They never know it will take a thousand years, and perhaps a thousand times a thousand years; they think it will be tomorrow; that is the trouble with them—it is the trouble with them all.
I lay in the Palace Polonia, with the European cars blatting in the sacrificial street and the trains hooting across the moribund way and it vividly occurred to me that in a few more years Hitler's men would blow down these corridors and blow up those cobblestones. I lay in Jericho.
I thought, finally, about a palm frond.
There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament, came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal.
While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning—the meaning of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea—but the felt significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process completed itself in that instant—a change came in the endocrines. Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite—the yin-yang—and hence, sometimes, joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along.
I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then, and all its other meanings. And that was that.
I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea.
That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as usual.
Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea.