Excerpts

An arresting quality in modern man is his attitude toward his natural surroundings, a quality likely to get him in trouble and even shorten his stay on earth. He commonly thinks of himself as having been here since the beginning—older than the crab—and he also likes to think he’s destined to stay to the bitter end. Actually, he is a late comer, and there are moments when he shows every sign of being an early leaver—a patron who bows out after a few gaudy and memorable scenes. It is entirely in keeping with man’s feeling about nature that when he suddenly notices his drinking fountain losing pressure, he should ascend to heaven and beat a cloud over the ears. Petulance, coupled with insatiable curiosity, and the will to dominate. “Somebody doesn’t want it to rain, I take it,” said the Mayor, while the lightning played all around his words.

Up early this day, trying to decide whether or not to bequeath our brain to our alma mater, which is making a collection of such stuff. It struck us as odd that the decision will have to be made by the brain itself and that no other part of us—a foot or a gall bladder—can be in on the matter, although all are, in a way, concerned. Our head is small and we fear that our brain may suffer by comparison if arranged on a shelf with others. Spent part of the morning composing an inscription to go with our brain, but all we got was this:

Observe, quick friend, this quiet noodle,
This kit removed from its caboodle.
Here sits a brain at last unhinged,
On which too many thoughts impinged.

The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart—over so many years, through so many cheap curtain-raisers. It is not destroyed even by all the arts and craftiness of the destroyers, having an essential simplicity that is everlasting and triumphant, at the end of confusion. We once went out at night with coon-hunters and we were aware that it was not so much the promise of the kill that took the men away from their warm homes and sent them through the cold shadowy woods, it was something more human, more mystical—something even simpler. It was the night, and the excitement of the note of the hound, first heard, then not heard. It was the natural world, seen at its best and most haunting, unlit except by stars, impenetrable except to the knowing and the sympathetic.

We commend to historians the steer wrestler who has been commuting between Chicago and New York by plane, in order to throw steers in the rodeos of both cities. In this pendulous cowboy, if cowboy is the word for him, our century comes to a sort of head: the winged ranch hand, his eye on two steers at once, and the steers a thousand miles apart yet capable of being thrown by the winged, neither steer needing to be thrown, each existing only to be thrown. The cowboy rises from the head of the fallen animal, dusts the seat of his pants, walks stiff-legged to the waiting airliner. The spectators, yearning for the open West and its herds of cattle on the ranges, rise from their mezzanine seats, stiff-legged, dust off their unfulfilled desires, walk to the exits.