What goes and what stays? What has changed and what is the same, and if there is any way of assessing the change, what is the referent we can use to measure it? I feel the question as I sit here on this bench in the Square in about the same spot where I sat forty-six years ago. The benches have been shifted and the paved walks have been rerouted and repaved, the traffic is no longer allowed across the park, but still it is the same park. It was one of the locales of my youth. Across a stretch of time so tortuous and long that I can barely recognize it as within my experience, I haul a scene into view: a tug-of-war between sophomores and freshmen of the university nearby, with the losers incurring the penalty of being pulled into the knee-deep waters of the fountain. I was with the freshmen and vaguely I recall the contest as episodic and fitful. No, it isn’t easy to sit here and devise a telescope that can reach down that fearfully long corridor and make out that wriggling speck at the other end as myself, especially with the corridor taking a number of tricky bends. Memory does it, memory, that performer of feats almost bloodcurdling in their virtuosity.

The time has gone, all right. It is no longer 1923. The pigeons that alighted on the walks in a hunt for free food are long dead and gone since that October. The aging shoeshine man, a Greek homosexual who used to gaze up at his clients with a wet sad eye in the hope of a more intimate transaction, is gone, too. I have to hold myself back from reading a roster of vanished items that would soon get too long and too achey. Where, then, has the time gone? The history book, the magazines, and the newspapers all tell quite reliably where the social time went. I feel no reason to pit my personal memory in competition with the record in print, patchy as it may be here or there. Nor do I have any mandate, as I read my mood, to lavish attention in detail on my personal past, instructive as that might be. No, the time has gone and the sense of its passing as I have it now is not planted in a remembrance of important social events nor of personal history. It is something else. I let my eye come to rest on the new roof-line on the south side of the Square, so changed now that the university has it, and the only idea I have is: I have lived, I remember, I am constant. To say less would leave me unnamed in some painful way and to say more would bow me down with supererogatory effort.

I am free now to bear witness to the silence all around me, musical, unhurried again, just about as it was the first time I ever sat here. The noise of the traffic, the intermittent grunt of a crane engine somewhere in the vicinity, the footsteps of passers-by (I have closed my eyes to mimimize the visual distractions) reach me from a distance. There are three main stages in the continuity of life—before, during, and after—and at the present moment all three are equally weighted, all three are totally aligned like so many billiard balls, so that my time sense does not obtrude from the present moment by so much as a hair’s-breadth.

It is therefore with the freest kind of mind that I muse, where has the time gone? I couldn’t be more unanxious as I ask, where did it go? I am inclined to answer myself the way Ma answered Pa when he would ask in that stricken voice, but what did you do with all that money? She would look utterly trapped for a moment but then take a quiet if desperate stand on her faith in her sanity. She would say, I don’t know just this moment where it went, but I know I didn’t waste any of it. I’m afraid I can’t make that kind of proud boast. I have wasted. I can’t say I wasn’t warned. I have known the true nature of time since I was four years old. Maybe three. So I do not now come awake to a sense of time gone with any wobbly feeling that I dreamed it all away or piddled it or flubbed it. I could have done better, yes, but then who couldn’t? Human action is almost always fatefully inefficient, the input of time and effort greater than the takeout of achievement and experience. Mine especially.

Right now I feel myself being detained by something other than the seemliness of this haunting scene. I feel a voice in me speaking unhappily at the prospect of keeping my appointment with the man I am supposed to meet, an old acquaintance I haven’t seen in many years. I feel mild distress at the prospect of breaking the ice and reviving a friendship never too intense at best and certainly not at its best now, after all these years. The question in my mind, therefore, is: is this voice I hear the voice of my true norm or is it the voice of passing convenience? I do not want to mistake the one for the other as I so often have in the past, and would not like to again. I never doubt there is a true norm within me worthy of trust as oracle and lawgiver for my life. My quandary is the babble of lesser voices trying to mask themselves in its guise, its authority, its timbre. That’s where the pinch is. And to complicate things even more, there is the changeability of everything, including the norm by which we strive to control changeability. Is it true for me to say, all things change, including norms? I’m not sure about that. Does it help me to say, go by what you feel now, when the question is precisely: what do I feel now?

So, going back to that deposition which is my existential self-summary, viz., I have lived, I remember, I am constant: in what is my constancy? By what evidence can I claim it? That I answer to the same name I did years and years ago? That isn’t enough. My norm, even in its inmost, could be changing under the very nose of my conscious mind but if, for some reason or other, I chose not to notice it and to go on proclaiming an inner constancy, everything in me would seem to support it. We persuade ourselves. I know a man who has persuaded himself quite completely that he had no Stalinist sympathies during the 30’s. The evidence to the contrary is piled sky-high right outside his window but he never sees it, not any more. So if I persuade myself of a certain constancy, if I claim a certain positive sameness in and amid all the change since I first became aware, at least I can say I have made some allowance for the innocent duplicity that lurks in the path of such belief.

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Time is the culprit. . It separates my thought of today from my thought of six months, a decade, two-score years ago. Time, the culprit, time, time. It goes and it goes and it goes, it will never stop until the last drop of change has been squeezed out of the phenomenal universe. Some day if we could travel faster than light and get to some condensing destination before the rays bringing the sights and sounds of an event we have witnessed, we could witness it again. Maybe. Or, that being a bit difficult, if we could station ourselves at the right spot in the curved universe we might intercept such rays in their circular journey. We would then see it all again and, at least by that much, set time on its heels. Events themselves being irreversible in my opinion, we couldn’t live it again, but we could see it again and hear it. And that might be nice. It might help my sense of constancy, my feeling that I have always been, and now am, I, if I could catch a glimpse of myself sitting here forty-six years ago, a thoughtful college freshman glad to be resting and alone and quiet after that tug-of-war with the sophomores.

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My eye comes to rest on the spot occupied by a red brick building on the south side of the Square, long demolished to make room for the buildings of the expanding university. In its heyday it was a fancy one-family dwelling, but by the time Paul found a small apartment there it was long past its glory and cut up into two shrunken units on each floor. I am thinking of Paul now. That loose mist in the mind that forms itself into images from instant to instant, some on conscious demand and some involuntarily, keeps becoming the uncomforted face of Paul. I am looking at the spot where the building stood with the innocent hope that something left over from the past hovers in the air there, perhaps some ectoplasmic smoke still lingering from the modest fires of our talks, the vigils we kept while the Sixth Avenue elevated rumbled by intermittently. There is nothing, not a trace that anything but what is there now was there ever.

I met Paul one late afternoon in the office of a mutual friend and I found him a rather good listener, very nicely underopinionated. It suited me well, and I dropped in on him from time to time when I was in the Village. He was then beginning a medical interneship in Bellevue or some other local hospital and he was trying to do right by it in the face of odds. He was trying to do right by his mother who lived in Long Island and who had half-pushed and half-cajoled him into medicine. She was a power worshiper, she believed everyone had to power his way through obstacles, and she had strongly influenced him. He could joke about the old war-horse, he could be sophisticated about silver-cord mothers, but when it came to bedrock, she was his mother, she had made important sacrifices for him, he owed her something. He was trying also to do right by the young woman with whom he was sharing the apartment and whom he had met at the hospital. She was from somewhere in the Midwest, had striking black eyes and jet black hair, seemed tied up in strange knots with gestures and mannerisms intimating that what she had to say was beyond words.

I remember hesitantly coming to the conclusion that Paul was overmatched, that he wasn’t quite up to all he had taken on. Everything he did was a holding action to stave off a sense of nothingness always waiting to creep up from wherever it bided. At that he felt scorn for nihilists, cynics, professional snivelers, the assorted grotesques around the Village. He had reservations about literature, art, writers. One night we were sitting across from each other in his small living room and he said, I wouldn’t mind being a failure as a writer or an artist if I felt it did something for me but it wouldn’t; if you suffer from the feeling of nothingness as I do, why prop it up with books or art? He seemed to feel that the sense of nothingness was a natural liability like a weak stomach, a speech stammer, or a defect in manual coordination, something to grow out of. It was nothing to exploit or put on display. Perhaps it was a matter of going out and creating a little miracle for oneself as he did one day when, in utter surfeit and rebellion against the hospital, he called in sick and took a neighbor’s child on a day-long visit through the Museum of Natural History. He glowed when he talked about it for weeks and weeks afterward. I recall his saying, for me the agedness of the universe and the enormity is worth far more than any man-made art and the beautiful thing is that it doesn’t strain to entertain me.

But these little miracles didn’t come too often, and most of the time Paul carried out a holding action. I remember sitting in that living room wondering if the furniture would be there the next time I came, if Paul and Dorothy would still be together, even if he would be alive, there was that feeling of impermanence in the air. I could see why a sensitive man like Paul would be enthralled by all the agedness he had seen in the Museum, considering that nothing in his or Dorothy’s life in the Village went back farther than yesterday, or maybe a week, and no future more than a day or two ahead was ever thought about. He was like a man with too many creditors and badly inadequate funds so that all he could do was to make a meager daily remittance, just enough to keep them quiet. It was, finally, a matter of just getting through the waking hours until it was time to sleep. Something would come along, something or someone would give him a cue, a reason, a meaning to live.

It came. He had never felt it a matter for argument that the Communists distorted, exaggerated, and falsified whenever they felt it served their purpose. It was so and he accepted it as so. But one night we were seated in the Willow Cafeteria and there was a new look in his eye when he said, it’s no use, man cannot be man in this system, I cannot think of any affirmation that I or anybody else can make about this society, but the Communists can make an affirmation that sticks. I said, do you believe that affirmation? He said, probably not, and that may be my trouble. He looked away in thought and his uncomforted face never looked more without comfort. He said, you know, I wonder if we’re not like the Romans of the 2nd or 3rd century who encountered the Christian gospel and could hear it only as an irrational cry of the helots? Are we missing a great cue of history out of complacence? I don’t recall exactly what I said but I couldn’t agree. Paul became more and more convinced in the weeks that followed that we were living in a millennial era, a time of great changes. Having taken a wavering first step, a second step was a little easier. He came out with stories of people in the hospital, people in the Village, who had declared their sympathy for Communism, and there was no denying the change he could see in them, the new sense of meaning, aim, purpose. He envied them, but he still hung back about seeing it as something for himself. He felt he had been too deeply marred by the canker of individuation, of personal autonomy, to be able to surrender to party discipline and control.

That stage lasted about a year. He vacillated. Yes, the Communists were fanatical apostles of redemption. No, they were sectarian bigots. Yes, the class struggle was gospel. No, the class struggle was twaddle. Yes, Stalin was aborting a great revolution. Yes and no, no and yes, yes and no. Paul was a man whose face at best looked strained but in those days he looked downright feverish. Word got around that he was a medical-school graduate, an interne, and party members or sympathizers came to the apartment in quest of help for their ailments. Arguments often got under way and the walls shook with noise.

Impulsively my eyes again turn to the spot where the building stood and I go on some foolish way expecting that some palpable trace hovers over it; there is of course nothing. The imposing facade of the university buildings that stand on the south side of the Square couldn’t be more exclusive and dominating in their hold on the present moment and their monopoly even seems retroactive. Those few times late at night when I tottered out of Paul’s building, my head spinning with all the talk, my nerves abuzz, my conscience quivering in a cross-grain distemper, have left no mark. And the park remains the park.

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I came across Paul one day on Fourth Street, we talked a few moments and his face became tight, defiant, portentous. He announced that he had become a member of the Communist party. It caught me by surprise, but otherwise had little effect. To all intents and purposes he had been one in my mind for quite a while, though I hadn’t supposed he was ready to part with all the independence and personal freedom to be a card-carrying member. I told him I hoped he would find whatever it was he was seeking. He said he was already sure of that, and then with a forced and mirthless smile, he added that it was only a question of time before I would be in the party. There was only one way for an intelligent man to go and that was into the party and he was certain I was an intelligent man. I answered that while no one could guarantee what he would do in the future, the odds against my becoming a member or sympathizer were overwhelming. Nothing had changed between us, it was an agreeable conversation. We were not one iota less friends after that conversation on Fourth Street than before.

One night a few weeks later I found myself in Paul’s place. At the crest of the evening about seven or eight people were there, among them a Welsh seaman who had come to consult Paul about a cough or some other item of health. Dorothy had left him by then, ill-suited to the endless talk of politics and the people who came to see Paul only to get free medical advice. Instead of Dorothy, there was a dark-haired woman who was in the process of moving in. By ten-thirty or so, only four of us were left, Paul, the new woman, the Welsh seaman, and I. The seaman had more or less claimed the floor all evening and poured out endless vituperation against the capitalist system and the bourgeoisie. There was no evil that the bourgeoisie wouldn’t practice or tolerate if it served its material interests, whereas in Russia as soon as they found out a man was an anti-social son-of-a-bitch, they put him against a wall and shot him. Now, thirty-odd years later, sitting here and remembering it, I can still see his face boiling red, his eyes aglitter, his nostrils dilated as he wallowed in near-voluptuous pleasure at the anti-social sons-of-bitches in Russia being gunned down in juicy numbers. He cursed and he frothed and he couldn’t pour out enough anathema. I early suspected part of it was by way of paying Paul for the medical advice, of letting Paul know that he, the seaman, was a truly zealous and deserving Communist. But even after discarding a fair portion of his tirade as rhetoric for the occasion, there was enough true vindictiveness left over to counterburn the sun. I sat there telling myself I would not get involved, I would let this manic have his fling unchallenged and unreproved.

It should have embarrassed Paul, the host, who was fair-minded, civilized, reasonable. It didn’t. He sat there with a smile which seemed mostly approving. I marveled at that a little. Then the seaman launched into the idea that the capitalist system maintained an annual quota of unemployed workers in order to have strikebreakers when needed, to keep those still working in line, and to keep wages down. I had vowed not to get involved, but at this point I couldn’t hold myself in. I said, do you mean that the capitalists deliberately arrange for the number of unemployed? Where do you get evidence for that? Evidence, he bellowed loud enough to be heard in Canarsie, what evidence do you want? Can’t you see millions of people out on the streets starving all over the world wherever this stinking system rules? What evidence do you want, an affidavit from the Pope with two witnesses? I turned to Paul who had been sitting there with that strange smile and said, Paul, do you believe that? The expression that came over his face, a certain kind of gross and coarse hostility, disquieted me. He said, yes, I do, and to hell with semantic niceties. I am talking true or false, I said, I am saying that if there actually were a conspiracy of capitalists to produce a certain number of unemployed workers, it would involve too many people and one way or another word would get out. The hell it would, bellowed the seaman—they control the press, don’t they, and everything else and they know how to cover their tracks, don’t be naive. He then launched into a tirade on the evils of hairsplitting. It was veiled just enough not to be a personal attack, but it was plain to see whom he had in mind.

It bothered me but I kept my mouth shut. What bothered me worse, though in a quieter way, was Paul’s manner. The seaman owed me nothing and I expected nothing from him. But for Paul to sit there while this vulgar and mindless agitator trampled over truth, moderation, sensibility, left me with a feeling of the floor giving way under me. More than merely being quiet, Paul seemed strangely fascinated and approving. This wasn’t Hyde Park or Union Square or a Berlin café, it was Paul’s living room, and the time when Paul should have intervened to get this man closer to line was already long past. But worse was to come. From his opening attack on hair-splitters, the seaman went on to an attack on petit-bourgeois intellectuals which became less and less veiled. He had been feeling his way, and when it had grown clear to him that Paul had no intention of befriending me, he really let himself go, over the entire spectrum of Communist abuse. He didn’t look at me, didn’t mention me, as he went through the repertoire: bourgeois lackeys and ass-kissers, mental masturbators, pen prostitutes, etc., etc., etc.

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I sat there not knowing where to hurt the most. It is most painful to recall this now as I sit looking at the spot where it all happened thirty-odd years ago, and I most earnestly wish it were not in my past. I kept looking at Paul as this obnoxious lumpenmensch went on with his performance; the least Paul could have done was to change the subject or clear his throat or offer more coffee, but he did nothing. For my part I should have gotten up and gone, which is what I would do now in a similar situation. I couldn’t then, I sat and suffered. The dark-haired young woman was, as near as I could see and understand then, rather enthralled and in sympathy with the seaman. More and more the realization grew in me that the reason Paul didn’t stop or check the seaman’s offensive rant was that it seemed true to him, that it represented the kind of strong words and strong sentiments that he hadn’t dared to use or even to affirm within himself, but now that someone else was saying them, he felt it was right that they should be said. That sickened me. It was a revelation about Paul. I had the feeling that he had developed a whole syndrome of the most vulgar and coarse reservations about the world in general and me and my life in particular but had lacked whatever it took to come out and say so. Perhaps at the outset he had drawn back a shade at the temerity of such notions, but now, as I watched the little smile on his face, I could see he liked it. He approved and he relished. It made him contemptible. All that earlier period when he had been groping his way toward Communism, I kept hearing from Paul what a better man he felt he was because of his new bond with ordinary people and how much a certain value long submerged was breaking the surface in his life. That kept flitting through my mind as I sat there, my face red, burning to death with discomfiture. Suddenly I saw Paul as weak and despicable and I knew that my original intuition about him—that he was a man spiritually overmatched—was more awfully true than I suspected.

I was goaded beyond my yielding point, I was in rout, I was hurting in all directions, and I took the one outlet that was closest to hand: the seaman. I let him have it. Oh, even at this remove it is painful to recall, and I am ashamed that I gave it back to him in the kind of language he had no trouble understanding. He lunged for me, I half rose to avoid him, and he aimed a knee to the groin. He fought like he lived and he thought: strictly deckhand. I managed to pin his arms to his sides and held him in a bear hug so that he could do me no harm. He wriggled but he couldn’t break the hold. Paul didn’t make a move or say a word. While this all happened quite quickly, there was still enough time for Paul to see and to react and to do something. He didn’t. He just sat there. It was unbelievable to me. I had this struggling man in my arms, I didn’t want him to hit me, I didn’t want to hit him. The adventure was over, the evening was over, many things were over that moment, and I wanted only to be out of that apartment, even if with no more than bare life and limb, leaving behind certain things of value that were then my sole possessions. I looked over my shoulder at Paul and shouted, take him away. Few people that I have taken into my life as peers and intimates ever appeared as ugly and evil and regressed to animalism as Paul did at that moment. I couldn’t understand. What was in his mind, what did he want? A brawl, blood, to see me humiliated even worse? Finally I pushed the seaman away from me and sent him sprawling across the room, not such a feat considering I outweighed him by at least thirty pounds. By that time Paul or the woman went over to him to quiet him down. My hands somehow found my hat and coat and I was out of the apartment.

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The park that I am looking at was the park I saw as I came out of the aromatic vestibule of that house. It rests now under the sunlight of a lovely spring day. That night it was a dark unrecognizable blur. Much as I like indoor life, usually the moment of passing from indoors to outdoors is a moment of release, relief, and freedom. Not that night. I couldn’t see or feel a single thing clearly or distinctly. If the injury was only to my dignity, then it is a mistake to underestimate the role of dignity. It would have been easier, perhaps, to bear with a bloody nose, a loose tooth, or a black eye. Why hadn’t I kept quiet? It wasn’t the first time I had encountered Stalinist blather, it wouldn’t have been the first evening in my life to go down the drain in incompatible company. The hazards were familiar, but the trouble was that I met up with them in totally unexpected circumstances. Paul was a likable and civilized man, and I never expected to run into a gauche, agit-prop harangue in his apartment, nor to be subjected to personal abuse and insult, at least not without some reproof or objection from Paul. I can see him now as I saw him then, with that strange little smile that couldn’t have been more reprehensible. He seemed to take pleasure in the strong things said, especially when they were directed at me. They were demolishing blows at my status as a questing man, blows that his own nature perhaps precluded from delivering, so that it seemed to fascinate him to hear someone else do it.

I never set foot in his apartment after that night. Our friendship was over and we both knew it. I’m sorry about what happened, said Paul later when I ran into him somewhere in the Village, but his statement of regret had no warmth or sincerity, it was a bow to the amenities. I answered, so am I, and that was it. I cannot be certain that at this moment I understand him better than I did then. I remember I rather absolved him with passing days because I surmised it was more in the times than in Paul. Everybody was tooling up for the use of any harshness or vileness necessary to settle the human account. The Communists were saying, comrades, we must not wince or flinch in our day of reckoning with the bourgeoisie, whether on the political, economic, or cultural front. The Nazi said, when someone mentions culture I reach for my revolver. The virilists were saying, the answer is in good liquor, nubile women, courageous bulls, and safaris to hunt tigers. There was no human dog so flea-ridden, so wormy and bemiseried but felt free to lift a leg on fair humanity or gentle life.

A misunderstood Nietzsche owned every street corner and Lenin, informed once that one of his followers was criminal lowlife said grimly, the revolution can use him too. So who was Paul to stand up to all that, and if a friendship had to be sacrificed in the class struggle, so what? Revolutions weren’t nice but necessary, and when blows began to fall, who could stop to worry if each one fell on the enemy? And, finally, if there were some things he was a little too squeamish to do or say himself, he was all the more impressed and indebted to anyone who could do or say them for him.

I ran into Paul a few times after that unhappy evening but we never said anything more than hello to each other. I heard rumors. He set up an office to practice medicine, he became a trusted friend of the apparat, a zealous defender of the faith, with sensitive nostrils to smell out deviations and heresy, whether white chauvinism or black nationalism or Trotskyism or collaborationism or Lovestoneism or what not. The days of the nothingness of life were far, far by. As Joyce said of Poldy, he had traveled. Paul’s journey came to an end shortly before the end of the Second World War when he fell ill of stomach cancer and died in a few months.

His face keeps bobbing in and out of my awareness as I sit here looking at the spot where he spent several important years, and something in me calls for an epitaph but I cannot find one that would be satisfactory to both of us. If I were to say he was an honest man who meant well, his ghost would rise to flay me alive. He felt burning scorn for honest men who meant well. He once argued warmly that Norman Thomas, an honest man who meant well, was helping the fascists to power. It was Communism or fascism, and those who weren’t lined up with Communism were helping fascism, whatever their honesty or good intentions. What, then, is there to say?

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Shall I avail myself of what Ilse said of him once? Ilse, a poetess. I remember her, she lived two houses away, they met through me but never became friendly. I met Ilse herself during those three or four months I spent in a literary agency which was bogus. I knew it was bogus the first week I landed there but I was young, my mind was elsewhere, I had an easy cynicism that this bogus was insignificantly tiny inside the huge bogus in which everybody was trapped. I was opposed to cavilling at a gnat in the process of swallowing a camel. Still, three months was all I could stand there. Ilse was a fellow employee. She spoke in a manner half-deferential, half-supercilious, and always quiet. And unexpectedly she would come to an early pause, look at her listener searchingly with a question: do I need to say any more? do we really need to waste time and words on this trifle? She was groomed and dressed for a role and there was no mistaking it: her hair was a rich brown, her shirtwaists were just so, her skirts tailored, any ornaments carefully picked, everything to proclaim: taste. One day we were talking of something or other when Paul’s name came up. She said softly, he’s such a typical fellow-traveler and I find him quite wearisome. Then came that look: do I need to say more? I did not like her remark and I said, Ilse, life is wearisome and death is wearisome, and the painful in-between is also wearisome, but I’m a sworn meliorist and I find nothing helped or solved or even understood in calling it wearisome. Again that look, and then she said with smiling amiability, do you really think so?—and she walked away.

Ilse wrote poetry of almost intolerable distinction. There was never a word or a phrase in it that wasn’t filtered through a mesh of elegance and fastidiousness, almost too much; but her spoken vocabulary was quite another matter. Without using them profligately, there wasn’t one four-letter word she denied herself when she felt it was in order. It came to me gradually that she was in mortal opposition to genteelness, conceiving it as an arch enemy of true elegance, to be riddled and annihilated every time she came across it.

We had lunch a number of times in an inexpensive little upstairs Italian restaurant and I remember her toying with a hard breadstick, distant and abstracted, delivering herself scorchingly on a number of matters. If there’s anything I can’t stand, she said with her supercilious smile, it’s poetry without balls. I said, you subscribe to the testicle standard of literary values. She said, please don’t pettifog and don’t be the professor, you know what I mean. I said, I truly do not know what you mean, what is the gonadal standard of value? She said, you’re a nice boy and it’s time you were told of life. I said, thank you, tell me. Ilse said, poetry, and all art for that matter, is a form of symbolic warmth and its success or effectiveness depends on whether it is born of true warmth or not, and the source of true warmth is the gonads, as you put it. I said, but your poetry doesn’t say balls, your poetry is full of exotic and unknown words and of difficult, recondite concepts. I would say they couldn’t be further away from balls. Ilse said, you’re making a common mistake, you’re thinking of roots and blossoms as being the same thing and of course they’re not, ovaries and balls are the roots but poetry is the blossom and the blossom doesn’t duplicate or emblemize the roots. The blossoms have their own laws, their own beauty and grandeur, do you find anything vulgar or pornographic in my poetry? I said truthfully, no I do not. Ilse said, with a certain disdain, of course not, I loathe and am embarrassed by naively erotic poetry, it’s aborted nature in which the roots are naively made to pass as blossoms.

Ilse intimated that if American letters were honest she would be a first lady, not a near unknown doing the work of a clerk. For her the literary agency was a stopover. Sooner or later there would be some recognition, a prize, a Guggenheim, a chair of English in a good college. She was still under thirty and there was time. She had been married and separated, and she now had a lover of whom she was disinclined to say much. It wasn’t that she set any value on privacy, it was merely that there was no way of telling about him that could bring out their tie. She told very little about the man she loved.

Where did I get the sense that in a quiet and overceremonialized way she was waging a most redoubtable campaign for recognition, advancement, preferment? I am not sure: a word here and there, a gesture, an expression. She came in one morning carefully bearing a cut-glass vase of wildflowers. She removed one of the flowers, delicately laid it on my desk and said, did you know today is Emily Dickinson’s birthday? I said, no, I didn’t. She said, yes, it is, I think we should observe it, I’m very fond of her, are you? I answered, I very much like her but I’m not a member of the cult. Ilse said, I know someone who is thinking of bringing out a new edition of the poems and I may get the chance to write an introduction, oh! I would love that, there are so many things about her I would like to say. Half an hour later, sitting at the desk and looking at the flower, I happened to fall into quite a mood of nostalgia about the 19th century, about Emily, about elm-lined New England towns, about any time and place that was far away from that morning at work. Then it occurred to me that the conversation of a few minutes ago was far more about the opportunity that Ilse might get to write an introduction than it was about Emily Dickinson. It was that way again and again. Once she left a literary quarterly on the desk. I read it. She had a poem in it and I praised it the next time I saw her. Ilse said, if you like it, why don’t you write a few words to Blank Blank and say so? I had the feeling that the thing had been staged for just that purpose.

Ilse, in a quiet way, was pressing hard for success and abstractly it didn’t bother me. By that time I had met scores of people doing the same thing and using means far less pretty. What bothered me, as I recall it now, was that a number of times when our conversation reached a point where further patient exploration was necessary, Ilse would break off. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the mind. She had mind enough for anything. It was something else. I sensed she was asking: when this conversation is over, how much more recognized or famous as a poet and writer will I be? how much financially richer? what opportunity I do not have now will be mine? Since the answer was always in the negative, Ilse would break off or change the subject, playfully or brusquely or even cruelly. But always with elegance and fastidiousness. There was even a faint touch of: you males are often the most engaging and delightful refugees from a spiritual kindergarten where ideas are absorbing playthings, but do you mind if we crass women keep an eye on the kitchen stove, on such coarse and vulgar things as success, money, good clothes, a nice apartment, and winters on the Mediterranean?

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Ilse sensed how I felt. She also knew that I knew how she felt. It stopped there. I soon gave over trying to understand her beyond a point. What was the use? One time I walked into her apartment while she was writing. She lived on the south side of the Square, two houses away from Paul whom I had set out to see that evening and who wasn’t home. I was badly in need of company. I walked upstairs to the floor she lived on, her apartment door was open, I entered. There was no one in the small living room but I saw a light behind a wooden partition and then the shadow of her chair and her figure through the narrow door opening. I poked my head inside and said, hello. There was a pen in her hand, her head was tilted up, her eyes were closed, and she seemed inside a spell or trance. I stood there for five seconds or more, not knowing if she was aware that I was there, not knowing whether to stay or to go. Her eyes opened gradually and it was the only move she made. Then she said with her eyes: you go on being here but let me be as I am. Nothing more. I went into the living room, sat down, and spent a restless twenty-five minutes reading a magazine, then I decided to leave and I walked out. I felt a little like a clumsy boy intruding on a grown-up’s business.

I never felt any need to refer to the episode but I vaguely remember she graciously explained things to my complete satisfaction. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have felt it a loss or mystery. Not by then. By then I could postulate that she had developed a certain kind of fearlessness out of having lived in fear, a perverse ethereality out of an idea that all vitality centered around the gonads, and even the very hyper-alertness of her mind out of a bent for revery. Yet I could still be disagreeably affected by her itch for success, for knowing important people. I remember my wanton imagination would cut loose shockingly and I would think of her on all fours, crawling about panting with her tongue hanging out, oh! success! recognition! distinction! money! importance! Is it that there is a dark side to our face that we never see until it is reflected in another’s?

And was there also a certain solipsism about her that rubbed me the wrong way, not nearly as much as the craving for success? Was she tipped by a hair’s-breadth toward overassigning grandeur and mystery to her own experience and denying it in others? Occasionally I thought so then. I remember one time in her apartment just after I read her latest poems, saying to her, Ilse, you baffle me, you seem to have two vocabularies. In your conversation you cut the world down to size very thoroughly with fucks and balls and dreck and other pleasant pungencies, but in your poetry not only is there no trace of them, but I find words that I don’t even know the meaning of; it’s almost a matter of two different ways of looking at life, one for what the world is and another for your subjective experience.

She said, finally, all right, let me concede some truth to your point for the sake of our discussion, but then what is so remarkable about it? The world today touches us as an obscenity and is viciously set to prevent us from building an altar, and what divinity there is lies exclusively in personal experience. Now in my conversation, as you note, I give the world its proper meed, and why not?—dreck unto dreck—but in my personal experience I find a great and terrible drama in what is celestial and what is clay, and that’s what I try to express. Brecht says, erst kommt das Fressen and the world grovels at his feet for being such an unsparing realist, including your Communist friend Paul—people want to wash out the dirtiness of their spirtual linen in the waters of a struggle for social justice and it cannot be done, all it does is produce dirty justice.

I said, Ilse, aren’t you misstating the problem a bit? She said, possibly I am, but then I’m not really interested in making the world secure for anything but poetry; you said a few minutes ago there were words in my poems that you didn’t know, would you tell me what they were? I remember looking down at her long poem which I was still holding in my hand and saying, my vocabulary is a modest one, what about nidulation, viduage, menisciform, pilose, stegnosis, renitent? Ilse said, what about them? I said, I don’t know what they mean. She said, you should be ashamed of yourself, you call yourself a literate man. I said, I am ashamed of myself and I shall no longer call myself a literate man. She said in a hurt tone, would you at least concede I might have felt urgent reason for using those words, not merely for impressing anybody? We argued that night, and I don’t think we convinced each other of anything. I walked out of her apartment and downstairs holding the same idea of Ilse that I had held when I walked in. I felt that in the meeting of herself and the world, she was giving herself a little too much the best of it, possibly holding herself a bit too dearly and the world a bit too cheaply. Then too I probably had a gently disquieting feeling of having thrown good time after a rather bad cause. The world was going up in smoke around us and there was Ilse worrying that it wasn’t erecting altars and beating the outer fringes of semantic exactitude with illation and nidulation and myriarch and tirl. I recall resting on a bench here quite a while afterward, letting her voice subside gradually and give over to this same norm, this same quiet.

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Sitting here now I muse on how easily life can fade out even the important people in our lives. And Ilse wasn’t that important. In a few months I tired of the bogus literary agency and I said to the owner, my life calls me elsewhere, friend, farewell. I no longer saw Ilse daily. In a few weeks or months I didn’t see her at all. The fading process set in and took the color from her face, muted the resonance of her voice. Then the Second World War came and that really was an avalanche to bury forever the semblance of whoever or whatever had been a thread of coherence. One night I walked into a restaurant on Eighth Street and there sat Ilse, alone, near the window, evidently finishing her dinner. I didn’t recognize her at first but I knew I knew her. It didn’t feel like fifteen years, it felt more like a hundred and fifty years, like reincarnation verified beyond doubt. She held a cup of coffee arrested in midair and I was standing there holding my hat and coat like a robot. We came inevitably to the conclusion that this was fact, not phantasmagoria. Soon I was seated at her table and we were talking.

She was a vastly changed woman. That was my impression as soon as I saw her, and it deepened with every minute that passed. I sat there, the floor heaving under me and a nervous storm all through me. I was too engrossed to be aware of it, much less to understand it. Gradually things assumed a bit of clarity. It was Ilse all right. She had changed, I had changed, the time, the place, the earth itself, everything. But, there we were.

Ilse’s lips as I remembered them had almost always been slightly open and apart and in a certain curlicue. It was an expression that seemed to leave her face ever prepared to break into a supercilious smile, a smile of amusement. I used to think if Gabriel, or whoever, popped out of the floor and announced the end of the world in five minutes, Ilse would have that supercilious smile on tap and murmur, could I perhaps have an extension of two minutes to finish this rahther int’rusting poeym? Her face had had certain prominences, certain bulging convexities that suggested indulgences of ego, her skin had had a creaminess right out of Colette and Renoir and Italian morbidezza. It was all gone. I thought at first it might be my angle of vision, it might be the changes in myself but, no, it was really gone. Her lips when they weren’t open for words or sipping, were firmly closed and in a straight line, her face had grown thinner. Her manner was ardent in a certain way and straightforward and I don’t remember that she uttered one critical or iconoclastic word about anything or anyone. She was no longer living in the Village, she was married to a man who was in business, she had an adopted daughter, they lived in Bronxville. She had come to the Village to have dinner and spend the evening with a friend, a last surviving friend, a woman who painted and who wrote. Something had gone wrong, the friend was not at home, and here she was.

No, she was no longer writing, at least not then. No. I asked, why not? She thought for a moment, then she said, I suppose I could say I wearied of rejection slips and no publication but I don’t believe that explanation, at least not as the essential one, no, as closely as I could probe the truth, it has seemed to me that I could no longer feel that the writing of poetry was a sapient function.

I said to Ilse, what is a sapient function? how would you define it? Ilse said very quietly, I’m afraid I shall have to beg off, I can only say that to me poetry has always had a vatic role, a something we perceive on the edge of awareness, a whisper we hear, but today people feel that only a shout or a dramatic declaration does justice to the important things, that to me is the death of poetry and an end to its sapient function. I said, but don’t you miss it, don’t you miss the writing? She looked white-faced and strained beyond limits, she said, I tell myself I don’t, I tell myself I plough the moment of heightened awareness back into a better grasp of life instead of making a poem of it.

No, this woman Ilse was not the woman I remembered from fifteen years ago. Yet of course she was. All that engrossed hour that I spent sitting at her table and talking was a tingling thing in which at every moment I was at work aligning Ilse as she was then with Ilse as she had been. It was exhausting. At times it was painful. My inner retina hurt from being a palimpsest on which the Ilse of that moment was crowding and clashing and rubbing in a quarrelsome way against the Ilse of that vanished time that lay so distantly on the other side of the war and God alone knew how many other quakes of history. Gone were the four-letter words, the obscenities by which she had felt she had to prevail over an obscene world, gone was the gonadal norm of value, gone was that posture of fastidiousness in which every ray of sunlight had to place itself elegantly and exquisitely across anything it touched in order to avoid her supercilious dismissal of it, gone was that overweening confidence that but for the stupidity and crassness of the cultural milieu she would be a greatly acclaimed and successful artist. All gone. But who was her successor, who was this woman, this Ilse? A woman vastly chastened by life? A woman whose genuine talents and insight had driven her into a corner out of which she had found her way with some myterious moral reserve? A woman who had not got what she wanted, and so had learned to want what she got? A woman who had learned simply that it was easier to get along with the world by talking pretty instead of talking harsh?

Then it was time to go. I reached for my coat and hat and stood up. Her head was lowered and her eyes were down, and it was deliberate and it was gentle and it was a tremendous reproof. Not a word, not a murmur, not a flicker of an eyebrow, just lowered eyes and I felt mocked, as if I were in the presence of the earlier Ilse who was saying: must little boys pick up their little playthings and run off to their little games for their little easy moments of fellowship? I stood there flattened out, all the more so because the Ilse of that moment would not mock anybody. Finally she looked up, reached for her handbag, pulled out a card and handed it to me. She said, won’t you please take my address, won’t you please come and visit me? There were two or three seconds of silence as we looked at each other, and I said, I will come to see you, Ilse, as soon as I am a little steadier on my feet. She still had her eyes on me, charging me to remember what I once said I stood for, and spoke as within a spell and said, please come to see me, I speak from the heart. I said, yes, Ilse, and walked away.

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I think it was an autumn night and the air felt cool as I stepped into the outdoors of Eighth Street. The air would have felt cool if it had been a sweltering summer night, that moment of being popped from the engorged confinement of that restaurant into the open space. I did not notice anything of what was going on around me, the Saturday night people seeking excitement and entertainment, the people at store windows, the automobiles, the whatever. I floated along in a mood, turned right on Fifth Avenue, made my obeisances to the familiar buildings and headed for this park, the old park which has been a symbol of the place to leave and the place to come home to for a rest, for meditation, for the achievement of clarity about the places I have been. Whatever mood I had, Ilse’s words kept breaking in from time to time in some rhythmic periodicity I wasn’t quite up to understanding: I speak from the heart, I speak from the heart. I picked a bench not too far from this one and sat down. There was still a substantial part of the evening left, I could claim it for whatever I wanted, and what I wanted then was to discharge from my being the force of the experience of the past hour and a half. Part of it had already slipped away in far time now that I was here in the old park, my immemorial home grounds. But the remainder burned scorchingly. I was in disgrace enough when I had stepped into that restaurant but now I was in disgrace on top of disgrace. The trees, the buildings, the people had taken up Ilse’s words and made them a chant: I speak from the heart. I hadn’t understood them when they were uttered, I didn’t understand them then. I looked around me searching for the ancient oracle, I remember saying, well, friend park, what have you to say to me now? The park didn’t have anything to say to me. There are times when a tree seems neutral, night-time unconcerned, and human faces diffident beyond all bearing. It was that way then. Twenty minutes passed before I felt strength returning, strength being that function that hoists the permanent over the passing. I felt its timeless voice in me: I have lived, I remember, I am constant.

What had Ilse meant by her words, I speak from the heart? Was it one of those ceremonial or sentimental phrases tacked on by people to sweeten the manner of what is otherwise a neutral if not harsh fact? Possibly, but not likely. Not Ilse, not as I knew her. Even if she wasn’t writing now, Ilse was a poet à l’outrance, a poet who would writhe in mortification and die before she would let herself fall into loose speech. Nor could it be an emphasis of mere urgency, Ilse was too much of a realist for that. She would never believe that the mere urgency of anybody’s wish or need, her own included, made it just or right. What then could it possibly mean for Ilse to say, I speak from the heart? Was it perhaps one of those winged things to be understood on the fly or not at all, fated for a cloudy death when stretched out on a table for analysis? I couldn’t accept that. There I sat, a man with an idea badly missing—or was it simply a state of repose that was missing? I didn’t know but I was sure I didn’t want the repose back unless it came bringing the missing idea with it.

When a satisfactory explanation began to dawn on me, I rejected it at first, but the explanation kept coming back, not to be waved off, and so it came to me that what Ilse meant in saying that her invitation came from the heart was that it was cast in absolute mutuality. She was saying, whatever reason you might have for not wanting to accept this invitation has been recognized in advance and provided for. She was saying, whatever other eye your own eye feels it would like to have the service of in seeing what it wants to see, I will be that eye and whatever mind your mind would like the help of in pondering the idea you wish to ponder, I will be that mind.

I arose from the bench and just wandered along the paved walks for another half hour or so. I had no quarrel with any of the contorted faces I might have passed, none with the unsightly buildings around the Square, none with anybody or anything. The autumn night was in bonus form and quite beautiful and standing up well against the city guff. I was stirred with the sense I felt I had found in Ilse’s words and in a heady mood to go on conjugating the possibilities of a discourse from the heart.

I’m not sure I know the reason I never did pay Ilse a visit. It wasn’t that I suspected even a touch of rhetoric in her words. That wouldn’t have stopped me even if I had. I can only stammer that the designs to which my imagination has been summoned at different times in my life have lain at too much distance from where my hand was working an actual shuttle. It happens that way. It is only now that a dismay in full strength settles on me and I ponder the meaning of another cue I missed. But it is all water over a dam that time has set in painless distance.

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Time, that quiet tireless alchemist working under and over and all around my life, the weaver of inexorable revelations. Sitting here this nice peaceful afternoon and sopping up the free minutes I have before I go to keep an appointment, I tell myself, why bother with time or with memory or anything that interferes with the total immediacy of that young woman over there walking with her young sons idly? Or that figure on a bicycle near the Arch. Or the tree over there, the bench, the people as they are this instant, the buildings. They are now. I am now, I never was before, and I never will be after. The only good thing to be with regard to time is oblivious of it. That is why it is good to compress all that extended duration that lies back of me into its most distilled essence: I have lived, I remember, I am constant. That says it for me. And yet, and yet, and yet, am I really done with the subject of time? Is he not an inexorable creditor who steals in by the back door immediately after being ushered out by the front door clamoring for his due? Take that man on the bicycle near the Arch over there, could I so quickly recognize him for a man over forty if my mind weren’t steeped in time and therefore able to discern the signs of time? The way he pushes the pedals, the way he leans forward, the set of his torso, the grip on the handlebars, it all tells a story of time understandable more readily to one who has been in time. Yes, time talks to time. Again and again I am thrown back on the amount of time my awareness has been stalking the world in order to squeeze out whatever intelligence I can. Occasionally they try to entice me with how nice it would be to view the Arch over there as something entirely in the present moment, forget the past, ignore the future. I answer, no, thank you. I tell them, I see all you see in the present moment but I see a little more for having seen it forty-six years ago and remembering it.

And my awareness of Ilse and Paul and that seaman and the others who were in their moment, what of that? What remains of it? Anything? Nothing? All that remains is a tremored sense of sped intervals, no memories, no ghosts, no relics. I who am now, also once was. Only a sense of intervals, hanging in the air around me like fine ash ever so faintly and fragrantly scented, left of a great tree created for burning and fated to go on burning as long as I am here to witness and to participate. It is that way.

And what then goes and what stays? What is? That was what I was asking when I sat down here, wasn’t it? Could I make short work of the question simply by declaring, some things go, some things stay, my life is a changed same since it began, everything is fixed in flux and all flux is with a fixity? No. No, that doesn’t satisfy me. I set out for a firm definition and that is what I will give myself. What then is constancy and how am I constant? I think constancy is a state of possessing and exercising a norm of being again and again and again. A norm of being that is so utterly satisfying, so prominent, and so recurrent that it becomes referent, prophet, beacon, judge. Having been so once, to be again and again. Just as the poet says, so was it when my life began, so is it now I am a man.

It is growing late. My old friend will soon be expecting me. Just now a boy sat down on the other half of this bench and is listening to a rhythmic rock tune from his transistor radio, and I am gently astonished to find my foot inside my shoe moving with the rhythm.

I am up off the bench now and walking toward my old friend’s apartment on Waverly Place. It feels good to be in motion now after the interval of rest. I can only conjecture on what turn of taste keeps him in the Village after all these years, but I concede he has been able to go on undiminished and achieve sufficient renewal to be himself. I think I can predict what his apartment will look like, what books will be on his shelves, what pictures on the walls, how the light will enter the windows and the view it will give of the street or the backyard. Yet whatever I find there I am confident I have an adequate repertoire of anticipations and it will only be a matter of bringing up the right one. And if it makes me happy to see him as I hope it will, then best of all I will shed all sense of reality as anticipated or not, because happiness is one state that needs no support to make it sit better.

Yes, it is a state in which I pass unchallenged, in which I do not need to show my card of identity, not even though I have it easily available and in most compact and distilled essence. It is a state within which the things of my furthest and most recessed past are brought up instantaneously into the here and now, like stragglers far from the fold brought home by a miraculous beacon. Then am I inclined to view the passage of time as a thing benign or harmless or neutral? No, absolutely not. Certainly not where it stands for a dimming or extinction of life, not where it brings outcomes all against my wishes. Only where it means intervals setting changes off from each other, only because there I have no choice, only because I can’t imagine things existing outside of time. Then what about my own sense of constancy, my sense of the timeless and the same? Ah, that pertains only to me and is an element only in my experience. Whom else or what else am I, in any final sense, authorized to speak for?

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