502
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ashtoreth, later Astarte and Aphrodite,-the gods go west and come back
again, grow from the sexual puppet to the marble sublimation; Minoan
pottery, Greek coins, and in the communal settlement at Caesarea, the
sea washes over the granite stubs protruding like rotten tceth of the
Roman harbor. The only relic of the old hippodrome (now a banana
grove) is a granite pillar lying like a dead mastodon in the long
leaves. Arabs have tried to hew a section to sell. Ozymandias! But
one feels no superiority toward the frustrated effort, the inadequate
technique. The abstract country seems to absorb every influence, the
sun irons out every shadow, so that one feels the simultaneity of history,
the parallelism of all effort, the precariousness of the hotel situated near
the ruined castle. As the physicists point out, if space is empty there is
no time. Time is an index, a gauge of movement. The mind compresses
and confuses human experience, as it does personal experience. What is
the present? There is no history except what you know. Dazed by the
sun in Acre, looking at the plaque commemorating the fall of Major
Oldfield in leading a sortie
ag~inst
Napoleon, I felt that my assump–
tion of the existence of jeeps and bars might be the delusion and in the
silent square with a Negro woman grinning from behind her vegetable
stall, it seemed that red-coated soldiers might come from the corner
where the camel was champing. This is not merely romanticism. Philo–
sophers make this distinction between the conveniences of chronology
and the chimerical nature of time. And here, on the ashen ground,
with grass in summer as palc as moss on a rock, where the almost imper–
ceptible undulations are as featureless as space, the eye always moves
on, having nothing to cling to. Hence the Arab, and, increasingly, the
Hebrew music, the incessant ululation, unpunctuated as the desert, the
interminable emotion, ceaselessly paid out like a tape worm to the unat–
tainable horizon, without beginning, without end, only the eternal
present, plaintive, lonely, crooning its weltschmerz like the cat on the
tiles in the interrogation of the augmented second. Everywhere is the
same. Tomorrow is like today. Love, hate, grief, do not vary and
therefore can be sung only by repeating them with ingenious new
emphases, rococo trills. A land of archetypal shapes, Grahame Suther–
land country, the rocks lie where they were flung in that early volcanic
explosion, the stones geologically potted history in compressions of grey,
pink, blue, amber, heave and rear, the primaeval thrust, the convulsion
snapshotted, travail petrified. The rocks are Henry Moore, expectantly
reared, incipiently alive. Impersonal as the surface of the moon, Israel
would have excited Paul Nash. From the north east came Tiglath
Pileser, the combed Assyrian bulls, from the south the wall-eyed men
