and ambitious Puerto Rican girl. He acts as if time does not touch him. But when I play the Bach suites or the Schubert trios—in fact, whenever Casals is mentioned—I think of him walking off that stage, forgetting his heart but not his dignity. I think of his musical genius and his artist’s simple outlook on the complexities of nations and politics. As a Spaniard, even a Catalan Spaniard, he thought first of dignity. But for this thought, and his genius, and the little Catalan flag, he would not be Pablo Casals.
Power, Politics and People, The Collected Writings of C. Wright Mills, ed. by Irving Louis Horowitz (Oxford, $8.50). Here is Mills coming from every angle at his central and obsessive concern: who has power, and why they shouldn’t. Power should be in the hands of intellectuals, not “crackpot realists,” should be used for “experiment,” not “patrioteering.” Brains, not wealth, should push society’s muscle. And the way to identify brain is by its abhorrence of wealth and those who possess it. Mills was a tragi-comically exaggerated case of the frustrated man of affairs in the frustrated teacher—Machiavelli retiring to write a manual for Lorenzo. He pretended, for most of his life, that he would be his own Lorenzo, but it is no accident that he ended as an apologist for the firing squads of Castro. Behind the denunciation of power was obsession with it, and behind the obsession was idolatry. He found, in Fidel, his god with a gun; and falling down, he worshipped him. w. ROMAN
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