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By Root 6227 0

on the bowed eagle legs of the 747, lifted into flight on the great wings, the machine passing from level to level into brighter and brighter atmospheres while I gripped my briefcase between my feet like a rider and my head lay on the bosom of the seat. On balance I believed that the Señora’s wicked and goofy lawsuit improved my position. She discredited herself. My kindliness, my patience, my sanity, my superiority would gain on Renata. All I had to do was to keep my mouth shut and to sit tight. Thoughts about her came thick and fast—all kinds of things connecting what-beautiful-girls-contributed-to-the-unfold-ing-destiny-of-capitalist-Democracy to, far beyond this, deeper questions. Let me see if I can clarify any of it. Renata was very nearly aware, as many people now are, of “leading a life in history.” Now Renata was, as a biologically noble beauty, in a false category—Goya’s Maja smoking a cigar, or Wallace Stevens’ Fretful Concubine who whispered “Pfui!” That is she wished to defy and outsmart the category to which she was assigned by common opinion. But with this she also collaborated. And if there is one historical assignment for us it is to break with false categories. Vacate the personae. I once suggested to her, “A woman like you can be called a dumb broad only if Being and Knowledge are entirely separate. But if Being is also a form of Knowledge, one’s own Being is one’s own accomplishment in some degree. . . .”

“Then I’m not a dumb broad after all. I can’t be, if I’m so beautiful. That’s super! You’ve always been kind to me, Charlie.”

“Because I really love you, kid.”

Then she wept a little because, sexually, she was not all that she was cracked up to be. She had her hang-ups. Sometimes she accused herself wildly, crying, “The truth! I’m a phony! I like it better under the table.” I told her not to exaggerate. I explained to her that the Ego had emancipated itself from the Sun and it must undergo the pain of this emancipation (Steiner). The modern sexual ideology could never counteract this. Programs of uninhibited natural joy could never free us from the universal tyranny of selfhood. Flesh and blood never could live up to such billing. And so on.

Anyway, we were lofted to an altitude of six miles in a great 747, an illuminated cavern, a theater, a cafeteria, the Atlantic in pale daylight raging below. According to the pilot, ships were taking hard punishment in the storm. But from this altitude the corrugations of the seas looked no higher to the eye than the ridges of your palate feel to the tongue. The stewardess served whisky and Hawaiian macadamia nuts. We plunged across the longitudinal lines of the planet, this deep place that I was learning to think of as the great school of souls, the material seat of the spirit. More than ever I believed that the soul with its occasional glimmers of the Good couldn’t expect to get anywhere in a single lifetime. Plato’s theory of immortality was not, as some scholars tried to make it, a metaphor. He literally meant it. A single span could only make virtue desperate. Only a fool would try to reconcile the Good with one-shot mortality. Or as Renata, that dear girl, might put it, “Better none than only one.”

In a word, I allowed myself to think what I pleased and let my mind go in every direction. But I felt that the plane and I were headed the right way. Madrid was a smart choice. In Spain I could begin to set myself straight. Renata and I would enjoy a quiet month. I put it to myself—thinking of the carpenter’s level—that maybe our respective bubbles could be coaxed back to the center. Then the things that really satisfied, naturally satisfied, all hearts and minds might be attempted. If people felt like fakers when they spoke of the True and the Good this was because their bubble was astray, because they believed they were following the rules of scientific thought, which they didn’t understand one single bit. But I had no business to be toying with fire either, or playing footsie with the only revolutionary ideas left. Actuarially speaking, I had only a decade