Every now and again an insecurity

Why, yes. If one thinks about it, it's miraculous, what insecurity has wrought for the better in more aspects of life than one can count, including, to be sure, the colour of our bath. Sleep out as often as one may, how can one feel confident of that hue of blaze with which one might greet the light of day with some assurance, not to say aplomb? Now travel, too, has graduated beyond that finishing school fount of name-dropping, that syringe of refugee flight and extraction of yore, into those very reaches of narcissism which flawlessly signify the interna-tional style in our age of globalism: everywhere we go, we may define where we are by being mercifully alone, uploaded in our own device. 

No more for us, contamination inherent in uncontrolled propinquity; no more for us those grubby sharings of the lowlife vistas of inelegant perspectives. We did not gather up our luck, only to recall where we have come from.

No, I do not think the statue in the harbour is about to be re-clad as Achilles' soccer mommy, hoisting the tainted tendon of his immunity from life. We carry a torchon still, for crème; and populations cannot be trusted to behave them-selves these days.



In a British periodical
on the insides of houses,
I noticed the other day
an advertisement for pas-
sages on a floating incu-
bator of self-regard,
promising that no other
person on board, much 
less on the seas, could
ever say he'd known one's
private view of the world.
I thought, what love. But 
they called it, luxury, 
and there will endlessly
be more of that to sell.

Francis Ford Coppola
  director
Gordon Willis
  cinematographer
The Godfather, Part II
Paramount, 1974©