OCR Text |
Show He smiles; it is a subtle argument, firmly rooted in the biological sciences, but one which he knows is persuasive. He flips forward through the manuscript; he finds to his pleasure that it grows less pedestrian in its science, more eloquent in promoting its argument: Bury the old, he has written, . . . initiate the new. No man can be loyal to his kind who fills a world with used ideas, disintegrating practices, an outworn mind . . . An objective admiration grows in him, the kind of distanced admiration he has always felt for work that is good, whether it is his own or someone else's. He is pleased, and pleased too that the has managed to keep all the little personal hopes and humiliations out of it: there is not a word in the Defense about the discomforts of insistent and accumulating arthritis, or about the indignities of superannuated status, or any of the other consternations which defeat the old. It is an argument from responsibility, from an ultimate concern for the condition and future of one's world. But the conclusion is somehow difficult. He takes up the pencil, puts the manuscript portions back in the pile. He places the lined pad at an exact 45° angle on the surface of his desk, poises the pencil to write. He studies the lines he had just been writing, but he sees that his handwriting has become crabbed and uneven, not at all like the bold stroke in which he had composed the earlier parts of the Defense. |