SPAN: September 1973

Mightiest of the Martian mountains is Nix Olympica (left), a 300-milewide volcanic pile that towers 15 miles high in parts. The painting at left by artist Ludek Pesek was created after careful study of Mariner 9's photographs (such as the photo montage of Nix Olympica shown below).

~.

-

SPAN 2 A PRIMER ON PL-480 RUPEES

by P.R. Gupta

5 IS THERE LIFE ON MARS?

by John Noble Wilford

13 IS ANYBODY OUT THERE?

16 A NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE

18 ARE THERE LIMITS TO MAN'S GROWTH ON EARTH?

by Robi Chakravorti and Peter Passel, Marc Roberts and Leonard Ross

22 AMERICA RECOVERS FROM THE FRANTIC 'SIXTIES

by Irving Kristol

24 AS OTHERS HAVE SEEN US he mystery of Mars has haunted man longer and more persistently than that of any other planet in our solar system. Perhaps it is because Mars is Earth's nearest neighbor; perhaps it is because we have "humanized" it, so to speak-identifying its fiery red color with the attributes of the angry Roman god of war.

If today the Mars mystery is nearer to solution it is mainly because of the Mariner-9 mission last year, which provided 7,300 photographs of the red planet. The discoveries of Mariner 9 are summarized on pages 5-12.

Scientists believe there is little likelihood of intelligent life on Mars. But what of the rest of the universe? The new science of exobiology explores the fascinating possibility that the universe is teeming with intelligent beings. (See "Is Anybody Out There?" pages 13-16.)

Another recent astronomical speculation concerns "black holes," stars so dense that they literally disappear into their "white hole" counterparts in other galaxies. This new theory is described briefly on pages 16-17.

Contemplating the vastness of the universe only serves to underline the confines of Earth-and its attendant problems of pollution, overpopulation, and abuse of natural resources. The pros and cons of the limits of man's growth on earth are discussed on pages 18-21. And if, as many ecologists predict, we will be forced to migrate, Mars may be the most likely haven. Will there then be an "Invasion from Earth," an ironic reversal of Orson Welles's famous 1938radio broadcast?

0

T

26 AN INDIAN LOOKS AT SAN FRANCISCO

by Anees Jung

28 AN AMERICAN LOOKS AT THE GANGES

by Elizabeth Wahl

32 A RUSSIAN LOOKS AT AMERICA

35 AN AMERICAN LOOKS AT AMERICA

by Max Lerner

36 CALDER

45 ON BEING A WRITER: AN INTERVIEW WITH E.B. WHITE by' George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther Wraparound cover: "Les Masques," a tapestry by Alexander Calder, is part of the Woodward Collection on display at New Delhi's Roosevelt House, official residence of the U.S. Ambassador. An illustrated feature on Calder, acclaimed by international critics as one of the greatest contemporary artists, appears on pages 36 to 44.

STEPHEN

ESPIE. Editor; ALBERT E. HEMS lNG, Publisher.

Publisbed by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Limited, Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-40000I. Pbotograpbs: Wraparound cover-photo

by I.D. Beri. Inside front cover-Š National Geographic Society. I, 5-NASA. 6-7, 8 bottom left, IO-II-Š National Geographic Society. 8 top--<:ourtesy Martin Marietta Aerospace. 29--<:ourtesy Steven Darian. 30-Steven Darian, courtesy Madras Museum. 31--<:ourtesy Archaeological Survey of India. 33, 34 (except 34 bottom)- Yu Abramochkin, E. Pesov APN. 36 right, 38 top -Braniff International.

39-Nelson Morris. 40-Perls Galleries, New York. 41 (bottom three) and 44--<:ourtesy Art Vivant, Inc. 42-43-photo

by Geoffrey Clements, Perls Galleries, New York.

Error of omission in SPAN article: The U.S. infornrationService, SPAN magazine. and author Isaac Asimov express their deepest regret for failing to mention the pioneering role of Dr. E.C.G. Sudarshan in Asimov's article "Faster Than the Speed of Light" in the July 1973 issue of SPAN. The article discusses research in subatomic particles such as "tardyons" (particles which travel at less than the speed of light), "Iuxons" (particles which travel at the speed of light) and "tachyons" (particles which travel faster than the speed of light). Asimov gives credit for this research to physicist Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk and his co-workers, but fails to mention that a co-worker of equal importance with Dr. Bilaniuk was a prominent Indian physicist, Dr. E.C.G. Sudarshan.

Asimov said his failure to name Dr. Sudarshan in the article was not deliberate. He was aware of the important role played by Dr. Sudarshan . is research. He said that throughout the SPAN article, in most of the instances where Dr. Bilaniuk's name has been mentioned, .,..,. Sudarshan's name should also have been mentioned.

Asimov cells a.ttention to the fact that he gave specific credit to Dr. Sudarshan in an article entitled "The Luxon Wall," which appeared in the December 1969 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This article later appeared as a chapter in Asimov's book, The Stars in Their Courses.

ER

RUPEES The Governments of India and the u.s. are negotiating the ultimate disposal of the PL-480 rupe~ fund. Since there are so many misconceptions about PL-480 rupees and how they have been used to benefit India over the years, SPAN is presenting the fact sheet on these pages.

QUESTION: What are PL-480 rupees?

ANSWER: Public Law 480 (PL-480), which was enacted by the United States Congress in 1954, permitted the U.S. to supply India with an enormous amount of agricultural commodities (mainly foodgrains) on concessional terms to help fight famine.

"Concessional terms" means the U.S. allowed India to pay for these foodgrains primarily in rupees rather than in dollars and at a low rate of interest. The rupees the U.S. accumulated from these sales are called "PL-480 rupees." The Indian Government deposits them in the U.S. Government account with the Reserve Bank of India. The U.S. Government grants or loans a sizable portion of this amount to the Government of India on mutually agreed terms. The repayment of these loans along with interest on them to the U.S. Government become part of the U.S.-uses rupees which are eligible for grants to the Indian Government.

QUESTION: How were PL-480 commodities procured?

ANSWER: The India Supply Mission in Washington bought the grain from commercial exporters who were paid in dollars by the U.S. Commodity Credit Corporation. The India Supply Mission set the specifications for grain quality.

QUESTION: How many rupees are there in the PL-480 fund?

ANSWER: India has imported about 60 million tons of foodgrains and other commodities under the program, at a total cost of Rs. 2,557 crores, of which Rs. 314 crores ($418 million) are

repayable in dollars. All these foodgrain sales came under what is called "Title I" of the PL-480 Law. Title I imports ended in 1971.

There is another provision of the program called Title II, which started in 1955. This provision made it possible for America to donate food to India to help meet famine or other urgent relief requirements and to combat malnutrition-especially in children. The total value of food donations to India under Title II-from its inception in 1955 up to June '73-amounts to $824.4 million (Rs. 618.3 crores). Title II food donations to India are continuing.

These food imports have helped India avoid widespread distress. Even in years when rainfall was normal, India's food production often fell short of demand; the food imports prevented runaway inflation. In 1970-71 when foodgrain production exceeded 100 million tons for the first time in history, India devoted the bulk of PL-480 imports to building up buffer stocks.

QUESTION: What is the effect of PL-480 Title I imports on India's foreign exchange?

ANSWER: India has saved Rs. 2,243 crores worth of foreign exchange by importing PL-480 commodities.

QUESTION: Are all PL-480 food imports paid for?

ANSWER: No. Some are free. As we said in the third answer, under Title II the U.S. has donated food valued at $824.4 million (Rs. 618.3 crores). This is the largest food donation program in the world. During the current American fiscal year (ending June 1974), the U.S. is planning to donate an additional 306,000 tons of food valued at $52 million (Rs. 39 crores). Current donations include wheat, milk protein foods and vegetable oils.

QUESTION: Who gets this donated food?

ANSWER: About 91 per cent of it goes to undernourished Indian children-raising the nutritional level of some 10 million schoolchildren and 3.8 million preschool children. It is given in the form of free lunches, to which Indian state governments and¡ local communities also make substantial contributions.

Some of the food goes to adults, too. Under the Food for Work program, about 1.2 million workers in a number of development projects receive food supplies as part payment for work done.

In India, the U.S.-donated food commodities under Title II are being distributed by voluntary agencies such as CARE (Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere), Catholic Relief Service, Church World Service and Lutheran World Relief.

QUESTION: Let's get back to Title I rupees-the actual "rupee fund." Where are these rupees and how have they been used?

ANSWER: Although these rupees are the property of the U.S. Government, they remain in India-mainly as loans to the Government of India-in the U.S. account with the Reserve Bank. The agreements spell out that 8I per cent of Rs. 2,243 crores (the bulk of the Title I rupees) should return to the Government of India in grants and loans for economic development (18per cent as grants, 63 per cent as loans). A sum equivalent to 6 per cent of the total is reserved for Cooley loans to private enterprises. Thirteen per cent is reserved for U.S. Government use. However, from the rupees generated from the repayments of the principal and interest thereon, which become part of the U.S.-uses rupees, a substantial part of this amount, too, is utilized to promote a number of activities beneficial to India. (See chart, below right.) The remaining Rs. 314 crores ($418 million) provided in the PL-480 agreements are repayable in dollars.

In 1966, the U.S. Congress amended the Title I provisions in response to the changing agricultural scene in the United States and abroad, and modified terms of repayment. Payment in agreements signed with India subsequent to 1966 called for a progressive transition from payment in rupees to payment in dollars. However, the terms of repayment are concessional, spread over 40 years with an initial grace period of 10 years.

QUESTION: What is the relationship of PL-480 assistance to the over-all U.S. aid program in India?

ANSWER: PL-480 commodities under both Title I and II have accounted for more than 50 per cent of the total U.S. assistance to India over the past 20 years. American aid to India since 195I now exceeds $10 billion (Rs. 7,500 crores at the present exchange rate ). Of all nations participating in the PL-480 program, India has been the leading beneficiary, accounting for almost a quarter of all concessional sales and food donations since the inception of the program.

QUESTION: How has the PL-480 rupeefund helped India develop her agriculture?

ANSWER: These rupees have played a big role in helping India meet her immediate food needs, stave off famine, fight inflation and combat malnutrition. For agricultural development, America has extended loans and grants totaling about Rs. 800 crores in PL-480 rupees. This, incidentally, is in addition to U.S. dollar assistance for Indian agriculture, which exceeds $700 million (Rs. 525 crores).

The very first Indo-U.S. technical co-operation agreement, in 1952,related to agriculture. At the peak of this farming assistance program, some 109 American specialists served in India.

The range of projects included irrigation, the high-yielding varieties program, fertilizer production, plant protection, soil and water management, rural electrification, farm machinery development, foodgrain storage facilities, agricultural universities, and many others.

QUESTION: How have PL-480 rupees helped irrigation?

ANSWER: India's gross irrigated area has nearly doubled in the last 20 years-from about 56 million acres in 1952 to about 100 million acres in 1972. The U.S. helped do this, and part of the help came from PL-480 rupees. Here are a few figures: The American Government helped improve irrigation in 10 states (Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Mysore, Orissa, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal) through loans and grants of PL-480 rupees totaling Rs. 241.8 crores. This money went to help create 12 big rivervalley projects. In addition to this, another Rs. 174.8 crores

worth of loans-!..also from the PL-480 rupee fund-went into developing minor irrigation schemes.

QUESTION: How has the PL-480 program helped increasefertilizer production?

ANSWER: It has helped set up three large fertilizer factories: a public sector plant located at Trombay in Bombay and two private sector plants-one in Goa and one at Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. The 135,000-ton Trombay plant is operated by the Fertilizer Corporation of India, which received a rupee loan of Rs. 13.43 crores. The Rs. 50-crore Visakhapatnam plant of Coromandel Fertilizers, a joint Indian-American enterprise, received a Cooley loan of Rs. 12.29 crores from the PL-480 rupee fund. The Zuari Agro-Chemicals' fertilizer plant in Goa is also a joint Indian-American enterprise. The U.S. gave Zuari a rupee-fund loan of Rs. 21.66 crores.

QUESTION: What other areas of agriculture have been assisted?

ANSWER: Many of the chemicals needed to make pesticides are being produced by Indian-American joint enterprises which have received loans from PL-480 funds. Storage of foodgrains is another area. To help increase modern storage capacity, the U.S. extended assistance valued at about Rs. 29 crores, largely in grants.

QUESTION: How about agricultural education?

ANSWER: Some 19 agricultural universities set up in the past 13 years are leading India's Green Revolution. The first of these was established at Pantnagar in Uttar Pradesh in 1960 with the assistance of America's University of Illinois. Pantnagar also received a grant of one crore of rupees from the PL-480 fund.

Seven other agricultural universities in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Mysore, Orissa, Punjab and Rajasthan have received assistance from PL-480 rupees.

QUESTION: Has any of this money gone into agricultural research?

ANSWER: Other PL-480 rupees have gone into that. Scientists of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research have played a big role in boos!ing grain production. The U.S. has extended a

R.. 1,413 CRORES (63 %) LOANS TO GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

The chart shows the allocation of Rs. 2,243 crores out of a total of Rs. 2,557 crores. Excluded is Rs. 314 crores to be repaid in dollars.

loan of more than Rs. 17 crores to the Council. It may come as along with the Rs. 45 crores given to REC by the Indian a surprising fact that funds for the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Government. In addition to the Rs. 105 crores American grant Research Grant Program derive from that portion of the Title-I from its Embassy funds, the U.S. Government also extended sales proceeds reserved for the use of the U.S. Embassy in PL-480 loans totaling Rs. 138.5 crores for other rural electriIndia. There is a widespread-and erroneous-belief that these fication projects.

U.S.-uses rupees are reserved only to pay for U.S. Government QUESTION: What about health? Have PL-480 rupees conexpenditures in India. More than 380 co-operative agricultural tributed? research grants have been awarded to colleges, universities, ANSWER: They've assisted scores of projects to improve the research institutes, and other agencies in India since the first health of the Indian people. During the past two decades, the research grant in 1958, from the rupee fund. Right now there expectation of life at birth has gone up from 32 to 52 years. A 20-year rise in only 20 years! Why? Because of nationwide are 122 active gran~s located in 60 different institutions.

QUESTION: Have any other educational institutions benefited programs to eradicate such killers as malaria and smallpox. The new longevity is also the result of antibiotics, more doctors and from PL-480 rupees?

ANSWER : Yes. The first thing that comes to mind is the Indian nurses, more rural hospitals.

Malaria once caused a million Indian deaths in a year. Now Institute of Technology in Kanpur, a pace-setter for engineering education in India. The U.S. extended grants and loans totaling it has been all but wiped out. The Government of India's Malaria about Rs. 10 crores to the Kanpur lIT. The money came from .Eradication Program is one of the world's biggest ventures the rupee fund. So did the grants and loans (exceeding Rs. 44 in public health. America's participation in it began in 1958 crores) that helped set up 14 regional engineering colleges at and the U.S. aid has totaled Rs. 86 crores in grants and ¡Rs. 17 Allahabad, Bhopal, Durgapur, Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Kozhikode, crores in loans-both from the PL-480 fund.

Kurukshetra, Mangalore, Nagpur, Rourkela, Silchar, Surat, QUESTION: Can we talk about India's industrial development?

Tiruchirapalli and Warangal.

ANSWER: Indian industry has taken giant strides during the .At the grass roots level, the U.S. Government has helped past two decades. The U.S. helped achieve this progress by establish or assist vocational schools by extending loans. and giving rupee-fund loans totaling Rs. 190 crores to the Industrial grants amounting to Rs. 80 crores. This assistance has helped Development Bank of India, the Industrial Finance CorporaIndia pay for seven central training institutes and 357 industrial tion, and the. Industrial Credit & Investment Corporation of training institutes with a capacity of over 100,000 students.

India.

QUESTION: Let's talk about education as a whole. Have PL- QUESTION: What about transportation systems?

480 rupees done anything to upgrade the quality of India's over- ANSWER: The U.S. has extended PL-480 loans and grants totaling Rs. 95.2 crores, for construction of national highways all education?

ANSWER: Yes. To broaden the base of the whole education and for development of major and minor ports. pyramid, the Government of India has been improving elemen- QUESTION: It would seem that most of the PL-480 assistance tary schools by getting them better textbooks, increasing went to aid the public sector in India. Have any of these rupees teachers' salaries, building more schools, and upgrading science aided the private sector? education. The U.S. helped by providing from the rupee fund ANSWER: Yes, some. The U.S. Government has extended Rs. 110 crores, about two-thirds of this amount in grants. loans amounting to Rs. 123 crores to some 71 joint IndianQUESTION: Is there any field of u.s. aid to India where PL- . American enterprises or Indian subsidiaries of U.S. firms in the 480 rupees are NOT involved? How about power development? private sector. These loans have been extended from the Cooley ANSWER: The answer to the' first question is "No." The Fund portion of the PL-480 rupees. answer to the second is that Rs. 349 crores from the PL-480 fund QUESTION: 1n what way is the PL-480 fund used by the U.S. have¡gone as grants or loans to some 24 Indian power projects Government to pay for running its Embassy in India?

-hydel and thermal-with a total capacity of 5.8 million kw, ANSWER: The United States Government uses its PL-480 one~third of the whole power generating capacity of India. funds to run its Mission in India, to pay port and freight charges Some of them are multipurpose projects which have also helped on agricultural commodities which America donates to India, develop irrigation facilities. and to make development grants to the Government of lndia for American co-operation has taken two forms. Some 10 pro- such projects as rural electrification. Since the PL-480 program jects, with a total capacity of 2.4 million kw, have received began, the expenditure from the "U.S.-uses" rupees through assistance or have utilized U.S.-financed construction machinery. June 30, 1973 amounted only to about Rs. 477 crores including The remaining 14 power projects have been equipped with U.S.- Rs. 104 crores in grants to the Government of India, mainly financed power generating machinery. to the Rural Electrification Corporation. In spending "U.S.These 24 U.S.-aided projects are located all over the country uses" rupees, the United States is careful not to add to inflaand include such mammoth ones as the Sharavathi hydroelectric tionary forces in India or to purchase an undue proportion of project (712,800 kw) in South India, the Dhuvaran thermal goods in scarce supply. In the U.S. fiscal year ending June 30, power project (534,000 kw) in Western India, the Chandrapura 1973, the American Embassy spent about Rs. 80 crores of its thermal plant (420,000 kw) in Eastern India. Many people are "U.S.-uses" rupees. Of this amount, the American Government not aware that America has been India's chief helper in the used a little over two-thirds for grants to the Government of development of power.

India and for port and freight charges on Title II food comQUESTION: How about rural electrification? modities, donated to India.

1\NSWER: In July 1969, the U.S. approved a rupee-fund grant QUESTION: What will be the final disposition of the PL-480 of Rs. 105 crores to the newly established Rural Electrification rupeefund? .

Corporation (REC). And this grant also came from the ANSWER: The subject is under negotiation. The U.S. GovernU.S.-uses rupee fund "reserved for U.S. Embassy use." The ment is confident that the negotiations will arrive at an agreegrant helped finance the spread of electric power in villagesment acceptable to both nations. .

0

Left: In this Ludek Pesek painting two satellites-Mariner 9 and the Martian moon Phobos-are 85 miles apart as they orbit Mars, whose pock-marked face is 4,000 miles below them. The scale of the painting is accurate; it is the clarity of airless space which makes distances seem less. But there is a "historical inaccuracy" in this painting: Mariner was never as close to Phobos as 85 miles.

Above: A Viking Lander scoops up Martian soil with 10-foot retractable arm (left foreground) in this painting by Charles O. Bennett. Two such unmanned American spacecraft are scheduled to reach the red planet in 1976. In quest of living organisms, miniature laboratories in the Viking craft will analyze soil samples and dish antennas will transmit the findings to earth.

M

ariner 9's mission to Mars, like most voyages of discovery, shattered preconceptions of the past and raised fundamental questions to challenge explorers of the future. .The 2,200-polmd, windmill-shaped spacecraft is now only a tumbling artifact circling Mars, out of gas, cameras and instruments dead, radio silent. But by the time the end came in late 1972, Mariner 9 had completed 698 orbits in nearly a year, transmitted 7,329 television photographs of startling clarity, and stirred new scientific interest in the red planet.

When Mariner 9 first entered Martian orbit on November 13, 1971, the first man-made object to do so, scientists generally had a picture of the planet as a dull, dead world. Three earlier Mariners-Mariner 4 in 1965 and Mariners 6 and 7 in 1969, which flew by the planet-contributed to this belief by transmitting fuzzy, low-resolution photographs showing a crate red surface more like the moon than anything else. The photographs were misleading because they showed only 10 per cent of the surface, which just happened to be some of the most uninteresting parts of Mars.

Mariner 9 surveyed and mapped the entire Martian globe, revealing Mars to be a distinctive, dynamic planet. It discovered Mars to be a varied world of sharp relief and many contrasts, a world that has been shaped in the past by water and therefore may be or may have been hospitable to some forms of life.

Mariner 9's instruments saw a world of high winds, great temperature extremes, clouds of water vapor as well as of dust, towering volcanoes, chasms larger and deeper than the Grand Canyon, glacial terraces, moonlike craters and meandering channels that may have been cut by the flow{)f water.

As Robert H. Steinbacher, the project's chief scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says: "Mars used to be likened to earth in science fiction, and was compared to the moon after the first pictures from Mariner 4. Now we are seeing that Mars has a character all its own. It is not This article has been reprinted from RSlldezvous courtesy Bell Aerospace Division of Textron.

magazme.

earthlike or moonlike, it is Mars-like.:' This discovery has raised as many questions as it answered: Were there once rivers, lakes and floods on Mars?

Or is the planet only now evolving out of an inert past, growing hot within and gradually coming alive with volcanic force?

Does Mars have periods of earthlike atmosphere?

Could Mars become, in some distant epoch, a haven for refugees from an earth that becomes uninhabitable?

Project scientists are now pondering such intriguing questions. They have no clear answers, only speculations. And one man's view of Mars often contradicts another's.

Dr. Bruce C. Murray of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) believes that Mars is just now evolving, never had any vast bodies of water and may be facing an atmospheric dead end.

Harold Masursky of the United States Geological Survey, the man who heads the Mariner photographic interpretation team, says that the presence of meandering, riverlike channels is difficult to explain unless there has been liquid water on Mars in the recent past.

Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University, another Mariner-9 scientist and a leading expert on the study of the solar system, agrees about the water and suggests an explanation. He says that periodic changes in the planet's angle of rotation could make the climate unstable, alternating between forbidding ice ages (the present condition) and warm, earth like eras that could support a "thriving biology."

If this is true, Dr. Sagan says, future spacecraft that land on Mars are likely to find evidence of some forms of life, either past or present. The U.S. plans two Mars landings in 1976, which is, coincidentally, the time of the nation's 200th anniversary.

Called Viking, the two unmanned American spacecraft will be launched in 1975, will travel 440 million miles through space and swing into an orbit of Mars. Then the space-

craft, each of which will weigh 7,500 pounds, will separate into two parts, an orbiter and a lander. While the orbiters take more mapping pictures and search for water vapor in the thin atmosphere, the two landers will descend with the aid of parachutes to the separate sites on the surface. They will probably be aiming for relatively low, flat and warm places where the chances of a successful landing and of finding moisture are greatest.

For at least three months, if all goes well, the Viking landers will scoop up Martian soil and analyze it for any signs of biological activity. They will also "sniff" the Martian atmosphere to determine its constituents, measure wind speeds, temperatures and humidity and determine the chemistry of the surface.

Until then, however, much of the controversy stirred by Mariner 9 will continue to center on the photographs of the many channels on Mars that look as if they were carved out by flowing water. They appear to run downhill. And they have many fingerlike tributary channels, which would seem to rule out lava flows as the cause.

What, then, could account for such features on a planet with a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and no liquid water on the surface?

Dr. Sagan offers the following theory: "At present the atmospheric pressure on Mars is too low to provide a lid that can hold liquid water on the surface. We must conclude that the present environment of Mars is not typical of past environments, which must have been favorable to liquid water.

"We're not talking about the really distant past, either. The channels are not highly eroded, so they could have been formed 10,000 or 10 million years ago-certainly not billions of years ago.

"The debate is over what could cause this instability in the Martian climate. No one is sure. After all, nobody has yet provided a good explanation of ice ages on earth.

"The change in Martian climate must have been global. Local outgassing from volcanoes would not create a sufficiently dense atmosphere, for the gases would leak away to the rest of the globe. The view I'm attracted toI proposed it before Mariner 9-is that the climate is connected with theplanet'sprecession."

Text continued on page 12 Left: This montage, made by combining several hundred Mariner photos, reveals a 360-degree view of the entire equatorial region of Mars.

Across the center of the montage runs a 2,500-mile-long canyon which at places is as wide as 150 miles and almost 20,000 feet deep.

Overleaf: Artist Ludek Pesek depicts o.'1eof the gentler sections of Mars's equatorial canyonwhere it is only two miles deep. This Pesek painting, like the one on pages 6-7, is the product of a collaboration with Mariner-9 scientists.

'Mars is just now coming alive ...

large-scale things are going on inside the planet.' .

Dr. Sagan is the first to emphasize that this enon on Mars. To Dr. Murray this is eviLike the earth, and much like a spinning top, Mars has a slight wobble in its spin about is still only conjecture. He says that if a space- dence that Mars is just now coming alive.

"It implies that large-scale things are going its axis. As a result, about every 50,000 years craft landed in one of the dry channels it the Martian north pole drifts into a position would be possible to test his theory. If the on inside the planet," Dr. Murray says, addof greater exposure to sunlight; at another spacecraft's television camera showed sedi- ing that this could lead to greater and more time in the same 50,000-year cycle the south mentary layering and its instruments detected extensive volcanic eruptions and eventually water crystals in the rocks, he says that should to major changes of Martian topography. pole also tilts toward the sun.

The prospect of studying a planet in the When this occurs, Dr. Sagan says, it is prove that Mars once had rivers.

Dr. Murray of Caltech says that he "is early stages of growing hot and active excites possible that the. polar ice cap, which contains frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide (dry still not convinced" of Dr. Sagan's theory. He all scientists, for it could help them to underice),would begin melting. The release of addi- recently said: "Now I think we can say that stand some of the earth's earlier history, a¡ tional carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere Mars has never had any oceans and no atmo- history that has been obliterated by the erowould form clouds and a denser, opaque air sphere for most of its life. The atmosphere sion of wind, water and violent internal forces. of Mars today is a relative newcomer." envelope-like a global greenhouse.

But Dr. Murray doubts that Mars would This "greenhouse effect," as the scientists Dr. Murray, who is a professor of plan- ever produce an earthlike atmosphere. He call it, would hold in more of the sun's radia- etary sciences and a Mariner-9 investigator, says that the cold temperatures on Mars tion and thus warm up the planet and lead to explains that Martian atmosphere probably meant that water vapor and excess carbon further polar melting and possible floods of formed a few hundred million years ago, or dioxide emitted by volcanoes would be quickwater rushing across the surface. Based on the even less-which is brief by geological stand- ly frozen out of the atmosphere. present size of the Martian polar cap, Dr. ards. Its creation was probably associated Dr. Sagan, however, has a far different viSagan made calculations showing that if with the beginning of heavy volcanic activ- sion of the future of Mars. His vision encomeither cap was totally vaporized, enough ity, which spewed out the gases that formed passes the time when the atmosphere of Mars gases would be released to create an atmo- the atmosphere. will become more like earth's. That could Discovery of the Martian volcano craters happen in about four billion years, Dr. Sagan sphere equal in density to earth's. (At present, Martian atmospheric pressure is about one was one of Mariner 9's scientific highlights. predicts, when the sun grows hotter and exper cent that of earth's.) This dense atmo- The crater of the most prominent of the vol- pands after it consumes its hydrogen fuel and sphere would form the lid capable of retain- canic peaks, Nix Olympica, is 315 miles wide, starts burning heavier elements. ing liquid water on the surface. The planet's twice as wide as that of the volcano that once With the sun radiating more energy, the warming, Dr. Sagan adds, could revive vege- formed the Hawaiian Islands. The absence of earth's oceans could be expected to turn into tation and other life forms that "might have many meteorite impact craters overlying the clouds of steam. The result: a "runaway greenbeen in repose during the climatic winter." volcanic formations indicates to scientists house" effect similar to conditions at present Then, after many years when the Martian that vulcanism is a relatively recent phenom- on Venus. The steamy clouds could increase pole tilts back out of such direct sunlight, Dr. earth's atmospheric pressure by 300 times. The Sagan suggests that the planet would return Below: Another photo of Mars's great canyon. steam, while admitting sunlight, would preto an ice age-the atmosphere cooling and Atmospheric pressure differentials recorded by vent the infrared radiation emitted by the thinning, the water and carbon dioxide re- Mariner 9 discovered that the canyon reaches down earth from escaping into space. Earth would turning to frozen states. become an unbearable place for humans. to depths as much as 19,700 feet below its rim.

But do not despair! There's hope. At the same time this is happening, Dr. Sagan says, Mars would permanently emerge from its ice age because of the same increase'in solar radiation. Mars, being further away from the sun, might then become like earth today.

In an article in the journal Science, Dr. Sagan and Dr. George Mullen concluded: "It is difficult to imagine what could be done to prevent this runaway, even with a very advanced 'technology, but at the same epoch the global temperature of Mars will become very similar to that of present-day earth. If there are any organisms left on our planet in that remote epoch, they may wish to take advantage of this coincidence."

When this comes to pass-if it does-the refugees from earth will probably want to â&#x20AC;˘. call their getaway vessel Sagan's Ark. 0 About the Author: John Noble Wilford, an aerospace and science writer for The New York Times, has reported on all the Mariner missions to Mars.

He is the author of We Reach the Moon, an account of the Apollo project which won the U.S. Aviation/Space Association's 1970 book award.

onsider the Earth as the only populated world in ¡¡111jinitespace, is as absurd as to assert that in an entire jield sown with millet only one grain will grow.

From the first time he looked into the heavens and sensed that there were worlds beyond his own, man has sought to answer a haunting question: Are we alone in the universe? Although he has worked out many rationales to justify costly space programs, man's prime motivation for launching his rockets is his determination to learn if there really is extraterrestrial life.

Such vast expenditures of energy and resources are contributing to t~e growth of an entirely new science called exobiology (from the Greek exo, or out of), which has come into being in the past decade and is dedicated specifically to the continued

0/1

next page

study of extraterrestrial life. Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson has sardonically called exobiology a science "that has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists." But in laboratories, at giant radio observatories and at esoteric symposiums, some of the world's keenest intellects have begun to focus on the new discipline.

In September 1971, for example, dozens of eminent scientistsincluding two Nobel laureates-gathered at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Soviet Armenia under the auspices of the Soviet and U.S. Academies of Science to ponder a mindboggling proposition: Should man try to monitor the messages of other worlds? The answer was a resounding yes. Soviet, American, Czech, Hungarian and British delegates united to support an unusually co-operative proposal: "It seems to us appropriate that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should be made by representatives of the whole of mankind."

In the heady friendliness of the conference, the Soviets also saw fit to reveal that they are conducting two continuing searches for messages from space. A IS-meter radio telescope is "listening" to the emanations from 50 relatively nearby stars, one at a time, in the hope of picking up an intelligent signal; and radio observatories in four different locations are trying to detect short, intense bursts of electromagnetic energy that might be transmitted into space by the technological products of an advanced civilization.

At a similar conference that summer at the Ames Research Center near San Francisco, one of the chief exobiology research centers in the United States, participants discussed the feasibility of launching Project Cyclops. The ambitious enterprise, which might cost as much as a billion dollars, would involve building three vast arrays of radio telescopes to conduct a more effective search for messages from the stars.

In their discussions of extraterrestrial life, most exobiologists suggest that in all probability the universe is teeming with intelligent beings. Most are now convinced that there is no intelligent life or technological civilization on the other eight planets of the solar system. If intelligent, technological races inhabit any of the other planets or their moons, so the argument runs, man would likely have heard from them-or have been visited by themlong ago. But that reasoning in no way diminishes the intense interest that most scientists feel about the faintest possibility of finding any form of life-or clues that it once existed-on the Earth's planetary neighbors.

Even before man had scientific facts to back his convictions, he was confident about the existence of extraterrestrial life. In the Middle Ages, when it was dangerous to question Christian dogma which held that the Earth was the center of the universe and that other worlds were lifeless, the Polish astronomer Copernicus and his followers thought otherwise. After years of observations, he concluded it was the sun-and not the Earth-that occupied center stage; the Earth, he said, was simply one of several planets that spun around the parent sun. A zealous disciple, the Dominican monk Giordano Bruno, added an even more shattering idea. "Innumerable suns exist," proclaimed Bruno. "Innumerable earths revolve about these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven [then known] planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds." Although Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 as a heretic, his views lived on.

In fact, after the newly invented telescope showed man that

the planets were not simply flecks of light, it became quite fashionable to regard all of them as inhabited. The 18th-century astronomer Johann Elert Bode, author of Bode's Law (which says each planet is roughly twice as far from the sun as the previous one), contended that the same mathematical proportions held for the spirituality of their inhabitants. Thus, by Bode's reckoning, Martians, on the fourth planet from the sun, were considerably more spiritual than the people on the third (Earth).

In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli reported actually observing canali linking dark areas on Mars.

Although the Italian word can simply mean channels or grooves, it was promptly translated into English as canals, which suggested that they were artificially made. That inspired an erstwhile American diplomat named Percival Lowell to take up astronomy and establish an observatory near dry, cloudless Flagstaff, Arizona, principally to study Mars. Lowell spotted hundreds of "canals" on the Martian surface and contributed the theory that they were the work of an advanced civilization. Belief in intelligent life on Mars was dramatized by H.G. Wells in his novel The War of the Worlds and carried into contemporary times by another Welles named Orson, whose 1938 radio broadcast of the novel caused many listeners to fear that Earth was being invaded from outer space.

In their persistent belief that extraterrestrial organisms exist, modern scientists are supported by laboratory experiments that have already brought man close to understanding the secrets of the origin of life. According to some theories, that process began shortly after the formation of the Earth some 4.6 billion years ago. The primordial planet was still enveloped in a thick atmosphere of ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water vapor. Perhaps because of the sun's ultraviolet radiation, or lightning discharges in the Earth's turbulent atmosphere, or even the heat from the volcanoes that were erupting all over the face of the young, seething planet, some of the atmospheric molecules broke up and reunited in different combinations. After these molecules were washed into the Earth's seas they formed amino acids, organic compounds that are the building blocks of protein and of life. Other reactions in this "soup" formed the forerunner chemicals of nucleic acids, which in turn are the building blocks of DNA, the master molecule that directs the production of protein in living cells.

FinallY, after millions of years and countless interactions, a long molecule was born that had an extraordinary capability: It could replicate, probably by breaking into sections that attracted other chemicals that in turn became duplicates of the original molecules. With the emergence of these genesis molecules, biological evolution was on its way.

A now classic experiment, performed in 1953 at the University of Chicago by a young graduate student named Stanley Miller, suggests that the theory is correct. Following a scheme proposed

by Nobel laureate chemist Harold Urey, Miller managed to produce amino acids and other organic compounds by sending electrical discharges through a mixture of gases that simulated the Earth's early atmosphere. Since then, a host of other researchers have repeated the experiment with different energy sourcesultraviolet rays, heat lamps and even shock waves. Taking the process through one more giant chemical step, chemist Sidney Fox of Florida's University of Miami has succeeded in linking up testtube amino acids into what he calls "proteinoids." These are tiny

protein fragments that tend to form themselves into bacteriasized spheres. In equally dramatic experiments, University of Maryland exobiologist Cyril Ponnamperuma and biochemist Juan Oro at the University of Houston have shown that it is also possible, in laboratory simulations of the early conditions on Earth, to make several of the chemical building blocks of nucleic acids.

There is increasing evidence that similar chemical combinations take place in outer space. Of the thousands of meteorites that bombard the Earth each year, about two per cent contain organic, or carbon-rich, compounds. On several occasions, researchers claimed that some of these meteorites-called carbonaceous chondrites-contained amino acids and even fossilized remnants of microscopic extraterrestrial life. But most scientists have contended that the amino acids or living debris were picked up by the porous meteorites either as they plunged through the Earth's atmosphere or later in the laboratory.

The whole argument was dramatically reopened in 1970 by the Ceylonese-born Ponnamperuma, who identified 17 different amino acids in a newly fallen Australian meteorite. Ponnamperuma conceded that even a thumbprint on a laboratory beaker could have introduced the acids into his test samples, but he presented evidence that seemed to rule out the possibility. Although amino acids can be assembled in two ways-one a mirror image of the other-most of those found in terrestrial life have a lefthanded configuration; that is, polarized light waves passed through them are rotated slightly to the left. Yet, when Ponnamperuma tallied up the meteorite's amino acids, he found an almost equal distribution of left- and right-handed molecules. That, he felt, was a clear sign that they had come from space.

There is growing evidence that the basic chemicals of life can be found beyond the solar system. In 1968, a team of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley pointed a radio telescope toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the island of stars in which the sun is located. To their great satisfaction, the telescope's big electronic ear picked up emissions that could only be given off by ammonia molecules (bombarded by radiation, molecules emit characteristic signals that can be used like fingerprints for identification). For the first time, complete, chemically stable molecules had been found in the swirling clouds of gases that occupy the enormous spaces between the stars. Since that discovery, about two dozen molecules, including carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, ethyl alcohol and water, have been identified in distant space.

The discovery of these far-off molecules, many of which are essential to life, indicates that the same chemical concatenations that led to life on Earth may be under way throughout the universe. Says Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University, an expert on the study of the solar system: "The building blocks of life are lying around everywhere."

Even so, life elsewhere in the universe might resemble nothing on Earth. It would almost certainly be molded by different environments and possibly by different chemistries. Says Sagan: "If we started the Earth all over again, even with the same physical conditions, and just let random factors operate, we would never get anything remotely resembling human beings. There are just too many accidents in our evolutionary past for things closely resembling human beings to arise anywhere else."

Although their thinking may well reflect planetary chauvinism, most scientists believe that life, whatever its form, can begin only on a planet or one of its moons; it is inconceivable to them that

it can evolve am~ng the molecules floating in space or within the nuclear fires of stars. But are there any planets outside the solar system? The capability of detecting a planet in orbit around even the sun's nearest stellar neighbor is beyond the power of the largest optical telescopes, but man y astronomers are convinced that there are billions of planets in the observable universe. The sun, they note, is an ordinary star in an island of 100 billion stars, the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way, in turn, is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. Thus the laws of mathematical probability would weigh heavily against the notion that the sun is the only star with a planetary system. Moreover, the more recent theories of stellar evolution predict that the formation of planets around ordinary stars like the sun is more the rule than the exception.

Astronomers have even more direct evidence that there are distant, unseen planets. Analyzing a wiggle in the path of Barnard's star, one of the sun's nearest neighbors, (six light-years, or 58 trillion kilometers away) they have concluded that two planets about the size of Jupiter and Saturn are orbiting the star and exerting a gravitational pull that affects its course. The observation raises the possibility that other smaller planets with Jess noticeable gravitational pull are also circling Barnard's star, and it helps support one common estimate by astronomers that there may be at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way alone.

Not all of these planets can support life. To do so, they must be orbiting a star that shines with steady intensity for billions of years and must occupy what U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration astrophysicist Su-Shu Huang called the star's habitable zone-the region in space where the amount of solar radiation is neither too intense nor too weak for life. Taking these requirements into account and considering the rate of new star formation (about one per year in the Milky Way), the percentage of stars that have planets (about half), and other factors, the scientists attending the 1971 meeting in Armenia concluded that there are now 100,000 to one million technological civilizations in the Milky Way. They are an average of a few hundred light-years apart, and each one is capable of transmitting radio messages.

That number, the scientists agreed, could vary widely, depending on the length of time that a race could survive as a technological society. Pessimists in the group estimated that a civilization might survive as little as 40 or 50 years after it developed the capacity to transmit radio messages; it would soon destroy itself in a nuclear holocaust or pollute itself to death. With that short a life span, the number of technological civilizations existing concurrently within the galaxy would be quite small, the average distance between them immense, and the possibility of an exchange of messages sharply reduced.

In any event, space travel as man knows it would be out of the question for contacting a civilization in another solar system. If an astronaut were sent off in a spaceship traveling at rocket speeds of eight kilometers per second, for example, it would take him at least 80,000 years to reach the nearby star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.3 light-years away; more distant stars might keep him en route for hundreds of thousands, millions or billions of years.

But if technological civilizations are capable of surviving hundreds of thousands of years, as the optimists at the conference suggested, the number thriving at anyone time would be much

greater, the average distance between them reduced an~ the possibility of communication-at least by radio-greatly lllcreased.

Says astrophysicist A.G.W. Cameron of New York's Y~shiva University: "We know that our species has managed to live 28 years since the development of the A-bomb. We want to know if it is going to live 100, 1,000, one million or one billion years.

The whole argument about communication hinges on the longevity of a species."

Man, for example, has been inadvertently sending strong signals into space for about 15 years by using military radar and UHF (ultrahigh frequency) communication devices. If the nearest technological race is 20 light-years away, for instance, the terrestrial signals will reach it in 1976. If that distant race immediately composes a message and sends it back, it will not rea~h t?e Earth until 1996. Will atomic-age man still be here to receIve It? There are other formidable problems in communicating with an alien race. At what frequency would a civilization listen for and transmit messages? Many scientists have proposed the 21-centimeter band, which is the wave length of emissions from the hydrogen atom, the most abundant element in the universe. Anoth~r hurdle might well be the choice of a language that would be Ulllversally understood by intelligent beings. Also, because man has so recently entered a technological- state, any civilization capable of receiving earthly signs might be far more sophisticated. Would it bother to reply? Possibly not, according to Sagan, because the alien race might find men as inferior as men find ants. "Would we bother teaching the alphabet to the ants?" he asks.

On several occasions in the past decade, radio astronomers have been startled to receive signals that seemed to signify an extraterrestrial intelligence. By 1960, when scientists led by Frank Drake in an operation called Project Ozma used the radi? telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, in an attempt to pick up signals from nearby stars, they detected regular pulses tha~ were later presumed to be emanating from a U.S. radar expenment.

In the mid-1960s, a Soviet astronomer detected varying signals from a mysterious radio source. The source was later identified as a distant, starlike quasar. When Cambridge astronomer Anthony Hewish and his assistant Jocelyn Bell in 1967 recorded blips coming from space at precise intervals, they playfully named the sources LGMs (for Little Green Men) on the chance that they had detected the beacon of an advanced civilization. The LGMs were later named pulsars and recently identified as natural phenomena: the long-sought neutron stars. Despite man's failure to pick up any interstellar communications, however, the entire galaxy could be filled with chatter between advanced civilizations, transmitted by a technique still undiscovered on Earth. Says Dr. Carl Sagan: "We may be very much like the inhabitants of an isolated valley in New Guinea who communicate with villages in the next valley by drum and runner but have no idea that there is a vast international radio traffic going around them, over them and through them."

If a signal from another planet is ever received and deciphered, it would surely have an immeasurable impact on man. In one brief burst of information it would expand his horizons into infinity.

Any civilization capable of communicating with Earth from another planet would unquestionably be older than man's. It would have long since mastered the problems that now plague the Earth; pollution, overpopulation and the ever-present threat of war would surely be a part of its past. And if it had learned to control the awesome power of the technology that it surely must possess,perhaps it would teach that secret of survival to man.

0

A NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE Most scientists now agree that the universe began with the cataclysmic explosion of an extremely dense primordial atom, and that the billions of starfilled galaxies, including the Milky Way, are still rushing outward from the original big bang. The speed of that expansion, astronomers have determined, is decreasingslowed by the gravitational pull of the galaxies upon each other.

What cannot be explained, however, is that the calculated mass of the universe's galaxies is only about one-tenth the amount required to produce that rate of deceleration. Where is the missing mass?

Some scientists think that the missing mass may be hidden away in a completely invisible form, inside so-called "black holes" in space.

First postulated in 1939 by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder, one of his graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley, black holes are the theoretical residue of extremely massive stars whose thermonuclear fuel has been exhausted. As the fires go out. the gases-which have been supported in the shape of a huge, distended globe by heat and radiation-suddenly begin to fall inward toward the star's center of gravity. If the star is massive enough, the imploding gases gather such momentum as they fall that they virtually crush themselves out of existence at the stellar center. Using the formulas of Einstein's general theory of relativity, more recent theorists predict that as the star shrinks toward oblivion, the familiar rules of physics may be Reprinted by permission from TIME, the weekly newsmagazine. Copyright Š by Time Inc.

violated. Its mass becomes infinitely dense, yet occupies no space. Its gravitational pull becomes so intense that no light or other radiation can escape from it. Thus the star cannot be detected by conventional observations. It becomes a black hole.

Although the existence of black holes has not yet been proved, scientists speculate that as much as 90 per cent of the universe's mass may e;lCist in this bizarre form. As they explain their theory, the early universe's mass probably consisted of clusters of huge superstars. These primordial giants, as much as 100 times as massive as the sun, eventually cooled, collapsed and disappeared.

One way to test the theory is to find a black hole. Scientists are already looking for binary stars (a pair of stars that rotate around the same center of gravity). It is possible that such pairs consist of one visible star and a partner that may have disappeared into a black hole, but is still exerting a measurable gravitational pull on the visible star. Now, just as scientists are beginning to study the first tentative signs that there really may be such black holes, they are also being asked to consider another fantastic notion: the existence of "white holes."

Astrophysicist Robert M. Hjellming of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, argues the possibility of holes that are the complete antithesis of black holes. Such opposites are common enough-for example, the negatively charged electron and its antimatter version, the positively charged positron. But Hjellming's white holes are more than simply mirror ima~es of

black holes. They are sources of matter that could literally come from out of this world.

Hjellming's hypothesis may be the answer to a question that has bothered scientists ever since the existence of black holes was proposed: If matter really vanishes inside black holes, as if they were bottomless pits, where has the matter gone?

British theorist Roger Penrose suggestedsome time ago that

the missing matter may pop out elsewhere in the universe-or even in an entirely different universe.

Picking up where Penrose left off, Hjellming says that the point at which the matter reemerges in the other universe would be a white hole. Even more intriguing, this passage of matter would not be a one-way street. Matter would also leave the other universe through black

holes, says Hjellming, and appear in ours through white holes. Thus the flow of matter between the two universes would be kept in balance.

Hjellming says that some evidence may already be at hand that white holes do exist.

One of the great puzzles of contemporary astrophysics is the huge amount of energy--cosmic rays, X rays, infrared radiationthat is apparently coming from

distant quasars and from the centers of galaxies, including the Earth's own Milky Way; the output seems to be greater than can be accounted for by known physical processes, including the conversion of matter into energy by thermonuclear explosions. If it could be shown that matter and energy were coming from another universe, Hjellming says, that problem would be neatly solved.

0

ARE THEREliMITS m MAN'S GROWTH ON EARTH iI YES T

he Limits

by ROB] CHAKRAVORTI

to Growth is a doomsday

book. When I first read about it, I recalled another book which had created a similar furor about six years ago. Its title was Report From the Iron Mountain. It made a convincing case for the inevitability of war in the present system of nation-states.

War sustains the system, Report said, and peace will bring about chaos.

Report was a shocking book. So is The Limits to Growth. One questioned traditional methods of peace-making with a sardonic humor; the other deflates the traditional "hang-up" with growth with careful thrusts of statistics, models and projections into the future.

Limits also reminded me of Walt Rostow's famous Stages of Economic Growth, but for a different reason. If we compare Limits with Stages, we realize how far we have traveled since the optimism of the '50s about the possibilities of progress and growth. The sweetness of the latter-day enlightenment is now turning sour, and the light dims.

Rostow made popular the aeronautical imagery of take-off. Limits warns that what has gone up contains a time-bomb and will crash down to the earth. "Overshoot and collapse" is the ultimate and inevitable fate of the present unchecked onrush for economic growth.

Unlike Report (and, I may add, most doomsday books), Limits is a closely reasoned and tightly written book. You may or may not agree with its conclusion; but you'll find it difficult to find fault with its methodology.

If you choose to criticize its methodology, then you must be ready also to throw out systems analysis and computer projections-in fact, most of the techniques that social scientists, industrial research teams and futurologists use to make enlightened guesses about the future. Discarding these techniques means picking up crystal balls from gypsy tents.

The scope of the findings of Limits is global. The book's sponsor is the Club of Rome, an informal international association with a membership of about 70

persons of 25 nationalities, including eminent systems-dynamics experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Three years ago, a team of experts sponsored by the Club of Rome took up a project on the predicament of mankind. It examined five basic factors that determine and therefore ultimately limit growth on this planet-population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production, and pollution. The Limits to Growth is a report on this research.

Since the research team consisted of systems analysts, they proceeded on the basis of a series of "givens" and a set of refined variables which were quantified and then combined into models. Papers on how these models were prepared are not yet available to the public; but the names of the experts associated with the project ensure its reliability. Limits presents the results of what must have been painstaking and foolproof research-an impressive array of data and their interrelationships, summarized in neat charts, graphs and computerized projections.

It is difficult to find fault with the ordering of data in the book. There are 48 figures and they are correctly presented in an ascending order of complexity, with each step in the order explained lucidly and simply for the lay reader. If he is concerned enough about the future of man on the spaceship earth, he should be able to thread his way through the logic of the book's argument which may appear complex at first sight, but is, in reality, simple in its fundamentals.

Limits sees man's activity as a complex web of interaction with his habitat. This is a simple proposition which human ecologists and some anthropologists have long used as the conceptual basis of their research. In a sense, the man-and-habitat relationship can be viewed as a simpler version of the man-and-nature relationship that Marx used as a philosophical underpinning of his theory of change. On a much more rarefied level, it can be argued that the man-and-nature relationship itself is a derivative of the purush and pra-

hiti interaction which was the concern of a school of Indian philosophy.

However, Limits does not raise ontological questions. It views the man-and-habitat relationship from the practical viewpoint of man's chance of survival. The problem that Limits poses is practical and not philosophical. It is nevertheless important to understand the conceptual framework before the detailed enumeration of facts in support of a theory can be grasped.

Instead of the terms man-and-habitat or man-and-nature, the book uses a population-and-capital system. A series of analyses and projections are made, some with the help of computers, all pointing to a simple conclusion: Unless growth is controlled, the earth's resources and its human habitants will be destroyed. Instead of the decline and fall of a civilization, Roman or otherwise, there will be a decline and fall of all civilizations in the long run, and the longest run may be less than ISO years.

The argument is presented logically through a step-by-step exposition. The first chapter, entitled "Nature of Exponential Growth," updates Malthus and makes projections of the widening disparity between rich and poor nations.

These two themes are not new; but they are presented clearly and concisely as the launching point for terrifying scenarios on food production in all its ramifications, fast usage rate of resources for industrial activities, and the relentless threat of pollution.

After submitting data piecemeal but in an ordered sequence, Limits goes global, seeks the help of computers and gives a series of models of the future. As exercises in futurology, these models are worth serious study. Detailed papers on them will be a source of exciting discussions by people interested in multivariate analysis with a longitudinal thrust into the future.

What is most fascinating, perhaps, are the combinations of variables used in these models. The simplest model accepts the world as it is now and makes a projection.

This is followed by a series of hypothet,ical

One of the most controversial books recently published in the United States is 'The Limits to Growth,' a computer study of the interaction of basic components-economic, technological and environmental-that make up our global Ol:ganization. The book has been lavishly praised and roundly condemned. It has been called 'a closely reasoned and tightly written book' as well as 'empty and misleading.' Here, SPAN offers its readers both sides-a general appraisal of the book and a pointed critique.

NO alternatives with rosy possibilities of improvement in one factor or a combination of factors.

For illustration, there is a model with the hypothesis of natural resource reserves doubled; another with "unlimited" resources based on the use of nuclear power and extensive programs of recycling and substitution. These are followed by models of escalating optimism combining "ideal" situations such as near-perfect pollution controls with perfect birth control. With each addition of saving measures, doomsday is postponed, but never eliminated from the perspective of mankind.

The most complex model in the series is also the most depressing. It assumes a world where resources are fully exploited and 75 per cent of those used recycled; pollution generation is reduced one-fourth of its 1970 value, land yields are doubled world-wide and effective methods of birth control are available to all.

The result, the book says, is still an end to growth before the year 2100. That is only 127 years from today. "In this case," Limits says matter-of-factly, "growth is stopped by three simultaneous crises.

Overuse of land leads to erosion, and food production drops. Resources are severely depleted by a prosperous world population (but not as prosperous as the present U.S. population). Pollution rises, drops, and then rises again, causing a further decrease in food production and a sudden rise in the death rate. The application of technological solutions alone has prolonged the period of population and industrial growth, but it has not removed the ultimate limits to that growth."

This last model represents what sociologists would call an "ideal type" situation. And, yet if computers are to be believed, even the best of all possible worlds is not good enough. The picture of the future does not look any better when we look at it with a narrower focus. The table on economic growth related to the usage of some of the basic nonrenewable resources appears on page 21.

T

by PETER PASSEL, MARC ROBERTI;

he Limits to Growth in our view, is

an empty and misleading work. Its imposing apparatus of computer technology and systems jargon conceals a kind of intellectual Rube Goldberg device-one which takes arbitrary assumptions, shakes them up and comes out with arbitrary conclusions that have the ring of science. Limits pretends to a degree of certainty so exaggerated as to obscure the few modest (and unoriginal) insights that it genuinely has.

It approaches the problem of predicting the future straightforwardly enough, employing the technique of mathematical simulation. Simulation has proved invaluable as a device for testing engineering designs at little cost and no risk to lives. For instance, instead of simply building a prototype aircraft and seeing if it flies, the airplane's characteristics are condensed to a series of computer equations which simulate the airplane in flight.

In Limits, attention is focused on the whole world and extended for centuries.

Factors the researchers believe influence population and income are boiled down to a few dozen equations. The crucial variables-population, industrial output, raw materials reserves, food production and pollution-all interact in ways that are at least superficially reasonable: Population growth is limited by food output, health services and pollution; industrial growth and agricultural growth are limited by resource availability and pollution.

Limits is thus able to create a hypothetical future based on knowledge of the past.

Scientists should have few objections to this scenario, even though it is based on what the book's authors admit are crude assumptions. The scenario does plausibly illustrate the need for continued scientific progress to sustain current levels of prosperity.

The quality of life in the future surely depends on the progress of technology Reprinted with permission from The New York Times Book Review. CopyrighlŠ 1972 by The New York Times Company.

A~

LEONARD ROSS

and, to a lesser extent, on our willingness to limit population growth.

But that should come as no surprise to a world that is already enormously dependent on modern techniques.

By the same measure, the simulation provides some small insight into the probable hazards of continued indifference to pollution and population growth.

The authors are out to show that pollution and malnutrition cannot be attacked directly, but only by stopping economic growth. They argue that any reasonable modification of their equations to account for new technology, pollution and population control might postpone collapse but would not avoid it. Under the most sanguine conditions imaginable, they say, growth must end within 100 years. Hence the only way to avoid collapse and its attendant miseries is to halt growth now. Limits preaches that we must learn to make do with what we already have.

It is no coincidence that all the simulations based on the authors' world model invariably end in collapse. As in any simulation, the results depend on the information initially fed to the computer. Critical to their model is the notion that growth produces stresses (pollution, resource demands, food requirements) which multiply geometrically. These stresses accumulate at a pace that constantly accelerates: Every child born is not only another mouth to feed but another potential parent. Every new factory not only drains away exhaustible resources but increases our capacity to build more.

Geometric (or as mathematicians prefer to call it, exponential) growth must eventually produce spectacular results.

While the book's world model hypothesizes exponential growth for industrial and agricultural needs, it places arbitrary, nonexponentiallimits on the technical progress that might accommodate these needs. New methods of locating and mining ores, continued

011

page 2)

'Limits' makes a series of projections into the future, all pointing to a simple conclusion: Unless growth is controlled, the earth's resources and its human inhabitants will be destroyed.

a methodologically precise model projecting changes in human behavior? Limits has decided not to try such a model, and unless someone else shows that he can build one, Linear Exponential it is not fair to criticize the book's assumpindex index tions and findings.

If the reader of the book is a radical, Aluminum 100 years 31 years Copper 36 years 21 years he may argue that a revolution will take Coal 2,300 years 111 years place and set things right before the world's Iron 240 years 93 years resources have reached a point of no reLead 26 years 21 years turn. After what has happened in the Natural gas 38 years 22 years Marxist and Communist movements in Petroleum 31 years 20 years recent times, can he be so sure? If that god Tin 17 years 15 years has not failed the faithful, it perhaps has Tungsten 40 years 28 years more than one face, like Brahma. Which Zinc 23 years 18 years face is the radical looking at?

If the reader is, on the other hand, a When an intellectual from the Third vague term encompassing a World looks at this table and hears the liberal-a variety of positions but with a common prophecy of doomsday, he may interpret faith in the perfectibility of man-the god it not as a nice little model of populationand-capital but as a confrontation model that will save us resides in the machine, in of the haves and the have-nots. technology. Limits does not make any refSuch reactions are expected. In fact, erence to the first god, but effectively any defender of Limits's findings must be demolishes the second. Read, for instance, prepared to meet such a reaction, which is the chapter, "Technology and the Limits based partly on facts and partly on emo- of Growth."

In any case, liberal believers in freedom tion. The question continually arises: How doesthe Third World get out of this pincer- and progress who may dream of such hold of chaos, misery and violent frustra- exotic measures of salvation as food from tions and half-hearted assistance from the algae, seabed farming, test-tube babies or advanced countries? Limits does not even planetary colonization forget that answer this question directly, but there is the brave new world they conjure up will a hint of an answer. A control of growth almost certainly destroy freedom as a in advanced countries is the way out, the price for dubious progress.

Believers in either revolution or techbook argues. This answer is based on the assumption that there is little possibility of nology often behave like "true believers," a phrase Eric Hoffer made popular. At a change in human values.

The models, the book declares, contain this point of history we should call them "dynamic statements about only the physi- well-meaning mystics. Neither revolution cal aspects of man's activities. It assumes nor technology, as we have known them in reality, as opposed to fantasy, offers us that social variables-income distribution, attitudes about family size, choices among a clear and precise solution of the problem goods, services and food-will continue to that Limits poses clearly and precisely. follow the same patterns they have folThis is why Limits is a doomsday book lowed throughout the world in recent his- par excellence. I don't like its findings, but tory. These patterns, and the human values I do not know how I can ignore them. D they represent, were all established in the growth phase of our civilization."

The assumption of inertia of human About the Author: Dr. Robi Chakravarti was an assistant editor of Amrita Bazar Patrika before values and attitudes is open to challenge, he went to the U.S. where he is an associate and I'm sure many critics of the book will professor of sociology at California State Uniquestion this assumption. My response to versity. While in America, he has continued to such critics is simple. On the basis of in- write articles for Patrika, Jugantar and other formation available today, can we project Indian periodicals. Dr. Chakravorti is presently on a two-year leave of absence from the Unia drastic change in human attitudes in versity to work as a consultant for the Press the near future, attitudes that will turn the Foundation of Asia, organizing advanced world around? Will someone please make courses on "development journalism" in Asia.

Estimates of nonrenewable reserves based on linear and exponential rates of use in the year 1970

or recycling used materials, are assigned the ability to do no more than double reserve capacity; agricultural research can do no more than double land yields; pollution can cut emissions from each source by no more than three-fourths.

Hence the end is inevitable. Economic demands must outstrip economic capacities simply because of the assumption of exponential growth in the former.

Still, The Limits to Growth might be excused if those dismal assumptions behind the calculations were accurate.

It is true that exponential growth cannot go on forever if technology does not keep up. But there is no particular criterion beyond myopia on which to base that speculation. While no one knows for certain, technical progress shows no sign of slowing down. The best econometric estimates suggest that it is indeed growing exponentially. The authors of Limits could have performed a service by citing hard evidence to discredit these estimates, if they have any. Instead they simply assume a bleak future for technology, announce that their own estimates are generous, and conclude that under any hypothesis about progress growth must end.

Natural resource reserves and needs in the model are calculated on the most conservative assumptions about the ability of the world economy to adjust to shortages. This is largely due to the absence of prices as a variable in the Limits projection of how resources will be used.

In fact, natural resource prices have remained low, giving little evidence of coming shortages. And the reasons are not hard to find. Technical change has dramatically reduced exploration and extraction costs, while simultaneously permitting the substitution of plentiful materials for scarce ones-plastics for metal, synthetic fibers for natural, etc.

Moreover specialists usually agree that cheap energy is the critical long-run constraint on output of raw materials.

Given enough energy, minerals might be reclaimed from under the sea, or from sea water itself. A virtually infinite source of energy, the controlled nuclear fusion of hydrogen, will probably be tapped within 50 years.

D

AIIEIICA IECOYEISPIOII Although the '70s are a time of relative calm in the U.S., most of the innovations of the frantic '60s are being absorbed.

It is an era of assimilation, adaptation, 'cooptation.' The innovations of the '60s, 'far from being repealed, are on their way to becoming institutionalized.'

Two of the most significant American events of early 1973, one gathers, were (a) President Nixon's budget, and (b) Marlon Brando's Last Tango in Paris.

I have myself neither studied the budget nor seen the movie, and Idoubt that I shall ever get around to doing either. But I have read the reviews of each attentively, have closely followed the controversy provoked by each, and am persuaded that, taken together, these two events give us a significant clue as to the odd way the 1970s are shaping up.

First, the budget. The most interesting fact about the budget is that it does 1101 attempt to repeal the 1960s. The second most interesting fact is that the Nixon Administration and the opposition Democratic leadership both talk as if it tried to do just that.

Mr. Nixon's budget is a moderately liberal document which increases nonmilitary expenditures by some $12 billion. There are increases in expenditures for health care, for education, for community development and housing, for medical research, for the arts and humanities. True, some of the more troubled of the Kennedy and Johnson programs are being abandoned-but these can be continued by the states if they wish, using revenue-sharing funds, and some of them may be. And not all Great Society programs are being abandoned. In addition, there are some truly interesting innovations, like a $1 billion scholarship program in higher education, which might have been expected to attract some attention, but which everyone pretends doesn't exist.

Does anyone really believe that a McGovern budget or a Humphrey budget or a Kennedy budget would have been all that different? Yes, the military budget may-repeat: may-have been reduced by a few billion, which then would have been spread thinly over various social programs. But in a budget totaling $250 billion, this would have mattered little. And it would not matter much more if a few extra billion had been picked up via "tax reform" (i.e., a tax increase on the wealthy). No grand new programs-not national health insurance, not a guaranteed, minimum income, not day-care centers-could be financed by these relatively small sums. Basically, Mr. Nixon's budget is an adaptation of the Great Society to the fiscal realities of the 1970s. Even his most "radical" idea-revenue sharing on a large scale, to reduce

the power of the federal bureaucracy-was a proposal devised by two of Lyndon Johnson's economists.

Why, then, this divorce between rhetoric and reality? Why does the Administration talk as if it were engaged in a counterrevolution? And why do the Democrats seem to think that their marginal differences with the budget represent an ideological Armageddon?

The answer, I would suggest, is that both Republicans and Democrats are finding it exceedingly difficult to face up to the fact that the frantic years of the '60s are over, and that the '70s are another time altogether. It is a time of uneasy stability, during which the '60s are being neither repudiated nor prolonged-but rather, as it were, absorbed. The nation is tired of Great Society rhetoric, and it is tired of the turbulence provoked by that rhetoric.

It is also too tired, and too uncertain of itself, to wish to annul the '60s. What it wants is a period of adaptation, during whichas our radicals might say-we would "coopt" the '60s into the mainstream of American history. But our two-party system, with its adversary structure, finds it impossible to address itself to this task directly. I know there may be some who will claim that the process of adaptation can work most effectively precisely when our politicians are busy reassuring their various constituencies that no such compromising activity is going on. I suspect they are wrong. That devious procedure creates too much fuss and furor, too much tension, too much anger-and these are precisely what we don't need in 1973.

Last Tango in Paris has been hailed by some as a marvelous revolutionary breakthrough in our culture-and by others as but the latest pornographic and subversive assault on our culture. ] should say it is neither of these things. It is, rather, a cunning (if largely unconscious) effort on the part of our culture to adapt itself to-yes, to "coopt" -the counterculture of the 1960s.This isbound to be a painful process: disturbing to the middle-aged, disillusioning to the young. But that is the strategy a liberal society always pursues when it seeks to regain a lost composure.

The counterculture of the '60s was mainly a youth culture, infused with youthful energy and exuberance, and it is therefore of no little significance that the sexual-athlete hero of Last Tango in Paris is middle-aged and world-weary. He is what many of tile young proponents of the counterculture will soon be, and it is not too far-fetched to think that the movie prefigures the demographic destiny of the '70s. In the 1960s, the United States experienced the greatest influx in its history of young men and women aged 14 to 21. They were the product, of course, of the postwar "baby boom." But that boom began to decelerate around 1960, and during the coming decade the proportion of our population made up by the 14-21-year-olds will grow inexorably smaller.

The big event, therefore, of the '70s will be the "growing up" of the young people of the '60s.

Last Tango in Paris, if I interpret it correctly, confronts the destiny of the counterculture-that growing up which looms ahead, and which will happen. The young lady in the film seems never to have heard of the counterculture or to be aware that she

TBI FBAITIC'SIITIIS was formed by it. She is already beyond it-only she doesn't seem to know where she is, or where she belongs. Marlon Brando, in contrast, is self-consciously experiencing the death of one of the great hopes of the counterculture: redemption through sexual liberation. It is the failure ofthat promise which is his peculiar anguish.

Being myself past middle age, I find it hard to have much empathy with that particular sense of the void, or with that particular anguish. Still, T cannot and do not doubt their reality. Many of our young people, as they mature, are going to experience some such emptiness and/or anguish. They are not going to slough it all off painlessly and then be "just like us." On the other hand, they are not going to be anything like what their youthful fantasies predicted. There is going to be a mutual adaptation between their society and themselves. It will satisfy no one entirely, and it will, for different reasons, vex just about everyone. But this accommodation is what seems to be happening, and I see both Mr. Nixon's budget and Brando's movie as unwitting testimony to that effect.

My impression of the American condition today can be summed up as follows: Our nation has just gone through a nervous breakdown, and is in the process of making a recovery. That breakdown is what the phrase, "the '60s," means to me. Something important happened to us during that period-something which, even as we recover from it, will profoundly affect the rest of our lives. No one who has ever-had a nervous breakdown is ever quite the same afterwards, no matter how pleased a doctor may be with his condition.

Similarly, no one who has ever had a nervous breakdown finds it possible to give a succinct account of its "causes." There rarely are cases where specific events can be pinpointed as an authentic cause of the collapse, as distinct from a mere "triggering" incident.

More commonly, the "cause" of a nervous breakdown is one's whole life up to that moment. What happened is not the consequence of something we did or didn't do, or of what someone else did or didn't do to us, but of what we were and are. Apparently what we Americans were and are was suddenly experienced by a great many of us-especially young, college-educated Americans -as so utterly inadequate as to be intolerable.

I find that I can achieve a better understanding of this by looking, not at America in the I960s, but at England in the I560s. At that time, a great many Englishmen expressed their discontent with their civilization by becoming Puritans, of one kind or another. Now, it is not obvious even today, with all our historical hindsight, what was so wrong with that civilization. The Church of England was, if anything, in considerably better shape than it had been for many decades; most Englishmen were better off economically than before; there was greater political stability than for most periods of English history. Nevertheless, and quite unexpectedly, a great many Englishmen sincerely came to feel that the Church of England was a contemporary version of "the whore of Babylon," and that the traditional English way of lifethe way of life soon to be so eloquently celebrated by Shakespeare!

-was unacceptable to them.

by JRVINGKRISTOl

About all one can say, by way of explanation, is that people began making moral and spiritual demands upon their civilization which it was unprepared to meet-and one has to add, in all fairness, that every civilization, having taken a certain shape, is bound to be vulnerable to a quick insistence that it have some other shape. One is tempted to paraphrase a maxim of one of the classical French moralists: "It takes time for any nation's way of life to become unsatisfactory to some of its citizens; but it takes only time."

In the United States, during the '60s, a substantial minority of Americans began making unprecedented demands upon their society. The nature of these demands was never entirely clear, even to those most insistent on them, but I think the heart of the. matter was revealed by a young man's statement which subsequently became the title of a famous article on our generational unrest: "You don't know what Hell is like unless you were raised in Scarsdale [a wealthy upper-class suburb of New York City]."

Since the purpose of American society has been to enable everyone to be raised in some version of Scarsdale, this proposition comes as a shock. Still, there it is; and there is no mistaking both the sincerity and despair behind it. Apparently, our affluent liberal-capitalist society is (or has become) incapable of satisfying the imagination, the sensibilities, and the spiritual needs of many of its newer citizens, who have been moving toward some kind of Reformation-religious, political, economic. One could write a book-a whole library will be written-on why this should have happened. But the indisputable fact is that it did happen; and it is a fact we shall have to live with.

The '70s, as I sense their drift, will be years of assimilation and adaptation, of "cooptation."

Big government is not going to go away, any more than pornography or abortions or women's lib will go away. These innovations mayor may not have been altogether desirable. One may even think that, on balance, they have been altogether undesirable. But so far from their being repealed, they are on their way to being institutionalized-to being rendered conventional, unsubversive, in the end uninteresting (though not uninfluential). The result will be an America quite different-but not altogether different-from the America we have known.

0 About the Author: Irving Kristol is a professor of Urban Values at New York University and co-editor of The Public Interest magazine. He is also a member of The Wall Street Journal's board of contributorsfour distinguished professors who contribute articles reflecting a broad range of views.

AS OTHERS HAVE SEEN US H the 1960s were 'frantic' for the United States, so were many other decades in the nation's history

-to judge from the comments of distinguished tourists. The first visitor to America, of course, was Christopher Columbus who told Europeans he 'found no human monstrosities, as many expected I would.' In the five centuries that have elapsed since Columbus, not every visitor has agreed. But as the quotations on these pages show, there has been no dearth of opinions about life in America.

"Some time ago I would say that most Frenchmen looked at your [America's] troubles with a mixture of indifference and halfsatisfaction that the United States was not immune from the troubles which affect almost every nation in the world. Now there is some degree of disquiet because even anti-Ameri-SWAMI VIVEKANANDA -JULIAN URSYN NIEMCEWICZ can Frenchmen are conscious that the minimum of order which exists in the world today A Polish nobleman. Excerpt from his book: Travelsin America 1797-1807 has as its condition not only a powerful "Excellent, honest-to-God California United States, but a United States able wines ... Coffee so weak you see the bottom to act." of the cup ... Motels always erected on the "The inability of a people otherwise so -RAYMOND ARON very edge of the highway. How about a chain technically adroit to master the simple rules French author and social critic specializing in sleepy, shaded grounds, far for making tea can only, surely, be explained from the noise? ... The overwhelming sense on the basis of a psychological blockage in of freedom: never in two months being asked the Bostonian memory."

"A European rapist will blame original for identification, once you are past the -FRANCIS WILLIAMS sin. An American rapist will say it was all for smiling immigration officer ... That sign, British author the good of the victim."

'Think,' along the highway. Think of what?

-ANTHONY BURGESS ... The amount of time the most important British author "Americans, very true to their candidatural men will devote to your appointment ... A very large cop stopping us in a very small role, like being liked a lot by foreigners. The Louisiana town (Where did we go wrong?): picture they cut is of a big shaggy dog charg"In America there has grown up a way of 'Would you care to enjoy our parish picnic?' ing up to the chance caller, in mixed feelings life that aims at nothing but foodstuff and the ... The America of yesterday still so easy to of welcome and defiance, and romping one acquisition of material benefit or wealth. The find, with white clapboard houses and veran- moment up your front with its great weight, Americans are so busy fighting for profits that das, with squirreled lawns, church suppers all in a plea to be fondled, and in the next they use all their abilities for this purpose and and Sunday schools, quiet lives ... And, very breaking off the embrace to canter about you, interest themselves in nothing else." deeply, the sense of living in a country still in head chasing after tail, and snout in the air, offering furious barks and bites." the making."

-KNUT HAMSUN

"American women! A hundred lives would not be sufficient to pay my deep debt of gratitude to you .... If the Indian Ocean were an inkstand, the highest mountain of the Himalayas the pen, the earth the scroll, and time itself the writer, still it will not express my gratitude to you."

,

-PIERRE AND RENEE GOSSET

" ... The internal conviction which is found in the heart and the mouth of practically every American that he is happy, is worthy of envy and rarely found elsewhere. 'We are a happy people, we live comfortably'; these are their words, words of avowal which a traveler in Europe will hear in I know not what country."

-J.P.

CLARK

Nigerian poet

"Americans do love objects, products, new things that work or make things work ....

The American love for goods is a transcendental love, not greedy or amassing. They love goods for what they say, romantically, about America, about rich resources and energy and the ability to make things work. That-and givingthem away-is all part of the view they like to have of themselves."

-RICHARD HOGGART Assistant director general of UNESCO and professor at Birmingham University, England

"The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years."

-OSCAR WILDE British man of letters

"I shall always think of America not just ; as jet planes and amazing material progress, but as people seeking spiritual values and searching for truth."

-SRI

JAYACHAMARAJAWADIYAR Former Governor of Mysore

"What is the secret behind the progress achieved by a country like America within a period of 150 to 200 years? Surely, there must be some internal strength in it, and one should learn from this remarkable record of progress which has made America the foremost nation in the world. So this is a strange meeting between India, an ancient country, which is thousands of years old and is a mixture of old virtues and old failings, and America which is a land of new ideas, new vigor and new power. This meeting of the two can benefit us at least, as also the world."

-JAWAHARLAL NEHRU "America has the figure of youth, and all that is best in Western civilization will eventually find lodgment here."

-RABINDRANATH TAGORE "This was a country in which the state was there for the people, not the people for the state ... [The system] was often cruel, often unjust, often inefficient, often wasteful, but it gave everyone a chance to be what he wanted to be. Above all, it didn't care. It let people alone."

"You have such a wonderful spmt of adventure and a faith in yourselves. And you are open-minded and generous."

"When I first came, in 1961, I had the impression about all Americans as a sleeping people-spiritually sleeping. Now they are awake. The youth, it is wonderful. What is youth? It is our future."

-YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO Russian poet

-D.W.

BROGAN

British political scientist

"The lunacy most Europeans see in the United States is precisely that of the Americans who press exaggerated claims for their country's supreme criminality and unpopularity. For America's crimes are pretty small stuff by 20th-century standards. To anyone who has really seen a sick society, the United States would appear as no more than one of those outpatients with chronic hypochondria, bothering a hospital by constantly trying to get one of the beds urgently needed by the truly ill."

-ROBERT

CONQUEST

British political writer

-DR. SARVEPALL! RADHAKRISHNA J

"An asylum for the sane would be empty in America."

"The combination [in America] of social conformism and individualism is, perhaps, what a Frenchman will have most difficulty in understanding. For us, individualism has re-JOHN BRAINE tained the old, classical form of 'the indiBritish author vidual's struggle against society and, more particularly, against the state.' There is no question of this in America. In the first place, "I am sold on Americans. They are most for a long time the state was only an adgenerous and kind to an embarrassing extent." ministrative body. In recent years it has -SRINIVASAN PARTHASARATHY tended to play another role, but this has not changed the American's attitude toward it.

Former publisher of The Hindu It is 'their' state, the expression of 'their' nation; they have both a profound respect for it "Many things about the United States are and a proprietary love." given a bad interpretation in Europe because -JEAN-PAUL SARTRE Americans tell everything about themselves French philosopher and even insist on the disagreeable aspects of their country, which others would conceal: statistics on crime, reports on juvenile delinquency, full accounts of any immoral act "I don't like the life here [New York]. There whatever, complete details on racial difficul- is no greenery. It would make a stone sick." ties, and so on. One need not go to foreign -NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV sources for information on the defects of the United States because Americans themselves relate them, comment on them, and at times "There is nothing wrong with the real even exaggerate them."

American; the trouble is that the ideal Ameri-DR. JULIAN MARIAS can is so awful."

Spanish author and director of the Instituto de Humanidades, Madrid

" 'Howdy, Stranger' is not a hostile greeting, and it was invented in America."

-G.K.

CHESTERTON British essayist

"Enslaved, illogical, elate, He greets the embarrassed Gods, nor fears To shake the iron hand of Fate Or match with Destiny for beers."

-RUDYARD

KIPLING

British man of letters

-GEORGE

BERNARD SHAW

British dramatist and critic

"The 20th century is only the 19th speaking with a slightly American accent."

-PHILIP

GUEDALLA British historian

"The American is supposed to be a materialist, but he simply is not. The American is abstract. He is interested in the essentials of life. This is why he discards objects so quickly."

AN INDIAN LOOKS AT SAN FRANCISCO 'Even as a stranger in town, alone and "exotic," I never felt lonely,' says the author, recalling experiences of her visit to San Francisco.

From the brown and green landscape of a tropical Bombay to which I have returned, recollections of San Francisco seem strange, almost unreal. U meal they had seemed even then, when I would lie under the cool quilted white sheets and listen to the sound of the foghorn through the dense night air: " ... at once the darkness has a name . . . . Is it a ship passing In the rut beyond the park, Or has this seeming-island Locked so long in dreams of stone At last begun to //love Seaward?"

Days in the city also had their unreal moments when sun and shade would play their pranks, making the city lose its shape in the mist or suddenly emerge through a square window-a gawky skyline mounting gently in the distance. Even when the sun shone and the hills around were bare and brown and the ocean a happy blue, a certain unreality persisted. For one never knew when the fog would roll over and blanket the brown and the blue. But through the sun and shade people moved and the streets were never empty.

Even as a stranger in town, alone and "exotic," I never felt lonely. Down the steep slopes ofNob Hill as I hung out of the wobbly cable car, I was breathless but never nervous.

The conductors usually smiled and seemed to be sharing in a game with all the others in a huddle. One morning I climbed into the car without the right change. "No problem, honey. Just give me whatever you have," said the conductor, his eyes flashing with good humor. "But on one condition, that you take me out for dinner tonight."

But I was to have dinner at the house of a local psychologist who lived in a house with deep red carpets, sunken sitting spaces and a large number of paintings. Around the carpeted dug-out we sat dangling our feet, a group of people who were doctors, writers, singers and others. Next to me sat a tall man with a handsome face and greying hair. His wife was a blonde wrapped in a cloak of leopard skin, an heiress of the Macy's department store in New York, I was told. Within an hour we were friends. Not only was I

DRAWINGS

invited for a drink but was invited to stay in their elaborate guest suite-a stranger from nowhere taken into a home with a warmth and hospitality that seemed baffling.

San Francisco is a city of art and artists.

Around the resurrected Palace of Fine Arts I spent several afternoons. The monumental structures in muted red, the spacious emptiness amid the colonnades, the lagoon with its

BY MARIO

mass of black-and-white ducks and the surrounding whispering greens would tend to push me into a mood of unreality. How strange it was to have a place like this, almost ~ a Roman relic in the middle of a big American city? Sitting here on the damp lawn I would always see a lot of young people, some alone feeding ducks, some in silent groups. Young people seemed everywhere, as if they were the sole inhabitants of the city. I found them in

the front rows of the cinema, operating a movie camera at an animated street intersection, singing in restaurants, playing a guitar or a harp. Many of the young people are in love with India, and I saw some of them crouching on the floor of a college hall, their heads moving trancelike to the music of an instrument called sarod. I saw them all over the city's streets, explaining the ideals of Krishna, Jesus or their own. Some whom I met in a music hall offered me chapattis that they had cooked in their warehouse commune. Some were studying Indian music at the Ali Akbar School of Music in San Rafael.

"Making disciplines for oneself is like a game and that is how I have taken Indian music to be. It is like being involved in the pioneering ventures of old times-cleaning up jungles, seeing green pastures." These young people were not "hippies." They were people with a highly developed sensitivity and intelligence who were seeking to find answers beyond their own familiar mental disciplines. However bizarre their quests may seem to others, they seemed to have given them a self-discipline, a simplicity in living and the belief that affluencealone did not guarantee happiness.

On a day when it rained and I had no raincoat or an umbrella, I encountered a bushyfaced, rosy-cheeked man in a bookshop ownedby the poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He introduced himself as a fellow writer, a native SanFranciscan and insisted on trudging along with me for a walking tour of Chinatown. In and out of bustling vegetable markets and c,hintzysouvenir shops, spilling with goods from Hong Kong and Japan, he opened and closed his huge black umbrella and kept a fact-filled monologue alive. He had begun many movements in his day and worked for them-including new films and new poetry.

He now devoted most of his time to practical projects like the antipoverty board, a citizens committee and an Asian association where he functioned as an honorary secretary.

With a couple of old ladies who wore pretty bright hats, I spent an uncluttered morning watching the sailboats and stray fishermen around the Marina. Then, ravenously hungry, I wandered away from the placid sport in search of a sandwich. Within moments I was on the edge of a highway and a profusion of trafficlights that turned red and green whimsically and baffled whatever sense of direction I had. Nowhere in sight was an eating place.

"Fine Food." A sign beamed, faintly red on a side street. Without much thought I pushed the old brown door open and almost backed out. "Is there anything you want, honey?" I heard a shrill female voice cry out. "I am looking for a sandwich," I answered meekly, feelinglike an intruder. "Come right in," she bawled out. "There is tuna, hot pastrami and grilled cheese. Which one would you like?"

Before I could make up my mind, she suggestedthat I have a hot one. She called out to

Teddy, the barman who whistled noisily.

"Get the little lady a hot pastrami ap.d let's sit you down," she said patting the tall stool next to her by the bar. She was an elderly woman, I noticed, probably in her 60s. She had dull blonde hair that rested sparely on her head in tiny tight curls. Her eyes were large, limpid and friendly and her face haggard. Looking at her, I suddenly thought of the warm and wonderful prototype of women whom she represented-women who aged but never really lost their grip on living.

"What are you doing here? Do you dance or something?" she asked me as she watched my golden hooped earrings dangle in front of her. No, I smiled back. What about her?

"Oh, I am too old to do anything now.

But years ago I was a cabaret artiste," she said as her eyes beamed and briefly seemed distant. "It was a beautiful life-beautiful clothes, gorgeous music and grand fun. There was a mystery to it and a certain beauty.

It was as beautiful as the Folies in Paris if you have seen that. I haven't but I hear it is a dream."

The hot pastrami arrived and whistling Teddy asked me what I would like to drink. I had already decided to have a coke. "It's all on me," she said as we clinked the tall glasses.

The bespectacled man next to her also joined in. "He's my cousin from Omaha," she explained. "He has come to see me after 18 years." While I tackled the hot pastrami and the coke, we chattered-she recapitulated the era of the '30s when she was a young girl, and I built visions for her of a country she only knew by name. Teddy produced the check. She grabbed it and insisted on paying it. As I said goodbye to her, she clutched my hands and asked her cousin from Omaha to see me to the door. It was only then that I noticed two wooden crutches leaning against her stool. Outside, the cars whizzed by and the day was bright and blue.

Glen Ellen-the very name conjures up images, of a distant valley, of a fairylike woman who once lived there and of curious tales that happened a very long time ago.

Today this tiny village in the Napa valley of wines, an hour's drive out of San Francisco, exists like a number of other tiny villages. It has its share of gently rolling meadows, blue and brown hills, sheep grazing on the green and also a general country store, a post office without any mailmen and a century-old pub in a weathered wooden house. Here one always finds a few country gentlemen who play a friendly game of billiards, drink Muscato Canelli and stop by to chat. An old man with a chiseled face and straight hair combed back in a knot talked to me about his Irish and Cherokee heritage and his wine farm in the valley. He told stories about Jack London roaring into Glen Ellen in a horse carriage.

"It was 50 years ago that Jack London lived

around here," they told me. "Yesterday we visited his grave. He died in a brilliant blaze, went out like the sun," said a girl. "He was a glorious socialist. He wrote books for the workers about adventures in the Klondikeabout building fires in 50 degrees below zero and digging for pearls in the oyster beds.... " I delighted in their tales and left Glen Ellen feeling closer to the landscape.

Sausalito is another town across San Francisco's legendary bridge which has not yet emerged out of its level-headed precincts.

Driving through its old-fashioned square and narrow cobbled streets and up its winding hilly lanes, one finally reaches Alta Miramar, a hotel with a view of the bay and passing ships. I was there on a Sunday morning to breakfast with a New Yorker and his bride.

He had left his dizzy climes for what he had figured out was "a happier living." He now lived in Berkeley where he intended to start a vegetable market in a bus he had just bought and painted in vivid colors. His aim was to enlarge the supply and consumption of fresh vegetables among the people of Berkeley. I sat with the divinely marrieds at their wedding breakfast in the golden sunlight of a crisp morning and indulged in eggs benedict and champagne with peaches.

But as he ate his breakfast and poured himself some tea, he talked about the CleanAmerica Campaign and Johnny Horizon, the new symbol of America. "Have you heard the song which Burl Ives sings?" he asked me.

"It goes something like this: Johnny Horizon where do you go from here?

Well I'm on my way To a better day Where the air is clean And the water clear .... " 0 About the Author: Anees lung is a free-lance writer whose articles have often appeared in India's leading magazines, including the Illustrated Weekly.

AN AMERICAN LOOKS AT THE GANGES "River of my dreams, flow forever. Never, never, never reach the sea." With these words Dr. Steven G. Darian, an American linguistics scholar, plans to end the book he has just begun to write. The river is the Ganges and it has been the stuff of dreams for Darian for more than 10 years.

"The Ganges has always conjured up magic in men's minds," the 39-year-old Dr. Darian said, "and I'm no exception. It has always seemed to me to be the embodiment of the best in Indian culture."

Although Dr. Darian has built a career as a linguistics expert and he is now associate professor of linguistics and literature at Rutgers University in New Jersey, his interest in India has grown at the same time and with the same intensity. During a stint as director of an English language program in Kabul, Afghanistan, he visited India every vacation. However, he recalls, "I went more as a tourist than a scholar or pilgrim. But I traveled everywhere I could and found that India attracted me very much."

Earlier Dr. Darian had obtained a Master's degree in international relations, concentrating on India and the Far East. After leaving Afghanistan to return to the United States in 1964 he completed two years of postgraduate work in Hindi, Sanskrit

and South Asian cultures at the University of Pennsylvania.

"The Ganges has long been known in Western literature but it has not been well-known," Dr. Darian explained. His sunlit study, lined with books on India and filled with huge file cabinets containing research notes, testifies to the thoroughness of his investigation. "The river is perhaps first mentioned in Western literature in the chronicles of Alexander the Great's campaign in India," he continued. "The writer Arrian in his Anabasis of Alexander said that Alexander told his troops that if they would march as far as the Ganges they could return home." They refused, of course, and Alexander was compelled to turn his army around and start westward for home.

Dr. Darian added that the river served as a metaphor for the Latin poet Virgil in the Aeneid, when he described armies marching in waves like the floods of the Ganges. And the early Christian fathers honored the Ganges by making it one of the four rivers in the Garden of Eden.

Although the Ganges is mentioned tantalizingly in early writings, no Western author has as yet given the river the full study it deserves, Dr. Darian maintains. He plans to take his readers literally down the Ganges from Gowmukh, its source, to Sagar

Though there have been tantalizing references to the Ganges in world literature, no Western author has yet given it the study it deserves, says Dr. Steven G. Darian of Rutgers University. He hopes to fill this gap with his forthcoming book on the great river. 'The Ganges is more than a river,' the U.S. scholar believes, 'and knowing it is a way of life.'

Opposite page: Drawing of a Ganga statue in Varendra Research Museum in Bangladesh. Darian considers this statue the most beautiful of its kind and calls it "opulent but restrained, rich but not a caricature."

Above: Dr. Darian against the backdrop of the famous Varanasi bathing ghats. Fascinated with the Ganges, he will end his book with the words: "River of my dreams, flow forever. Never, never, never reach the sea."

Following the course of the Ganges, Dr. Darian explores three great themes in Indian traditio.

Island and the open sea. And on the way he will explore three great themes in Indian tradition: samsara or the cycle of birth and rebirth, maya or illusion, and moksha or spiritual freedom.

The Ganges at Gowmukh calls to Dr. Darian's mind Indian traditions concerning the source of life and its manifestation in the world, samsara. He notes that in a mythological sense the Ganges itself drew its life from the death or disappearance of another river, the Saraswati. This river of legend, now said to join the Ganges and the Jamuna at the sangam near Allahabad, may have once actually existed somewhere west of the subcontinent, Dr. Darian said. The river is described early in the Rig- Veda, but gradually it becomes less significant. Whether it dried up or changed its course no one knows, but as the Aryans moved east, the magical powers and legends attributed to the Saraswati were increasingly applied to the Ganges.

This transference does not seem to have troubled the Aryan mind, proof perhaps of Dr. Darian's contention that a belief in the interrelatedness of all things has bee~ a long-standing foundation of the Indian world view.

"You have the idea of interpenetrating forms throughout Indian art," he said. "There is one substance, the source, that manifests itself as a lot of different subjects-as people, as animals, and as plants.

"This is why you can have a sculpture of people with vines coming out of their mouths," Dr. Darian continued. "You find it in artistic expressions of the Ganges. The makara, a symbol associated with water and the river, is a crocodile with a vegetal tail. Again this is the theme of the oneness of all creation."

According to Dr. Darian, the cycle of birth and rebirth or samsara is also expressed in the course of the Ganges. In traditionallegend, the Ganges loses itself in the sea only to reform as mist rising to the mountains and falling back to its source as rain. This circle can be seen as a chakra or wheel, which he considers the most important symbol in Indian culture.

"In the Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler says that each culture is dominated by a particular metaphor," Dr. Darian explained. "The crucial moment in a culture's development comes when some unconscious theme is made conscious in a symbol.

Then the symbol fixes the course of the culture."

The wheel as the dominant symbol in Indian culture appears in countless forms from Vishnu's chakra to Asoka's wheel of law, Dr. Darian said. "There is no beginning or end to the rotation of the wheel; it is life as an endless round, which many view as an endless round of pain. The traditional response is to regard the round of pain as something to be endured rather than cured."

Asked to name the dominant symbol in American culture, Dr. Darian smiled, tugged his goatee and replied, "The cowboy.

He's the loner, always traveling and moving on, the man of action who takes care of himself."

"One problem cultures face is that sometimes the symbol can become inappropriate in terms of reality," Dr. Darian continued.

"In India the wheel has persisted into the time when conditions can be changed. Then the wheel becomes a wheel of iron, trapping the civilization."

If the life cycle of the river represents samsara, its journey

Above: Sculpture of Siva-ardhanari. half man and half woman, represents the concept of duality which Darian will examine in his book. Right: The goddess Ganga makes obeisance to Siva. Notice the makara.

through the Gangetic plain illustrates the concept of maya or illusion. "The Ganges touches on all aspects of maya and in some ways generates it," Dr. Darian noted, adding that throughout its history the river has served as a highway for trade and as a communications link among the cities and empires that rose and fell on its banks.

As the river fulfilled its function, Ganges water itself became a trapping of earthly power, Dr. Darian continued. In medieval India, for example, the water was sometimes given in tribute, and at the temple of Gangaikondacolapuram, south of Madras, one finds today a long canal which proud kings filled with Ganges water. "Even the Muslims used it for cooking and at weddings," he said.

The relationship between the Ganges and kingly power found its artistic expression in medieval statues showing the river goddess shielded with a parasol, the symbol of kingship. When the Ganges is depicted together with the Jamuna as dvarpalas, Indian artists are exploring another aspect of maya-the problem of duality.

"India is a land of extremes," he explained. "You have the fantastic heat of the summer followed by the monsoon-fire and water." This natural heritage, he believes, is expressed in philosophical concepts of duality that pervade Indian thought. "The essence of the life struggle is to resolve duality, to reach the point when duality becomes oneness," Dr. Darian said. The Ganges as dvarpala is an expression of this tension: "She is the lady of mystery who ushers one into the mystery."

Moksha or spiritual freedom is the end of duality and maya,

lmsara' or the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, 'maya' or illusion, and 'moksha' or spiritual release.

and is expressed when the Ganges loses itself in the open sea.

One noted sculpture illustrating this concept is at the Varaha templein Udayagiri, Madhya Pradesh, where the Ganges is shown joining the Jamuna or, as some scholars say, merging with the ocean.

"In the sea, the river loses its individuality just as the soul releasedfrom bondage loses itself in the universal soul," Dr. Darian explained. "In a sense water is an ultimate spiritual symbol since it is formless. At the beginning and the end there is water."

This finds expression in the iconography of the Ganges when the riveris associated with a vine or scroll, "looping and interlooping without end, a symbol of spiritual sovereignty."

Thus, Dr. Darian's Ganges, laden with legend and artistic and religioustradition, becomes a manifestation of virtually all major themesin Indian culture. "It is a vehicle, really a way of viewing India," he explained, noting that his book, scheduled for completion in 1974, will range in subject matter as widely as possible. In discussingmoksha, for example, he will analyze the tradition of the mandala and the dance of Siva. When the Ganges travels through Allahabad he will focus on Indian concepts of the number three asrelated to time and space (past, present and future, for example).

At Varanasi he will examine the Indian view of death.

Dr. Darian is by no means the first scholar to be afflicted with the Aristotelian desire to classify and organize Indian tradition around a central theme to make it more accessible to Western audiences. He plans to succeed in this difficult task by playing "intellectual hopscotch," comparing, for example, an Italian

renaissance statue of a man dancing on a demon with the Nataraj to illustrate the similarities and differences between the two traditions. And animating the book will be Dr. Darian's own involvement in both worlds-what he calls the "tension between the Eastern me and the Western me."

The Bhagavad Gila was Dr. Darian's first contact with Indian culture, and he remembers that when he read the classic work in college he was instantly fascinated. "I began to feel that some Indian speculation has much more to offer men in terms of helping us understand ourselves and the universe. To me Western philosophy seemed to run dry; it did not give much in the way of practical advice about how to live in the world."

Dr. Darian went on to explain, "Gradually the Ganges book became something I had to do. Sir Francis Chichester, the British explorer who sailed the world alone, said that once in every man's life there is something that has to be done. Either you do it or you spend the rest of your life wondering what it would be like to do it. That is what the Ganges has become for me."

A grant from the Breezewood Foundation allowed Dr. Darian and his wife Jean (she has a Ph.D. degree in demography) to return to India in 1971 to complete research for the book. The two spent part of the time in India at an ashram studying yoga and meditation. This Dr. Darian feels was preparation for the book since, "to understand the Ganges and its tradition, you have to be receptive to other values and ways of seeing life."

Dr. Darian hopes that his Eastern and Western intellectual affinities will result in a "creative tension" that will be expressed through his book. This "tension like a strung bow" he sees as the only valid result of a synthesis of the two traditions.

"It seems to me that just as the Indian wheel of iron must change to reflect modern life, we have to be able to absorb the Indian sense of acceptance," he explained. "In Hindu philosophy, you change yourself in order to free yourself. In the West you change the world to your own image.

"The ideal will be to achieve a balance between material success and technology on the one hand and acceptance of man's place in the universe on the other," Dr. Darian said. "Only this balance can prove a dynamic, but nondestructive answer for man."

While he hopes his research will enable others to understand the two traditions and to achieve a balance between them, Dr. Darian admits he has not achieved this in himself. The sentence he has chosen to end his book asks the Ganges to "flow forever," and "never, never, never reach the sea." This, he confesses, is a reflection of his own "inability at this point to accept the cycle.

It's a Western sense of striving, an unwillingness to accept oneness and the loss of individuality."

But the search for synthesis promises to continue to inspire Dr. Darian's intellectual wanderlust along the Ganges. "As I've learned more about it, I've come to see it as wider, broader and more significant than anyone realized," he said. "The Ganges is more than a river, and knowing it is a way oflife."

0 About the Author: Elizabeth Wohl is a free-lance writer in New York

City. and has visited India twice. She first came as a Fulbright scholar and then revisited the country in 1971 with her husband Frank Wohl.

A RUSSIAN WOKS AT AMERICA

Last June- Mr. Leonid Brezhnev, General.Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, spent nine days in the B.S., his first visit to America. With President Richard Nixon (ab():ie he discussed man sJlbjects, including, increased U.S.-Soti ade. If only .time had permitted, Mr. Brezhnev said, he would have liked 'to visit New York and Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles, to see. industrial projects and farms, to talk to American people.' But he did get to see the life of Washington, D.C., and to cruise down the Potomac River. He relaxed at Camp David on Catoctin Mountain in Maryland, and saw' the spectacular sights of the Grand Canyon as the Presidential plane carried him 'to San Clemente, CalifornIa; which he described as 'a wonderful part of the United States.' .

l.

"This is my first direct acquaintance with America and the American people.... Our capitals are separated by 6,000 miles. But international politics has its own concept of relativity, not covered by Einstein's theory. The distances between our two countries are shrinking ... because we share one great goal ... to secure lasting peace."

With these words, S~viet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev began his historic visit to the United States. Following the welcoming ceremony on the south lawn of the White House, which included a review of an honor guard by Mr. Nixon and Mr. Brezhnev (above) and a glimpse of a flag-waving crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue (top), the two leaders began their summit talks (left) in the White House.

In the week that followed they discussed a broad range of subjects, all designed to bring about President Nixon's number one aim in

office-"a generation of peace" for the world. Although many treaties were discussed, the United States made it clear that the new U.S.Soviet negotiations would not affect America's commitments to its allies. "The existing obligations in existing documents, treaties and alliances will be maintained," said Dr. Henry Kissinger.

Perhaps the main thrust of the summit-and of Mr. Brezhnev's many meetings with American businessmen-was increased U.S.Soviet trade. Mr. Brezhnev said he believed in a "truly large-scale economic relationship." In a protocol signed June 22 both sides recognized that increased co-operation "would contribute to the promotion of contacts between businessmen of U.S.S.R. and U.S.A." And one communique said "that the two [nations] should aim at a total of two to three billion dollars of trade over the next three years."

0

'I am pleased that this visit has given me an opportunity to gain some first-hand impressions of America ... to meet with prominent government and public leaders ... and to have some contact with the life of Americans.'

An enthusiastic crowd (above) greets Leonid Brezhnev as he arrives in Washington on June 18, 1973, to begin his visit to the U.S. Top: Mr. Brezhnev chats with Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at a luncheon hosted by the Soviet leader for some members of the U.S. Congress. Right: Mr. Brezhnev and Mr. Nixon hold commemorative plaques presented to the Soviet leader by the first Skylab crewmen in a ceremony at San Clemente, California. From leji: Paul Weitz, Leonid Brez/mev, Pete Conrad, Joseph Kerwin and Richard Nixon.

*~ .

~.~

AN AMERICAN

~~

LOOKS

~

•••¥¥.¥¥¥••¥~¥¥¥.¥.¥ •••¥

*

~

t

AT~:!ICA

~

'Somehow, we thrive in this impossible, extreme, obsessive, exasperating

~

and quite wonderful assemblage of unlikely contradictions we call America.'

~* ~ ~ ~ ~

* ~ ~

*

~

* * * * *

""-~

""-~ ~ ~

~ ~

~ ~

~ ~

** ~ ~ ""-)IIf'

""-~ ~

It may be time to try for an answer to the question: "What is America?"

The answer is never simple and often contradictory, which is part of the wild richness of the American experience. America is a vast expanse of land and people, yet it is also tied by the instant media into a continental village.

It cuts its educational budgets, yet it is more obsessed with education than any other society. It has the best graduate and professional schools in the world, but a dismaying number of its children cannot read.

Americans are a people with a deep and stubborn conservative streak in them, but for a decade they have been carrying through a whole cluster of breakthroughs and social transformations which many observers agree is the deepest revolution to be found anywhere today. The revolutions are still unfinished, but the mysterious impulses that led to their acceleration may now lead to their slowing down and containment. That is the present mood, but will it be five years from now? America is changes and resistances to changes together.

America has from its start been promises, but for a larger portion of its people than most other societies it has also been life fulfillments. It is toughly pragmatic, but where has moral idealism had a longer history than among those who have founded movements for every p<?ssiblecause?

It uses its technology-especially its war technologyruthlessly, and its science has too often been in the service of profit and power. But along with its bent toward science, its conscience is quickly appealed to. Talk to Americans about business and you get a ready, breezy alertness, but talk to them about value systems and you reach something very deep in their make-up, perhaps the residue of centuries of American religious intensity, still there after the church dogma has been stripped away.

Americans are supposed to be materialistic, as they are supposed to be power mad. But the fact is that they are drenched in an ocean of commodities and saturated with power, and are therefore likely to value either of them less than countries that are hungry for both. They are arrogant, with the arrogance that comes with the consciousness of their place in the sun, yet these arrogant people go in more for self-criticism than any in history. They distrust eggheads, as shown by the long record of anti-intellectualism in the American past and present, but the surest way to attention and success in the media is to have an innovative idea.

America makes a cult of youth, but is today fearful of what many of its young people propose. It makes a cult of

it: ~

the future, yet constantly it acts as if there were no tomorrow. America is young as a culture, compared to cultures in Europe and Asia, but old in the continuity of its institutions.

Americans go mad about cookbooks, but stop at one of those endless series of restaurants for motorists and you get some of the most atrocious food in the world. They are not thought of as an artistic people, yet from the '20s to today they spawned the best novelists, painters, architects and filmmakers. American men and women have been held to be poor lovers, yet America has been the locus of a set of sexual and hedonic revolutions that may fix a personality pattern for the world, far more powerfully than Soviet or Maoist man has been able to do.

Americans have shown a scabrous streak of violence, but they are deeply concerned about its causes and effects, and the rule of law is once again being rediscovered as a deep-rooted passion. They are fierce adversaries in their political struggles, but later they try to behave as if no wounding words had been spoken. Everyone prophesies doom for America, and Americans themselves join in the doom-predictions-every group for different reasons. But the sluices of personal and social energy are still flowing, and the social body seems to have a built-in principle of balancing itself after crises and excesses.

Americans are always threatening to leave for Canada, Britain, Australia or the Scandinavian areas if their own country doesn't mend its ways, but if it were not painful to leave, nobody would consider it much of a threat. Somehow we suffer and cope and thrive in this impossible, extreme, obsessive, exasperating and quite wonderful assemblage of unlikely contradictions we call America.

t

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

r'

it ~ ~

ire ~ ~ ~ ~

-r'

~ ~ ~ ~

O~-r'

About the Author: Max Lerner, like the America he writes about, is the sum of many parts. A newspaper columnist, editor and author, he is professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. In 1959-60 he was the Ford Foundation professor of American Civilization at Delhi University's School of International Studies.

~

-r' ~ ~ -r' ~ -r'

* * ~ t ~ ** ******************************** )IIf'

""-~ ~ ~

""-~

This article has been reprinted

by courtesy of the Los Ange/es Times.

~ ~ ~ ~

Alexander Calder (below) works on one of several small models of the McDonnell Doug/as DC-8 jetliner he will paint this autumn for Braniff International Airways. The models themselves are considered "original Calders" and will be offered for exhibit to various museums. The painting of the actual 48-meter-long plane (wing span: 50 meters) begins this autumn. Braniff ispaying Calder S100,000 for his work on "the ultimate mobile." Left: Another Calder objet d'art seen by millions every year is the black-andwhite terrazzo sidewalk of the Perls Galleries in New York City.

Alive and well in his 75th year, the 'window-dresser of space' starts working on 'the ultimate mobile'a jet plane for Braniff International Airways.

Acclaimed by international cntlcs as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Alexander Calder is busy at work on seven new projects. There is his annual exhibition at Perls Galleries in New York where his worksof art include the sidewalk (above, far left). There are commissions for four huge stabile sculptures for public buildings and plazas in Los Angeles, Hartford, Fort Worth and Chicago (model above); a commission for the world's largest mobile in a Philadelphia bank; and the most dramatic project of his life, painting the exterior of a Braniff International Airways jetliner (model, above center). In keeping with the importance of the artist, the name of Braniff will not appear on the plane-only the signature of Calder. The jet will go into commercial service later this year on the U.S.-South America run, and Calder's plane may eventually be

seen by more people than any other original contemporary work of art. It is a fitting climax to the career of the man who invented the "mobile" and whose art adorns more than 70 cities of the world, from Paris to Chicago, Caracas to Montreal, Mexico to Delhi (see cover of this issue, "Les Masques," which hangs in the residence of the American Ambassador to India).

Thousands of words have been written about Calder's genius. French artist Fernand Leger calls him "serious without seeming to be ... and 100 per cent American."

Jean-Paul Sartre says of Calder's mobiles: "They are lyrical inventions ... a little merry-making, a pure play of movement, jus~ as there are pure plays of light ... a holiday thing." What does Calder say? A humble and laconic man, the great American artist simply calls himself "a window-dresser of space."

Calder's "Flamingo" (model above) will be a 16-meterhigh stabile for Chicago's Federal Center. Costing 1325,000, it has been described by President Nixon as a "gift" from the U.S. Government to "the people of Chicago" under the Government's new plan to subsidize art in public places. "Flamingo" is, said Mr. Nixon, "the first major work of art commissioned under my program to encourage fine art in Federal buildings." .

Calder works in his studio in Saclle.

France (right). Below left: One of several models of the jetliner that Calder is painting for Braniff International Airways. Bouom left: One of Calder's most famous stabiles, the 24-meter-high "Red Sun," stands in front of Mexico' s Aztec Stadium.

'A strong man with the soul of a nightingale who breathes mobiles.'

It is no surprise that Calder was asked to paint a plane (model above), for he was the first modern artist to make sculpture move, breaking away completely from the classic notion of modeled motionless forms. In the words of artist Robert Osborn: "What distinguishes Calder most of all is that a full generation before this present space-seeking age began, he was intuitively perceiving-as the great artist always does-what the future was to be, and he forsook the earthly solids, the laborious heavy masses, and tackled space."

Alexander ("Sandy") Calder began life as a mechanical engineer. His career as a graphic artist began in 1923 as illustrator for the National Police Gazette in New York City.

In 1926 he worked his way to France on a freighter, immediately caught the attention of Jean Cocteau, and held his first one-man show in Paris that same year. He soon met the three artists who have most influenced his workFernand Leger, Joan Mire and Piet Mondrian. He made his first moving sculptures in 1931, and Marcel Duchamp was the one who christened them "mobiles." It was the painter Jean Arp who later suggested the name "stabile" for the "motionless mobiles" (example at left) that Calder began to produce in the early 19405.

Today Calder's studio (right) is still full of mobiles and stabiles, and even the smaller ones command prices between $2,000 and $12,000. "Yet money hasn't changed him at all," says his son-in-law, Jean Davidson. "He goes to meetings with accountants and they're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars and he falls asleep."

Although a Calder mobile might look like a typical product of the machine age, it is a highly personal thing, produced mainly with hand tools. Calder is indeed engineer and artist both. In the words of his friend and mentor Joan Mire: "Sandy is a strong man with the soul of a nightingale who breathes mobiles."

'His prodigious oeuvre is destined to be one of the major cultural legacies of our time.'

One of the fine.stexamples of Alexander Calder's art in India is "Les Masques" (right), a tapestry which hangs in New Delhi's Roosevelt House, the official residence of the American Ambassador; the work also appears as the wraparound cover of this issue of SPAN. "Les Masques" is part of Roosevelt House's "Woodward Collection," which Mrs. Moynihan was able to borrow from the Woodward Foundation for the duration of the Moynihans' tour in India. The Woodward Foundation-established in 1961 by a former diplomat, Stanley Woodward, and his wife-is a nonprofit organization devoted to assembling and loaning works of art by contemporary American artists to American ambassadors abroad. The 26 works in the Roosevelt House collection, which will be featured in a forthcoming issue of SPAN, include pieces by such famous artists as Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Tobey and, of course, Ale~ander Calder.

"When the Foundation asked me if there was anything I particularly liked," said Mrs. Moynihan, "I told them I was a great Calder fan and wondered if they had a Calder. They said yes, they did, but just one, 'Les Masques.' It is my favorite of the whole collection."

In the autumn of this year the Ambassador and Mrs. Moynihan will host the first in a series of public exhibitions of Roosevelt House's art.

"We feel these works are not here mainly to decorate the residence," said Mrs. Moynihan, "but to reach out to the artists and art lovers of India, to reveal the variety and richness of contemporary American art."

Right, top: "Les Masques" Tapestry, 166x 246 em.

Right: "The Yellow Worm Is Longer Than the Red Worm" Tapestry, 179x 114 em.

Far right, top: "Spirales" Tapestry, 165 X 244 em.

Far right, bottom: "Boomerang" Tapestry, 220 x 128 em.

Living and working in both the U.S. and France, Alexander Calder has brought his versatile genius to bear on many m~diums: mobiles, stabiles, oil paintings, lithographs and other prints, jewelry and household objects, tapestries and gouaches like the ones on these and the following pages.

He did not start making tapestries until 1962 and most of them (including those shown at right and on page 44) are woven by Pinton Freres of Aubusson, France, from designs provided by Calder. The motifs are simple: spirals, boomerangs, snakes and masks. Like his mobiles, says one critic, "the t~pestries seem to have a movement that avoids cliches and weak sentiment."

Among Calder's most recent work are his gouaches-or paintings in opaque water colors (above, and 'on pages 42-43, overleaf). They are all scenes from fields or gardens in which flowers thrust energetically upwards and animals confront each other as forthrightly as the creatures in

children's paintings. Again, the hand of the mobile-maker is unmistakable: grass is as taut as wire; snakes coil as springily as do the tendrils of the plants. Like his mobiles, Calder's gouaches express joy-the satisfaction that arises from simply existing in the world, whether a bird in the air, a beast in the field, or leaves hanging like pieces of metaL waiting for the wind. When asked why he prefers gouaches to oils, he answers with characteristic terseness: "With oils you have to wait too long for the stuff to dry."

Calder was asked what concerns him the most in his 75th year. "My concern right now," he answered, "is a IO-ton object that's going to hang from the ceiling of a bank." The statement reflects the same childlike whimsy he has brought to all his art over the last 50 years, an output as enormous as it is varied. In the words of critic Donald Karshan: "Calder's production is unceasing and his prodigious oeuvre is destined to be one of the major cultural legaciesof our time."

ON BEING A WRITER: AN INTERVIEW WITH

•

•

by GEORGE A. PLIMPTON AND FRANK H. CROWTHER

Early this year American children-and their parents-were delighted by the appearance of a full-length animated film based on a book that has become a modern children's classic: 'Charlotte's Web' by E.B. White. The film marks another milestone in the career of one of the finest prose stylists in American literature. Now 74, Elwyn Brooks White was for many years among 'The New Yorker's' most prominent contributing editors. An essayist and author of numerous books for children, White won the 1971 National Medal for Literature given annually to a living American for the excellence of his total contribution to the world of letters (see page 48).

In the following interview, White looks back on the past and discusses the pleasures and pains of his chosen profession.

QUESTION: Many critics equate the success of a writer with an unhappy childhood.

Can you say something of your childhood?

WHITE: As a child, I was frightened but not unhappy. My parents were loving and kind. We were a large family (six children) and were a small kingdom unto ourselves.

Nobody ever came to dinner. My father was formal, conservative, successful, hardworking and worried. My mother was loving, hardworking and retiring. We lived in a large house in a leafy suburb, where there were backyards and stables and grape arbors. I lacked for nothing except confidence. I suffered nothing except the routine terrors of childhood: fear of the dark, fear of the future, fear of the return.

Reprinted

by permission.

The Paris Review Digest.

Copyright

Original interview

and this abridgment

©

appeared

in

is from Intellectual

by The Paris Review Incorporated.

to school after a summer on a lake in Maine, fear of making an appearance on a platform, fear of the lavatory in the school basement where the slate urinals cascaded, fear that I was unknowing about things I should know about. I was, as a child, allergic to pollens and dusts, and still am.

I was allergic to platforms, and still am. It may be, as some critics suggest, that it helps to have an unhappy childhood. If so, I have no knowledge of it. Perhaps it helps to have been scared or allergic to pollensI don't know.

QUESTION: At what age did you know you were going to follow a literary profession? Was there a particular incident or moment?

WHITE: I never knew for sure that I would follow a literary profession. I was 27

'Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. or 28 before anything happened that gave me any assurance that I could make a go of writing. I had done a great deal of writing, but I lacked confidence in my ability to put it to good use. I went abroad one summer, and on my return to New York I found an accumulation of mail at my apartment. I took the letters, unopened, and went to a Child's Restaurant on 14th Street, where I. ordered dinner and began opening my mail. From one envelope two or three checks dropped out, from The New Yorker. I suppose they totaled a little under a hundred dollars, but it looked like a fortune to me. I can still remember the feeling that "this was it"-I was a pro at last. It was a good feeling, and I enjoyed the meal.

QUESTION: Were you a voracious reader duringyour youth?

WHffE: I was never a voracious reader and, in fact, have done little reading in my life. There are too many other things I would rather do than read. In my youth I read animal stories-William J. Long and Ernest Seton Thompson. I have read a great many books about small boat voyages-they fascinate me, even though they usually have no merit. In the '20s, I read the newspaper columns: F.P.A., Christopher Morley, Don Marquis. I tried contributing and had a few things published.

(As a child, I was a member of the St. Nicholas League and from that eminence was hurled into the literary life, wearing my silver badge and my gold badge.)

In order to read, one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all-except that I write for a living.

QUESTION: Although you say you are "not really a literary fellow at all," have you read any books, say in the past 10 years, that deeply impressed you?

WHITE: I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all. As for what comes out on paper, I'm not well equipped to speak about it. When I should be reading, I am almost always doing something else. It is a matter of some embarrassment to me that I have never read Joyce and a dozen other writers who have changed the face of literature. But there you are.

QUESTION: Can you listen to music, or be otherwise half-distracted when you're working on something?

WHITE: I never listen to music when I'm working. I haven't that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn't like it at all. On the other hand, I'm able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There's a lot of traffic. But it's a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me.

A girl pushing a carpet sweeper under my typewriter table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy.

My wife, thank God, has never been protective of me, as I am told the wives of some writers are. In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing manthey make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.

QUESTION: Do you have any warm-up exercises to get you going?

WIDTE: Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer-he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave in which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor-as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.

QUESTION: You said you often went to zoos rather than write. Can you say something of discipline and the writer?

WIDTE: There are two faces to discipline.

If a man (who writes) feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo.

He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns.

It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it. The other face of discipline is that, zoo or no zoo, diversion or no diversion, in the end a man must sit down and get the words on paper, and against great odds. This takes stamina and resolution. Having got them on paper, he must still have the discipline to discard them if they fail to measure up; he must view them with a jaundiced eye and do the whole thing over as many times as are necessary to achieve excellence (or as close to excellence as he can get). This varies from one time to maybe 20.

QUESTION: Does the finished product need a gestation period? Do you put it away and look at it a month later?

WmTE: It depends on what kind of product it is. Many a poem could well use more than nine months. On the other hand, a newspaper report of a fire in a warehouse can't be expected to enjoy a gestation period. When I finished Charlotte's Web, I put it away, feeling that something was wrong. The story had taken me two years to write, working on and off. I took another year to rewrite it, and it was a year well spent. If I write something and feel doubtful about it, I soak it away. The passage of time can be a help in evaluating it. But in general, I tend to rush into print, riding a wave of emotion.

QUESTION: Do you revise endlessly?

How do you know when something is right?

Is this critical ability perhaps the necessary equipmentfor the writer?

WIDTE: I revise a great deal. I know when something is right because bells begin ringing and lights flash. I;m not at all sure what the ~'necessary equipment" is for a writer-it seems to vary greatly with the individual. Some writers are equipped with extrasensory perception. Some have a go_od ear, like O'Hara. Some are equipped with humor-although not nearly as many as think they are. Some are equipped with massive intellect, like Wilson. Some are prodigious. I do think the ability to evaluate one's own stuff with reasonable accuracy is a helpful piece of equipment. I've known good writers who've had it, and I've known good writers who've not. I've known writers who were utterly convinced that anything at all, if it came from their pen, was the work of genius and as close to being right as anything can be.

Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious ... and congenial readers on earth.'

QUESTION: Thurber said that if there was such a thing as a New Yorker style, possibly it was "playing it down." Would you agree?

ture, I suspect, is not the contrived humor of a funny man commenting on the news but the sly and almost imperceptible ingredient that sometimes gets into writing.

I think of Jane Austen, a deeply humorous woman, I think of Thoreau, a man of some humor along with his bile.

the profits, and foul up the room. Shocking writing is like murder: The questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

Much writing today strikes me as deprecating, destructive, and angry. There are good reasons for anger, and I have nothing against anger. But I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion, their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation. I am often mad, but I would hate to think that I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun and to report them whenever-and if ever-they happen to strike me. The role of the writer today is to sound the alarm. The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late, and not much is being done. Instead of carting rocks from the moon, we should be carting feces out of Lake Erie.

WIDTE: I don't agree that there is such a thing as a New Yorker style. If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copy desk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammati- QUESTION: Is there any shifting of gears cal exactitude and stylish convention. in writing such children's books as CharlotCommas in The New Yorker fall with the te's Web and Stuart Little? Do you write precision of knives in a circus act, outlining for a particular age group? the victim. This may sometimes have a WHITE: Anybody who shifts gears when slight tendency to make one writer sound he writes for children is likely to wind up a bit like another. But on the whole, New stripping his gears. But I don't want to Yorker writers are jealous of their own evade your question. There is a difference way of doing things and they are never between writing for children and for adults. chivied against their will into doing it I am lucky, though, as I seldom seem to some other way. have my audience in mind when I am at work. It is as though they didn't exist.

QUESTION: Do you think media such as Anyone who writes down to children television and motion pictures have had any is simply wasting his time. You have to effect on contemporary literary styles? write up, not down. Children are demandWIDTE: Television affects the style of chil- ing. They are the most attentive, curious, QUESTION: How extensive are the jourdren-that I know. I receive letters from eager, sensitive, quick and generally con- nals you have kept and do you hope to pubchildren, and many of them begin: "Dear genial readers on earth. They accept, almost lish them? Could you tell us something of Mr. White, My name is Donna Reynolds." without question, anything you present their subject matter?

This is the Walter Cronkite gambit, them with, as long as it is presented WIDTE: The journals date from about straight out of TV. When I was a child I honestly, fearlessly and clearly. I handed 1917 to about 1930, with a few entries of never started a letter, "My name is Elwyn them, against the advice of experts, a more recent date. They occupy two-thirds White." I simply signed my name at mouse-boy, and they accepted it without of a whiskey carton. How many words that a quiver. In Charlotte's Web I gave them .would be I have no idea, but it would be the end. a literate spider, and they took 'that. an awful lot.

QUESTION: You once wrote that good Some writers for children deliberately The journals are callow, sententious, English usage is often "sheer luck, like getavoid using words they think a child moralistic, and full of rubbish. They are ting across a street." Could one deduce from doesn't know. This emasculates the prose also hard to ignore. They were written and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children sometimes in longhand, sometimes typed this that great writers are also lucky?

WIDTE: No, I don't think so. My remark are game for anything. I throw them hard (single-spaced). They contain many clipabout the ingredient of luck in English words, and they backhand them over the pings. Extensive is the word for them. I usage merely referred to the boghole that net. They love words that give them a do not hope to publish them, but I would every writer occasionally steps into. He hard time, provided they are in a context like to get a little mileage out of them. begins a sentence, gets into the middle of that absorbs their attention. I'm lucky After so many years, they tend to hold my it, and finds there is no way out short of again: my own vocabulary is small, as attention even though they do not excite retracing his steps and starting again. compared to most writers, and I tend to my admiration. I have already dipped into That's all I meant about luck in usage. use short words. So it's no problem for them on a couple of occasions, to help out me to write for children. We have a lot on a couple of pieces.

In most respects they are disappointing. in common.

QUESTION: Could we ask some questions Where I would like to learn what I did, about humor? Is it one of the writer's probI learn only what I was thinking. They are QUESTION: Can you suggest something lems that humor is so perishable? loaded with opinions, moral thoughts, WIDTE: I find difficulty with the word about the present state of letters, and, perquick evaluations, youthful¡ hopes and "humor" and with the word "humorist" to haps, the future of letters? peg a writer. I was taken aback, the other WIDTE: I don't suppose a man who hasn't cares and sorrows. Occasionally they manday, when I looked in Who's Who to dis- read Portnoy's Complaint should comment age to report something with exquisite cover Frank Sullivan's birthday and found on the present state of letters. In general, honesty and accuracy. This is why I have him described as a humorist. It seemed a I have no objection to permissiveness. in refrained from burning them. But usually, wholly inadequate summary of the man. writing. Permissiveness, however, lets after reading a couple of pages, I put them Writing funny pieces is a legitimate form down the bars for a whole army of non- aside in disgust and pick up Kilvert, to see of activity, but the durable humor in litera- writers who rush in to say the words, take what a good diarist can do.

QUESTION: Faulkner has written of writers, "All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection." Would you put yourself in this category?

WHITE: Yes. My friend John McNulty had a title for a popular song he always intended to write and never did: "Keep your dreams within reason." We both thought this was a very funny idea for a song. I still think it is funny. My dreams have never been kept within reason. I'm glad they've not been. And Faulkner was right-we all failed.

QUESTION:

Could you say what those

dreams were?

WHITE: No. Here I think you are asking me to be specific, or explicit, about something that is essentially vague and inexpressible. Don Marquis said it perfectly: My heart has followed all my days Something I cannot name.

QUESTION: What is it, do you think, when you try to write an English sentence at this date, that causes you to "fly into a thousand pieces?" Are you still encouraged (as Ross once wrote you after reading a piece of yours) "to go on?"

WHITE: It isn't just "at this date"-I've always been unstable under pressure.

When I start to write, my mind is apt to race, like a clock from which the pendulum has been removed. I simply can't keep up, with pen or typewriter, and this causes me to break apart. I think there are writers whose thoughts flow in a smooth and orderly fashion, and they can transcribe them on paper without undue emotion and without getting too far behind. I envy them. When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said-it makes all the difference.

So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.

I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn't know where else to go.

0 About the Interviewers: A man of diverse talents, George Plimpton is best known as a sports writer and his book Out of My League has been called "a baseball book such as no one else ever wrote." To gain first-hand impressions, he actually participates at the highest professional levels in each sport he writes about-bullfighting, boxing, baseball and football. The same man edits Paris Review, one of the world's most prestigious literary magazines. Frank Crowther is Paris Review's associate editor.

THE FAITH OF A WRITER The following address by E.B. White was made upon receiving the 1971 National Medal for Literature, an award conferred annually by the U.S. National Book Committee to a living American writer for the excellence of his total oeuvre.

I accept the Committee's award with thanks and with as much vainglory as I can muster at so great a distance. I'm very unhappy about not attending the meeting. Ten years ago they pulled the railroad out from under me, and this almost severed my connection with New York. Then, 16 months ago, I met with a motor accident, and this made the highway a problem for me. As for the skies, I quit using the flying machines in 1929 after the pilot of one of them, blinded by snow, handed the chart to me and asked me to find the Cleveland airport.

The world of letters sometimes seems as remote or inaccessible to me these days as the City of New York, and it would be foolhardy of me to comment at length on that wonderful, untidy, and seductive world. I drifted into it a long time ago with no preparation other than an abiding itch. I fell in love with the sound of an early typewriter and have been stuck with it ever since. I believed then, as I do now, in the goodness of the published word: It seemed to contain an essential goodness, like the smell of leaf mold. Being a medalist at last, I can now speak of the "corpus" of my work-the word has a splendid sound. But glancing at the skimpy accomplishment of recent years, I find the "cadaver of my work" a more fitting phrase.

I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend-to make flights, carrying others along if he could manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit. My favorite aeronaut was not a writer at all, he was Dr. Piccard, the balloonist, who once, in an experimental moment, made an ascension borne aloft by two thousand small balloons, hoping that the Law of Probability would - serve him well and that when he reached the rarified air of the stratosphere some (but not all) of the balloons would burst and thus lower him gently to earth. But when the Doctor reached the heights to which he had aspired, he whipped out a pistol and killed about a dozen of the balloons. He descended in flames, and the papers reported that when he jumped from the basket he was choked with laughter.

Flights of this sort are the dream of every good writer: the ascent, the surrender to Probability, finally the flaming denouement, racked with laughter-or with tears.

Today, with so much of earth damaged and endangered, with so much of life dispiriting or joyless, a writer's courage can easily fail him. I feel this daily.

In the face of so much bad news, how does one sustain one's belief? Jacques Cousteau tells us that the sea is dying; he has been down there and seen its agony.

If the sea dies, so will Man die. Many tell us that the cities are dying; and if the cities die, it will be the same as Man's own death. Seemingly, the ultimate triumph of our chemistry is to produce a bird's egg with a shell so thin it collapses under the weight of incubation, and there is no hatch, no young birds to carryon the tradition of flight and of song. "Egg is all," quotes Dr. Alexis Romanoff, the embryologist, who spent his life examining the egg. Can this truly be the triumph of our chemistry-to destroy all by destroying the egg?

But despair is no good-for the writer, for anyone. Only hope can carry us aloft, can keep us afloat. Only hope, and a certain faith that the incredible structure that has been fashioned by this most strange and ingenious of all the mammals cannot end in ruin and disaster. This faith is a writer's faith, for writing itself is an act of faith, nothing else. And it must be the writer, above all others, who keeps it alive---choked with laughter, or with pain.

0