Morning postcript to last night: today in the NY Times, I read a short interview with the British sculptor Damien Hirst--I think that's how you spell his name--the guy famous for putting dead animals in glass cases. When he was asked if he was angry at the way that the U.S. dragged the U.K. into war, he replied that he bore no ill sentiments and that he was not interested in politics. Then he quoted Sylvia Plath as saying that she was not interested in Hiroshima, she wanted to know what a tired surgeon was thinking late at night.

This struck me as stupid: the tired surgeon is thinking about Hiroshima, of course (assuming a surgeon operates out of compassion.) We are pebbles in the cement, making a sidewalk maybe. And the pebble can say: I'm not a sidewalk, I'm a pebble, an iconoclastic little singing pebble. But the pebble is still a sidewalk. That's why liberalism is sometimes annoying in its piety--how childish to pretend we're not all complicit. That we're not the sidewalk. And the pretense of disengagement also says: I'm not the sidewalk, and so is equally exasperating. How stupid the pebble is that doesn't want to admit it's the sidewalk. Or at least, conversely, the sidewalk is the pebbles. There's still an element of mutual cooperation whether the pebble accepts this or not.

Maybe the civic voice, the Jeffers voice, belongs to the fuddy-duddy grandpa. And some people recoil against Plath as childish. I guess most of us are muddled, between these two polarities.