Notes from the Underground

Extract

Analogies are a little like the toeholds one grasps on a steep slope; they enable one to take the next step in a dangerous geography. The next step is the point in question: is it possible ? The question, for a climber, cannot be an abstract one; he must create as he goes. And he draws breath, when the air is very thin indeed, from the example of those who went far, who died in the breach, or who made it further.

Danger is within and around. Whatever the quality of the air (it is not high, by all reports) this is of its substance. It is not merely that one is hunted in a perpetual open season; this is taken for granted, part of the game today. Much nearer the point is the possession of one’s own life, one’s own soul: not to belong to the hunters, not to inhabit their dreams, not to be hung as a trophy on their walls. Resistance is one way of putting it; the pressures one can olfer against a foul project, unworthy of man, undertaken in that decrepit chain of command which forges one man to another, a chain gang of slaves, blind in authority, blind in obedience.

Such thoughts arise on the occasion of the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s death. His faults, which were indeed large ones, died with him, extinguished in blood. The questions raised by his life and dramatized in his murder remain to haunt those who were his friends, who, two years later, have tears to shed for a young life, so brutally extinguished. In a sense which is both true and difficult of understanding, his death was irrelevant to his failure; one could still consider him as having won his prize, gone on to the highest political honour—and changed nothing.