The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [316]
jobs under the kind sun, surrounded by velvet woods and bright gardens and Elysium lawns sown with Lincoln Park grass seed. However, we are meant to be carried away by the complex and hear the simple like the far horn of Roland when he and Oliver are being wiped out by the Saracens. I told Stella I was keen about beekeeping. Hell, I thought, I had got along with an eagle, why not get along, with different winged creatures and there be honey instead? So she bought me a book on beekeeping and I took it out with me on my second voyage. But I already knew what she thought the academy would look like: a beatenup frame house of dead-drunk jerry-builders under dusty laborious trees, laundry boiling in the yard, pinched chickens of misfortune, rioting kids, my blind mother wearing my old shoes and George cobblering, me with a crate of bees in the woods. At first Stella said it was a lovely idea, but what else was she going to say in the emotions of reunion when I told her how the ship went down, and the rest. She cried, holding on to me, and her tears fell on my chest, almost spurted. "Oh, Augie," she said, "the things that happen to you! Poor Augie!" We were in bed. I saw her round smooth back by the Italian mirror, a big circular one that hung over the mantel. "Well, to hell with this war and falling in the water and all of that," I said. "I want to get this place where we can have a settled life." "Oh yes," she said. But at that time what else could she say? However, I didn't have the least idea of how to go about it. And of course it was only one of those bubble-headed dreams of people who haven't yet realized what they're like nor what they're intended for. Pretty soon I understood that I would mostly do as she wanted because it was I who loved her most. What it was that she wanted wasn't clear for a time. You see, there was all the immense giubbilo of homecoming and being saved from the sea and this Basteshaw, a romantic survivor and escapee; it was appropriate there should be cries of Thanksgiving as if written down by Franz Joseph Haydn and sung by the Schola Cantorum, and so on. And after all Stella did love me, and we had a honeymoon still to catch up on. So if sometimes I saw she was preoccupied I considered that probably her preoccupations were with me. That was the intelligent thing to consider. Yet it wasn't really I who absorbed her most. What do you think it is, to drag people from their preoccupations, where they do their habitual toil! At first you wouldn't think anything in such a connection with a woman who looks as she does, with those endowments, not light but solid, her body rising toward a delicate head with feathery dark bangs. Around some people the space is their space, and when you want to approach them it has to be across their territory so that how you are to behave to them is mainly under their control, and then it is always astonishing to learn that they suffer, and perhaps worse than others, from their predominant ideas. Now my foster-home and academy dream was not a preoccupation but one of those featherhead millenarian notions or summer butterflies. You should never try to cook such butterflies in lard. So to speak. Other preoccupations are my fate, or what fills life and thought. Among them, preoccupation with Stella, so that what happens to her happens, by necessity, to me too. Guys may very likely think. Why hell! What's this talk about fates? and will feel it all comes to me from another day, and a mistaken day, when there were fewer people in the world and there was more room between them so that they grew not like wild grass but like trees in a park, well set apart and developing year by year in the rosy light. Now instead of such comparison you think. Let's see it instead not even as the grass but as a band of particles, a universal shawl of them, and these particles may have functions but certainly lack fates. And there's even an attitude of mind which finds k almost disgusting to be a person and not a function. Nevertheless I stand by my idea of a fate. For which a function is a substitution