Monday, November 18th

AT DAWN, heavy frost on the grass, a congregation of crows cawing in the woods behind the house … I heard them yesterday on our walk. (I should say the walk, as it is the walk through the woods and around in a circle that I make every morning around twelve with Tamas, and Bramble when she so chooses.) Perhaps there is a wounded deer dying somewhere? I heard the ominous leaden sound of a shot just after dawn. It is the season of dread now, the deer hunting season. On the walk I talk all the time to warn anyone around not to shoot.

As I drove out with Richard Henry two or three days ago we met a sinister-looking man with a shotgun. I stopped to be sure he understood that the property is posted. He said he was going far into the woods—somewhere not posted, he implied. I know that people need their deer for meat this autumn of soaring prices, but it is hard to describe the fear and horror I felt seeing that shotgun. Anything that moves is in danger. More than the immediate dread, I felt fierce revolt against guns in general and so many people every day who become murderers as if by accident because they have this tremendous power to kill in their hands—a man loses his temper and “bang! bang!” his wife falls dead or his child. How can we accept such a state of affairs? How have we allowed the gun manufacturers to hold us at bay? After all the assassinations and daily “incidents” there is still no gun law. It is almost unbelievable.

In the perfect silence this morning, not a wave breaking and the ocean absolutely flat and blue, at any moment peace will be shattered by a terrifying explosion. I remember Perley who had hunted as a young man, but in old age no longer wanted to kill. And I have heard of others like him.

Yet this deer hunting is legitimate. What is far more sinister is the number of children in New York City, fourteen and fifteen, who hunt down old women, exactly as though they were animals, following the human track to its lair, then killing for a few dollars or a TV set. What have we done to our children that such indifference is possible? A total disconnection between the act and the human terror and despair involved?

A friend telephoned the other day to tell me of her traumatic experience of finding the body of her cat in the road (it happened to me with Bel-Gazou while I was still in Nelson, Bel-Gazou, Bramble’s brother, and the dearest little cat I ever had. And I remember how I howled with pain and outrage like a Jew at the Wailing Wall). “Rigor mortis,” K. said. “It is something I had never experienced.” The whole grief and outrage will be with her for weeks and some part of her will never get over it.

How to make these boys, so detached from and beyond humanity come into their humanness? Do they have bad dreams afterward? In their sleep do they become human again? It is anomie carried to its farthest limit, the moment when lawlessness has crept into the inmost person and that person is totally detached.

War does it. My Lai. But we are in a period where torture is taken for granted almost everywhere, and where the so-called civilized peoples must go on eating candy and drinking whiskey while millions die of hunger. So one has to extrapolate the morally indifferent boys to the whole ethos in which they live. And at the root of it all is the lack of imagination. If we had imagined what we were doing in Vietnam it would have had to be stopped. But the images of old women holding shattered babies or of babies screaming ended by passing before our eyes but never penetrating to consciousness where they could be experienced. Are we paying for Vietnam now by seeing our children become monsters?

I am more and more convinced that in the life of civilizations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that has not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything—ends in anomie. The structures break down and there is nothing to “hold onto.”

It is understandable that at such times religious fanatics arise and the fundamentalists rise up in fury. Hatred rather than love dominates.

How does one handle it? The greatest danger, as I see it in myself, is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence—nature, the arts, human love. Maybe that is why the pandas in the London Zoo brought me back to poetry for the first time in two years.