Very Funny
Sirs:
I shall now tell you something very funny.
After a while will come a night when those intelligences on other stars will turn away from their eyepieces with marked scientific pleasure and note down the coming of another Nova to this universe.
Down here, after the flash of light has passed and the wind that flattens the redwoods has swept by and the sound has burst off toward emptiness, the ether will stop swirling and crash back in its place again. Thomas Mann and Alfred Einstein and Robinson Jeffers and Harry Truman and you and I and the spotted deer will stop twitching and lie in obedient silence.
And then, out from under his top-turtle town car will crawl the sturdy manufacturer who registered and secured all rights to, and seven weeks after V-J day, advertised his Atomic Hair Restorer in the larger department stores. This gentleman will be modestly unaware that he is the final surviving symbol of several million "business-as-usual" mentalities, will shake his fist at the void and say: "Jeez! The dirty sons-a-bitches! Weren't we just right not to sign any of their tricky international agreements—by God! Don't this just prove it!!"
And then, even as you and I and the wild blue iris and the tall buildings, he will crumple slowly down across the body of his chauffeur.
A prosperous New Year!
DAVE HOTCHKISS Big Sur, Calif.
Great Times
Sirs:
Young Henry Adams, writing from London to his brother, had this to say:
"I tell you these are great times. Man has mounted Science and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, Science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.
"Not only shall we be able to cruise in space, but I see no reason why some future generation shouldn't walk off like a beetle with the world on its back, or give it another rotary motion so that every zone should receive in turn its due portion of heat and light."
The date was 1862. And incidentally, England was having a great to-do about her Navy, whether to scrap her wooden ships or not.
FRED L. ABBOTT Bonneville, Ore.
Katz v. Rats
Sirs:
Please pass on my humble congratulations to whoever did the piece on my book [The Liberal Tradition] in the current issue [TIME, Dec. 3]. The overtones ring so clear that even the clamorous silence of the opposition is broken. The real joke is to watch people reading and thinking What a clever parable! and then suddenly coming to and saying But yes, that really is what it will be like! I had often—in this environment—reflected on the Katzes, but I never thought of the ratzes—and yet, now I remember (and wish I hadn't) how they used to look at us, and wait for us, in the trenches in 1916!
W. A. ORTON
Northampton, Mass.
Sirs: