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invigorating. I saw them solitarily pensive; I beheld them in the church, praying before confession; I listened to their single, spontaneous words and exclamations; I remember their faces—and, believe me, not one of them, in his innermost, considered himself right!
    —Fyodor Dostoevsky,
    from
The Diary of a Writer
    1873 42

VI.
    F ROM THE PENTHOUSE SUSPENDED silently so high above the winding traffic’s iron lamentation, forty straight-down stories into those long, low, night-blue bars aglow below street-level, a lonely guilt pervades us all.
    A loneliness not known to any ancestral land. To some other less cautious race conquering or lost. No other age, more distant and less troubled. No other time, less lonely and much longer. No other night-blue bars.
    No other forest of the night, no other wilderness than ours.
    Ours no longer being the lonesome prairie’s desolation, but the spiritual desolation of men and women made incapable of using themselves for anything more satisfying than the promotion of chewing gum, a goo with a special ingredient or some detergent ever-urgent. Working one trap or another for others, the aging salesman of bonds or used cars having made his little pile, senses dimly that he’s backed up into a trap of his own devising.
    The tiger-pit of loneliness out of which there is noclimbing. Alone at last with his little pile, the weary years in and the weary years out haven’t brought him a thing he wanted in his heart. It was only that which he was taught he was supposed to desire that he now owns so uselessly.
    “It is because of the abstract climate in which they live that the importance of money is so disproportionate,” Simone de Beauvoir observes. “The people are neither mean nor avaricious.… If money is the sole object for so many, it is because the other values have been reduced to this one denominator.” 43
    The criticism is valid but neglects those rebels, from penthouse to bar, who resist, every hour on the hour, success according to that cult. All those who feel their hours to be too brief to devote to the working of traps. In them the desire to be of real use in the world deadlocks with the carking dread of being used by it. Habit has made it impossible for them to exist beyond the boundaries of the cult. Contemptuous of a philosophy that preaches that every man is an island and each man’s duty is to appoint his private island comfortably, they are, even while being most contemptuous, unable to live except on an island and simply cannot endure the discomfort of living anywhere else.
    The most bitter protest against the middle-class faith in money as an end in itself always comes, in the States, from the children of that class, who have to take the spiritual consequences of having too much of everything though earning nothing, while those who work hard alltheir lives never have enough of anything. Trapped between the double tyrannies of conscience and personal comfort, comfort wins going away. The bitter protest is drowned at last in that self-pity that abides at the bottom of the nearest pinch bottle of Haig & Haig.
    “It isn’t that young Americans don’t wish to do great things,” Mme. de Beauvoir adds, “but that they don’t know there are great things to be done.” 44 Not what they desire most deeply, but what, for lack of a better goal, they are forced to settle for.
    From the coolest zoot-suit cat getting leaping-drunk on straight gin to the gentlest suburban matron getting discreetly tipsy on Alexanders, the feeling is that of having too much of something not really needed, and nothing at all of something needed desperately. They both want to live, and neither knows how. That’s the trap.
    A trap in which some turn to that same twenty-dollar-an-hour analyst—“Doctor, what’s my problem?” And the doctor cannot speak the truth without losing his double saw. To stiff-arm a customer with the alarm that his trouble is something as simple as cowardice, or as