2
It was a hell of a morning.
3
From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial.
You wouldn't be interested.
We'll go on, anyway.
What the hell else can a man do?
4
Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous.
The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway. It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning—the creation of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id, meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All these, and countless other "punishments"—which change with changing social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and differ from one home to another and one culture to another—set up such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate indignities.
Add to this the regimentations of school—the musts and must nots of classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in the passing years, fold in the Law—cop, truant officer, and prison bars—sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed, or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations), and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the adolescent, the adult.
Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence. Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze—at the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped. Detach him, that is to say, from Nature—deprive him of its experiences and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never know a spring's taste.
Set him to work at earning a living without acquaintance of how the whole of any living is made. On the contrary. Let his life's blood derive from some capillary of the flow. Let him take charge—not of house-building, or food-raising, or wood-gathering or fire-keeping, not of cookery or childbirthing or the weaving of fabrics—but of the twenty-eighth step in the manufacture of one size of ball bearings. Call this earning a living.