Thanksgiving For A Habitat

Nobody I know would like to be buried with a silver cocktail-shaker, a transistor radio and a strangled daily help, or keep his word because of a great-great-grandmother who got laid by a sacred beast. Only a press lord could have built San Simeon: no unearned income can buy us back the gait and gestures to manage a baroque staircase, or the art of believing footmen don't hear human speech. (In adulterine castles our half-strong might hang their jackets while mending their lethal bicycle-chains: luckily, there are not enough crags to go round.) Still, Hetty Pegler's Tump is worth a visit, so is Schönbrunn, to look at someone's idea of the body that should have been his, as the flesh Mum formulated shouldn't: that whatever he does or feels in the mood for, stock-taking, horse-play, worship, making love, he stays the same shape, disgraces a Royal I. To be over-admired is not good enough: although a fine figure is rare in either sex, others like it have existed before. One may be a Proustian snob or a sound Jacksonian democrat, but which of us wants to be touched inadvertently, even by his beloved? We know all about graphs and Darwin, enormous rooms no longer superhumanise, but earnest city-planners are mistaken: a pen for a rational animal is no fitting habitat for Adam's sovereign clone. I, a transplant from overseas, at last am dominant over three acres and a blooming conurbation of country lives, few of whom I shall ever meet, and with fewer converse. Linnaeus recoiled from the Amphibia as a naked gruesome rabble, Arachnids give me the shudders, but fools who deface their emblem of guilt are germane to Hitler: the race of spiders shall be allowed their webs. I should like to be to my water-brethren as a spell of fine weather: Many are stupid, and some, maybe, are heartless, but who is not vulnerable, easy to scare, and jealous of his privacy? (I am glad the blackbird, for instance, cannot tell if I'm talking English, German or just typewriting: that what he utters I may enjoy as an alien rigmarole.) I ought to outlast the limber dragonflies as the muscle-bound firs are certainly going to outlast me: I shall not end down any oesophagus, though I may succumb to a filter-passing predator, shall, anyhow, stop eating, surrender my smidge of nitrogen to the World Fund with a drawn-out Oh (unless at the nod of some jittery commander I be translated in a nano-second to a c.c. of poisonous nothing in a giga-death). Should conventional blunderbuss war and its routiers invest my bailiwick, I shall of course assume the submissive posture: but men are not wolves and it probably won't help. Territory, status, and love, sing all the birds, are what matter: what I dared not hope or fight for is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft where I needn't, ever, be at home to those I am not at home with, not a cradle, a magic Eden without clocks, and not a windowless grave, but a place I may go both in and out of.