【正文】 he choked, sank, came up. The rock, lately weighted with boys, seemed to rear up out of the water as their weight was removed. They were flying down past him, now, into the water。 under him, in the water, the dim shapes of the swimmers had disappeared. Then one and then another of the boys came up on the far side of the barrier of rock, and he understood that they had swum through some gap or hole in it. He plunged down again. He could see nothing through the stinging salt water but the blank rock. When he came up, the boys were all on the diving rock, preparing to attempt the feat again. And now, in a panic of failure, he yelled up , in English, Look at me ! Look ! and he began splashing and kicking in the water like a foolish dog.1613 They looked down gravely, frowning. He knew the frown. At moments of failure, when he clowned to claim his mother39。s throw. They were of that coast, all of them burned smooth dark brown, and speaking a language he did not understand. To be with them, of them, was a craving that filled his whole body. He swam a little closer。s old enough to be safe without me. Have I been keeping him too close? He mustn39。ve had enough, e to the big beach. Or just go straight back to the villa, if you like. She walked away, that bare arm, now slightly reddened from yesterday39。t spend more than six months at a stretch in any other European country, home to America as to a country more stimulating than depressing. I brave the brutality and the guilt in order to be on the scene. I shall be backLesson sixteen Through the Tunnel 161 Going to the shore on the first morning of the holiday, the young English boy stopped at a turning of the path and looked down at a wild and rocky bay , and then over to the crowded beach he knew so well from other years. His mother walked on in front of him, carrying a brightstriped bag in one hand. Her other arm, swinging loose , was very white in the sun. The boy watched that white, naked arm, and turned his eyes, which had a frown behind them, towards the bay and back again to his mother. When she felt he was not with her, she swung round . Oh, there you are,Jerry. She said. She looked impatient, then smiled. Why, darling, would you rather not e with me? Would you rather... She frowned, conscientiously worrying over what amusements he might secretly be longing for which she had been too busy or too careless to imagine. He was very familiar with that anxious, apologetic smile. Contrition sent him running after her. And yet , as he ran, he looked back over his shoulder at the wild bay, and all morning, as he played on the safe beach, he was thinking of it.162 Next morning, when it was time for the routine of swimming and sunbathing, his mother said, Are you tired of the usual beach , Jerry? Would you like to go somewhere else?163 Oh, no! he said quickly, smiling at her out of that unfailing impulse of contrition a sort of chivalry . Yet, walking down the path with her, he blurted out , I39。m not suggesting that writers and artists have the task of finding a solution to the American mess , but they can at least clarify its nature and show how it relates to the human condition in general. Literature often reacts magnificently to an ambience of unease or apparent breakdown. 1516 I am not suggesting that Americans sit back and wait for a transient period of mistrust and despair to resolve itself. Americans living here and now have a right to an improvement in the quality of their lives, and they themselves must do something about it. It is not right that men and women should fear to go on the street at night, and that they should sometimes fear the police as much as the criminals, both of whom sometimes look like mirror images of each other. There are too many guns about, and the disarming of the police should be a natural aspect of the disarming of the entire citizenry .1517 American politics, at both the state and the Federal levels, is too much concerned with the protection of large fortunes. The wealth qualification for the aspiring politician is taken for granted。 The agony that America is undergoing is not to be associated with breakdown as much as with the parturition of selfknowledge. 1514 It has been assumed that the youth of America has been in the vanguard of the discovery of both the disease and the cure. The various escapist movements, however, have mitted the gross error of assuming that original sin rested with their elders, their rulers, and that they themselves could manifest their essential innocence by building little neoEdens. The drug culture could confirm that the paradisal vision was available to all who sought it. But instant ecstasy has to be purchased, like any other modity, and, in economic terms, that passive life involves parasitism. Practically all of the crime I encountered in New York was a preying of the opiumeaters on the working munity. There has to be the snake in paradise. You can39。 she is Europe39。 evil had no place in America.1513 At last, with the Vietnam War, Americans are beginning to realize that they are subject to original sin as much as Europeans are. Some things the massive crime figures, for instance can now be explained only in terms of absolute evil. America is no longer Europe39。 you can be fired for treading the path of experimental enterprises.159 I know that American technical genius, and most of all the moon landing, seems to give the lie to too summary a condemnation of the educational system , but there is more to education than the segmental equipping of the mind. There is that transmission of the value of the past as a force still miraculously fertile and moving mostly absent from American education at all levels.1510 Of course, America was built on a rejection of the past. Even the basic Christianity which was brought to the continent in 1620 was of a novel and bizarre kind . And now America, filling in the vacuum left by the liquefied British Empire, has