Life Is All Getting Used To What

A Year And A Half After The End Of The War And The German Occupation, Paris Was Muted And Looked Bruised And Forlorn. Everywhere I Went, I Sensed The Tracks Of The Wolf That Had Tried To Devour The City. But Paris Proved Inedible, As It Had Been Ever Since Its Tribal Beginnings On An Island In The Seine, The Ile De La Cité.

If A Person Had Accused Him Of Meanness, He Could Have Defended Himself. But With A Dog - You Did Something Cheap To It When You Were Sure No One Was Looking, And It Was As Though You Had Done It In Front Of A Mirror.

And What Movies We Saw! All The Actors And Actresses Whose Photographs I Collected, With Their Look Of Eternity! Their Radiance, Their Eyes, Their Faces, Their Voices, The Suavity Of Their Movements! Their Clothes! Even In Prison Movies, The Stars Shone In Their Prison Clothes As If Tailors Had Accompanied Them In Their Downfall.

Labels Not Only Free Us From The Obligation To Think Creatively; They Numb Our Sensibilities, Our Power To Feel. During The Vietnam War, The Phrase Body Count Entered Our Vocabulary. It Is An Ambiguous Phrase, Inorganic, Even Faintly Sporty. It Distanced Us From The Painful Reality Of Corpses, Of Dead, Mutilated People.

The Truth Came Slowly Like A Story Told By People Interrupting Each Other.