The chaplain stood at the open window, speaking softly. He’d told the old
man lying in the iron bed at the other end of the room that, yes, he'd met the
writer. He’d met the writer they were talking about. "Yes," he said, "we
were going across together, on the Normandy - before she burned up and
sank at her moorings, of course. I don't know when that was exactly - I can’t
remember now - but it was sometime in late forty- three; or, maybe," he said,
"early in forty-four.

    "We'd been crossing," he said, "with replacements. For some reason, I
was tapped to shepherd a boatload of troops into the Mediterranean, before
going on myself through the Suez, back out to the South Pacific again; and
ah, yes, I think maybe he was traveling over to one of those lesser
invasions." The chaplain chuckled. "Anyhow," he said to the old man, "it
was fairly late in the war."

    The young chaplain was a big, balding, chubby fellow, always smiling. He
looked like a wrestler. He stood by the partly opened window at the south
end of the old man's hospital room with his large hand on the sun-grayed
window sash, looking outside. He stood there looking out of the window as if
he’d been talking to someone or something outside. And as he spoke, he kept
examining the view in just that way; and then, turning slowly, stepping back
over to the bedside, he began looking down compassionately at the old man in
the iron bed. "You know," he said, "I, ah, I remember now, the fellow kept
telling me this business about his family being Congregationalists, as if it
mattered somehow. I don't know why that would matter, why it mattered. He
didn't go to church anymore, and, ah, as far as I could tell, he didn't have
much use for it either - really. He hadn't since the other war, I think. At any
rate, that's how I understood it."

    He paused here, as if reflecting; and then, half to himself, added, "Well,
maybe he was a Catholic by then." He paused, and then he smiled broadly.
He was punctuating this talk with lots of pauses, and the old man had noticed
that maybe he couldn't help this. "I don't know," the chaplain said now. "If,
ah, if that was true, I'd say he was a rotten Catholic!" He laughed abruptly
now. "I don't know why the hell he bothered to talk about it in the first
place," he said, "especially with me." The chaplain put his big hand on the
iron siderail of the old man's bed, looking pleasantly absorbed.

    The old man waited, looking at him.

    "Well," the young man said then, "...except that, I, ah, I was having trouble
myself. You know? Can you imagine? I was having trouble with my services,
Doctor, even trouble with praying, all of it. I can't explain it. I don't know what
it was. It just came onto me, was like a slight stutter or something, like
something that was blinking in my brain; and, I, ah, I fought that off, finally.
But it worked its way into my speech you see." The chaplain laughed again,
and threw his hands up. "I'm used to it by now," he said. "You see, I ah, I use
it all the time." He paused again. "But, your friend Hemingway - well, maybe
mine, too - he noticed it also, you see; and he laughed about it. He told me, he
said, you're much better off to play it speechless than pitch fastballs at heaven."
The chaplain laughed again, less forced this time. "Hemingway told me, he
said, he said ‘God will just powder your offering, padre, slam your offerings
out of here, park it all in the bleachers, everything you throw at him. You're
better off not praying."

    "So, what did you do?" the old man asked.

    The chaplain sighed. "Well," he said, "we boxed - when the seas permitted.
And ah, normally, they did. It was an easy crossing. We’d smack each other
across the old fantail; and ah - we spent a lot of time that way - you know
- just ah, just talking together. He was okay - all right. He was pretty good with
his fists, pretty fair for an amateur. And me - ah, I had all these game details to
organize, for the troops and so on. And ah, I found myself... well," he said, "I
was in pretty good shape too, you know. We had regular punch ups, sometimes
at dawn. There'd be a bunch of sea gulls sitting on the aft railing, waiting for
breakfast. They'd watch us at first, cold eyed, and ah, then they’d fly off after
the ship's garbage. We were too fast for the subs, so we could dump it all in the
water. And after a while, I began to think, well, ah, well maybe he's getting a bit
old for this boxing. He was doing a lot of boozing too; but then, I guess you
really had to admire him."

    The young chaplain with his burly smile seemed just now trying to actually
recall it visually. "You know," he said, "I ah, I would guess that, ah, that he'd
had, had developed this great ‘attraction’ for combat. He always denied it. Me,
I got used to it; but I'd also have said that, well, ah, well maybe the experience
of it should have taken you the other way. I believe he was cut up in the first
war, that sort of thing. It either deadens you, you know, or ah, you know,
makes you ripe for God." He paused, and then chuckled to himself. "But out
there, on the ah, great Atlantic, chinning with me on the fantail, he always said
he had no real use for faith and that it didn't help him any with the war either.
You can have all the trouble you want praying, he told me. I just have it not
praying. The trouble is really in not wanting to pray." The young chaplain
paused again, looking away. "The old war was still beating him up I guess.
Maybe it still is."

    The old man waited for him to continue. "Well, maybe I ah, maybe I should
have tried to beat some faith back into him," the young chaplain said, finally.
"I didn't have the guts. Well, I don't know... really, maybe he needed a catharsis.
Whatever it was, underneath it all, he really didn't care anymore, inside."

    The chaplain had drifted back to the partly opened window; and now he
continued to look outside. He told the old man that after the war he hadn't kept
in touch with the writer; but he felt he knew the writer well enough to have
written him personally, once or twice, in Cuba, where he was now living
somewhere. "After all," he said now, peering back out of the open window,
"he's famous, what?"

    The old man smiled. "Yes," he said, "yes, surely." He was quietly watching
the burly young chaplain; and he said to him now, softly, "You know, Sauter,
by sheer coincidence, and by that alone alone, I met him once also. I met him
a long time ago, in Paris, after the Great War."

    Sauter turned his head to query the old man, with innocent surprise.

    "I think he'd gone over to live in Paris at that time," the old man said, "and
their family minister, back home in Chicago, whom I'd known quite well over
the years, asked me to look him up one summer, when I was going over
myself, visiting. They were Chicago people you know, and, I think as best I
can recall it - it was back in twenty-six or seven - the young man had just had
his first book published, the first or maybe even the second one. I believe it
was called, In Our Time." The old man smiled quietly, remembering. "Their
parson sent it over to me, in the mail," he said, "and then I read it on the trip
across. I must have realized, right away then, that - well, you know, here was
a witness."

    The chaplain looked over at him blankly. "What do you mean," he asked,
"...by a ‘witness’?" He'd been bending, peering out of the window; and now
he straightened up again and came back to sit down beside the iron bed.

    The old man could tell that his remark had not "connected". "Well, yes," he
told him, "I did call him that, I think - a witness. I think, maybe, I really called
him the ‘war witness’. It was meant as a compliment." He looked at the young
chaplain for effect, pausing here; and then he said, "Well, I don't know, perhaps
I should explain."

    They were sitting together, and the old man was cranked up on his iron bed
in the cool, anticeptic looking hospital room, both of them knowing that the old
man was dying. Whatever had brought him here, he was finally worse for the
wear inside and he was propped up in the iron bed in consolation, enjoying a
sunny morning's conversation with the hospital chaplain.

    "Most of us you see, are just carried along," the old man said, "like specks,
floating on the zephers of chance." He paused, as if for effect. Then, laughing,
he said, "How do you like that now, eh? We see the life, Sauter, and hear it,
and don't know what's going on in it. What I'm referring to isn’t something
ecclesiastical; but, rather, it's about someone who is quite different, who,
although maybe no more in control of the swim and substance of his own life
than you or I might be, nevertheless seems to see through it - to see beyond it
you see - and so, just seems to witness the report of some larger thing, some
larger life surrounding himself, that no one else sees. No one really knows why
this is so."

    The chaplain nodded now, frowning a little, as if not taking it all in.

    The old man went on. "You see," he said, "I would judge that most of us
are merely driven. We're driven by the appetites of our natural organs, or at
least by some ideology which substitutes for that desire. Very few people are
driven by real experience, or even claim to be; and fewer still are driven by
higher instincts. But, if you're a witness," he said, "as I meant it just now,
you'd be involved in things which not only quite literally invoke you to
respond, but mean something figuratively. There are places and things, and
events, which can involve you in a great unknown, sometimes in very
horrifying ways; and in this sense you see, it can overwhelm you if it doesn't
simply tame you first. It's rare, but it happens, it happens all the time. I took
that young man to be one of these, that one-of-a-kind you see."

    "I ah, yes, I understand," the young chaplain said to him. "I understand the
theological side of this, Doctor; but what's the practical meaning?"

    "Of... what, you mean the one-of-a-kind?"

    "No, I mean... yes!"

    The old man laughed. "Yes, well, I suppose it's in the practice of reporting,"
he told him. "These people are able to see evil." He was staring at the young
chaplain over his glasses now. They see it standing out in front of them when
you and I and everyone else would miss it," he said. "And they can just sense
and foretell it and broadcast it to you. Which is, I suppose, about how we've
come to know him anyway, even as a writer you see. There are many writers,
but in this particular business, the witness actually sees inside. It is not just
with his eyes, but, internally, maybe not even knowing what it is he sees when
he sees it, or even that he really does see it; and, because he is witnessing, you
see, he knows it anyway, without knowing it. Do you see this?"

    The chaplain shrugged, raising his hands, grinning. "I ah, I just don't know,"
he said. "You've lost me."

    "He knows things like a poet knows them," the old man said, "with pure
feeling, and intuition."

    "Oh! I see," the chaplain told him now. "I get you now."

    The old man sighed. "No, nevermind he said. "It's not like dealing in trade
skills. No, it’s not like something you can sharpen and then leave by to get dull
when you're old - it's not anything that can be gained or lost, you see. And I
don't really suppose it comes to you through being reborn, either." The old man
sighed and then smiled again. "You may always witness for the propagation of
faith," he said, "but you are not reborn to be a witness, because you are reborn
to wait. And so, not to confuse the issue, you may have both sides of it in front
of you." He said this smiling and gesturing with a slight wave of his hand. "You
have those who are born to tell you about it," he said, "and those who, being
merely reborn, cannot."

    Sauter continued to study the old man. "You're talking about biblical
witnesses," he said, "aren't you?"

    "Yes," the old man said, "certainly. I'm referring to the element of prophesy
here. But, if you think about it, there are other kinds, too. Yes, well, I don't
know. You'll just have to forgive an old man about this."

    "Nonsense," Sauter told him.

    "Well, no, what I'm trying to say is, that life is mostly just what you see,
most of it. And we all see it differently. You have witnesses who see clear to
the heart of matters and others who might have seen something of life they
can't forget, an evil you see; and finally, you have all the rest of us. We may
have seen nothing at all, or have seen only in the remembering to think, and
have managed to remember what was not even seen."

    Now both of them laughed, vigorously. "Bravo!" the chaplain said.

    "Well," the old parson told him, "as I recall it now, I'd concluded from
reading this little book of his on the way over to Paris that our young friend
Hemingway was the second kind of witness. And, you know, I'm pretty sure
my father was the first. The rest of us belong to a society which constantly
masks itself from the truth, eh? And therefore, we don't really know - do we,
Sauter?" The old man spoke wryly now. "We don't know about you, or for
that matter, about me, hmn? We're here and we wait again for the advent;
but, if you are born to do it, you witness the report of good and evil in the
waiting for it. It's that simple; and it’s that sort of gift. That writer was born
with that gift, as I would take it, or with that curse on him perhaps. Maybe it
had to rule him from the start, and maybe it will undo him in the end.
Anyway, it made him a great reporter." The old man sighed again. "I truly
thought he was a great reporter, Sauter. I saw that reading the book on the
way over to Paris."

    Sauter nodded. "Have you read anything else?"

    "Well, yes," the old man said. He was smiling again now. "I've read them
all, over the years."

    The chaplain touched the head rail of the iron bed with his big hand, lightly.
"Well," he said now, "I recall that name, at any rate - of that particular book,
I mean - as when old Neville Chamberlain flew back from Munich, and
peddled it - peace, he proclaimed, in our time!"

    "Ah, yes," the old man replied, "he did say that." He was holding the top of
the coverlet in his hands, looking at the cloth. "Not much that we tell each
other is very original," he said, "although, perhaps it may seem to be that way
because we also forget." He paused, reflecting again, looking at the cloth.
"But that writer," he said, "was truly original."

    "Is original," the chaplain corrected. "He's not dead."

    The old man was thinking now. Even while speaking, the old man had started
to realize how much his perception was affected, is always affected, he thought,
in some way or other, by time. He was so old now, and at the end of things,
and one of the things he'd kept wanting to discuss with the chaplain was the
seeming fact that if time is a measure of changes, it is also a measure of how far
apart things are, so that time is really distance, too, as well as change; and
maybe it’s your life's own reality, he thought, a measure of how far it’s come.
Maybe it too is just another function of time, and is conditioned by that
distance. Time is everything, including the time to go. You drift away from it
so much, lose it and can never go back to it. Good-bye, good-bye Anna, he
thought. He was still acutely aware of the end. She died of an illness in the Great
Depression and he felt greatly removed from this now. But you can’t deal with
it, he thought, because it is like an ancien moyen. You can deal with with its
stories, yes; and yes, deal with them presently, as if they were here just now
and still occuring in front of your eyes, yes you can deal with it; or maybe it is
only as if it has not yet occurred but you saw it anyway. You went in and out of
memory. It would change form and you would change with it, maybe just to
meet it, or, maybe, just because of it, lose it. That's the importance of
remembering, or of any reading of it, he thought, the remembering always just
to offset the effect of time, offset it because in some peculiar way all of it, time,
distance, change - reality - are the same damned thing, they are all parts of
that non-material universe that awaits out there, for you now. All of that which
happened already is still yet to happen, he thought, and is still happening in
some sense presently too, all at once, all at once; and the living and the dying
are parts of it, and no more.

    The young chaplain had remained patient. He seemed to know that old men
drifted in and out of their conversational focus at the end of things. The bulge
of the old man's abdomen seemed to contrast with the scrawny condition of his
arms and neck, and the legs were just lines under the coverlet. Their talking had
suddenly stopped while the old man was suffering his introspection. It did not
take very long, and the chaplain was gently asking him then, to go on.

    "With what?" The old man asked him. He had been looking at the cloth and
now he looked up. It was as if he'd forgotten what they were talking about.

    "Go on with your story," the chaplain said. "The one about the young
Hemingway."

    "Ah, yes, young Mr. Hemingway," the old man said. "I did meet him, you
see. I’ve told you that. He was just a young man then, just a kid and all. He
was very young when I met him and I got the impression that he’d been
deeply affected already, by what he'd seen over there, principally in Anatolia.
That was in his book you see. It wasn't so much the war, I think, as the
seeing of it, inside, later on, like a rumination. I arranged to meet him very
soon after my wife Anna and I arrived in Paris that summer, at the
Traveller's Club, down at the bottom of the Champs; and I bought him a hot
lunch, a bit of alms, eh?" The old man chuckled. "He was typically poor -
poorfolks, you know? We had an easy conversation together, I don’t know
why, and we met several more times just because we were able to do so.
Perhaps it was like those talks he had with you, at sea. I listened mainly, and
he went on doing most of the talking, mostly about the Turks. He had this
thing about it, having gone down to watch Gamal Ataturk's troops clean up
the Greeks, and about the Greeks really fumbling with their first try at
freedom in, what, fifteen centuries? He'd been surprised out there because
the Greeks were overcoming centuries of oppression, and should've been full
of righteous fire, ready to fight; and Turkey had already been advertised to
everyone as the sick man of Europe. The odds were crazy."

    The old man tried to lift himself up on his elbows in order to rearrange
his legs under the cover. They were beginning to ache from inactivity. "I
suppose," he said, "no one recognized that the sickness of Turkey had
nothing to do with its valor. A few years back, and they'd been slaughtering
Christians over on the Transcaucasis. You wouldn't remember that, of course.
But now here they were again, meeting the Greeks face to face, and it was the
same thing. Their inability, basically, to progress from the great Saracen
cavalry sword, and Chinese gun powder, to the tank and the airplane, spelled
their end. But, face to face, they were still as fierce as ever. Valor had nothing
to do with it, you see. Cultural sloth did what no gun could do. The Turks
were mean tempered hand fighters. We hardly knew about the Greeks."

    The old man's legs were easing now. He stopped to savor this. "No," he
said, "really, reality is not a different kind of thing during a war, but it just
seems so; and the three wars we know anything about, ourselves, were not
altogether different in this respect, one from the other. No, perhaps that was
what it was, he thought. The great wartime "times" are just one and the same
time, maybe really only one event, one reality; and you think now that if the
young writer had looked into the heart of all of that by some accident, and
had not recognized any start of it or the end of it either, perhaps his feelings
were bludgeoned, perhaps because underneath it he knew finally that what he
saw there wouldn't end. It would just go on; and the longer it did, the greater
its antecedents would grow. Well, whatever it was he'd seen it and it had hurt
him. He had seen clear into the heart of it and it had hurt him. That was
really what it was, the witness part. That was it. He'd seen more than he
should have, could bear. He could speak of it well and could report it truly;
but he could never really deal with it in the end. Something more was coming
on, coming out of it, or from deep inside it, bigger than all of it, bigger than
you.

    "But, there must have been another reason for talking together," he said. "It
was kind of funny, a little joke come to think of it. I'd never actually met
anyone in his family, you see, nor he anyone in mine, although he was just my
son’s age; but, somehow - and I don't rightly recall exactly how, how we got
into this - it seemed his mother's father had been in an Iowa calvary regiment -
one of some twenty six that were formed in all during the Civil War - that my
father had chaplained. They'd been together, briefly, amongst the seventy
thousand or so sons which Iowa gave to ‘The Cause’. And you see I
remembered hearing an interesting tidbit from my father about that - a very
interesting one, even if trivial."

    The old man stopped then, as if waiting for the chaplain to ask him to tell
the story. He knew he would also think about it some more, later on, on his
own, in a kind of largely ambiguous, self ruminating reverie in which he would
always be watching across a broken, southern Iowa landscape, always at
twilight, always with dusk shrouding the figure of his own father standing there,
erect, prematurely white, wearing a black preacher's frockcoat with a fine, gold
watch chain dangled across the inside, and his trademark, a blue bow tie, plain
and simple, stretched across the starched collar. He could always see his father
under a tree alongside the post and rail fence, standing by the outer gate with
a young officer in blue and gold, wearing his preacher's bow tie and standing
maybe with a hand in his pocket and one booted foot up on a rail. He
wondered why he could see it so well. They were always standing there
quietly, always waiting, always looking off into the west, into the auburn
streaked, gathering dusk, looking up along the sloping, rutted road above the
alluvial valley into the low, green hills where the young men were slowly
coming down through the dust and shadows, moving along in small groups
or singly, coming in for "The Cause" now that the Proclamation had mde it
all clear. All these young faces were shadowy and blurred to indistinction in
his permanent tableau, the more so when he tried to see them well. Some of
them were dressed in uniform and some were armed he thought and some
were lightly bearded too, probably trying to look older than they were; but his
father was not bearded, and never was. His father's chin was clean and
creased, cleft almost like his own, and he had a certain way of looking out at
you like a cold light was glowing in his hazel eyes, glaring through the
shadows, and there was something melancholy about all this, this shining
vision, something anxious and provoking too, something heart rending and
sad for him, even now. It was remembering what you could never change. It
was the vision that went along with what wars did to you, he thought, in or
out of them, it didn't matter, and it was what you did just by thinking about it.
It was a thing those young men saw when they were too young for it.

    The old man had begun looking up at the ceiling to see all of this and he now
tried to refocus his attention on the chaplain.

    "My father had been elected chaplain of the 33rd Iowa," he said, "and was
asked to move down river with a bunch of recruits from the Iowa coal fields,
boys who were recruited at a small place above Oskaloosa called Fort Tuttle.
Some of them were from as far north as Dyersville, and my father was bringing
them down on horseback to assemble units of mounted infantry for the
Vicksburg campaign. They were headed, I guess, eventually, to Helena. I was
a baby then.

    "We were living fairly close to the Des Moines River," he said, "and they
had to move along the northern bank of it and cross over just above its
confluence with the Missouri; and then go down the big muddy, down past
Memphis to the mouth of the Yazoo. That's how they were stringing all these
volunteer forces together, just then, integrating the new military units along
the line as detachments came in from the countryside."

    The old man had started smoking now, and was holding a burning cigarette
between his gnarled, yellowed fingers. He was looking at Sauter intently now.
"As I recollect it," he said, "what happened was this: his maternal grandfather
had been recruited into light horse, and was there with one of the detachments
my father had brought down the river, when they encountered a regular army
troop coming along in the opposite direction with several prisoners in tow. The
officer in charge of these prisoners was unclear about their status, since they
were not uniformed and had been captured in a brief ruckus coming up from
southern Missouri, and he'd brought them along for want of anything better to
do with them; and this captain asked my father to take them to Cairo.

    "But that evening - well, as I recall the story goes - one of these young
recruits, not even sworn in yet as a regular soldier, was setting up to guard
those prisoners - a back country, rag tag bunch from Missouri I think, not
army and not expected to cause any trouble or do anything rash because
nobody, including themselves, had any idea of what to do with them in the
first place - well, the recruit was mounted in the night shadows with a loaded
musket, which he'd somehow cocked in the dark; and just, somehow,
someway, one of those unofficial prisoners, although he had nowhere to go
by doing it, startled the horse and in that same momentary commotion decided
to try or at least it was said he tried to pull the recruit down off his horse at the
same time. Maybe he was going to ride away; but in that brief melee, as they
wrestled, the gun fell and went off. The musket ball travelling clear through the
prisoner and the horse and shot the recruit in his upper thigh. It wounded him
so that he ended up being a casualty of war before he was ever actually
inducted into the army to fight in it. But you see, it killed the other one, the
prisoner you see, and since it had killed him, the recruit had to be separated out
of the army before getting into it, the question being purely a legal one, you see
- was it an accident or had he shot an unarmed civilian or a prisoner of war?
And if he'd killed a prisoner of war, was he himself a soldier? This was the kind
of thing that wars stir up you know, and it stirred up right then, along with some
heavy conversation about who was paying for the horse. And in this case, my
father had to sort it all out himself, mainly because no one else wanted to come
near it, not the battalion command, not the judge advocate nor anyone else; and
he finally decided to report it all as a combat fatality, and a wounding in action."

    The old man laughed. "And the funny part about that old story," he said, "was
that this unfortunate recruit was apparently Mr. Hemingway's grandfather!"

    The chaplain grinned, and then began to laugh.

    The old man was enjoying it too. "We put all these little bits together," he said,
"after a nice, hot meal; and then over a couple of snifters of musky calvados
served to us in the bar at the Traveller's Club, I don't remember it exactly, but,
maybe the story was helped along by, you know, by one of those nice Upmann
habanas, eh? We were comfortable on the brandy and cigars and were humorous
about this little story."

    The old man smiled wistfully. "But, you know," he said, "I thought he was a
bit morbid about it, too. It was just as if it was also some kind of personal
metaphor, of sin somehow, maybe an illustration of the ‘crime’ of witnessing and
then not paying attention. After all, you had to know what was going on, or you
were - what, doomed?"

    "Yes, yes," the chaplain said. "It was contained in his Christian heritage; and
in ours too, I should think."

    "It seemed to cause him no little pain," the old man said, "even if we laughed
about it. And there was something else in that story which he finally perhaps
translated into everything else he ever thought about his family. I don't know
what all, what all caused it. The magic of transfer perhaps."

    "That's really very interesting," the chaplain said. He was slowly getting up
again, stretching his big arms. "As if there really was such a thing," he said, "like
a curse." He walked slowly back over to the window, and looked out again.
There were now sailboats out on the bay. "Anyway he said, "what kind of a
`peculiar' curse could that be?"

    "Well, I don't really know," the old man said, almost to himself now. "Your
guess is as good as mine."

    "Try one on me, for size," the chaplain said.

    "All right then, how about, say, the Civil War 'never ended' curse?"

    The chaplain looked back at him, puzzled. "But, of course," he said, "it did."

    "Yes, and then, of course, this last one," the old man said, "this, this awful
business we've just finished - who knows, perhaps it did not begin?"

    The chaplain was measuring him somberly from the window. "But it did
begin," he said, "it began in Poland."

    "Yes, and then, how about the one in the middle?" the old man went on.
"Perhaps it therefore had no beginning and no ending, either one. Maybe it
was just an explication of this unrecognized, unarticulated curse, the curse of
something larger and really deeply malevolent going on in our lives all that
long time, in the general life of man you see. That would have affected
everyone, don't you think? And somehow, it must have affected the witness,
because he was not just anyone. He was there to - well, that's it, you see - to
witness ‘la mort de guerre’!"

    "Whoa!" the chaplain said, laughing. "Oh, yes, brilliant!"

    The old man had almost lost him. He was staring out the window, and now
he turned once more and after pausing said that what had been most apparent
when he himself had met Hemingway was a kind of ‘expertise’ about
everything that was truly sad in life. Yes, he seemed to have gone past his
own time," he said. "Really," he said now, "maybe it was just me; but if it
wasn't sad, he could almost make it seem so with this kind of global
knowledge he had about what lies inside you, or beyond. There was just no
celebration in him," he said.

    The old man actually seemed to have been waiting for this. "Yes, that's
perfectly right," he said, "perhaps that's the key. And that would be precisely
the reason why evangelical faith lacks continuity with the real world. The real
world," he said, "like Hemingway, has never really celebrated; and the
evangelical one has never really stopped."

the end


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