![]() Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. He came to the United States after France fell in World. ![]() And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. His book, Wind, Sand and Stars won the French Academy's 1939 Grand Prix du Roman and the National Book Award in the United States. ![]() ![]() They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. ![]()
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