This morning it’s a lovely spring day, the sun glowing in a cool blue sky and the air caressing the tips of trees like a spark alive on an exhausted torch (head for the hills, children, Father William’s prose is turning purple again; the last time this happened we called the doctor and the doctor said we should put him to bed with a poetry book and), just the perfectest, splendidest day on which to receive a letter from my old friend Jedediah Bone, who has spent the last thirty years uncomfortably convinced that the trouble with the twentieth century, the real trouble, the really real genuine ratsbane trouble with it, is that it has sold its soul to Technology, in the pointless hunt for Wealth, and has found itself Empty, suffering with the gobbywobbles and the swine acedia, yea Apathetic, yea Mindless, yea even Rootless (hey, Root! Can you hear me, down there? Root! Wake up, Root! Turn over a New Leaf!), yea Barren and Unfulfilled and Mired in the Flesh, yea Sodom, yea Gomorrah, yea yea yea. And much more to the same tune, with much cacklings and much mickle muckle muchness of gesturations, claps of thunder from the margins and the postscripta, interlineations, transpositions, knockabouts, and your usual run of trills and bombas-tardimenti.
It is a small man, trembling, showing me his ticket. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but, sir, this is the train for Chicago, isn’t it? See here, I have a reservation in the Economics Car, and I rather thought from your discourse that . . .”
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