torical truth—that no vagary can help hut dash itself to death against the edifice. To know that every man in a trench coat carrying a briefcase comes tape-recorder-laden from the FBI! It is too easy, much too easy, and that is my objection. All right. Let their tendrils tremble in the noon sun, these white etiolated young men and women, raw sensibilities attuned to the transgressions of the Establishment. Let them cluck like capons over their newspaper headlines. Let the breasty young girls with their fat knees and torn sandals tell me about Cuba; let the baby-befatted shaggy-headed young men of the sophomore class explain Marx. Let them sing folk songs against Franco, and drink rot gut out of paper cups, and propitiate God knows what bloodless deities with the incense from a thousand filter-tipless cigarettes. That’s their business. Their business, too, the copulation of white unwashed bodies on broken sofas, the bloody six-week embryo torn from the womb of an emancipated girl, the naked sexual play of people who have given themselves over to sensation because they have substituted history for love. All that is their business. They do not have to invite me to their parties; I shall not invite them to mine.
A Few Small Trumpets
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