — by the same impulse that drove the roots of that hatred deeper and deeper and more and more covetously into all that was profound and evil.

This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this “Redeemer” who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners — was he not this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those Jewish values and new ideals? Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this “Redeemer,” this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that “all the world,” namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait?

But there were other reasons for drinking as well. America put two White men on the moon, and lifted them off. A triumph of White men was being celebrated in the streets of this city. It was even worse than that. For the developed abilities of these White men, their production, their flight skills, their engineering feats, were the most successful part of that White superstructure which had been strangling the possibilities of his own Black people for years.

The professor was an academic with no mean knowledge of colonial struggles of colored peoples. He was also a militant. If the degree of his militancy was not precisely defined, still its presence was not denied. His skin was dark. If he were to say, “Black is beautiful” with a cultivated smile, nonetheless he was still saying it.

Aquarius had never been invited to enter this Black man’s vision, but it was no great mystery the Black believed his people were possessed of a potential genius which was greater than Whites. Kept in incubation for two millennia, they would be all the more powerful when they prevailed. It was nothing less than a great civilization they were prepared to create.

Aquarius could not picture the details of that civilization in the Black professor’s mind, but they had talked enough to know they agreed that this potential greatness of the Black people was not to be found in technology. Whites might need the radio to become tribal but Blacks would have another communion. From the depth of one consciousness they could be ready to speak to the depth of another; by telepathy might they send their word.

That was the logic implicit in CPT. If CPT was one of the jokes by which Blacks admitted Whites to the threshold of their view, it was a relief to learn that CPT stood for Colored People’s Time. When a Black friend said he would arrive at 8 P.M. and came after midnight, there was still logic in his move. He was traveling on CPT. The vibrations he received at 8 P.M. were not sufficiently interesting to make him travel toward you — all that was hurt were the host’s undue expectations. The real logic of CPT was that when there was trouble or happiness the brothers would come on the wave.

Well, White technology was not built on telepathy, it was built on electromagnetic circuits of transmission and reception, it was built on factory workers pressing their button or monitoring their function according to firm and bound stations of the clock. The time of a rocket mission was Ground Elapsed Time, GET. Every sequence of the flight was tied into the pure numbers of the timeline.

So the flight to the moon was a victory for GET, and the first heats of the triumph suggested that the fundamental notion of Black superiority might be incorrect: in this hour, it would no longer be as easy for a militant Black to say that Whitey had built a palace on numbers, and numbers killed a man, and numbers would kill Whitey’s civilization before all was through. Yesterday, Whitey with his numbers had taken a first step to the stars, taken it ahead of Black men.

How that had to burn in the ducts of this Black man’s stomach, in the vats of his liver. Aquarius thought again of the lunar air of technologists. Like the moon, they traveled without a personal atmosphere. No wonder Blacks had a distaste for numbers, and found trouble studying. It was not because they came — as liberals necessarily would have it — from wrecked homes and slum conditions, from drug-pushing streets, no, that kind of violence and disruption could be the pain of a people so rich in awareness they could not bear the deadening jolts of civilization on each of their senses. Blacks had distaste for numbers not because they were stupid or deprived, but because numbers were abstracted from the senses, numbers made you ignore the taste the of the apple for the amount in the box, and so the use of numbers shrunk the protective envelope of human atmosphere, eroded the extrasensory aura which gave awareness, grace, the ability to move one’s body and excel at sports and dance and war, or be able to travel on an inner space of sound. Blacks were not the only ones who hated numbers — how many attractive women could not bear to add a column or calculate a cost? Numbers were a pestilence to beauty.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title ‘Lord of the White Elephants’ above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this preeminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day;

and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things – the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity;

and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of the part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

…

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues — every stately or lovely emblazoning — the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge – pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?