The Dust of Death [antikvár]

Preface There were beggars in Berkeley. It was a warm October evening in the mid-sixties. With some close friends I had eaten a leisurely dinner in a small restaurant on Telegraph Avenue. We were enjoying our coffee, our minds relaxed and running deep. Suddenly two young men entered the restaurant and toured the tables, hurriedly scraping off the remains left on the plates. Then they slipped outside, sat down on the steps and began to eat, begging for dimes from passers-by as they did so. Beggars in Berkeley? As a European on my first visit to the United States I was forcibly struck by the incident. China, once, perhaps, where my memory of pre-Mao conditions include a forest of stretched-out arms; India, perhaps, where the sunken gaze of poverty is unique in its depth and its submission; Haight-Ashbury, perhaps, where the boarded-up shop windows stare like the sightless eyes of a self-maimed community. But Berkeley, the so-called freedom lab in the heart of the world's largest educational corporation? The much-heralded pilot plant of simplicity designed to combat materialism and waste? There were beggars in Berkeley. Certainly it was only an isolated incident. But the impression it left settled as a brooding suspicion that what we were witnessing in this and a thousand similar incidents was the gradual disillusionment of a generation, perhaps even of a culture. Ideals had grown so distant they were barely distinguishable from illusions. Meaning had become a mirage. Eager minds, soaring beyond facts to a super-freedom of fantasy, had plunged earthwards. Even resolute action, which seemed to have rolled the stone almost to the top of the hill, paused for