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We did not think of ourselves as poor then. We simply had no money. Our food was fairly plentiful, what with fishing and planning and a minimum of theft. Entertainment had to be improvised without benefit of currency. Our pleasures consisted in conversation, walks, games, and parties with people of our own financial nonexistence. A real party was dressed with a gallon of thirty-nine-cent wine, and we could have a hell of a time on that. We did not know any rich people, and for that reason we did not like them and were proud and glad we didn’t live that way.
Often the desk was piled so high with unopened letters that they slid tiredly to the floor. Ed believed completely in the theory that a letter unanswered for a week usually requires no answer, but he went even farther. A letter unopened for a month does not require opening.
I use this method as well, but I have found it isn’t a good one at all no matter how hard I try to let it succeed.
He hated women with thin lips. “If the lips are thin—where will there be any fullness?” he would say. His observation was certainly physical and open to verification, and he seemed to believe in its accuracy and so do I, but with less vehemence. He loved women too much to take any nonsense from the thin-lipped ones. But if a girl with thin lips painted on fuller ones with lipstick, he was satisfied. “Her intentions are correct,” he said. “There is a psychic fullness, and sometimes that can be very fine.”
This hatred was only for reasonless cruelty. When the infliction of pain was necessary, he had little feeling about it. Once during the depression we found we could buy a live sheep for three dollars. This may seem incredible now but it was so. It was a great deal of food and even for those days a great bargain. Then we had the sheep and none of us could kill it. But Ed cut its throat with no emotion whatever, and even explained to the rest of us who were upset that bleeding to death is quite painless if there is no fear involved. The pain of opening a vein is slight if the instrument is
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“Consider now,” he would say, “if you look superficially, you would say that the local banker or the owner of a cannery or even the mayor of Monterey is the successful and surviving individual. But consider their ulcers, consider the heart trouble, the blood pressure in that group. And then consider the bums over there—cirrhosis of the liver I will grant will have its toll, but not the other things.” He would cluck his tongue in admiration. “It is a rule in paleontology,” he would say, “that over-armor, and/or over-ornamentation are symptoms of extinction in a species. You have only to
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Consider the blundering anarchic system of the United States, the stupidity of some of its lawmakers, the violent reaction, the slowness of its ability to change. Twenty-five key men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but we could lose our congress, our president, and our general staff and nothing much would have happened. We would go right on. In fact we might be better for it.
“Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane,” he said. “And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have
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One thing is certain. Ed did not like his sex uncomplicated. If a girl were unattached and without problems as well as willing, his interest was not large. But if she had a husband or seven children or a difficulty with the law or some whimsical neuroticism in the field of love, Ed was charmed and instantly active. If he could have found a woman who was not only married, but a mother, in prison, and one of Siamese twins, he would have been delighted.
But for all of Ed’s pleasures and honesties there was a transcendent sadness in his love—something he missed or wanted, a searching that sometimes approached panic. I don’t know what it was he wanted that was never there, but I know he always looked for it and never found it. He sought for it and listened for it and looked for it and smelled for it in love. I think he found some of it in music. It was like a deep and endless nostalgia—a thirst and passion for “going home.” He
was walled off a little, so that he worked at his philosophy of “breaking through,” of coming out through the back of the mirror into some kind of reality which would make the day world dreamlike. This thought obsessed him. He found the symbols of “breaking through” in Faust, in Gregorian music, and in the sad, drunken poetry of Li Po. Of the Art of the Fugue he would say, “Bach nearly made it. Hear now how close he comes, and hear his anger when he cannot. Every time I hear it I believe that this time he will come crashing through into the light. And he never does—not quite.”
DEHISCENCE. A bursting discharge, usually of eggs or sperm.
EPITOKOUS. Sexually mature stage in polychaet worms, characterized by changes of the posterior end which enable normally crawling worms to be free-swimming.
Sort of like Harvey Weinstein. Snort!
ETIOLOGY. Dictionary definition: “1. The science, doctrine, or demonstration of causes, especially the investigation of the causes of any disease. 2. The assignment of a cause or reason; as, the etiology of a historical custom.”
TELEOLOGY. The assumption of predetermined design, purpose, or ends in Nature by which an explanation of phenomena is postulated.
