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The whole country is lawless, violent, explosive, demoniacal.
It's in the air, in the climate, in the ultra- grandiose landscape,
in the stone forests that are lying horizontal, in the torrential rivers
that bite through the rocky canyons, in the supra-normal distances,
the supernal arid wastes, the over-lush crops, the monstrous fruits,
the mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects, beliefs,
the opposition of laws and languages, the contradictoriness of temparaments,
principles, needs, requirements. The continent is full of buried
violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of
man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is
at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and
runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not
at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is
temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly
fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story.
Nature dominates. Nature wins
out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage,
to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people
- healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with
worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.
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Often it happens, as in Russia, that a man came in [to the employment office] with a chip on his shoulder. He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon. Nine times out of ten he was a good fellow, a fellow whom everyone liked. But when the rage came on nothing could stop him. He was like a horse with the blind staggers and the best thing you could do for him was to shoot him on the spot. It always happens that way with peaceable people. One day they run amok. In America they're constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for their energy, for their blood lust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America is pacifistic and cannibalistic. Outrwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it's a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbor and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world, actually it's a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody knows what it is to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the films where everything is faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place. |