Read Online Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Joan Didion
Ads: Link
all the young and lonely and inarticulate, to all those who suspect that no one else in the world understands about beauty and hurt and love and brotherhood. Perhaps because she is older now, Miss Baez is sometimes troubled that she means, to a great many of her admirers, everything that is beautiful and true.
“I’m not very happy with my thinking about it,” she says. “Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Come on, Baez, you’re just like everybody else, ’ but then I’m not happy with that either.”
“Not everybody else has the voice,” Ira Sandperl interrupts dotingly.
“Oh, it’s all right to have the voice , the voice is all right...”
She breaks off and concentrates for a long while on the buckle of her shoe.
So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences. “One day we went around the room and told a little about ourselves,” she confides, “and I discovered that boy , I’d had it pretty easy.” The late afternoon sun streaks the clean wooden floor and the birds sing in the scrub oaks and the beautiful children sit in their coats on the floor and listen to Ira Sandperl.
“Are you a vegetarian, Ira?” someone asks idly.
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Tell them, Ira,” Joan Baez says. “It’s nice.”
He leans back and looks toward the ceiling. “I was in the Sierra once.” He pauses, and Joan Baez smiles approvingly. “I saw this magnificent tree growing out of bare rock, thrusting itself...and I thought all right , tree , if you want to live that much, all right ! All right ! OK! I won’t chop you! I won’t eat you! The one thing we all have in common is that we all want to liver
“But what about vegetables,” a girl murmurs.
“Well, I realized, of course, that as long as I was in this flesh and this blood I couldn’t be perfectly nonviolent.”
It is getting late. Fifty cents apiece is collected for the next day’s lunch, and someone reads a request from the Monterey County Board of Supervisors that citizens fly American flags to show that “Kooks, Commies, and Cowards do not represent our County,” and someone else brings up the Vietnam Day Committee, and a dissident member who had visited Carmel.
“Marv’s an honest-to-God nonviolenter,” Ira Sandperl declares. “A man of honesty and love.”
“He said he’s an anarchist,” someone interjects doubtfully.
“Right,” Ira Sandperl agrees. “Absolutely.”
“Would the V. D. C. call Gandhi bourgeois?”
“Oh, they must know better, but they lead such bourgeois lives themselves...”
“That’s so true,” says the dreamy blond boy with the violet marble. “You walk into their office, they’re so unfriendly, so unfriendly and cold...”
Everyone smiles lovingly at him. By now the sky outside is the color of his marble, but they are all reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm.
1966
Comrade Laski, C. P. U. S. A. (M.-L.)
michael laski , also known as M. I. Laski, is a relatively obscure young man with deep fervent eyes, a short beard, and a pallor which seems particularly remarkable in Southern California. With his striking appearance and his relentlessly ideological diction, he looks and talks precisely like the popular image of a professional revolutionary, which in fact he is. He was born twenty-six years ago in Brooklyn, moved as a child to Los Angeles, dropped out of U. C. L. A. his sophomore year to organize for the Retail Clerks, and now, as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party U. S. A.
“I’m not very happy with my thinking about it,” she says. “Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Come on, Baez, you’re just like everybody else, ’ but then I’m not happy with that either.”
“Not everybody else has the voice,” Ira Sandperl interrupts dotingly.
“Oh, it’s all right to have the voice , the voice is all right...”
She breaks off and concentrates for a long while on the buckle of her shoe.
So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences. “One day we went around the room and told a little about ourselves,” she confides, “and I discovered that boy , I’d had it pretty easy.” The late afternoon sun streaks the clean wooden floor and the birds sing in the scrub oaks and the beautiful children sit in their coats on the floor and listen to Ira Sandperl.
“Are you a vegetarian, Ira?” someone asks idly.
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Tell them, Ira,” Joan Baez says. “It’s nice.”
He leans back and looks toward the ceiling. “I was in the Sierra once.” He pauses, and Joan Baez smiles approvingly. “I saw this magnificent tree growing out of bare rock, thrusting itself...and I thought all right , tree , if you want to live that much, all right ! All right ! OK! I won’t chop you! I won’t eat you! The one thing we all have in common is that we all want to liver
“But what about vegetables,” a girl murmurs.
“Well, I realized, of course, that as long as I was in this flesh and this blood I couldn’t be perfectly nonviolent.”
It is getting late. Fifty cents apiece is collected for the next day’s lunch, and someone reads a request from the Monterey County Board of Supervisors that citizens fly American flags to show that “Kooks, Commies, and Cowards do not represent our County,” and someone else brings up the Vietnam Day Committee, and a dissident member who had visited Carmel.
“Marv’s an honest-to-God nonviolenter,” Ira Sandperl declares. “A man of honesty and love.”
“He said he’s an anarchist,” someone interjects doubtfully.
“Right,” Ira Sandperl agrees. “Absolutely.”
“Would the V. D. C. call Gandhi bourgeois?”
“Oh, they must know better, but they lead such bourgeois lives themselves...”
“That’s so true,” says the dreamy blond boy with the violet marble. “You walk into their office, they’re so unfriendly, so unfriendly and cold...”
Everyone smiles lovingly at him. By now the sky outside is the color of his marble, but they are all reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm.
1966
Comrade Laski, C. P. U. S. A. (M.-L.)
michael laski , also known as M. I. Laski, is a relatively obscure young man with deep fervent eyes, a short beard, and a pallor which seems particularly remarkable in Southern California. With his striking appearance and his relentlessly ideological diction, he looks and talks precisely like the popular image of a professional revolutionary, which in fact he is. He was born twenty-six years ago in Brooklyn, moved as a child to Los Angeles, dropped out of U. C. L. A. his sophomore year to organize for the Retail Clerks, and now, as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party U. S. A.
Similar Books
