Occasional Prose by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online

but she was responsive to a sense of calling, vocation, including that of the citizen to serve the common life. She was also a very private person, and I think (though we never spoke of it) that The Life of the Mind was a task she dedicated to the memory of Heinrich, a kind of completion and rounding out of their common life.
    Heinrich Bluecher, her husband and friend, was the last of her teachers. Though he was only ten years older than she, in their intellectual relationship there was something fatherly, indulgent, on his side, and pupil-like, eager, approval-seeking, on hers; as she spoke, he would look on her fondly, nodding to himself, as though luck had sent him an unimaginably bright girl student and tremendous “achiever,” which he himself, a philosopher in every sense, was content, with his pipes and cigars, not to be. He was proud of her and knew she would go far, to peaks and ranges he could discern in the distance, while he calmly sat back, waiting for her to find them.
    For her, Heinrich was like a pair of corrective lenses; she did not wholly trust her vision until it had been confirmed by his. While they thought alike on most questions, he was more a “pure” philosophic spirit, and she was more concerned with the vita activa of politics and fabrication—the fashioning of durable objects in the form of books and articles. Neither was much interested in the biological sphere of the animal laborans —household drudgery, consumption of goods; though both were fond of young people, they never had any children. When he died, late in 1970, quite suddenly, though not as suddenly as she, she was alone. Surrounded by friends, she rode like a solitary passenger on her train of thought. So The Life of the Mind , begun in those bleak years, was conceived and pondered for (and she must have hoped with ) Heinrich Bluecher, not exactly a monument but something like a triptych or folding panel with the mysterious will at the center. Anyway, that is what I guess, and she is not here to ask.
    I spoke of a crowning achievement, but Hannah was not in the least ambitious (absurd to connect her with a “career”); if there was some striving for a crown, it was in the sense of a summit toward which she had labored in order to be able to look around, like an explorer, finishing the last stages of an ascent alone. What would be spread out before her were the dark times she had borne witness to, as a Jewess and a displaced person, the long-drawn-out miscarriage of a socialist revolution, the present perils of the American Republic, where she had found a new home in which to hang, with increasing despondency, the ideas of freedom she had carried with her. From her summit she would also look out at the vast surveyor’s map of concepts and insights, some inherited from a long philosophical tradition and some her own discoveries, which, regarded from a high point, could at least show us where we were.
    In the realm of ideas, Hannah was a conservationist; she did not believe in throwing anything away that had once been thought. A use might be found for it; in her own way, she was an enthusiastic recycler. To put it differently, thought, for her, was a kind of husbandry, a humanizing of the wilderness of experience—building houses, running paths and roads through, damming streams, planting windbreaks. The task that had fallen to her, as an exceptionally gifted intellect and a representative of the generations she had lived among, was to apply thought systematically to each and every characteristic experience of her time— anomie , terror, advanced warfare, concentration camps, Auschwitz, inflation, revolution, school integration, the Pentagon Papers, space, Watergate, Pope John, violence, civil disobedience—and, having finally achieved this, to direct thought inward, upon itself, and its own characteristic processes.
    The word “systematically” may be misleading. Despite her German habits, Hannah was not a system-builder.