There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I
stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza
and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent
antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach
boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came
meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament,
came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very
green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal.
While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning--the meaning
of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea--but the felt
significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process
completed itself in that instant--a change came in the endocrines.
Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the
Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite--the yin-yang--and hence, sometimes,
joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a
great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave
the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and
Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along.
I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then,
and all its other meanings. And that was that.
I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in
the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea.
That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as
usual.
Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea.
My shoulder was disjointed and full of slime. Certainly. My left leg
was also paralyzed. I was ankylosed and calcified and atrophied. But of
course. Agony--_sic_. What was left of me might be a stumblebum but the
outside part could somewhat swim still and the inside part could fly.
My brother was dead.
There was work to do.
To hell with Dr. Jerkski, great man of the Institute.