Tales Of Pirates

so he abandoned Life and the Coast Guard and helicopters and two Senators and rushed home to be comforted.
For this purpose his wife had taken off everything and was brushing her exceedingly dense hair. Her enormous
violet and gray eyes were impatient, her tenderness was mixed with glowering. She was asking tacitly how long I
was going to sit on the chaise longue in my socks, heart-wounded and full of obsolete sensibility. A nervous and
critical person, she thought I suffered from morbid aberrations about grief, that I was pre-modern or baroque
about death. She often declared that I had come back to Chicago because my parents were buried here.
Sometimes she said with sudden alertness, “Ah, here comes the cemetery bit!” What’s more she was often right.
Soon I myself could hear the chain-dragging monotony of my low voice. Love was the remedy for these death
moods. And here was Denise, impatient but dutiful, sitting stripped on the bed, and I didn’t even take off my
necktie. I know this sorrow can be maddening. And it tired Denise to support me emotionally. She didn’t take
much stock in these emotions of mine. “Oh, you’re on that kick again. You must quit all this operatic bullshit.
Talk to a psychiatrist. Why are you hung up on the past and always lamenting some dead party or other?” Denise
pointed out with a bright flash of the face, a sign that she had had an insight,swg power leveling, that while I shed tears for my dead I
was also patting down their graves with my shovel. For I did write biographies, and the deceased were my bread
and butter. The deceased had earned my French decoration and got me into the White House. (The loss of our
White House connections after the death of JFK was one of Denise’s bitterest vexations.) Don’t get me wrong, I
know that love and scolding often go together. Durnwald did this to me,sword of the new world vis, too. Whom the Lord loveth He
chasteneth. The whole thing was mixed with affection. When I came home in a state over Humboldt, she was
ready to comfort me. But she had a sharp tongue, Denise did. (I sometimes called her Rebukah.) Of course my
lying there so sad, so heart-injured, was provoking. Besides, she suspected that I would never finish the Life
article. There she was right again.
If I was going to feel so much about death, why didn’t I do something about it. This endless sensibility was
awful. Such was Denise’s opinion. I agreed with that, too.
“So you feel bad about your pal Humboldt!” she said. “But how come you haven’t looked him up? You had
years to do it in. And why didn’t you speak to him today?”
These were hard questions, very intelligent. She didn’t let me get away with a thing.
“I suppose I could have said, ‘Humboldt,swg power leveling, it’s me,tales of pirates money, Charlie. What about some real lunch? The Blue Ribbon is just
around the corner.’ But I think he might have thrown a fit. A couple of years ago he tried to hit some dean’s
secretary with a hammer. He accused her of covering his bed with girlie magazines. Some kind of erotic plot
against him. They had to put him away again. The poor man is crazy. And it’s no use going back to Saint Julien
or hugging lepers.”
“Who said anything about lepers? You’re always thinking what nobody else has remotely in mind.”
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Republican Senator managed very well.
And this was what Denise wanted me to occupy myself with. Denise had arranged all this for me, phoning the
people at Life, supervising the whole deal. “Come on home,” she said. But she was displeased. She didn’t want
me in Chicago now.
Home was a grand house in Kenwood on the South Side. Rich German Jews had built Victorian-Edwardian
mansions here early in the century. When the mail-order tycoons and other nobs departed, university professors,
psychiatrists, lawyers, and Black Muslims moved in. Since I had insisted on returning to become the Malthus of
boredom, Denise bought the Kahnheim house. She had done this under protest, saying, “Why Chicago! We can
live wherever we like, can’t we? Christ!” She had in mind a house in Georgetown, or in Rome,tcos gold, or in London
SW3. But I was obstinate, and Denise said she hoped it wasn’t a sign that I was headed for a nervous breakdown.
Her father the federal judge was a keen lawyer. I know she often consulted him downtown about property, joint-
tenancy, widows’ rights in the State of Illinois. He advised us to buy Colonel Kahnheim’s mansion. Daily at
breakfast Denise asked when I was going to make my will.
Now it was night and she was waiting for me in the master bedroom. I hate air conditioning. I kept Denise from
installing it. The temperature was in the nineties, and on hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul. The
stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter-city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of
railroad siding along the streets once were filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter the yards
lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place. It returns at times,sotnw vis, suspiring from the vacated soil, to
remind us all that Chicago had once led the world in butcher-technology and that billions of animals had died
here. And that night the windows were open wide and the familiar depressing multilayered stink of meat, tallow,
blood-meal, pulverized bones, hides, soap, smoked slabs, and burnt hair came back. Old Chicago breathed again
through leaves and screens. I heard fire trucks and the gulp and whoop of ambulances, bowel-deep and
hysterical. In the surrounding black slums incendiarism shoots up in summer, an index, some say, of
psychopathology. Although the love of flames is also religious. However, Denise was sitting nude on the bed
rapidly and strongly brushing her hair. Over the lake,tales of pirates gold, steel mills twinkled. Lamplight showed the soot already
fallen on the leaves of the wall ivy. We had an early drought that year. Chicago, this night,chronicles of spellborn gold, was panting, the big
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urban engines going, tenements blazing in Oakwood with great shawls of flame, the sirens weirdly yelping, the
fire engines, ambulances, and police cars?a mad-dog, gashing-knife weather, a rape and murder night, thousands
of hydrants open, spraying water from both breasts. Engineers were staggered to see the level of Lake Michigan
fall as these tons of water poured. Bands of kids prowled with handguns and knives. And?adear-dear?athis
tender-minded mourning Mr. Charlie Citrine had seen his old buddy, a dead man eating a pretzel in New York,

took a cab to La Guardia and caught the first plane to O’Hare. I return again and again to that day because it was
so dreadful. Two drinks, the limit in flight,cheap swg credits, did nothing for me?anothing! When I landed I drank several double
shots of Jack Daniel’s in the O’Hare bar, for strength. It was a very hot evening. I telephoned Denise and said,
“I’m back.”
“You’re days and days early. What’s up,tales of pirates money, Charles?”
I said, “I’ve had a bad experience.”
“Where’s the Senator?”
“Still in New York. I’ll go back to Washington in a day or two.”
“Well, come on home, then.”
Life had commissioned an article on Robert Kennedy. I had now spent five days with the Senator, or rather near
him, sitting on a sofa in the Senate Office Building, observing him. It was, from every point of view, a singular
inspiration, but the Senator had allowed me to attach myself to him and even seemed to like me. I say “seemed”
because it was his business to leave such an impression with a journalist who proposed to write about him. I
liked him, too, perhaps against my better judgment. His way of looking at you was odd. His eyes were as blue as
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the void,buy tales of pirates money, and there was a slight lowering in the skin of the lids, an extra fold. After the helicopter trip we drove
from La Guardia to the Bronx in a limousine, and I was in there with him. The heat was dismal in the Bronx but
we were in a sort of crystal cabinet. His desire was to be continually briefed. He asked questions of everyone in
the party. From me he wanted historical information ?a”What should I know about William Jennings Bryan?”
or, “Tell me about H. L. Mencken”?areceiving what I said with a kind of inner glitter that did not tell me what he
thought or whether he could use such facts. We pulled up at a Harlem playground. There were Cadillacs,
motorcycle cops, bodyguards, television crews. A vacant lot between two tenements had been fenced in, paved,
furnished with slides and sandboxes. The playground director in his Afro and dashiki and beads received the two
Senators. Cameras stood above us on trestles. The black director, radiant, ceremonious, held a basketball
between the two Senators. A space was cleared. Twice the slender Kennedy, carelessly elegant,sword of the new world vis, tossed the ball.
He nodded his ruddy, foxy head high with hair and smiled when he missed. Senator Javits could not afford to
miss. Compact and bald he too was smiling but squared off at the basket drawing the ball to his breast and
binding himself by strength of will to the objective. He made two smart shots. The ball did not arch. It flew
straight at the loop and went in. There was applause. What vexation, what labor to keep up with Bobby. But the

Each one fears somebody.
Only the heedless lions
Under the Booloo tree
Snooze in each other’s arms
After their lunch of blood?a
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I call that living good!
Eight or nine years ago,tales of pirates gold, reading this poem, I thought, Poor Humboldt, those shock-treatment doctors have
lobotomized him, they’ve ruined the guy. But now I saw this as a communication, not as a poem. The
imagination must not pine away?athat was Humboldt’s message. It must assert again that art manifests the inner
powers of nature. To the savior-faculty of the imagination sleep was sleep, and waking was true waking. This
was what Humboldt now appeared to me to be saying. If that was so, Humboldt was never more sane and brave
than at the end of his life. And I had run away from him on Forty-sixth Street just when he had most to tell me. I
had spent that morning, as I have mentioned, grandly dressed up and revolving elliptically over the city of New
York in that Coast Guard helicopter, with the two US Senators and the Mayor and officials from Washington and
Albany and crack journalists, all belted up in puffy life jackets, each jacket with its sheath knife. (I’ve never
gotten over those knives.) And then,tcos gold, after the luncheon in Central Park (I am compelled to repeat), I walked out
and saw Humboldt,cheap tales of pirates gold, a dying man eating a pretzel stick at the curb, the dirt of the grave already sprinkled on his
face. Then I rushed away. It was one of those ecstatically painful moments when I couldn’t hold still. I had to
run. I said, “Oh, kid, good-by. I’ll see you in the next world!”
There was nothing more to be done for him in this world, I had decided. But was that true? The wrinkled
postcard now made me reconsider. It struck me that I had sinned against Humboldt. Lying down on the goose-
down sofa in order to meditate, I found myself getting hot with self-criticism and shame, flushing and sweating. I
pulled Doris Scheldt’s pillow from behind my head and wiped my face with it. Again I saw myself taking cover
behind the parked cars on Forty-sixth Street. And Humboldt like a bush tented all over by the bagworm and
withering away. I was stunned to see my old pal dying and I fled,swg power leveling, I went back to the Plaza and phoned Senator
Kennedy’s office to say that I had been called to Chicago suddenly. I’d return to Washington next week. Then I

the meditative exercises recommended by Rudolf Steiner in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its
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Attainment. As yet I hadn’t attained much, but then my soul was well along in years and very much stained and
banged up, and I had to be patient. Characteristically, I had been trying too hard, and I remembered again that
wonderful piece of advice given by a French thinker: Trouve avant de chercher?a Val|ry, it was. Or maybe
Picasso. There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.
And so the morning after my day with Cantabile I took a holiday. The weather was fine and clear. I drew the
openwork drapes which shut out the details of Chicago and let in the bright sun and the high blue (which in their
charity shone and towered even over a city like this). Cheerful, I dug out my Humboldt papers. I piled notebooks,
letters, diaries, and manuscripts on the coffee table and on the covered radiator behind the sofa. Then I lay down,
sighing, pulling off my shoes. Under my head I put a needlepoint cushion embroidered by a young lady (what a
woman-filled life I always led. Ah, this sexually-disturbed century!), a Miss Doris Scheldt, the daughter of the
anthroposophist I consulted now and then. She had given me this handmade Christmas gift the year before. Small
and lovely, intelligent, strikingly strong in profile for such a pretty young woman,buy sro gold, she liked to wear old-
fashioned dresses that made her look like Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. Her footwear, however, was
provocative,buy rose online zulie, quite far out. In my private vocabulary she was a little noli me tangerine. She did and did not wish
to be touched. She herself knew a great deal about anthroposophy and we spent a lot of time together last year,
when R enata and I had a falling-out. I sat in her bentwood rocking chair while she put her tiny patent-leather
boots up on a hassock, embroidering this red-and-green, fresh-grass-and-hot-embers cushion. We chatted,cheap wow gold,
etcetera. It was an agreeable relationship, but it was over. Renata and I were back together.
This is by way of explaining that I took Von Humboldt Fleisher as the subject of my meditation that morning.
Such meditation supposedly strengthened the will. Then,buy rose online zuly, gradually strengthened by such exercises, the will
might become an organ of perception.
A wrinkled postcard fell to the floor, one of the last Humboldt had sent me. I read the phantom strokes, like a
fuzzy graph of the northern lights:
Mice hide when hawks are high;
Hawks shy from airplanes;
Planes dread the ack-ack-ack;

material, like a miner by gas fumes. I wouldn’t stop, though. I’d say to myself that even Rip van Winkle had
slept for only twenty years, I had gone him at least two decades better and I was determined to make the lost time
yield illumination. So I kept doing advanced mental work in Chicago, and also joined a gymnasium, playing ball
with commodity brokers and gentleman-hoodlums in an effort to strengthen the powers of consciousness. Then
my respected friend Durnwald mentioned,cheap star trek credits, kiddingly, that the famous but misunderstood Dr. Rudolf Steiner had
much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. Steiner’s books,cheap rs money, which I began to read lying down,sro gold, made me want to
get up. He argued that between the conception of an act and its execution by the will there fell a gap of sleep. It
might be brief but it was deep. For one of man’s souls was a sleep-soul. In this,warcraft gold, human beings resembled the
plants, whose whole existence is sleep. This made a very deep impression on me. The truth about sleep could
only be seen from the perspective of an immortal spirit. I had never doubted that I had such a thing. But I had set
this fact aside quite early. I kept it under my hat. These beliefs under your hat also press on your brain and sink
you down into the vegetable realm. Even now, to a man of culture like Durnwald, I hesitated to mention the
spirit. He took no stock in Steiner, of course. Durnwald was reddish, elderly but powerful, thickset and bald, a
bachelor of cranky habits but a kind man. He had a peremptory blunt butting even bullying manner, but if he
scolded it was because he loved me?ahe wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. A great scholar, one of the most
learned people on earth, he was a rationalist. Not narrowly rationalistic, by any means. Nevertheless, I couldn’t
talk to him about the powers of a spirit separated from a body. He wouldn’t hear of it. He had simply been joking
about Steiner. I was not joking, but I didn’t want to be thought a crank.
I had begun to think a lot about the immortal spirit. Still, night after night, I kept dreaming that I had become the
best player in the club, a racquet demon, that my backhand shot skimmed the left wall of the court and fell dead
in the corner, it had so much English on it. I dreamed that I was beating all the best players?aall those skinny,
hairy, speedy fellows who in reality avoided playing with me because I was a dud. I was badly disappointed by
the shallow interests such dreams betrayed. Even my dreams were asleep. And what about money? Money is
necessary for the protection of the sleeping. Spending drives you into wakefulness. As you purge the inner film
from the eye and rise into higher consciousness, less money should be required.
Under the circumstances (and it should now be clearer what I mean by circumstances: Renata, Denise, children,
courts, lawyers, Wall Street, sleep, death, metaphysics, karma, the presence of the universe in us, our being
present in the universe itself) I had not paused to think about Humboldt, a precious friend hid in death’s dateless
night, a camerado from a former existence (almost), well-beloved but dead. I imagined at times that I might see
him in the life to come, together with my mother and my father. Demmie Vonghel, too. Demmie was one of the
most significant dead, remembered every day. But I didn’t expect him to come at me as in life, driving ninety
miles an hour in his Buick fourholer. First I laughed. Then I shrieked. I was transfixed. He bore down on me. He
struck me with blessings. Humboldt’s gift wiped out many immediate problems.
The role played by Ronald and Lucy Cantabile in this is something else again.
Dear friends, though I was about to leave town and had much business to attend to, I decided to suspend all
practical activities for one morning. I did this to keep from cracking under strain. I had been practicing some of

generous, with a heart of gold. Still his goodness was the sort of goodness people now consider out of date. The
radiance he dealt in was the old radiance and it was in short supply. What we needed was a new radiance
altogether.
And now Cantabile and his PhD wife were after me to recall the dear dead days of the Village, and its
intellectuals, poets, crack-ups,buy sto credits, its suicides and love affairs. I didn’t care much for that. I had no clear view of
Mrs. Cantabile as yet, but I saw Rinaldo as one of the new mental rabble of the wised-up world and anyway I
didn’t feel just now like having my arm twisted. It wasn’t that I minded giving information to honest scholars, or
even to young people on the make, but I just then was busy, fiercely, painfully busy?apersonally and
impersonally busy: personally, with Renata and Denise, and Murra the accountant, and the lawyers and the
judge, and a multitude of emotional vexations; impersonally, participating in the life of my country and of
Western Civilization and global society (a mixture of reality and figment). As editor of an important magazine,
The Ark, which would probabl never come out, I was always thinking of statements that must be made and truths
of which the world must be reminded. The world,sro gold, identified by a series of dates (1789-1914-1917-1939) and by
key words (Revolution, Te hnology, Science, and so forth), was another cause of busyness. You owed your duty
to these dates and words. The whole thing was so momentous, overmastering, tragic, that in the end what I really
wanted was to lie down and go to sleep. I have always had an exceptional gift for passing out. I look at snapshots
taken in some of the most evil hours of mankind and I see that I have lots of hair and am appealingly youthful. I
am wearing an ill-fitting double-breasted suit of the Thirties or Forties, smoking a pipe, standing under a tree,
holding hands with a plump and pretty bimbo?aand I am asleep on my feet, out cold. I have snoozed through
many a crisis (while millions died).
This is all terrifically relevant. For one thing, I may as well admit that I came back to settle in Chicago with the
secret motive of writing a significant work. This lethargy of mine is related to that project?aI got the idea of
doing something with the chronic war between sleep and consciousness that goes on in human nature. My
subject,silkroad gold, in the final Eisenhower years, was boredom. Chicago was the ideal place in which to write my master
essay?a “Boredom.” In raw Chicago you could examine the human spirit under industrialism. If someone were
to arise with a new vision of Faith, Love, and Hope, he would want to understand to whom he was offering it?a
he would have to understand the kind of deep suffering we call boredom. I was going to try to do with boredom
what Malthus and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill or Durkheim had done with population, wealth, or the
division of labor. History and temperament had put me in a peculiar position, and I was going to turn it to
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advantage. I hadn’t read those great modern boredom experts, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, and Baudelaire,buy sro gold, for
nothing. Over the years I had worked a lot on this essay. The difficulty was that I kept being overcome by the

“All right, easy does it. Some things are sacred. I understand. But we can work everything out. I listened at the
poker game and I know that you’re in plenty of trouble. You need somebody tough and practical to handle things
for you. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I have all kinds of ideas for you. We’ll trade off.”
“No, I don’t want to trade anything. I’ve had it. My heart is breaking and I want to go home.”
“Let’s have a steak and finish the wine. You need red meat. You’re just tired. You’ll do it.”
“I won’t.”
“Take the order, Giulio,” he said.
Chapter 11
I wish I knew why I feel such loyalt y to the deceased, Hearing of their deaths I often said to myself that I must
? 71 3 12 336 3
carry on for them and do their job, finish their work. And that of course I couldn’t do. Instead I found that certain
of their characteristics were beginning to stick to me. As time went on, for instance, I found myself becoming
absurd in the manner of Von Humboldt Fleisher. By and by it became apparent that he had acted as my agent. I
myself,cheap sro gold, a nicely composed person,buy rs money, had had Humboldt expressing himself wildly on my behalf, satisfying some
of my longings. This explained my liking for certain individuals?a Humboldt, or George Swiebel, or even
someone like Cantabile. This type of psychological delegation may have its origins in representative
government. However, when an expressive friend died the delegated tasks returned to me. And as I was also the
expressive delegate of other people,buy star trek credits, this eventually became pure hell.
Carry on for Humboldt? Humboldt wanted to drape the world in radiance,star trek online credits, but he didn’t have enough material.
His attempt ended at the belly. Below hung the shaggy nudity we know so well. He was a lovely man, and

was signed Lucy Wilkins Cantabile and it was the letter of a model graduate student, polite, detailed, highly
organized, with the usual academic circumlocutions?athree single-spaced pages, dense with questions,flyff penya, painful
questions. Her husband kept me under close observation as I read. “Well, what do you think of her?”
“Terrific,” I said. The thing filled me with despair. “What do you two want of me?”
“Answers. Information. We want you to write out the answers. What’s your opinion of her project?”
“I think the dead owe us a living.”
“Don’t horse around with me,cheap flyff penya, Charlie. I didn’t like that crack.”
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“I couldn’t care less,wow power leveling,” I said. “This poor Humboldt, my friend,buy rose zulie, was a big spirit who was destroyed … never mind
that. The PhD racket is a very fine racket but I want no part of it. Besides, I never answer questionnaires. Idiots
impose on you with their documents. I can’t bear that kind of thing.”
“Are you calling my wife an idiot?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her.”
“I’ll make allowances for you. You got hit in the guts by the Mercedes and then I ran you ragged. But don’t be
unpleasant about my wife.”
“There are things I don’t do. This is one of them. I’m not going to write answers. It would take weeks.”
“Listen!”
“I draw the line.”
“Just a minute!”
“Bump me off. Go to hell.”

“At Radcliffe, Harvard.”
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“That’s very good,” I said. I emptied the champagne glass and refilled it.
“Don’t brush it off. Ask me what her subject is. Of the thesis.”
“All right, what is it?”
“She’s writing a study of that poet who was your friend.”
“You’re kidding. Von Humboldt Fleisher? How do you know he was my friend? … I see. I was talking about him
at George’s. Someone should have locked me in a closet that night.”
“You didn’t have to be cheated, Charlie. You didn’t know what you were doing. You were talking away like a
nine-year-old kid about lawsuits, lawyers, accountants, bad investments, and the magazine you were going to
publish?aa real loser, it sounded like. You said you were going to spend your own money on your own ideas.”
“I never discuss these things with strangers. Chicago must be giving me arctic madness.”
“Now, listen, I’m very proud of my wife. Her people are rich, upper class. . . .” Boasting gives people a
wonderful color, I’ve noticed, and Cantabile’s cheeks glowed. He said,buy rappelz money, “You’re asking yourself what is she
doing with a husband like me.”
I muttered, “No, no,buy wow gold,” though that certainly was a natural question. However,runescape money, it was not exactly news that highly
educated women were excited by scoundrels criminals and lunatics, and that these scoundrels etcetera were
drawn to culture,warcraft gold, to thought. Diderot and Dostoevski had made us familiar with this.
“I want her to get her PhD,” said Cantabile. “You understand? I want it bad. And you were a pal of this Fleisher
guy. You’re going to give Lucy the information.”
“Now wait a minute?a”
“Look this over.” He handed me an envelope and I put on my glasses and glanced over the document enclosed. It