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Timothy; Timothy drove half an hour, grew bored, asked me to take over. I am the Richard Nixon of the automobile—tense, overeager, bumptious, forever miscalculating and apologizing, ultimately incompetent. Despite his handicaps of the soul, Nixon became president; despite my lapses of coordination and attention, I have a driver’s license. Eli has a theory that all American males can be divided into two moieties, those capable of driving and those who cannot drive, the former being suitable only for breeding and manual labor, the latter embodying the true genius of the race. He regards me as a traitor to the clerisy because I know which foot to put on the brake and which on the accelerator, but I think after experiencing an hour of my driving he’s begun to revise his harsh placement of me. I am no driver, I merely masquerade. Timothy’s Lincoln Continental is like a bus to me; I oversteer, I wobble. Give me a VW and I’ll show my stuff. Oliver, never a good passenger, eventually lost his nerve and told me he’d take over the wheel again. There he sits now, our golden charioteer, flogging us toward sundown.
    A book I was reading not long ago drew a structural metaphor of society from an ethnographical film about some African bushmen out hunting a giraffe. They had wounded one of the big beasts with their poisoned arrows, but now they had to follow their prey across the bleak Kalahari, chasing him until he dropped, which would take a week or more. There were four of them, bound in tight alliance. The Headman, the leader of the hunting unit. The Shaman, the craftsman and magician, who invoked supernatural aid when needed and otherwise served as the conduit between the divine charisma and the realities of the desert. The Hunter or Beautiful One, famous for his grace, speed, and physical strength, who bore the hardest burdens of the hunt. Lastly, the Clown, small and freaky, who mocked the mysteries of the Shaman, the beauty and strength of the Hunter, the self-importance of the Headman. These four constituted a single organism, each essential to the whole of the chase. From this the writer developed the polarities of the group, invoking a couple of Yeatsian counterrotating gyres: Shaman and Clown are the left gyre, the Ideational; and Hunter and Headman are the right gyre, the Operational. Each gyre realizes possibilities inaccessible to the other; each is useless without the other, but together they form a stable group in which all the skills are balanced. Onward from there to develop the ultimate metaphor, rising from the tribal to the national: the Headman becomes the State, the Hunter becomes the Military, the Shaman becomes the Church, the Clown becomes Art. We carry the macrocosm in this car. Timothy, our Headman; Eli, our Shaman; Oliver, our Beautiful One, our Hunter. And I, the Clown. And I, the Clown.

10. Oliver
    Eli saved the nasty part for last, after we were hooked on the idea of going. Leafing through the papers of his translation, frowning, nodding, pretending to have trouble finding the passage he wanted, though you bet he knew all the time where it was. And then reading to us:
    “The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O Nobly-Born, that eternities must be balanced by extinctions, and therefore we ask of thee that the ordained balance be gladly sustained. Two of thee we undertake to admit to our fold. Two must go into darkness. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live. Is there one among thee who will relinquish eternity for his brothers of the four-sided figure, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of self-denial? And is there one among thee whom his comrades are prepared to sacrifice, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of exclusion? Let the victims choose themselves. Let them define the quality of their lives by the quality of their departures.”
    Cloudy stuff. We poked and prodded at it for hours, Ned exercising