【正文】 life that it had yet lived, and all its fear of the death that now threatened it. In its eye he saw the green gloom of willowsleeved canals in cool decay, an eye filled with panic and concern for the remaining veins of life that circled like a silent whirlpool around it. Where do fishes go when they die? he wondered. The glow of longremembered lives was mirrored in its eyes, and the memory of cunning curves executed in the moving shadows from reed to reed as it scattered the smaller fry and was itself chased by bigger fish was also pictured there. Arthur felt mobile waves of hope running the length of its squamous body from head to tail. He removed the hook, and threw it back into the water. He watched it flash away and disappear.147 One more chance, he said to himself。 but if you or any of your pals e back to the bait, it39。s curtains for 39。 em . With float bobbing before him once more he sat down to wait. This time it was war, and he wanted fish to take home, either to cook in the pan or feed to the cat. It39。s trouble for you and trouble for me, and all over a piece of bait, The fattest worm of the lot is fastened to the hook, so don39。t grumble when you feel that point sticking to your chops.148 And trouble for me it39。ll be, fighting every day until I die. Why do they make soldiers out of us when we39。re fighting up to the hilt as it is? Fighting with mothers and wives, landlords and gaffers, coppers, army, government. If it39。s not one thing it39。s another, apart from the work we have to do and the way we spend our wages. There39。s bound to be trouble in store for me every day of my life, because trouble it39。s always been and always will be. Born drunk and married blind, misbegotten into a strange and crazy world, dragged up through the dole and into the war with a gasmask on your clock, and the sirens rattling into you every night while you rot with scabies in an airraid shelter. Slung into khaki at eighteen, and when they let you out, you sweat again in a factory, grabbing for an extra pint, doing women at the weekend and getting to know whose husbands are on the nightshift, working with rotten guts and an aching spine , and nothing for it but money to drag you back there every Monday morning .149 Well, it39。s a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don39。t weaken, and if you know that the big wide world hasn39。t heard from you yet, no, not by a long way, though it won39。t be long now. 1410 The float bobbed more violently than before and, with a grin on his face, he began to wind in the reel.Lesson Fifteen Is America Falling Apart? 151 I am back in Bracciano, a castellated town about 13 miles north of Rome, after a year in New Jersey. I find the Italian Government still unstable, gasoline more expensive than anywhere in the world, butchers and bank clerks and tobacconists ready to go on strike at the drop of a hat, neofascists at their dirty work, the hammer and sickle painted on the rumps of public statues, a thousandlira note (officially worth about $) shrunk to the slightness of a dollar bill. 152 Nevertheless, it39。s delightful to be back. People are underpaid but they go through an act of liking their work, the open markets are luscious with esculent color , the munity is important than the state, the human condition is humorously accepted. The northern wind blows viciously today, and there39。s no central heating to turn on, but it will be pleasant when the wind drops. The two television channels are inadequate, but next Wednesday39。s return of an old Western is something to look forward to. Manifold consumption isn39。t important here. The quality of life has nothing to do with the quantity of brand names. What matters is talk, family, cheap wine in the open air, the wresting of minimal sweetness out of the longknown bitterness of living . I was spoiled in New Jersey.153 In New Jersey, I never had to shiver by a fire that wouldn39。t draw, or go without canned food . America made me develop new appetites in order to make proper use of the supermarket. A character in Evelyn Waugh39。s Put out More Flags said that the difference between prewar and postwar life was that, prewar, if one thing went wrong the day was ruined。 postwar, if one thing went right the day would be made. America is a prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong. Hence the neurosis, despair, the Kafka feeling that the whole marvelous fabric of American life is ing apart at the seams. 154 Let us stay for a while on this subject of consumption. American individualism, on the face of it an admirable philosophy, wishes to manifest itself in independence of the munity. You don39。t share things in mon。 you have your own things. A family39。s strength is signalized by its possessions. Herein lies a paradox. For the desire for possessions must eventually mean dependence on possessions. Freedom is slavery. Once let the acquisitive instinct burgeon, and there are ruggedly individual forces only too ready to make it e to full and monstrous blossom. New appetites are invented。 what to the European are bizarre luxuries bee, to the American, plain necessities. 155 During my year39。s stay in New Jersey I let my appetite flower into full Americanism except for one thing. I did not possess an automobile. This selfelected deprivation was a way into the nastier side of the consumer society. Where private ownership prevails, public amenities decay or are prevented from ing into being. The rundown rail services of America are something I try, vainly, to forget. The nightmare of filth, outside and in, that enfolds the trip from Springfield, Mass., to Grand Central Station would not be accepted in backward Europe. But far worse is the nightmare of travel in and around Los Angeles, where public transport does not exist and people are literally choking to death in their exhaust fumes . This is part of the price of individual ownership.156 But if