Alone, I could react.
As now, I thought of my wife and my daughter and the insurance and the
banks.
And having finished with that, I turned to rue.
Feeble fool. Wretched clot!
How little of what you felt and thought did you take the trouble to
express!
When your corpse follows your brother's to the crematory in Gdynia,
what epitaph?
Here lies a minor author--an excessive curiosity and a penchant for
investigation--who never bothered to write up his reports.
So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase.
_I knew: I never got it said._
Isn't it true of you, also?
Didn't you know--and weren't you always on the verge of saying so--when
you had to go to the movies, lunch, the bathroom, bed, or the jute mill
in quest of new shoes for baby?
Yanh-yanh.
Each generation learns enough too late to pass it to the next, for when
the learning's accomplished the newcomers have always been educated
ahead of the achievement--in ignorance.
So when will cradles be rocked by wise men and good women?
They never know it will take a thousand years, and perhaps a thousand
times a thousand years; they think it will be tomorrow; that is the
trouble with them--it is the trouble with them all.
I lay in the Palace Polonia, with the European cars blatting in the
sacrificial street and the trains hooting across the moribund way and
it vividly occurred to me that in a few more years Hitler's men would
blow down these corridors and blow up those cobblestones. I lay in
Jericho.