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+{"text":" \nDedication\n\nTo my writing friends, who dragged me out from under my rock and made me put words on the screen. You guys are the best. To Bethany, and all at Samhain for taking a chance on a weird post-apocalyptic reaper thing.\nChapter One\n\n\"They say she roams the old roads, looking for her victims. Human, paranormal...she don't care. She'll kill anything.\"\n\nThe raspy voice echoed around the half-empty bar. Like a chill wind it reached into the corners of the candle-lit room, found all those who were listening and pulled a shiver from the very depths of their souls. Forget the bogeyman, since the war people had learnt there were far more dangerous things than the pretend monster under the bed.\n\nThose in the room listened anyway. Chair legs scuffed on the worn wooden floor, disturbing the sawdust scattered over its battered surface. Shadows crowded against the steel-grilled windows that showed evidence of the bars use as a last line of defense.\n\nAt the back of the bar, Mason snorted into his whiskey. Good old Fred. He sure did like his ghost stories, even if they did scare the crap out of the customers. Not that they had many. Normally the place was filled with locals. It had been that way since the world went to shit in a storm of fire and brimstone.\n\nMason rolled a mouthful of the amber fluid around his mouth, before letting it burn its way down to his stomach. Stuff would rot your gut, but hell did it have a kick, exactly what a man needed at times. He leaned back against the wall and swirled the rich colored liquid around in his glass as he watched the bar as a whole. After wandering in here six years ago, badly busted up from an altercation with a couple of Lycans, he'd gone from recovering patient to self-appointed town protector.\n\nRight now his attention was on a group of youngsters at the other end of the bar who'd waltzed into town earlier. After scoring refills on their water bottles and a pack-load of supplies, they were living it up in the bar, full of bravado, and crazy-ass stories of escaping a nest of Vamps.\n\nMason had been up close and personal with a couple of Vamps, and they were tough bastards. It'd be hard, not impossible to escape a whole nest of the bloodsuckers, but you'd have to be a combination of Bruce Lee, Rambo and the terminator.\n\nTwo girls, three boys. Way too young to have survived on the roads. He pursed his lips, feeling the scar at the corner pull slightly. He remembered his days as a wanderer. It was a tough life. Practically everything out there wanted to screw you over, and eat you. Or screw you, and eat you. Or screw you whilst eating you...there were some kinky-ass critters out there.\n\nHe lifted his glass to his lips again. He never sat at one of the middle tables, preferring to keep his back to the wall with his gun free and easy by his side. Even in the supposed safety of the town Mason carried, locked and loaded. The light from the candle on his table caught the rim of his glass, twinkling in the corner of his eye.\n\nHe looked at the group again and caught his breath. Between the light spots from the candle and the flickering shadows cast by the other candles in the room, the group of visitors looked different. Changed.\n\nIt was a spilt-second, as though their masks had slipped a little and allowed him a glimpse at the creatures beneath. The one Mason had tagged as the leader turned around, looking around the bar with an assessing eye. Too assessing, and way too hungry.\n\nMason took another drink as though nothing had changed. But this time he didn't savor the drink as it went down. Before the war Mason had been a soldier. A damn good one. In that life he'd seen lots of corpses, but he'd never seen one walk and talk until ten years ago. Like the one scanning the bar as if it was an all-you-can-eat buffet.\n\nGhouls. How the fuck had they gotten past the defenses? They had everything from warding sigils carved into the plaster of the walls under the hangings to a demon-trap painted on the underside of the floorboards by the door. The first drink of water visitors to the town were given contained a dash of holy water, and the cutlery they got was silver-plated. With all their precautions, the town was loaded for everything but bear.\n\nHis gaze flicked around the room. Just his luck, most of the locals were in tonight. A heavy sigh escaped his chest as he drained his glass. He fucking hated Ghouls.\n\nGetting rid of them was always messy.\n\nHis lips compressed as he placed his glass on the table in front of him. Seeing an empty, Valerie, the bar-owner, headed over. Her hips swayed as she walked, and there was a smile of invitation on her lips as she approached.\n\n\"All done there, sugar-bun? Want me to get you another?\"\n\n\"No, thank you, I'm good. Listen, V, I need you to start moving people out.\" His voice was low and firm--completely at odds with the brilliant smile he flashed her. Anyone looking their way would assume the two were flirting, which was exactly what he wanted.\n\nValerie's face dropped. \"Aww, no... Those kids? You gotta be kidding me, Mason. They're barely old enough to be out on their own.\"\n\n\"Exactly. They aren't old enough, or anywhere near tough enough. They're not human, V. Don't be fooled by the cute mask they're wearing. Otherwise next week it might be your Suzie's.\"\n\nValerie's face went stony. The only thing that made her madder than a bunch of wet hens was a threat to her daughter. Mason had no idea what had happened to the kid's father. He'd never asked. Out here, no one did. Everyone had a past they would rather forget, things they'd had to do to survive. Most of the time those things didn't make for a good night's sleep.\n\n\"Give me five minutes, I'll get it cleared.\" She started to turn, and then paused to look back at him. \"Make it quick and clean, would ya? The girls look scared, like they don't want to be here. Plus, it took me weeks to get the bloodstains out of the floor last time, and I'm all out of sawdust.\"\n\nMason nodded, pitching his voice a little louder. \"Sure thing, sweets. Leave it to me.\"\n\nHis tone was friendly and flirtatious. For good measure he leaned over and swatted Val on the ass as she passed him. She squealed in delight, wagging her finger at him as she headed back to the bar.\n\nThroughout the room the locals carried on drinking, or talking, but he knew they'd caught the signal. The last time he'd flirted with a woman and meant it, mankind had a future, not this squalid mess they were trying to survive in.\n\nThe evacuation didn't take long. As soon as Valerie had dropped another glass off at his table with a wink, there was a slow, but determined exodus. The non-combatants left as the rest found reasons to go talk to friends on the edge of the room.\n\nExcept old Fred, who sat on the table next to the Ghouls. It was his favorite spot. The table never moved. It couldn't, it was riveted to the floor. Even now Mason knew that Fred's finger was on the trigger of the shotgun rigged underneath it.\n\n\"Lady of Death? Ohhhh purlease, old man, that's just a kid's tale. Like the bogeyman,\" one of the Ghouls scoffed. Mason had already tagged him as the leader. Loud and obnoxious he was the sort Mason would want to waste even if he was human.\n\n\"You wanna be careful, sonny,\" Fred warned. He was an odd choice for a front man, but he was one of Mason's best. A crack-shot with that gun, he looked like everyone's favorite grandfather. No one suspected Fred, even if his life depended on it.\n\n\"Oh yeah, Pops. Why's that?\"\n\nThe Ghoul spun his chair around to face Fred and straddled it. The skin between Mason's spine itched. He'd seen what Ghouls could do. They could rip a man apart with their bare hands without breaking a sweat. The instant the kid looked like he was even thinking of making a move towards Fred, Mason would put a bullet between his eyes.\n\n\"They say the lady sees all, and knows all. There's no way to escape her. Don't matter if you don't believe in her, as long as she believes in _you._ \"\n\nMason watched Valerie busying herself at the bar out the corner of his eye. She was wiping glasses, her attention seeming to be half on the conversation going on and half on her work. He knew better. By her left knee, next to the defunct cash register there was a fully loaded rifle. When the shit hit the fan, she would have it in her hands and firing within a heartbeat.\n\nHe almost felt sorry for the Ghouls. Almost.\n\nHe looked back. The mask had slipped completely now. Confident that the dumb humans they'd found themselves in the middle of couldn't tell what they were, they'd let their cover slip.\n\nMason _could_ see through their human disguises, and right down to the foulness beneath. They had the same matted hair and rotten flesh of every other corpse he'd seen. Added to that were blackened, claw-like fingers, and the guy on the left had a bad drool problem. Looked like he'd gotten a busted jaw before he'd become what he was now.\n\n\"Don't be fucking stupid, old man.\" The Ghoul started to stand. Fred didn't move an inch, still smiling even though Mason knew he had to have the trigger down to first pressure. Interesting that, when they had their balls to the wall, humanity could rock it against creatures of darkness in the bloody violence stakes.\n\n\"No, Johnny, don't. They've been nice to us.\" The girl at his side caught his arm, stopping Johnny's headlong rush into certain suicide. _Do us all a favor, lass, and let Fred blow his head off. Might be something human in you left to save._\n\nThe kid turned on her like a Rottweiler, a low snarl in his throat. \"Shut it, bitch. You're here to look pretty, not question me.\"\n\nHe had had enough. Even though she was a Ghoul, if the kid hit her, Mason was taking his hand off at the wrist. \"What do you believe in, Johnny?\"\n\n\"What's it got to do with you?\" The Ghoul's head whipped around, isolating the new voice in the conversation with the instinct of a predator.\n\nMason leaned forwards. \"If you don't believe in the Lady of Death, what do you believe in? Vamps? Lycans? The Abominable Snowman? Santa Claus? Ghouls? How about Ghouls?\"\n\nJohnny's face went blank, his eyes wary and flat. Mason levered himself from the bench in one lithe movement, his rifle held loosely in his hands. Even though he was armed, in this day and age that wasn't a threat. Everyone carried, if you didn't, you were dead.\n\n\"You believe in Ghouls, Johnny boy?\"\n\nJohnny shrugged. \"Lots of weird shit out there. Could be Ghouls too.\"\n\nMason made it to the end of the bar. If Johnny had been anything close to clever, he'd have realized by now all the locals were quiet. More to the point, he'd have twigged that all the friendly locals of earlier weren't looking half so friendly now.\n\n\"Oh, I know there are Ghouls. Now, because I'm a fair man I'm going to give you and your dream team one chance. Get up, get your stuff and walk out of my town.\"\n\nJohnny looked around the room. Mason watched as the penny dropped _._\n\n\"Come on, man,\" he wheedled, injecting a pathetic note into his voice. That was what disgusted Mason about these creatures. Ghouls were tricksters, playing up the sympathy vote to get into a town, and get a free meal. \"It's after nightfall. You can't turn us out onto the road at night. God knows what's out there.\"\n\nMason shrugged. \"We got a simple rule in this town, kid. You ain't human, you ain't staying. Now walk, before we perform a little...vermin control.\"\n\n\"Johnny, they're onto us. We should go...\"\n\n\"No.\" Johnny shook her arm off with a snarl as he glared at Mason. \"I'm not being told what to do by a fucking human. We're the top of the food chain man, and no one can stop us. We're gonna eat your heart and laugh while we chow down.\"\n\nMason didn't bother with any more dialogue. His dad had always said, when you face down a man with a gun you'd better hope that man is a bad man. A bad man will keep you talking before he shoots you so, if you're smart, you can find a way to escape. A good man though...he won't bother chatting you up, he'll just shoot you without a word. He wasn't sure his dad had gotten those definitions the right way around, because he sure as hell wasn't a good man.\n\nHis rifle was on his shoulder, and the Ghoul in his sights within a heartbeat. The next a blackened rose spread over the kid's forehead as Mason's double tap blew out what was left of his rotten brain.\n\nThe bar erupted into gunfire. Bullets and shotgun slugs tore into the small group of Ghouls without mercy, making them dance like marionettes. It wasn't a shooting. It was an execution.\n\n\"Cease fire,\" Mason yelled over the noise. The Ghouls were done for. The guys had all received double taps to the head courtesy of Mason, and Johnny had pretty much gotten shredded.\n\nHis footsteps were light as he approached, to check if the Ghouls were dead. Of course, with their kind, dead was a relative term. He needed to make sure they weren't the snacking-on-your-guts kind of dead.\n\n\"Fucking hell, just the stink'd put you off.\"\n\nFred was right by Mason's side as he reached what remained of the lead Ghoul, Johnny. Just as he suspected, the thing was old and rotten to the core. Rifle trained on the mass of torn flesh and rags, he kicked the leg nearest to him.\n\n\"That's Ghouls for you. Corpses too dumb to die.\"\n\nThere was no resistance. If the thing was playing possum it was good at it. He took one last look at the sightless eyes and moved his attention. The other two males were just as bad. From the sheer amount of damage, Mason figured they'd copped at least half the payload from the townsfolk. The girls, by comparison, looked almost untouched.\n\nHe scooted around one side of the bodies on the floor as Fred went the other way. They both saw movement at the same time. An arm twitched and then one of the girls, the one who had spoken earlier, groaned.\n\n\"We got a live one.\" Mason barely heard the end of his own sentence over the sound of rifles and pistols being cocked.\n\nHis world shrank to what he could see through his sights. Gaze firmly fixed on the girl's face, he watched as her eyes fluttered open and she slowly turned her head to look at him. Black blood covered one side of her face, and he didn't want to think about the thicker fluid oozing out from behind her ear.\n\n\"Please...\" she begged, her pale eyes fixed on him. \"I didn't want this. Make it quick...please.\"\n\nShe held his gaze, the moment stretching out. In that instant she ceased to be a monster, and became just a young girl wanting the nightmare to go away. Throat thick, he didn't trust himself to speak so he just nodded.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she whispered. He pulled the trigger and sent her into the afterlife.\nChapter Two\n\nTen years, three months and four days. That was how long it had been since the worst day of Andy's life. Of course, since that date coincided with the Apocalypse--Doomsday, Armageddon or whatever you wanted to call it--it had been a pretty shitty day the world over.\n\nThings hadn't got much better. She settled her backpack more securely on her shoulders and studied the road ahead. She'd walked these roads since that day, always on the move, never stopping for more than a night or two. She'd tried to in the beginning, but she was just too different to hide amongst humanity for long.\n\nShe trudged along the road, the tightening in her calf muscles telling her she was heading up an incline. She wouldn't have known otherwise, after a while everything looked the same. Dust and fuck-all else leading into foothills and mountains in the distance. Apart from yesterday...yesterday she'd passed a tree. It had provided hours of entertainment.\n\nReaching the top of the incline something new caught her eye. Pausing to rest her booted foot on the bumper of an abandoned car, she shielded her eyes and squinted. Despite her dark glasses the bright sun foiled her vision, making the dark smudge on the horizon dance and waver.\n\nShe growled under her breath. Why the hell couldn't she have gotten useful abilities like some other paranormals? The ability to change form and run like a Lycan, or the night vision of a Vampire...either would have been useful. At least, far more useful than what she did have, dangled on the end of a chain at the disposal of fate, chasing silver threads only she could see. It sucked, big time.\n\nOf course, most people would tell her to look on the upside--she couldn't die. Would've helped if she'd known that _before_ she'd tried to commit suicide. Three times. That had been the year after the war. She'd been way unstable back then. Mind you, when you were forced to kill your family, friends--hell, everyone you knew, then it was bound to knock a few cogs loose upstairs. Since then she'd come to terms with what she was, somewhat, and just did her job.\n\nThe smudge on the horizon resolved itself into a plume of smoke. Five silver lines, the sort only she could see, flickered and lit up in the corner of her vision. They headed off straight towards the smoke.\n\nShe sighed. _Another job. No rest for the wicked_.\n\nThe small black mark on the horizon grew larger and larger as she walked. Eventually it became a small town. Andy studied it as she trudged closer. Most humans lived in places like these. Towns fortified against any sort of attack--be that attacks from other humans looking for supplies, or attacks from any of the paranormal types.\n\nThis one had particularly good defenses. The person who'd put them together had really known what they were doing. She passed an outer redoubt of steel and iron barricades, nodding at the stony-faced guard stationed at the lookout post.\n\nThe silver lines she was following didn't lead into the town. Instead they branched off to the right. Like a good little puppy she followed them. The skin between her shoulder blades itched as she walked. Within seconds more armed figures appeared on the main wall, silent and watching. She was impressed. These people were on the ball.\n\nTurning the corner she found what she was looking for. A funeral pyre smoldered away, billowing black smoke high into the air. The wind changed direction for a second. Wrinkling her nose she tried to breathe through her mouth. Humans smelt bad enough when cremated, but Ghouls were even worse.\n\nShe didn't need to count the bodies on the pyre. Five silver lines fed straight into what she was looking for. Five souls, the ones belonging to the remains on the pyre, stood waiting for her. Standing in a nice little line, ready and waiting for her to reap them.\n\nUsed to the drill Andy took a deep breath, and let her spirit slip into the Shade. The layer between life and the afterlife, it was where the souls waited for a Reaper to come along and send them into the afterlife.\n\nThe world changed hue, painted in shades of black and grey. There was no color here, no life to speak of, and the truly alive couldn't enter this place. She looked over her shoulder at the figures on the wall watching her. To them she would appear to be looking at the pyre. She could step bodily into the Shade if she had to, but figured that would freak them out too much if she just disappeared.\n\nAs it was, they wouldn't see her reach around and under her pack, drawing the twin sickles sheathed there with practiced movements. A good thing, because she didn't fancy being hit with enough lead to drop a rhino. She'd only had this jacket a couple of weeks, and the last thing it needed was ventilation.\n\nThe weapons filled her hands, their well-used handles as smooth as silk under her callused palms as she walked towards all that remained of the Ghouls. Twirling the twin blades around, she sliced her way through the souls with ease.\n\nWith the souls already separated from their bodies, it was easy. They only put up a fight when she had to both kill them and reap their souls at the same time. She could understand that, most people were kind of attached to breathing. Sometimes she caught a break--death by old age or something like that--but most went down fighting, all the way.\n\nAs soon as her blades touched them the souls shattered, disintegrating like smoke blown away by a stiff breeze. As the last soul broke up, a tendril separated itself and wrapped around Andy's wrist for a moment. A surge of relief and gratitude filled her, welling in her chest and bringing dampness to her eyes. She smiled, knowing it was the soul's way of saying thank you.\n\n\"You're welcome.\" She flicked her blades back along her forearms and sheathed them with a small _snick_ under the pack again. \"I hope you find the peace you're looking for.\"\n\nJob done, Andy returned to the spot she'd entered the Shade. It was easy to spot. Behind her, stretching back into the world of the living was her own lifeline. It wasn't the silver of the Ghouls, or the gold of humanity, or any other color that marked a creature that was truly alive...instead her lifeline was black as pitch.\n\nShe snorted in amusement as she stepped back between the worlds. Twin sickles, which when you looked at them were just very small scythes, black on black clothing and a black lifeline... All she needed was to become anorexic, wear a black cloak and she could really rock the Grim Reaper image.\n\nShe ignored the watchers on top of the walls as she headed back towards the main gates. Like every other town she'd visited there was another guard on the gate.\n\n\"Morning, ma'am, what's your business in Sanctuary?\"\n\nThe greeting from the guard was polite enough--even if the smile didn't extend to his eyes and there was absolutely no way he could hide the threat in the casually held shotgun. To his credit he didn't even try.\n\n\"Just a quick stop off to trade for supplies and water. Perhaps a night's sleep without having to keep one eye open.\"\n\nThe guard nodded. It was a familiar story, probably one he'd heard countless times. Still his eyes swept her in a quick but thorough assessment. Without asking, she knew he'd be able to describe her from the weaponry she was carrying but wouldn't be able to remember her hair color.\n\nBlack. Fitting for a Reaper.\n\n\"Okay, step under the arch please, ma'am, just there on the red cross. Thanks.\"\n\nWith a frown she did as she was told, standing right in the middle of the crude cross sprayed in red on the rough concrete. A shiver ran down her spine as magic surrounded her. The guard's gaze flicked up, so Andy followed suit. There was nothing on the underside of the arched gateway. Frowning, she flicked her vision back into the Shade, and was almost blinded by the devil's trap painted up there.\n\nClever. Someone here knew how to mix holy water with PVA glue to make paint invisible to the living eye but capable of use in a spell. She kept her expression level and slightly puzzled, as though she wasn't sure what the kid was looking at. No need to alert anyone to the fact she wasn't _homo sapiens_.\n\n\"That it?\" She injected a bored note into her voice. \"Or would you like me to dance a jig as well?\"\n\nHe chuckled, and a rueful smile spread over his face. Andy grinned back. Under the wariness and the worry on his face, the kid was rather good looking.\n\n\"No, you're okay, ma'am. You're good to go.\" He nodded through the gates into the town. \"Best place to go is Val's. Just head up the road and it's on your left, can't miss it.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" She inclined her head, shrugged her pack to a more comfortable position and walked into Sanctuary.\n\nInside the walls with their impressive defenses it was pretty much the same as every other town she'd visited. Dilapidated buildings lined the streets, and as she walked further she passed inhabited houses like small fortresses.\n\nIt didn't take her long to reach Val's bar. Like the rest of the town it was a little worse for wear. Right at the moment though, it looked like heaven. She couldn't remember the last time she'd stopped. Sitting in an actual chair rather than on the ground would be a novelty, and if they had running water and a bath, she might just think she'd died and gone to heaven.\n\nThe hackles on the back of her neck rose a second before the door in front of her burst open. A young lad stumbled out, glaring over his shoulder to snarl. \"You'll regret saying no. Jed doesn't like people who don't play ball.\"\n\nAndy stopped. The kid righted himself, his yellowish gaze sweeping over her, and all her instincts went into high alert. He wasn't human, not with eyes like that. Her palms itched, but she fought the compulsion to draw her sickles.\n\n\"What you lookin' at?\" he snarled, recoiling a little from her presence. Without realizing what he was doing he kept her in front of him as he skirted around her. He couldn't know what she was, but most paranormal creatures recognized the ultimate predator when they saw one.\n\nShrugging, she carried on into the bar. Perhaps they had coffee. Her brain all but shut down at the thought. She could smell it already, taste the stuff on her tongue. It was her only vice, if you discounted bloody murder and reaping souls. She'd run out weeks ago and cold turkey was no fun. It made her cranky.\n\nShe caught the swinging door on the way out, halting it with a flat hand on the wood and pushing back inwards. Her fingertips came away tingling. A devil's trap at the gate, and active ash-wood inlaid in the door? This place got any more interesting, and she'd have to raid an old cinema for popcorn.\n\nAfter the bright sunlight outside, entering the room was like being plunged into cool water. Andy stood in the doorway and let her eyesight adjust. Her sense of smell kicked in first. The stench of blood under pine floor cleaner was unmistakable--as was the fact someone had tried to scrub more than one kind of blood off the wooden floor. Under the Ghoul she could make out Vampire, Were and...Brownie? Holy hell, if they'd managed to see off a Brownie infestation then these people were serious players.\n\nThe room resolved itself into a large, almost cavernous space with a long bar at one end. At one time four pool tables had stood near the door, rings on the floor marking their positions like invisible sentinels. Sauntering down the center of the room, she headed towards the bar. Every set of eyes in the room was on her, which didn't surprise her after the Werewolf.\n\nShe reached the bar. Elbows on the wooden surface, she planted a booted foot on the rail and smiled at the woman wiping glasses behind the bar. Andy knew the smile didn't reach her eyes, but it didn't matter. The dark glasses did more than shield her eyes from the sun.\n\n\"Howdy. What'll it be?\"\n\nThe barmaid put a glass away next to an army of its cohorts lining the shelves. Andy wasn't fooled by the easy manner. If the woman didn't have at least three weapons within easy reach she was a monkey's uncle. Or aunt. Whatever.\n\n\"A refill of water, and if you've got some coffee I'll love you forever.\"\n\nAndy pitched her voice to polite and friendly as she put her water bottle on the bar. Invulnerable she might be, but being shot hurt. Since she had no active job in this town, all she wanted was to resupply, and perhaps get a good night's sleep.\n\n\"Room for a night, if there's one available. If not, I'll kip down in here...with your permission, of course.\"\n\nThe woman, Val presumably, inclined her head. \"One water and a meal on the house, coffee you gotta pay for.\"\n\n\"You trade?\" It was what Andy had expected. Her hands were already in her pockets as she withdrew a few trinkets she'd collected on her travels. Lip-salve, a box of old plasters with smurfs on them and a couple of disposable lighters. All suitable payment for the supplies she needed.\n\nVal's keen eyes assessed the offerings, and she nodded towards a table nearby. \"Can do, have a seat and I'll bring them over. No rooms, you sleep in here. There's someone on the bar all night.\"\n\nAndy's lips quirked as she turned and headed towards the table indicated. In other words, there will be someone with a gun on you all night, so don't try anything funny. Good policy.\n\nReaching the table, she slid her pack off her shoulders and shoved it under the table, out of the way. The intake of breath behind her warned Andy that her sickles had been spotted. She ignored it and sat. Since the whole thing was spelled to be inconspicuous, then that meant there were spells here that countered illusion. She really _was_ going to have to pick up some popcorn.\n\nShe lounged back in the chair and took her time looking around the room. She didn't bother with the people, instead she scanned the walls and the ceiling. She couldn't see them, but she knew the enchantments were there.\n\nHer water and food arrived. Andy gave up her search. With tricks like holy water and PVA glue to draw devil traps she was sure they'd gotten inventive here too. If she wasn't very much mistaken then her cutlery was silver plate, and she'd bet her bottom dollar that the water had a drop of the holy stuff in it as well. _Boiling Vamps from the inside was a new approach. Nice._\n\nShe studied the food in front of her for a while. One of the figures the other side of the room peeled himself from the wall and headed her way. Andy watched him from the corner of her eye. He didn't walk, he stalked...a predator like her. The rifle in his hand seemed an extension of his being, like her sickles were, and a pistol played peek-a-boo from his shoulder holster.\n\nMost men didn't bother with holsters, just shoved their pistols into the waistband of their pants. Andy had always wondered how many had done the gene pool a favor and castrated themselves. Stupidity like that didn't deserve to breed.\n\n\"Good work with the Ghouls. I'm impressed,\" she commented as he reached the table and spun a chair around to straddle it. He looked back, his blue-grey eyes as blank as his expression.\n\nCute and hot. Very hot.\n\nShe might not be human, but she _was_ female. Everything about this guy--from the blond velvet-like stubble on his scalp to the solid, ripped body the tight T-shirt hinted at--called to every feminine instinct she had. Worse, in the middle of a cruelly handsome face sat a perfectly straight nose and a sinful pair of lips that made even a reaper think wanton thoughts.\n\n\"The Brownies impressed me more though.\" Andy leaned back in her chair and studied him more closely. To his credit he didn't flinch. \"How'd you manage to waste the little freaks? They're worse than a bad dose of the clap.\"\n\nMr. Tall, blond, and less-than-chatty shrugged but didn't answer her question. Instead he nodded at the plate in front of her. \"Not hungry?\"\n\nThe voice didn't match the rest of the package. Andy had traveled the length and breadth of the land. She'd tracked and reaped virtually every creature within living legend and a fair few that weren't. The guy in front of her was human, but the voice. _Ohmygod,_ the voice was something else.\n\nIf Andy didn't know better, couldn't _see_ better, she'd swear he was a Vamp, or even a fae...some being with the ability to hypnotize with sound alone. Smooth as silk, it went down like a good whiskey, making her think of languorous nights in front of a roaring fire. Then the bite kicked in, like the burn of a good shot as it slid down her throat. Satin over a core of pure steel. Of all the creatures Andy had come across on the roads, her instincts warned her that this one, this mere human, was the most dangerous.\n\n\"Not particularly.\"\n\nShe met him look for look. Foolish perhaps but she found she rather enjoyed baiting him. She knew that, even at this moment, he was making the decision on her. One signal, and she'd be treated to the same fate as the Ghoul's whose blood had decorated the floor beneath her feet.\n\n\"Neat.\" She nodded to the items on the table. \"Silver for Weres. Splash of holy water in the glass by any chance?\"\n\nHe started, and Andy's lips quirked again. She'd surprised him. Lifting the glass she took a long swallow then put it back on the table pointedly.\n\n\"Just proves you ain't a Vamp. Take off the glasses.\"\n\nHer eyebrow winged up. There was no way to take that as anything other than an order. As a rule she didn't take well to orders...\n\n\"Tell me your name.\" She hooked a finger around the arm of her glasses and slid them down her nose to look at him over the top. Dark eyes met light, and her breath caught for a moment. Andy kicked herself. _Oh for heaven 's sake, get over it girl. What do you think this is...some kind of great romance novel?_\n\n\"Mason.\"\n\nOh my, the sparkling conversation was going to be the death of her. She just hoped his talents lay in...other directions. Her mind hit the gutter level as she wondered what all those tight muscles under his T-shirt felt like. She sighed, and tried to get her raging libido under control.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Mason. I'm Andy. You're not part-siren by any chance, are you?\"\n\nHe recoiled, disgust written over his features. \"I'm not part anything. I'm human through and through.\"\n\nAndy kept her skepticism to herself. There was something about him--she just couldn't put her finger on it.\n\n\"So...Andy. How about you? You going to drop the charade, or pick up the silver so we can see what you really are? I warn you though, Old Fred behind you is a crack shot with that sawn-off.\"\n\nAmusement rolled through her as she took her glasses off, and placed them precisely on the table in front of her. If Fred was going to shoot her in the back, then she'd rather not be wearing them. Good sunglasses were damn hard to find these days.\n\n\"A little unsporting, wouldn't you say? What happens if I pick the silver up, and nothing happens? Do I pass all your tests?\"\n\nHis gaze hardened. \"What makes you think you passed them all?\"\n\nA chuckle of amusement escaped her lips. She hadn't had this much fun in years. \"Let me see... Ash-wood in the door to bar witches...wouldn't stop a warlock or a sorcerer though. The door-step has an iron strip, and you'd be hard pressed to find a real living horse this far out so those...\" she nodded to the horseshoes behind the bar. \"...are definitely imports.\n\n\"I'm guessing you have another devil's trap by the door, but I can't see it.\" She scanned about the room, picking up each layer of protection she could see. \"Wall hangings to cover warding sigils and the ones you have carved in the windowsills are some serious mojo. I'd recommend adding a couple to stop Banshee's though...passed a band of them a couple of days ago heading this way.\"\n\nPicking up the silver fork she speared a lump of beef from the stew and popped it into her mouth, busting the theory she was a Were or a Ghoul. Silver burned the first, and the other couldn't stomach cooked meat. She looked at him in expectation for a second and grinned at his shell-shocked expression. \"Did I miss anything?\"\n\nHis surprise disappeared under a glower. \"What the fuck are you?\"\n\n\"Let's just say I'm not a threat to you and your town. In fact, I'm intrigued. Where did you learn all this stuff?\" She waved her hand, indicating the silver, the wards and the other protections in the place. \"I've never come across a place so well prepared.\"\n\n\"Playin' dangerous games, sweetheart,\" Mason bit out, holding his hand up in warning as someone in the shadows behind her cocked a weapon. \"People around here get jumpy when it comes to non-humans. I'll give you the same warning I did those Ghouls on the barbeque outside. Get your kit, and walk. You ain't human, you ain't stayin'.\"\n\nAndy rose to her feet. Below average in height, she'd long ago given up trying to attain the grace her mother had possessed. Finding out at the end of the world she was not only adopted but a different species altogether sure explained a lot.\n\n\"Can't say fairer than that I guess.\"\n\nSwiping a razor-sharp nail over the pad of a finger Andy watched blood well up from the small cut. Leaning forwards she drew a symbol onto the table in blood.\n\n\"What the fuck are you doing?\" Mason demanded, his gaze sharp as it flicked from her to the symbol and back again.\n\nAndy shrugged her pack on and picked up her glasses. \"Copy the ward, wash the table and do the same with the water as you did with the symbol on the gate. It'll keep those banshees out.\" With that, she slid her glasses on and walked out the door.\nChapter Three\n\nThe day had been a long one. Mason walked into his room, and shut the door behind him with a quiet click. Still fully clothed he rolled onto the bed, and closed his eyes with a grateful sigh.\n\nHe was exhausted. As normal, he'd been up before sunrise to join the work-parties that kept the town running. He should have been exhausted, but sleep was elusive. Ordinarily it was an insistent bed partner, often claiming him before he managed to shrug out of his clothes. Tonight it danced just out of reach. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Andy, the woman from earlier.\n\nHe ground his teeth, and squeezed his eyes together until fireworks lit up the back of his eyelids. Correction, she wasn't a woman. She was a paranormal. Not human, not a woman, no one he should be bothered about. A thing he shouldn't worry himself about. With those wicked-looking blades strapped crosswise on her back then no doubt she could take care of herself. For someone to carry blades instead of a gun was a statement all in itself.\n\nIt said that the carrier was either a) stupid and about to buy the farm or b) they were good enough to get those blades into anything they came up against. To do that they'd have to be faster than a Werewolf, able to hear even a Vampire creeping up, and be able to outwit a shade. She'd looked too human, and way too cute, to be capable of half that.\n\nMason groaned as images of her lying in the darkness, her skin pale as she bled out, filled his head. His male protective instincts, rusty from inactivity, rushed to the fore. He shouldn't have let her leave. Unlike other non-humans, she hadn't offered them any harm. She'd even drawn them a ward...and as soon as he'd looked at it, he'd known she was telling the truth. The thing had hummed with power.\n\nHow he knew stuff like that, he had no idea. He just did. Since the war he'd been able to spot all manner of paranormals, and magic users, under their disguises. Not just non-humans either. Souls black with sin...that was the saying. He'd always expected a soul ready for hell to be as black as pitch, rotten through and through. They weren't though. If they were human, they were bright silver. Paranormals, as always, were different. Their souls were a whole rainbow of different colors. Amber for wolves, red for Vampires, black for the undead.\n\nHis eyes snapped open as he ran through his memories again. He'd done the usual cursory check to see if he could detect anything hidden behind the pretty face and had come up with nothing. Looked human on the outside, no monster lurking inside to leap out like a freaky jack-in-the-box. Still, Mason's instincts had warned him there was something not right about her, and now it hit him.\n\nHer soul had been black.\n\nAt three forty-five he gave up on sleep, and rolled out of bed, sat on the edge of the narrow cot and rubbed his eyes. They were like piss-holes in the snow--gritty and hot. He cast a baleful glance back at the lumpy mattress. He needed a bottle of whiskey, fourteen hours sleep and a new mattress. Preferably in that order.\n\nThe stink of sweat assaulted his nostrils. Mason grimaced and risked a quick sniff at his armpits. Shower time for sure. He walked out of his clothes on his way to the bathroom. Even here, in the safety of his own room, his rifle was the last thing to leave his hand. Propping it up against the wall beside the door Mason switched the water on.\n\n\"Jesus _fucking_ Christ...that's cold.\"\n\nTeeth chattering, he forced himself under the spray of frigid water. This time of morning, he had no chance of it warming up. The town attracted a lot of waifs and strays so they had most occupations, from a former hairdresser to a Hollywood gynecologist, but could they find a damn plumber? Until they did, the ailing boiler was only run for short periods, and carefully baby-sat in case it decided to go critical.\n\nPity it couldn't do that with Jed and his pathetic pack of dogs in the room. He shook his head as he scrubbed down quickly with the hard soap produced in town. He still could not believe that animal had had the audacity to send one of his mutts into town, and demand a tithe.\n\n_\" Five women, old enough to fuck and not too old to have kids. So we don't want any dried up old-grandma's. If the tithe is suitable, your town will be spared our wrath.\"_\n\n\"Spared our wrath.\" Mason snorted, washing his sack and crack with quick economical movements. Who did the guy think he was? He didn't give a flying fuck about Jed's wrath. He tried anything in Mason's town, and he'd end up like every other para that tried it...with Val scraping his brains off the bar's floor.\n\nFinally he stepped out of the shower and grabbed the thin towel draped over the rail. Like everything else here it showed signs of hard use. He dried off quickly and dropped the towel and his dirty clothes in the washing basket.\n\nThe clean ones he put on were nearly identical. He pulled an old T-shirt over his head, covering the multitude of scars that marred his torso, and grabbed his combat pants. Once they'd been black but now they were a faded grey. Clean socks went on next, after he gave his feet a quick check.\n\nThey said an army marched on its stomach, which was true. What was also true was that a soldier never neglected his feet or his boots. He laced up quickly and tucked the ends back into the top of the boots. Pulling his pant leg up, he strapped his knife to his calf. A legacy from his army days, it was Mason's last line of defense. If he ever had to draw it, then the shit had hit the fan in a big way. Shrugging his shoulder holster on, he grabbed his rifle and headed for the door. If he hurried, he might be able to catch the morning hunting party.\n\nAn hour later, Mason was walking point. The small group of hunters fanned out behind him. Their faces were grim and professional. A sense of pride filled him. In this, at least, his former life had been of some help. Whenever they left the town to hunt, they took their lives into their hands. Out here, things fell into one of two categories--things that ran away from them, and things to run away _from._\n\nHe pulled his rifle tighter into his shoulder, steps soundless as the group walked. Concentration wrapped around them so tightly it was like a cloak. Every gaze was alert to the smallest movement. The only major cover for half mile or so, this was where they were likely to find either game or become it.\n\nTension wound through his frame as he paused, raising his arm with a clenched fist. At the signal the group stopped, and assumed kneeling positions facing outwards from the group. Mason crouched to study the tree line.\n\nAll was quiet. There weren't many birds around these days, anything bigger than a sparrow was an immediate candidate for the stew pot. But this was _too_ quiet, as though nature herself was holding her breath, and watching the scene around the copse unfold.\n\nWay too quiet.\n\nDecision made, he stood and signaled to the group to skirt around. The likelihood of bagging some sort of game within the trees was good, but the risk was too high. They had a few hours left to find something elsewhere. He wouldn't risk good hunters.\n\nHe sighed softly as they moved out. When the scientists had unleashed hell on earth, and changed the fabric of reality, why couldn't they have created cows the size of trucks? He'd happily trade in Ghouls and wolves for a guaranteed good meal. And steak...he had re-occurring fantasies about a good steak.\n\n\"Keep it tight.\"\n\nHis order was low as James, one of the newest hunters, edged into his line of sight. Not a place he wanted to be when Mason was on patrol. Anything that moved was getting shot on the basis that it was either food, or it was hostile.\n\nThe patrol continued in silence as they walked their pre-arranged route. Frustration began to mount in his chest as they walked further and there was still no sign of prey. Pickings were getting increasingly slim. Each hunting team came back in with smaller and smaller catches until recently, when most times they came back with nothing at all.\n\nIf they didn't bring something back in today Val was going to have to dip into the canned goods secured in bar's kitchen. That was something he tried to avoid. Canned goods would last for years. They were his fail-safe in case the whole situation went tits-up and they had to move out of town. On the road, they would be too busy defending themselves to risk hunting for food.\n\nUnease itched in the space between his shoulder blades. It started off a small itch, then grew and grew until his shoulders were tight with tension. Someone...no, some _thing,_ was watching them. Mason'd bet his last bullet there wasn't just one of them either.\n\nBefore he could alert the team, they were attacked. Hard and fast, everything happened at once. \"Contact. Full right, six o'clock,\" he yelled, rifle on his shoulder and already squeezing rounds off as the first Werewolf burst out of cover to his left.\n\n\"Weres!\"\n\n\"No shit, Sherlock,\" he muttered as his double tap took the first wolf between the eyes and splattered its brains over the one right behind it. The second jumped over the carcass, red eyes fixed on Mason as it snarled. Saliva dripped from its yellowed teeth as it crouched low, stalking him.\n\nHe aimed and fired. His bullet ripped through its right front leg, shattering the joint. Squealing in pain it crashed to the ground, and tried to shift to heal the massive damage to its leg.\n\nMason had seen Weres change before, and it turned his stomach. All that bone snapping and changing, not to mention skin that melted and reformed to the new shape. Bile rose in his throat as he approached the creature where it writhed on the ground.\n\n\"Down boy.\" He lifted the rifle and put a bullet through its reforming brain.\n\n\"Keep in. Controlled bursts, conserve your ammo,\" he yelled over the sound of firing as the small group of humans clustered back to back for protection. The wolves circled them, flitting in and out of cover.\n\nThey'd already lost Julian. The wolves had gotten to him within seconds of the initial attack. He snorted. The stupid cunt had tried to play the hero, ignoring all orders in favor of doing his own thing like some kind of post-apocalyptic Rambo. These days you didn't want to be the hero. Playing the hero just got you dead. Fast.\n\nThe kid had deserved to suffer for the stunt he'd pulled, but Mason had done the decent thing and put a bullet between his eyes when the wolves had ripped into his stomach. No one deserved to be breathing through something like that.\n\nJulian's body, or what was left of it, lay off to the left. His abdomen was torn open, his intestines strewn around him like the stuffing out of a battered teddy bear. Steam rose off the slimy red tubes in the cold morning air.\n\nSausages, Mason thought absently as he rattled off a couple more rounds at a Werewolf that dared to poke its head over the top of an old concrete pipe. He hadn't had sausages in years. He could still remember how they tasted. Little bites of pure, fatty pleasure that burst on the tongue.\n\nNext to him, Julia kept a sharp eye out as he reloaded. The drill was smoothly executed, and instinctive. It was his last magazine. He didn't need to ask to know they were all running low on ammunition.\n\nWhat the fuck where they going to do when the bullets ran out?\n\n\"Single shot,\" he ordered. \"Make them count. If you can't get a head shot, blow a leg out. I don't care how, but I want these fuckers on the ground. If we're going down, we're taking them with us.\"\n\nThe bushes around them rustled as the wolves closed in. Mason knew they were closing the net. Within minutes, they'd launch their final attack and the humans were screwed six ways to Sunday.\n\nAhead of him, an ear poked up over one of the concrete tubes the bastards were hiding behind. Mason grinned. It was less an ear, and more a furry suggestion of an ear. Disregarding his own order Mason aimed and squeezed the trigger, and grinned at the squeal of pain and fury that emanated from behind the pipe.\n\n\"What was that?\" He cupped his ear as though listening hard for something. \"Sorry you flea-bitten mutt, you'll have to come a little closer. I can't _hear_ you!\"\n\nThe group behind him chuckled softly. Within seconds, a low rumble overwhelmed the sounds of mirth, a rumble that coalesced into vicious snarling. He centered himself. This was it. They were about to die. He knew that, the men and women with him knew that. Miracles didn't happen. Not anymore, not for anyone. Mason rolled his shoulders, checked his safety catch was off and waited for furry vengeance.\n\nToday was a good day to die.\n\n\"Incoming,\" he yelled as the wolves swarmed out of cover. Gunshots sounded around him as battle was joined. He emptied the last of his rounds into the face of a wolf stalking towards him and dropped into a crouch to yank the big blade from the sheath on his calf.\n\n\"Come on, you bastard. Come get me.\" Mason's voice was thick with fury as he faced off against a lean, pissed-off-looking wolf with a tattered ear and murder in his amber eyes. Mason grinned, showing all his teeth. \"Let's see if I can't make that other ear match...\"\n\nThe wolf curled its lip back, and snarled a low warning of pain and terror to come. As it bunched powerful legs underneath its body, Mason prepared for his last battle. Adrenalin sang in his veins. There was nothing like the imminent threat of death to make a man feel alive. He felt no fear. In fact, he didn't feel anything at all. Except a small measure of regret about kicking Andy out of town last night without even trying for so much as a kiss.\n\nThe wolf lunged at him. Mason was quicker. He sidestepped as the creature rushed him, letting its momentum and weight carry it past him. As it did, he stepped back into its side, easily avoiding the slash of vicious teeth and landed a solid back-fist on the side of its skull. The wolf howled as Mason grimaced in pain. It was like punching bloody granite.\n\nThe creature turned, and Mason knew he was done for. The group was scattered, wolves closing in on each of them. Julie, his fire team partner screamed as a wolf tumbled her to the ground, standing over her and slowly licking her face.\n\n\"Come on then. Come and get me.\" Mason's lip curled back as he snarled. \"I hope I give you the shits.\"\n\nThe wolf grinned, eyeing him up as though deciding which tasty portion of Mason's anatomy he was snacking on first. Mason's grip tightened on the blade in his hand. No matter where the creature struck, his knife was going through its heart.\n\n\"Want a hand there, handsome?\"\n\nThe seductive voice took him by surprise. Andy. He slid a glance sideways, trying to look at her and keep an eye on the wolf too.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing here, woman?\"\n\nShe was already injured. Blood coated one of her arms, soaking through the light material of her T-shirt. The bullet hole at the shoulder and the tattered skin beneath told him the blood was hers. \"You'll get hurt.\"\n\nMason wasn't quite sure how the events of the next thirty seconds unfolded. As the snarling Werewolf launched itself towards them he tried to shove her out of the way, and protect her with his own body. Only she wasn't there anymore.\nChapter Four\n\nGrim determination flowed through Andy's veins as she stepped towards the Were. Her non-human instincts were in full force. Its lifeline was bright red, ready to be reaped. Trouble was, the soul was still firmly embedded in the body, and she knew from the look in its eye that it wasn't giving it up without a fight.\n\nShe grinned. Just the way she liked them.\n\nTime slowed to a crawl as the creature barreled towards her. She dropped to one knee, the other leg stretched out for balance, as it sailed over her. Spinning the sickle in her right hand she sliced across its belly. The contents of its abdomen evacuated the premises in a torrent of blood and heavier things.\n\nAndy ignored it as it thudded to the ground to twitch its last. The soul and the body were separate, and that was all she cared about. Most corpses tended to twitch a little before they realized they were dead.\n\nShe turned her attention on the other wolves. Some of the humans were already dead--there was nothing she could do about that. All she could do was protect those that still lived. Muscles filled with the power of her calling, Andy swept through them like a hurricane.\n\nHer blades sliced and diced, ripped and danced, as she caught fur and bone alike, slicing through the body to catch the soul inside.\n\nWithin seconds she stood in a pile of lupine bodies. Her eyes were flat and unemotional as she watched the remaining wolves beat a hasty retreat. She didn't blame them. Vamps and Weres--both thought they were the top of the food chain. Did them good to come across something more powerful...something they couldn't beat, couldn't kill.\n\nSlowly she became aware of her ragged breathing, and the pain streaking like wildfire down her arm. She wrinkled her nose as she looked at her shoulder. \"Dammit...\"\n\nThe bullet had ripped through the fabric, and from the feel of it, was still lodged in her flesh. Great, surgery before lunch. She sighed. She needed a vacation. Somewhere hot. She'd heard Hawaii was nice this time of year.\n\n\"Here, you're bleeding. Let me.\"\n\nA voice at her side made Andy jump a little. She turned and looked up into warm eyes. A smear of blood marked his cheek, but Andy was caught instead by the small laughter lines at the corners of his eyes. He must have smiled a lot at some point. The desire to get him to smile at her was nearly overwhelming.\n\n\"This? It's just a scratch.\"\n\nShe flinched as he slapped a field dressing over her arm and applied pressure. To her, it was little more than a hole in her skin. She wouldn't call it a wound. Such a name gave it an importance that was unwarranted. Whatever she did--dressed it or allowed it to bleed--nothing untoward would happen. No matter how much blood she lost, she wouldn't bleed out.\n\n\"Just a scratch, huh?\"\n\nHis lips quirked into a half smile. The expression transformed his harshly handsome face into something that took Andy's breath away. _Oh, for God 's sake girl, get a grip. He's a good-looking guy and you're an intelligent woman. No need to start thinking with your damn ovaries._\n\n\"I suppose if you lost your leg, you'd claim it was a mere flesh wound, eh?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\nHer smile turned into a hiss of pain as he pressed hard onto her arm. It hurt like a bitch, but her reaper physiology only needed a little help. Already the bleeding had stopped, and she could feel the skin starting to close. She could feel something in there, which meant she was going to have to open it up later to get the damn thing out. Trust her to get hit by the only shotgun in the group, just her luck.\n\n\"How's it feel?\" His pale eyes studied her with a perception Andy found disturbing and thrilling at the same time. It was like he could see right through to her soul. If she even had one...the jury was still out on that. Still she had a feeling that, of all the people she'd come across in the last ten years, Mason was the one who would see past her human disguise to the real woman beneath.\n\nShe wiped her blades off on the nearest furry carcass with swift swipes and sheathed them with efficient movements. They slid back into place with a satisfying click. Waving his hand away, she gingerly peeled back the field dressing to look. As she'd suspected the ragged tear in her skin was closed and fresh, pink skin had taken its place. She flashed him a smile as she dropped the dressing back into place.\n\n\"Good as new, thanks.\"\n\nMason arched an eyebrow. \"What, no pain? Feeling dizzy, anything like that?\"\n\nShe gave him a long look. \"Not human, remember?\"\n\n\"Hmm...you still bleed like the rest of us.\"\n\nHis voice was low as he looked around the small group. They were scattered around the scene of their showdown with the wolves. A couple just lay on their backs, staring up at the sky as they dragged harsh breaths of air into their lungs.\n\n\"Yeah. So do wolves.\"\n\nMason frowned, looking at the small pile of lupine bodies in front of them. \"That's odd. They normally turn human again when you kill them.\"\n\nSurprise filled Andy, but she hid it as she looked sideways at him. She'd under-estimated him. Again. After seeing the way he had the town set up, she should know better. \"They do. Well spotted. I take it you've killed a few in your time?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Yeah. Spent a couple of years on the road before settling down. Traveled with a witch for six months...seen just about everything that's out there.\"\n\nA witch. It made sense now. The defenses at the town weren't random--they were planned with experience of protecting such a location.\n\n\"I saw. Nice touch with the devil's trap on the main gate. Almost didn't spot that. Good setup, I'm guessing you're ex-military?\"\n\nSurprise filled his eyes. \"You saw that? It's invisible.\"\n\n\"To a human maybe. As we've already established, I'm not human.\"\n\n\"Good point. What are you?\"\n\nBlunt and to the point. She liked that in a guy. The smile that had been trying to break free for the last couple of minutes spread across her lips. She tapped the side of her nose. \"That's for me to know, and you to find out.\"\n\nMason looked at her for a long moment, the corners of his lips twitching suspiciously. Then, as though he couldn't hold it in any longer, he burst into laughter. \"Oh, I intend to, sweetheart, I intend to.\"\n\nAndy's heart, an organ she'd long thought dead, skipped at the warm smile and flirtatious look on his face. Oh hell, this man could charm the birds from the trees if he wanted. A second later though, it was gone as he flicked a glance down at her arm. His jaw tightened, and she could sense the inner battle raging from the tenseness of his body.\n\n\"You should come back with us. You know...in case that gets infected.\"\n\n\"Breaking your own rules, Mason? _Tsk_ , _tsk_. Shame on you.\" She softened her refusal with a smile. \"I'll be okay. You get your guys back to safety before the rest of this lot come looking for their friends.\"\n\n\"Of all the stubborn, mule-headed, bloody stupid...\"\n\n_Bloody women. Can 't live with them, can't live without them and most of the time they drove normal, sensibly minded guys completely insane._\n\n\"You aright, hun?\" Cleaning tables on the other side of the room, Valerie paused and looked up at his outburst.\n\nHe grimaced as he leaned back in his chair. Maps of the local area spread over the table in front of him, highlighted by a shaft of sunlight from a nearby window. He watched, his thoughts in turmoil, as dust-motes danced in the sun.\n\nHe couldn't concentrate. All he could see was the blood running down Andy's arm. She was paranormal. What type Mason didn't know--his usual acuity in spotting what a person really was seemed absent in this particular case. Whatever she was, so far she hadn't harmed any of them.\n\nIn fact, she not only had _not_ harmed anyone in town but she'd come riding to the rescue when they were in trouble like some kind of white knight. Mason sighed and ran his hands across the short stubble on his scalp. The way she moved... Pure lethality and grace in motion. Like a combination of a ninja and the hottest super model he'd ever seen all rolled into one uber-sexy package. His perfect woman...and he'd let her go injured into the wilds alone. What kind of fucking idiot was he?\n\n\"Nothing. Just a little tired, that's all.\"\n\nValerie looked less than convinced. Giving the table in front of her a last swipe with her cloth she picked up the bottle of cleaner and headed towards him.\n\n\"Mister-I-don't-need-sleep-invincible-Mason-Callahan is tired?\" She plonked the bottle and cloth down on the table and flopped onto the seat in front of him. \"Yeah, right. Try something believable...like...you moonlight as Santa Claus. _That_ I might believe.\"\n\nHe gave her a blank look, but the expression on her face said she wasn't having any of it. He swore. The vicious curse did nothing but elicit laughter from the blond bar-keeper.\n\n\"It's that girl, isn't it? The one that was in here last night. What was her name...Andrea or something?\"\n\n\"Andy,\" he replied begrudgingly. No point in trying to hide anything. If V was confronting him about it, then she already had the answers. Just like a woman to work that way, and V was as manipulative as they came.\n\nHe sighed and rearranged his maps for the tenth time since opening them up. He was trying to plot a route to the nearest town. Something that wouldn't leave them in the open too long, was on the least blocked highways and avoided both the local Werewolf packs and Vampire nests. That just left the other stuff to worry about--wandering Were-packs, nomadic creatures like banshees and plain weird shit he didn't have a name for.\n\n\"Andy. I knew it was A something. Julie says she was out there today.\" V ran her finger along a deep grove in the tabletop. \"Said you lot would have bought the farm if she hadn't turned up.\"\n\nMason just nodded.\n\n\"Had us surrounded. Must have been stalking us for a while. I just didn't see it. Julian broke formation, so they got to him first. They were about to take us all out when she showed up. Took on three herself, like there was no stopping her.\"\n\nHe shook his head, still amazed at what he'd seen. \"The rest ran. Like they were scared shitless of her. Don't blame them, I would've been too.\"\n\nValerie looked up, her expression serious. \"So, what do we think? Vampire?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Not the right vibe for a Vamp.\"\n\n\"Something worse?\"\n\n\"Worse than a Vamp?\"\n\nMason chuckled, but Valerie's words struck a chord deep within him. There _was_ something dangerous about Andy. Something Werewolves ran from, something he was sure would scare the un-dead crap out of Vampires too. It was the same thing that called out like a siren to him.\n\nHe stood in a lithe movement and gathered his maps.\n\n\"She helped us, and she got hurt. Wouldn't come into town because of our rules. That doesn't sit right with me. Human or not, the last thing anyone needs out there is to be bleeding from a fresh wound. I'm gonna go look for her...she's on foot. Can't have gotten far.\"\n\n\"Fucking... _hell! \"_\n\nThe sound of Andy's curses reverberated back at her, echoed nicely by the concrete of the old bridge she'd made camp under. There was a small tent in the backpack next to her sleeping bag but she rarely bothered to unpack it unless the weather was crappy.\n\nMore curses spilled from her lips as she glared at the bloody mess that was her shoulder. Small knife in her hand, not one of her sickles, she squinted and tried to spot the pellet she knew was in there.\n\n\"Stupid cow. You should have dug it out there and then, not let it heal over.\"\n\nGritting her teeth, she probed with the knife again. Just because she couldn't die didn't mean she couldn't feel pain. Right now, she was feeling shed-loads of it. Her blade scraped against bone, sending razor sharp needles of pain through her, and twisted her gut into a cat's cradle of bile and nausea.\n\n_Not throwing up, not throwing up, s_ he chanted the mantra in her head as she tried to force the feeling back down. She hated being sick. Hated it with a passion. Always had, and always would. Leaning back against the rough concrete wall, she tried to use the cold surface to leech some of the heat from her body as she waited for the feeling to subside. By slow degrees it did, until she could think straight again. Grimly she gathered the courage to try again. Finally she lifted her head to study the edges of the wound again.\n\n\"What the _hell_ do you think you're doing?\"\n\nAndy jumped, and lost her grip on the knife.\n\n\"Oh bollocks! Look at what you made me do,\" she snapped, searching in the folds of her sleeping bag for the bloodied knife. It came away from the fabric with a wet smear that made her wince. \"Great, that's gonna need sponging off or the flies will have a field day. What the hell are you doing out here anyway? Thought you'd be tucked up all nice and safe in your little town?\"\n\nMason stalked into the circle of light cast by the small fire. \"Looking for you, that's what. Wanted to make sure you weren't doing anything stupid...like trying to carve up your arm with a god-damned butcher's knife!\"\n\nShe frowned at the blade in her hand. Sure, it was a little on the long side but it was the only straight blade she had. Her sickles were sharper, but knowing her luck, she'd probably amputate her own arm.\n\n\"Huh? This thing? It's nowhere near heavy enough for a butcher's knife.\"\n\nIgnoring him as he squatted in front of her, she dug the knife into her arm again. The pellet was still in there...she could feel it.\n\nAfter her second bout of swearing Mason reached out and plucked the knife from her hand. \"Here. Let me. I'll make less of a mess than you are. You trying to end up with a scar?\"\n\nAndy shrugged. \"Wouldn't make a difference. I don't scar.\"\n\n\"Yeah, right. Everyone scars...only things that don't are Vamps. And you aren't a Vamp. I might be human, but I'm not stupid.\"\n\nHis voice was amused as he studied her arm. Light from the fire behind him caught the tips of his cropped hair, casting the hard plains of his face into shadow and giving him a fiery-red halo. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Felt nice to let someone look after her for a change.\n\n\"I could be a day-walker Vampire.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Sorry sweetheart. This is reality, not a Hollywood blockbuster. Only Vamps we got are the ones who don't tan well.\"\n\nFingers moving gently, he probed the ragged edges of the wound in her arm. Then he paused. \"This looks different. What have you been doing to it?\"\n\n\"Doing to it? You mean, other than digging around in it with a sharp implement?\"\n\nIt was sarcastic and she knew it. But Andy couldn't help it. She'd always had a sharp tongue and spending years traveling with only herself for company...that was bound to warp even the healthiest of minds. She didn't want to think too closely on her mental state. If a psychiatrist assessed her, she was sure the words homicidal and possibly fruit-loop would feature heavily in their report.\n\nHe shot her a look.\n\nAndy grinned, unrepentant. \"What? Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. Owww! Lay off with the squeezing, would you? That bloody hurts.\"\n\n\"Cry-baby. It's just a scratch. Remember?\"\n\nHe ignored her glare with an innocent expression and carried on manipulating around the wound. Blood oozed thickly down her arm.\n\n\"It _was_ just a scratch. Earlier. That was before I opened it up to dig a hole the size of freaking China to find the pellet one of your friends shot me with.\"\n\n\"It's the wrong shape.\"\n\n\"What do you mean it's the wrong shape?\"\n\nAndy winced and tried to wriggle away as he put more pressure on her upper arm and dug in with the knife. Bloody hell, with friends like this, who needed enemies? Pain lanced down her arm as he went after the pellet. Fire and ice shot through her body and brought a slick of sweat to her skin. She clamped her jaw shut to keep from crying out until she was sure the pressure was going to crack her teeth.\n\n\"Ahh, there it is.\" Mason sat back on his heels, the small pellet between his bloodied thumb and forefinger. With satisfaction, he threw it into the fire.\n\n\"It's the wrong shape for China. So, what do you mean by you opened it up? Had it already scabbed over?\"\n\nShe recognized a leading question when she heard one. Humans healed slowly but still, most paranormal races would show some sign of such a recent injury--a healing wound, or a scar--something.\n\n\"Not scabbed over, no.\" She paused. Was she ready to tell him what she was? He already knew she wasn't a Vampire so she couldn't give that excuse. Was being the physical embodiment of death worse than being a blood-sucking fiend from beyond the grave? What the hell...he already knew she wasn't human. \"It had healed over.\"\n\nThe silence between them stretched out. His gaze locked with hers, and she couldn't look away. Even if the bombs had fallen all over again, she wouldn't have been able to move a muscle.\n\nHis expression was level and emotionless, apart from his eyes. His eyes blazed with suspicion and a deep, dark something Andy wasn't sure she was reading right. If she didn't know better, she'd say it was...interest?\n\nThat couldn't be right, even when she'd been human men had never found her interesting, much less attractive. Too short, too skinny, pale skin, dark hair. An all-round plain Jane.\n\nGreat. The first guy she was interested in and who just _might_ be interested in her, and she was about to tell him she was the female version of the Grim Reaper.\n\nThe battle continued to wage in his eyes, the knuckles of the hand that held the knife white with pressure. His voice was tight and contained.\n\n\"I'll ask again, for the last time. What are you?\"\n\nMason's heart did a tango in his chest as he waited for her answer. He'd come out to look for her because he'd been worried. Concerned about her safety out here all alone and injured. Concerned about a woman who'd taken down three fully shifted Lycan's without so much as breaking a sweat.\n\n_Well done, Mason. That 's what thinking with your prick does for you._\n\nHer dark eyes flicked to the blade in his hand. One by one he forced his fingers to relax. She might be about to tear his face from his skull but he felt a strange need not to scare her. She was small, female...and that delicate curl in the curve of her neck was driving him nuts. Of all the women he'd met--why did the only one that sparked an interest in him have to be a paranormal?\n\n\"You sure you want to know?\"\n\nHer arched eyebrow was a challenge he couldn't ignore. Throwing caution to the wind he flicked his wrist and half threw-half thrust the knife into the dirt by his knee. With the speed she'd displayed earlier, no knife was going to help if she wanted to hurt him.\n\n\"The truth,\" he said firmly. He'd had enough of being given the run around by this one. However pretty she was, with her masses of dark hair and soft lips that made a man think wicked things, he had a limited supply of patience.\n\nAgain that maddening half smile flirted with the corner of her lips. \"The truth? You can't handle the truth.\"\n\nAmusement rolled through him at her quick-fire reply. For a moment all of it fell away--the war, the hard fight for survival since, the fact the town was running out of food. For a few blessed seconds he could forget and just enjoy being in her company.\n\n\"You ever going to give me a straight answer, or just more movie quotes?\"\n\n\"Depends.\" She grinned, a quick flash of teeth against her pale skin.\n\nHe knew she wasn't a Vampire, but still Mason did a quick dental check. No elongated canines or anything that could be remotely described as a fang.\n\n\"Depends on what?\"\n\nAt his words the atmosphere between them changed. Her eyes darkened and he was stuck, caught in a web of fascination. Heat and smoke coiled in puppy-dog brown, changing her eyes from pretty to breathtaking. Need and desire hit him low down in the gut, sending shivers along every inch of his skin.\n\n\"On whether you kiss me or not.\"\nChapter Five\n\nThe bold statement threw a shudder along Mason's spine. His gaze dropped to her lips. Plump and perfect with a slight sheen across the lower one. A cupid's bow of temptation. He shouldn't, he knew that...there were a thousand reasons why he shouldn't.\n\n\"Is that so?\"\n\nHe leaned forwards by slow degrees, teasing them both with anticipation. Her breath caught as she went still, her gaze locked on his mouth. His lips brushed hers. An introductory touch that whispered over the surface of her skin.\n\nShe moaned. A soft sound in the back of her throat, but it fuelled his male pride. With a groan he claimed her mouth fully. Crushing her lips under his, he dominated the kiss, demanding a response from her.\n\nHis hand delved into the thick hair at the nape of her neck and held her head still as he explored every inch of her lips. _This is heaven_. Her lips were soft and seductive, clinging to his as she wrapped her arms around his neck. He'd heard flowery descriptions from old books about this moment...about women tasting like champagne and strawberries and other such nonsense.\n\nAndy didn't taste like that. What she did taste like was indescribable. Like a taste that extended through his whole body and affected each part of him from the top of his head right down to his toes, and certain portions of his anatomy in between. Bollocks to champagne and strawberries--she tasted of heaven and coming home.\n\nA taste he wanted more of.\n\nWrapping his arms more securely around her he pulled her forwards onto his lap. She whimpered again, that little half-moan in the back of her throat that called out to everything male within him. Sweeping his tongue over her lower lip he demanded entry. Like a flower opening to the sun she let him in, and then it was Mason's turn to bite back a moan.\n\nHe slid his tongue against hers, teasing and tempting, and then, when she responded to him, he took control again. His free hand roamed down her back, and the part of his brain that was functioning noted how well she fit against him. Her slender curves were a perfect match for the harder plains of his body.\n\nWithin seconds the kiss wasn't enough, was never going to be enough. The need to roll her under him and slide deep into her welcoming softness almost overwhelmed him, and banished all other thoughts. The crotch of his jeans tented, the savage ache there reminding him just how long it had been since he'd been with a woman. How long it had been since he'd even _wanted_ to be.\n\nGentling his movements with an iron control he didn't know he had, Mason lowered her to her back and stretched over her. One large hand looped about her wrists and he pulled them slowly over her head, alert for any sign of discomfort.\n\nHer breathing caught, a delightful little hitch as her eyes darkened another notch. Her back arched as he held her hands captive. Her breasts brushed against his chest, and caused a cascade of fire to roll down his spine.\n\nShe was smaller than he'd thought. Now, with that sassy tongue quiet and her eyes watching him with an unreadable expression, he realized just how delicate she really was.\n\nA warm breeze gusted over them, catching a stray curl and blowing it over her face. Slowly, gently, he reached out and brushed it back. The look of wary trust in her eyes nearly unmanned him.\n\n\"If you don't want this, say something now.\" His demand was raspy and rough-edged, but he didn't care.\n\nSwooping in, he claimed her lips again, letting go of her hands. He didn't know, didn't want to think, what he was going to do if she said no. Okay, so that was a lie. Somehow he would find the strength to release her from his arms. He'd never forced a woman before, and there was no way he intended to start.\n\nHer lips pursed in disappointment when he pulled away to look at her.\n\n\"As I recall I asked you to kiss me.\"\n\nShe stroked a soft hand up his arm, finding the edge of the worn T-shirt and sliding under it. He sucked in a ragged breath. He was harder than he could ever recall. What was it about her that drew such a reaction from him?\n\n\"Yeah, but a kiss isn't the same as...um...\"\n\nJust like that Mason found himself speechless. What the hell did he say next? Having sex...fucking...doing the dirty? Making love? Startled, he damped down on that last thought, not sure where it had come from. He'd known her all of forty-eight hours. Love didn't come into it in any way, shape, or form.\n\n\"Mason?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Shut up, and get your kit off.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nThe speed Mason scrambled to obey her softly spoken order massaged Andy's feminine ego. Within a heartbeat he hauled his shirt over his head to reveal a muscled and scarred torso that made her mouth water. His T-shirt had barely hit the ground before he started on his belt buckle.\n\nShe chuckled softly. \"Slow down, tiger. We have all night.\"\n\nHis second boot thudded into the dirt next to the first. Andy paid it no mind as Mason crawled towards her. The inferno in her veins threatened to engulf her, burning everything else away apart from the arousal that clenched her stomach and made her ache.\n\nHer skin was too hot and tight. Pulling at her top she fought down the urge to tear it away from her. She needed to feel the cool night air against her skin, needed to cool the fires that raged through her at the look in his eyes.\n\n\"Oh, I know. I'm counting on it.\"\n\nHis voice was a silken whisper as he reached her. Then he was in her space, something she guarded jealously, not allowing anyone within it. He didn't seem to care, crowding her with a dominance, which took her breath away. \"I'm planning on using that time to explore you. Taste you...and make you scream my name.\"\n\nA soft moan of need and arousal escaped her before she could stop it.\n\nHis hands bracketed the sides of her head, capturing her between the hard ground under her and his hard male body above. His nostrils flared as a tiny muscle in his jaw pulsed tightly. He wanted her but still he held back. The air around them swirled with sexual tension, yet he was taking things slow rather than falling on her like an animal.\n\n\"If you want me to stop, say something,\" he begged hoarsely. \"Because if you don't say something in the next two seconds, then it's gonna be too late.\"\n\nShe smiled--the mysterious little smile of a woman who knows she has her man. Arching her back she let her breasts brush against the hardness of his chest. He was lean and solid, with the kind of muscle that said he didn't spend his days sitting comfortable at a guard post. No, he had muscles that could only have been built by hard work and hunting.\n\nThe scent of warm, clean man filled her senses. Andy lifted her hand and trailed her fingers down his chest and then beyond to explore the ridge at the front of his jeans. He shuddered and closed his eyes.\n\nShe smiled, enjoying her sensual hold over this powerful man. Again that disturbing feeling, that he was more than human, came back to haunt her. She squashed it in favor of dipping the tips of her fingers under his waistband.\n\n\"How about you quit talking and make good on your promises?\"\n\nHis lips crashed down on hers. Without thinking she opened up, allowing him access. His tongue thrust past her lips, and he kissed her like there was no tomorrow.\n\nTheir hands were everywhere, stroking and caressing, touching and teasing. Clothing fell away as though it were no more substantial than mist. His skin slid against hers and she was lost. They moved in concert, part of a dance as old as time yet made new all over again because this was _their_ dance. Heat and need welled up from her core as his hair-roughened knee slid between her thighs. They parted automatically, his weight cradled by her hips.\n\nHer teeth worried at her lower lip as he moved. The broad head of his arousal brushed against the entrance to her body, slick and ready for him. With a moan that was echoed a second later by hers, he sank into her welcoming warmth.\n\nSleep receded in comfortable waves and, for the first time in years, Andy woke feeling refreshed. Grunting in complaint as the chill dampness of the morning air whispered across her exposed cheeks, she snuggled back against the warm, male chest behind her. Waking up next to someone was a novel feeling, something new, but she liked it.\n\nShe hadn't woken up next to anyone for a long time. Sure, she'd had lovers...she wasn't an innocent, no matter how people decided to interpret her looks... There was no way she'd have trusted any of them enough to sleep next to them though. She knew better than to put herself in such a vulnerable position.\n\nSome people said having sex was the most vulnerable position a woman could be in. That allowing such intimate access to her body left her open to all kinds of emotional and physical violence. Andy disagreed. If someone was going to hurt you then they were going to do it anyway. Or at the least, try.\n\nAwake, you could fight back. You could see the situation developing and manage it to the best of your ability. Anyone that couldn't see a violent situation brewing these days quite honestly didn't deserve to live. It was survival of the fittest. Asleep a person, male or female, was truly defenseless.\n\nA solitary bird chirped the dawn chorus with entirely too much enthusiasm. Andy yawned and opened her eyes. The campsite was a mess. Clothes and boots lay in a tangled mess, thrown willy-nilly in their passion last night. The only things laid out neatly within easy reach of the sleeping bag were their weapons.\n\nShe wriggled again, trying to get more comfortable. It was a roomy single but with Masons large frame crammed into it as well, it was a little snug. The smell of warm bodies, sleep and sex wafted up as she wriggled.\n\nShe felt deliciously sore in places she had begun to think didn't exist anymore. Hell, a nun would have seen more action than she had the last couple of years. He'd woken her a couple of times in the night and their coupling had gone from tender and touching to fast and frenzied, as though they couldn't get enough of each other.\n\nOrdinarily that sort of link would have scared the crap out of her, but with Mason it felt right. Amused, she snorted a little. Who would have thought it...the big, bad Reaper feeling safe and protected in the arms of a human?\n\nBehind her Mason stirred, and his strong arm looped crosswise over her body to pull her closer into him. He sighed and buried his face against the nape of her neck, as if she were a human-sized teddy bear.\n\nShe nuzzled her cheek against his hand on her shoulder. What was it about him? As soon as she'd seen him in the bar the other day something had pricked her interest. Both her feminine _and_ her non-human instincts had stood up and taken notice. At first she'd thought the latter was because he was due to make a decision that might bring him under her blades but no, a look at his lifeline had revealed a dull, flat line.\n\nShe turned her head to study him. He was older than she was. Physically at least. Inside Andy felt ancient. If she didn't know better, she'd believe the claim her grandmother had always made.\n\n_\" You're an old soul, Andrea, my love. You've been here before.\"_\n\nThe first part might have been true but not the latter. She didn't have a soul, ancient or otherwise, just a dead lifeline. She snorted in wry amusement. Dead lifeline for a Reaper. Fitting.\n\nMid-thirties, she decided, still studying Mason. His muscled frame bore no puppy fat and the lines on his face were telling. Even before the war he'd had a hard life. His skin bore the scars of violence...both new and old...one gunshot wound looked like it had been treated surgically, which put it pre-war.\n\nYes, his lifeline _was_ different. Now she had the chance and the leisure to study it properly she realized it was the grey of humanity but flatter than normal. Most lifelines pulsated with life, the potential of a thousand decisions taking them closer or further away from the touch of the Reaper. His didn't move, no pulse of life even though her other senses, and her experiences last night, told her he was very much alive.\n\n_How odd_ , she thought to herself. _Just what are you, Mason?_\n\nMason woke as a cold draft chased down his spine. Pulling the sleeping bag tighter around his bare torso he tried to recapture sleep. Then it occurred to him that he didn't sleep naked and didn't own a sleeping bag.\n\nMovement nearby had his eyes snapping open. For a second he was treated to an extremely nice view of Andy's backside before she pulled her jeans up over her hips. Everything slammed back in a second...going after her, her wounded arm, and everything else. No wonder he was tired, the woman was insatiable.\n\n\"Nice view to wake to.\" His voice was rough and raspy with sleep. Propping himself on one elbow Mason cleared his throat and waited for her answer.\n\nShe was gorgeous, all slender curves and satin skin. His cock stirred as he thought of what they'd done. By rights he should be exhausted, but he wanted her again already.\n\nA frown settled onto his brow at her quick movements. This was no leisurely dressing, she was moving with economy and purpose, as though she needed to be somewhere quick. That or she wanted to be away from somewhere quickly. Or someone...\n\n\"Going someplace?\"\n\nHis voice was light-hearted, but concealed the doubt that seethed in his gut. She regretted last night...that was it, and she was trying to get away from him as fast as she could.\n\n\" _Your soul is dark Mason, black and steeped in blood. I can 't be around you. Not anymore._ \" __ Julietta's words, never far away, escaped from the locked box he kept them in and swam up to haunt him. Once the first part of the memory was free, the rest wriggled loose and filled his mind.\n\n\" _Babe, you know I 've only been protecting us. That girl wasn't human...she was going to kill us,_\" _he argued, shock filled his chest. He needed Julie. She was the only thing that made sense in a world gone mad._\n\n_She shook her head, her palm soft against his cheek as she looked into his eyes. Looked down into his very soul._ \" _It 's not that Mason. It's not even recent. Your soul...it's dark, black. I've never seen anything like it. You have blood and lives on your hands. I'm sorry, I can't be around someone like that. It's not good for my karma._ \"\n\nMason's heart stilled as lead lined his gut. Perhaps his soul was too corrupt for any woman to want him for more than a night and a quick fuck. His heart ached. He didn't want that, didn't want to be a throwaway lover. He knew he wasn't a good prospect for any woman, but for Andy, he wanted to be.\n\n\"Huh? What?\"\n\nThe exasperated look she shot him as she shrugged on her jacket and reached for her curved blades reassured him. It wasn't the hunted look of a woman trying to get away but the look of someone with a task on their mind.\n\n\"Yeah, time to get up. Early bird catches the worm and all that.\"\n\nShe slammed home the buckles of the sheath and tested how easily the wicked-looking blades pulled free. Nodding in satisfaction she looked at him and smiled. His breath caught in his throat. The expression transformed her from pretty to breathtaking.\n\nTheir gazes locked. She knew what he was going to ask, and he knew she knew it. Before he could open his mouth though, she spoke.\n\n\"I...help people. It's part of what I am,\" she explained, as though the words were dragged from her. \"Like I helped you yesterday.\"\n\n\"You save people from Werewolves?\"\n\nHer dark hair danced on her shoulders as she shook her head. \"Not just wolves. Any predator, paranormal or human. Far too many of them out there.\"\n\n\"How can you tell someone needs help?\"\n\nMason was relentless in his questioning but he had to know. They were his people in the town and damned if he was going to put them...or her in danger.\n\n\"I just can.\"\n\nShe leaned forwards and brushed a lingering kiss against his lips. Carnal thoughts ambushed Mason as the urge to drag her back down onto the sleeping bag almost over-whelmed him. Possessiveness filled him. Somehow, in the last two days, she'd wormed her way past his guard and under his skin. This was _his_ woman, damn it, and no one was stealing her away, not as long as he had breath in his body.\n\nIt took them less than five minutes to pack the campsite up. Whilst she packed the sleeping back, Mason dealt with everything else. A few minutes later he did the top of the pack and looked around. All that remained of their cozy little camp was the remains of the fire. Slinging the backpack over one shoulder he kicked the ashes over to make sure it was out.\n\nHe stamped again, trying to shake the ash, which clung in a black tidemark on the battered leather. There was no sense in making tracking them any easier. Leaning down he grabbed his rifle, and smiled at Andy.\n\n\"Ready?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Let's go.\"\nChapter Six\n\nThoughts swirled around his head as they walked in silence. Whilst they were alone, them being together seemed right, normal. Now, faced with their return to the town, he could reflect on the strangeness of it all and on the strange puzzle she presented. Trouble was, even after the long walk that got him back in sight of the town walls, he was no closer to solving it than he had been when they started.\n\n\"Wait. There's something wrong.\"\n\nInstantly Mason slowed his pace and slid her a sideways glance. Everything looked fine. The walls were quiet. Automatically he glanced at the town walls as he approached, looking for damage or smoke that would indicate the town had been over-run whilst he was gone. Nothing was out of place.\n\n\"You sure?\" Everything looked fine but, after yesterday, he wasn't going to argue. She had a serious set of non-human skills on her, and he'd be nuts to ignore that.\n\nShe stood motionless, her eyes not on the walls ahead, but out of focus, as though she could see something he couldn't. \"Something bad has happened. I'm going to scout around. Be careful.\"\n\nBefore he could say another word she stepped backwards, and pulled a Houdini on him. Mason looked at the space she'd been just a moment before for a long moment.\n\n\"Great. Chicks that disappear. What next?\"\n\nWith nothing better to do and not wanting to stand around like a lemon with a thumb up his ass, Mason turned towards the town and resettled Andy's backpack over his shoulder. Disappearing act or not, he knew she was coming back. If only to collect her belongings.\n\n\"Morning, Joe,\" he nodded to the guard on the outer redoubt as he passed. A man of few words, Joe nodded back and let him pass. Mason didn't think anything of the long, sweeping glance as he walked by. All his people knew that anyone coming in was suspect. For all they knew he could have run into a Vampire or worse whilst out there and been changed into something else.\n\nThere wasn't a guard on the main gate. Damn it! How many times had he told them to get cover when they had to take a leak? Irritation flashed white hot in Mason's chest as he stormed down the main street. All he wanted was to make sure they were safe, and they disregarded the most basic safety principles. It was enough to make a guy lose it...\n\nHis footsteps slowed as he clocked the crowd outside Val's bar. His gaze moved from one grim face to the next, noting reddened eyes and tear tracks down dust-covered cheeks. Then he realized the children were gone.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\nStony silence met his question. Dread curled its icy fingers around Mason's gut as he looked from one stony face to the other. Instead of the warmth he was used to, their eyes were hard and unforgiving. He'd seen that look before. Right before they drew down on something non-human.\n\n\"Well come on. I'm no mindreader. Someone tell me what bloody well happened!\"\n\nWariness thrilled through his veins like a fine concerto played by an orchestra. They were armed. Thanks to him they were always armed but this was different. The subtle change in their body language said he needed to be careful, very careful.\n\n\"Where've you been, Mason?\"\n\nHe half turned at the voice behind him to find Joe, his rifle held loosely. Surprise joined the wariness and worry fighting for dominance in his veins. He needed Andy here, something was very wrong.\n\n\"What are you playing at? Please don't tell me the gate's unguarded...\"\n\nJoe shrugged. \"Seems to me we got more worries in here than we have from out there. Where were you last night?\"\n\n\"I went after Andy, the girl who saved our asses against the wolves yesterday, remember? She was wounded...\" He trailed off as the silent tension in the group mounted.\n\n\"Andy...the _paranormal_ chick we threw out a couple of days ago?\"\n\nMason's brow furrowed at the hostility in Joe's voice. He turned a little more, trying to keep an eye on the weapons in the group. His instincts screamed at him to un-sling his rifle and take cover, but he stayed where he was. That the crowd had itchy trigger fingers was easy enough to see. Just one move would be enough to set them off.\n\n\"Well, it wasn't really a case of letting her anything. If she hadn't shown up then we'd all be dead, you know that Joe.\" He looked around, searching the group for another face. \"So do you Julia.\"\n\nJulia's expression wasn't as understanding as he'd expected. Instead fear and hatred filled her eyes. \"Aye, but better us dead than those creatures take our kids.\"\n\n\"Aye, she's right.\"\n\n\"Should have let be, like Fred...God rest his soul...said.\"\n\n\"His fault... We should never have listened to him.\"\n\nThe chorus of agreement from the parents in the group staggered Mason. They saw him as the enemy? Nausea rolled in his gut and clawed its way up his throat. In his travels he'd seen what happened when a community turned on one of its own, for whatever reason. The result was never pretty.\n\n\"What...the _wolves_ took the kids?\" he demanded, desperate to get to the bottom of this. Instinctively he looked for Valerie. _Please don 't let them have taken Suzie. _His heart dropped when he located her at the back. Her reddened eyes and tear-marked cheeks were answer enough.\n\n\"Aye. They took the kids. Stole in here in the middle of the night whilst we were sleeping and took them.\"\n\n\"What about the guards?\"\n\n\"Took out Katie on the outer wall with a crossbow. We don't know what happened to Victor on the gate, no sign of him. It was only old Fred, God rest his soul, that tried to stop them.\"\n\nMason was stunned. They'd protected the town for years against creatures, how could their methods fail so dramatically in one night? He'd only left to go after Andy because he was sure that the town was adequately defended.\n\n\"This is _your_ fault.\"\n\nThe shrill accusation came from behind him. Mason turned again, feeling like he was watching a tennis match.\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"If you hadn't told that wolf no then they wouldn't have taken our kids. God knows what they're doing to them. Jamie's only three--\" Tears streamed down Julia's face as her voice cracked.\n\nGuilt hit him like a truck at Mach-one. This was his fault. If he hadn't gone, then he'd have been here to stop them. He opened his mouth to argue. What would they have preferred? To lose five women, including some of the mothers of the children who'd been taken...\n\nHe shut his jaw with a click. He knew the answer. Of course they would have. Any parent would lay their life down if it meant his or her child lived. That was what being a parent was about.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I didn't know...\" He trailed off into silence, not sure what else to say. What else _could_ he say? Then something prickled at the back of his mind.\n\n_God rest his soul._ That wasn't a phrase people used for someone who was alive. It was used for someone who was six foot under or shortly to head that way. Anguish clawed at his soul, both for the loss of a friend and the communities' loss.\n\n\"Where's Fred?\"\n\n\"You'd better come through,\" Valerie said quietly from the back of the group. Her voice was hoarse from crying. \"He doesn't have long left, so we've made him comfortable. It's all we can do...\"\n\nThe crowd parted, the hostile stares and the fingers curled around triggers making Mason jumpy as he walked through them. They hadn't tried to relieve him of his weaponry yet, but he knew it was coming. Unless they planned on just turning him out of town, then someone was going to make a play for his weapons pretty soon. With the way things were going, that wasn't going to turn out pretty.\n\nHe didn't think they were going to let him walk. Tension was running too high, and mob mentality had already set in. With their children stolen right from under their noses, they needed someone to blame. Mason was no idiot. He was going to be the scapegoat. It was already cut and dried.\n\nThe trouble was, he couldn't blame them. He was in charge of making sure the town was safe. He'd told them they could trust him, rely on him. This was his fault. He shouldn't have left them alone last night.\n\n\"V,\" he started as he drew level, and tried to catch her eye. Of all the people in town, he was closest to Valerie. Something deep inside needed her to understand how sorry he was for letting them down. How bad he felt that their kids, that Suzie, had been taken.\n\n\"We'll get them back. _I 'll_ get them back... I'll get Suzie back. I promise.\"\n\n\"He's in there. You might want to hurry. State he's in, he won't last long.\"\n\nShe gave the door a sharp nod, and turned to walk away quickly. Mason watched her for a long moment. Pain lanced through him. Valerie didn't cry in front of people. Not ever. Blanking his expression, Mason took a deep breath, steeled himself, and walked into the bar.\n\nDarkness enveloped him in its welcoming embrace. Mason paused to let his vision adjust, and regretted it. Out of the dark the smell of death hit him like a sucker punch to the gut. Bile rose and hammered on the back of his throat. He swallowed it down, and tried to breathe through his mouth, his ears...tried to breathe through anything if it meant he didn't have to suffer through the smell that was packed into the dark room like a crowd hundreds deep.\n\nHe'd smelt death before, so the coppery tang of blood mixed with a fouler stench was nothing new. The smell of a gut wound was unmistakable. He'd know it anywhere. The contents of his stomach rose sharply again, bile burning up his throat. He'd smelt it before, but it was a hundred times worse with the realization that the person whose guts were leaking out over the floor was a friend.\n\nHis footsteps rang out against the floorboards in measured treads as he walked towards the bar. His eyes adjusted, and the room was transformed from blackness to shades of gray. Within seconds, Mason wished it hadn't.\n\nFred sat slumped in front of the bar, head dropped forwards onto his chest, with his back to the wooden surface. Sat was a relative term. Most of Fred sat in front of the bar, in more or less a humanoid shape, but there were other bits Mason didn't need, or want, to identify scattered around the room.\n\nHis sight had adjusted completely to the dim light in the room as he rounded the last table--the one riveted to the floor--and looked down at the slumped figure. Blood decorated the bar, the floor, and other surfaces around him in thick, black arcs that spoke of violence and pain. Mason couldn't help the wince as he looked at what remained of his friend.\n\nHe was in a worse condition than Mason had thought. A red towel covered his midsection, from chest to mid-thigh, covering the worst of the damage. It was sticky with blood and other fluids, but that wasn't the worst of it. Fred had always been a well-built man, retaining an impressive beer gut despite the recent heavy rationing. However, now Fred's abdomen looked as lean as his own. Mason gritted his teeth. He would not be sick. He wouldn't dishonour the older man in that way. How Fred was still alive was beyond him, _if_ he was still alive.\n\n\"Wondered how long it would take you.\"\n\nThe voice was little more than a wheeze, but Mason caught it. He dropped to his knees next to Fred, not caring that his jeans were instantly soaked, and grabbed for the hand the older man lifted.\n\n\"Sorry, mate, traffic's a bitch.\"\n\nFred's hand was cold, the skin icy to the touch. Mason didn't need to press on the nail beds to know Fred's circulation was severely compromised. The wounded man chuckled. The sound degenerated into a cough, which was more a death rattle. For long moments he struggled to breathe.\n\nA tiny muscle in the corner of Mason's jaw jumped. His throat was thick with emotion as he fought back the hot prickles at the backs of his eyes. In all his time on the road, all the times he'd nearly died, and all the times he'd watched others die, he'd never felt as helpless as he did now.\n\n\"What happened, Fred?\"\n\nFred rolled his head back to lean it against the bar. Mason winced. The skin was shredded to the bone. A gaping hole in one cheek revealed the whiteness of teeth, and the eye socket furthest from Mason was empty.\n\n\"Jesus...\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'm not gonna win any beauty contests, am I?\"\n\nThe self-deprecating comment startled a laugh out of Mason. \"No, now that you mention it, I doubt it's on the cards. What happened, man?\"\n\nFred started to speak but another coughing fit hit him. Mason looked away as blood and spittle flew. Good thing he seemed to be immune to the Lycan infection, or Fred's tainted blood would have done him for sure.\n\n\"Sorry 'bout that. Anyways...Jed happened. Or them bastard wolves of his did. They come out of nowhere, Mason. Not like they normally do...this was sneaky. They were in human form, got the kids real quiet like. One of them had on Victor's coat...you know, that long jacket he always wore.\"\n\nMason bowed his head, shaking with anger.\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\nHis voice was tight and controlled. The sheer force of feeling surging through him was like a tidal wave. One tiny slip, one little crack in the iron wall of his control, and it would spill over. Then whoever was in the way would be in for a world of hurt.\n\n\"I was in here, heard something out the back.\" Fred shrugged. \"Went to investigate, didn't see the one sneaking up on me and, well, the rest you can see... Bastards thought they'd done me for, and didn't bother to finish me off. I need to warn you--\"\n\nMason shook his head. That didn't make sense, he already knew about the attack. \"Warn me about what? We already know the kids are gone.\"\n\n\"No, not that.\" Fred flicked a glance to the door at the front of the bar. \"You gotta get out of here, Mason. The wolves left a message. Jed'll give the kids back--\"\n\n\"Good. He'd better if he knows what's good for him. I'm gonna take great pleasure in ripping his guts out,\" Mason growled, his anger almost overwhelming him. That alpha was a dead wolf. Even if they did give the kids back, which he highly doubted, there was no way he was leaving Jed alive. Not after this.\n\n\"No, you don't get it. Jed'll give the kids back...if your head is on a stake by sunrise.\"\n\nMason didn't get time to flee. He didn't even get time to process Fred's words before the door to the bar burst open, and the townsfolk spilled in. Hard faces, and harder eyes watched him down the barrels of several rifles, and he knew. They were here for him. They weren't waiting for sundown, never mind sunrise.\n\nInstead of going for his own rifle he remained where he was, looking down at the friend who'd tried to warn him. The look in Fred's remaining blue eye was compassionate. \"Don't blame them. They're only protecting their kids.\"\n\nHe nodded and shook Fred's hand. \"Thank you, my friend. Go easy.\"\n\nFred smiled and clasped his other hand over Mason's in a final farewell. \"Was just waiting for you. Sorry it was too late.\"\n\n\"No worries. Catch you on the flipside.\"\n\nHe watched Fred's hand slide from his. After a second he reached out and closed the single, sightless eye with gentle fingers then he stood to face his execution party.\n\n\"This is it then?\"\n\nMason couldn't believe his voice was so level, or calm. These people were going to kill him, and with so many rifles trained on him, there was nothing he could do about it.\n\n\"So you're just going to kill me in cold blood?\"\n\n\"Here, this way. Let's get him to the walls.\"\n\nMason groaned. His right side was on fire, blood soaking through what remained of his T-shirt, the rags of the fabric a match for the torn skin underneath. They'd shot him, several times. So much for not shooting an unarmed man.\n\nNone of his arguments had saved him. As soon as the first trigger had been pulled, more had followed. He had no idea how much lead he'd taken but it had to be enough to drop a damn rhino. It fucking hurt.\n\nClamping his eyes shut, he tried to breathe through the pain as they dragged him through the streets. He knew what fate awaited him on the walls of the town. Locking his legs and planting his feet, he pit his weight against his captors. His heavy boots dug into the dirt as he put up a fight. He was bigger built than either of the men trying to drag him, something they seemed to have overlooked. There was no way he was going anywhere _near_ that wall. Not if he could help it. They'd have to drag him kicking and screaming, and he'd make them pay for every step.\n\n\"Christ, he's like a bull...some help here.\"\n\nHe slammed a hard elbow into the side of the guy on his right, freeing that hand. Fist clenched, he twisted and drove it upwards into the jaw of the guy on his left. The vicious uppercut dropped the smaller man without a word.\n\nMason moved back, his guard snapping up. It should have been a light dance on his feet, as he'd been trained in the ring, except that his side felt as if it had been caved in by a sledgehammer. He started to turn to face his next opponent when there was the distinctive click of a hammer being drawn back, and something hard was pressed against the back of his head. He froze.\n\n\"Now I've seen just about everything out there on the road.\" Valerie's voice was cool and calm, with an edge of suppressed hysteria no man in his right mind would mess with. \"I've seen men get up after being filled with lead like you. But I ain't ever seen any of them get up after a couple of rounds to the brain. What's the betting you don't either?\"\n\nCrap. Mason held his hands up in the universal gesture of surrender.\n\n\"Only one problem with that darlin'. Jed wants my head on a stake. You put a bullet through my brain with that, and there ain't gonna be much of my head left. What do you think your chances of getting the kids back are then?\"\n\nMason counted silently as he waited for Valerie to make a decision. Finally the pressure let up, and he heard the hammer click back into place. Relief and cold sweat slithered down his spine as he released a breath he didn't realize he was holding.\n\n\"He has a point. Get him up on that wall. And make sure you have a good hold on him this time, for pity's sake.\"\n\nHe held in his curses as he was grabbed again, and Donny, the victim of the uppercut, took the opportunity to dig an elbow into the wounds that peppered his side.\n\n_Bastard, you 'll pay for that._ Mason glared at his tormentor as they shoved him roughly forwards.\n\n\"I suggest you let him go. Now.\"\n\nMason's head snapped up as the townsfolk went for their guns. There was Andy, as large as life, standing in the middle of the town gates. In their hurry to lure him in like a lamb to the slaughter the residents of Sanctuary had forgotten Town Defense 101. _Shut the fucking gate._\n\nIf he weren't so messed up, he'd kiss each and every one of them.\n\n\"I suggest you take your paranormal ass, and hightail it out of here, missy. Unless you want your head to join his on a stake,\" Donny snapped, high on a cocktail of anger, pain, and adrenalin.\n\n\"Is that so?\"\n\nA chill wind blew through the town, whipping the dust of the road and her long, black coat up into a frenzy around her. Andy slid the dark glasses down her nose to look at Donny, and then at the rest of the townsfolk, her gaze as hard and unblinking as a rattlesnake. That was when Mason realized what was different about her.\n\nWhen she'd arrived in Sanctuary she'd walked and talked human. Even with his talents he'd had to see some serious evidence she wasn't human before he believed her claim to be something paranormal. The speed and sheer lethality she'd displayed with her blades during the rescue yesterday had nearly done it, but Mason himself was proof that a human could outwit and outfight the majority of paranormals.\n\nIt wasn't until he'd dug a bullet out of her arm, and seen for himself how quickly she healed that he'd truly believed her claims. And even now he wasn't sure what she was, just that there was no way she could be plain old _homo sapiens_.\n\nNow though, with the sky churning and angry behind her where it had been calm a moment ago, and the wind driving up a storm, there was no mistaking the fact she was something on the darker side of paranormal. Lightening cracked, and thunder rolled, leaving her highlighted in silhouette. The crowd around him drew a collective breath as just for a second she was cast into shadow, her silhouette stretching into a familiar cloaked and hooded figure carrying a scythe.\n\n\"The Lady of Death.\"\n\nThe whisper ran through the crowd, from one pair of lips to another. She couldn't be...could she? The Lady wasn't a paranormal. They said she was Death itself made flesh and set upon the Earth to hunt down the unworthy. Which, when you thought about it, amounted to ninety percent of the current population.\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous. That's just a story, made up to scare the kids.\" Donny had his rifle in his shoulder, but if he could aim and fire accurately Mason was a monkey's uncle.\n\n\"You sure about that, Donald? Just because you don't believe in the bogeyman, doesn't mean the bogeyman doesn't believe in you.\" Andy took her sunglasses off and slid them into her inside pocket.\n\n\"H-how did you know my name?\"\n\nShe shrugged, her voice calm and pleasant when she spoke. \"Same way I know Valerie's, and John's, and Eric's. Believe me, I'm not like anything you've ever met before. And you might as well put that away...\" She motioned to Donny's rifle. \"Shooting me'll only piss me off.\"\n\n\"Para's have threatened to kill us before. It's all been hot air and illusion. None have managed it,\" Valerie broke in, clapping Donny on the shoulder as she walked forwards to face Andy. Mason had to admit, she had guts.\n\nAndy smiled. It wasn't a nice expression. The wind rose again, more ferocious this time, moaning as it whirled through the gate and around them. A chill wind, which whispered bad things directly into the souls of all who heard it.\n\n\"You know what other names I know? How about Katie, Victor and Frederick?\"\n\nLightening spilt the sky behind her. Mason shook his head and blinked as three figures materialized around her. Something was wrong with his eyes. He could swear the three dead townspeople stood there, as pale and opaque as ghosts. Hell...they were dead. If this wasn't a trick, some illusion, and Andy really was who they said she was, then they could be ghosts.\n\nAs his brain tried to find some logical and scientific rationale for the appearance of the three figures, he knew. He'd felt the tug inside as she'd raised her hands and knew that she'd called the souls of the dead to her.\n\nJaws dropped, and rifles clattered to the dirt. Her voice, cold and terrible, cut through the mournful moan of the wind.\n\n\"You called me, and you named me. I am Death, and that man--\" she lifted her hand to point at him, \"--is the only thing standing between you and me. Kill him and you won't have to worry about the Werewolves. I'll drag you to hell myself.\"\nChapter Seven\n\n\"They're freaking out six ways to Sunday.\"\n\nStill unable to believe what had happened and his luck, Mason leaned back against the cool stone wall of the town, and watched as the townsfolk went about their business. Mostly they were keeping their distance from Mason, and the object of their fear, Andy, who knelt in front of him.\n\nShe snorted as she lifted his shirt to assess his wounds. \"So they should be. I wasn't kidding when I said I'd drag them to hell.\"\n\nHe watched her. She was beautiful. Scary, but beautiful.\n\nShe looked up, a frown on her face. \"Okay, handsome. Want to tell me why you're not dead yet? You should be.\"\n\n\"Sorry, sweetheart. Not a clue.\" Mason shrugged as she dropped the shirt back into place. Soaked in blood, it clung wetly to his torso.\n\nShe sighed. \"You're not dead, Mason. I don't know how or why. You look human. You walk, talk and act human. But you're not. You can't be.\"\n\n\"Don't talk rubbish,\" he scoffed. \"Of course I'm human. What else would I be?\"\n\n\"That's what worries me.\" Andy stood and held her hand out to help him up. \"I don't feel the call to reap your soul, and your body is already healing the damage. You're not human.\"\n\nMason grabbed her wrist and hauled himself to his feet in one lithe movement. An hour ago he'd felt like he was at death's door but now he felt energized, and raring to go. Hand still wrapped around Andy's he looked down into her eyes.\n\n\"I'm as human as they come,\" he told her firmly. \"Nasty, devious...yes, but plain old human. And those wolves are about to find out why we were the top of the food chain for thousands of years.\"\n\n\"Listen up. Are we putting together a rescue plan for the kids, or am I doing this on my own?\"\n\nAndy watched as Mason walked away from her, his shoulders squared as he challenged the very people who, less than an hour ago, had been ready to kill him. Admiration filled her. That had to hurt. She knew how much the town, and the safety of the people within it, meant to him. To insist on helping them after what they'd done to him? It said good things about his soul.\n\nSilence met his challenge as people looked away. Andy didn't blame them. She'd forced them to actually look at what they were doing. Forced them to admit to themselves they were about to kill one of their own.\n\nThey called the other races monsters. But those monsters, herself included, had no choice in what they were, how they acted. Vampires craved blood to the exclusion of all else, Lycans were born for the hunt and the kill. They couldn't help their instincts. Humans though, they were different. They could choose to kill, or not. Most of the time, when pushed, they chose to kill rather than walk away. In her book, that made them worse than any of the monsters out there.\n\nUnable to bear the silence she sighed, brushed the dirt off her denim-covered jeans and stood.\n\n\"I'm in,\" she said simply, moving to stand next to Mason.\n\nHe smiled quickly, shooting her a sideways glance filled with thanks. She didn't need the thanks. Whilst she understood the needs and instincts, which drove them, kidnapping and extortion were not natural Lycan drives. She and that pack Alpha would be having words, and they weren't going to be pleasant ones.\n\nShe looked around the assembled crowd, most of whom looked embarrassed.\n\n\"Now I'm sure you're not going to let us go in alone to rescue _your_ children, are you?\" she prompted, and took half a step into the Shade.\n\nThe world lost its color. She reached out and called the lifelines of every living creature within a hundred meters to her. The sparkling silver ropes leapt into her palms like puppies eager to do her bidding. Only two didn't. Her own, which stretched out flat and black behind her, and Mason's.\n\nShe paused to look at it. The grey of humanity had started to fade. Already it was a lot darker than the silver strands she held in her hands. Puzzlement filled her, as a frown creased her brow. Just what the hell was he?\n\nNo way was he human, but he wasn't a Reaper either, despite the darkness of his lifeline. Chiding herself for getting distracted, she pulled on the lifelines, and stepped back through into the mortal world. As expected she had the attention of everyone in the crowd. Including Mason. She wasn't surprised. She'd just reminded them she held their lives in her hands. Sure, she couldn't actually _kill_ them, or reap their souls until they were ready to go, but they didn't need to know that.\n\n\"Just as I thought. Let's plan this thing then, shall we?\"\n\n\"Ugh. That was like pulling teeth,\" Andy announced as, three hours later, the pair made it back to Mason's room. \"Are they always so obstructive?\"\n\nHe closed the door behind them, and, for good measure, threw the bolt. It didn't take a genius to work out that he didn't trust the townsfolk any more than she did. She didn't blame him. Without their stabilizing influence, or her there to scare the crap out of them, there was no saying that they wouldn't revert to plan A, and try to stick Mason's head on a stake again.\n\nThat happened and she wasn't bothering with the softly-softly approach anymore. She might not be able to drag their souls to hell until they were dead, but all it took was one little decision and their lifelines were ready to reap. One little decision and those threads would light up like a Fourth of July display. One little decision, like deciding to kill Mason, and she'd go to work with her sickles and carve a bloody swathe through the town.\n\nShe rolled her shoulders as she wandered around the small room. Small was the only word to describe it, and bare. A small window opposite the door allowed bright sunlight to stream in and provided a stage for the ever-present dust motes to dance in.\n\nA small bed took up one wall, a battered chest of drawers next to it. A clock sat on it. Even without the _tick-tock_ in the room she knew it was broken. Batteries were a precious commodity these days, so valuable no one would waste one on a clock.\n\nShe turned to find Mason with his back to the door, watching her. His eyes were intense, and his expression patient. There was something different about him, but she couldn't put her finger on it. The hungry look on his face sent a shiver down her spine. He looked like a starving man faced with a sumptuous banquet, and she had a feeling she knew what was on the menu.\n\n\"Come over here.\" His voice was low, with a rough, husky timbre to it that sent a shiver down her spine. Hands clasped behind her back she looked at him, and raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHis eyes darkened dangerously, the heat of hell itself contained there. It was an inferno that licked at Andy's skin, heated the blood in her veins and made her panties damp.\n\n\"Because I said so. Don't make me come over there.\"\n\nShe chuckled, enjoying the light-hearted banter. They had an hour or so before sundown and the planned start of the mission. There was time. More than time for what he obviously had in mind.\n\n\"Not dressed like that you won't, Mister.\" She motioned towards his torn and bloodied shirt. \"You need a shower and a change, then we'll think about it. Let me look at how those wounds are doing.\"\n\nHe dropped his chin and looked up at her through his eyelashes. It should have been a feminine gesture but on the very masculine Mason it became something totally different. She sucked a shaky breath in, feeling like she'd been punched in the gut. Only no punch she'd ever taken before had left her with a tingly feeling through her entire body and an ache that made her want to clench her thighs together.\n\n\"All healed. See? How, I have no fucking clue. But they are.\"\n\nHe looped a hand under his ragged T-shirt and smoothed it upwards over his toned and muscled torso. Despite a very feminine interest in those muscles, Andy still had enough about her to check for damage. Where there had been wounds, bloody tears in his skin where bullets had torn through it on their way into his body, there was nothing. No marks, no healing scars, no old scars. Nothing.\n\nJust like her.\n\nA rush of feeling hit her. After all these years believing herself alone, she wasn't. Mason should be dead. He had been dead, he had to have been, no one could survive being shot that many times and not pass over. Except a Reaper.\n\nPerhaps that was it. Perhaps because he _had_ died...maybe that was the trigger? The bombs of the war had done their work and twisted humanity's DNA a decade ago. Some had changed immediately and become whatever their twisted DNA dictated. For the first time in history Vampires, Werewolves and their brethren, the creatures of legend and myth, had walked the earth. And the world had gone to hell in a hand-basket since.\n\nOthers didn't change. Somehow they carried the potential for that change deep within them. Waiting for something like a bite, or death itself, to trigger what was locked inside. Her world tilted on its axis as she crossed the small room.\n\nHer hand smoothed over the undamaged skin, but her gaze was locked with his. From the moment she'd seen him in the bar, she'd known something was different about him. Now she knew what. Like called to like.\n\n\"Reckon we'll both fit in that shower,\" she whispered against his lips, and then claimed them with her own.\n\nDarkness blanketed the world, the moon playing peek-a-boo through the thick clouds above. Andy knelt in the shadows next to Mason and watched as he organized his team with silent gestures. That he'd been military was obvious, as was the fact that he'd trained these people to work together. A fan of the march-in-and-kick-ass school of thought, she tried to stay still and not jitter impatiently.\n\nThen it was game on. The attack started, not with a bang, but a whisper as the human forces approached the Lycan camp on silent feet. Mason had made them all shower to try and erase the smell of human sweat. Like soldiers from before the war, their faces were smeared with dirt, and they carried their rifles as if they meant business.\n\nThis was Mason's gig, and she was happy to let him lead. She was used to working alone and had no idea how to get a group of people working together without half scaring them out of their minds. He didn't need to terrify them to get them to work well. Even though they'd tried to kill him earlier they were following his orders now.\n\nWraiths in the night, they flitted from cover to cover, moving towards their objective. She thought back to the briefing. Over a scale model of the terrain made from dirt and anything lying to hand Mason had given each team directions and orders about how the attack was to go down. As plans went, it was a good one. She just knew from experience no plan survived first contact with the enemy. Double that when you were dealing with paranormals.\n\nThe camp appeared before them like an island rising from a foggy sea. The light from the campfire cast sky above and around in a warm orange glow. It should have been a welcoming scene; the makeshift camp with sleeping bags lay haphazardly around the fire warding off the chill of the night. It wasn't too much of a stretch to imagine marshmallows being toasted or steaks sizzling on a grill plate...only this was ten years after the end of the world. Marshmallows had gone the way of the dodo, and Lycans preferred their meat uncooked.\n\nThe wolves lounged around the fire in human form. She'd noticed that about them, unless they needed to hunt or fight Lycans preferred their two-legged forms. She'd never understood that. If she had the freedom to shift forms and run with the wind like they could, she'd never switch back to being human.\n\nHer breath plumed on the night air as she dropped into cover behind a group of old barrels next to Mason. He flicked her a glance and smiled, a quick flash of white teeth in the darkness, before he reached out to squeeze her arm quickly. A brief touch but one that spoke volumes as his fingers lingered a second on her skin.\n\nShe could hear his breathing and her own heart as they waited for the signal from the other teams. Every second stretched out to infinity as she studied the layout of the camp. To the side of the fire was the makeshift cage they had the kids in. Sneaky bastards. They'd put it between the fire and an outcrop of rock, which meant the human teams were going to have to go through the Lycan pack.\n\nNext to her, Mason muttered under his breath as he did a headcount. Andy didn't bother. Her reaper senses told her that all the kids were alive. Whether they made it through the night that way though, that one was anyone's guess. Life or death hung in such a precarious balance that perhaps only a Reaper could appreciate it. Every day a multitude of decisions took each soul nearer or further away from death. Right now, the decisions the humans made, and those of the Lycans, would affect whether those kids lived or died tonight.\n\nThe moon flitted in and out of view, allowing her a brief glimpse of the terrain on the other side of the camp. Mason's teams were good. She could see neither hide nor hair of them with her normal vision. Feeling Mason's attention on her, she switched her vision to look into the Shade. The mingled gray and silver lifelines decorated the landscape like tinsel on a Christmas tree.\n\nHer eyes narrowed. The first two teams were in position, but the third had yet to reach its mark. She waited until they jockeyed into position behind the tree stump Mason had indicated earlier, and nodded. Cooking with gas now.\n\nShe watched as Mason checked his weaponry, every movement calm as he watched the camp below for movement. Nothing happened. Most of the Lycans appeared to be asleep, their lifelines sparkling red to Andy. Her palms itched to draw the blades sheathed across her back, but she held off. The breeze picked up, bringing the scents of the campsite to them. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of stale beer and unwashed bodies.\n\nMason leaned down and selected one of the pebbles by his knee. A thoughtful look on his face, he hefted it in his hand a couple of times, as though considering its potential. Reeling his arm back he launched it into the middle of the camp. She caught her breath, wondering what the hell he was playing at as it landed in the center of a group of empty beer cans.\n\nWith a loud clatter the projectile scattered the cans. The noise woke the snoozing Weres, bringing them to their feet with shouts of alarm. Andy glared at Mason. The idiot had just given away the element of surprise, which was pretty much all they'd had going for them.\n\nHe winked at her as he pulled something from the side of his vest. A grenade. Pulling the pin with a vicious twist of his wrist he launched it into the middle of the Lycan camp.\n\n\"Fire in the hole.\"\nChapter Eight\n\nThe pair twisted away as the small canister sailed through the air and landed with a hop, skip and a jump by the campfire. Andy clapped her hands over her ears as it went off with a balance-destroying bang, and lit the night sky up like a sunny day.\n\nThere was no rest for the wicked though. Immediately she and Mason were on their feet and moving. Adrenalin surged through her body as they covered the distance between their hiding place and the camp.\n\nThe wolves caught in the grenade's radius staggered around as though drunk, blinking as they tried to regain their vision. In wolf form Lycans could see a mouse taking a shit at six hundred meters, but shine a big enough torch in anything's face and it was blind as a bat for a couple of seconds.\n\nThey were still as dangerous as hell, probably more so when blinded and panicking. Leaving the worst affected to the humans, she went for the Lycans who'd been on the edge of the blast radius. Stun grenades were non-lethal; a percussive explosion and a bright light enough to render most incapable long enough for the attacking force to control whatever was going on. For humans it was sufficient but Lycans recovered fast.\n\nA feral howl of fury erupted from the center of the camp, the sound peppered with the sound of gunshots as Mason's teams picked their targets. The human forms of the Lycans were swallowed up as their wolf forms exploded from them faster than the eye could see. Instead of a group of teenagers out on a camping trip, they were faced with a pack of snarling and angry predators.\n\nShe grinned to herself, an expression without either humor or mercy as her blades cleared leather and lined up her first target, a scraggy-looking wolf already turning towards her. Its lips curled into a snarl as it gathered itself to leap.\n\n\"Com'on then, fugly,\" Andy taunted, waggling her blades in warning. She fought with them in opposing grips, one blade up and one with the blade curved along her forearm. Matched with a healthy dose of martial arts training, it was a lethal combination. \"Let me give you a good belly scratch.\"\n\nMassive paws skittered in the dust as it launched at her. The thrill of the fight singing through her, Andy waited until the creature was almost upon her then leapt into action. Time slowed to a crawl as a hop put her in the air, and her back foot lashed out. Her steel-toe cap caught the wolf under the chin, and slammed its mouth shut over the vicious canines within. Satisfaction surged through her as she felt bone crunch. Even if she had busted the creature's jaw, it wouldn't make much difference. Already its freaky physiology would be repairing the damage.\n\n\"Awww, does that hurt? Lemme give you something for that.\"\n\nIt staggered away, trying to put some distance between them so it could heal the damage. She didn't let it and followed. Her blade flashed in the light of the campfire as she slashed it through the air towards the furry throat. The razor-sharp edge cut through fur, skin and muscle like a hot knife through butter. Gritting her teeth, she rammed the blade deeper until it scraped against bone. Triumph surged as she felt her blade hook the edge of the soul. With a vicious yank she pulled it back, and severed the soul from the body. Blood spurted as the beast shuddered, and slumped dead at her feet.\n\nOther howls filled the air as the human teams picked their targets, and overwhelmed the Lycan pack. Mixed amongst the furry death-calls were human screams as the creatures defended themselves. So many lifelines lit up that Andy was almost blinded. Knowing she was going to have her work cut out for her later, she flicked her vision firmly to human and looked about for her next victim.\n\nTo her left a group was baiting a big wolf. It was bleeding from numerous bullet wounds, but was still on its feet and lashing out with razor-sharp teeth. A body lay under the massive paws, throat a bloody mess and sightless eyes staring up at the night sky. Donny. Try as she might, Andy couldn't bring herself to feel sorrow that the mouthy human had met his end in such a violent way, just annoyance that his lifeline had been cut short unnecessarily.\n\n\"Oscar...left knee. Now!\" Valerie yelled the order as she lifted her rifle. In concert, shots rang out. The wolf ate dirt as its front knees disintegrated in a shower of blood and bone. Without a word Andy slid between the humans, and slashed her blades across its neck to free the soul.\n\n\"Nice move.\"\n\nShe nodded at the other woman as she danced back, impressed by the teamwork. Pity this lot had tried to kill Mason, she might have actually grown to like them at some point.\n\nValerie just smiled in reply, a small tight nod as she looked around at the cage the children were being kept in. Three wolves surrounded it, guarding their captives. The team who was supposed to be freeing the children was dead, scattered in pieces around the wolve's paws.\n\nThe two women locked eyes as understanding flowed between them. The children were paramount. Without a word, both women, human and reaper, turned on a dime and stalked towards the cage and its furry guards.\n\nAndy was impressed all over again. Unlike her, Valerie was just plain old human. Easily caught, and just as easy to kill. Despite that, she had a look of grim determination and hard vengeance on her face. Left to herself, Andy had no doubt that if anything happened to her kid, the woman would spend the rest of her life tracking those responsible and taking them apart piece by piece. Slowly.\n\nShe could admire vengeance like that.\n\n\"Yo, heads up.\"\n\nAndy grinned as she approached the cage, calling out to attract the wolves' attention to herself. However you cut the cards, she was the one who could hold out longest against the creatures, and when it came to it, survive a wolf attack. She might wish like hell they'd kill her, but at some point the pain would end and she'd heal. Then hunt herself some wolves and make a nice winter coat from their hides.\n\nThe three wolves turned their attention on her, eyes picking up the light from the fire as she walked past it and shining brightly. Lips curled back from their teeth as they snarled, drool dripping on the dirt beneath them. Unlike the kid in town the other day, these were fully shifted Lycans which meant any human survival instincts they had were buried under layers and layers of predatory desires. Desires and needs that marked the two-legged, soft-skinned creature walking towards them firmly as prey.\n\n\"How many wolves does it take to change a light bulb?\"\n\nFrom the corner of her eye she saw Valerie step back into the darkness and work her way towards the cage. Good girl, she'd gotten the message. The three wolves looked at each other and back at her. Puzzlement crossed their furry faces as they tried to figure out why she wasn't scared or running away.\n\nShe deliberately didn't look behind them to where Valerie was freeing the kids. The cage door was secured with a length of rope, the knots too tight for young fingers but no match for the knife Valerie carried.\n\n\"Com'on...it's a killer.\"\n\nShe hid her grin and walked closer, waggling her blades to make them catch what little light there was. Reading them was like reading a book. They weren't used to someone who looked human, and more importantly _smelt_ human, not running the other way in terror.\n\nThe trouble was, at some point in the next minute, that puzzlement was going to turn into irritation, which was then going to turn into violence. By the time that happened she needed to be within range. Calmness filled her, radiating out from her core to fill the rest of her being. Input from all of her senses was heightened, and sharper.\n\nShe could hear the rasp of breathing as the massive chests rose and fell, the stink of their fetid breath as they bared their teeth and the smell of unkempt fur, like they hadn't groomed properly for weeks. She'd seen Lycan packs before and this wasn't a pack. This was a bunch of filthy scavengers who were a disgrace to their species.\n\nWithout warning she slipped into the Shade fully, leaving them staring at empty space.\n\n\"Actually, who gives a shit?\"\n\nHer voice was conversational as she re-appeared less than a heartbeat later between the largest of the wolves. Both turned and lunged at her in the same instant, their teeth slicing the air where she had been. Instead of the soft target they had been expecting though, she was gone back into the Shade, and two sets of teeth encountered only the furred hides of their pack mates.\n\nIgnoring the howls of pain and fury, Andy stepped from the Shade again by the third Lycan. Slightly smaller than the other two, she'd guess it was female, but that was only a guess. She'd never been sufficiently interested in the different forms Lycans took to learn to identify their genders. As long as they bled, that was all she cared about.\n\nIt sensed her by its shoulder at the same time she raised the wickedly curved sickle, and froze. The eye nearest to her rolled back in the socket to try and get a bead on her, but it was too late. A soft whimper escaped the creature's lips as Andy slammed the blade down hard. The point parted the fur and popped through the skin with a small _snick_. Using her weight and momentum the sickle powered through the Lycan's throat, and exited the other side in less time than it took to think about it.\n\nBlood pulsed from the ruin of its throat to splatter the dry dirt below. With something almost akin to grace, the creature's knees folded and it collapsed to the ground. Deftly Andy reversed the blade as she dropped into the Shade and dispatched the soul on the way back in.\n\nShe turned her attention to the other two wolves, nipping in and out of the Shade to harass and harry them. They whirled and danced, trying to catch her as she appeared and disappeared. Their extra abilities were no use against a creature who could simply chose not to be in their plane of existence. She kept an eye on how Valerie was doing rescuing the children, and as the seconds ticked by, the gray lifelines active to her reaper senses started to wink out one by one. A signal that some of those kids would survive.\n\nFor tonight at least.\n\nThe shit had well and truly hit the fan. As Mason pounded across hard dirt, his teams unleashed seven levels of hell on the Lycans. They didn't have long until the creatures recovered from the flash-bang, so he'd told them to make every second count. Advice he was taking to heart himself.\n\nThey hit the outer perimeter of the camp, and he paused for a second as Andy peeled away. Pulling his rifle tight into his shoulder, he selected his targets rapidly and fired in short, economical bursts. Each time his muzzle spat bullets he hit his target. A knee here, through a throat there, even taking the teeth right out of the mouth of one wolf as it lunged at one of the humans. Suppressive fire, designed to put as many wolves down as possible so the others could get close.\n\nHis aim was lethal, punching holes through furry hides and making the turned Lycans bellow with pain. Without silver shot though, any damage he inflicted would be temporary. Where was a fifty cal when you needed one? He could really level the playing field with something like that.\n\nHis rifle clicked, the bolt holding open in a warning that his magazine was empty. No time to reload. Casting it aside, Mason pulled the Glock from his shoulder holster and moved further into the camp. He skirted between the groups already fighting, his eyes peeled for one figure. Screams from his left distracted him for a moment, as the group attacking the cage went down. Grimly he ignored them. They'd all known the risks before they'd come on the mission. He'd made sure of it. And he was damned if, after trying to kill him, he was going out of his way to cover their asses anymore. Nope, he was back into mission mode. He'd complete the objective, and then he was out of here.\n\n\"Jed. Get your furry ass out here and face me like a fucking man, rather than a whipped puppy,\" he yelled, trying to taunt the alpha into the open. Truth be told, he had no fucking clue what the guy looked like, as a man or a wolf. None of them did, a fact Mason hadn't been too happy about. Going into a hot situation without intel was usually a good way to get people killed. However, so was taking on a pack of Lycans on their own turf. But then, Mason had never claimed to be sane, Andy wasn't even mortal and the people of Sanctuary were just plain desperate.\n\nHe didn't have to wait long. A rumbling snarl sounded behind him, the sound full of menace. Of course, any Lycan snarl was full of menace but this was a very personalized sort of malevolence. Mason whipped around, the Glock already leveled and aiming right between the eyes of the large wolf behind him.\n\n\"Jed, I presume?\" he asked, as though this was a society dinner, and they'd just been introduced. Regardless of his nonchalant attitude, the muzzle of the gun didn't waver. If Jed looked like he was going to leap, Mason would double-tap him right between the eyes before taking his next breath. Unfortunately, now he'd actually seen Jed, Mason didn't think that would put the bastard down for long.\n\nHe was huge. Possibly the biggest wolf-type Lycan Mason had ever seen, and he'd hunted more than enough of the creatures. Gray and black fur covered a frame straight out of a pre-war horror film, and his teeth wouldn't look out of place on a sabertooth. Amber and black eyes fixed on Mason, hatred and anger burning in their depths. A silver bar cut through the creature's eyebrow.\n\nMason's brow winged up in surprise. One of the only things the old films had gotten right about Werewolves was silver. It burned them, ate at their skin like acid. Most avoided it like plague, or like the average Vampire did sunlight. It took a twisted SOB-Were to actually pierce himself with the stuff. Jed dropped his head lower to the ground and curled his lips from his teeth.\n\n\"I'll take that as a yes then. Christ, you are one _ugly_ fucker, aren't you?\"\n\nThe lips curled back further, the massive paws shifting in the dust. It was all the warning Mason got before the massive Werewolf leapt. He pulled the trigger before his eyes and brain got their action together, his instincts kicking in. The Glock spat fire, but Jed was faster. He twisted to the side as the 9mm rounds tore through his shoulder instead of going through his brain.\n\nMason's heart pounded, driving adrenalin around his veins in a survival-driven chaotic race. It galvanized every cell in his body as the age-old fight or flight instinct took over. Time slowed to a crawl as the Lycan launched towards him. Its jaws opened wide, giving him a good view of toothy death as it came for him.\n\nHe bellowed an incoherent war cry, falling backwards and still firing at the oncoming behemoth. His shoulder hit the dirt, barrel tracking the creature's head as it sailed over him. His finger carried on, pulling the trigger independent of thought until the magazine was empty. The bullets slammed into Jed's body, punching holes through his skin on the way. He snarled in fury and pain, landing on paws bigger than dinner plates and stumbled, face planted in the dirt by the still blazing campfire.\n\nMason was on his feet in the blink of an eye. He tossed the useless Glock aside. He wouldn't get a chance to reload it anyway and went for the fighting knife on his leg. Most people, if they knew Mason had been a soldier at all, assumed he was American. An infiltration expert, he only had an accent when he wanted, and he could choose which accent that was.\n\nOnly those who had seen the winged dagger tattoo on one arse-cheek, done by his squad-mates whilst he was insensible, and clocked the Fairbairn-Sykes knife he carried, realized he wasn't only not American, but also something a cut above normal for the British army.\n\nMan and the beast who'd once been a man eyed each other up. Mason had always wondered, would he have become something like this? If his DNA had been slightly different? It was a thought that had plagued him for years. At first, in the first bloody years after the war, when those who had turned preyed on those who hadn't, he'd gone to sleep each night expecting it to be his last. Expecting to wake the next morning as something else, something not human.\n\nIt had never happened. Whatever evils he'd done in his former life, they hadn't been visited on him in this version of hell on earth. Something Mason wasn't sure whether he was grateful for or pissed off about. Was it reward or punishment to live in a world gone mad?\n\n\"Come on then, you fucker. Let's be having you,\" he roared, his native accent out in full force.\n\nThe hilt felt good in his hand as he faced down Jed. The familiar grip fit his palm like a glove, the weapon an extension of his being as he circled Jed. Everything else...the sounds of the other groups fighting, the pitiful whimpering behind him as a team finished off one of the Lycans...all fell away as he concentrated on one thing, and one thing alone. Killing something considered unkillable.\n\nThere was nothing Mason liked more than a challenge. He grinned slowly, the expression making Jed blink and falter a little in surprise.\n\nJed feinted to the left, paws kicking up dust, and then to the right. Mason kept to his low crouch, knife held along his forearm and glinting dully in the light cast by the fire. He was only going to get one shot at this, so he had to make sure it was a good one. His gaze focused in on a small spot on Jed's broad, lupine chest. Any second now, confident that Mason didn't have another gun on him, the wolf was going to go for the kill, then Mason had him.\n\nHis FS was dipped in silver nitrate, something guaranteed to give any Were a bad day for all of ten seconds. Unfortunately for said Were it would be the last ten seconds of its life. Unfortunately for Mason, getting close enough was also close enough to get his throat torn out. Something he hadn't planned on doing this morning but, hey, shit happened.\n\nHis gaze still locked with Jed's, he saw the moment the Lycan made the decision. Then the air was full of pouncing wolf, fur and sharp teeth. He didn't even try to avoid the creature as it bowled him over. His breath was knocked from his body in a savage whoosh as he hit the deck hard. A grin of fury and triumph crossed his face as his head slammed against a large stone near the campfire and stars filled his vision.\n\nTeeth clamped around his throat, the sharp points popping through the skin like fingernails though a balloon. Warm blood streamed as they drove in, but Mason was already there. Even as he felt his jugular and more tear, he rammed the knife between two ribs and right into Jed's heart.\nChapter Nine\n\nLycan blood coated her blades and ran down her arms, but Andy didn't bother to wipe it away. She'd only get bloody again. Using both hands she dispatched the wolf in front of her with a vicious, cross-handed swipe and watched without emotion as it dropped lifeless to the ground. Blood surged from the ruin of its throat onto the thirsty dirt below. Idly she wondered what would grow there, with the soil being watered with wolf's blood. _Plants with a tendency to bite and snarl at other plants?_\n\nThen it happened. She looked up at the howl behind her, and started to turn. They'd heard plenty of howls during the attack, but this was different. The fury and defiance, the general bad-assed, I'm-a-wolf tone was gone, replaced by a sound of unimaginable torment so complete it made even Andy shudder.\n\nShe whipped around. A huge wolf was on its side, writhing in pain. Its shape-shifting ability seemed to be completely out of control. Its body was in a continuous state of flux, each part shifting from human to wolf independently of any other. Bones popped and cracked, breaking only to reform themselves, then start the cycle all over again. She winced as its ribcage inflated to the size of a barrel but its shoulders turned human. Even from here she could hear muscles tearing and bones creaking as they tried to settle into a form even the current, twisted version of nature had never intended.\n\nThe skin was worse. Sickeningly worse. It bubbled and slid, flowing over the monstrous forms beneath, but like everything else, it couldn't seem to make up its mind what to be. One second it was hide and fur, and the next it was soft human skin regardless of what lay underneath. A massive paw formed from the end of a human arm, then covered itself in skin before the bones within, too large for the casing, ripped through it.\n\nShe turned her head away for a second, covering her mouth as bile rose, and fought the urge to lose her lunch. She hated to be sick but just looking at that was enough to make her forget the habit of a lifetime.\n\nThe sound of torment rose into a plaintive plea for mercy. A death howl which called to every non-human instinct she had. All emotion leeching from her, Andy stepped forwards and into the Shade, her blades already raised for the killing blow.\n\nWarmth and color disappeared as she left the land of the living behind. Here things were calmer, so much simpler. Spectral souls, human and Lycan, waited by their bodies, nice and orderly, for her to go along and reap them. She ignored them. They were dispatched. First she needed to deal with the tortured wolf.\n\nWithout asking, she knew it was the alpha, Jed. The power rolling off him was unmistakable. Just as she knew what had killed him. The silver-treated knife lodged into his heart glowed white hot in her enhanced vision. Even if she'd been of a mind to kill him, he was done for. After the blade had entered his heart to deliver its fatal payload, the continuous form changes had locked it within his flesh, putting protective layer after layer over it. The only way they were getting it out would be with a gifted surgeon, or a chainsaw.\n\nShe sure hoped that wasn't Mason's favorite knife.\n\nJed's soul stood to one side, watching his body contort with an expression of fascinated horror on his face. Registering movement he looked up and at her. His face blanched, which considering where they were was an achievement.\n\n\"No! Not me, not yet. I'm not done,\" he protested, and tried to run. Andy didn't hurry her measured pace, nor crack a smile. She'd seen this before. It was rare, admitted, but sometimes when a person was caught between life and death, they could see her in the Shade.\n\nShe watched as Jed ran two steps then fell, yanked back to his body by the unbreakable thread of his own lifeline. There was only one creature on the planet that could cut a lifeline. Her. He looked up over his shoulder, whimpering as he tried to scramble away.\n\nHer lips compressed into a thin straight line as she looked deep into his heart. Normally she didn't bother. Whether they went up or down was no business of hers. This time though, she was interested. If Jed wasn't headed down, so help her God, she was going to drag him to the fiery pit herself.\n\nShe needn't have worried. His heart was black, rotten to the core with evil deeds and disgusting impulses. She blinked as every act of violence he'd committed, every rape, every murder, every evil deed right back to his childhood flashed before her eyes. Here, in her world, she didn't feel sick. She just felt angry.\n\nShe stalked him, murder in her eyes. Apart from the fact he was already dead... Kind of hard to murder someone who was already dead. He leapt over his own body, trying to escape again. She sighed and changed direction. If there had been railings nearby, she'd have clicked her blades along them as she approached, just to scare him more.\n\n\"I can do this all day, you know? Now stand still like a good little doggie.\"\n\n\"Fuck you, bitch,\" he sneered.\n\n\"Not without a week long bath, a change of species, and a personality transplant,\" she snarled back as he flipped to his back and bared his teeth at her. \"Might as well put them away, sunshine. This is my __ world and here we play by _my_ rules.\"\n\n\"Bitch. I'm gonna rip your fucking heart out.\"\n\nSliding one of her sickles home into its sheath, she reached down to the lifeline from the shadowy mound that represented his body in the mortal world. Like everything else, here it was indistinct and lacking in features, but she knew what it was. The pulsing scarlet thread attached to it was a dead giveaway.\n\n\"Oh, you can try.\"\n\nShe started to wrap the thread around her fist, pulling him closer by slow increments. He struggled and fought, to no avail. She dragged him closer and closer until he was within range.\n\nFinally close enough, he took a swipe at her. Vicious claws erupted from the ends of his fingers as they flashed towards Andy's face in an unstoppable arc. She stood and waited, an impassive look on her face, as they passed right through her and exited the other side, turning the enraged soul into something akin to a spinning top.\n\nAs soon as he turned she slammed her booted foot into the small of his back at the same time as she looped his own lifeline around his throat, then pulled him hard against her.\n\n\"How's it feel to be helpless, Jedediah?\" she whispered into his ear, picking his hated full name from the memories she'd gleaned. \"To be able to do nothing whilst it all goes to shit around you? Impotent, useless...at the whim of someone else. Terrified, like so many of the people you killed.\"\n\nHer breath whispered over his neck as she tightened the red cord around his throat. Of course, his soul couldn't be killed by strangulation, but Jed didn't know that and he reacted as though Andy was throttling the very life out of him. His fingers scrabbled at her hands, as he kicked and bucked in her hold, but Andy was unshakeable. Her lips twisted as she pulled the line tighter.\n\n\"Rot in hell, Jed,\" she whispered, lover-like, before she snapped the cord.\n\nShe stepped out of the Shade to a much quieter scene than she'd left. The fire popped and crackled merrily to itself. Soft sobbing and the odd whimper broke the silence periodically. Half the attacking humans were dead. She nodded slightly to herself, the numbers were better than she'd expected. If she was honest, she hadn't expected any of them to survive. Period. There was one way to describe humans attacking a Lycan camp.\n\nSuicidal.\n\nShe stood for a moment in the center of the camp, just by the hideously twisted corpse of the former alpha and scanned the survivors. They sat in shell-shocked silence, most of them covered in blood. She couldn't see Mason but she wasn't overly worried. Something told her that, if anyone could survive attacking a Lycan camp, the hard-nosed, ex-soldier turned town-guardian could.\n\nShe turned and looked behind her. The cage the children had been kept in was empty. Valerie had done her job well. Andy flicked her vision to the Shade for a moment, noting that all the lifelines that led away from the cage into the darkness were flat and healthy, including Valerie's. Good. Some of the parents hadn't survived the attack, and those kids would need someone strong to look after them.\n\nScanning around her in the Shade she looked for Mason's peculiar lifeline. She'd never seen another one like it, so it would be hard to miss. However hard she looked though, she couldn't spot it. Which was impossible. Wherever a person went, their line followed behind them, like a scent trail. It was what Andy followed when she tracked a soul ready to be reaped. Unlike scent though, it was something that was impossible to mask, and Andy was no bloodhound to be put off the scent easily.\n\nWhere the hell was he? A familiar sense of irritation rising, Andy stomped around the fire to the nearest survivor, one of the young men from the town. He sat in a trance next to another of the furry corpses, his face splattered with blood.\n\n\"Have you seen Mason?\" she demanded, waving her hand in front of his face. \"Hey! Wakey-wakey!\"\n\nAt the sound, the guy snapped out of it somewhat. Still wearing a stunned expression he transferred his attention to her face. \"Huh?\"\n\n\"Mason? Tall, shaved head. Kick-ass attitude,\" she said shortly. \"Seen him?\"\n\nHe lifted his hand slowly to point behind her. A sickening feeling wormed its way into Andy's heart as she turned to look at what he was pointing at. There, hidden behind the bulk of Jed's twisted body, caught somewhere between human and Lycan, was another, smaller one. Andy's heart shuddered to a halt as ice filled her veins.\n\n\"No...it can't be.\" Her voice was a low whisper, a plea to any God who might be listening. Unable to tear her eyes away from the fallen figure, she took a couple of steps forwards and stopped, her feet refusing to carry her like they were stuck in quicksand. It couldn't be Mason, it just couldn't.\n\nThe broad shoulders were too familiar though, as was the tattered T-shirt stretched over them. He lay on his side, unmoving. Too still. Her breath caught in her throat as she raced around the fire and slid to her knees in the dirt next to him.\n\n\"Oh God, no. Please. No,\" she moaned as she tugged on a shoulder to roll him onto his back. There was no resistance. Mason flopped onto his back, his eyes wide and unfocused as they stared sightlessly up at the night sky. His throat was a bloody mass of mangled flesh, the bones of his spine glinting white in the gaping wound.\n\nAndy screamed, a mingled sound of agony and fury as her heart broke in her chest with a sharp crack. She fussed, gathering him to her, not caring that his blood soaked through her top. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she cradled him. She'd only just found him, the other half of her soul, and now he was gone. Snatched from her by a cruel twist of fate and the snapping of a Lycan's jaws.\n\nDead.\n\nHer head lifted slowly.\n\nDead. Mason was dead.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nIt was a simple word but one spoken with utter conviction. She looked at the man in her arms. He couldn't be dead because she wouldn't allow it. Death did not scare her, nor did it hold any sway over her. She was a Reaper...perhaps the _only_ Reaper. The Grim Reaper herself.\n\nDeath would bow to her, be bound by her rules and her will.\n\nFighting back panic she reached deep inside herself. Deep within, in a place she avoided thinking about or calling on too much, was a dark place devoid of anything. The center of her reaper powers, the core whatever that made her what she was. For years she'd avoided it, tried to forget it was there, as she carried on pretending to be human.\n\nBut she wasn't human, and she never would be.\n\nThis time she didn't just brush the void, or embrace it, she did a run up and went for a full-on base jump right into it. The void enveloped her, consumed her. She threw her head back and screamed again, as the memories of a billion or more deaths slammed into her. Time lost meaning as she tumbled, bounced from death to death throughout the ages. Her voice expanded, power added to the feminine scream as she accepted her destiny and took on the full power of a Grim Reaper.\n\nHer mouth snapped shut--the sound cut off as she lowered her chin and opened her eyes to look at the world around her anew. Jed still lay in front of her, his body locked in everlasting torment, the fire still blazed merrily, and the man she loved still lay dead in her arms.\n\nOnly, like her, the man she loved wasn't human, and never had been.\n\n\"Can't be having that, now can we?\" she said to no one in particular, and leaned down to kiss him. At the first touch of her lips, power flowed between them. A spark of life that she gently blew against his lips. Nothing happened for a long moment, then he coughed.\n\nShe lifted her head. As she watched, the hideous mess that was his throat started to heal. Flesh filled out as structures started to form. Veins slithered across the open space and started to pulse with blood as skin crept over the wound to cover it. Within a minute it was gone, his skin as unmarked as it was this morning.\n\nHe opened his eyes to look up at her. She smiled as a pitch-black lifeline flared into life in the corner of her vision.\n\n\"Welcome back, my love.\"\n\nHe'd been dead six months, and it had been the best six months of his life. Sighing with contentment Mason leaned back in his chair and took a sip from his drink as his gaze followed the small woman behind the bar.\n\nSix months pregnant, Andy was starting to waddle but she still insisted on pulling her weight. Like pulling the late shift in the bar whilst Valerie was settling the kids. With so many orphaned the night of the Lycan attack, looking after them all was a full-time job.\n\nShe wiped glasses with efficient and swift movements, placing them neatly on the shelves behind the bar. Every so often she would cut a glance his way, heat in her dark eyes which set an answering heat to smoldering within him.\n\n_\" Just you wait until later, woman,\" _he promised silently, knowing she could hear him. Quite how the link between them worked, or exactly what he was now Mason hadn't figured out. All he knew was that he had been dead, and now he wasn't. And that now he could see things...lines he couldn't see before. Like the three amber lines which blinked into existence in the corner of his vision. Andy calmly wiped the last glass, and placed it on the shelf.\n\n\"Incoming,\" she announced as the door opened and three Vampires swaggered in.\n\nMason smiled and caressed the trigger of the shotgun rigged under his table. Vampires before nine in the evening? Looked like it was going to be a busy night.\nAbout the Author\n\nMina Carter was born and raised in Middle Earth (otherwise known as the Midlands, England). After a slew of careers ranging from logistics to land-surveying she can now be found in the wilds of Leicestershire with her husband and young daughter...the true boss of the family.\n\nSuffering the curse of eternal curiosity Mina never tires of learning new skills which has led to Aromatherapy, Corsetry, Chain-maille making, Welding, Canoeing, Shooting, and pole-dancing to name but a few.\n\nShe juggles being a mum, working full time and writing, tossing another ball in the air with her cover artwork. For Mina, writing time is the wee hours of the morning before anyone wakes up and starts making demands, or any spare minute that can be begged, bought or conned.\n\nHer first stories were penned at age 11, when she used a stationery set meant for Christmas thank you letters to write stories instead. More recently, she wrote for her own amusement and to save on outrageous monthly book bills. Now she's totally addicted and needs her daily writing fix or heads roll!\n\nYou can find Mina at:\n\nWebsite: www.mina-carter.com\n\nTwitter: @minacarter\n\nFacebook: www.facebook.com\/mina.carter\n_A one night stand turns into a partnership for survival..._\n\nNeon Chaos\n\n_(C) 2011 Karen Erickson_\n\nParty girl Samantha Sanders is celebrating her thirtieth birthday in style--a road trip to Las Vegas for a long weekend with her girlfriends. Staying in the swankiest hotel on the strip, she's naked and in bed with the sexiest guy she's ever laid eyes on when the clock strikes twelve. Who knew the world would really end December 21, 2012? Those Mayans, they weren't lyin'...\n\nRuss Weaver is above all else a soldier. Looking for a little fun before spending Christmas with his crazy family, a weekend on leave in Vegas unexpectedly turns into his newest mission----protecting the sweet, scared woman he happens to be in bed with when the world as they know it is over.\n\nWandering throughout the virtually abandoned streets of Vegas, they fine city has turned into a war zone. Their only hope to get out alive is to stick together--and fight those who wish to cease their endeavors. Permanently.\n\n_Enjoy the following excerpt for_ Neon Chaos:\n\n\"Where the hell could they be?\" he roared, throwing the flashlight with all his might. It crashed against the wall before it dropped to the floor, denting the drywall, and she watched in horror as her personal hero crumpled to the ground and beat his fist upon it.\n\nSamantha ran to him, kneeling by his side and slipping her arm around his trembling shoulders. He was upset, he had every right to be and it scared the ever-living crap out of her.\n\nHe'd been the strong one from the beginning. If he lost it now how would they ever make it? On her skills and gumption alone?\n\n_Yeah, right._\n\n\"They must be dead.\" His voice was shredded, and he sniffed. \"My parents must be dead. I don't know where else they could be.\"\n\nShe wrapped her arms around him and brought him to her, his head resting against her chest. Smoothing a hand over his thick, dark hair, she offered soothing words, her eyes closing when she felt him shudder.\n\nIt broke her heart to see him like this. His arms banded around her waist, and he held her tight, his face buried against her neck. She swore she felt the hot dampness of tears, but she would never ask him. Had a feeling he was a bit of a macho man who would never admit to such a thing.\n\n\"What should we do, Russ?\" She hated asking, but they needed some sort of plan.\n\nHe lifted his head, his gaze meeting hers. The discarded flashlight was still on, throwing a shaft of light across his face, and she saw all the despair there, all the weariness.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he croaked, sounding good and truly lost. \"What do you think?\"\n\nShe pushed his hair back with her fingers. \"You're tired. Maybe we should try and rest for a bit.\"\n\n\"They'll find us.\"\n\n\"We'll stay only for a little while. You need to sleep.\"\n\nHis eyes slid closed for the briefest moment, and he grabbed hold of her hand, bringing it to his mouth so he could press a gentle kiss to the back of it. A full body shiver moved through her at the contact and when his eyes opened, she leaned in, kissing him soundly on the lips.\n\nHe looked like he really needed it.\n\n\"I fucking hate this,\" he whispered. \"I don't know what to do.\"\n\n\"I don't know either, but we can't go on like this. We're both running ragged. That's why we should rest. Even for just an hour.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"You're right. Let's stock up and hide in the detached garage in the back. Sleep for a while and then get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\"Stock up? I have food.\" She shook her purse, which she'd brought in with her.\n\n\"I'm not just talking food, sweetheart, though we should grab more, good idea. I'm talking about _useful_ stuff.\" He kissed her again, as if he needed the bit of physical contact to keep going. \"I'm talking weapons. My father has a stockpile of them.\"\n\nThe sadness had slowly left him, replaced by a simmering, potent rage that bubbled just beneath the surface. His parents were fucking gone--hell the entire family had probably disappeared, and he could do nothing about it.\n\nNothing.\n\nHe'd cried, not like a blubbering baby but tears had slipped out and he'd struggled not to ball. Samantha had offered comfort, holding him close, not saying a bunch of stupid words to try and make him feel better because nothing would've made him feel better at that particular moment. Not even now.\n\nNope, she hadn't said anything at all, just offered him a shoulder to sniffle on. He appreciated her more than she could imagine.\n\nAfter gaining control over his emotions he forced himself to get over the sadness. He was pissed. He wanted to kick some ass.\n\nHe wanted revenge.\n\nFirst though, he needed to remain calm and rational and gather supplies.\n\nSamantha filled a few grocery bags with food from the pantry while he went to his father's den. The gun case was locked. Samantha had the flashlight so he kicked his booted foot through the glass door, smashing it to bits. The broken glass fell to the floor in a tinkling pile.\n\nHis mother would've had a fit if she could see him.\n\nReaching through the broken glass pane, he unlocked the door and it swung open. He grabbed two shotguns and two handguns, a set each for himself and for Samantha. They needed to be prepared for whatever might come at them. He had a sneaking suspicion it would be pretty damn bad.\n\nRuss hoped like hell she wasn't scared of guns.\n\nReaper\n\n__\n\n__\n\n__\n\n_Mina Carter_\n\n__\n\n__\n\n__\n\n_The World after the End of the World will never be the same again..._\n\nSanctuary. Cliched name, but the sentiment is still the same. Ten years after the end of the world, ex-soldier Mason and a small group of humans defend their fortified town against creatures of myth and legend made real. But with dwindling game to hunt and a lycan pack in the area looking for an easy meal, just surviving is getting harder every day.\n\nAndy has a few screws loose, and she knows it. She's been on the road since the bombs fell and changed humanity forever. Driven by inhuman instincts, she tracks the newly and soon-to-be dead and dispatches their souls to the afterlife. Sometimes they go quietly, most put up a fight. She doesn't care either way. Her ambition in life is to find her next hit of coffee and one day, maybe, sleep in a real bed again.\n\nThen Andy's instincts bring her to Sanctuary and its enigmatic leader, Mason, and even the world after the end of the world will never be the same again...\n\nWarning: Contains a snarky female Reaper with a hair-trigger temper and a caffeine addiction, a hot ex-commando with an attitude and a twisted sense of humour and a happily ever after that defies death itself.\n\n**eBooks are _not_ transferable.**\n\n**They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.**\n\nThis book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.\n\nSamhain Publishing, Ltd.\n\n11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B\n\nCincinnati OH 45249\n\nReaper\n\nCopyright (C) 2011 by Mina Carter\n\nISBN: 978-1-60928-630-9\n\nEdited by Bethany Morgan\n\nCover by Kanaxa\n\nAll Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.\n\nFirst Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: November 2011\n\nwww.samhainpublishing.com\n\n# Table of Contents\n\nDedication\n\nChapter One\n\nChapter Two\n\nChapter Three\n\nChapter Four\n\nChapter Five\n\nChapter Six\n\nChapter Seven\n\nChapter Eight\n\nChapter Nine\n\nAbout the Author\n\nAlso Available from Samhain Publishing, Ltd.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n_The Litter of the Law_ is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2013 by American Artists, Inc.\n\nExcerpt from _Nine Lives to Die_ copyright \u00a9 2014 by American Artists, Inc.\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nPublished in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.\n\nBANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.\n\nIllustrations copyright \u00a9 2013 by Michael Gellatly\n\nLIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA  \nBrown, Rita Mae.  \nThe litter of the law : a Mrs. Murphy mystery \/ Rita Mae Brown & Sneaky Pie Brown; Illustrated by Michael Gellatly.  \npages cm  \nISBN 978-0-345-53048-6  \neBook ISBN: 978-0-345-53857-4  \n1. Haristeen, Harry (Fictitious character)\u2014Fiction.  \n2. Murphy, Mrs. (Fictitious character) \u2014Fiction.  \n3. Women detectives\u2014Virginia\u2014Fiction. I. Title.  \nPS3552.R698L58 2013  \n813'.54\u2014dc23  \n2013007940\n\nwww.bantamdell.com\n\nCover design: Beverly Leung  \nCover illustrations: \u00a9 Daniel Pelvin (cat),  \n\u00a9 Shutterstock\/MisterElements (yarn)\n\nv3.1_r2\n\n# Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\nCast of Characters\n\nThe Really Important Characters\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\nChapter 8\n\nChapter 9\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nChapter 12\n\nChapter 13\n\nChapter 14\n\nChapter 15\n\nChapter 16\n\nChapter 17\n\nChapter 18\n\nChapter 19\n\nChapter 20\n\nChapter 21\n\nChapter 22\n\nChapter 23\n\nChapter 24\n\nChapter 25\n\nChapter 26\n\nChapter 27\n\nChapter 28\n\nChapter 29\n\nChapter 30\n\n_Dedication_\n\n_Other Books by these Authors_\n\n_About the Authors_\n\n_Excerpt from_ Nine Lives to Die\n\n# Cast of Characters\n\n**Mary Minor Haristeen** \u2014\"Harry,\" just forty-one, a Smith graduate who wound up being Crozet, Virginia's, postmistress for sixteen years, is now trying to make some money by farming. She survived breast cancer and prefers not to think about it. She more or less lives on the surface of life until her curiosity pulls her deeper.\n\n**Phararond Haristeen, D.V.M**.\u2014\"Fair\" specializes in equine reproduction. After graduating from Auburn he married his childhood sweetheart, Harry. He reads people's emotions much better than his wife does. He is a year older than Harry.\n\n**Susan Tucker** \u2014Outgoing, adept at any and all social exchange, she's Harry's best friend since cradle days. She loves Harry but worries about how Harry just blunders into things.\n\n**The Very Reverend Herbert Jones** \u2014A Vietnam veteran, Army, he is pastor at St. Luke's Lutheran Church, which is well over two hundred years old. He is a man of deep conviction and feeling. He's known Harry since her childhood.\n\n**Deputy Cynthia Cooper** \u2014Tall, lean, and Harry's next-door neighbor as she rents the adjoining farm, she loves law enforcement. Harry meddles in Cooper's business from time to time but the Smith graduate has an uncanny knack of finding important information.\n\n**Tazio Chappars** \u2014She's an architect in her early thirties often assisted by her yellow Lab rescue, Brinkley. Italian African heritage gives her dazzling good looks. She hails from St. Louis, Missouri.\n\n**Buddy Janss\u2014** A huge fellow and a successful farmer; he can be counted on to pitch in for fund-raisers. He and Harry like to discuss crops, weather, and new equipment.\n\n**Hester Martin** \u2014A middle-aged graduate of Mary Baldwin, she runs a roadside produce stand. Odd, opinionated, but blessed with a good heart, she drags people into her projects.\n\n**Aunt Tally Urquhart\u2014** This 101-year-old aunt of Marilyn Sanburne, Sr., does what she wants when she wants. She's not in too much evidence in this volume, which gives everyone a rest.\n\n**Marilyn Sanburne, Sr.\u2014** \"Big Mim,\" known as The Queen of Crozet. She runs everything and everyone except her aunt. Big Mim is a political animal.\n\n**Marilyn Sanburne, Jr**.\u2014\"Little Mim\" has just had a baby, Roland. Her mother doesn't like the name. Often Little Mim doesn't like her mother.\n\n**Miranda Hogendobber** \u2014A second mother to Harry, a devout member of the evangelical Church of the Holy Light, she, too, isn't much in evidence in this volume. Like Big Mim, she's in her seventies and has no idea how she got there so fast.\n\n**Sheriff Rick Shaw** \u2014The sheriff of Albemarle County, he is overburdened, underfunded, and overworked. Despite that, he likes law enforcement and has learned to trust Cooper. Originally, he wasn't thrilled having a woman in the department.\n\n**Neil Jordan** \u2014The treasurer for St. Luke's, Neil can be picky, picky, picky. He drives Harry crazy and vice versa but they have to work together as both are on the vestry board. He owns a fertilizer business that is lucrative.\n\n**Wesley Speer** \u2014He's also on the vestry board and brings a business perspective. He works sometimes with Neil since Wesley owns an upscale realty firm. He'll often refer clients to Neil. Wesley, like any high-end Realtor, is slick.\n\n**BoomBoom Craycroft** \u2014Another childhood friend of Harry's, she had an affair with Harry's husband years back. It was a mess, of course. Everyone has recovered and in many ways is the better for it. BoomBoom runs her late husband's concrete business. She is conventionally beautiful.\n\n**Alicia Palmer** \u2014Now here's a showstopper. Alicia was a movie star in the fifties, whipped through a few husbands, affairs, etc., made pots of money, inherited more from an old flame. She returned to Crozet, fell in love with BoomBoom, and is blissfully happy.\n\n**Sarah Price** \u2014Hester Martin's niece comes up to Crozet from Houston.\n\n**Paul Diaz** \u2014Tazio's boyfriend, who trains Big Mim's horses.\n\n# The Really Important Characters\n\n**Mrs. Murphy** \u2014She's a tiger cat who is usually cool, calm, and collected. She loves her humans, Tucker the dog, and even Pewter, the other cat, who can be a pill.\n\n**Pewter** \u2014She's self-centered, rotund, intelligent when she wants to be. Selfish as this cat is, she often comes through at the last minute to help and then wants all the credit.\n\n**Tee Tucker** \u2014This corgi could take your college boards. She is devoted to Harry, Fair, and Mrs. Murphy. She is less devoted to Pewter.\n\n**Simon** \u2014He's an opossum who lives in the hayloft of the Haristeens' barn.\n\n**Matilda** \u2014She's a large blacksnake with a large sense of humor. She also lives in the hayloft.\n\n**Flatface** \u2014This great horned owl lives in the barn cupola. She irritates Pewter, but the cat realizes the bird could easily pick her up and carry her off.\n\n**Shortro** \u2014A young Saddlebred in Harry's barn who is being trained as a foxhunter. He's very smart, young, good-natured.\n\n**Tomahawk** \u2014Harry's older Thoroughbred. They've been friends a long time.\n\nThe Lutheran Cats\n\n**Elocution** \u2014She's the oldest of the St. Luke's cats and cares a lot about the \"Rev,\" as his friends sometimes call the Very Reverend Herbert Jones.\n\n**Cazenovia** \u2014This cat watches everybody and everything.\n\n**Lucy Fur** \u2014She's the youngest of the kitties. While ever playful, she obeys her elders.\n\n#\n\nFair Haristeen, doctor of veterinary medicine, and his wife, Mary Minor \"Harry\" Haristeen, loved to steal a Saturday and cruise the back roads of central Virginia. It reminded them of their courting days, back in high school, when Fair, bruised from Friday night's football game, would pick up Harry, dirty from the stable, and they'd drive around in his 1958 Chevy pickup. Now, over two decades later, Fair was at the wheel of their station wagon, Harry beside him, the pets in the back seat, as they rode through the countryside.\n\nMrs. Murphy, the tiger cat, Pewter, her gray, overweight sidekick, and Tucker, the corgi, usually accompanied their people everywhere except in high heat. On a mild day like today, windows down a crack, the three could sleep or chat while the humans talked.\n\n\"Perfect weather,\" Fair declared.\n\nOctober 12 was indeed a ravishing fall day\u2014early fall, for the summer warmth lingered late this year. Forests looked spray-painted with yellow, orange, flaming red, deep red, old gold.\n\n\"Hey, Miranda got the respiratory flu.\" Harry mentioned a former co-worker and dear friend. \"She's swearing that drinking electrolytes will cure her. She saw it on TV.\"\n\nFair shook his head. \"Electrolytes will help, but our beloved Miranda seems susceptible to quacks.\"\n\nWatching the passing scenery, Pewter noticed a lovely yellow clapboard farmhouse. _\"Quack\u2014duck. Why call a crook a quack?\"_\n\n_\"I don't know,\"_ Tucker replied. The corgi was well used to Pewter's inquiring mind. _\"They also use the term 'snake oil.' A quack sells snake oil. It's confusing.\"_\n\n_\"Ha!\"_ Pewter whooped. _\"If they'll buy snake oil, maybe we can get them hooked on catnip.\"_\n\n_\"Humans don't sniff catnip,\"_ Tucker replied with dignity.\n\n_\"They can learn.\"_ The gray cat spoke with conviction.\n\n_\"Pewter, sometimes I think you're cracked as well as fat,\"_ the dog unwisely said.\n\n_\"Fat!\"_ Pewter raged.\n\n_\"You need a seat all your own. Every time we take a turn, the flab on your belly sways,\"_ Tucker teased.\n\nPewter lashed out, a quick right to the shoulder.\n\nTucker growled, showing her fangs.\n\n\"That is enough!\" Harry turned around.\n\n_\"I haven't done a thing.\"_ Mrs. Murphy distanced herself from the combatants, who now rounded on her.\n\n_\"Brown-noser!\"_ Pewter whacked the tiger cat, who gave as good as she got.\n\nThe hissing and barking irritated Fair to the point where he pulled over to the side of the road, near where Hester Martin's vegetable and fruit stand was located.\n\nHarry got out of the car, opened the back door. \"I am going to give you such a smack.\"\n\nAll three animals jumped to the far back of the Volvo station wagon. Harry walked around to the rear of the car and opened the hatch door; the animals jumped back into their original seats.\n\nSlamming both doors shut, Harry cursed as Fair couldn't help but laugh. She walked over to the driver's side; he had the window down.\n\n\"They know how to pluck your last nerve,\" said Fair, laughing.\n\n\"Yours, too. I'm not the one who pulled the car over.\" Harry looked down the road at the produce stand, a small white clapboard building with a large overhang, goods displayed in orderly, colorful rows. \"Hey, let's get some pattypan squash. Bet Hester still has some.\" She walked around the car, getting in the passenger side before turning to face her animal tormentors. \"If I hear one peep, one sniff, one hiss while I am shopping, no food tonight. Got it?\"\n\n_\"Hateful.\"_ Pewter turned her back on Harry.\n\nAs Tucker hung her head, Mrs. Murphy, the tiger cat, loudly defended herself. _\"I didn't do one thing.\"_\n\n_\"Of course not, the perfect puss.\"_ Pewter curled her upper lip.\n\nFair coasted to the stand, where Hester\u2014orange apron, black jeans, and an orange shirt\u2014was talking to customers, most of whom lived in Crozet or nearby.\n\n\"I'll stay here.\" Fair knew how Hester could go on, plus Buddy Janss was there, all three hundred pounds of him, and he could outtalk Hester.\n\nOrange and black bunting festooned the roof overhang. Scarecrows flanked the outdoor wooden cartons overflowing with squashes, pumpkins, every kind of apple imaginable. Inside, one could buy a good sandwich. Little ghosts floated from the rafters; big green eyes glowed in the room's upper corners. Brilliantly gold late corn and huge mums and zinnias added to the color.\n\nAlmost as big as Buddy, a sign sat catty-cornered to the entrance, announcing the community Halloween Hayride to raise money for the Crozet Library. No doubt Tazio Chappars, an architect, had designed the impressive sign. She worked hard for the library and the sign really grabbed you: From a large drawn skeleton, one bony arm actually reached out to get your attention.\n\nHester looked up. \"Harry Haristeen, I haven't seen you in weeks.\"\n\nBuddy turned. \"How'd you do with your sunflowers?\"\n\nBuddy, a farmer who rented thousands of acres along with cultivating his own holdings, enjoyed Harry's foray into niche farming. Who knew better than Buddy the cost of equipment and implements for wheat, corn, soybeans? Harry had made a wise choice in focusing on her field of sunflowers, her quarter acre of Petit Manseng grapes, and the ginseng she grew down by the strong deep creek that divided her property from the old Jones farm.\n\n\"Pretty good,\" she said, not wanting to brag that this year's field of sunflowers was her biggest yet. \"How's your year so far?\"\n\nHe hooked his thumbs in his overalls. \"Tell you what, girl, that mini-drought thinned out my corn crop. I did better than most because my lower acres received enough rain. Others didn't. Never saw anything like it. On one side of the road the corn would be twisted right up, and on the other just as plump as you'd please. The corn behind the old schoolhouses looks poorly.\"\n\nHester jumped in. \"Government's fault. All that stuff they have circling around up there in space. Gotta affect us.\"\n\nBoth Harry and Buddy nodded politely, for Hester was a little in space herself. Sometimes a lot out there. Middle-aged, good-looking, with glossy light brown hair hanging to her shoulders, she applied just enough makeup to draw attention to her symmetry and health. Every small town as well as big city has its Hesters, it's just they can't hide in the small towns. Good-looking people, often bright, but they don't quite fit in and often they never marry. Hester had gone to Mary Baldwin, excelled in her studies, but came back over the Blue Ridge Mountains to run this roadside stand. Her brother, more ambitious, moved to Houston right out of the College of William and Mary. He had perfect timing, hitting Texas on the cusp of a building boom and making the most of it. Her parents had built the stand more as a hobby than a business, but it flourished. Her father had been a banker; her mother had run the stand. These days Hester seemed happy enough, engaged with a steady stream of regulars and tourists.\n\nBuddy kindly semi-agreed. \"What scares me is what we don't know. I mean, just in general, look at this drought and, hey, we came out a lot better off than they did in the Midwest, where everything burned up. Right now our water table is good. I planted more Silver Queen corn because I think the weather will stay warm longer. I'll get it harvested and if not, I'll make a lot of critters happy.\" He let out a booming laugh.\n\nHester asked, \"You've got crop coverage, Buddy? After the drought of 1988, surely you started paying for an insurance policy, revenue protection.\"\n\n\"I do. I elected an eighty percent revenue protection policy. Yes, I did learn from 1988 but, girl, every time I turn around I'm writing another check and I see my return diminish. Farming gets harder and harder,\" said the well-organized man, a true steward of the land. \"Just to keep up, I have to plant more acreage. Plant an early crop, then come back and throw soybeans down. I feel like I'm running to stay in place.\"\n\n\"Think we all do,\" Hester agreed.\n\n\"Only way I can buy or rent\u2014and renting makes sense in the short term\u2014is to sell some of my land closer in to Crozet or Charlottesville.\"\n\nHester's shoulders snapped back. \"Don't do that, Buddy. Don't ever do that.\"\n\n\"Before I forget, Hester, do you have any pattypan squash?\" Harry didn't want to keep Fair or the arguing animals in limbo.\n\n\"I do. Wait until you see it.\" Hester nodded to Buddy, who winked at Harry.\n\nThe two women walked inside, where there was crooknecked squash, acorn squash, and Harry's favorite, cream-white pattypan squash that looked like scalloped discuses.\n\n\"Beautiful! And the right size.\"\n\n\"Right about now the pattypan is usually over, but this year with the long, long summer, I'm still getting some,\" said Hester. \"The melons are over, though. I do so love melons. Before I forget, now, you and Fair are buying tickets for the hayride. You must. The library is built but there's a lot to be done. We need $59,696 just for adult computers and, oh my, the adult area needs tables and we need furniture for a meditative reading room. The list is endless.\"\n\n\"Of course we'll buy tickets. I'll even buy tickets for Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker.\"\n\n\"If that gray cat of yours gets any fatter, I'll have to find a special wagon and pony just for her.\" Hester laughed.\n\n\"You're looking pretty Halloweeny yourself, all orange and black.\"\n\n\"Oh, this is just my warm-up. Next week I'll be out here in my witch's costume.\"\n\n\"So long as you don't scare customers away.\"\n\n\"I could be a Halloween fairy except I've never seen a Halloween fairy.\"\n\nThey kept chatting as Harry picked out two succulent squashes, then paid at the cash register run by Lolly Currie, a young woman looking for a better job but making ends meet at Hester's stand until then.\n\nBack on the road, Fair grinned. \"That is the shortest time you have ever spent at Martin's Stand.\"\n\n\"Buddy Janss helped me out, because as soon as I paid for my squash, he came back to chat up Hester, about late produce deliveries. I swear, Buddy has put on more weight. His chins now have chins.\"\n\n\"Buddy may be fat but he's light on his feet. He was a hell of a football player in high school and college. It's a pity that retired linemen run to fat so often.\"\n\n\"Boxers, too.\" She watched rolling hills pass by.\n\n_\"Maybe you should go live with Buddy. The two of you could be Team Tubby.\"_ Tucker knew this would start a fight.\n\n_\"Don't,\"_ Mrs. Murphy counseled in vain.\n\n_\"Bubble Butt. Poop Breath!\"_ Pewter hissed loudly.\n\nHarry twisted around in the front seat just in time to see Pewter hook the dog's shoulder with one claw.\n\n_\"Ouch,\"_ Tucker yelped.\n\n_\"Next, your eyes.\"_\n\n\"Pull over, honey. There will be fur all over the car if I don't stop this right now.\"\n\nHe pulled over on the side of the road. The field on the north side of the two-lane road was jammed with corn. Morrowdale Farm usually put these fields in good hay, but this year row after row of healthy corn filled them. They had somehow escaped the small drought.\n\nOpening the door to again castigate the backseat passengers, Harry remarked, \"This has to be one of the best-run and prettiest farms in Albemarle County.\"\n\n\"Sure is.\"\n\nThey looked out to the scarecrow in the middle of the field, currently being mobbed by crows.\n\n\"I thought scarecrows were supposed to frighten crows,\" Fair said.\n\n\"Those crows are having a party. Look at that. Pulling on the wig under the hat.\" Harry laughed. \"What are all those birds doing?\"\n\nFair stepped out of the car to stare intently as a crow plucked out an eyeball.\n\n\"Honey, that's not a scarecrow.\"\n\n#\n\n\"Tucker, come back!\" Harry called to the corgi as the dog raced across the cornfield.\n\nFair, in his shock, hadn't closed the station wagon door, so all three animals had rushed out after deciding to see what was going on.\n\nThe corn rustled as the strong little dog bounded through.\n\nThe two cats also sped down a row, curiosity raging.\n\n\"Selective hearing.\" Harry shook her head as she followed, starting into a corn row.\n\n\"Honey, they'll be back. You should stay where you are, otherwise you might destroy footprints or some other kind of evidence.\"\n\nShe stopped, turned to face her husband. \"You're right.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure you want to see the corpse anyway.\"\n\nHarry leaned up against the Volvo. \"Death really is ugly and this one is probably especially so. But, Fair, why truss someone up like a scarecrow?\"\n\nHe folded his arms across his chest. \"Clever, really. How many people passed by this field on Garth Road? Plenty, I bet, and still no one stopped or called the sheriff's department. The only reason we did was because of the ruckus raised by our passengers, and then the crows caught our eye, and... well.\"\n\nAs the married couple waited for the sheriff's department to arrive, the three investigating animals reached the base of the scarecrow.\n\nA blue-black crow perched on the straw hat looked down. _\"Beat it!\"_ he squawked.\n\nMrs. Murphy knew she could climb the dead man's leg if need be, so she stood on her hind legs reaching far up, feeling the cold flesh under the faux scarecrow's pants. _\"I can climb up and shoo all of you away,\"_ she threatened the birds.\n\nA second crow in this mob, on an outstretched arm, gibed, _\"Go ahead. We'll fly away, circle, and come right on back.\"_\n\nThe first crow opened his wings to their full span, the light picking up the blue highlights. _\"What do you want with this feast? Cats don't eat carrion.\"_\n\nPewter ignored the question and asked one of her own: _\"Did you see the scarecrow being set up?\"_\n\nThe second crow spoke. _\"No, but he hasn't been here long. We caught a whiff as we flew over this cornfield on our way to Shelford Farm. When we tear off a juicy piece of meat, some blood still drips.\"_\n\nFew scarecrows are well dressed. Neither was this one. It wore a drab, wrinkled shirt over a red undershirt. Worn, old pants, rope for a belt, took care of his bottom half. Old work boots, the sole separated from the left one, covered his feet. The straw hat, edges frayed, hatband missing, gave the fellow the final country touch.\n\nAs blood pools in the extremities, the crows provided valuable information. The scarecrow wouldn't show the signs of rigor mortis because the body was tied, arms outstretched, legs tied down, too. No blood was moving, the body temperature had cooled down, but this was a fresh kill, relatively.\n\nMrs. Murphy noticed that the eyes had been plucked out and a lot of flesh had already been eaten off his face and hands. Eventually, the crows would have torn through the clothing.\n\n_\"Did you smell another human?\"_ the tiger cat asked.\n\n_\"No. The sun had been up about an hour. What we smelled was him,\"_ the first crow reported, his olfactory powers acute, especially for blood and meat.\n\n_\"Without his eyes, I can't tell if he was strangled,\"_ Pewter matter-of-factly announced. _\"They'd be bulging and bloodshot.\"_\n\n_\"Eyes are so tasty.\"_ A smaller crow opened his beak wide. _\"A real delicacy.\"_\n\n_\"Any idea how he was killed?\"_ asked Mrs. Murphy.\n\n_\"You didn't hear him scream, did you?\"_ Pewter, normally not interested in much besides her own meals, was oddly thrilled at having discovered such an unusual murder.\n\n_\"How could we have heard him scream?\"_ a young crow replied. _\"He was dead and gone by the time we found him.\"_\n\n_\"Eat what you can, because the sheriff is on his way. He'll cut him down,\"_ Mrs. Murphy advised.\n\nTucker sniffed the bottom of the stake, sniffed the corpse's shoes, then picked up the diminishing odor of a set of rubber boots. Raising her nose, she sensed the smell moving away from the body, then, nose to ground, she began to track, the cats in her wake. As the three friends stuck to their trail of the pair of rubber boots, presumably those of the person who had carried the body, the crows burst out singing a song whose refrain was _\"Oh, those beautiful eyes, those great big beautiful eyes.\"_ Then they burst into raucous laughter.\n\n_\"Gross,\"_ Tucker said.\n\n_\"Yeah.\"_ Pewter looked back. _\"Twisted. They're really twisted.\"_\n\n_\"It's the killer who's twisted,\"_ Mrs. Murphy sensibly replied as she, too, kept her nose down.\n\nThe three followed the line until it came out to the side of the road, where there was a small stain that smelled like motor oil.\n\n_\"Every third person wears rubber boots around here when it's wet.\"_ Tucker sat down. _\"But I think this is the spot where the scarcrow's companion parked, then carried out his body from here.\"_\n\n_\"A strong person. They don't call it dead weight for nothing,\"_ Mrs. Murphy noted.\n\n_\"She's red in the face,\"_ Pewter said, referring to Harry, calling their names in the distance with increasing frustration. _\"We'd better go back to the wagon.\"_\n\nWhen they got back to the Volvo, Harry scooped them up, put them in the back, and closed the door. \"Curiosity killed the cat,\" she huffed, unaware of the irony of Harry Haristeen making such a statement.\n\n_\"Yeah, yeah.\"_ Pewter put her paws on the window just to make a smear.\n\n_\"She's upset.\"_ Tucker put her head on her paws.\n\n_\"Pop is, too. Humans can't face death.\"_ Pewter was right about that.\n\n_\"This is murder. Worse.\"_ Mrs. Murphy heard cars coming closer.\n\n_\"I found a head in a pumpkin, remember?\"_ Pewter reminisced.\n\n_\"We've heard that story a hundred times,\"_ Tucker grumbled, heading her off. _\"This is just as weird. And we were first on the scene. I mean, after the crows and the killer.\"_\n\nThe sheriff's car rolled up. Sheriff Rick Shaw stepped out from the driver's side and Deputy Cynthia Cooper emerged from the other. Cooper\u2014Harry never called her Cynthia\u2014rented the farm next to Harry's farm, the old Jones homeplace. The two women had become friends.\n\nThe two law enforcement officers carefully pushed through the late-maturing corn, the leaves rattling, ears full on the stalks. They looked downward as they walked but were rows away from the footprints that Tucker had found.\n\nHarry and Fair stayed with their station wagon as instructed. They could see how carefully Rick and Cooper looked about, conferred, looked down. Then the two circled the scarecrow. The crows flew in loops around them.\n\nOne crow dive-bombed. _\"Leave us alone!\"_\n\nCooper ducked, then waved her hands at the noisy birds. \"Damn.\"\n\nRick, tempted to take out his sidearm and fire, did not. No need to alert the residents of Morrowdale or anyone else at this moment.\n\nAfter twenty minutes, they returned.\n\n\"Do you know who it is?\" Harry asked.\n\nCooper shook her head. \"The face is pretty well gone. But he's youngish, and had been in fairly good shape. Look, why don't you two go on home? I'll get a statement from you later. If there's anything of immediate importance, tell me now. Otherwise, you'll get caught up in the removal team, the forensic team, and, of course, the news team, as they know where we are every minute thanks to being able to listen in to all our calls.\"\n\nTucker barked from the car. _\"There's a drip of oil just up the road. And footprints in a corn row.\"_\n\n_\"Save your breath,\"_ Pewter, paws on the windowsill, counseled.\n\n_\"They'll find the footprints,\"_ Mrs. Murphy said. _\"The humans will crawl over that cornfield and the two of them will be down at Morrowdale questioning everyone and going through the barns and sheds.\"_\n\nHarry and Fair drove west down Garth Road, then turned toward Crozet, heading south. The Blue Ridge Mountains were now on their right. They passed a large cattle farm, Dunrovin, with Herefords in the pastures; they passed by rolling acres of grapes, the land dotted here and there with old farmhouses and the occasional new structure, always sited for the view.\n\n\"You okay?\" Fair asked.\n\n\"Yeah. You?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" They passed the apple shed now housing Chuck Pinell's leather shop. \"Yeah, but...\" His voice trailed off.\n\n\"Creepy.\" Harry shivered.\n\n\"People kill for lust, for love, in a fit of anger, or for money, and some because they are plain nuts,\" Fair said.\n\n\"You'd need to be pretty demented to take someone you've just killed and tie them up as a scarecrow, especially with Halloween just around the corner,\" Harry said. \"Or it could be a side show designed to cover up another crime. Think about it.\"\n\nFair couldn't take his eyes off the road, because it was two-lane and treacherous. \"I'd rather not.\" As he continued, his voice was firm, for his wife was more curious than the cats. \"You don't need to think that much about it either. It was a shock. An unfortunate discovery. We can say a prayer for the victim and then go about our business.\"\n\n\"Prayers are wonderful. So are results. Who speaks for an innocent victim? Until I know more, I'm assuming he's innocent.\"\n\nKnowing he was losing the battle against his wife's curiosity, he calmly replied, \"Just leave this to Rick and Cooper.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n_\"Boy, was that a fib.\"_ Pewter giggled.\n\nThe others laughed with her.\n\nHarry then said, \"Whoever did it has quite the imagination.\"\n\n\"The last thing this county or state needs is an imaginative killer,\" said Fair, \"especially if you're one of the victims.\"\n\n\"Fair, think about this: Don't most murderers try to dispose of their victim's bodies so no one finds them? Or if it's a crime of anger or passion, they run away and leave it, but they don't turn the corpse into a scarecrow or a public display. Whoever did this had time to plan it out.\"\n\n\"I guess.\"\n\n\"So I don't think it's a crime of passion.\"\n\n\"Unless the killer meant to make a mockery of the corpse.\" Fair braked at the stop sign at the Amoco station in Crozet. \"Dammit. Now you've got me thinking about it. Let's just let it all go.\"\n\n\"Mmm.\" Harry was already off and running.\n\n#\n\nOn the kitchen table, Pewter flopped on her side, her tail gently swaying. She thought this her best angle. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker thought otherwise.\n\nAs Harry opened the oven door to pop in a casserole, Pewter lifted her head.\n\n_\"I know you're making that for me.\"_ Her voice hit the dulcet-tone register.\n\nMrs. Murphy and Tucker, each curled up in their faux-sheepskin-lined animal beds by the door to the back porch, observed with amusement.\n\nMrs. Murphy imitated the gray cat's voice: _\"I am the most loving kitty in the world.\"_\n\nPointedly ignoring this, Pewter again sweetly meowed. _\"I could use a little tuna until the casserole is ready.\"_\n\nHarry closed the door, set the timer, then turned to behold the cat, whose head was now raised, tail moving a bit faster. \"Does smell good, doesn't it, Pewts?\" Harry said. She caressed the cat's silken fur.\n\n_\"I have suffered a terrible shock,\"_ Pewter panted, pushing her head into Harry's hand. _\"The sight of a shredded face. Crows devouring human fleshbefore being impertinent to me. If one of those vile birds had dropped even two feet, I could have leapt up and torn it to bits.\"_\n\n_\"You're laying it on a little thick.\"_ The dog raised her head.\n\n_\"Shut up, Bubble Butt. If she breaks out the cookies, you owe me big-time.\"_ Pewter rolled onto her back, cocking her head to one side.\n\n\"All right.\" Harry opened the treat cabinet, counted out two greenies, and gave them to Tucker. Next she opened a bag of cat treats in the shape of fishes. She gave half of these to Pewter, then walked over and gave the rest to Mrs. Murphy.\n\n_\"You owe me!\"_ Pewter cried in triumph as she gulped her tiny yellow fish.\n\nHarry\u2014unaware of the exchange, it sounded like meows and catcalling to her\u2014walked back to her husband's small office in the old farmhouse.\n\n\"Forty-five minutes,\" she told him.\n\n\"Huh.\" He looked up from the screen. \"Okay.\"\n\n\"Work?\"\n\nFair was the best equine veterinarian in central Virginia.\n\nHe smiled sheepishly. \"No. That's the trouble with the Internet. Easy to get sidetracked.\"\n\n\"And?\" She came up behind him, placing her hands on his broad shoulders.\n\nNot an inch of fat on the man.\n\n\"Uh, well, I've been kind of reading about bizarre murders. This website has examples going back to the eighteenth century. Really weird things, like duels fought in costumes or heads put on London Bridge with fake crowns. I guess that's political. But here's one from Wisconsin in the 1850s that caught my eye: A guy would kill men for no particular reason, or at least one no one could find, and he'd put them in a boat, push it out onto Lake Michigan, and set it afire. A Viking funeral. His victims were all men he had admired.\"\n\n\"Sometimes I wonder when I hear or read these things whether anyone is normal.\"\n\nFair leaned back in his chair. \"I guess that's debatable.\" He rolled his chair around to face her, the rollers clicking on the hardwood floor. \"I guess I can't fuss at you. Sometimes I'm a little too curious myself.\"\n\nShe kissed his cheek. \"Makes me feel better,\" she said, then headed to the kitchen.\n\nHe followed the wonderful aroma of her chicken casserole, her mother's recipe.\n\n\"That scent brings back so many memories,\" Harry said. \"And, hey, Halloween is what, two and a half weeks away? More memories.\"\n\n_\"Heads in pumpkins,\"_ Pewter blathered.\n\nTucker listened, then put her head back on her paws. _\"I thought they were about to discuss food. They'd be much better off focusing on things that matter rather than random corpses.\"_\n\nThe tiger cat silently agreed as she left her own bed to curl up with the corgi.\n\nBoth animals felt the chill of premonition.\n\n#\n\nThe day after the grisly discovery, the temperature dropped twenty degrees and rains came. Like all farmers, Harry had a rain plan. There were the chores that one did no matter the weather, and then there were those set aside for downpours.\n\nThe tack room in the old barn doubled as her office. If she had fixed up an office in the house, she knew she'd bother Fair or vice versa. The tack room made sense plus she could smell the leather, the horses, and their sweet feed. She liked sitting in the old knotty-pine room, the size of two good stalls, twenty by twenty-four feet. One wall held saddle racks and bridle holders. Under those items rested her personal tack trunk, as well as her husband's. Each horse stall also had a tack trunk in front of it, carrying items Harry felt should be separated from the main tack room. And each tack trunk hid treats: dried apples, special horse cookies. When a lid was lifted, the nickering started.\n\nAt fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature hit the perfect mark for the horses. Most of them were turned out in the rain, which was now steady but soft. Once on the other side of the equinox, Harry switched her schedule, bringing the horses in at night and turning them out during the day. Horses needed to move about.\n\nPewter, splayed out on Harry's tack trunk, which was covered with a lush saddle pad, had no such inclination. Tiny snores emitted from her body. Mrs. Murphy, wide awake, sat on the desk surface just inches from her human, who was trolling the Internet and considering seed purchases for the spring. If Harry ordered now, she would benefit with a ten percent discount from Southern States, the large supplier. She would always double-check with Augusta Co-op to see if those prices were better.\n\nBrow furrowed, chin resting on her hand, Harry scrolled through various seed types as the tiger cat peered at the screen, too.\n\nTucker, knocked out in her plaid bed under the desk, was as oblivious as Pewter.\n\nAn old massive teacher's desk, painted hunter green, a tall wooden file cabinet, and two director's chairs as well as the wooden teacher's chair in front of the desk took up the space opposite the saddle wall.\n\n\"I can't believe this,\" Harry said to Mrs. Murphy. \"They say they've developed a winter-resistant Bermuda grass and it's only $123.50 per hundredweight. First, I don't believe it. Second, that is an outrageous price. Bermuda grass isn't as good as alfalfa or orchard grass.\"\n\n_\"Then why use it?\"_ The cat had a practical turn of mind.\n\nHearing the clear meow, Harry looked into the bright green eyes. \"I love you, pussycat.\"\n\n_\"I love you, too,\"_ the cat replied as the attractive forty-one-year-old woman returned to her task.\n\n\"It's the terrible summers we're having, Murphy. That's what makes Bermuda grass useful. We now need some kind of forage that can withstand the heat and drought conditions. Unfortunately, it dies in the winter. It looks as though fescue, orchard grass, and timothy die in summer's searing heat, but they do not. They burn off, or wilt. The pastures are brown, but with a bit of moisture or a snowy winter, those grasses pop back up. Of course, clover really holds water in nodules.\" She nattered on, captivated with grass crops, as she had been since she was a tiny girl following her father around the farm.\n\nWhile not enraptured by grasses, legumes, or corn, the tiger cat proved a good listener. Corn appealed to her because it brought in mice, foxes, and other animals seeking the high calories. Then she remembered the scarecrow and the crows.\n\nBoth Harry and Mrs. Murphy looked up when they heard a motor, then a door slam. Harry hurried outside to catch whomever it was before they ran through the rain to the back door.\n\n\"Coop, I'm in the barn,\" Harry hollered.\n\nThe tall blonde deputy smiled and hurried into the barn. \"Can you believe how much cooler it is all of a sudden?\"\n\nAs she walked down the center aisle to the tack room, Harry replied, \"October.\"\n\nOnce inside, Cooper sank into a director's chair. She leaned over to peer under the desk.\n\n\"So much for Tucker being a guard dog.\"\n\nHarry laughed. \"She really is dead to the world, isn't she?\" Then she indicated the fat gray cat on the tack trunk. \"Another one.\"\n\n\"You need to tie a roller skate under Pewter's stomach.\"\n\n\"Coop, that's a great idea.\"\n\nMrs. Murphy giggled.\n\n\"How was church this morning?\" Cooper inquired. \"I overslept.\"\n\n\"Herb gave a really good sermon, as always. He talked about harvesttime and read some passages from the New Testament about gathering. He always holds my interest.\"\n\n\"He makes it real. Not a bunch of rules.\" Cooper rented the Reverend Herb Jones's homeplace, as the pastor of St. Luke's Lutheran Church had moved in to the beautiful vicarage on the church grounds.\n\n\"Can you imagine building St. Luke's? This used to be the Wild West. The Monacans\"\u2014Harry mentioned an Indian tribe\u2014\"weren't happy to see us.\"\n\n\"Still aren't, I bet,\" Coop said.\n\n\"Small wonder.\" Harry inhaled. \"Anyway, Albemarle County didn't really start rolling until after the Revolutionary War. That's when the first stone was laid for St. Luke's. Don't you love the church building that evolved?\"\n\n\"I do. I love people that evolve, too.\" Coop sighed.\n\n\"Okay, what's on your mind?\" Harry knew her friend and neighbor well enough to tell from the tilt of the conversation that Coop was turning something over in her mind.\n\n\"University of Virginia football, for one. Every time there's a home game, it's one scrape after another, plus we have to really keep our eyes out for the kids who are flat-out loaded. Hey, I was in college once, too. I don't mind if you get drunk. Everyone has to learn that one, how to handle the bottle, but I don't want them behind the wheel of a car.\"\n\n\"That's not going to change. Do you know who the scarecrow is yet?\"\n\n\"No. We found a class ring.\" Cooper leaned closer. \"The crows had eaten the flesh from his fingers and hands. It slipped off. Actually, crows like shiny things. If we hadn't gotten there when we did, that Virginia Tech ring would be in a nest somewhere.\"\n\n\"Did it have initials and a year inscribed?\"\n\n\"J.H., 1998.\"\n\n\"Did you find anything else?\"\n\n\"Nothing. Pockets empty. But we'll get an ID soon enough. Well, I speak too soon. But the faster you have an ID, the easier some links of inquiry are. For all we know, the killer is in Paraguay by now.\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\" Harry leaned forward.\n\n\"Actually, Harry, I don't either.\"\n\n\"I'll see that scarecrow forever. The sight itself was unpleasant enough, but the whole idea of it is really disturbing, you know?\"\n\n\"I do.\" Cooper sat quietly for a moment. \"Pewter snores.\"\n\n\"Yes, she does.\" Harry laughed.\n\n_\"No one wants to sleep next to her,\"_ Mrs. Murphy informed them to no avail.\n\n\"Where's Fair?\"\n\n\"He got an emergency call. Sometimes that man works around the clock. It's a good thing he loves what he does.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Cooper chimed in.\n\n\"The horrible part of police work, like finding a corpse scarecrow, doesn't get to you?\" Harry wondered.\n\n\"I can't say that finding murder victims thrills me, but finding their killer does.\"\n\n\"You know I read the paper, magazines. There are articles claiming that there are identifiable traits in children who grow up to become violent. Some writers even suggest putting them away before a crime has been committed.\"\n\n\"Even if we could violate individual rights that way, there would still be murders,\" Cooper stated.\n\n\"The human condition?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, yes.\"\n\n#\n\nPulling his veterinary truck up to the house that Sunday evening, Fair opened the truck's door, then got out and wearily leaned against it.\n\nTucker, hearing the motor, dashed out the house's animal door to greet him. _\"Hi, Pop. I missed you. I'm glad you're home.\"_\n\nThe tall man bent down to pet the dog. \"Hey, buddy.\"\n\n_\"You're covered in blood and you're sad and tired. Can I help?\"_ Tucker implored him with her soft brown eyes.\n\nFair stroked the smooth head once more before standing. Taking a deep breath, he walked to the house.\n\nIn the kitchen, Harry heard his footfall but didn't look up as she stuffed a Cornish hen. \"First frost tonight, I think.\"\n\n\"Feels like it.\"\n\nShe turned and took in his bloodied, bedraggled appearance. \"Oh, no! Honey, is the horse all right?\"\n\nHe sank into a kitchen chair. \"Couldn't save her. She'd nicked her aorta. By the time Paul Diaz found her out in the pasture, she'd already lost so much blood. What a beautiful filly.\" He rested his head in his hands. \"The Medaglia d'Oro filly.\"\n\n\"Oh, no.\" Harry washed her hands. \"Big Mim had such hopes for her.\"\n\nMedaglia d'Oro was a Thoroughbred stallion with a big career. Even in these hard economic times, his stud fees had been creeping up, and Big Mim had selected a mare to breed to him. He'd been siring winners on the track. The Queen of Crozet, as she was called behind her back and even to her face, had a knack for breeding, whether for steeplechasing or flat racing. It ran in her family. Her mother had it, too, and Big Mim passed it on to her daughter, Little Mim, who had recently given birth to a boy. Perhaps the magic would pass to him.\n\n\"That filly was one of the most correct horses I've ever seen. We all thought she was bound for greatness.\"\n\nComing from Fair, that meant something.\n\n\"Is Big Mim okay?\"\n\nHe thought a moment. \"She's a horsewoman. She accepts fate. But she's upset. Seeing any animal you love die...\" He shrugged.\n\nHarry put her arms around him. \"I know you did your best. I'm so sorry, honey.\"\n\n\"The poor girl was down in the pasture. She'd lost so much blood, she couldn't stand up, so I ran out, cleaned the wound, and she died while I was stitching her up. If she'd lived, I think we could have rolled her onto a canvas and dragged her into the barn, gotten her in a stall. I was prepared to give her massive transfusions and drip antibiotics into her. Whatever it took.\"\n\n\"Big Mim would have sat up with you.\" Harry warmed at the thought of the svelte septuagenarian sitting in the aisle, wrapped in a blanket.\n\n\"She would; Paul would, too. I think even Jim\"\u2014he named Big Mim's husband, who was not a horse person\u2014\"would have taken a turn.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\" She kissed him. \"You are such a good veterinarian. Such a good man. I love that you care.\"\n\nHe kissed her hand. \"Most of us do. A person should only go into medicine, veterinary or human, if they really care.\"\n\n\"Well, that's a subject for a long discussion, and my money is on the vets.\" She kissed his cheek again.\n\n\"Let me get out of these clothes, shower. I'll throw them in the washer.\"\n\n\"Fair, how did it happen?\"\n\n\"No idea. Honestly, honey, if I knew how half my patients did the stuff they did to themselves, I would be a genius. Horses are pretty careful animals but they can do the dumbest things sometimes, and she was young.\" He smiled. \"That doesn't help.\"\n\n\"Doesn't for us either.\" Harry stopped. \"Except now that I am officially middle-aged, I pray the young will be a little wild, take some crazy chances, think the unthinkable.\"\n\nHe stood up. \"You still do. Every now and then, I really have no idea what's going on upstairs.\" He tapped his head with his forefinger.\n\n_\"He's right,\"_ Pewter, in her kitchen bed, remarked to Mrs. Murphy, who sprawled in Tucker's bed as the dog followed Fair out of the room.\n\n_\"Poor Fair.\"_ Mrs. Murphy ignored Pewt's comment about Harry\u2014not because it would start an argument, but because she knew it was true.\n\n_\"Tucker will cheer him up,\"_ said Pewter.\n\n_\"We could, too,\"_ said the tiger cat. _\"We could take our catnip mouse in the bedroom and throw it around. Fair always laughs when we do that.\"_\n\nPewter was firm. _\"I'm not getting out of this bed unless food is involved.\"_\n\n_\"Right.\"_ Mrs. Murphy smiled at her friend.\n\nHarry slid the two small Cornish hens into the oven. She'd made a salad earlier. Neither she nor Fair ate heavy rich foods and this would be a good supper for them. Also, Harry lacked the time to prepare complicated meals.\n\nThe wall phone rang.\n\nShe wiped her hands on a dish towel and picked it up. \"Haristeen.\"\n\n\"Cooper.\"\n\n\"Hey, if you haven't eaten supper, come on back. I'll have plenty.\"\n\n\"Date tonight.\"\n\n\"You stopped by here and you didn't tell me that? I am wounded, deeply wounded,\" Harry teased.\n\n\"Forgot. It's a first date. We'll see. I'm just glad I have a night off. I've worked the last three weekends.\"\n\n\"The county really needs to hire more people, don't they?\"\n\n\"No money. I called to tell you, since you and Fair found him: We have an ID on the scarecrow.\"\n\n\"That was fast.\"\n\n\"The ring really helped, and we have super people sitting behind those computers and making calls. I don't think people in the county have any idea how good their sheriff's department really is.\"\n\n\"It's kind of like making a will. No one thinks about it until they have to, I guess. So?\"\n\n\"Joshua Hill, graduated from Tech in 1998. Accounting major. Worked for a large firm in Richmond for four years, then hung out his own shingle in Farmville, where he quickly built up a large clientele. Unmarried. Hobbies: fly-fishing, country music concerts.\"\n\n\"How did you get so much information so quickly?\"\n\n\"Caitlin did,\" said Coop, referring to one of the criminologists on the staff, a fantastic researcher. \"She went online, got the 1998 yearbook, and started looking. Even though our victim was torn up, we had a decent description of height, weight, approximate age, and hair color, and she narrowed it down to a few possibilities. Then she started calling places where the potential matchups worked. Josh didn't come into his office on Friday, nor did he call, which his assistant found odd but she wasn't overly concerned. I'm going down there Tuesday. Haven't seen Farmville in a long time, and I hear Longwood University has grown. It's a pretty school.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is.\" Harry paused. \"Accountants don't get themselves murdered too often, do they?\"\n\n\"No. This is a curious case.\"\n\n\"Who's the date?\" Harry just had to know.\n\n\"Barry Betz, new batting coach for UVA. First year here. This guy has the sweetest smile. He lights up a room.\"\n\n\"Hope it's fun. I'd go out with him just because of his name.\" Harry smiled. \"Thanks for calling me.\"\n\nFair walked in, clean, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. When he sat down, she told him about Josh, the dead accountant.\n\n\"Maybe he was cooking the books,\" said Fair, after devouring half of the Cornish hen Harry had cooked for dinner.\n\n\"If that's a motive, wouldn't there be so many more dead people in America, especially in certain professions and industries?\" she remarked, gazing at him across the table.\n\n\"You've got a point there.\" Fair was feeling better and so was Tucker, wedged between his slippered feet.\n\n\"Sometimes I think about why people commit crimes, not the impulsive ones but the premeditated kind,\" Harry said. \"I bet once you're free from society's rules or an ideology, anything is possible. The world is your oyster.\"\n\n\"Never thought of it that way.\" He stopped for a second. \"This hen is wonderful.\"\n\n\"Oh, thanks. Miranda's recipe.\" Harry knew any recipe from Miranda would be delicious. \"It's kind of like offense and defense. The criminal is the offense, so that split-second advantage is his. He knows what he will do. The law has to react.\"\n\nShe neglected to add that the law could only react if they knew what was going on.\n\n#\n\n\"I ought to arrest you, throw the book at you!\" Cooper shouted at Harry two days later, on the street outside Joshua Hill's office in Farmville.\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Stalking?\"\n\n\"I came to shop. You have no grounds for suspicion.\"\n\nThe attractive police officer shook her head. \"Harry, how can you look in the mirror after a lie like that?\"\n\n\"Farmville is famous for its furniture warehouses. I especially like Number 9, so named since all the warehouses had numbers on the outside, easy to see. And come on, Coop, you know I've been wanting to get down here for months. It's been one thing after another.\"\n\nCalmed down a bit, Cooper replied, \"You didn't have to come today. You want to know what I found out at Hill's office, and it was a big zero.\"\n\n\"His assistant wouldn't talk?\"\n\n\"No.\" The lean woman put her elbows on the hood of her unmarked car, called a slicktop. \"She kind of just answers the phone. She has a million pictures of her grandchildren on her desk. It's fair to say she isn't overly involved in her work.\"\n\n\"But she did note that her boss hadn't called in?\"\n\n\"Yes, but she also said a lot of times he worked at home, or he called on clients at their offices.\"\n\n\"Did she give you a client list?\"\n\n\"Harry!\"\n\n\"Hey, you wouldn't be on this case if I hadn't found the body.\" Though she knew this wasn't one hundred percent true, Harry still pressed her point. \"And murder is a lot more exciting than picking up drunk frat boys who then puke all over the back of your squad car.\"\n\n\"No drunk has ever puked in my car.\"\n\n\"Now who's the liar?\"\n\nCooper took out her service revolver. \"I put this to their temple, and tell them if they throw up in my car, I will blow their brains out.\"\n\n\"I can see how that might work.\"\n\n\"One time,\" the cop mused, \"I had to pull over 'cause a guy pretended he was going to be sick, and then he ran into the woods.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"Followed until he tripped and fell. It was pitch-black. Then he threw up. Drunks are truly disgusting.\"\n\n\"Mmm. Anything of interest in Hill's office?\"\n\n\"You enter into a small waiting room. There are a few nature prints, both there and in his office. His desk didn't have a single paper on it. I'll get the Prince Edward County Sheriff's Office to go over it all.\" Cooper gave out just enough information to tease Harry.\n\n\"You'd think an accountant would have piles of papers on his desk,\" said Harry.\n\n\"Or some, anyway,\" Coop agreed. \"Though clients send so much stuff through email.\"\n\n\"Was his computer in the office?\"\n\n\"Yes. Obviously, I can't take it without jumping through all the proper legal hoops, but I've already set that in motion. A forensic accountant could find out if Hill was doing anything suspicious. Anything you put into a computer can be dug out. Best to not put it there in the first place. Of course, I don't know that this murder has anything to do with numbers. Truth is, I don't know what this murder is about at all. Usually, I get a hunch.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to know what I found in Number 9 warehouse?\"\n\nCooper gave her a sharp look. \"If you did find something, you'll complain about the price.\"\n\n\"Follow me.\"\n\nHarry climbed back in her Volvo station wagon. She'd parked outside Hill's office once she'd cruised through her favorite warehouse so her excuse for being in Farmville wouldn't be a total fib.\n\n\"Why should I follow you to see furniture?\"\n\n\"Cooper, please follow me.\"\n\nSomething in Harry's voice made Cooper close the door to the slicktop, turn the key, and tag behind her neighbor.\n\nOnce at the warehouse, Harry opened the showroom door for Cooper. \"Ready?\"\n\nCooper stepped inside and stood a moment. \"This place is huge.\"\n\n\"Four big floors, I think. But what I want you to see is right here on the first floor, the flashy showroom floor.\"\n\nBriskly walking, Harry reached the middle of the cavernous building. Pumpkins, mums, and Halloween witches overhead all drew attention to a stunning country kitchen with a solid oak table, easily seating twelve.\n\n\"Look.\"\n\nCooper followed Harry's forefinger to a figure in the corner of the display room, among ghosts, more pumpkins, and little goblins popping out of the pumpkins.\n\n\"Jesus.\" The officer whistled.\n\nIn the middle of this lively display was a scarecrow with a drab undershirt, old pants with a rope belt, worn-out work boots, the sole separating from the left one. A straw hat topped it off. An exact replica of Joshua Hill.\n\n#\n\nSquares of fabric and seed catalogues littered Cooper's desk at police headquarters. Peering at her computer screen, she scanned a list of clothing manufacturers.\n\nEyes watering, she clicked off her computer, got up, stretched, and went outside. She tapped out a long coffin nail, lit it, watched the sky shift colors.\n\nSometimes taking a smoke break cleared her mind. Along with an increased chance of lung cancer, she'd get better ideas. After a few thoughtful minutes, she ground out the stub, walked back in, tidied up her desk, and left for the day. She'd worked overtime this Tuesday but didn't mind.\n\nDriving home, she noticed the last of the day birds returning to their nests. A few bats were already out and about. She liked bats; they kept the bug population down.\n\nThinking about bugs and pests snapped Coop back to this strange scarecrow case. After Harry had pointed out the unsettling look-alike dummy, Coop had sent her on her way, then had gone to the store's office and asked to see their display person. In Coop's mother's day, that individual would have been called a window dresser regardless of what part of the store they decorated.\n\nThe display person was named Melinda and the young lady worked in the store full-time. Well groomed, well spoken, she was well dressed, good-looking.\n\nCooper was good at relaxing people. She sat the light-blonde-haired woman down in the middle of one of her own displays. After a bit of chitchat, she asked Melinda about the scarecrow.\n\n\"Don't you love the boots?\" she gushed. \"They aren't as easy to find as you might think and...\" She trailed off. \"Sorry. I get enthusiastic about these things.\"\n\n\"No, no, that's fine. But did you work with anyone else on that particular display?\"\n\n\"No. I do all the work here in Number 9. The guys help me move the furniture but that's it. Actually, I like that I can let my imagination go.\"\n\n\"Would you have any way of knowing if someone asked specifically about that scarecrow?\"\n\n\"No. No one asked me, but, Officer Cooper, there's a great volume of foot traffic through these warehouses, especially on the weekends. People come from all over Virginia, even from out of state. Lots of volume.\"\n\n\"Did you have any particular inspiration for the clothing?\"\n\nThe young lady thought for a moment. \"No. I mean, just the scarecrows I saw as a child.\" She grinned. \"Can't be a scarecrow without a big straw hat.\"\n\n\"Would you mind giving me a list of where you bought the pants, the shirt, the boots, and the hat?\"\n\n\"Not at all. If you wait a minute, I can print it out for you.\" Melinda hurried to her office, returning to Cooper in ten minutes, just enough time for the deputy to see an end table she wanted.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Cooper said as she quickly perused the list Melinda had given her. \"I guess anyone could buy this clothing.\"\n\n\"That's the idea.\" Melinda smiled.\n\nCooper smiled back. \"I won't take up much more of your time. Did you know Joshua Hill?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Do you live in Farmville?\"\n\n\"No. I live on the eastern edge of Buckingham County and drive in. I'd like to move down here when I can afford it. May I ask you a question? What's this about?\"\n\n\"Friday, October 11, Josh Hill, who had an accounting business near here, was murdered in Albemarle County. His dead body was found on Saturday. It was a big football weekend. Didn't make the front page of the papers until Monday.\"\n\n\"That's horrible.\"\n\n\"He was dressed just like your scarecrow here.\"\n\nMelinda's eyes popped. \"How awful.\"\n\n\"Well, yes, but it must have been a lot of work to dress him up, I would think.\"\n\nMelinda paused. \"The straw man took me about an hour to get all the clothes on, then make a head, paint on features. He's not exactly scary or gruesome. I mean, a scarecrow isn't, but I think a human one would be awful. I wish I could help you, but anyone could have come in and seen my scarecrow, and the clothing isn't unique or anything.\"\n\n\"Well, I've taken up enough of your time.\" Cooper handed her her card. \"If you should think of something or if someone as to come in here and seem really focused on your display, let me know.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nLater, Cooper replayed that conversation. She felt the young woman was telling the truth. It had been a shot in the dark, but that's what she did. Lots of shots in the dark, lots of scraps of paper, old receipts, chewing gum wrappers, computer records, if she could get them. The endless gathering of data, most of it useless. But it only takes one perfect clue to point you in the right direction.\n\nAfter being sent home, Harry drove leisurely through Dillwyn, then west through Scottsville on Route 6. At Route 151 she turned right, right again on Route 250 to head home to Crozet. The late afternoon sun's magical light enhanced every field and stone wall, even those raggedy few gas stations on the way.\n\nTuesday, October 15, was just a gorgeous day, the kind that makes one forget the suffocating heat of summer or the soon-to-come frigid winter days.\n\nHester Martin's stand stood up ahead, decorated even more lavishly than usual. Two farm trucks were unloading produce and there stood Hester, in witch's costume, directing the men. Next to Hester a well-groomed black mini schnauzer kept an eye on the men.\n\nLaughing, Harry parked in the lot.\n\n\"Woo woo,\" Harry called out as she got out of the car.\n\nHester turned and picked up her broom, to shake at her.\n\nThe deliveryman closest to Hester ducked.\n\n\"Olin, don't you dare drop one apple,\" she admonished the man.\n\nJake, in the bed of his truck, leaned over with another wooden crate of plump green apples. \"You fly with that broom, Hester?\"\n\n\"I've got my pilot's license,\" she sassed. Then, to Harry, she said, \"Girl, you just go on and pick out whatever you want. I can't leave these boys for one minute. They need constant supervision. Heidi is helping.\" Hester indicated the schnauzer. \"She belongs to my old friend Cindy Walters, who's around here somewhere.\"\n\nJake rolled his eyes, saying nothing.\n\nThe other fellow on the ground, Greg Perez, carefully carried pumpkins to a pile he was building. No point in having Hester cuss him out, plus she might give him a big tip.\n\nInside the other truck, his partner, Stafford Schikel, groaned as he lifted another major pumpkin. \"Hester, these are the best pumpkins you've ever seen.\"\n\n\"Big,\" she replied simply. \"Did you cheat and put grow dust on them?\"\n\n\"No. You know we do everything organic. We lose a lot to worms, birds, and rats because of it and you.\" He grinned. \"You only buy organic.\"\n\n\"You charge me enough.\" She hadn't put her broom back.\n\n\"You want organic pumpkins, you pay.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Yeah.\" She pushed her pointed hat a bit to the side. \"You know I go by your fields, I get out and smell everything. I run my fingers over the skins.\"\n\n\"We know.\"\n\nShe'd told them this ad infinitum.\n\nOlin picked up another apple crate and asked, \"Ever find anything?\"\n\n\"Not at either of your farms, but let us never forget the owner of the organic store in Charlottesville who got busted for lying. His stuff was no different than Food Lion's.\"\n\nGreg couldn't help but tweak her. \"Food Lion is a good company, and, Hester, not everybody can afford organic produce. It is more expensive.\"\n\n\"You are what you eat,\" she forcefully replied. \"If you care about your body, you eat right. No processed foods. No foods that have suffered chemical sprays. That's that.\"\n\nHarry joined the conversation. \"Well, I am eating this fresh lettuce and I will buy one of your super pumpkins. Think I'll make a big jack-o'-lantern.\" She smiled.\n\n\"Fellas, excuse me.\" Hester walked back inside to the cash register.\n\nLolly Currie quickly put down her e-book reader.\n\n\"Now, girl,\" said Hester to Harry, \"it's time to buy those hayride tickets.\" Hester reached next to the old cash register as Lolly slipped out two large glossy tickets decorated with an illustration of goblins riding on a hay wagon drawn by spectral horses. \"Two?\" Hester asked.\n\nLolly piped up: \"We have lots.\"\n\n\"I bought my tickets,\" Harry reminded Hester, \"but I'll see if I can sell some.\"\n\n\"Hmm. So you did.\"\n\n\"Shameless.\" Cindy Walters laughed as she pointed her forefinger at Hester. \"You'll chain people to the pumpkin stand before you'll let them go without a ticket.\"\n\n\"Well.\" Hester blushed, then introduced Cindy. \"Harry, this is Cindy Walters from Florida and this little tyke is Heidi.\"\n\n_\"Hello.\"_ The schnauzer barked.\n\n\"We met at an environmental conference years ago. Been friends ever since.\" Cindy checked the clock on the wall. \"I'd better push off.\"\n\n\"Oh, stay the night,\" Hester offered.\n\n\"If I get into North Carolina I can make Florida the next day.\"\n\n\"Wait! You can't go without buying a Halloween Hayride ticket.\"\n\n\"And I want to buy your best pumpkin,\" Harry quickly interjected.\n\n\"I'll have Greg pick out the biggest and put it in your station wagon. How's the mileage on that?\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Harry. \"Of course, newer cars get even better.\"\n\n\"Save where you can so you can help the library.\" She grinned. \"Our two-year book fund is $175,000.\"\n\nHarry laughed. \"Hester, you're relentless.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I know, but this is critical to not just Crozet but the western part of the county. For years Crozet was always the weak sister, but we're coming up. This library means a lot. Mike Marshall, the Crozet reporter, is coming on the hayride. You know he'll write about Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker. Cindy, don't you dare walk out of here without a ticket.\"\n\nMike Marshall was the editor and publisher of the _Crozet Gazette_ , so if he covered it, it was news.\n\n\"Hester, I'm touched that you remember my cats' and dog's names.\"\n\n\"Family.\" She exited with Harry. \"Greg, pick the biggest and prettiest pumpkin for Harry.\"\n\n\"You bet.\"\n\nCindy walked with them, ticket in her hand.\n\nJust then Buddy Janss pulled up front, crates of late sweet corn in the back of his well-used pickup. A minute later, he walked toward them.\n\nHester turned to Buddy and fired away: \"How many acres of late-maturing sweet corn did you plant?\"\n\n\"Just like I told you last week and the week before, I planted two hundred acres. And those cool September nights just make the late sweet corn taste like candy. I harvest it twenty days after the first silks appear, I put it in huge tanks of ice water, and I bring it to you.\"\n\n\"Mmm?\" She raised her carefully plucked eyebrows. \"Long, long summer. You were smart to plant so late.\"\n\n\"Well, I planted corn every two weeks throughout the summer, but I waited extra long for the Silver Queen. Read my _Farmers' Almanac_. Better than the National Weather Service.\" He grinned, revealing a slight gap between his front teeth, as he winked at Harry.\n\n\"Odd, isn't it?\" Harry agreed. \"I find the same thing and I read it every morning.\"\n\nA few cars rolled by. One turned in, lured by the display.\n\n\"A new customer.\" Hester beamed as she walked over to welcome the young man.\n\nBuddy shook his head, smiling. \"She asks me the same thing again and again.\"\n\n\"Yep.\" Harry crossed her arms over her chest. \"If there's one tiny deviation in your story or one of mine from one week to the other, she's like a chicken after a grub.\"\n\n\"Just her way.\" He shrugged his massive shoulders.\n\n\"Some people can't fully trust,\" said Harry. \"They can like you but they can't accept what you tell them. They have to see it for themselves or check and double-check, just like Hester. Buddy, can you imagine how exhausting that is?\"\n\n\"Never thought about it.\"\n\n\"Means you can't learn from other people, your world becomes very narrow. I guess I thought about it as a kid because I had a great-uncle like that. After all these years, I now believe that trust is the bedrock of a community and it's the only way we can progress. Each of us doesn't have to invent the wheel.\"\n\n\"Harry, how do you think of this stuff?\" He took off his ball cap, revealing tightly curled jet-black hair.\n\n\"On my tractor. Bouncing along jogs my brain.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"I'm on my tractor more than you, and I think about how dry the soil is, what is the soil temperature, should I check it, and what's the chance of rain.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but your tractor is like a Rolls-Royce. Doesn't bounce.\" She grabbed his hand and squeezed it while they both had a laugh.\n\nHester returned just as Tazio Chappars drove onto the crushed-stone parking lot. Brinkley, her yellow Lab, sat in the car, with the windows rolled down.\n\nTazio, now in her early thirties, became more lovely with each year. Harry liked her very much but had to wonder what her secret was: great bone structure or an unerring fashion sense? Whatever it was, Harry felt she didn't have it, but she muddled along and in extremis would smack a full coat of makeup on her face. Fortunately, she, too, had good bone structure.\n\n\"Taz!\" Harry waved as the gorgeous architect walked in. \"It is true! Hester attracts the best people.\"\n\nUnder his breath, Buddy muttered, \"And the most beautiful.\"\n\n\"Why, thank you, Buddy.\" Harry punched him lightly in the stomach.\n\n\"Violence! No violence at my stand.\" Hester joined in the fun.\n\n\"You look happy,\" Harry remarked to Taz.\n\n\"I just got the green light to redesign the Western Albemarle High School library.\" As she looked Hester's way, Tazio's gorgeous features displayed the beauty of her African Italian heritage. \"And I thank you for that,\" she said.\n\nThe older lady smiled. \"I didn't do a thing.\"\n\n\"Yes, you did. You fought for me to work on the new Crozet Library, and what a difference that has made in my career. I thought I'd be knocking out development houses forever and then I prayed I would be once the crash came. I can never repay you, Hester.\"\n\n\"Sure you can. Buy a pumpkin.\"\n\nThe neighbors and friends laughed, and Brinkley barked from the car, which set off Tucker in the Volvo.\n\nMore cars pulled in.\n\n\"Wow. Big day,\" Harry noted.\n\n\"I'd better go inside and help out Lolly at the cash register,\" Hester said. \"She's easily overwhelmed.\"\n\nWith a pumpkin in the back of the Volvo, Harry smiled all the way home. She glanced in her rearview mirror to see Hester still talking to Cindy and Heidi. Obviously, the good woman hadn't made it back into her store nor could Cindy get in her car.\n\nLater that evening, Cooper turned in to the driveway to Harry's farm. The lights were still on. She stopped her SUV at the barn just as Tucker rushed out to greet her. Both Harry's station wagon and Fair's truck were parked by the barn.\n\nAs Tucker accompanied her, she opened the screened porch door, then knocked on the kitchen door.\n\nWithin a minute, Fair, smiling, opened the door. \"Hello, neighbor.\"\n\n\"Hi, Fair. Forgive me for not calling first.\"\n\n\"Are you just coming home from work?\"\n\n\"Long day, but you know all about long days.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Madam is in the living room and I'm on my way to the barn, if you need me.\"\n\nCooper entered the simple well-proportioned room with high ceilings. The fireplace gave off an inviting scent: burning pear-wood. The cats lounged on the back of the sofa.\n\nHarry, board on her lap, was drawing.\n\nSetting that aside on the coffee table, she asked, \"Are you still mad at me?\"\n\n\"No. I got over being mad at you when you showed me the scarecrow at Number 9.\"\n\n\"Any luck?\"\n\nThe taller woman shrugged. \"No, but I didn't expect the decorator to come at me with a meat-ax. She was quite nice, actually.\"\n\n\"Isn't that weird? I mean, the exact outfit.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is.\"\n\n\"So what's next?\"\n\n\"Tracking down clients. Rick questioned everyone at Morrowdale the day you and Fair found the body on their property. They were horrified, but no one had driven out that way, so they hadn't seen it. Everyone on the farm was questioned.\" She sat down across from her friend.\n\n\"You have a lot of patience,\" Harry complimented her. \"You're dogged and determined.\"\n\n\"I have to be. I live next to you.\"\n\nHarry laughed. \"Hey, look at my little garden drawing. Maybe I'll get it right this time.\"\n\n\"You taught me to plan my garden in the fall or winter, and so I have. Along with trying to focus on this case, I'm going through the possibilities.\"\n\n\"Is there anything I can do to help?\"\n\n\"With my garden, I can always use your help. With the case, I live in fear.\"\n\n\"I'm not that bad.\"\n\n_\"Yes, you are,\"_ Mrs. Murphy said.\n\n\"Let's say you have a way of stumbling onto things like the Number 9 scarecrow today,\" said Coop. \"What if the killer had been the decorator? Or someone in there observed you studying the scarecrow? Someone involved in this murder. You can't take chances like that.\"\n\nHarry didn't reply.\n\n\"Harry?\"\n\n\"I know you're right.\"\n\n_\"Knowing Cooper is right doesn't mean she'll stop,\"_ said Pewter.\n\n\"We know so little,\" said Coop. \"This could be a revenge killing. If you dig enough into people's lives, you eventually find someone who can't stand them or someone who is unbalanced.\"\n\n\"Kind of scary,\" Harry mumbled.\n\n_\"Well, it's almost Halloween.\"_ Pewter giggled.\n\n\"I dug down a little deeper.\" Cooper crossed one leg over the other, pulled at her anklet to stretch her leg. \"Hill loved fly-fishing. Had a two-thousand-dollar fly rod. How can a fishing rod cost that much?\"\n\n\"Beats me.\" Harry held up her hands.\n\n_\"Me, too. I don't need one,\"_ Pewter bragged, lifting her head off her arm.\n\nTucker was astonished at such a bold-faced lie. _\"What? You can't fish.\"_\n\n_\"I didn't say I fished. I wait for Mom to open a can of tuna. Now, that's real fishing.\"_\n\nMrs. Murphy laughed at her gray friend.\n\n\"Two thousand dollars.\" Cooper dropped her crossed leg. \"Boxes of flies. He was very organized and had quite a few books on fishing, according to the team that searched his house today. Fishing was his passion in life, so it seems. On his computer we found what you would expect\u2014a list of clients, a list of other accounting firms and legal firms as well as IRS agents for his area. Pretty cut and dried. Oh, one strange thing: Hester Martin's name. No tagline, nothing, just 'Hester Martin' and the farm stand address, phone number, and her email.\"\n\n\"Did you talk to Hester about him?\"\n\n\"Drove over earlier today. She said she knew him some. He was a member of the Upper Mattaponi tribe. She seemed a little bit resentful at being questioned. I don't know. Maybe she was in a bad mood. That was the extent of it.\"\n\n\"Hester does attend those annual powwows. Every year she says she's going. Never says why or what happens.\" Harry thought a moment. \"She's not a tribe member, but she's so interested in proper use of the land, I think that's the real draw.\"\n\nCooper furrowed her brow. \"She told me she's always had an interest in the Virginia tribes. Her mother was a Sessoms, which is a Cherokee name.\"\n\nHarry drew a long breath. \"That's right. I think my mother once mentioned it back when I was in fifth grade.\"\n\n\"How can you remember fifth grade?\"\n\n\"Because that's when we learn about the peoples who were here before we came. I loved it.\"\n\n\"Anyway, that was that. Hester was shocked that such a nice fellow, as she put it, was killed. As far as she knew, he wasn't a crook. Said Josh Hill always treated her kindly.\"\n\n\"Coop, did you know there are eleven Virginia tribes?\"\n\n\"I do now. I started looking this stuff up to see if there might be any connection at all to Hill's bizarre death. It's terrible.\"\n\n\"His murder, sure,\" Harry responded.\n\n\"No. The way the Virginia tribes are pushed around. The Commonwealth only recognizes eight tribes and the federal government doesn't recognize Virginia tribes at all. It really stinks.\"\n\n\"That and much else.\" Harry sighed. \"I guess the feds didn't take responsibility until after the 1870s. After all the Indian Wars, they had to do something. And Virginians with Native American blood were denied official status by the federal government. Since the seventeenth century, many Virginia Indians had intermarried with European descendants. Every Sessoms I know has blue eyes, bright blue eyes like Hester. Anyway, this gets the feds out of any form of repayment or protections as near as I can tell.\"\n\n\"That doesn't let the Commonwealth off the hook,\" Cooper shrewdly said.\n\n\"Doesn't.\" Harry returned to the murder. \"Well, you know a bit more than yesterday.\"\n\n\"Just enough to make this more confusing.\" Cooper suddenly smiled. \"But you know, sooner or later, a picture emerges. You get a feeling. For all the legwork in the world, for all the computer checks and cross-checks, I still rely on that hunch. It will come.\"\n\n\"Maybe it has something to do with fish. A two-thousand-dollar fly rod.\"\n\n\"Harry, you can be really awful.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n_\"So true!\"_ Pewter sat up to give her remark emphasis.\n\n#\n\nThat same evening, glittering stars pierced the night. Looking out the tall, high windows of the old schoolhouse, Hester Martin could vaguely make out the obelisk in the cemetery a mile down the tertiary state road. Occasionally a truck would pass. She thought she heard a coyote.\n\nSitting down at one of the small school desks, she took out her Moleskine notebook, flipped it open, pulled out a pen. Before she could write down her thoughts, a car pulled up outside, its headlights illuminating the windows, then both the motor and the lights turned off.\n\nWithin seconds, Tazio entered the lovely room accompanied by her yellow Labrador retriever, the popular Brinkley.\n\n\"Good to see you,\" said Hester. \"I know you're busy, what with your job and various committees.\"\n\n\"Hester, I always have time for you and it's important we run through the Halloween Hayride.\" Tazio sat in the desk across the aisle from Hester's.\n\nThe desks remained in rows just as they were in 1965, when the school was abandoned.\n\n\"Gets dark so early now,\" Hester remarked. \"Somehow it always affects me. Makes me sleepy.\" She laughed at herself.\n\n\"Makes me fat.\" Tazio ruefully smiled. \"I always put on weight in the winter. This year I am determined not to do it.\"\n\n\"Natural. It's a natural cycle.\"\n\n\"You never gain weight. Neither does Harry,\" Tazio said.\n\n\"With me it's high metabolism. That or worry. As to Harry, both her mother and father stayed slim. They worked hard, those people. So does Harry and so do you.\"\n\n\"Hard enough, but most of the time I'm sitting on my butt. If I go to a building site or walk through construction, that's about it. I need to join a gym.\"\n\n\"You look just fine. I wanted you to see these buildings from the inside. This one, the middle one, was literally the middle school. Has some lab equipment, not much. Everything these students got was already used, passed down. The books especially were worn.\" She thought a moment. \"Your outstanding work for the library is almost done. We still have to raise money but your architectural work is complete and so practical. That's why I wanted you to see this.\"\n\n\"Funny, I've driven by these schoolhouses from time to time but never stopped. I always wanted to.\"\n\n\"They're built to last.\" She pointed to the windows. \"So much natural light saved lighting money. When my mother was small, each of these buildings had a wood-burning stove smack in the middle. You can't see the hole for the flue, as when the stoves were removed the workmen patched the ceiling. Put in oil-fired heat. And since the county still pays the electric bill and fills up those old tanks, there is low heat here throughout the cold weather. The pipes don't freeze.\"\n\nTazio rose, walked to the back of the room, with Brinkley following her, and opened a door. \"Well, they put a bathroom in, too.\"\n\n\"Right around the time of World War One. That's what my mother said.\" Hester smiled, pulling an old-fashioned long key from her coat pocket, a grosgrain ribbon attached. \"Come here.\"\n\nTazio and Brinkley walked back. \"Wow, that's really old.\"\n\n\"Hold out your hand,\" Hester ordered, dropping the key into the young woman's outstretched palm. \"This key opens all the doors. It's the master key. I've had it for years.\" She held up her hand. \"Long story made short: I took it back in the eighties. Didn't trust the county commissioners or anyone else, really. Tazio, consider bringing these buildings back to life. Oh, it will take time, money, and lots of political organizing, but you of all people can imagine the possibilities if we saved the buildings' best features. No lowered ceilings.\"\n\nTazio looked around. \"For what purpose? It won't be used as a school again.\"\n\n\"I don't know about that. It's possible it could be the basis for a small private school or a museum. You'll have to fight for it.\"\n\n\"And you are assigning me this task?\" Tazio asked, eyebrows raised. \"Aren't you going to help?\"\n\n\"Yes, but\"\u2014she smiled weakly\u2014\"my brother died six years ago. Sometimes I think I'm not long for this world.\"\n\n\"Hester, I hope not.\" Tazio's voice registered concern.\n\nHester waved her hand. \"No one knows, do they? I could live to one hundred or be gone tomorrow. Now come along with me. Bring the doggy.\"\n\n_\"Thank you,\"_ Brinkley replied.\n\nThe three of them piled into Hester's SUV. \"Let me just review with you, briefly, the Halloween Hayride. I'll be in wagon one. You're the ringmaster. You've got to make sure our actors are in costume, go to their proper places. If anything is amiss, you fix it. I'm going to sit in hay and enjoy the show.\" She grinned.\n\nDriving slowly, Hester headed north on the winding road, Buddy's cornfields on her left behind and around the schoolhouses.\n\nShe turned to Tazio in the passenger seat and said, \"Okay, Frankenstein and Dr. Frankenstein will be in the schoolhouse. Goblins and ghosts that fly around will be in the dried-out cornfields. That ought to be scary, hearing the rustle.\"\n\n\"And it will be dark, too,\" said Tazio. \"I checked my calendar. It's a couple of days after the new moon.\"\n\n\"As you know, the ghosts and goblins will be lit from within. Oh, this ought to scare the devil out of people.\" Hester stopped between two huge trees on each side of the road. \"Jeepers Creepers will fly between the trees.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Tazio knew the order of events, but riding with Hester through the outdoor fright stations amplified how dramatic this year's hayride would be.\n\n\"We've got a cable to run between the trees. For the Headless Horseman\u2014but you know him. Your boyfriend.\"\n\n\"Well, yes,\" Tazio laughed.\n\n\"Now, here's a good one.\" The middle-aged lady stopped on the road, the stone retaining wall of the graveyard standing out against the night sky. \"Jason with his chain saw battles Count Dracula. Don't forget to make a convincing arm to come out of a grave.\"\n\n\"Already have it. We aren't using a real grave. I imagine the family would be upset.\"\n\n\"Mmm.\" Hester cast her eyes toward the obelisk and a few other tall statues. \"The big monuments\u2014families had big money back then, and you know, every one of them came to wrack and ruin. The names still fill the county voting registers but not much else. Ever notice how sometimes money makes people stupid?\"\n\nTazio laughed again. \"Among other things. But if things are too easy, I guess people lose their ambition.\"\n\n\"Oh, the Villions, the Huntleys, the Yosts, they either gambled it away, drank it away, or made really bad business decisions.\"\n\n\"Wine, women, and song?\" Tazio raised one eyebrow.\n\n\"I will give those families some credit. The women were beautiful, all married well. It was the men who went to hell in a handbasket. Well, anyway, on the other side of the graveyard you repel Dracula with a cross, and then just past you, Reverend Jones will be a monk with an electric torch guiding people to Mount Carmel Church. You can just see the little spire. Mount Carmel only has but so much money.\" She stopped. \"We are paying them well for the use of the rec hall. Always a good idea to keep on the sunny side of any church.\" She stopped talking, turned the truck down the farm road on the north side of the graveyard, backed out to return to the schoolhouses.\n\n\"Aren't there something like twenty-two thousand Christian sects, each with different ideas?\" Tazio asked.\n\n\"I don't know. I'm Catholic myself. Sometimes I believe it. Sometimes I don't. Mostly I love mass. But out here looking at the stars, that's my true church,\" Hester replied with great feeling.\n\n_\"It's mine,\"_ Brinkley piped up.\n\n\"I know what you mean,\" Tazio quietly agreed.\n\n\"Where'd you put the key?\"\n\n\"In my pants pocket. It's deeper than my coat's.\"\n\n\"Don't you lose that key. That's the master.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am, I won't.\"\n\n\"Good girl to call me ma'am. You always call a lady older than yourself ma'am.\"\n\nTazio laughed again. \"Hester, we do that in St. Louis, too.\"\n\n\"Miss it?\"\n\n\"Not really. I go home to see Mom and Dad but I don't think I could live in a big city anymore.\"\n\n\"Millions upon millions do.\" She pulled in to the parking lot, a flat dirt place, next to Tazio's car. \"That's another thing that scares me: How can the newcomers appreciate these buildings? They move down here to escape the city, but they bring their ways and they want efficiency, services, bottom-line kind of thinking. Spending money on these historic buildings would seem stupid to them.\"\n\n\"Maybe not,\" said Tazio, taking the bait. \"It's part of our history. No matter where you come from.\"\n\n\"Well.\" Hester slowed her speech. \"I hope you're right. My true dream is that eventually we can buy these from the county. Ha!\" She clapped her hands. \"Won't that be a fight! Will it help that you're mixed race? Yes. Politically it will help. You have such wonderful gifts, gifts few people possess. You could bring these buildings back to life. Wouldn't it be glorious to hear laughter inside them?\"\n\n\"Yes, it would,\" Tazio agreed.\n\nHester cut the motor, turned to face her. \"I know people think I'm weird.\"\n\nTazio didn't quite know what to say. \"You're different from most Virginia ladies.\"\n\n\"I speak my mind. I don't have the time for the minuet of politeness. Bores me.\"\n\n\"I certainly understand that.\" Tazio smiled, remembering what a jolt it was to move from Missouri to Virginia.\n\n\"Maybe I am weird. I get worked up about things, history, getting books into childrens' hands, bringing buildings back to life, righting old wrongs.\" She inhaled deeply. \"I get ideas like everyone worries about carbon emissions. What about the billions of people breathing out CO2? That has to damage the environment. I blurt out this stuff and then people think I'm weird. They don't want to think. That's the problem.\"\n\n\"It's painful to think, Hester.\"\n\nHester stared at her. \"But you do.\"\n\n\"Only after I've exhausted every other alternative.\"\n\nThis made Hester giggle. \"Sometimes I do that, too. Well, girl, I railroaded you into designing parts of the Crozet Library and now I'm railroading you again.\"\n\n\"You are,\" Tazio said honestly.\n\n\"Will you take this on?\"\n\n\"You know I will. But you have to work with me.\"\n\n\"I will, Taz, but things can happen. If something happens to me, you carry the ball, hear?\"\n\n\"Don't say that, Hester.\" She breathed deeply. \"But if anything happens to you, I will carry the ball and vice versa.\"\n\n\"Deal,\" Hester quickly answered.\n\nWhen Tazio and Brinkley drove away, Hester returned to the middle schoolhouse. Inside, she sat down, took out her notebook, and started to write, then paused. She walked up to the teacher's desk in the front of the room, pulled open a drawer, took out a yellowed square of paper, and wrote a name on it with her fountain pen. She'd just dropped a lot on Tazio. She knew that when the younger woman read this, her natural curiosity would do the rest. She returned it to the middle drawer, turned out the lights, and shut the door and locked it, for she had a backup key to the outside door. Hearing the satisfying click, she walked to her truck, then stopped a moment to study the stars. They'd been up there long before she was born and they'd be there long after she was gone. She found that comforting.\n\nTazio, driving home with Brinkley next to her, wrestled with emotion. Hester had touched her. She had a strong feeling that Hester must have a premonition of her death, and that the kind-hearted eccentric was passing the torch on to her.\n\n#\n\nTucker, left behind, mournfully watched as Susan Tucker, Harry's best friend, picked her up at six in the evening on Wednesday, October 16. Rushing from the house, Harry jumped into the Audi station wagon's passenger seat. Joined at the hip, friends since cradle days, these two discussed everything and everybody with each other daily. Of course, Harry had already told Susan about the scarecrow down at Farmville.\n\nAnd Susan, naturally, had commanded her friend to stay out of it.\n\n\"Thanks for picking me up,\" said Harry, closing the door to the station wagon. They almost always rode together to the St. Luke's vestry meeting.\n\n\"Gives us more time. Anyway, I'm not sure I trust you by yourself.\" Susan smiled.\n\n\"You never make a mistake.\"\n\n\"Finally you've realized that.\" Susan reached the state road at the end of the long gravel drive, looking both ways. \"Uh-oh, here comes Aunt Tally. Let's give her a wide berth.\"\n\nThe almost-101-year-old indomitable woman behind the wheel of her old Bronco beeped and waved, swerving slightly to the right but correcting herself, much to the gratitude, no doubt, of her passenger, her great-niece, Little Mim.\n\n\"Wonder where those two are going,\" said Harry. \"This has got to be the first time Little Mim has left the baby.\"\n\n\"She's a new mother. He's only three months old. It's good she's left him with Blair.\"\n\n\"He's a good father. Bet Big Mim is there.\"\n\n\"Harry, you got that right. The new grandmother\u2014wait, the _only_ grandmother in the world\u2014doesn't believe men can take care of babies. Well, in her defense, she said her husband never changed a diaper.\"\n\n\"They didn't back then.\" Harry knew that prior generations led more gender-defined lives.\n\n\"Plenty don't now, but in the main I think young men want to be involved. I remember my father at the end crying that he barely knew his children until he retired. Poor Dad. He did what men did. He worked his ass off and came home after we were asleep.\"\n\n\"Your father did work hard. He ran that lumberyard, and when you own the business, it owns you.\"\n\n\"You were lucky that you could farm with your father,\" Susan said without envy.\n\n\"I was. Mom was the librarian, so she would come home a little after I got home from school. We didn't have much money but we had a lot of love. My parents taught me a lot.\" She looked at Mount Tabor Presbyterian Church as they passed. \"They taught me not to be a Presbyterian.\"\n\n\"Harry!\"\n\nHarry laughed. \"Mom and Dad were generally open-minded people, but they did have their share of religious prejudice. If there had been a Church of England here, that's where they would have worshipped.\"\n\n\"Reminds me. You have your building-and-grounds notes for the vestry meeting?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Why?\"\n\n\"Because if there's ever an outlay of expenses, that's where it is,\" Susan said as she, too, eyed the lovely white Mount Tabor Church.\n\nThere was a bit of traffic on the narrow two-lane highway. People were driving home from work. In the morning and the evening, going could be slow.\n\n\"I never noticed that,\" Susan said, her voice rising.\n\n\"What? Mount Tabor is Mount Tabor. Really pretty.\"\n\n\"No. There's a Halloween scene on the grounds nearest the road.\"\n\nTwisting to look back, sure enough, Harry saw pumpkins, tied-up cornstalks, baskets of harvest, and a jolly-looking witch on a broomstick over a sickle moon. Actually, the broomstick used the midpoint of the moon for stability.\n\n\"So?\" Harry shrugged.\n\n\"Harry, pagan. Halloween is a pagan festival.\"\n\n\"It might have started that way,\" Harry said, \"but then, Christmas is a co-opted pagan festival. So this became All Hallows' Eve and the early church fathers could sleep soundly at night.\"\n\nSusan, who knew her history, maintained, \"Pagan. When have you ever seen a church with a Halloween display?\"\n\nHarry shrugged. \"I give Mount Tabor credit. It's fun.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I guess it is.\"\n\n\"Here we are,\" said Harry as Susan pulled the Audi into the Lutheran church's parking lot. \"No Halloween display at St. Luke's. Leaves are raked. Grounds are sleek. Am I doing a good job or what?\"\n\n\"Divine, darling.\"\n\n\"Well, it is our church.\"\n\nThe meeting took place in a twenty-by-thirty-foot room with a high ceiling. Built of native stone in the eighteenth century, St. Luke's emitted a feeling of peace, of thoughtfulness. And being Lutheran, it excelled in good works.\n\nThe Very Reverend Herbert C. Jones, a Vietnam veteran, deeply believed anyone could talk about Christ. One had to comfort one's fellow man. And he did, personally. His congregants did, too. St. Luke's provided tutoring for children in need. Also, their small soup kitchen had recently grown with the depression.\n\nThe Reverend Jones used innovative techniques to draw in his flock. Every October 4th, on St. Francis's Day, people brought their animals to the church for a blessing. This year's service had proved especially unusual in that a young woman brought a jar of worms. She had started a worm farm and wanted the reverend's blessing. The clergyman dutifully picked up the jar and blessed those worms as though they had been devoted dogs. We are all God's creatures.\n\nWhen reprimanded by a parishioner for keeping a saint's day\u2014\"leave that to the Catholics\"\u2014Herb took no offense. He merely replied that the saints were as good a model for Lutherans as they were for Catholics. And who could be a better example for all than St. Francis of Assisi?\n\nThe St. Luke's vestry board, six people, usually met the second Wednesday of each month.\n\nElocution, Cazenovia, and Lucy Fur, the Lutheran cats, invariably joined the proceedings.\n\nThese meetings generally ran smoothly until the group had to consider expenditures. Last year, the old church truck breathed its last. The unplanned expense of a new four-wheel-drive truck had sent the church treasurer, Neil Jordan, into a tailspin. Now in his second year on the board, Neil wanted to impress his fellow parishioners as a fiscal conservative. He was always seeking new ways to save money. But also, he was beginning to discover if it wasn't one thing, it was another, and the bills piled up.\n\nNeil read the treasurer's report. He looked straight at Harry over his tortoiseshell glasses, expensive ones from Ben Silver in Charleston. \"You're the one I worry about.\"\n\nBoomBoom Craycroft, another childhood friend of Harry's as well as Susan's, laughed a little, as did the reverend.\n\n\"Neil, all the church's equipment is in good order,\" Harry assured him. \"We can get one more year out of the leaf blower, and I fixed the zero-turn mower this summer. We're in good shape except for one small necessity.\"\n\nNeil froze. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"There's a small portion of the slate roof right on that northwest corner which gets hit the hardest,\" said Harry. \"Two of the shingles have dislodged, and with one more hard blow, I'm afraid we will lose a larger section than need be. I climbed up there.\"\n\n\"Harry, I wish you wouldn't do that,\" Reverend Jones admonished her.\n\n\"Rev, I'm in charge of buildings and grounds.\"\n\nThe good pastor said, \"Surely there's a man who can do some of this.\"\n\n\"Are we going to have the Sexism 101 talk?\" BoomBoom laughed. \"We are supposed to be long past that caveman talk, Rev.\"\n\n\"No, but...\" The Reverend Jones sighed heavily.\n\nLooking at the beloved clergyman, Harry compromised. \"How about next time I go up on the roof, I take someone with me, possibly someone male who is actually a roofer? I can do it but we need a professional up there.\"\n\nThis truly alarmed Neil. \"Roofing costs an arm and a leg!\"\n\nKeeping her tone level, Harry replied, \"It does. However, if we don't attend to this right now before the weather turns\u2014and you know how bad the winds get in winter straight through March\u2014we will most certainly lose more slate shingles. The water will run into the beams and travel from there. I doubt it will come through the ceiling, though, unless a huge hole is blown into the roof. We'd need a big tree limb to accomplish that\u2014I think. But that sort of silent water damage will come back to haunt us, years from now when the building's wood beams rot out. Pay now or pay later, big-time.\"\n\nThe members of the vestry board were persuaded, as was the reverend.\n\nNeil, defeated, asked, \"Do you have a ballpark figure?\"\n\n\"That's why I would like to get a professional roofer up there. My personal guess is if we do this now, we can do it for about thirty-five hundred dollars.\"\n\n\"Thirty-five hundred! For two shingles?\" Neil's voice cracked.\n\n\"No. I estimate we will need to replace about a two-foot square. True slate shingles are expensive, plus we have to try and match shingles that are over two hundred and forty years old. The labor is expensive, too, but once we have the materials, it's not an all-day job. Oh, and I expect there will be a gas surcharge if the gas prices go up again.\"\n\n\"That's the truth. Everyone's doing it.\" BoomBoom, her beautiful mane of blonde hair catching the light, nodded. \"There's no way business, small business, can absorb those prices and still make a profit.\"\n\n\"How about the post office?\" asked Harry, the former postmistress. \"I can't even imagine what a one-cent increase in gasoline does to their budget. Delivery trucks, cars in every state in this nation\u2014it has to be mind-boggling.\"\n\nWesley Speer shook his head. Also new to the board, he owned a high-end realty firm. They'd felt the downturn but not nearly as badly as Realtors in Las Vegas or other large cities. Wesley believed once the foreclosure mess cleared up, maybe in another two years, the economy might pick up some momentum. He knew he'd never again see the craziness, the flipping of houses and farms, that he saw in, say, 2007, but he was confident sales would rebound. If people can get work, they want to own a home. He'd built a life's career on that.\n\nSusan joined the conversation. \"Did you read in the paper where our area, Richmond in particular, has the worst postal service in the country?\"\n\n\"Your husband's in the House of Delegates,\" Neil teased her. \"Make him fix it.\"\n\n\"Virginia's state government can't fix the federal postal system, but you know Ned would if he could. I swear that man is a glutton for punishment. He actually loves being in the House of Delegates.\" Susan threw her hands up in the air.\n\n\"He must be a glutton for punishment, he married you.\" Harry smiled so sweetly.\n\n\"Well, I think this meeting is over, unless there's more discussion concerning the roof,\" the Reverend Jones said, enjoying the banter between the two old friends.\n\nThe committee members zoomed toward the kitchen, some heading straight for the bar. The vestry board enjoyed getting together after the meeting, catching up on one another's news and listening to Reverend Jones, who had an appropriate Bible quote at the ready for just about any topic of conversation.\n\nLucy Fur wove between people's legs. _\"Do drop something, will you?\"_ the cat urged the thoughtless humans munching away on ham biscuits.\n\nElocution, the senior cat, curled up in Reverend Jones's lap.\n\nCazenovia picked out Susan for her victim. Susan couldn't take a step without Cazenovia sticking right next to her, meowing.\n\n\"Suffer the little kitties to come unto you,\" the reverend joked.\n\nLibations in hand, all sat in chairs around the coffee table, books pushed to the middle.\n\n\"Harry,\" Wesley said, \"you've known Buddy Janss longer than I have. Why won't he sell the one hundred acres behind the old abandoned schoolhouses? Be very profitable for him.\"\n\n\"More to the point,\" BoomBoom interjected, \"why doesn't the county finally do something about those schoolhouses? Old well-built buildings can still be useful. Instead, the county blows millions on new construction. Everything has to be new.\"\n\n\"Plans for repairs tend to languish in the county budget.\" Reverend Jones's deep voice rumbled. \"But it's much as you say, BoomBoom, everything has to be new and, to my way of thinking, antiseptic. Those three wooden buildings, with their big tall windows, beckon one to learn.\" He smiled. \"Can't you imagine sitting at one of the old desks with the flip-top lid we all used, staring out the windows on an early spring day? If nothing else, might make you want to learn about the environment.\"\n\nThe group laughed.\n\nHarry answered Wesley's question as best she could: \"Buddy fears development, and for good reason. The school buildings and those acres are in a prime spot.\"\n\nWesley tried not to sound too judgmental, even though he was. \"He would make so much money. At least three point two million. These are hard times. That profit would allow him to buy or rent much more land farther west in the county or he could invest it in bonds or something.\"\n\n\"Buddy isn't averse to profit, but like I said, he fears development,\" said Harry. \"He thinks good soil, good farmland, should stay farmland. Wesley, he isn't going to sell.\"\n\n\"Mmm.\" Wesley heard Harry's words but he still hoped he could find a way to pry those one hundred acres from Buddy.\n\n\"Don't forget, Wesley, the schoolhouses could create a problem for any development.\" Susan Tucker kicked off her shoes. \"Sorry, my feet hurt.\"\n\n\"Yeah, you guys should be forced to wear heels just once in your life,\" Harry said. \"Torture,\" she declared, grinning.\n\n\"Well, these are low heels but I've had enough.\" Susan rubbed her right foot. \"Okay, the problem: County land remains county land. And those school buildings might be considered historically significant. Now, the county can elect to sell its land. There must be a public hearing advertised in the newspaper each week for a month. These days the announcement has to go on the county website, too.\"\n\nNeil spoke up. \"You think the fear is that if the one hundred acres go, whoever purchases same will have no use for the schoolhouses and demolish them. That's jumping the gun, I'd say.\"\n\nHarry's mouth fell open a little, then she said, \"I hadn't thought that far ahead, but I guess it could be a real concern.\"\n\n\"Those schoolhouses would make welcome living quarters for the aged,\" said BoomBoom, thinking out loud. \"Nice setting, pretty grounds, easy access from the state road and not really far from Route 250.\"\n\n\"Or condominiums, which would bring the county more revenue than what we used to call the poorhouse.\" Reverend Jones drained his glass.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Harry, one of the younger people in the room, asked him.\n\nThe reverend clarified, \"Honey, back when the earth was cooling, every county in this state had its own poorhouse, and it was usually a farm. Those down on their luck worked the farm. We don't have that anymore, but a place for the aged is somewhat like that in that anyone dependent on government-subsidized living is usually poor. 'Course, at Random Row, they wouldn't have to do farm work.\"\n\n\"Random Row?\" BoomBoom repeated. \"I remember Mother saying that once or twice, but I figured she was just forgetting the actual name of the place.\"\n\n\"It's a great name,\" Neil said, nodding to Reverend Jones. \"Be a great name for condominiums.\"\n\n\" 'Tis, but I doubt they would be called that,\" Reverend Jones quickly replied.\n\n\"All right, Rev, what's the story?\" Harry plied him.\n\n\"Well,\" he said, \"those schoolhouses were built for the African American children. When I was little, you didn't use terms like 'African American.' The polite word was 'colored'\u2014polite among white folks, anyway. Really, back then no one said things like 'Italian American' either. Well, I'm getting off the track, but I do think about these things sometimes. Anyway, so many of the children at the schoolhouses had white fathers. Rarely did the men visit the school, because often they were married to white women, but many of those men did support their children, the random children, economically.\"\n\nA silence followed this, then Susan said, \"Nothing is simple, is it?\"\n\n\"Not when it comes to human beings.\" Reverend Jones smiled. \"What always strikes me is how most of us try to normalize an abnormal situation. I guess I learned this in Vietnam. We just struggled to keep things tied down. I mean, all I could think about apart from staying alive was, how were the Baltimore Orioles doing? We'd all try to get baseball scores and then football scores. If my team lost and one of my buddies gloated, fistfight. Here we were in a war in a different world, and we'd fight over a football score. But it felt safe in a way. Random Row was kind of the same thing, people normalizing a difficult situation.\"\n\n\"The desegregation act was enforced in 1965,\" Susan informed them. \"That resolved it.\"\n\n\"You weren't born yet.\" Reverend Jones smiled at her. \"It resolved political issues; it did not nor could not resolve personal issues. If your father is white and doesn't claim you, you may not be thinking about desegregation the same way.\"\n\nNeil looked at the reverend. \"What's the old saying, 'The personal is political'?\"\n\n\"Is and isn't.\" BoomBoom was firm about this. \"But in 1965, what happened to these so-called random kids' schools?\"\n\n\"Abandoned,\" said Reverend Jones. \"It was a political victory but it came at an unintended price. At least, I think it did. Basically, the children from Random Row were crammed into the white schools with no support system. The assumption was and still is that white ways are better. I don't exactly see this as black and white, I see it more in class terms, but the reality of the children at Random Row was most of them were African American or mixed race, and poor. They were thrown into schools with children from a higher socioeconomic group and with vastly different needs. Not a good thing, in my mind.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a done deal,\" Wesley replied with no emotion.\n\n\"It is.\" The reverend nodded. \"But that doesn't mean we can't learn from it, and not repeat our mistakes. We have to think of people's emotions.\"\n\n\"What happened to the teachers at Random Row?\" asked BoomBoom; at forty-one, she was the same age as Harry and Susan.\n\n\"I suspect they were bought off. You know, early retirement or something like that. I guess what really gets my blood up is the assumption those teachers weren't as well educated. Howard? Grambling? The list of excellent black colleges can go on. The teachers may have gone to segregated colleges, but tell you what, I never met any graduate of those colleges who wasn't well educated.\"\n\n\"Racism is subtle and not so subtle.\" Susan grabbed a cookie from the plate that Reverend Jones had placed on the table.\n\n\"So is sexism,\" said BoomBoom.\n\n\"Yes, but you ladies have so many ways to even the score,\" Neil teased her.\n\n\"Don't forget that, Neil,\" BoomBoom teased him right back.\n\n\"Not to ignore this fascinating history,\" interjected Wesley, \"but what I deduce from this is that the county, which could realize high profits on those buildings, won't for political reasons?\"\n\n\"Don't you think it depends on the budget?\" said Harry. \"We're in hard times. If the Board of County Commissioners wants to let those buildings and the land go, this would be the time.\"\n\n\"If they're willing to put up with the protest that our history is being demolished,\" said Neil, in between bites of a chocolate chip cookie. \"Here's what I think. Use them or sell them. To keep the land idle, just sitting there, is stupid.\"\n\n\"Do you think Buddy would sell his hundred acres to the county?\" Wesley asked.\n\n\"They wouldn't need it,\" Harry replied.\n\n\"Probably not,\" said Wesley. \"I mean, if a housing development was part of the plan, yes. Otherwise, no. It does seem wasteful, though. The schoolhouses just abandoned and going to ruin.\"\n\nSusan simply said, \"I say restore the buildings as a museum. It could be a good lesson for all and those rooms have cozy, lovely proportions. I'm like Reverend Jones, everything today is too antiseptic and big. I'm really tired of big.\"\n\nAfter an hour of lively talk, the group began to trickle out. Harry, Susan, and BoomBoom stayed longest, helping Herb clean up, washing dishes and glasses.\n\nDrying her hands, BoomBoom remarked to Harry, \"I was so sorry to hear that Big Mim lost the Medaglia d'Oro filly. Stunning, that filly.\"\n\n\"Fair was devastated. He thought she was one of the most perfectly formed horses he had ever seen. Big Mim was, well, in tears according to Fair, but still took it like a trooper. Being a grandmother was a comfort, I think.\"\n\n\"Heard she doesn't like the boy's name, Roland.\"\n\n\"Little Mim and Blair love the ancient history of Roland at the Roncevaux Pass. 'Course, Big Mim just ignored it and calls him Roy.\"\n\nBoomBoom laughed. \"Those two never have gotten along. Still, they do love each other.\"\n\n\"Would you want to be Big Mim's daughter?\" asked Harry.\n\n\"No,\" the blonde replied. \"I love being her friend, though.\"\n\n\"Me, too. She's one hell of a horsewoman.\"\n\nThey nattered on, Susan chiming in as she wiped down the coffee table, Herb as he put away glasses. Each lady kissed Herb's cheek, then each other as they left St. Luke's.\n\nOn the drive home, the stars glittered in pale silver light. Friday would be a full moon.\n\n\"Good meeting.\" Susan hit her brights. \"At least Neil isn't talking about algorithms anymore. He gave a straightforward treasurer's report.\"\n\n\"He's figuring out that simple is better,\" Harry said. \"Always is, too, no matter what the subject.\"\n\n\"Ned says what drives him crazy about his fellow politicians in Richmond is how they complicate things to make themselves look smarter. He also said the level of discourse is so low a man of average intelligence has to stoop to match it.\" She smiled. \"But there are some good people there in both chambers. He likes working with David Toscano and he likes working with some of the people from the farming counties. He's not too thrilled with the ones from northern Virginia.\"\n\n\"Like I said before, he's a glutton for punishment.\"\n\nThey rounded the curve, Mount Tabor up ahead.\n\n\"My tire light went on. Reach into the glove compartment and get out my pressure check, will you?\" Susan turned in to Mount Tabor's parking lot. \"Oh, dear, Witchy Woo has fallen over. Come on, let's set her up. They put a lot of work into this. Then I'll check my tire.\"\n\nThe two kept the brights on in the direction of the display and walked over.\n\nThey reached the corn bundles, all the arranged pumpkins, some cut as jack-o'-lanterns, the large baskets overflowing with gourds and squashes. Witchy Woo had fallen uphill onto the uneven ground.\n\nHarry sniffed. \"Something's gone off.\"\n\nSusan inhaled. \"Just. Probably a dead gopher somewhere. He'll be gone tomorrow.\"\n\nHarry bent over to pick up the tumbled-over figure, noticing that its rubber mask was complete with a long, warty witch's nose. She stood up again. \"It's not a gopher.\"\n\nBoth women stared at the black-clad figure.\n\n\"Good God.\" Susan put her hand to her face.\n\nHarry reached down to pull off the mask.\n\nSusan shouted, grabbing her arm, \"Don't!\"\n\n#\n\n\"Aren't you off work tonight?\" Harry, still upset, asked as Cooper crossed the parking lot in her civilian clothing.\n\n\"I am, but Dabny called me from headquarters and said that you, once again, have found a strange corpse. So here I am. Anyway, I'd like to see this before the body goes to the state medical examiner. You two stay here. I _mean_ it.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Susan firmly agreed. \"I'll take charge of Harry.\"\n\nCooper turned her back to walk away, then faced them again. \"Are you two doing okay?\"\n\nHarry shrugged, and fibbed a tad. \"Yeah. It's gross but...\" She shrugged again as Susan nodded in assent.\n\nThe police investigative team circled the display. The photographer snapped, stepping out of the way of the officers.\n\nDorothy Maddox, chief of forensics, had only been with the team a year. She was kneeling down, surgical gloves on, carefully touching the corpse's arm. In the temporary lights now shining on the scene, she studied a swollen hand, and a forearm with purple splotches.\n\nCooper stood behind Dorothy. \"Thirty-six hours at most, my guess.\"\n\n\"Your guess isn't far wrong. The nights have been cold, the days in the seventies. She's on the other side of maximum rigor mortis, obviously, but intact, and that's a huge help.\" Dorothy stood up. \"Is Rick on the way?\"\n\nNo sooner was his name spoken than the sheriff pulled off the road and into the church driveway. He, too, was in his civilian clothes and driving his personal vehicle. He glanced toward Harry, then walked over to the scene.\n\n\"We'll need to dust everything. The pumpkins, the baskets, every single thing.\" He took a deep breath, then coughed slightly. \"I hated to leave my ball game, but this is, well, original.\" He paused. \"There's nothing like the odor of death, is there? It isn't even that bad yet. I'm surprised the body wasn't damaged.\"\n\n\"Boss, can I remove the victim's mask?\" Dorothy asked. \"I waited for you.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" Rick motioned for all the lights to shine on the witch's face.\n\nCarefully, Dorothy removed the rubber mask with the hooked nose.\n\n\"My God,\" Susan exclaimed, as she could see the face with the flashlight focused on it. \"It's Hester Martin!\"\n\nHarry recognized her all the way from where she stood in the parking lot. She covered her mouth with her hand, then let it fall. \"Hester Martin. She never did a thing to anybody.\"\n\nTears filled Susan's eyes for the middle-aged lady. Her mind flashed to Hester proudly showing off produce, filling her specially decorated wooden wheelbarrows, some worn and painted green, some barn red, some faded marine blue. Large wheels were yellow with a pinstripe matching the color of the painted display cart. Hester had a good eye for proportion and color. The produce gleamed, as she had misted it, too. Susan's tears rolled faster now. She met Harry's eyes. \"Remember when Hester declared that black gum trees were conspiring against humans? Well, everyone gets a free pass for a few crackbrained ideas. Hester's seemed more imaginative than most.\"\n\n\"I can't believe this!\" exclaimed Harry. She, too, cried a bit.\n\nRick was as surprised as they at the victim's identity. \"Dorothy, get the body out of here as soon as you can. We're lucky it's night.\"\n\n\"Sure. I've done what I can do without disturbing the rest of this Halloween scene.\"\n\n\"Here's Ted. Excuse me.\"\n\nRev. Ted Foster had driven over as soon as the sheriff's office called him. He lived about twenty minutes up Route 810. Along the way, he'd had the presence of mind to pick up Bunky Fouche, the church groundskeeper.\n\nSeeing Hester laid out in the witchy garb, Bunky had to be steadied.\n\nRick escorted both men directly to the corpse.\n\nBunky shook uncontrollably. \"Oh, Sheriff, I can't look at dead bodies.\"\n\n\"Bunky, tell me who this is.\"\n\n\"It's Hester Martin, God rest her sweet soul. She was good to me.\"\n\n\"Reverend Foster.\" Rick turned to the minister, who also appeared shaken by the grisly sight and rank odor. \"When did you put up this Halloween cr\u00e8che, for lack of a better word?\"\n\n\"Three days ago,\" answered Reverend Foster, his voice low. \"The witch was a manikin and she had straw hair.\"\n\n\"And did you look at the display each day?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I didn't. From a distance, it all looked fine to me.\"\n\n\"It was fine.\" Bunky's voice quavered.\n\n\"So, neither of you has any idea when Hester Martin's body was placed here?\" Frustration edged into the sheriff's tone.\n\n\"No,\" both answered.\n\nRick put his hand under Bunky's elbow to steady him, walking him away from the eerie but all-too-real vision.\n\nCooper watched the men's departure, then said to Dorothy, \"It's a lot of work to carry a body, dress it up, place it on the broom.\"\n\nHarry had inched closer from the parking lot, and piped up. \"Maybe Hester's body was already dressed up when it was brought here. The killer first observed the manikin's witch outfit and dressed her just the same. I mean, it makes sense the killer would make it easy on himself.\"\n\nCooper stared at Harry, thought a moment, then replied, \"A possibility.\"\n\nSusan said, \"If Hester's body had been here for any real length of time, dogs would have already gotten at it, crows, flies. We're all country people. We know the stages of death.\"\n\nThe three women stood silent.\n\n\"We've got a real sicko,\" Cooper replied simply, saying what they were all thinking: The killer had kept Hester's body somewhere else and placed it here once rigor mortis decreased and the muscles relaxed.\n\n\"Coop, let me get poor Hester out of here.\" Dorothy motioned for the stretcher and the body bag. \"I need to get her in the cooler at the morgue before there's more damage. And maybe when I get the costume off, I'll know how she was murdered.\"\n\n\"If the modus operandi is the same as our scarecrow accountant, we've got a major problem,\" said Coop.\n\nDorothy whispered, \"No matter what, we've got a major problem.\"\n\n#\n\nFair ran out to the drive at 11:10 P.M., when his wife finally drove up with Susan.\n\n\"Why didn't you let me come to you?\" Harry's husband asked, his voice betraying his concern.\n\nHarry opened the door to get out as Susan rolled down the window. The dog and the two cats also ran out of the house at Harry's arrival.\n\n\"Honey, there was enough confusion,\" she said. \"Susan and I were together. We're all right.\"\n\n\"We are,\" Susan reassured Fair. \"I mean, as all right as you can be after finding something like that.\" She took a deep breath. \"Let me get on home. My dog needs to go to the bathroom.\"\n\n\"Where's Ned?\" Fair asked.\n\n\"In Richmond.\"\n\n\"Why don't you stay here?\" he invited her.\n\n\"I appreciate that but Owen needs to go out and I'll feel better with him, at home, with a hot bath and bed.\"\n\n\"Sure?\" he asked, his eyebrows raised.\n\n\"Sure. And when I get there, if I can't do as well as I think I can, I'll bring Owen back with me and we'll bunk up with you all.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he agreed.\n\nHarry leaned in the window, gave Susan a kiss. \"I'll call you tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Better.\" Susan rolled up the window and turned the car around. Her two friends and their animal companions watched her motor down the long drive.\n\nSlipping his arm around her waist, Fair walked Harry back into the house.\n\n_\"Must be good,\"_ Pewter said, meaning another big mess Harry had stumbled into.\n\n_\"If only we could have heard the phone call,\"_ Mrs. Murphy said.\n\n_\"Yeah. I hate not knowing.\"_ Tucker followed right on Harry's heels, resisting the urge to slightly bite them.\n\nOnce inside, closing the kitchen door against the chill, Harry surprised Fair as she sat at the table. \"I'd like a drink. What should I have?\"\n\n\"Oh, how about if I make you a simple scotch and soda? Not too strong.\"\n\n\"You know I can't drink. But I need something,\" she said, stating the obvious.\n\n\"This will relax you and help you sleep. No nightmares.\" He opened the pie safe, where the liquor bottles were lined up like orderly soldiers.\n\nNeither husband nor wife was much of a drinker, but there were spirits on hand for guests. Fair occasionally liked a cold beer at night in the summer and a scotch in the winter, but he could go days without a drink.\n\nTucker lifted her head. _\"Scotch has an interesting smell. Not bad.\"_\n\n_\"Tuna is better,\"_ Pewter remarked, patrolling the kitchen counter.\n\n_\"Can't drink tuna.\"_ Mrs. Murphy jumped up on the corner.\n\nPushed by Fair, Harry took a sip of the scotch, then recounted everything. When she finished her tale, she sighed, then said, \"Tell me about your day. I don't want to think about this anymore.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, honey. I'm just worried and I want you to carry the old .38. Your father's Smith and Wesson is as good as the day it was made.\"\n\n\"Why? I'm in no danger.\"\n\n\"Probably not, but you found two bodies and it seems likely both were done in by the same killer or killers. You will be in the paper and on TV. A bad guy might wonder why Harry Haristeen has a nose for murder.\"\n\n\" 'Nose' is the right word.\" Harry wrinkled hers.\n\n_\"Humans can't smell worth squat.\"_ Pewter leapt onto the counter with Mrs. Murphy.\n\n_\"Even a human can smell a corpse that's been dead for a bit, the days being warm. It's not the full-blown effect but they can tell.\"_ With her phenomenal powers of smell, Tucker knew of what she spoke.\n\n_\"Sometimes I wonder how they survive.\"_ Pewter looked out the window over the sink, where the last moth of the year fluttered.\n\nUnaware of the animals' condescending observations, Fair leaned back in his chair. \"Pretty easy day today, so I actually got a little research done. Stem cell stuff.\"\n\n\"Haven't you used stem cell therapies?\"\n\n\"Not much, honey, though I'd like to. It's complicated but those treatments really work for horses' musculoskeletal injuries. Vets have been using stem cell transplants since 2005. The problem is that there are bogus firms on the Internet that claim stem cell therapies can treat laminitis and neurological conditions, and that's not true.\"\n\nHarry knew that \"laminitis\" meant an inflammation of the sensitive tissue of a horse's hoof.\n\n\"I guess there are scam artists in every profession,\" she lamented.\n\n\"There are, but when they cause suffering to living creatures, my blood boils. Someone without veterinary knowledge or degree, but with every good intention in the world to help their horse, gets on the Internet, finds a bogus product, buys it, and their horse continues to suffer.\"\n\n\"Do you think the stem cell transplants used for horses will work for people?\"\n\nHe folded his hands together. \"Yes. But there again, as the science progresses, you will have doctors making wild claims or dishonest companies doing so.\"\n\nFair was such a fount of knowledge that sometimes Harry fired question after question at him. \"You think in time the obstacles for using human stem cells will be removed?\"\n\n\"In some cases they already have, and while I believe in relieving suffering, I have to think about this one. It truly is a complex moral issue.\"\n\n\"Maybe everything is, honey,\" Harry said.\n\n\"Yes. Take murder. It seems cut and dried, doesn't it? And yet surely there are times when murder is justified. A wife defends herself and her children against a rampaging husband. I couldn't find it in my heart to condemn such a woman. Throughout all of nature, mothers kill or die defending their young.\"\n\n\"Nothing is really that clear cut, is it?\" Harry agreed.\n\n\"Well, the Ten Commandments make it seem so, but I guess there are exceptions to every rule, even those. Maybe that means I'm going to hell.\" He half-smiled.\n\n\"You're the best man I know,\" she said, smiling his way. \"And there have to be millions of people who ask questions, who wonder. What helps me is talking to Reverend Jones. I don't know what I would do without him.\"\n\n\"I should talk to him about this.\" Fair unfolded his hands. \"That and genetic engineering. We may be on the cusp of creating a super horse, and if we do that, people aren't far behind.\"\n\n\"That's a terrifying thought.\"\n\n\"It will start out safely enough. A tag on a gene sequence will be discovered to cause some kind of cancer. Doctors will get in there and manipulate the sequence. It sounds far-fetched but it isn't. Just look at the genetic manipulations you've seen in crops.\"\n\nShe took a long sip of scotch. \"You know, when I was a kid, Dad and I would sit down with the seed catalogues. We'd try and figure out which corn could survive a drought, too much rain, which one had the sweetest taste. You had so many choices and now, well, you really don't. I look in my catalogues and there's just one page for corn, and every offering has disease resistance, a list of qualifications. Me, I just want Silver Queen,\" she said, citing an especially delicious corn usually available at central Virginia vegetable stands in August. Her eyes misted. \"Hester sold the best Silver Queen.\"\n\n\"Brave new world.\" He smiled at her. \"I am so sorry you found Hester. So sorry.\"\n\n\"If it's a brave new world, that means we have to be brave to face it. But I remember the Law of Unintended Consequences. You never know what you're stirring up.\"\n\n\"By God, that's the truth,\" he said, slipping his arm around her again.\n\n\"But these murders have very intended consequences. They were carefully planned and enacted, and inflicted on the rest of us. That means there's a message. You don't do something as elaborate as this unless it's an attempt to make a statement of some sort.\"\n\n\"And that's why you'd better carry your father's snubnose .38.\" Fair's voice was firm.\n\n#\n\nFriday the air sparkled, the leaves exploded with color, and the temperature hung at about forty-seven degrees. Fall ushered in many changes. Fur-covered animals now had their thick undercoat, the outer coat shining luxuriously. With the waning of daylight, chickens laid less eggs. All those creatures slowed down by summer's heat now surged with energy. Robins and some ducks and geese had already departed on their southern journey, as had the monarch butterflies. Everyone else busied themselves with nest repair. Turtles readied for sleep, along with other amphibians and reptiles. Toads lined their shallow nests with straw, hay, anything that could insulate, as did mice, who could unravel a sweater quickly.\n\nHarry had once left a thick wool sweater in the tack room only to come back the next morning to find mice had chewed big holes in it, all of that fine wool now lining their nests behind the wall. Those mice lived good.\n\nThis perfect October morning, having just finished the barn chores, Harry tossed up some jelly beans for the possum in the hayloft, then shook the hay bits out of her hair.\n\n_\"Don't shake that on me,\"_ complained a perfectly groomed Pewter, languishing below.\n\n\"All right, who's ready to go?\" asked Harry.\n\n_\"Me!\"_ Tucker ran in from the back of the barn.\n\n_\"Me, too,\"_ Mrs. Murphy echoed her friend.\n\nBoth eagerly sat in the center aisle as Harry hung up her big wide sweeper. \"That's two. Let me check on Pewts.\"\n\n_\"Leave her here,\"_ Tucker advised. _\"She's such a priss and a pain.\"_\n\nPewter lifted her head from her paws. _\"I heard that.\"_\n\nShe'd been sleeping in the tack room, disturbed only when Harry had shaken out the hay while looking in the big mirror.\n\n\"Come on,\" Harry urged her.\n\n_\"I have nothing to wear,\"_ Pewter replied facetiously.\n\n_\"Just leave her,\"_ Tucker practically begged.\n\nMuch as Pewter wished to languish in the tack room, the prospect of irritating the corgi held greater allure. She rose, stretching fore and aft, then daintily leapt to the floor and sauntered out the tack room door.\n\n_\"Peon,\"_ the gray cat remarked to the sitting dog as she passed.\n\n_\"Pissant,\"_ Tucker fired back.\n\nTucker flattened her ears and readied herself to lunge after the large cat, but Mrs. Murphy whispered, _\"Cool it.\"_\n\n_\"How can I let her get away with that?\"_ asked Tucker.\n\n_\"If you growl or chase after her, Mom will leave you here. She hates fights in the truck or car, you know that.\"_\n\nTucker's ears drooped, her expression saddened. _\"That cat gets away with murder.\"_\n\nPewter, full sashay working\u2014a swing to the right, a swing to the left\u2014called over her shoulder, _\"I am fascinating. Harry never likes to go anywhere without me. You, on the other hand, are a mere drooling dog. So eager to please. Peon. You really are a peon.\"_\n\nMrs. Murphy walked tightly next to her canine friend. _\"Ignore her.\"_\n\nHarry opened the door to the 1978 Ford F-150, a half-ton pickup truck you couldn't kill on Judgment Day. The two cats jumped onto the floorboard while the human bent over to pick up the solid dog. \"Onf.\"\n\n_\"Don't call_ me _fat.\"_ Pewter grinned as the dog was placed on the seat.\n\n_\"I'm a lot bigger than you,\"_ Tucker said, defending her weight.\n\n_\"Oh, la,\"_ the cat sang out, then crawled onto Harry's lap once she was behind the wheel.\n\nHarry could easily drive with a cat in her lap, so she fired up the old engine, listened to the melodic deep rumble, then pulled around and down the long drive.\n\n_\"Where are we going?\"_ Pewter asked.\n\n\"Okay, you all, we're going to Cr\u00e8me de la Cr\u00e8me. I am finally going to break down and buy two of those heavy Italian mugs.\"\n\n_\"She understood?\"_ Tucker's ears shot up.\n\n_\"Of course she didn't,\"_ Pewter laughed. _\"She just likes to hear herself yak.\"_\n\n_\"Look who's talking,\"_ Tucker said in a low voice to Mrs. Murphy.\n\n_\"I have good ears, you know,\"_ Pewter said.\n\n_\"You do,\"_ Mrs. Murphy agreed.\n\n_\"It's your attitude that's not so good.\"_ Tucker had to say it.\n\nThe gray cat turned her back on the other two on the bench seat, rested her chin on Harry's left forearm, and watched the passing scenery out the side window.\n\nSlowing for a turn, Harry could see the houses on the ridge at the Old Trail development. Below, she spotted Buddy Janss on his huge tractor, harvesting his soybeans. The other side of the road was filled with corn: some rows cut, others left standing to dry. On the road, yellow metal signs about the size of the old Burma Shave signs marked the rows. Each sign showed a golden ear of corn with two green leaves folded back. Below that, the seed company Demeter was identified in red letters, and under that in black Arabic numerals were the seed ID numbers. Buddy Janss had worked with Demeter for years and this was his test field. His other acres were dedicated to revenue crops.\n\nHarry pulled off the road as Buddy cut the motor of his tractor. He climbed down to check something on the attachment. Satisfied, he turned to climb back up.\n\n\"Buddy!\" Harry called out as she walked toward him, with three four-footed friends in tow.\n\n\"Harry.\" He smacked his baseball hat on his leg. \"After hearing the news, I was going to call you, girl, but I figured you'd had enough.\"\n\nHe wrapped his massive arms around her, giving her a hug as she kissed his cheek.\n\n\"I appreciate that. It was crazy.\"\n\nHe put his hand on her shoulder. \"I can't believe it, just can't believe it.\"\n\n\"Me neither.\"\n\n\"Now, Hester was peculiar, no doubt, but she was a good girl.\" He wiped a tear from his eye with his handkerchief.\n\n\"I've been racking my brain to think who could do such a thing.\"\n\n\"Can't think of a soul, can you? Who would want to hurt Hester?\" He looked into her eyes. \"She could get in your face about things, stuff she really cared about, like ethanol, but you don't kill someone over ethanol. And there were certain people she just wouldn't do business with, but how much money would a farmer lose by not having his produce sold at Hester's? I'm like you, racking my brain.\"\n\n\"I've been thinking over her many pet projects, pet peeves,\" said Harry. \"We all know she loved the Crozet Library. She loved history and wanted to preserve as much of our history as she could. She also cared about farming practices.\" Harry laughed as the tears rolled down her face. \"I don't think Hester ever saw an abandoned building she didn't want to save. Like some people save animals, she tried to save existing buildings or raise funds for a building the community needs. Remember when she was afraid the old Coca-Cola building would be torn down? And I think she checked into the three abandoned school buildings there by your one hundred acres. Oh, also she wanted to have designated as a historical spot the house where Georgia O'Keeffe lived ever so briefly. You don't murder someone over any of that.\" Harry cried more, which made Buddy join in.\n\nBuddy, like most powerful men in this part of the world, readily showed emotion. Bighearted to a fault, they wanted to hold babies, pet your dogs, take your arm as though you needed guidance, and to help any lady, old, young, pretty or not.\n\nHarry wiped her eyes, then reached up and wiped Buddy's. \"I hate that someone made a mockery of her in her death,\" she said.\n\n\"You know, girl, sooner or later that S.O.B. will make a mistake, and I want to be there.\"\n\nLittle did Buddy or Harry know, he would get his wish.\n\n#\n\nThat afternoon, Harry peered down at Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker, all sitting at her feet in the tack room. \"Remind me never to buy an Italian desk lamp again.\"\n\nAfter two years, the high-intensity bulb had burned out. The lamp boasted appealingly sleek design, but getting its bulb out was proving infuriating. She had to flip back the head of the angular lamp, figure out how to remove the frosted-glass square, then dislodge the small cylindrical bulb.\n\nA rustle of mice behind the tack box irritated Mrs. Murphy. She left her human and jumped on top of the box, squinting behind it. _\"Stay put,\"_ she warned.\n\nMartha, the savvy mother of many, giggled. _\"We've never heard so much cussing in our lives.\"_\n\nThe tiger cat smiled. _\"You know our bargain.\"_\n\n_\"I do, but think of my children. Such language.\"_ Martha looked up into the predator's green eyes.\n\nYears ago the two cats had made a deal with the mice who lived behind the baseboard in the tack room. The insulated tack room walls provided toasty winter lodging, along with the yarn, hay bits, and old rag pieces the mice brought in to further line their nests. So long as the mice didn't show themselves or chew tack or saddle pads, they could eat whatever fell in the horses' stalls. This way the cats didn't look as though they'd fallen down on the job and the mice could tidy up the horses' mess. Also, mice heard things domestic animals did not. They occasionally provided useful information.\n\nAbout once a month, Mrs. Murphy or Pewter would dispatch a field mouse or mole and dutifully drop it at Harry's feet, after which the attractive woman praised them lavishly. She never knew the difference, bragging to her friends about how she never saw a mouse in her house or barn. Well, she never did.\n\nHaving finally pried out the oddly shaped light bulb, Harry turned it around in her hand. \"How am I supposed to find something like this?\"\n\n_\"Go to Eck,\"_ Tucker said, sensibly suggesting an electrical supply firm because Harry would never find such a replacement bulb at Wal-Mart.\n\nHarry glanced down as the dog offered unintelligible advice, then looked up again.\n\n_\"Car!\"_ Tucker immediately charged out the tack room's animal door, then charged back in. _\"Coop!\"_\n\n_\"I could have told you that,\"_ Pewter said, sprawled on the desk behind the offending lamp.\n\n_\"It's my job to announce any intruder or visitor,\"_ Tucker said. _\"I am good at my work.\"_ The corgi pouted for a moment.\n\n_\"You are,\"_ Mrs. Murphy complimented the dog, then looked behind the tack trunk and addressed Martha the mouse. _\"I can't control what she says. Cover your children's ears.\"_\n\nCooper entered the tack room and took a look around. \"Is this another Haristeen project?\"\n\nHarry motioned for her to sit in one of the director's chairs. \"You can call it that. I will never buy anything based on design again.\"\n\nCooper, studying the lamp on its side, said, \"Pain in the ass. All this fabulous-looking stuff. Like Gucci high heels that torture the feet. Just a royal pain. I'm ready to break out the oil lamps.\"\n\n\"I have them for emergencies. The smell isn't all that bad but the little plume of smoke will have you scrubbing ceilings and walls.\"\n\n\"If it's dark, you won't see it,\" Cooper laughed. \"Less light now anyway. Every day gets shorter until December twenty-first, the solstice.\"\n\nHarry dropped her hands into her lamp. \"Always gets me a little.\" Then she handed the light bulb to her neighbor. \"Look at this.\"\n\nBringing the tiny bulb close to her eyes, Cooper said, \"To get another one of these, you'll have to go into town, spend time and burn gas. Oil lamps, I'm telling you, and think what we'd save on electricity.\"\n\n\"My darned electric bill for the house, the barn, and the big shed ran me over five hundred dollars last month, and you know that figure will go up with the darkness. Electric bills never get cheaper.\"\n\n\"Nope,\" Cooper said. \"Of course, our entire society is dependent on it, and I'm as dependent as the next guy. Sometimes I wonder what kind of corner we have painted ourselves into.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\" Harry took the bulb back, placing it in the long desk drawer.\n\nPewter would knock it on the floor if Harry didn't hide it. She had to remember where she put it, though. Sometimes when a lot was happening all at once, Harry would forget the little things.\n\n\"I brought my seed book, thinking I'd swing by on my way home,\" said Coop.\n\n\"Where's the book?\"\n\n\"Out in the car,\" Cooper said, standing. \"I figured I'd ask first if you had the time.\"\n\n\"You don't have to ask. Go get it.\"\n\nWithin a few minutes the lanky police officer returned with a large, fat seed catalogue.\n\n_\"If they go through that whole thing, we will never get supper,\"_ said Pewter, mildly alarmed.\n\n_\"Do you some good.\"_ Tucker mischievously grinned.\n\nPewter sat up. _\"I'm laying for you, Bubble Butt.\"_\n\nThe dog ignored her as Mrs. Murphy left the tack trunk to sit next to Tucker, just in case.\n\nHarry flipped through the pages, the glossy photos tempting her to think she, too, could grow such specimens. \"So, what are you looking for, flowers or vegetables?\"\n\n\"Buddy Janss promised me some corn seed and Miranda is giving me rose cuttings. And she said I could dig up that one Italian lilac bush she has.\"\n\n\"If it's Italian, don't do it,\" Harry laughed. \"This damned lamp is Italian.\"\n\nCooper laughed with her. \"I'll bear that in mind. You know the best varieties of okra, lettuce, all kinds of tomatoes. I don't know too much.\"\n\nHarry read copy. \"Okay. My advice\"\u2014she picked up a pencil and began circling vegetables\u2014\"is to go with the hardiest. Also, the old varieties often taste better but they're harder to grow sometimes. So, here.\" Harry pointed to a green pea. \"A little water, a little sun. Tough. And so is this squash.\"\n\nAs Harry flipped through pages, circling types of vegetables, Cooper talked. \"Both of our recent murder victims' bodies are with the medical examiner, but we already know how they were killed: bullet through the heart. No struggle, and the killer faced Josh and Hester. So it's likely the killer seemed unthreatening, or they knew who it was and didn't fear him\u2014or her.\"\n\n\"Face-to-face. Damn, that's cold-blooded.\"\n\n\"It is. I'm telling you because you found them. The paper will report the gunshot wounds, but we're holding back details, like face-to-face. No true bruises on the forearms, no teeth knocked out. You'd be surprised how many people fight for their lives, but neither Josh nor Hester fought, so I hope it was quick. Finding those victims always affects me. I wonder, were they afraid or was the adrenaline too high for them to act defensively? I guess it varies from person to person. One confusing moment of recognition when the gun was pulled, then _bam_.\"\n\nHarry shivered. \"It's still an awful thought.\"\n\n\"Well, this is more awful: If Hester knew her murderer, so do we. I think of that a lot, how many killers do I pass each day and don't know it?\"\n\nHarry rested her chin in her hand. \"Never thought about that, but then, I'm not a deputy.\"\n\nCooper sighed. \"Well, didn't mean to sound so negative. Back to the seeds.\"\n\n\"I marked everything you need, because I know your soils,\" said Harry. \"You and I are both right up on the base of the mountains. We have our own little weather system.\"\n\nCooper took the catalogue back. \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"This isn't negative exactly, but I can't erase the sight of both those people's grisly ends, and I didn't know how much I liked Hester until, well, until she wasn't with us,\" admitted Harry. \"What could she have ever done to provoke being killed? I didn't know that accountant, but Hester wouldn't hurt anyone. Oh, she might make you check your watch, but she was okay.\"\n\n\"Best roadside stand in the county, and she'd always try to give me something for free,\" said Coop. \"I'd tell her I can't take anything when I'm on duty. I mean, really, she wasn't bribing me, but the rules are rigid and people these days are so quick to find fault. If anyone had seen me take a cantaloupe and not pay, I bet you Rick or the newspaper would have heard about it.\"\n\n\"I can see the headline now: 'Scandalous Melon Payoff.' \" Harry laughed.\n\n\"I'm starting to wonder if these aren't some sort of thrill killings. Usually sex is involved in those cases, or some sort of dominance or power play. This doesn't exactly fit the pattern, but then again, maybe we, the public, are supposed to feel a thrill, a ripple of fear.\"\n\nHarry thought a long time. \"So the killer is really warped or really smart, or both.\"\n\n#\n\n\"P _oppy, she's not listening to you,\"_ Elocution warned as she sat in the chancery window the next morning, observing Harry outside.\n\nCazenovia and Lucy Fur meowed in unison.\n\nRev. Herb Jones, wedged behind his desk, glanced up, opening his mouth to quiet the kitties, then he heard a metallic _clink_. Pushing the chair away from his desk, he rose, hurrying to the window where Elocution fussed.\n\n_\"See! See!\"_ the cat spoke louder.\n\n\"I will bless her.\" Reverend Jones hustled out of his beautiful office, grabbing his coat and dashing out the back door. \"Harry, what are you doing?\" he said, finding her next to a ladder propped against the building's wall.\n\n\"Waiting for the roofer?\" she half-fibbed.\n\n\"You were going to climb up there, I know it.\" Reverend Jones's face reddened.\n\n\"Well, eventually.\" She flashed her brightest smile.\n\nInside, Lucy Fur turned to Elocution. _\"He can never resist her smile.\"_\n\nCazenovia agreed. _\"It's amazing.\"_\n\nOutside, Harry, hands in pockets for the air had chilled, headed off a lecture. \"Seth Isman will be here in a minute. I just know bad weather is around the corner, so I figured we'd better hop on this.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" The reverend crossed his arms over his chest. \"Hop on, hop up.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about me. I've got two feet on the ground and am looking at the most wonderful Lutheran minister in Virginia.\"\n\nHe burst out laughing. \"You stinker.\" Then he put his arm around her. \"Sweetie, I do thank you for taking on building and grounds and for doing this so soon after finding Hester's body. We would all have understood if you'd waited.\" He took a deep breath. \"God rest her soul.\"\n\n\"I'd already made the appointment for today, Reverend, and truthfully, I feel better if I'm busy.\"\n\n\"You know, Hester's service still isn't organized.\" The pastor shook his head. \"Hester's brother died years ago and her niece lives in Houston. I called over to St. Francis in Staunton, where Hester worshipped, but so far, no plans. We are all distressed. If I knew her niece I'd offer help, but Hester's priest told me the young lady\u2014her name is Sarah Price\u2014is doing all she can and he feels things will be properly done. She'll get here from Texas next week. Terrible. Such a terrible thing.\" He turned as the roofing van drove up and parked in the rear of the church lot. \"Now, see here, Harry, don't you get up on that roof. Look me in the face and promise.\"\n\nTaking a deep breath, she promised, \"I won't.\"\n\n\"You can't dissemble to my face.\" He laughed. \"Well, you can't really lie anyway. Never could, but that doesn't prevent you from withholding information or wiggling just a little.\"\n\n\"You've known me too long.\"\n\n\"Remember that. I've got my eye on you.\"\n\nTrue to her word, Harry remained earthbound while wiry Seth scrambled around up on the roof. After a few minutes, he backed down the ladder.\n\n\"Is it worse than I thought?\" asked Harry of the short young man.\n\n\"No,\" he replied. \"A two-foot-square area, just like you thought, should fix the problem and prevent more. The workmanship on that old roof is something, just something.\"\n\n\"Our ancestors knew what they were doing and they weren't deluded by technology. It still takes good materials and a good man who knows how to use them.\"\n\nSeth smiled, which enlivened his strong face. \"Yeah. We're losing it, though. Losing hand skills.\"\n\n\"You haven't lost yours,\" Harry complimented him.\n\n\"Thanks, Harry. Once I decided to concentrate on older structures, things just fell into place. I don't work with cheap materials. After I've repaired a roof, I don't get calls back about leaking. I understand that most folks don't know about construction. And they only have so much money, so they buy footage and flash instead of maybe something smaller that is well built. Being able to get up on this roof, seeing how those shingles were laid... I don't know. Kinda gives me chills. Like I'm part of something that goes way back.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean. Well, you know I have to report to the board, so as soon as you can write up an estimate, I will deliver it. They already agreed for the work to be done, but if I can present an estimate, that makes everyone feel better.\"\n\n\"You'll save money because I can do this with just one other man. We can work pretty fast together. The really good news is I have a source of slate shingles that should closely match yours. A huge old house was dismantled in Cumberland County. The heirs just let it go. Built in 1719.\" He paused. \"A little bit of history slips away but it takes money to restore and keep those old places going. I understand, but if you can't do it, sell it to someone who can. Don't wait until it falls apart.\"\n\n\"Good advice, but when there's more than one heir, things tend to get dragged out.\"\n\n\"Boy, that's the truth. Anyway, I can get on this next Monday. Figure a full day just in case. If all goes well, half a day. I don't think the bill will go over four thousand dollars, and I will try to do it for less. Preacher's price.\" He smiled broadly.\n\n\"Seth, you're a good egg.\"\n\n\"You don't know me,\" he devilishly replied. \"Want me to put the ladder back?\"\n\n\"Sure. Thank you. I'll walk with you to the shed.\"\n\nAs Harry and Seth strolled away, chatting about SEC football, she noticed Neil Jordan drive up, followed soon after by Wesley Speer.\n\nAfter Seth drove away, Harry returned to the chancery.\n\n_\"There's a lift to her step,\"_ Lucy Fur noted. _\"Must be good news.\"_\n\n_\"We'll see.\"_ Cazenovia hopped off the windowsill to hurry out of the room and down the hall to greet Harry, whom she very much liked.\n\nPushing open the back door, Harry beheld the beautiful longhaired calico cat already on her hind legs.\n\n\"Caz.\" Harry knelt down and scooped her up. \"Such a religious kitty. And such a good concierge.\"\n\n_\"I am.\"_\n\nCarrying the contented cat, Harry peered into the large office. She didn't want to disturb the reverend, as he seemed to be in the middle of a meeting. Neil and Wesley sat in the chairs around the coffee table. The reverend was standing at his desk, papers in hand. He looked up at her.\n\n\"I can come back,\" said Harry.\n\n\"No, come on in.\"\n\nPutting Cazenovia down, Harry pulled off her work gloves. \"Hi.\"\n\nNeil and Wesley stood up to greet her.\n\n\"Should I brace for the worst?\" Neil joked.\n\n\"No. Good news. Seth can start on the roof next Monday, should finish the same day, and\u2014here's the good part\u2014he's got a source of old slate shingles and he feels sure he can keep the bill under four thousand. What luck.\"\n\n\"I suppose if a bill can be said to be good, that is,\" Neil solemnly replied.\n\n\"Neil, slate costs an arm and a leg,\" said Wesley. \"Old slate, especially. We'll make up the shortfall if we have one, but I bet we don't.\" He beamed.\n\n\"Harry, sit down. Let's all have a hot cup of cocoa or whatever. Betty!\" Reverend Jones called.\n\nA middle-aged woman stuck her head in the room. \"Yes? Oh, hi, everyone.\"\n\n\"How about cocoa?\" The reverend looked at his small gathering.\n\n\"Cocoa sounds perfect.\" Harry smiled.\n\n\"I'll go with that,\" Wesley agreed, as did Neil.\n\nThe young, pretty secretary usually outside the reverend's office was now in her last months of pregnancy and on leave. Filling in was Betty Maddox, cousin to Dorothy, the sheriff's department's chief of forensics. You had to be careful what you said about people in Crozet, as most folks were related.\n\n\"While we wait, it's good you're here, Harry,\" said Neil. \"I'd like to give the church lawns a good dressing of fertilizer and put it down before mid-November. Give it plenty of time to get into the ground. Checked the soil. Good pH, selenium. Potassium okay. Needs a little magnesium.\"\n\n\"Neil, that's wonderful.\" Harry smiled. \"The little mini-drought that we had didn't affect our lawns too much, but fertilizer always helps, and I'll come on back in springtime and drill in some wonderful lush grass seed. I always throw some rye in, too. Give the clover and bluegrass early cover.\"\n\nThanks to his real estate company, Wesley kept up with farming news. His largest sales were big estates and he had to know something about soil conditions and crop yields if selling to a true farmer, or even a new person who would lease out the land. Most new people wanted to live on a grand estate but didn't want to actually farm, which was wise since they weren't raised to it.\n\n\"Harry, did you see where the USDA\"\u2014he used the initials for the United States Department of Agriculture\u2014\"predicts the drought reduced our economic growth by almost half a percentage point? That's extremely serious.\"\n\n\"Sure is,\" she agreed. \"But I was talking to Buddy Janss and he said what was so bizarre was that sometimes fields on one side of a road twisted up while on the other side the crops were healthy. What crazy weather. Buddy has suffered some losses, though.\"\n\nNeil didn't much like Buddy, in part because the large fellow didn't buy his fertilizer. Buddy was so smart he'd worked out a deal years ago with horse owners to remove their manure and straw for free. This he put in piles, let it cook, then the next year used it himself, selling the extra for fertilizer. The horse owners, most of them owning but a few horses, gladly paid him to haul off the muck. Buddy used commercial fertilizers if a field needed extra potassium or another nutrient. That drove Neil crazy, but then, the two possessed such differing personalities they would have struggled to like each other no matter what. Neil was detail oriented and picky, whereas Buddy was expansive, and did his best but didn't fret.\n\n\"Wasn't Buddy friends with Hester?\" Neil asked, as he had only lived in the area a few years.\n\n\"For years and years.\" Harry smiled. \"You know Hester wouldn't sell anything that was sprayed or if the seeds had been genetically modified.\"\n\n\"She was a crank,\" Neil said. \"Not that I wished her dead, but really.\"\n\n\"Hester was an eccentric,\" the reverend said in his most diplomatic tone, \"but she worked hard for causes she believed in, she mentored younger people like Tazio, and I expect any of us could be considered a crank at one time or another.\"\n\n\"Not you.\" Harry grinned and the men laughed.\n\n_\"You should live with him,\"_ Elocution called out from her fuzzy den on the floor.\n\n_\"He feeds us Fancy Feast and he even tried to see if we'd chew on greenies,\"_ Cazenovia chided her from the windowsill. _\"He's the best.\"_\n\n_\"Yeah, Elo,\"_ Lucy Fur chimed in. _\"Button your lip.\"_\n\n_\"All right, all right,\"_ the Lutheran cat said, giving in.\n\nBetty arrived with a tray of hot cocoa and sugar cookies. The Reverend Jones jumped up to carry it and place it on the table.\n\nWesley returned to the subject of Hester. \"Horrible. Harry, you have endured two shocks. Finding that young man and then Hester.\"\n\n\"Did,\" she agreed. \"As I didn't know the fellow who was killed, it was a shock and that was all, but Hester, that hurt. Yes, she had her ways, but she was a good soul and really pretty smart. I mean a lot smart, actually.\"\n\n\"That she was,\" Wesley agreed. \"The last time I stopped by the stand, we got on the subject of crop irrigation. I don't remember how we did get on it\u2014you know with Hester, one thing didn't lead to another, it jumped to another. But anyway, she was telling me that farmers have been pulling water out of the Ogallala Aquifer since the early 1950s and some of those irrigation booms are a half mile long. A half mile!\"\n\n\"Great day,\" Reverend Jones exclaimed.\n\n\"It's hard to imagine, isn't it?\" said Wesley. \"A half-mile boom spinning around a fixed water pipe? But there's a lot of talk, consideration in a lot of the affected states, about cutting back on irrigation because the droughts are dropping water levels, as is all the population growth.\"\n\n\"Where are water levels dropping? Which states?\" Neil asked.\n\nFortified by the cocoa, Wesley leapt in. \"Neil, it's eastern Wyoming, about all of Nebraska, southern South Dakota, eastern Colorado and New Mexico, a huge swath of Kansas, Oklahoma's Panhandle, and a chunk of Texas. The water shortage is huge.\"\n\n\"The breadbasket,\" Harry thought out loud.\n\n\"For us. For the world, too, really,\" Wesley said. \"Hester had been reading up on it, just like she was always reading about chemicals, her history interests, that sort of thing. I was so impressed at the facts she had at her fingertips. She felt if farmers didn't cut back, wells would run dry and that would become a disaster, a true disaster. Irrigation accounts for one-third of our nation's annual water demand. I told her that genetic engineering could create more drought-tolerant corn, soybeans, etc. We could reduce our irrigation, but she didn't want to hear that.\"\n\nThey laughed.\n\nHarry stood up. \"It was good to see you all and I'm glad I have what I think is good news about the roof. Tell you what we could do for Hester: Let's sell all those tickets for the Halloween Hay-ride. The funds go to the library, and we know how much Hester loved the Crozet Library. Will you all help me?\"\n\n\"It would be an honor,\" Wesley immediately replied.\n\n\"Of course,\" Neil agreed.\n\nIn his gravelly voice, the Reverend Jones said, \"I can preach a good sermon on this. We'll sell those tickets. We'll sell out! Thou hast put gladness in my heart.\" He smiled. \"Psalm 4:7. If we sell those tickets, it will put gladness in all our hearts.\"\n\n#\n\n\"How many miles have you racked up on this car?\" Harry asked later that day. The two friends were headed back to that shopping mecca, Warehouse Number 9.\n\nIn the driver's seat, Susan glanced down at her Audi's odometer. \"Let's see... 131,839. I'm averaging about 40,000 miles per year. Engines are so well made these days they aren't even broken in until 100,000 miles.\"\n\nSwaying slightly as they turned right at the stoplight in Dillwyn on Route 20, Harry said, \"True. The advances in engine longevity are pretty fabulous. 'Course, my old '78 rolls along, but I baby that truck, as you know. Actually, Susan, I really like driving without computer chips.\"\n\n\"That's you. I don't care.\" Susan smiled. \"Is everyone asleep back there? It's so quiet without the cats.\"\n\nHarry twisted to look. \"Owen is curled up with his sister Tucker. That was one of the best litters you ever bred.\"\n\n\"It was.\" Susan nodded. \"I loved breeding corgis, but it was so much work, and part of that work was making sure the puppies found the right homes. I love all dogs but I especially love corgis.\"\n\n\"I love Tucker. Sometimes I think about the German shepherd Mom and Dad had when I was a kid. That was a great dog. Funny how you can measure your life by animal lives.\"\n\n\"Wonder if that scarecrow fellow had any pets.\"\n\n\"No. Coop told me he lived an unencumbered life.\"\n\n\"Sad,\" Susan replied simply.\n\n\"I think so, too. What's the purpose of being alive if you don't have husbands, friends, cats, dogs, horses, birds, possums, more friends, and friends' children? It just goes on and on. Mother used to say that if everyone in Virginia studied their bloodlines, we'd find out we are related. No one is all black, no one is all white. We're all part of one another and that includes the Indians.\"\n\n\"Can't say 'Indian' anymore.\"\n\n\"Sure about that? These labels we give ourselves are always changing.\"\n\n\"Now, Harry. You look just like your father when you get muley.\"\n\n\"Do I?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear.\" Harry slumped in her seat slightly. \"Daddy could be...\"\n\n\"Yes, he could.\"\n\nThey both laughed, remembering Harry's much-loved and very original father.\n\n\"Today is going to be a mob scene at the store. People are feeling that change in the seasons, the holidays looming. Those credit cards start burning in one's pocket.\"\n\n\"Not mine,\" Harry staunchly declared.\n\n\"It is possible to be too tight. I mean, Harry, you don't have voice messaging on your phone because it costs an extra three dollars a month. That's silly. Three dollars!\"\n\n\"A penny saved is a penny earned,\" Harry countered.\n\n\" 'Tis, but you can carry it too far. Hey, where do I turn?\"\n\n\"Left up ahead.\"\n\nSusan turned onto the Farmville main drag, then turned left again at Harry's direction, and shortly the Audi station wagon was parked in the lot closest to Number 9 warehouse. As predicted, the place was packed.\n\nSusan cracked the windows for the two dogs, although the day was brisk. \"You all go back to sleep. We won't be long.\" She hoped this wasn't a fib. She loved looking at furniture, fabrics, even lampshades.\n\nThe two women walked into Number 9, and Harry immediately pulled Susan to the Halloween display.\n\n\"Exactly the same,\" Harry declared.\n\n\"As I didn't see the corpse in the cornfield, I can only imagine what a human looked like as opposed to this.\"\n\n\"But that's just it. From a distance, they look exactly the same.\"\n\nSusan stood next to the ghosts. \"No witches.\"\n\n\"Not in this display. It's ghosts, little goblins, pumpkins, and the scarecrow.\" Harry sat down in a kitchen chair for a moment. \"You know, I think of Hester hanging all that black and orange bunting at the stand, then last week trussing herself up in a witch costume while unloading produce. She did have such a funny sense of things, and you had to laugh. Why would anyone kill her? I've thought of everything, including her being a Russian spy. I mean wild stuff. Nah.\" Harry shook her head.\n\n\"Me, too.\" Susan looked around. \"I'm going to walk through the floor. Won't be long.\"\n\n\"I'll tag along.\" Harry did.\n\n\"Look at this.\" Susan pointed out a distressed bureau painted a sky blue. \"That would look good in my workroom.\"\n\n\"What do you need with a bureau in your workroom?\"\n\n\"Store papers in it. Better looking than a file cabinet.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I guess. Here.\" Harry handed her a notebook and pencil from her coat pocket. \"Write down the particulars. If you decide you want it, you can call. They deliver.\"\n\n\"I forgot about that.\" Susan scribbled down the item number and manufacturer.\n\nHarry again tacked over to the Halloween display. \"Whoever killed Josh Hill had to have seen this scarecrow. It looks exactly the same. So the killer is someone who comes through here regularly.\"\n\n\"Maybe. It could also be someone with a good memory or someone who took a picture on their phone. That could be just about anyone.\"\n\n\"You're right. I'm jumping to conclusions.\"\n\n\"They should make that an Olympic sport.\" Susan put her hand under Harry's elbow to steer her out of the store.\n\nThey walked over to Number 8, which had a courtyard featuring large outdoor sculptures for sale.\n\n\"I like the large horse.\" Harry stood next to an almost life-sized horse resembling the horses of Piazza San Marco. \"Can you imagine what would happen if I put one by the barn?\"\n\nBoth women laughed. They knew the statue would spook the real horses, although eventually they would adjust.\n\nSusan flipped the price tag over. \"You'll need smelling salts.\"\n\nHarry bent over to peer at the tag. \"Nine thousand dollars!\"\n\n\"You pay for your pleasures.\" Susan checked her watch. \"Speaking of which, if I stay here, I am going to spend money, and I don't have it right now. Ned isn't making as much at the law firm. He's in session and there goes the income. He thought he could swing it, but there's so much to do down in Richmond, so many meetings and so much material to master, plus he had to rent an apartment. It's overwhelming. Yet he loves being in our House of Delegates. Anyway, I'm thinking of finding a job.\"\n\nOnce they were back in the car and heading home, Harry said, \"Your kids are out of the house. No reason you can't work full-time.\"\n\n\"When we graduated from college and I got my first job as a legal assistant, I remember shopping in the supermarket, seeing the women at the checkout counters and wondering what went wrong. You know what I mean? How did they wind up in that job?\"\n\n\"I never thought about it. You were, _are_ , better about that stuff than I am.\" Harry put on her sunglasses.\n\n\"Well, I thought maybe those cashiers had picked the wrong man. He'd left them high and dry and with children. Or they were people who didn't plan ahead and one day woke up at forty. As years rolled along, I realized that sometimes bad luck rolls over someone like a tide. I felt less superior after that. Now I look at those women and think it could be me, you know?\"\n\nHarry thought for a long time. \"I don't. Susan, I always knew I would farm.\"\n\n\"But what if the crop failed year after year? What if you became injured?\"\n\n\"I have had crops fail and I survived, on not much. I figure whatever happens, I can deal with it. 'Course, it's easier now with Fair. My hardest times were without him.\"\n\n\"It preys on my mind, finding Hester like that,\" said Susan. \"She never expressed fears. But I think maybe her ideas\u2014like aliens being responsible for crop circles, stuff like that\u2014maybe that was how she expressed fear.\"\n\n\"Susan, you might be right. I don't know. I don't look into other people like you do or like Fair does; I kind of take everyone at face value.\"\n\n_\"What if they're hiding behind a mask?\"_ Tucker wondered.\n\n#\n\nAlthough two hundred and twenty years old, the organ at St. Luke's sounded as good as the day it was installed, twenty years after the church's cornerstone was laid, and possibly even better, for time had enriched the sounds. The early small congregations had worked tirelessly to afford such a wonderful organ. Subsequent generations of worshippers continued to give thanks.\n\nThis Sunday morning, even Cazenovia, Lucy Fur, and Elocution luxuriated in the deep reverberations of the low notes, the sparkle of the high. While Reverend Jones delivered his sermon, the three cats sat in the balcony along with the organist and the robed choir. Occasionally the choir would sing down below, but somehow their voices always sounded better from the balcony. As the cats often attended services, none of the choir members paid them any mind.\n\nLucy Fur listened as her human's deep voice filled the church. _\"Poppy worked so hard on this sermon.\"_\n\n_\"He likes any story about people helping people,\"_ said Elocution. _\"I don't think there are Bible stories about people helping animals.\"_\n\nCazenovia added her two cents: _\"There's lots of stories about us helping them. All the animals in the stable, and how about the donkey that carried Jesus on his last journey?\"_\n\n_\"We helped build Christianity,\"_ said Lucy Fur. _\"I mean, how about all the disciples? They had to travel. Donkeys and mules carried them or carted them, too. Dogs protected them and cats kept the grain supply free from pests. All the saints would have died young if it weren't for us.\"_\n\n_\"That's too long ago and far away,\"_ said Elocution. _\"How about all we did to create the United States? We saved the colonists time and again, and then when we went to war against Great Britain, animals fought and suffered, too. Cats are perfect spies. The problem was the humans didn't listen. We could have shortened the war.\"_\n\nCazenovia smiled. _\"Poppy reads aloud, and remember when he read about those battles lost in South Carolina? But it all turned out all right. We're here.\"_\n\nAs the Reverend Jones preached about humans seeing beyond one another's superficial differences and helping others, the cats convinced themselves of their own superiority.\n\nOnce the service ended, Reverend Jones walked down the center aisle to the door at the back of the church. As the congregants exited, he shook the hand of each one, chatting with them a few moments.\n\nHarry had always liked this part of the service.\n\nAs this was the eleven o'clock service, the crowd of worshippers poured out onto the grounds a bit after twelve noon. The temperature had risen to sixty-two degrees; it was a gorgeous October day, the leaves in flaming color.\n\nBoomBoom and her partner, Alicia, chatted with Susan and Ned. Groups formed and re-formed as different folks caught up with one another.\n\nNeil Jordan moved from group to group, selling tickets to the Halloween Hayride. Whether they intended to go or not, everybody bought one.\n\n\"Harry, Fair,\" he greeted them. \"Tickets?\"\n\n\"We bought five,\" said Harry. \"I bought them from Hester.\" She thought about that for a moment, then recovered. \"But tell you what. If you give me a handful, I'll sell them this week.\"\n\n\"Harry, I only have twenty left.\" He beamed.\n\n\"Ah. I'll get more from the library, then. That's wonderful, Neil.\"\n\n\"Eighty tickets.\" He couldn't resist telling the number he'd sold. \"I'll have these twenty sold in no time.\"\n\n\"You're a big success.\" Fair slapped him on the back.\n\nBefore he left them, Neil said, \"Harry, I want to bring you materials on some different kinds of fertilizer I have. If you fertilize now in the fall, it's perfect. And if you've planted winter wheat or cold-resistant rye, you will be amazed at the yield. I know you're busy, but I'm really high on these new types of fertilizer applications. The normal corn yield in a good year is about 207 bushels per acre without irrigation. My fields yielded 250 and my irrigated fields averaged 320 per acre. And this wasn't a particularly good year. If you like my products, we can work out a payment plan.\"\n\n\"Sure. I'll call you.\"\n\nHe persisted. \"I rented two thousand acres in Nelson County to show what these fertilizers can do. I numbered the strips just like you do with corn varieties. You just wait. Next year's numbers will soar.\" With that and a big smile, Neil left.\n\nWalking with her husband toward BoomBoom and Alicia, Harry remarked, \"He'll soon have as many acres under cultivation at Buddy Janss.\"\n\nFair shrugged. \"Neil seems to thrive on competition, on a task, I guess.\"\n\n\"Hey, wasn't that a great sermon?\" Alicia, a former movie star now in her fifties, hugged Fair.\n\nThe old friends all started talking at once as soon as Susan and Ned joined them.\n\n\"My wife told me you'll start on the roof tomorrow,\" Ned said to Harry.\n\n\"Be done before nightfall.\"\n\n\"Susan said that Seth has old slate shingles,\" said the Richmond politician, with respect.\n\n\"Ned, I think he has everything. He doesn't even bother with the salvage yards. He has lines to those small companies dismantling old buildings or rebuilding historic ones that can be saved.\"\n\n\"Smart. I think there's a real niche for that kind of business. It's not all big companies. I keep trying to push in the House for the small businessman, the artisans, and little by little some of my colleagues are getting it.\"\n\nFair smiled. \"You can't always shoot the stag, but you can still eat if you bring home a lot of rabbits.\"\n\nThe group smiled and nodded.\n\nBoomBoom then said, \"Sometimes I think small is better. I go to the bank now, the same bank I have used for twenty-five years, it's been bought up and amalgamated so many times that even though the tellers all know me, I have to go through hoops! I can't even transfer money from my personal account to my business account without paperwork. My money!\"\n\nAlicia put her hand on BoomBoom's forearm, since she knew a tirade was dangerously close. \"If it's too big to fail, it's too big to exist,\" she said.\n\nThat got them all going.\n\nOn the way home in Fair's vet truck, Harry fluffed her plaid wrap skirt. \"Don't you love our friends? We can talk about anything and I always learn something. And I love that we can agree to disagree.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\"\n\n\"Yesterday at a meeting in the chancery, Neil described Hester as a wacko. Well, maybe he didn't put it that strongly, but we let him know in the nicest way that, yes, she was a little strange, but she was part of Crozet and she did much good. Now he's hawking those tickets. Maybe this is atonement.\"\n\n\"Well, that would be nice,\" said Fair. \"My experience of Neil is he assumes we're all dumb rednecks.\"\n\n\"If he wants his fertilizer business to thrive, he'd better get used to it. And you don't go into fertilizer if you want to discuss Raphael,\" said Harry, an art history major at Smith.\n\nFair laughed. \"You have a lot to answer for.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she mused, \"Mother thought whatever I did was fine, but Dad sure was surprised. He'd say, 'How can you make a dime being an art history major?' And I'd say, 'Dad, this is the only time in my life when I can study, when I don't have to make money. I'll come back to the farm.' \" She paused. \"Little did I know they'd both be gone by the beginning of my junior year.\"\n\n\"You never know. I loved your parents. We all did.\"\n\nThey drove along in silence, then Harry thought out loud, \"Do you think anyone ever loved Hester like that?\"\n\nA long silence followed. \"No,\" he answered at last. \"But she was part of all of us, she was valued. That counts for something.\"\n\nTurning down the long gravel driveway, Harry added, \"Alicia was telling me to read a book about the environment. And then she told me to pick up one that's a few years old, _The Great Warming.\"_\n\n\"She's always been a big reader,\" said Fair.\n\n\"She said that back in her acting days, there was so much downtime on the sets that she made up for not going to college with one book after another.\" Harry saw a redheaded woodpecker dart along the fence line. \"I hope our fences don't have bugs.\"\n\n\"I doubt it. That pesky fellow is heading for the next tree. You know, sometimes I look at Alicia and I think what a terrific vet she would have made, or a professor. She does read all the time and she wants to learn. A real passion for knowledge.\"\n\n\"She always told me she hated Hollywood. She felt like a piece of meat. The money was great, but through her, I learned about the sorrows of great beauty.\"\n\nHe turned to look at her. \"You don't have any?\"\n\nAt this she let out a war whoop.\n\nSunday afternoon, Harry and Fair, accompanied by Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker, tackled laying out all the heavy-duty extension cords, hooking them up at various places, and running them out to large water troughs in the smaller fenced pastures. The water troughs had heaters in them, and though conditions were mild, it was best to do this before heavy frosts arrived.\n\nThe largest pasture, seventy good acres, lay along the creek between Harry's farm and Coop's, so it didn't need a trough.\n\nThe horses happily drank from the clear flowing mountain waters, for Harry had extended some fencing onto Coop's side so they could easily wade around, which they enjoyed. Coop thought that was just fine. Most country people worked at accommodation. The trouble began when an outsider bought an old farm and for whatever reason felt no need to share. They seemed to think that people wanted to take advantage of them and that boundary lines were sacrosanct. Naturally, this created problems and often the newcomers found they had few friends except for other newcomers. Then something awful would happen and their neighbors would show up to help out. It usually changed their attitude. They figured out why their neighbors, whom they had usually disturbed or offended in some fashion, showed up to help. It was the country way. Most learned to be a little country themselves. A few did not and returned to where they had originated or moved on, looking for the next wondrous place. Perhaps this happened all over the country, but it happened in Virginia a lot, probably due to the state's great beauty. People wanted to live there.\n\nHarry thought all this as she checked her lines. If Coop couldn't eventually buy the old Jones place and if Reverend Jones one day had to sell, she could be facing this problem.\n\nThere were problems enough for now.\n\nShe and Fair finished the day's work, ate supper, then took a sunset walk all the way back to the vast walnut groves Susan owned on this side of the Blue Ridge Mountains.\n\nA barred owl flew from one tree to another.\n\n\"So silent,\" Harry noted.\n\n\"And such an efficient hunter,\" Fair added.\n\n_\"I'm just as good,\"_ Pewter bragged from below, never one to tolerate compliments of others.\n\nFrom a perch high above, the owl looked down at this groundling. _\"Dream on.\"_\n\n_\"I'll show you,\"_ Pewter sassed, _\"and furthermore, you don't come around the barn because Flatface is bigger than you.\"_\n\nFlatface, the great horned owl, lived in the cupola. She was two and a half feet high. The barred owl was about a foot and a half, with a wingspan just under four feet, impressive enough on his own terms.\n\n_\"Pewter, I wouldn't start a fight with an owl, even a screech owl,\"_ Tucker wisely admonished.\n\n_\"Hoo!\"_ the barred owl replied.\n\nAnd down below, Harry, once again thinking of who could have killed Hester, thought, \"Who, indeed?\"\n\n#\n\n\"W _hy are we going this way?\"_ Pewter asked as she stared out the station wagon window Monday evening. _\"I'm ready to go home.\"_\n\n_\"We've only been on the road for fifteen minutes,\"_ Mrs. Murphy replied. _\"Plus you just ate fresh tuna. Don't be crabby.\"_\n\n_\"I'm not crabby!\"_ Pewter snapped. _\"I just want to know what she's doing, that's all. She checked the roof work at St. Luke's and now she's heading west\u2014the wrong direction. You know how she can get if she sees a friend or passes one on the road.\"_ The gray cat referred to Harry's conviviality; her human was always stopping to chew the fat with another local.\n\nAlso staring out the window, Tucker said, _\"She had to get to St. Luke's before sunset. She wanted to recheck the roof work.\"_\n\n_\"The roof work is fine,\"_ Pewter spoke louder.\n\nThe three watched as Harry slowed, then turned in to the old gravel driveway to the three abandoned school buildings.\n\n_\"Hey, there's Brinkley.\"_ Tucker stood on her hind legs as she saw her yellow Lab friend sitting in front of the faded clapboard building with paint peeling.\n\nAfter parking, Harry stepped out, then opened the door for the animals, all of whom rushed to the big sweet dog.\n\n\"Hey,\" Tazio Chappars called out as Harry stepped through the schoolhouse door, which creaked.\n\nHarry looked around. \"I've never been in here.\"\n\n\"Few people have after 1965, I guess.\" Tazio dropped her hand to pet Brinkley's head. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"Has character. Public buildings don't anymore. Plus they look so cheap. Ugly boxes.\"\n\n\"You're talking to an architect.\" Tazio laughed. \" 'Ugly' is too kind a word. And these three distinguished buildings were built for the underclass, for lack of a better word. We have beautiful examples throughout the state of what was built for the middle classes and the rich. Maybe builders had a better feel back then for space, light, warm materials. I don't find reinforced concrete warm.\" She smiled. \"Hester railroaded me. Now I'm going to railroad you, girl.\"\n\n\"Let me sit down.\" Harry sat at one of the old-fashioned desks and took a deep breath. \"I'm ready. Have at me.\"\n\nTazio sat at the desk across from Harry, as she once had done with Hester. \"You know so many people. Your people have been here since the Revolutionary War. They've worshipped at St. Luke's since that time.\"\n\nHarry crossed her arms over her chest. \"With a lead-in like that, this is going to be a biggie. I know it.\"\n\n\"Uh, yes.\" Tazio leaned toward Harry a bit. \"I believe Hester knew she was going to die.\" Tazio held up her hand, sensing that Harry was about to interrupt her. \"She knew she was in danger. When she asked me to take on the fight\u2014the project of bringing these buildings back to life\u2014I said I would only do it if she led the charge. She agreed but then she made me promise before we parted that if something happened to her, I would carry on.\"\n\n\"Dear God.\" Harry's hand flew to her face.\n\n\"It's a promise I must fulfill. I, well, I just must.\"\n\n\"Of course, Tazio. It's a debt of honor, and think of how much she trusted you.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"You told this to Cooper?\"\n\n\"I did. Gives her not one more solid fact, but she did say it's possible Hester knew more than she was telling. We'll never know, but what I want to know is, will you work with me, Harry, use your contacts to help save the schoolhouses?\"\n\nHarry thought a bit, then replied, \"I will, but you and I have to be clear about the future use of the buildings. That means involving other people, asking their opinions, and, well, I don't want to put the cart before the horse. Let's do the Halloween Hayride first. I see you've started on Frankenstein's table.\"\n\nHarry looked at the red lights that accentuated the fake pools of plastic cut-out blood on the table and floor. Strangely cut lampshades cast ominous shadows with low light.\n\nA flat table, straps across it, stood in the middle of the classroom. Tazio had moved some of the desks aside to make room for it. \"This is the mad doctor's operating room,\" she stated with faux solemnity.\n\n\"Sure looks convincing,\" said Harry.\n\n\"Good. I want to make this year special,\" said Tazio. \"This has to be the best Halloween Hayride ever. Raise tons of money for the library.\"\n\n\"Who is going to be Frankenstein, or will he be a cutout figure?\" Harry inquired.\n\n\"Buddy Janss volunteered to be the monster. Wesley Speer said he'd be the doctor. Has a lab coat, sort of, and clothes they wore back in Mary Shelley's time.\"\n\n\"Wesley Speer. Good for him.\" Harry smiled at the thought of her fellow vestry board member being Dr. Frankenstein.\n\n\"I heard that Neil Jordan has sold one hundred hayride tickets in just a few days,\" said Tazio. \"That's something. He must be twisting every arm he knows.\"\n\n\"He can be persuasive, and it is a tradition. Also, in a sick way, the scarecrow and the witch deaths have kind of promoted the horror aspect, driving up sales.\" Harry looked around. \"Built solid, this schoolhouse.\"\n\n\"All three of them have stood the test of time. One for the little children, then the middle school, and the last building was for the big kids. I went through drawers and found old test tubes and stuff. I'm going to set it all up, see if I can't get some things smoking and bubbling and then backlight it.\"\n\n\"Creepy and perfect. However, don't let Brinkley in. That tail could be lethal.\"\n\n\"I'll put everything over his head. I learned the hard way, he can clean off a coffee table. He'd make a real mess in here.\"\n\nAs though on cue, Brinkley pushed open the front door, letting in a rush of cold air. _\"I'm here. I'm watching everything.\"_\n\n_\"What can you see?\"_ Pewter said, marching in behind. _\"My eyes are a lot better than yours.\"_\n\nBrinkley, a natural diplomat, replied, _\"They are. I wish I could see as good in the dark as you and Mrs. Murphy do.\"_\n\nHarry walked to the door to close it. \"Boy, that temperature drops with the sun.\"\n\n\"That's another thing,\" said Tazio. \"This old heating system works. I checked it out, cast iron. The boiler is enormous but solid cast iron. The boiler room was installed right about the time of World War One.\"\n\nHarry wondered, \"Who would know how to repair the boiler?\"\n\n\"Same company's been servicing it since installing it in 1915. Couldn't stand it\u2014I hopped on my computer, and sure enough, the information is online.\"\n\n\"That's a piece of luck.\" Harry smiled.\n\nTazio agreed. \"It is. Harry, thank you for signing on. You and I will make a great team. I hope Hester's looking down on us and giving a cheer.\"\n\n\"Me, too, but she might be saying, 'Not Harry!' \"\n\nTazio smiled. \"Not a chance. Well, I think we've got the ride in good order.\"\n\n\"This ride scares me before I even get on the hay wagon.\" Harry's eyes widened. \"It's going to be spectacular.\"\n\n\"Let me show you the little bathroom.\" Tazio stood up.\n\nThe two walked to the door at the back of the large room. Tazio opened it.\n\n\"Water still runs.\" Harry turned the faucet on and off. \"The old towel dispenser still works, too.\" She gave the white towel a tug and more came down as the used portion fed up into the metal dispensing box. \"Gets me excited. The quality of the workmanship, the layout.\"\n\nThey closed the door and walked to the front of the room. Harry, always curious, sat behind the large teacher's desk, which was set on a dais so the teacher could view the entire classroom.\n\n\"You will now recite your ABC's,\" Harry ordered.\n\nTazio, before her, ran through them quickly, then shoved Harry from the seat.\n\n\"Harry Haristeen, what is twelve times twelve?\"\n\n\"One hundred and forty-four,\" Harry victoriously answered.\n\n\"I gave you an easy one,\" Tazio teased as she pulled out the middle desk drawer. \"Hey, look.\"\n\nHarry stepped back up on the dais. \"Pencils, a hand sharpener, a wooden ruler.\"\n\n\"Grandpa's Tar Soap,\" Tazio said, reading the advertising printed on the ruler. \"And here's an old piece of paper.\"\n\nHarry read out the name printed on the paper: \"Walter Ashby Plecker.\"\n\n\"If Walter's name was in the teacher's drawer, he must have been a bad boy,\" said Tazio.\n\n#\n\nThursday, October 24, the service for Hester Martin was finally held at St. Francis Catholic Church in Staunton. Harry quietly sat in the pew, next to Susan, BoomBoom, Alicia, Big Mim, and Miranda Hogendobber. Fair, up in Leesburg at a veterinary conference, couldn't attend, but most everyone else who knew Hester was there. Wearing a suit, Buddy Janss made people look twice, since the portly farmer was nearly always seen wearing overalls.\n\nHarry appreciated the dignity of the Catholic service. She thought that being a Lutheran, as she was, was sort of like being a Catholic but without the incense. In her mind, people divided up into high church and low church. She admired Miranda, staunch member of the Church of the Holy Light, a charismatic church, for her strong feeling of a personal relationship with God. But Harry needed the liturgy, the ritual. Obviously, Hester had needed it, too.\n\nFortunately, Hester's niece, Sarah Price, raised Catholic, had made sure the ceremony was done just right. She had spoken at length with the priest and had picked out appropriate hymns. A woman in her mid-thirties, Sarah quite resembled her eccentric aunt.\n\nHester's niece had relied on Susan Tucker to help her with the other necessary arrangements after finding her name in Hester's address book. She'd placed a gold star next to Susan's name. Hester used different colored stars and gold meant the best.\n\nSarah also had the presence of mind to give the address book to the sheriff.\n\nAs the mourners filed out after the service, they walked down steep steps to the parking lot below. Wesley Speer and Buddy assisted the elderly down the hazardous steps, the older folks grasping the railing for all they were worth.\n\nSlowly descending next to Harry, Big Mim said, \"Staunton is a town of hills. One can find a wonderful view for a reasonable price.\"\n\n\"True,\" Harry replied.\n\n\"Mary Baldwin has the best spot in town,\" remarked BoomBoom, just behind them.\n\nMary Baldwin College did indeed have a wonderful setting. The prestigious school had been continually graduating women since 1842, and most of those alumnae had flourished, often bucking the odds against women.\n\nWoodrow Wilson's house rested not far from the college, and Harry wondered whether as a boy he had watched the girls walk by. It was hard to imagine the former president as a man being dazzled by women. In photographs, he appeared rather cold.\n\n\"Well, on to the cemetery. It's really beautiful,\" Alicia noted. On the west side of town, the graveyard was a refuge for the living to think and reflect, and a fitting place for the departed.\n\nThe graveyard was glowing with October sunlight when Hester's Crozet friends reached it. Again, the burial service for the dead was dignified and brief.\n\nThe reception that followed was held in Hester's home and started at four. It took most of the crowd about forty-five minutes to drive to the simple brick two-story house, a graceful structure that had belonged to Hester's grandparents. The paint on the brick, a creamy yellow, had flaked in spots, and the soft paprika of old brick shone through. The old place felt warm and lived in.\n\nHaving never been inside Hester's house, Harry was curious to see it, and paused in the entryway.\n\nCooper, right next to her, also paused a moment. \"Some of this furniture has to go back to the Revolution.\"\n\n\"Heppelwhite,\" Big Mim, close by, crisply filled her in. \"And the silver is Georgian, but not just any George. George II.\"\n\n\"I had no idea,\" Harry exclaimed.\n\n\"That was her way.\" Big Mim removed her hat. \"Hester lived simply. She wanted it that way.\"\n\nAlways proper, Big Mim wore a hat in church, as did most of the older women. Harry and Susan also wore hats, mostly because their mothers had long ago drummed it into them. Neither woman much liked hats.\n\nBig Mim knew Hester better than the others. \"She inherited most of what one needs in life. Not an ounce of the snob in her; she would never have called attention to the quality of the furnishings, the fabrics, and, of course, the elegant silver. I will miss her.\" The older woman smiled sorrowfully, then began moving about, a pure political animal regardless of circumstance. Big Mim was of that generation that worked through men. Her husband, Jim, was mayor of Crozet.\n\n\"Well, old girl, ready for the shake and howdy?\" Harry teased Cooper, who had not been born and bred in the region.\n\n\"I'm getting ready.\" Cooper followed Harry.\n\nSusan stood next to Sarah, introducing her to the guests.\n\n\"Sarah, please meet my best and oldest friend in the world, Harry Haristeen, and with her, one of our sheriff's department deputies, Cynthia Cooper.\"\n\nSarah shook their hands. \"Thank you so much for helping to celebrate my aunt's life.\"\n\n\"The service became her: simple and elegant,\" Harry complimented her.\n\nCooper stepped up to the plate. \"And the gravesite is so beautiful.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Please have some refreshments,\" said Sarah. \"Buddy Janss made the punch. He said it was my aunt's favorite.\"\n\nThe two moved on, glancing at each other with raised eyebrows.\n\nHarry pushed Cooper through the crowd. \"You first.\"\n\n\"I am not drinking that stuff.\"\n\n\"A sip. Come on, girl. You can do it.\"\n\nThey arrived at an enormous silver scalloped punch bowl; the family initials in elegant script were intertwined on its front.\n\nBetween laughter and tears, Buddy ladled out a full silver cup.\n\n\"Buddy,\" warned Coop, not yet committed to this alcoholic endeavor.\n\n\"Come on, Coop. You're not on duty.\"\n\n\"If I drink this, I will pass out,\" Coop protested.\n\n\"First your legs will lock up. But I'll carry you home,\" he promised.\n\nHe was irresistible, so Coop took a too-big swig. Harry wisely sipped hers.\n\nCoop gasped. \"My throat is on fire.\"\n\nBuddy laughed. \"Well, go on and talk to people. That will cool you down. Neil, come on, your turn.\"\n\nNeil Jordan accepted a silver cup, drank a bit. His eyes watered. Reverend Jones squeezed in next to him and laughed.\n\n\"Did Hester really drink this stuff?\" Neil sputtered. \"My God, what a tough broad.\"\n\n\"You're just now figuring that out?\" Reverend Jones slapped him on the back.\n\nNeil didn't spill a drop. He reached into his pockets, pulled out tickets to the Halloween Hayride, and began moving through the crowd\u2014with difficulty, but he was selling those tickets.\n\n\"Reverend, did you have a clue that Hester had such impeccable taste in home furnishings?\" Harry asked as he was now pushed next to her.\n\n\"Well, I'd been here once or twice. Knew her people, of course, as did you. All of them quiet living. Well, you knew her mother and father and her older brother.\"\n\n\"I was pretty little and they seemed so old. I don't remember her brother except that he was tall,\" Harry responded.\n\nThe party grew louder as the punch took effect. Faces red, people in the crowd talked over one another as they each recalled their favorite Hester stories. Some burst into tears, but that's the way of a Virginia celebration. Emotions rise right up to the surface.\n\n\"She was not lonely,\" said the reverend. \"People thought she was, because in this part of the world you march in twos. Crozet is a Noah's ark.\" The preacher took a sip, peered over the silver rim. \"And, Coop, you'll be walking side by side with someone before you know it.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know.\"\n\n\"A good-looking woman like you? Just you wait.\" He beamed at her, then returned to the subject of Hester. \"She threw herself into good works. I believe she was a fulfilled person, a good person. Granted, sometimes the notions about black gum trees or the fact that food modification would make us all idiots took me aback, but we all have our pet peeves.\"\n\nAs the conversation continued, Wesley Speer moved toward Buddy. A funeral gathering is as good a place as any to patch up hard feelings.\n\nBuddy held out a full cup. \"Wesley.\"\n\n\"Buddy, I've been pushing you a little hard about those one hundred acres. I'm overanxious.\"\n\nBuddy took a deep breath. \"Wesley, in these times I think we are all overanxious. Let's just set it aside for now and we can talk maybe after Thanksgiving. I can't sell rich soil without replacing it, you see?\"\n\n\"I do, Buddy, I really do.\"\n\nThe two men clinked cups and Buddy then nodded to the next person pressing at the punch bowl.\n\n\"I can hardly breathe,\" Cooper whispered.\n\n\"What?\" Harry inclined her ear toward her.\n\nA bit louder, Coop repeated herself.\n\n\"It's the punch,\" said Harry. \"It'll stay with you for a while. Don't drink any more,\" she advised.\n\n\"I'm sorry I drank what I did. This can't be legal.\" Cooper ruefully smiled.\n\n\"Well, dear Deputy, if you run a roadside stand and you've lived here all your life and your people have lived here since way back, your friends know where to find the best country waters to see you off with.\"\n\nCooper laughed as she saw her boss, Rick Shaw, the sheriff, come into the room. \"He knows about the hooch, of course.\"\n\n\"Always did.\" Harry laughed. \"It's a wise law enforcement officer who knows when to turn a blind eye.\"\n\n\"Ain't that the truth? Let's see if we can work our way over to the library. Doesn't look like so many people there.\"\n\nThe two edged their way through the crowd toward the mahogany-shelved library, chatting as they did so, which meant the short walk into the next room took a half hour.\n\nJust before reaching the library, Harry bumped into Cindy Walters, whom she introduced to Cooper.\n\n\"This is so terrible.\" Cindy spoke above the crowd noise. \"I no sooner reached home than I turned around to come back. She would have done the same for me.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Harry simply agreed.\n\nCindy looked at Cooper. \"I don't know if this will help you but Hester told me she was stepping on toes. Her refusal to sell sprayed crops, her opposition to development. She mentioned this in passing.\"\n\n\"Any names?\" Cooper was accustomed to people providing information.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Did she seemed frightened?\"\n\n\"Officer, I don't really know. Hester hid a lot.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Miss Walters.\"\n\n\"Where's Heidi?\" Harry asked.\n\n\"Upstairs. Couldn't live without her.\" The short, trim lady smiled.\n\nOnce inside the library, they looked at the books, many old, bound in Moroccan leather of deep colors.\n\nHarry found a shelf dealing with agriculture. \"She's got books dating back to World War One; she's got books released year by year from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.\"\n\nCoop bent down to read spines on the lower shelves. \"Some of these are in French. Hey, here's one on Percherons and it looks very, very old.\"\n\nHarry knelt down. \"Percherons are French draft horses. I had no idea. I mean, I knew that Hester had a college degree, but look at all these books.\"\n\n\"Here're two rows on Indian affairs.\" Cooper squinted to see better.\n\nHarry joined her and looked closely at the titles. \"She must have everything Virginia and the U.S. government ever released on the subject.\"\n\n\"She's got newer stuff, too,\" said Coop. \"Custer and Little Big Horn. _Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee_.\" The law officer read a few more titles out loud, then moved to the next shelf at her eye level. She stopped cold. \"Harry.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" Harry was utterly absorbed in her examination of the old volumes.\n\n\"Come here.\"\n\nHarry did as she was asked and beheld a photograph of Hester in an old silver frame. She had a fly rod in her hand, and her surroundings looked to be Bath or Highland County, Virginia counties adjacent to the state of West Virginia. Standing next to her in a stream was a man considerably younger, fishing rod also in hand. He held up a lovely trout.\n\nHarry leaned closer.\n\n\"It's Josh Hill,\" Cooper said, her voice low.\n\nHarry swallowed. \"I never saw his face, I mean intact.\"\n\nCooper had seen plenty of photographs of the accountant during her ongoing research. \"It's him all right, which makes me wonder: Were these two fishing for trouble together?\"\n\n#\n\nSunlight flooded Hester's kitchen, which faced east. The morning after the reception, Cooper and Rick Shaw sat at the kitchen's small square wooden table with Sarah Price. After apologizing for troubling her at such a time, the two law enforcement officers began their questioning of Hester Martin's niece.\n\n\"Did you ever meet the young man in the photograph?\" Rick Shaw asked Sarah. The silver-framed photo of Hester and Josh Hill sat on the table in front of them.\n\n\"Not that I remember,\" the pleasant woman replied. \"I don't know who he is.\"\n\n\"She never mentioned Josh Hill?\" asked Rick.\n\nSarah looked again at the photo. \"No.\"\n\n\"Did she talk about fishing?\" Cooper asked.\n\n\"Some. Aunt Hester and I would speak over the phone about once a week. She wouldn't text me or email. She said she wanted to hear my voice, then she'd know if I was okay.\"\n\n\"Did she talk about her other interests?\" Rick folded his hands then unfolded them.\n\n\"Aunt Hester loved to lecture! That is, once she had inquired about my health, boyfriend status\u2014I'm divorced\u2014and my career advancement or lack thereof.\" Sarah smiled. \"After all that, I would be treated to discussions about the global food crisis, why agribusiness couldn't meet the demand, and why she refused to sell foods treated with pesticides. She admitted organic farming was less efficient. A lot of goods are lost to bugs and stuff. You didn't so much talk with my late aunt as you listened.\"\n\nBoth Rick and Cooper smiled before Cooper spoke up. \"Did your aunt ever talk about what she was reading? That's a gorgeous library. All those books from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. She must have loved reading or at least collecting.\"\n\n\"Much of that library she inherited, but she was an avid reader. Often she read in French, especially plays and novels. We would laugh about something she quoted from Moli\u00e8re. But mostly, with me, anyway, she would talk about something she'd read in English about farming or about human impact on wildlife.\"\n\n\"It's funny, Miss Price,\" said Cooper. \"I have stopped at your aunt's roadside stand for years and I never knew she could read in French, never knew she owned such beautiful things.\" She looked around the kitchen, her eyes resting on the old wooden cupboards.\n\n\"That doesn't surprise me. I don't know as I would classify Aunt Hester as secretive so much as, uh, compartmentalized.\" She leaned to her left, toward Rick. \"Her friends and interests fell into categories, which didn't overlap.\"\n\n\"Did she talk about them with you?\" Rick inquired.\n\n\"Not much. Most of what I knew came from my dad, who died about six years ago from lung cancer. He was older than Hester by two years. They got along but weren't close. Too different.\"\n\n\"How?\" Cooper often found that an offhand comment, a recollection, pointed in the right direction.\n\n\"Oh, Dad was sophisticated, driven. And social. Houston is a great city in which to be social. He married very well. Both my parents loved fine things, evening-gown parties. You know the type. Aunt Hester thought he was superficial.\"\n\n\"Was he?\" Rick's eyebrows lifted.\n\nA silence followed this. \"By Virginia standards, he was. He talked about money too openly. His suits were too flashy and he wore a big gold Rolex, which Aunt Hester called a Texas timepiece. But Daddy had a heart of gold, so if he wanted to wear a little gold, okay. He made sure I got the best education possible. He went to Houston to make money and he did. Sure, he indulged Mother and he indulged me, but he also made sure I knew right from wrong, and he could be tough. Can you tell? I loved my dad.\"\n\n\"He sounds like a good fellow.\" Rick nodded. \"And Virginians can be snobs. Aunt Hester might have filled those shoes.\"\n\n\"Oh, she didn't mean anything by it. Dad took it with a grain of salt. He called her the Old Maid and declared if she'd find a good man she'd be much less judgmental. I remember Aunt H, as I would call her, used to say to my mother, 'He's my brother, I love him, but how can you live with him?' Mom would laugh.\"\n\n\"What did you think?\" Cooper shrewdly asked.\n\n\"I guess in some ways I agreed with Dad, but you never got the full picture with Aunt H. Her interests were passionate but compartmentalized, as I said. Like the fishing, for instance. She rarely talked to me about it but she would talk about it for hours to Mom, who liked to fish, too. Once they went together to the Snake River in Wyoming. Dad paid for everything. Aunt Hester was appalled that Mother put on makeup to fish.\" Sarah laughed, a tinkling, engaging laugh.\n\n\"Maybe the fish liked it.\" Rick laughed with her.\n\n\"They must have, because Mom caught more than Aunt H, and that didn't sit well.\"\n\n\"Do you know if she traveled to other places?\" Cooper kept on.\n\n\"I do know, again through Mom, that Aunt Hester usually fished in Bath or Highland County in Virginia. They both swore it was the best fishing on the East Coast.\"\n\n\"I've heard that,\" Cooper said. \"Do you fish?\"\n\n\"No. I'm a golfer. Love being out there surrounded by such green vistas, sometimes all by myself. Other times in a foursome. Houston has some wonderful courses. Of course, Charlottesville, for such a small place, does, too.\"\n\n\"Farmington?\" Rick raised his voice as a question.\n\n\"Those long fairways. Keswick Club is a challenge. Glenmore. A short drive to the Country Club of Virginia. And in four hours I can drive down to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to one of the most fabled golf courses in the country.\"\n\n\"Did Hester golf?\" Cooper pressed on.\n\n\"No. Her interests were, as you know, varied: fishing, farming, the library, old buildings. She loved the Library of Virginia in Richmond. Loved Monument Avenue. She had a quiet, longstanding interest in the Virginia tribes.\"\n\nCooper sat up straighter. \"Why do you think she was interested in Virginia Indians?\"\n\n\"Our maternal line is Sessoms, a Cherokee name,\" Sarah explained. \"But they adapted so well to the early colonists\u2014I mean early as in eighteenth century\u2014that the Sessoms farmed, wore English clothing, spoke English, and intermarried with Europeans. Over time they became so much like the English that they didn't have the trouble the other tribes did, including the Cherokees in the more southern states. Those people went through hell. Sessoms is a common last name in the tribe, just like Adams is a common last name for the Upper Mattaponi.\"\n\n\"Did you know that Josh Hill was an Upper Mattaponi?\" Cooper felt that little buzz when she knew she was finding her way on a case.\n\nWhere it was going, she didn't know.\n\nSarah shook her head. \"I knew nothing about this fellow, but he appears to have been a fishing buddy, and if he was a member of a Virginia tribe, Aunt H would have been fascinated.\"\n\n\"She never spoke to you about this? About the Cherokee connection?\"\n\n\"No. It was Dad who told me about that part of our ancestry.\" She thought a moment. \"Once I mentioned something about a bracelet I saw that had been made by the Pueblos. Aunt H said southwestern Indians, Texas Indians, were much different from the East Coast tribes but all were fascinating to study.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\" Cooper persisted.\n\n\"She said\u2014and this I do remember, because I heard it at odd times, not a lot but enough to remember, and I heard it repeated by my dad, too\u2014the Indians never raped the land.\"\n\nBoth sheriff and deputy sat quietly for a moment, then Rick asked, \"Were either of your parents ever involved in environmental causes or perhaps trying to return tribal lands to their original owners?\"\n\n\"They supported the Nature Conservancy. They made vacations to go on field trips, wonderful places like southern Chile, Moosehead Lake in Maine. They really pitched in with the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited. We had to live in the now. Mom and Dad wholeheartedly believed that. Dad said that he thought in some ways Aunt H lived too much in the past.\"\n\n\"And Aunt Hester's attitude?\" Cooper asked.\n\n\"That we needed to make amends. We needed to preserve the past and also make amends to other peoples, to wildlife. As you see, she preserved the past in this house. Aunt H was consistent and she really did care about providing good food at her stand, about taking care of the land. Maybe that's why she liked fishing. She could get away but still be part of nature. I suspect she threw back whatever she caught. Mom always did.\"\n\nBoth interrogators smiled.\n\nCooper then said, \"We combed her roadside stand. Lolly\u2014you met Lolly?\" When Sarah nodded yes, Cooper continued. \"Showed us the back rooms, everything. She opened the cash register, lifted the tray where Hester kept notes, odd returned checks, stuff like that.\"\n\nSarah quietly interrupted, \"And you found that my aunt Hester was organized about everything but her financial records. I've found old bank statements in kitchen drawers, in the visor of her truck.\"\n\nCooper smiled. \"She appears to have used a system unique to herself. What interested us was a check for a thousand dollars written to Joshua Hill. Written on the bottom memo line was 'Research.' It had been cashed.\"\n\nSarah registered surprise. \"She wouldn't write a check that size on a whim.\"\n\n\"We don't know what the research was, and his records are sparse,\" Rick said.\n\n\"So there is a connection between the murders.\" Sarah spoke lowly.\n\n\"It certainly seems possible,\" Cooper answered.\n\n\"May I ask you a question?\" said Sarah.\n\n\"Anything.\" Rick liked her, obviously.\n\n\"Do you have any idea who would kill my aunt, or why?\"\n\n\"I won't b.s. you,\" he answered. \"We don't but I promise you, Sarah, we will find out and we will bring them to justice. Your aunt was a good woman.\"\n\nCooper looked Sarah in the eye. \"I apologize for pushing you with questions, but you knew Hester as well as anyone, perhaps better. The rest of us took her at face value, and even those who had been in her home, like Mim Sanburne, only knew a fraction of who and what she was.\"\n\n\"You don't think she was involved in anything illegal, do you?\" asked Sarah, distressed. \"I mean, I can't imagine her doing something illegal. Aunt H was a straight arrow.\"\n\n\"No. But my hunch, and it is just a hunch, is she may have stumbled onto something someone else was doing that was illegal.\"\n\nSarah's hand covered her heart for a moment.\n\n\"I wonder if she knew she was in danger. She would have kept it to herself. She was so independent, had lived her whole life alone\u2014if she did think she was in danger, she would have thought she could handle it.\" Sarah swallowed. \"I make her sound unrealistic but who could have foreseen something like this? Aunt H never did understand evil.\"\n\n#\n\nThe wind rustled through the dried cornstalks in Buddy Janss's one hundred acres behind the three abandoned schoolhouses. Buddy walked through the fields with an insurance agent. The crop insurer, on overload thanks to the drought, worked every day but Sunday. This Friday, October 25, he had already visited three farms before noon.\n\nThe U.S. government underpinned about sixty percent of insurance premiums. Until now, the premiums farmers paid for various farming insurance had more than covered the payouts, but this year it looked as though the government payouts would be greater than the intake.\n\nLooking down at his clipboard, Drake Stoneman, thirty-two, traced acreage numbers with his index finger. \"Why do you insure some acres and not others for the same crop?\"\n\nBuddy, fifty-two, didn't much like the tone of this younger man nor the assumption, so prevalent these days, that one must explain one's self exhaustively. \"Because for years I carted some vegetables and corn to a roadside food stand where the owner was fierce about organic foods.\"\n\n\"Given the losses to fungus, birds, and insects, you must have gotten top dollar.\" Stoneman looked up from his figures into Buddy's dark brown eyes.\n\n\"I did not,\" the large man replied firmly. \"I did business with the lady who owned the stand and my father did business with her people. It's just something I did.\"\n\n\"Hard to farm if you don't put profit first,\" the college-educated fellow smugly said.\n\n\"You don't have much of a life if profit is all you care about.\" Buddy, feeling his anger rise, then followed with, \"I make enough money elsewhere.\"\n\nStoneman nodded at the equipment parked nearby. \"This your boom sprayer?\"\n\n\"Is. It's calibrated for each nozzle to spray 1\/128 of an acre. Been doing this all my life. Divide the tank capacity by the gallons per acre pesticide or liquid fertilizer application rate. Do the math. Set your nozzles correctly given the crop, figure your normal spraying speed, and record the travel time in seconds. It's the only way to get the application correct. Otherwise, I waste my money.\"\n\nDrake looked at Buddy, slowly realizing it might be prudent not to lecture him on broadcast applications. \"I see.\"\n\n\"You asked about my organic corn, which is how I think of it,\" said Buddy. \"Silver Queen is in this field. As you are a bright fellow from Virginia Tech...?\"\n\nQuickly Drake replied, \"North Carolina State.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. You know Silver Queen is hard to grow.\"\n\n\"That I do.\"\n\n\"My untreated acres did better than this one hundred. Look. Lost everything and I sprayed this patch every two days. In this climate, an insect like the corn borer can span three generations in one crop cycle.\" He yanked an ear off the stalk. \"No corn borers.\"\n\nJust to prove he was on the ball, Drake twisted off an ear himself, separate from the one in Buddy's hand, and inspected it. \"I see.\"\n\n\"This entire crop is worthless. Couldn't even use it for forage.\"\n\nDrake couldn't miss the nasty signs of smut on the now dried-up ears. \"It is possible to be fooled. This stuff sometimes just seems to appear overnight.\"\n\n\"I kept after these acres. I shouldn't have any disease in here, including the smut. I sprayed for that, too. I mean, I did everything. Sure, I want my crop insurance. That's why I pay the premiums, but I want to know how this happened.\"\n\n\"I would, too.\" Drake was becoming a little more sympathetic. \"Corn means big bucks. Our country's exports for fresh corn alone, not counting frozen or canned corn, should bring in about $47 million for farmers, and this year it's nowhere close.\"\n\n\"Got to cut growing forty percent of the crop for ethanol when people go hungry,\" Buddy firmly stated.\n\n\"That's a hot potato, Mr. Janss.\" He paused. \"Do you mind if I look at your acres, the ones you used for the roadside stand?\"\n\n\"Not at all. Everything's off of them.\"\n\n\"Plow under the stalks?\"\n\n\"No, I leave stuff up until the first hint of spring. Gleanings for birds, bunnies, foxes. Brings 'em right in.\"\n\n\"Why don't you plow this under now so it can start breaking down?\"\n\nBuddy wondered what this kid had learned in college.\n\nHe calmly explained, \"Smut spores can live in the soil, for one. But we do share the earth and the old corn helps wildlife. If I plow it under, the soil will compact by spring and I'll have to break it up again\u2014duplication of effort, hours, and cost, plus I just may have made it easy for the smut to regenerate.\"\n\n\"Uh, yes.\"\n\n\"A ripper and shredder, John Deere 2720, can just tear this up, save time, do a terrific job. But a seventeen-foot with forty disc blades costs almost fifty thousand dollars. The twenty-seven-foot with sixty-six disc blades starts at eighty-nine thousand dollars. Can't begin to afford that. I use my old disc\u2014well, it's ancient, really, and sometimes I even pull my old York rake when the stubble's down. I can't just figure crop profit. I have to factor in equipment costs, hours, wear and tear, and then there's wear and tear on me, too.\"\n\nDrake knelt down, pulled out a little brown paper bag and a small sharp trowel from his pocket. He dug out a sample of soil. He then walked twenty-five yards, took another one.\n\nBuddy watched. He took his own soil samples each fall and then again in the spring. In this part of the world, a farmer needed to keep checking for magnesium deficiency. Out west the lack was often selenium, not a problem in central Virginia.\n\nDrake came back, Buddy hopped in his new Ford while Drake followed in a serviceable old Ram.\n\nThey reached the harvested fields, where the younger man again took soil samples.\n\nBuddy watched, his anger somewhat subsiding. \"I can send you my soil tests for all my acres. I'll shoot it to you from my computer.\"\n\n\"That would be helpful. You'll receive your check. Like you said, Mr. Janss, that's why you pay the premiums, and your taxes, too. We need the government for a lot of this. You can imagine the stress on farmers in the Midwest and the Southwest.\"\n\n\"I pray for those people.\" Buddy meant it, too.\n\nDrake shook his head. \"Don't see how people can argue with climate change.\"\n\n\"Actually, Mr. Stoneman, I do see how they can and I have some real questions about our ability to predict and plan how to handle Mother Earth, but I know something's changing. I just want to know more and I'd sure like the politics to be taken out of it.\"\n\nFor a flash Drake dropped his professional mask. \"Politics is in everything.\"\n\nBuddy looked right into his eyes. \"You got that right, brother.\"\n\nAs Drake drove away, Buddy folded his arms across his chest, looking over some of his well-tended acreage. It was odd that the untreated Silver Queen corn had done better this year than the treated. He never planted more than two hundred acres with this type of corn, mostly because it took so much management. It was susceptible to about every pest and problem known to corn and needed steady water, too. But, oh, how sweet that Silver Queen was and how people looked forward to it come August, September, and this year, even early October.\n\nEvery now and then Buddy would think he'd just plant every field with orchard grass and the hell with it. But he couldn't. He loved his corn crops, loved the squash, and _really_ loved the small orchard he tended of the old Alberta pears. People would come from all around to get those pears, not much seen anymore.\n\nSighing, he stepped on the running board and got into the Ford's cab. He drove back to the disease-ridden crop, parked at the three schoolhouses, and looked for a moment, then drove into the middle of the field.\n\nHarry, pets along with her, happened to be cruising by at that moment to double-check the Halloween Hayride route that Tazio had given her.\n\nShe saw Buddy. So she drove out to the field, her old 1978 Ford churning through the hardened, bumpy earth with ease.\n\nAs she opened the door, the dog and two cats shot out.\n\n\"Buddy. Hey. Saw you here and wanted to thank you again for serving at Hester's house and, well, for being a pallbearer.\"\n\n\"It was an honor to be a pallbearer. Something hits you when you hoist that coffin on your shoulders along with five other men. Can't explain it.\"\n\n\"Well, thank you for honoring a special person.\"\n\nHe leaned against his truck, having stepped out since she left her truck. \"Here's something funny goin' on. Wish Hester were with us, she'd crow with delight. These acres, sprayed every two days. My Silver Queen. Well, smut ruined everything. The untreated Silver Queen acres\u2014healthy. Oh, sure, a worm here and there, and always corn spiders, but they do no harm. The birds got some of the corn, but mostly my untreated acres are really healthy, even with our brief drought. I can't figure it out.\"\n\n\"What about your irrigated acres?\"\n\n\"Same story. I irrigated half my plots. The irrigated rows did a little better but not as much as one would think, but, you know\"\u2014he swept his hand westward\u2014\"so many creeks, and I think some of that moisture in the air from them helped. But like I said to you before, my crop yield varied from one side of the road to the other, but this, this is smut and I don't know what's going on. I read all the time and I haven't read anywhere where smut has become resistant to treatment. Now, we know some _insects_ are becoming resistant. I'll get my insurance check but I want to figure this out. I'm here to grow good crops, not to collect money for failure.\"\n\n\"I hear you.\" Harry studied the midsized John Deere tractor parked fifty yards off, boom on the back. \"Mind if I look? I'd love to get a boom and I'd sure love to get a drill seeder, too.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you if I see anything used that's in good shape. Stuff new costs as much as a car or a house these days.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know.\"\n\nThey reached the green and yellow tractor. It had a tank affixed to the back, with a long boom off that. \"I used to rely on a gravity feed, but now I've got a small pump to suck out any stuff on the bottom,\" Buddy told her.\n\n\"You thought of everything.\" Harry admired practical solutions.\n\nHe smiled. \"Try. I need to flush this baby out and take her back to the shed for the winter. You know, Harry, I kind of lost heart. Since I pulled down that first husk and saw the damage, I haven't done much in here.\"\n\nTucker, right under the machine's tank, called out, _\"No chemicals. Can't smell a one. What's he spraying with?\"_\n\nThe two cats joined her.\n\nPewter sniffed. _\"Smells, though.\"_\n\n_\"Does,\"_ Mrs. Murphy agreed, then jumped on the back of the boom hitch and up onto the tank, where she balanced herself and tapped at the screw-on cap.\n\nHarry laughed. \"Looks like we've got a Future Farmer of America here.\"\n\n_\"Open it up. Come on. There's no chemicals in here. We'd know,\"_ the cat pleaded.\n\nSmiling, Harry did untwist the cap as Mrs. Murphy jumped off. Harry peered into the tank. \"Buddy,\" she said, sniffing, \"Buddy, look at this.\"\n\nHe dutifully did and immediately became enraged at the sight. \"Goddammit to hell!\" Then he apologized. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Buddy, I'd have said worse.\"\n\nThe tank had smut in the bottom. With his own system, Buddy had infected his crop.\n\n\"Harry, I calibrated the gallons per acre. I flushed the system clean, I checked every screw, nozzle, everything. And I refilled this tank each morning.\"\n\n\"Well, Buddy, someone drained your tank halfway, put a smut slurry in, then refilled it. How would you know? And I bet they cleaned it after you left the day's work. Someone who knows farming also knows your schedule. And smut spores are easy to grow. You can do it in your kitchen.\"\n\nHis face blanched, then turned scarlet. \"Why? Who would do such a thing?\" He paused, color deepening. \"I'll kill the S.O.B.\"\n\nHarry said nothing. Any talk of killing right now gave her a chill.\n\n#\n\nAdjustable wrench in hand, Fair frowned as he worked in the big red shed near the barn. \"That's strange,\" he said, squinting at the dismantled ATV in front of him.\n\n\"Honey, there's so much weird stuff going on around here, this is just one more thing, but to deliberately put smut in a spray tank...\" Harry shook her head. \"Why?\"\n\n\"You don't think it could have occurred naturally?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, it will all come out in the wash.\" He checked the sun, now low in the sky above the fields. \"I'd better start putting this back together.\"\n\n\"Did you find the problem?\"\n\n\"The first problem was the fuel line clogged. The second problem\u2014I'm not sure but this generator isn't going off.\"\n\nHarry peered down into the ATV's engine. \"It's a bitty thing.\"\n\n\"Anything compared to the engine in your '78 Ford is a bitty thing. Well, let me put this back together. We need it.\"\n\n\"If we can't get it back working, I'll call Wayne's Cycle.\" She mentioned the place where they had bought the ATV years back in Waynesboro, then realized her husband didn't want to hear that.\n\n\"It will run,\" he loudly announced.\n\nAs she walked back to the house, Tucker beside her, she looked over her fields, the sunflowers all harvested. \"Time to plow stuff under,\" she said to the corgi.\n\n_\"If you leave it alone, rabbits will come in,\"_ Tucker said. She liked to chase rabbits.\n\nPushing open the screen door, Harry heard a frantic scramble on the kitchen countertops.\n\n_\"You forgot to completely close the toaster oven,\"_ said the corgi. _\"I smell the corn bread.\"_\n\nStepping into the kitchen, no cats in sight, Harry noticed corn bread crumbs strewn across the counter in front of the toaster oven.\n\n\"Those boogers!\"\n\nThe cats had hooked the corn bread inside the toaster oven, tearing pieces off, pulling them out of the oven and onto the counter, where they ate them. However, they had been interrupted in their thievery, so crumbles\u2014golden evidence\u2014lay scattered on the counter and on the floor.\n\nSince some was on the floor, Tucker ate it. No point in letting food go to waste.\n\nBefore Harry could cuss, the phone rang.\n\n\"Susan,\" Harry greeted her.\n\n\"I got a job,\" came her enthusiastic voice.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"At Ivy Nurseries. I'll be making arrangements and stuff like that.\"\n\n\"Wonderful.\"\n\n\"Well, I learned a lot from you.\"\n\n\"You learned more from Miranda.\"\n\nMiranda Hogendobber, a passionate gardener and former co-worker at the post office, possessed a gift for arranging height, color, breadth. If it involved a flower, Miranda could grow it, then display it.\n\nSusan replied warmly, \"How about I give you both credit? I need to do more than I've been doing.\"\n\nHarry then told her about the corn smut and Buddy. \"Never saw him so mad.\"\n\n\"Remind me, what's corn smut?\"\n\n\"It's a fungus. It can survive during the winter if it finds the right place to hide. It can survive in old cornstalks, but usually the wind has blown spores all over the place after the swollen infected kernels explode. Not a lot left in the stalks. You and I could grow smut ourselves in corn. The later-maturing corn varieties are more susceptible to it. Has a lot to do with the change in nighttime temperature from midsummer. And when kernels explode, you can see the stuff. It's actually not that hard to control if you spray before you get it. Once you get it, though, you might as well forget it, and sweet corn is pretty vulnerable.\"\n\n\"Doesn't make sense.\"\n\n\"No, it doesn't. Before I forget, when do you start your job?\"\n\n\"Monday.\"\n\n\"I'll drop by the nursery around quitting time.\"\n\n\"Great.\"\n\nThey hung up. Harry looked out the window over the sink. She could tell from her husband's walk that he hadn't fixed the ATV. She wouldn't bring it up but she would make sure the magnetic card for Wayne's Cycle was moved to the front of the refrigerator.\n\nGiven the scowl on his face, she thought she'd better distract him. She disappeared into the small workroom and turned on the computer.\n\nMrs. Murphy and Pewter smelled the computer. Humans couldn't detect the smell computers gave off when they were working, but for the cats the odor was coppery, distinctive.\n\n_\"She gets wrapped up with that nonsense,\"_ Pewter gloated. _\"She'll forget what we did.\"_\n\n_\"She won't forget but she will be occupied. That corn bread, oh, full of butter.\"_ Mrs. Murphy smiled.\n\nThe two cats wiggled out from under the bed where they'd been hiding and silently made their way into Fair's small office, where Harry peered at the screen.\n\nFair, calmer now, stuck his head in. \"What's cooking?\"\n\n\"Lasagna,\" answered Harry.\n\n\"No, I mean, what's cooking here?\" He pointed to the computer.\n\n_\"Lasagna,\"_ Pewter said, sounding crushed. _\"Not my favorite but it's okay.\"_\n\n_\"You'll eat. You'll eat anything,\"_ said Mrs. Murphy.\n\nThe culprits tiptoed to one side of the desk, sitting to listen.\n\n\"I'm looking up corn stuff,\" Harry explained to her husband. \"Like, did you know that people living in what is now Mexico domesticated corn fourteen thousand years ago?\"\n\n\"Isn't corn basically a grass crop?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but says here that the original plant didn't look anything like modern corn. They called it _teosinte_.\"\n\nHe stood next to her now. \"Fourteen thousand years ago. Imagine if you got a toothache back then. Ouch.\"\n\n\"Hurts enough now.\" She looked up at him, then back at the screen.\n\n\"Says here that what we call sweet corn was first grown in Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. The first commercial variety was introduced in 1779.\" She scrolled up more stuff. \"Hey, hey, honey, how about this?\"\n\nHe leaned down and read along with her. \"Corn invaded by corn smut is considered a delicacy in Mexico. Infested corn was cooked even before Columbus.\"\n\n\"Guess every culture enjoys its delicacies.\" She touched his hand. \"But maybe Buddy can make a little money. I'm going to call him.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'll shower.\"\n\n\"Thirty minutes to supper at the most.\"\n\nHe kissed her on the cheek.\n\nShe dialed Buddy Janss, launched right in with her discovery.\n\n\"They eat that stuff?\" replied an incredulous Buddy.\n\n\"Buddy, if you go to your computer, Metapathogen.com has a little section on corn smut, under its Latin name, Ustilago maydis. Yeah, Mexican restaurants think it's terrific.\"\n\n\"Well, I already walked the insurance agent through.\"\n\n\"You did, but if you call around to some really fancy Mexican restaurants, maybe you can figure prices. Obviously, if they'll pay more than the crop insurance, that's an easy decision.\"\n\n\"You bet.\" His voice picked up energy.\n\n\"Before it slips my mind, when Cooper and I walked through Hester's library looking at her beautiful books, we found some on fishing, and a picture of her with a friend fishing. She ever talk about this with you?\" Harry pointedly did not mention the friend was scarecrow Josh Hill.\n\n\"Oh, well now, over the years maybe once or twice. Hester and I mostly stuck to business.\" He chuckled. \"Her version of business.\"\n\n\"Had you ever been in her house before the reception?\"\n\n\"No. What about you?\"\n\n\"Me neither. I was surprised at how lovely it was. And the expensive things she owned.\"\n\n\"Life is full of surprises.\"\n\n#\n\nSaturdays Harry and Fair liked to join their friends for foxhunting. As the fox was chased, not killed, they especially enjoyed riding behind hounds, land rolling before them like green waves, Blue Ridge Mountains behind, a splendid theatrical backdrop.\n\nToday's hunt lasted three hours. Once back at their trailers, people wiped down horses and threw sweat sheets over them, since it was warm, in the mid-fifties. After putting out buckets of water, they hurried to join everyone else at the tailgate. Literally it was a tailgate: The tailgates on trucks were dropped, a few card tables were put out and little oil tablecloths were tossed over them.\n\nThe talk always began with the day's sport before rapidly moving to other subjects. Many of today's hunters had also attended Hester's service.\n\nBig Mim, hot coffee in hand, mentioned, \"I believe Sarah Price will take over Hester's house.\"\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Wesley said, nodding.\n\n\"I'd think you'd feel otherwise,\" said Neil with a hint of sarcasm. He was a non-rider who'd come to join the group, as did others, food and drink being a reliable magnet.\n\n\"Why? It's a piece of old Virginia, and better that such places stay in the family.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Neil swilled his scotch. \"You're right. I was thinking of the commission on a sale. Would sell for a lot, that place.\"\n\nHarry said, \"I couldn't possibly afford my farm today. It's kind of crazy.\"\n\n\"Prices go up and down,\" said Wesley, \"but when it comes to beautiful farms in Virginia, they have held steady despite all. Now, I'm not saying I've sold a lot lately, mind you, but we are in a better position than most of the country.\"\n\n\"Not the boom towns,\" Neil pressed.\n\n\"Like Oklahoma City?\" Fair asked. \"You know, it's exciting when something hits like the boom in the Dakotas and Oklahoma. Hope, energy, jobs, but you wonder how it will all turn out down the road.\"\n\n\"Honey, that's true for everything.\" Harry smiled, then focused on Neil. \"How about fertilizer samples? Just enough to, say, put on three small patches, four feet by four feet. I'll make little squares back behind the sunflowers.\"\n\n\"Be happy to. I know if you have a good experience and endorse my products, others will follow.\" Neil was right about that. \"Have you thought about what you would be growing?\"\n\n\"Have.\"\n\nTazio and her boyfriend, Paul Diaz, joined them. As Paul rode and trained Big Mim's horses, Tazio had realized she'd better learn to ride.\n\nTo Paul's credit, he was studying architecture, and the two, on his weekday off, would drive to Richmond, Washington, and other places to look at buildings constructed at different periods in our history. He found he liked it, just as Tazio found she liked riding.\n\n\"She's going to move up to Second Flight,\" Paul bragged of Tazio, referring to the foxhunting group closer to the action.\n\nTazio rode in the back on an adorable babysitter of a horse, but as she gained skill and confidence, she would move up a notch.\n\n\"Never doubted that for a minute,\" Fair told her.\n\n\"How's it coming for the Halloween Hayride?\" Neil asked.\n\n\"Frankenstein will be ready,\" said Tazio. \"He'll snap the restraining belts, climb off the table, attack the good doctor\"\u2014she nodded at Wesley\u2014\"then run out the door.\"\n\n\"I'm scared already,\" Harry said.\n\nNeil laughed. \"It's going to be the scariest hayride ever, and we will raise a bundle. I'm committed to that and others are, too.\"\n\n\"I think a room in the library should be named for Hester,\" Harry thought out loud.\n\n\"You're right, honey,\" Fair agreed.\n\n\"After the hayride, we can bring it before the library board. I'm getting excited about this.\" Neil smiled.\n\n\"You get excited about anything that makes money,\" Wesley teased him.\n\n\"Profit motive. Built this country,\" Neil fired back.\n\nBig Mim, who had left the group, sailed back into their conversation, changing the subject. \"Given the dryness, not a bad hunt. We do need rain, though. Desperately.\"\n\n\"That we do,\" Fair said. \"The ground is so hard it's like running on brick.\"\n\n\"Tazio,\" Big Mim addressed the architect, who looked stunning in hunt kit, \"you've been over there at the school buildings. Are they salvageable?\"\n\nWith a big grin, Tazio replied, \"They are in great shape. The real expense in fixing them up would be plumbing, heating, air-conditioning. But those buildings were solidly built, well sited, and there's not even a leak in those roofs. You could actually still use the huge cast-iron furnaces.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Big Mim said. \"Lot of history there.\"\n\n\"I wish older people would write down what they lived through\u2014the good, the bad, and the ugly,\" Harry said with some emotion. \"History books can be dry or filled with speculation about this world force and that armament technology. I want to hear what people who lived through it all thought and felt.\"\n\n\"Good point.\" Tazio rested her hand on Harry's shoulder for a moment.\n\n\"Speaking of knowing, the TV reporters and the newspaper say that Hester was shot,\" said Neil. \"And so was that fellow you found in the Morrowdale field. But how and where were they shot, exactly?\" he asked, not realizing that Harry might not wish to recall any of this.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she replied.\n\nFair stepped in. \"When we found the scarecrow, he was fully dressed. Hester was, too. No wounds were evident.\"\n\n\"Neil, I don't really _want_ to know,\" Harry lied. Cooper had told her they were shot through the heart. Cooper had also told her the sheriff's department was withholding the exact M.O. \"They're both gone, a young man and a neighbor. That's enough.\"\n\nNeil shrugged. \"I guess I get too curious. Too many crime shows on television.\"\n\n\"It's always so antiseptic, those shows. No faces frozen in horror.\" Tazio reached for Paul's hand. \"What I want to know is why our society is so enthralled by crime and violence. Why can't we be enthralled by beauty, harmony, or perfect proportion?\"\n\n\"Because they demand sensitivity.\" Fair surprised them by coming right out with this. \"Anyone can see a beautiful sunrise or hear great music, but not everyone can _feel_ it. Yet everyone can feel violence.\"\n\n\"I never thought of that,\" Wesley remarked.\n\n\"And I suppose everyone can kill,\" Tazio said, \"but how many people can compose a symphony?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure everyone can kill,\" Neil replied. \"Then again, I don't want to find out.\"\n\nTo change the subject, Harry asked Tazio, \"That old slip of paper you found\u2014did you by any chance check to see if it was a student? I mean, I wonder if they have the old rolls.\"\n\n\"I didn't find out yet.\"\n\n\"What was the name?\" Wesley was nosy.\n\n\"Walter Ashby Plecker,\" Tazio answered.\n\n#\n\nLater that afternoon, after Harry finished her barn chores, she set up shop at the computer in the tack room. Outside, the sun was already setting as Simon, the possum, peeped over the hayloft.\n\nPatrolling the barn's center aisle while the horses munched away, Mrs. Murphy heard the possum's squeak.\n\n_\"Murphy?\"_\n\n_\"What, Simon?\"_\n\n_\"What does she do in there? I see that bluish light. She sits there for hours! It's unnatural for people to sit still that long.\"_\n\n_\"Ha.\"_ Pewter, faking her patrol, stopped to look up. _\"Millions of people sit on their butts for weeks and years. After a while, part of them is in the next zip code.\"_\n\n_\"Look who's talking,\"_ sassed Tucker, plonked down on an aisle tack trunk.\n\nFor a fat girl, Pewter could move. She flew down the aisle, jumped onto the tack trunk, batted the corgi with an extended claw, then leapt off in an attempt to flee the barn, Tucker in pursuit.\n\n_\"I loathe violence.\"_ Simon closed his eyes.\n\n_\"Mmm,\"_ was the tiger cat's reply, since she often considered batting Pewter, as well as Tucker. Well, more Pewter than Tucker\u2014she could reason with Tucker.\n\nHeavyset though she was, Pewter easily flummoxed the dog. She could zig and zag so quickly that Tucker would skid out trying to catch her. Then Pewter would run straightaway, Tucker would make up lost ground, and once again the cat would turn. She even stopped dead in her tracks, faced the onrushing dog, then soared right over Tucker, who by now was barking nonstop.\n\n_\"I hate you!\"_ barked the corgi. _\"I really, really hate you.\"_\n\n_\"Peon!\"_ Pewter gleefully tormented the dog.\n\n\"What now?\" Hearing the clamor, Harry pushed away from the computer and walked outside. \"All right, you two. Calm down.\"\n\n_\"Kill. I want to kill!\"_ Tucker practically foamed at the mouth.\n\n_\"Bubble Butt, Tailless Wonder!\"_ Pewter was merciless as she climbed a gum tree, then spread out on a lower branch like a courtesan, tail swaying to and fro. _\"You'll never catch me,\"_ she taunted.\n\n_\"You have to sleep sometime.\"_ Tucker stood on her hind legs, reaching as high as she could with her front paws on the thick ridged bark.\n\n_\"I sleep with one eye open,\"_ Pewter called down in a singsong voice.\n\n_\"What a liar she is,\"_ laughed Mrs. Murphy, now with the human.\n\nGrabbing Tucker by her rolled leather collar, Harry pulled the enraged dog away from the tree. Pewter watched from above, enjoying the spectacle.\n\n\"Tucker, leave it,\" Harry ordered.\n\n_\"Really, Tucker,\"_ Mrs. Murphy counseled. _\"She's not worth this much emotion.\"_\n\nTucker stared imploringly at Harry. _\"You don't know how awful she is. You don't know how I suffer.\"_ She thought a moment, searching for further damning ideas. _\"I think she's a member of a Confederate underground. She's gray, you know. She wants to restore the old ways. She's really, really awful.\"_\n\nMrs. Murphy laughed, while poor Simon, who had run to view this chase from the opened upper hayloft door, wrung his front paws. _\"Tucker, she would be the same no matter if it was the old days or these days,\"_ he said.\n\n_\"She'd be worse. I know it.\"_ Tucker still stared at Harry, who reached down to pat her silky head.\n\nAs though singing an aria, Pewter meowed, _\"She can dish it out but she can't take it.\"_\n\n\"Pewter, that's the worst screeching ever,\" Harry insulted the cat. \"Now, here's the deal. If you don't behave, it's lockdown. Separate rooms. Closed doors. No treats. Hear that? No treats.\"\n\nTucker growled low. _\"I'd starve to get even.\"_\n\n_\"I wouldn't.\"_ Pewter hastily backed down the tree, circled Tucker so she would be behind Harry, then rubbed the human's legs while purring mightily.\n\n_\"How can she fall for this?\"_ Crestfallen, Tucker lowered her head.\n\n_\"Because she likes me better.\"_ Pewter kept rubbing.\n\n\"I can't concentrate when you all carry on like this,\" Harry complained. \"Too much noise. If we were in the house, God only knows what would have been smashed to bits. Now come on. Settle down.\" She turned to go back to the barn.\n\nDutifully, Tucker stuck by the human's heels while Pewter, in a flash of glory, or so she thought, raced ahead, tail straight up. She paused for a moment, then Mrs. Murphy zoomed up next to her and the two cats chased each other, in good fun, to the barn.\n\nHarry loved watching animals play. \"Tucker, cats are, well, cats. They'll chase each other, play-hiss, howl\u2014it's just dumb stuff. You, being a sober and responsible dog, are above it.\"\n\nTucker considered this and thought for a fraction of a moment that maybe Harry did understand. To some extent, she did. Anyone who lives with cats figures out soon enough they will do what they want.\n\nBack in her tack room chair, Harry wiggled to get comfortable. The lamp she was using until she could buy the Italian light bulb\u2014which is how she thought of it\u2014couldn't shine its light as precisely as the designer one, but it was okay.\n\nTucker flopped at her feet. This made Harry happy because she always enjoyed reporting her progress to the dog, who invariably perked her ears at Harry's voice.\n\n\"Tucker, I have gotten into the county records for students, but the records for Random Row are spotty at best. I'm trying to find a student's name that was on a piece of paper in the teacher's desk.\" She scrolled through the years. \"The years before 1918 aren't even entered. They microfilmed the written records back in the 1960s. Maybe the handwritten records are in a forgotten vault somewhere in the county building.\" She kept clicking the mouse. \"Oh, hey, they actually scanned them in. The handwriting is beautiful. I can't make some of this out, but there does not appear to be a student named Walter Ashby Plecker.\"\n\nMissing his wife, Fair walked into the barn, looked up, and saw Simon. \"Hey, fella.\"\n\n_\"Hey,\"_ said Simon, then scuttled away.\n\nFair entered the tack room. \"Simon is such a scaredy-cat. 'Course, most possums are.\"\n\n\"It helps if you feed him.\" Harry leaned her chin on her hand. \"Molasses on bread or molasses in the snow.\"\n\n\"I know, but when am I going to have time to feed a possum? When do you have time?\"\n\nShe smiled up at him. \"I do it every day.\"\n\n_\"Feeds us, too,\"_ Shortro, the athletic Saddlebred horse in the stall next to the tack room, called out.\n\nTomahawk, Harry's beloved Thoroughbred, also nickered. _\"We love Harry,\"_ he declared.\n\nAll the horses agreed, and up in his nest even Simon squeaked, _\"Me, too.\"_\n\nThe two cats entered the tack room just as Harry finished telling Fair about her failure to find any information on the mysterious name.\n\n\"Here.\" He leaned over, typed a bit, then stood back. \"You did the logical thing. You assumed Walter was a student's name because the paper was found in the teacher's desk. I just punched in his name to see what would show up. There you go.\" Fair started to read over her shoulder. \"Hmm, not so good,\" he said.\n\n\"Why didn't I think of that?\" Harry, delighted that her husband was smart, was equally put out by her own slowness on this subject.\n\nShe read along with him. \" ' _Paper genocide_ is often the term used to describe the actions of Walter Ashby Plecker, the government employee who was head of Vital Statistics in Virginia from 1912 to 1946.' \"\n\nFair continued. \" 'Plecker replaced the term _Indian_ with the term _colored_ on all official documents, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and voter registration forms.' \" He stepped back a moment. \"Paper genocide.\"\n\nShe looked up at her husband. \"Fair, what does it mean exactly?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure but I think it means that if everyone is jammed under one umbrella, you can treat or mistreat everyone the same. This is bizarre.\" He read more as she scrolled down the text. \" 'Members of Virginia Indian tribes are severely handicapped in proving they are indeed Indians according to federal standards. They can't apply for scholarships or receive federal funds for housing, health care, or economic development.' \" He stopped looking at the screen, looked at his wife. \"And, of course, they can't open casinos, which brings in big bucks. Wait a minute, here. Says the Virginia tribes do not want to open casinos and have signed away those rights.\" He'd returned his gaze to the computer screen.\n\n\"Fair, this is a terrible thing.\" She read more on the subject. \" 'Seven Virginia governors, irrespective of party affiliation, have supported federal recognition of Virginia's Indians.' But, in so many words, they've been told to sit on a tack.\"\n\n\"Hey, look at this. No Virginia tribe member can return their ancestors' bones to a rightful and respectful burial. Harry, this is outrageous. I mean, I had no idea. This is one of the most disgusting things I have ever read.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Harry said, \"a bill, H.R. 783, the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2011, is presently working its way through Congress. Yeah, right. And how many bills prior to this have died in one subcommittee or another?\"\n\nFair rarely swore but he let it fly. \"Bastards.\"\n\n\"Walter Ashby Plecker appears to have been the biggest bastard of the bunch, and it's just rolled on from there.\" Stunned and deeply disturbed, Harry clicked off her computer. \"Let's call Coop,\" she said, standing.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Come on. Let's go inside and use the house line. Anything ever spoken on a cellphone is out there somewhere.\"\n\nIntrigued, he followed his wife into the kitchen, as did the two cats and the dog.\n\nHarry rang Cooper up on the kitchen wall phone and explained what she and Fair had discovered about Walter Ashby Plecker. \"It's only a scrap of paper but maybe you should ask Sarah Price if you can go through Hester's desk to see if there's a link. After all, Hester had Cherokee blood on her mother's side, and Josh was a member of the Upper Mattaponi tribe.\"\n\n\"I've asked Sarah to go through Hester's things on Monday, and I'll be there with her.\"\n\nUrgency in her voice, Harry prodded. \"Move it up. Go tomorrow, Sunday, if she'll do it.\"\n\n\"Harry, this isn't much to go on.\"\n\n\"It's a long shot, a really long shot, Cooper, but right now it's one of the few links between the two murders, other than both corpses were dressed for Halloween, cleverly disguised.\"\n\nA long, long pause followed this. Over the phone line, Harry could almost hear Cooper's mind whirring. \"All right.\"\n\nHusband and wife remained silent after Harry hung up.\n\nFinally, Fair said, \"While you were on your computer in the barn, I was on mine. Come on. I have something to show you.\"\n\nOnce inside his small, tidy office, he showed her an article reporting that jobs exposing women to plastics and man-made chemicals greatly elevate a woman's chance of developing breast cancer.\n\nHe pointed to the screen. \"A long-term study of more than two thousand women in Ontario found those who worked for at least ten years in food canning and automotive plastics developed cancer at a rate five times higher than women in other jobs. Chemicals such as BPA\u2014bisphenol A\u2014are to blame.\"\n\nShe replied, \"I'm a farmer. Well, I worked in the post office after college. I've checked out fine at every exam for the last two years, and after my next checkup, I won't have to go back for six months. I'm okay.\"\n\nFair, who had felt shocked, frightened, and useless when his wife was diagnosed with stage I breast cancer two years ago, still carried with him the fear that it might return. Because of this, he was vigilant concerning cancer research and treatments. \"Read on.\"\n\n\"Pesticide exposure is also elevated for female farm workers.\" She quieted for a moment. \"I rarely use much of anything.\"\n\n\"What about your father?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"He used more. Cut back later on, but he said that in the beginning they thought those things were a godsend.\"\n\n\"Our air, food, and water are loaded with chemicals unheard of even fifty years ago. BPA and phthalates, to name a few, are known hormone disrupters. I see so much more cancer in horses than I did when I started practicing as a vet.\" Harry's husband looked stricken.\n\n\"Honey, my cancer is not coming back,\" she assured him.\n\n\"I know.\" He kissed her cheek. \"But now that you've been through it, I want to keep abreast of recent research, forgive the pun.\"\n\nThey both laughed and she hugged him when he stood up. \"You're stuck with me.\"\n\n\"Better be, which reminds me: Carry your father's old snubnosed .38.\"\n\n\"I can't shoot cancer cells.\"\n\n\"No, but you can't keep your nose out of those two murders. I know you. Just carry the gun.\"\n\n#\n\n\"A Montblanc Diplomat,\" Cooper said the next afternoon, holding up the fancy pen, which she had fetched from the drawer of Hester's desk.\n\n\"She didn't have much or spend much, but what she had was the very best.\" Sarah smiled, remembering her aunt's lectures on prudent expenditures. \"If she was going to fork out cash, it had to be for something that would last.\"\n\n\"This certainly will.\" Cooper studied the gold point. \"Medium.\"\n\n\"How do you know so much about pens?\"\n\nCooper laughed. \"How do you?\"\n\n\"Drilled into my head: Write in your own hand on good paper. Always write a thank-you and a condolence, and, of course, the condolence should never be on pastel paper. The rules, but I'm glad I know them. Of course, who in my generation practices such etiquette?\"\n\n\"We're close in age. I kind of think these things are coming back. I mean good stationery, fountain pens, elegant clothing, and hats for men, too. Cycles. Then again, how many butt cracks can you observe before you decide that maybe low-rise trousers are not the way to go?\"\n\nSarah, emitting peals of laughter, snatched a heavy wooden ruler from the desk. \"This would solve a lot of problems in that regard.\"\n\nCooper laughed, too, as they both kept rooting through the long drawer of the antique desk.\n\nSarah pulled out a Smythson leather-bound day calendar. \"Probably you should keep this, and take a lot of time with it.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Cooper ran her forefinger over the textured leather. \"I don't see a computer anywhere in here.\"\n\n\"Aunt H didn't have one at home, just one at the stand, which you know about. I'd bug her about it but she said when she came home she didn't want to think about work.\"\n\n\"We've already got someone working on the store computer with Lolly. Lolly still needs it to transact business. Working in the evening, our computer whiz found sales, purchases, and a soil map for Albemarle County with the farms she did business with clearly marked. Wherever she bought anything from anyone, she checked their soils. She really was a very thorough person.\"\n\n\"About most everything. Dad was that way, too. 'If you're going to do it, do it right.' Must have heard that a thousand times.\" Sarah sighed and smiled. \"I miss them. I will miss their generation and my grandparents' generation. I never really thought about it much before.\" She blinked. \"Sorry. You're here to go through Aunt H's effects and I'm babbling on.\"\n\n\"Not babble. It does kind of dawn on you that nobody is here forever. Then you have to realize you won't be here forever either. I see enough death in my line of work to give me great respect for life.\"\n\nSarah tilted her head. \"Officer, that's a wonderful thought.\"\n\n\"Will you call me Cooper? I'm not even in uniform. Thank God. I mean, have you ever seen a law enforcement uniform that looked good on a woman?\"\n\n\"Now that you mention it, there's never quite enough room for...\" Sarah made a rolling motion over her breasts.\n\nAgain they both laughed.\n\n\"Nothing here,\" Cooper said, glancing at an empty drawer. \"There's still this big one on the bottom, the double drawer. Let me get on my knees and hand you the files.\" She did just that.\n\nSarah arranged the files in neat piles. \"Hmm,\" she said, reading the tabs. \"A lot on fertilizer, pesticides, wildlife studies. County soil and water maps.\"\n\n\"Probably hard copies of the maps that are on the work computer.\" Cooper pulled out the map file, flipped it open, and unfolded a large county map.\n\nSarah reached into the open folder. \"Here's the info key.\"\n\nCooper studied the numbers and the outlines, all in different colors. \"Number one is her own holdings. Pretty good soil. Number two is eastern Albemarle. Hmm, not as much produce over there. She has most of it marked as hay.\" Cooper ran her finger back to western Albemarle. \"Morrowdale, that's a beautiful farm out on Garth Road, where we found the first body. According to Hester, good soil, but she has the pesticide sign near some of the acres. I guess that means they were sprayed.\"\n\n\"Look at all three yellow outlines. Someone owns a lot of property,\" Sarah remarked.\n\nCooper checked the key again. \"That's Buddy Janss, the big man who served punch at the reception. He rents most of it.\"\n\n\"He must be rich.\"\n\n\"Land poor might be another way to put it.\" Cooper smiled. \"He owns maybe eight hundred acres outright. Rents the rest, so he has a lot of money sunk into soil improvement. That's the conundrum of renting land. You usually need to improve it. Most landowners, especially suburban or city people who buy in the country, don't want to spend money on their fields and don't realize how important it is. Buddy dutifully fertilizes, weeds, tests soil. He doesn't want to sell his acres if he can help it. And he'd buy what he rents if he could.\"\n\n\"Who is in chartreuse?\"\n\nCooper ran her finger down the list. \"Neil Jordan. Hester marked what's owned, what's rented, and what's for sale. She must have updated this weekly.\"\n\nCooper folded the map and placed it back in the manila folder, then pulled out the file on fertilizers. \"This is full of equations,\" she exclaimed.\n\nSarah studied the figures. \"Aunt H took high school chemistry. Maybe she took more when she was at Mary Baldwin.\"\n\n\"Bet she did. This stuff is complicated.\" Cooper shook her head.\n\n\"The brochures aren't.\" Sarah handed her a pile of glossy brochures for fertilizer products, featuring photos of lush fields of corn, wheat, soybeans, even orchard rows.\n\nCooper examined a pamphlet. \"Here's one that Neil Jordan wrote on the back of, telling your aunt to call him if she had questions. It's for a new fertilizer.\"\n\n\"If it was a natural product, she probably did call him, but she was wary, as you know, and she was really opposed to anything petroleum based,\" said Sarah. \"She would say something about it to me every now and then, but not too much since I don't understand agriculture.\"\n\n\"Did she ever ask you about your work?\"\n\n\"A little. Enough to tell me it's boring, which it is.\" Sarah looked directly at Cooper. \"Insurance is a good thing to have but so much of it is oversold on fears. I've done well, but I, well...\" She shrugged. \"I think I can walk away from it now, thanks to Aunt H.\"\n\n\"She must have loved you very much.\"\n\nSarah's eyes teared up, then she laughed her tinkling laugh. \"I was her only heir. I suppose she had to love me.\"\n\n\"Big Mim put the word out that you're going to move here. Live in Hester's house. Keep the family place alive. Oh, Big Mim runs Crozet, which I should have told you or someone should have told you before the reception.\"\n\n\"Susan Tucker filled me in on all the locals. I learned who, what, when, and where, and sometimes why. Aunt H, when I'd come on visits, didn't much talk about other people.\"\n\nChin on her hand now, Cooper pulled out another folder, flipping it open.\n\nShe sat up straighter. \"Here are the procedures for officially establishing an American Indian group as an Indian tribe.\" She read a footnote. \"The seven criteria are presented here in abbreviated form. 'For the complete federal text, refer to 25 CFR Part 83.' Huh?\"\n\nSarah rummaged through the files. \"She's got some really old stuff here. Stuff before computers took over. It looks to be clearly presented. It's all about the Virginia Indian tribes. What about the criteria you have, is it more recent stuff?\"\n\n\"Number one is, 'The petitioner has been identified as an American Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis since 1900.' \"\n\n\"My list says, 'Be identified from historic times until the present on a substantially continuous basis as _American Indian or aboriginal_.' \"\n\nEach reviewed the other's list and the language.\n\n\"Your list is clearer,\" Sarah said.\n\n\"It is. Number two: 'Prove that a substantial portion of members lives in a specific area or lives as a community viewed as American Indian and distinct from other populations of the area; and prove that members of this community are descendants of an Indian tribe.' \"\n\n\"That's easy to do in the western states.\" Sarah read on for Cooper. \"Number three: 'Prove that it has maintained tribal political influence or other authority over its members as an autonomous entity throughout history until the present.' \"\n\nCooper read on, then threw up her hands. \"All this crap about documentation. If you've been moved around or removed, how can you provide documentation to the very same government that's screwing you?\" She stopped herself. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"No, no. I understand, but this is even worse.\" While flipping through the papers, Sarah had plucked out the criteria needed for an individual to prove he was Indian, as described by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. \"This is real betrayal. Worse than 'screwing you.' Look at this.\"\n\nCooper read the passage, then said, \"This is flat-out impossible. You have to give the maiden names of all women listed on the request for the Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. So you need, at the least, your mother and grandmother's maiden names. You can abbreviate that to CDIB. How helpful.\"\n\nSarah continued in Cooper's line. \"Birth certificates? Okay, that's reasonable. 'Delayed birth certificates,' what in the devil does that mean? Death certificates... and 'the Indian tribe must have a duly adopted tribal ordinance concerning the issuance of such documents.' So you can't be born or die according to your customs, you have to do it the U.S. government way and prove it? And your degree of Indian blood can only be computed if there are records of ancestors of Indian blood who were listed on an official roll.\" Sarah caught her breath. \"This is a bureaucratic paper nightmare.\"\n\n\"Paper genocide,\" Cooper whispered.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nCooper explained what Harry had told her about Walter Ashby Plecker and the peculiar phrase linked to him.\n\nSarah was silent for a long time, then said, \"It is genocide. Dear God, it is. Why did Aunt H have all this stuff?\"\n\n\"Do you think she might have wanted to prove her own Cherokee blood?\"\n\n\"No. There would be no way to prove it and by now it's so intermingled with, for lack of a better description, British Isles blood.\" Sarah shook her head.\n\n\"Yeah.\" Cooper stared at the folder, then turned more pages. \"Obviously, Hester was fascinated with this. And you know about the Virginia tribes not being recognized by the federal government?\"\n\nAs Sarah did not, Cooper explained. Sarah exploded, \"They're totally ripped off. It isn't even the loans and all that stuff. It's needing to be recognized for surviving at all, for keeping their cultural integrity intact. This may sound odd but one of the main reasons I go to Mass is for the liturgy, for the tradition. It's my culture. It has been intact for two thousand years. I am saying and praying what people before me prayed throughout the centuries. I need that. Doesn't it make sense that those of Indian blood need their customs, spiritual solace?\"\n\nCooper returned to the file. \"It does make sense. It's more important than the money, but I'm willing to bet the reason this is all so complicated and difficult is the government doesn't want thousands of people applying for scholarships, loans, you name it.\"\n\n\"Everything comes down to money. Like divorce. A relationship devolves into fighting over money and who gets the couch. Pretty much the whole thing repulses me.\"\n\n\"Divorce?\" Cooper half-smiled at her.\n\n\"Yeah, but what I'm really talking about is bean counting. That's what I do at the insurance company: I count beans.\"\n\nCooper took in what the young woman said, then returned her gaze to the file in front of her. \"Says here that tribes may purchase or reacquire traditional lands and have the property placed in trust status, exempt from state or county rules, including, in some cases, zoning restrictions.\" She read more. \"This states the possible land base for Virginia Indians is too small here.\"\n\n\"I don't believe that,\" Sarah said. \"It's just that the land has been in other hands for centuries. White folks got here in 1607. Well, earlier if you count the city of St. Augustine down in Florida.\"\n\n\"Here's something else,\" Cooper said. \"If a close affiliation with a property can be shown, the tribe might reclaim the lands or demand damages for its 'illegal' usage\u2014'illegal' is in quotes\u2014many years ago. Means church and school lands used by the Catholic Church, Quakers, etc., could possibly be reclaimed, bought back, and some sort of reparation deal structured.\"\n\n\"What a mess, except it isn't because it's hidden,\" Sarah said. \"Squelched. People nowadays are too busy downloading the latest film to even think about something like this.\"\n\nCooper smiled again at Hester's niece. \"I don't think being self-centered is unique to our time. We simply have more ways to pursue it.\" She then looked down before exclaiming, \"Big bucks!\"\n\nSarah took the paper from Cooper's hand and read, \" 'The Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut run the biggest moneymaker in the western hemisphere with their casino.' All the other tribal-owned casinos are listed here with profits. And there's a note at the bottom.\"\n\nCooper read out loud: \" 'Dear Hester, Per your request. It's fascinating. Think of the fly rods one could buy with even a sliver of those profits. Ha. Your buddy, Josh.' \"\n\nCooper's face turned pale. \"He was onto something. He had to be. He couldn't have been killed in such a bizarre way for finding an accounting error in the books of the local convenience store.\"\n\n\"Maybe he wanted to push for a casino.\"\n\n\"But the Virginia Indians signed away that possibility.\"\n\n\"Laws can be overturned. It must be something like that, Cooper, because my aunt would never, ever be involved in something underhanded. She wanted just enough to live decently and wished the same for others.\"\n\n\"Sarah, I know that's the truth, but your aunt Hester discovered something dangerous, and I'll bet she shared it with Josh.\"\n\n#\n\nBrilliant sunshine flooded Harry's fields and pastures Monday afternoon, turning golden the sunflower stubble and the plowed fields.\n\nSoil map in hand, Neil Jordan by her side, Harry stepped over a gray fox den nestled between a deep fold in her back quarter acre where she'd planted Petit Manseng grapes. Foxes love grapes, or any sweet things.\n\nTucker, his snout smushed down in the opening, announced, _\"Vixen! I can smell old chicken bones.\"_\n\nA fox's voice from within called, _\"I killed that chicken fair and square, Bubble Butt.\"_\n\nPewter, daintily following the dog and Mrs. Murphy, paw midair, shrieked with delight at the female fox's declaration. _\"Bubble Butt! She called you Bubble Butt. See, I'm not the only one that recognizes your more ridiculous qualities.\"_\n\n_\"Don't worry, she heard you,\"_ Tucker snapped, a little embarrassed.\n\n_\"I did,\"_ said the fox. _\"You can hear Fatty Screwloose for acres when she runs her big flannel mouth.\"_\n\nAppalled at the insult, Pewter flashed to the den's opening, pushing aside the dog. _\"How dare you? Come out of there and I'll pull every whisker from your pointy face.\"_\n\n_\"Come in here and say that to my pointy face,\"_ the gray fox challenged.\n\nEnraged, Pewter stuck her head farther into the den.\n\nSensible as usual, Mrs. Murphy warned, _\"Don't go in there. She has every advantage.\"_\n\n_\"For one thing, I'm not fat,\"_ the fox sang out, enjoying herself.\n\nPewter moved in a bit farther, to stare into two golden eyes. She hit reverse in a hurry, waddling back out comically.\n\nTucker held her tongue.\n\nPewter sat for a moment, licking her paw.\n\n_\"Come on, Pewts,\"_ Mrs. Murphy told her. _\"Time to keep up.\"_ Neither she nor Tucker was fooled by the cat's studied nonchalance.\n\nThe three animals scampered up to be with Harry and Neil.\n\nThe gray fox emerged from her den to watch. Ever curious about humans and domesticated animals, she wondered how on earth they could get along, but they seemed to do just fine. She liked Harry's grapes, so she somewhat liked Harry. Sometimes seeds dropped; some corn kernels from a little patch were tasty. This was a perfect location for a den. Occasionally, Tucker would drop and forget a bone nearby. Those were treasures. But still, spending your life following an animal lurching around on two legs? Seemed odd, and perhaps undignified. Humans were so slow, but the two cats and the dog willingly poked along.\n\n\"Right here I have a pH of seven.\" Harry turned over some dirt with her boot tip. \"I'd like to get it to six point five.\"\n\n\"Let me give you Centerpoint,\" said Neil. \"It's one of my best products. Given that you want to experiment with a small portion\u2014what, four by four feet?\"\n\n\"Right,\" Harry answered.\n\n\"Spread it by hand, or if you have one of those walking spreaders, the type people use for small lawn areas, that will do it. Mark your corners and I promise you next harvest you'll see a difference.\"\n\n\"All right.\"\n\n\"You're fortunate to have good soil. Well, good soil for Virginia. Davis loam. Some alluvial deposits.\"\n\n\"Most of the lower fields are like that, but Dad really kept at them and when I was little we could use muck from the Bay.\" She meant the Chesapeake Bay. \"Can't do that now, but that really helped here. We could also use crushed oyster shells.\"\n\n\"Calcium,\" Neil said, nodding. \"Well, that's the best, but since those things are off-limits now, these commercial applications do provide the same things: calcium, selenium, potassium, magnesium, and on and on the list goes. Soil tests are so accurate today they can pinpoint the exact application you need for your specific crop. Much more cost-effective.\"\n\n\"Until you hit red clay.\" She scuffed some dirt with the toe of her boot.\n\n\"Harry, we can even enrich that these days. Clay has important uses. The reason so many early Virginian homes are brick is thanks to that red clay. It's the devil to dig up. But I mean it, fertilizer today helps even that.\"\n\nThey turned to walk back to Harry's house, about a half mile away, glowing in gorgeous afternoon light.\n\n\"Neil, how'd you wind up selling fertilizer and other ag products? You didn't go to ag school.\"\n\n\"My college major was business and I liked it okay, but an old girlfriend, premed, goaded me into organic chemistry. She said it was the washout course for premed and that included vet premed, too. First, I had to take regular chemistry. Liked it. Then I took organic and found I loved it. But what could I do with it? I didn't want to be a medical student.\"\n\n\"I think you are the only person I have ever heard say that they loved organic chemistry.\" She smiled.\n\n\"Actually, a lot of people do, but you have to have a feeling for it, because it's not always logical like, say, mathematics is. Magic happens in those equations.\" He grinned. \"Anyway, I graduated from Amherst with a business degree and starting working at a Monsanto satellite company outside of Minneapolis\u2014great city, by the way. That's when I realized that, much as I did like the business end of the company, I truly liked the hands-on, using the products. Monsanto gets attacked all the time for their genetic engineering of seeds, etc., but I learned a lot, and, Harry, how are we going to feed billions? Twenty-five million babies are born annually in India and seventeen million are born each year in China. They want Western foods, technology, all our goodies.\"\n\n\"What's the number of births annually in the U.S., if you know it?\"\n\n\"Four point three million.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" The implications were becoming dreadfully clear. \"All those people in developing countries... if they can't get enough to eat, seems to me there will be tremendous instability.\"\n\n\"There already is,\" he said with conviction. \"Anyway, I started thinking about what to do to make money based on what I was learning, and I decided to go out on my own selling fertilizer. There are good companies that I can call on, get the best products, and, of course, buy in bulk from Mosaic, PotashCorp. I work with the best. Even companies like Bayer, which made their fortunes in other areas in the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth, now have ag arms. Food is the future, not doctors.\"\n\n\"I believe that.\"\n\n\"Harry, in the next forty years, farmers will need to produce more than they have in the past ten thousand, and the biggest grain producer in the world is still the United States and it will always be. Huge corn producer, too.\"\n\n\"That I know. No other nation in the world has the soils, the variety of climate, that we do. But that huge midwestern belt is gold, pure gold. And we are bound by two huge oceans and have the Gulf right in the middle of the country. Fishing alone is worth billions.\"\n\n\"Like everything else, it's politicized. Do I think we need to carefully manage our resources? I do. It's a tightrope walk, so either some of the environmentalists give a little ground or ultimately millions will starve to death and then a billion or so. There will be nine billion people by 2050 and I think you and I might still be alive then.\"\n\n\"Who knows?\" Harry shrugged. \"But I can see you do your homework.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be in business if I didn't.\"\n\n_\"He kind of smells like fertilizer, don't you think?\"_ Tucker said.\n\n_\"It's a medley of smells.\"_ Mrs. Murphy flared her nostrils.\n\nThey reached the back porch.\n\n\"Come on in for a Co'Cola or maybe something stiffer,\" offered Harry.\n\n\"Too early for that.\" He smiled. \"But I could use something cold.\"\n\n\"I have some iced tea. Always have it, even in winter.\"\n\n\"Sounds good.\"\n\nThe animals walked into the kitchen, where Pewter took up her post next to her bowl, just in case.\n\nAs Neil sipped his beverage, Harry unfolded the soil map with the plan of her farm.\n\nNeil studied it again. \"You're very fortunate.\"\n\n\"I am. Given your business and your outlook for the future, I mean that population growth, how do you feel about housing development?\"\n\n\"In the next ten years Richmond and its surrounding area is supposed to grow by four hundred thousand people. That means good farmland goes under.\"\n\n\"Does. Well, it's happening here.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is, but if developers will plan entire communities with common gardens, wild spaces, stuff like that, or even build more row houses that share an exterior wall, maybe we can limit the damage. People have to live somewhere and not everyone is meant for a high-rise, especially in Virginia. People don't move to Albemarle County to live in a skyscraper. It's much easier to make money as a developer than by farming. We need to find that balance, but profit is what drives all business. There's going to be more development everywhere.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't it make sense for, say, Wesley to buy and build on those acres where the soil is poor?\"\n\nNeil leaned back. \"Sure. But he also has to consider access to I-64, Route 29, good roads in general. Water. Can wells be dug in places where there is no city water? The whole permitting process is complicated, and like every other county in America, there are people on the board of commissioners dead set against any form of growth or development.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Harry. \"So why do you and Wesley want Buddy's hundred acres so much?\"\n\n\"Harry, look where it is! Close to Crozet, a hop to Route 250, maybe a twenty-minute commute to Charlottesville or thirty to Waynesboro, forty minutes to Staunton. Perfect location and the soils seem to be decent, which I don't like to see built upon, but Buddy's got corn smut. Those spores have to be in the soil.\"\n\n\"If he sprays for corn borer, it will somewhat cut down on the smut, not a lot.\"\n\n\"There is no seed treatment for corn smut,\" Neil said, warming to the subject. \"You can remove the galls in a home garden, but not for one hundred acres. So he has to burn or plow under the diseased stalks. Burn, then plow, that's the surest way.\"\n\n\"He can plant a more resistant variety.\"\n\n\"Not for Silver Queen.\"\n\n\"True, but Mexican restaurants like cooking with those galled ears, think it's a delicacy. And they'll pay good money for it.\"\n\n\"Really?\" His eyebrows shot up.\n\n\"I told Buddy and he called around. Just talked to him this morning, actually. He says he can make more selling to them than he can just selling straight old Silver Queen. It's too late for this crop\u2014it's been on the stalk too long\u2014but he's kind of excited.\"\n\n\"Harry, you never cease to surprise me. Maybe you saved those one hundred acres from development.\"\n\n\"Hey, if I can help out a friend, I will. I don't know if this will help Buddy and his hundred acres, but Tazio and I are going to work to save Random Row. Before Hester was killed, she asked Tazio to head that project. It's the last thing we can do for Hester, and it's the best thing we can do for our special history.\" She glanced at the calendar on the wall. \"Three days until Halloween. Any tickets left?\"\n\n\"Sold every one.\" Finishing his drink, he thanked her, then said, \"Well, I've got to push off. If you come on out with me, I'll give you the Centerpoint sample now. Have it in the truck. And I'll drop some more by later.\"\n\n\"Great.\"\n\nHarry happily followed Neil, Tucker in her wake. The dog didn't much like the odor of fertilizer, and said so to the cats.\n\n_\"Powdery stuff,\"_ Mrs. Murphy chimed in. _\"Goes right up your nose.\"_\n\n_\"Always smells a little like dead stuff, which I usually like,\"_ said the dog, _\"but you can detect other things, man-made odors.\"_\n\n_\"Like car exhaust?\"_ Pewter wrinkled her nose and the others laughed.\n\nIvy Nursery, just west of Charlottesville and the Boar's Head complex, contained long greenhouses as well as trees and other plants in rows outside the buildings.\n\nHarry pulled into the almost full parking lot right before 6 P.M., quitting time for Susan. She walked inside the main building and there to the side was Susan, creating a wonderful boxwood topiary.\n\n\"Harry!\"\n\n\"Said I'd see you on your first day of work. That looks interesting.\"\n\n\"My inspiration is the gardens of Harvey Ladew in Harford County, Maryland. So I'm making this little fox.\" She put down her shears, pulled off her protective but flexible gloves.\n\n\"Let me be your first customer. I'll buy your fox.\"\n\n\"Harry, you don't have to do that.\"\n\n\"I'd love to. He's cute as a button.\" She touched his boxwood nose.\n\n\"My boss saw right away that if I could make foxes and hounds, we'd do a big business. It's taking me some time.\"\n\n\"What do you do, outline it first?\"\n\n\"That's the thing, you can't really make a good three-dimensional outline. I have all these photographs.\" She swept her hand in front of six fox photographs leaning against the back of the long table at which she worked. A deep metal sink stood in the corner with glazed pots, terra-cotta pots, and square redwood containers on lined shelves. Ribbons\u2014every color imaginable, including the fashionable gauze ones\u2014lined another shelf, the spools affixed to the edge, a bit of ribbon hanging down from each. The trimming and cutting tools hung above the worktable on a magnetic strip. Filling the workroom were the fragrances of potted plants, small trees, and cut flowers.\n\n\"You just eyeballed it?\" Harry was incredulous.\n\n\"Did.\"\n\n\"You always got A's in art class. Not me.\"\n\nSusan wiped her hands with a small terry-cloth towel. \"You got them in physics.\"\n\n\"I like that he's running,\" said Harry of the topiary fox.\n\n\"I thought it would be easier to do than a sitting fox. But I'll get the hang of it. Hounds, too.\"\n\n\"Susan, you could do dachshunds, Labs, cats. People could give you pictures of their pets.\"\n\n\"Great idea. I'll see if my boss will go for it.\"\n\n\"Who is the boss?\"\n\n\"Karen Corriss, you remember her? She was three grades ahead of us.\"\n\n\"You mean Karen Dillard?\"\n\n\"Yeah. She married Rudy Corriss.\" She lowered her voice. \"Apparently he's not doing too well. Real estate.\"\n\n\"I can believe that, but, well\"\u2014Harry shrugged\u2014\"Ivy Nursery has to be an interesting place to work.\"\n\n\"For one day, it is.\" Susan laughed. \"Okay, let me take pictures of this on my cellphone so I can show Karen my work and my first sale. You're a peach, you know that?\"\n\nAs Susan took pictures from every angle on her cellphone, Harry beamed. \"You never called me a peach before.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on. I have so.\"\n\n\"Sometimes you've called me a good egg. I like peach better.\"\n\nThe two old friends laughed. Susan wrapped a beautiful gauze bow around the fox's neck. \"Charlie in gold,\" she said, calling the fox by his English name. The French use \"Reynard.\"\n\nHarry held up the creation. \"Let me get this through the cash register and I'll meet you outside.\"\n\nThey met by Harry's truck, animals in it.\n\nOpening the door, Harry placed the topiary fox on the passenger-seat floor. \"Touch that and I pull your whiskers out.\"\n\n_\"Why would I touch it? It's not food.\"_ Pewter tossed her head.\n\n\"Tucker?\" Harry stared right into her wonderful corgi's brown eyes.\n\n_\"Not me,\"_ the intrepid dog replied.\n\n_\"Don't even ask, I don't chew greenery,\"_ Mrs. Murphy said.\n\n_\"No, you just wrecked last year's Christmas tree,\"_ Pewter reminded her.\n\n_\"I had help.\"_ The tiger cat's pupils enlarged as she growled at Pewter.\n\n\"Enough.\" Harry shut the door, the window open a crack. \"These last two months all those cats have done is fight. And Pewter chases Tucker, too.\"\n\n\"Not for long, I assume,\" Susan laughed.\n\n\"She does need Weight Watchers, doesn't she?\"\n\nThey stood there in the faltering light, coolness coming on. Shoppers left the nursery, purchases in hand.\n\nWesley Speer emerged, two huge amaryllises in his arms. Harry, on seeing him, ran up. \"Let me help. These are beautiful.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Harry. Hey, Susan. We could have a vestry board meeting right here.\"\n\n\"No quorum,\" Susan said as she walked with them to Wesley's Lexus SUV.\n\nHe opened the back.\n\n\"You bought my chest of drawers!\" Susan exclaimed.\n\n\"Huh?\" He stepped back from the inside of the Lexus, a beautiful vehicle and an expensive one.\n\n\"My chest of drawers!\" repeated Susan. \"Baby blue. You went down to Farmville, Number 9, didn't you?\"\n\n\"I wanted to get something for Rebecca,\" Wesley said, mentioning his wife. \"We often go down there.\"\n\n\"Well, I wanted that one.\"\n\n\"Susan, I bet if you call down there, they'll have another one or can get it for you. This just shows what good taste we both have. Rebecca dragged me down there, oh, weeks ago and she fell in love with this. I sneaked back today and bought it.\"\n\n\"She'll love you for this.\" Harry smiled.\n\nHe smiled back. \"Every now and then it does a husband good to surprise his wife. I thought I'd carry it up to her dressing room, put it by the window, and place the two amaryllises on it.\"\n\n\"Lovely.\" Susan nodded. \"Well, home to Owen. He needs to go outside. I'll see you...?\"\n\n\"Halloween Hayride, if not before,\" Wesley answered.\n\nThe two women friends returned to Susan's station wagon, parked not far from the old Ford.\n\nSusan kissed Harry on the cheek. \"Thank you for making my day.\"\n\n\"You made mine. I have a fox.\"\n\nSusan put her hand on the door handle. \"I can't believe he bought my bureau.\"\n\n\"Honey, Wesley's right. Call them up. It's kind of funny\u2014I'm telling you to spend money and I just spent a little. I didn't even make a fuss.\"\n\n\"Maybe we're exchanging personalities.\"\n\n\"Nah.\" Harry shook her head. \"You can smooth over ruffled feathers, make people feel good. I say what I mean too often and suffer the consequences.\"\n\nSusan hugged Harry, whom she truly loved. \"Harry, I know we are both getting older, because nine times out of ten you now hold your tongue.\"\n\n\"Mmm, five out of ten.\"\n\n\"Six.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"I am,\" Susan said, slipping behind the wheel.\n\n#\n\nThe hum of an overhead fluorescent light distracted Cooper. Outside the police station's windows, the sun was setting. Opening her metal briefcase, she laid out the papers from Hester's folder onto the long table in the conference room.\n\n\"Precise,\" observed Rick, the sheriff, rubbing his chin as he noted a large map with parcels of land and soil types outlined in different colors.\n\n\"Sarah was helpful. We went through Hester's papers a few times, and she reiterated that her aunt didn't speak of these much, except to say she was extra vigilant about where and from whom she bought her produce.\"\n\nHe read the numbered key, checked the land to which it referred. \"She had properties' sales reports, too, with the price and when land changed hands, which wasn't often.\"\n\n\"From everything we know of Hester, that makes sense. She liked to do business with people she'd done business with for years, preferably whose parents did business with her parents. If a family farm was sold, she wanted to know the new owner's intentions.\"\n\n\"That's one thing about this part of the world. There are times when you can see five generations at a crack.\"\n\n\"Makes you see quite clearly where bad blood galloped from generation to generation.\" Cooper laughed.\n\nHe laughed, too. \"Does, but other things, little things\u2014like have you ever noticed that Tally Urquhart, Big Mim, Little Mim, all favor bright blue? Blue signs, blue dresses, blue cars.\"\n\n\"Now that you mention it, they do. Looks like Aunt Tally is going to bust a hundred and one this winter.\" She paused at the thought of the wise old woman. \"I think I'll call on Aunt Tally. She knows these farms, knew them before most of the roads were paved. Maybe there's something we're missing.\"\n\nThe sheriff pushed his chair back from the table. \"Coop, any time spent with the old dragon is time well spent, but I don't see the connection between the farms on this map and Hester's death.\"\n\nShe sat staring at the paper, thin where it had been repeatedly folded and unfolded over the years. Pointing to Buddy Janss's holding, she said, \"Hester dealt with Buddy for decades. Land value and use are changing. Buddy is certainly aware of it. For one thing, the sale of even one of his parcels would be worth seven figures.\"\n\n\"To Buddy, not to Hester.\"\n\n\"She was opposed to development,\" said Cooper.\n\n\"So is Buddy, up to a point.\" Tired, Rick's voice betrayed it.\n\n\"Chief, I told you about the tie between Josh Hill and Hester. The Virginia tribes connection.\"\n\n\"So they went fishing together,\" said Rick, his voice now skeptical.\n\n\"Here's Morrowdale, where Josh was found,\" said Cooper, now on a roll. \"Hester has a soil outline for it. Also on this map, Hester has all of Neil Jordan's purchases outlined and soil-typed. I keep coming back to this. It has to do with soil, crops, and organic farming, but as far as I know, no one has ever been killed for applying fertilizer.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Not yet anyway.\"\n\n\"But here's where I'm heading. Some of these farms had to have been formerly owned by the Monacans.\"\n\nHe shifted in his seat. \"Wouldn't Hester have marked that as well?\"\n\n\"I don't know. All the stuff Sarah and I found in a folder on land issues, Indian scholarship funds, housing funds, all hinged on proving one's Indian blood to the federal government. I think she might have paid Josh Hill to research who was a Monacan tribe member. We just haven't found his research.\"\n\n\"That's a big jump,\" he said, holding up his hand. \"There is no solid connection between the murders themselves that we know of other than the costumes\u2014no connection to farming practices and no connection to who owned what when.\"\n\n\"Here's where I'm going. The Virginia tribes are not recognized by the federal government, but that doesn't mean they couldn't work to repurchase such lands, nor does it mean they can't continue their pressure on the government as well as the state. The state can't deny them as easily as the feds, but the state would have a difficult time assisting in any purchases.\"\n\nHe threw up his hands. \"So what?\"\n\n\"These lands are worth millions, but they sure wouldn't be if returned or repurchased by a tribe, because they would never come on the market again.\"\n\n\"But if the land was sold now, wouldn't the tribe have to pay fair market value?\"\n\nCooper leaned toward him. \"Maybe. Maybe not. There are so many possibilities. Let's say a landowner dies without any heirs. If the state takes over and the tribes create an outcry, they could possibly win the right to reclaim the land or maybe the right to purchase it at a reduced rate.\"\n\nThe lawman remained unconvinced. \"But first the tribe has to come up with the money.\"\n\n\"They can open it for fishing and hunting, find new ways to create revenue based on their history and culture, and lastly, even though the Virginia tribes signed away the right to create casinos, they could possibly fight to reclaim those rights. As they are not now recognized by the federal government, think of the fight\u2014a long fight, national attention, with billions at stake! The federal government would look really bad, and what if the timing was just right, say, during a presidential election? A great case could be made that the Monacans' rights were signed away and stolen under duress. This could be huge.\" She paused. \"In Alexandria, preservationists want to save Carver School\u2014built in 1944 for African American children, which means tribal children, too. The purchase price is $675,000. For Alexandria, right outside of D.C., that is not bad. If they succeed, it will energize other preservationists. Obviously, the focus is African American. They may not know about Plecker.\"\n\nHe drummed his fingers on the table. \"Billions of dollars, that seems to me to be more motivation for murder than protecting an ancestral school or home.\"\n\n\"To us, but we're white.\"\n\nThis struck the sheriff. \"Coop, you're grasping at straws, but one of those straws might be the right one. I'll call the chief of the Upper Mattaponi. I don't fully understand the hopes of the various Virginia tribes.\"\n\nCooper refolded the map. \"Had another thought. Halloween is Thursday. We might want to assign extra people to the hayride.\"\n\n\"We're stretched thin as it is,\" he said. \"I've assigned extra officers to the downtown mall. It's bound to get rowdy. If a private function gets out of control, we'll be called, but the mall is public. I can't really spare anyone.\"\n\n\"If our killer is as arrogant as I think he is, the hayride could be a perfect venue for more of his showmanship.\"\n\n\"Arrogant, yes, but we still haven't got a compelling motive for these murders, and I don't see how the Halloween Hayride, a fund-raiser for the library, ties to the two killings, other than people will be in scary costumes.\"\n\n#\n\nThe fact that October 29 was forever marked as Black Friday hovered in Harry's consciousness. Not much of a history buff, she was reminded by the media, as were most people, of the dark day when Wall Street went to hell in a handbasket. Of course, panics and depressions had occurred before but, thanks to radio and newsreels, 1929 slid the whole country into debt, disillusionment, and death in front of the entire world. The news media fed the panic.\n\nJust lately, a second depression, called the Great Recession, was broadcast live by cable TV, radio, the Internet, and every possible form of instant communication. Same old, same old, no matter how you sliced and diced it. That was Harry's logic as she pondered life from her tractor seat. She plowed under her harvested barley field. She allowed her sunflowers and the small patch of cornstalks to stand as she thought of how history is a shadow dogging your every step.\n\nFinishing up her work in bright sunshine, the temperature a remarkable sixty-four degrees, she bumped along in the old reliable machine, kicking up dust, driving back to the big shed. Next to her, Tucker had a little seat with a seatbelt. At every lurch, her corgi ears would jangle, then straighten out. Made Harry laugh. Sometimes her animals or the wild animals she watched proved so comical, tears would roll down her cheeks.\n\n\"Got to check the vital signs,\" she said, turning off the engine. After unhooking Tucker's seatbelt, she held the dog in one arm, not easy, and climbed down backward off the vehicle.\n\n_\"You are very particular,\"_ the dog accurately noted.\n\nHarry checked the tractor's oil, the fuel line, and the hydraulic line. The only thing she didn't check was tire pressure. She rarely worried about that, although if a big temperature shift occurred, she'd do it.\n\n\"Tucker, waste not, want not,\" said Harry. \"If you keep things tip-top, saves money and saves worry, too.\"\n\n_\"Right, Mom,\"_ answered the corgi. _\"I don't waste bones or greenies.\"_\n\nA flutter overhead made both domesticated creatures look up. A brilliantly colored male goldfinch perched on a rafter, showing off his plumage. _\"Whatcha doing?\"_ the little fellow asked.\n\n_\"Mom's going over her tractor,\"_ said Tucker. _\"She does this every time she finishes a job. Careful.\"_\n\n_\"Tell her to put out more seed, will you? The bird feeder's getting low.\"_ Thinking he saw something to eat, he pecked at the rafter. Nope. He spat it out.\n\n_\"I'll try, believe me,\"_ Tucker promised, _\"but she doesn't understand. Hey, how come you're on your own? You goldfinches are so social.\"_\n\n_\"Too much chatter in the flock. I needed a break. Who needs to know the sordid details of everyone's nest? I like being in the tractor shed. Nice and quiet. No one else is here, although in the summers the swallowtails build nests. Pushy, those birds.\"_\n\n_\"Don't the cats harass you?\"_ the dog wondered.\n\n_\"The gray cat is too fat to harass anybody,\"_ he chirped with pleasure. _\"Now, the tiger, got to keep my eye out for her. Fortunately, she's usually occupied by something else.\"_\n\n_\"Do you talk regularly to any other birds? Birds that fly around farther away than you do?\"_\n\nAs Harry wiped off her greasy hands on an old red cloth, the happy little fellow hopped down on the tractor seat and looked down at Tucker. _\"Sure,\"_ answered the bird. _\"Birds do love to gossip.\"_\n\n_\"Ever run into those crows who ate the scarecrow?\"_ asked Tucker.\n\nThe goldfinch hopped down to a back fender to get closer. _\"I heard you were there with the cats. The crows complained you all spoiled a great find, but they didn't know who killed the human, if that's what you want to know. They said he was fresh meat. So he was killed close by, maybe even killed in a car or something.\"_\n\n_\"We kind of stumbled upon it. Did you talk to anyone who knew about the murdered witch at the church?\"_\n\n_\"No, but I heard about it. When you live in a flock, news travels fast. And I also socialize with birds other than goldfinches,\"_ he said proudly, bragging at how cosmopolitan he was. _\"Anyway, I don't know anything about that witch except people seem to like killing one another, so what's it to you?\"_\n\n_\"My human is curious, plus she liked the witch lady. She wants to catch whoever did it.\"_\n\nThe bird cocked a snapping black eye at the corgi. _\"You need better control over her. She's wasting her time. Now, spending more time on her fields, that will yield something of value.\"_\n\nTucker's attention was diverted by a vehicle coming down the driveway. The sound sent her flying out of the tractor shed to bark warnings.\n\n_\"Dogs are idiots.\"_ The goldfinch laughed as he hopped to the other rear fender, getting closer to Harry.\n\nThe slender woman turned around, hands cleaner, beheld the small brilliantly colored bird. \"Hello,\" she said.\n\n_\"Hello back at you,\"_ he chirped, which sounded to her ears like \"potato chips.\"\n\nHearing the familiar goldfinch call, she smiled. \"You're a bold fellow.\"\n\nShe hung up the red rags, walked out of the shed, glanced over her shoulder. The goldfinch chirped, then flew up to the rafter.\n\n\"Hey,\" Cooper called out, Tucker at her heels.\n\n\"Is this a courtesy call or business? I never know when you're in uniform,\" Harry said.\n\n\"I was down at Rose Hill. Thought I'd stop by on my way back to town.\"\n\nThe two fell in side by side as they made their way to the house.\n\n\"How's Aunt Tally?\" Harry asked. Rose Hill was the old lady's estate.\n\n\"Never changes. She's besotted with the baby.\"\n\nThe two walked into the sunny kitchen.\n\n\"Is she dispensing advice?\" Harry asked, raising an eyebrow.\n\n\"No, she's leaving that up to Big Mim, who, by all accounts, is a treasure trove of childrearing wisdom.\"\n\nThey laughed.\n\nBefore they sat, Harry asked, \"Coffee, tea, Co'Cola, hot chocolate?\"\n\n\"Nothing, thanks.\" Cooper took a seat at the table. \"Harry, I asked Aunt Tally a lot of questions about Hester, about ownership of old farms, stuff like that. Someone should record what she remembers before it goes with her.\" Cooper felt that every old person was a library.\n\n\"Good idea,\" said Harry, sitting across from her. \"Learn anything new?\"\n\nThe tall deputy nodded. \"More than I imagined. Who married whom. How many children, legitimate and non. Who hated whom and who was smart and not. She said such things run in families. I showed her a county map with farms outlined. She knew the history of every single one, and her memory started with the end of World War One. Got really clear in the twenties, but she said with her parents, her friends' parents, and their grandparents\u2014well, the living memories recounted to her when she was young, all put together, reached back to the 1830s. She could just rattle stuff off.\n\n\"She pointed out which farms had been well managed, even through the Depression, World War Two, and up to today. She knew where some of the old slave graveyards were, and even where there are Indian mounds, which may or may not be graveyards. Most of that history has been lost. She said if you have an ancestor in a graveyard, you have a legal right to tend to that graveyard once a year. She noted farms that had endured ups and downs, and much of that seemed to tie in to drinking. Then there were those who lost everything.\" Cooper sighed. \"I hit a dead end. Learned a lot, but...\"\n\n\"Any disputes?\" asked Harry. Aunt Tally could always tell a good story.\n\n\"Not as many as you would think. A lot of squabbling among heirs in certain families. Any dispute she recounted seemed to involve wine, women, moonshine.\" Cooper laughed.\n\n\"Never a bad place to start.\"\n\nCooper, hat off, ran her fingers through her ash-blonde hair. \"I'm pretty frustrated.\"\n\n\"I can understand that,\" said Harry. \"Look, I know I get in the way, but let me make a suggestion. Hester, though well educated, was country. I'm a Smith graduate but country. I can help.\"\n\nCooper shook her head at her neighbor and friend. \"You? Harry, one of these days you'll either fall into a well or get yourself killed.\"\n\n\"Now, just a minute here. Hear me out. Let's go to Hester's house. Let me go through her truck, the outbuildings where she kept equipment. If we don't find anything of interest, then let's go to her roadside stand.\"\n\n\"You don't want to go into the house?\" Cooper's curiosity rose. Despite herself, she wanted to understand Harry's logic.\n\n\"No. Like I said, I'm country, Hester was country. I can look at equipment, tools, trucks, tractors, and see things you don't.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Let's find out,\" Harry egged her on.\n\nChallenged face-to-face, Cooper had to say yes.\n\nCooper called ahead and asked permission from Sarah to comb the outside grounds and equipment. Sarah readily agreed.\n\nIn the barn, pulling open every drawer of Hester's freestanding toolbox, Harry found old tools but nothing that proved helpful. She ran her hands along the inside walls of the shed\u2014no false boards or hiding places. She opened the small box behind the tractor seat, finding the manual. She lifted up the seat. Carefully searching each outbuilding, examining each piece of equipment, she even looked into the bins holding birdseed, sticking a broom handle down into them and twirling it around.\n\nCooper admired Harry's thoroughness. \"Hiding something in a seed bin\u2014now, that's clever, though there's nothing here.\"\n\n\"Moonshine is often hidden that way, just like when it's trucked, it's generally hidden in the middle of another shipment, like furniture boxes. Or before flyovers with infrared cameras, when the boys would grow marijuana, it would usually be in the middle of a corn crop. That doesn't work anymore.\" Harry looked around the shed. \"Let me check her truck. She spent a lot of time in it; she told me it was on its third set of tires.\"\n\nBefore going into the cab, Harry pulled off the hubcaps. \"Cooper, pull the ones on the other side. Hubcaps can be good storage if you're careful.\"\n\nUsing her penknife, Cooper popped off the hubcaps, took a look, then replaced them. Next she opened the truck's passengerside door as Harry opened the one on the driver's side.\n\n\"Our team went over the truck,\" said Cooper.\n\n\"I know,\" said Harry, though she continued searching, undeterred.\n\nIn the glove box, they found the usual: manual, registration, insurance information, old pens, a box of Altoids. From the side pocket, Harry fished out one earring, a notebook, which she leafed through, a powerful LED flashlight, and bits of leaf, dirt. Leaning over the steering wheel, she ran her palm over the dash.\n\n\"Damn,\" Harry cursed low.\n\n\"I told you we went over it.\"\n\n\"Pull up the floor mat.\" Harry did it on her side of the truck and tossed the rubber mat outside. \"There's the covering that came with the vehicle underneath. Take your penknife and slowly work around that to see if anything lifts up.\" As Harry did this on the driver's side, excitement crept into her voice. \"I think I've got something.\"\n\nShe raised the loose edge of the original mat and carefully slid her hand underneath it. \"Aha\u2014here's something...,\" she said, and pulled out a flat manila envelope with a clasp. \"Let's see what we've got.\" She hurried to the back of the truck and dropped the tailgate.\n\nNow next to her, Cooper watched as Harry drew papers and a map from the envelope and gently spread the map on the truck bed.\n\n\"Same as the other map...\" Cooper's voice trailed off.\n\nHarry squinted. \"Some properties have parcels that are outlined in purple.\"\n\nCooper grabbed some papers. \"Here's the key. The purple signifies ancestral land.\" She pointed to a spot on a nearby farm. \"Here's a Quaker school near Midway Farm. That school's gone now. Boy, is this thorough!\"\n\nCooper flipped through the other pages. \"This is Josh Hill's research,\" she said, pointing to his name on a document. \"Look here. Says the Virginia tribes cared greatly about education.\"\n\nHarry exclaimed, \"Some of this goes back to right after the Revolutionary War. He has a note here, 'Many of us took Quaker names. The Quakers have been consistently helpful identifying and helping the Monacans and other tribes to reclaim our lands.' \"\n\nShe picked up an old newspaper clipping. \"Here's an article about how the Upper Mattaponi purchased land and restored Sharon Indian School, which is the only Indian school on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register.\" Harry checked the map again. \"Hill drew double lines around old church schools, Random Row, and also where old churches used to stand. And hey, about forty acres of Buddy's one hundred acres are marked off in purple.\"\n\nCooper leaned over and studied this after setting down a paper she'd just been examining. \"Hill wrote out a plan for raising money to purchase Random Row and part of Buddy's land, saying it would be easier to prove tribal usage there, even with Walter Ashby Plecker's paper genocide.\"\n\nHarry straightened up at the ramifications of Hill's report.\n\nCooper continued. \"He wrote that while church lands were carefully recorded, the buildings had usually disappeared after a century and more, but, and he underlined 'but' in red, with the School Desegregation Act of 1965, the records for schools are much more recent.\" She put her forefinger to her lips. \"The problem goes back to how to prove you're a Virginia Indian.\"\n\n\"If someone like Josh or Hester could arouse interest among the African American community to jointly preserve history\u2014say, at Random Row\u2014working together would render that less important,\" said Harry. \"Here's a list of local people Hill thought might help their efforts.\"\n\n\"Your name is on there,\" Cooper remarked.\n\nHarry stared at her name, along with the names of professors, businesspeople, and community leaders, white, black, and tribal. \"Tazio's name is on here, too. Hill did his homework.\"\n\n\"And he paid for it,\" said Cooper.\n\n\"Hester did, too. She must've hid these documents because she was afraid. She didn't want this information to fall into the wrong hands and all of this research to be destroyed.\"\n\nCooper whistled. \"Those that would gain by this being destroyed are Buddy, Wesley, and maybe Neil, as they often work together on land purchases.\"\n\n\"They don't seem like murderers,\" said Harry, mulling it over. \"Wesley and Neil are on the vestry board. Buddy is the sweetest man ever.\"\n\n\"People can fool you.\" Cooper thought a long time. \"I can't arrest three men on suspicion of murder with only a map and these papers to go on. And there is the good possibility they have nothing to do with it. But I'm nervous about what might happen at the hayride, and it's only two days away.\"\n\n\"Can you assign extra security to it?\"\n\n\"I can try again.\" Cooper called her boss and pleaded her case once more.\n\nFinally Rick relented and said he'd assign Dabny to work with her.\n\n\"Thanks, boss.\" Cooper clicked off her cellphone. \"Dabny.\"\n\n\"One more is better than none.\" Harry folded her arms across her chest. \"Thursday night is going to be interesting.\"\n\n\"I hope not,\" Cooper said, though she feared the worst. Halloween had never seemed so frightening.\n\n#\n\nHalloween colors, orange and black, gave way to shimmering slate on Thursday night as twilight fell over the rolling Virginia countryside. Those trees without leaves appeared outlined in charcoal, and the conifers swayed blue and silver. The pin oaks, dried leaves still attached, rustled in the light breeze. When the wind lifted their leaves upward, the pale underside contrasted with the tree's dark bark. Then as the wind died down, they turned right side up.\n\nAs the sun set, the actors for the Halloween Hayride met at Random Row's middle schoolhouse, along with the starter, Lolly Currie; Neil, who would keep reports on traffic midway through the hayride; and two boys charged with keeping the goblins lit. The number of people totaled thirteen, the ideal number for a Halloween drama. While they reviewed their parts, a molten sky faded to blue velvet.\n\n\"Darkening of the moon,\" said Wesley. \"What luck. We can scare the pants off everyone.\" He laughed as he glanced out the long windows.\n\n\"You do that anyway, Wes,\" Neil remarked.\n\nTazio focused on the task at hand, once more reviewing the night's plans. At her side was Lolly, with a duplicate schedule on her clipboard. \"Okay,\" said Tazio. \"First hay wagon leaves from the barn at seven P.M. After that, the wagons leave at ten-minute intervals and we have...\"\n\n\"Ten wagons plus foot followers,\" Paul reminded her, and Tazio was grateful for the strong man's presence at her side.\n\n\"Why are people going on foot?\" Wesley wondered.\n\n\"Some people like to walk and some groups won't all fit in the wagons. We'll put the children in first and have the adults walk alongside the wagons,\" Tazio replied.\n\n\"How many people can we expect tonight?\" Cooper had just finished putting on her Jeepers Creepers costume.\n\n\"Three hundred and twenty-one,\" Tazio said. \"That's how many bought tickets. That doesn't mean all will come out. The library also received contributions from over one hundred people who won't be here. After expenses, we net over twenty thousand dollars. Pretty good. Paul, we can't thank you enough for getting the horse-drawn wagons and drivers to contribute their services, and Reverend Jones, you organized the truck-drawn wagons. We have four of those. They'll be good backups if a problem arises with the horses.\"\n\n\"I trust the horses more than engines,\" Reverend Jones replied.\n\n\"Okay. First scare, after Lolly gives the initial go-ahead. The wagon rolls by the schoolhouse, Dr. Frankenstein has the monster on the table.\" She glanced over at Buddy Janss, a credible if rotund Frankenstein's Monster. \"Buddy breaks the bands, rises up, chokes Dr. F after a suitable struggle, then flees the building, running into the cornfield, threatening folks on the wagon. Then he runs back into the corn and sneaks into the schoolhouse, gets on the table, and does it all over again.\"\n\nLolly read from her schedule, \"After that, 'glowing goblins and ghosts flutter through the cornfield as the wagon progresses.' How you guys made those things work, I'll never know.\"\n\n\"Pretty much the same way you make a jack-o'-lantern.\" Paul smiled at the two high school boys who had created the goblins and ghosts. \"They're lit by LEDs, and they go up and down, back and forth on wires, using the tiny battery packs in their backs.\"\n\nBrows wrinkling for a moment, Tazio asked Neil, \"No one using candles tonight, or torches?\"\n\n\"No, too dangerous,\" said Neil. \"We have a fake torch at the end, when the monk\"\u2014he nodded to Reverend Jones\u2014\"calls the spirits to order and points the wagons toward the old Mount Carmel Church, where it all ends festively.\"\n\n\"And safely,\" the reverend reminded them.\n\n\"All right,\" said Tazio. \"After the goblins and ghosts, Frankenstein's Monster should be back in the schoolhouse, ready for the next wagon. Okay. Now, the first wagon goes between the two big trees on either side of the dirt lane.\"\n\n\"That's my cue.\" Cooper smiled in her Jeeper Creepers costume. \"And given that I need to get hooked up to a darned cable, I'm leaving now.\" What she didn't say was that Dabny, who would fasten her to the guy wire between the trees, would be observing from an old farmside road along the edge of the cornfield, ready in case trouble occurred.\n\nFrom her perch in either of the trees she would swing between, Cooper would have as good a view as possible, given it was five days after the dark of the moon. Both on-duty officers would have cellphones, but should a cellphone not properly work, Cooper and Dabny also carried a piercing whistle.\n\n\"Once people recover from the Jeepers Creepers scare,\" said Tazio, \"they round the bend and the Headless Horseman gallops toward them before going into the open-air shed, disappearing from the hay wagon's sight. Is there any way to throw a pumpkin for a head from there?\" Tazio asked her boyfriend.\n\n\"It would scare the driving horses,\" said Paul. Despite his assigned role, his head was always screwed on straight. \"Basically, I'll be running toward them, then veering off. We did set out a jack-o'-lantern on a fence post about a quarter of a mile down the road from me and Dinny.\" He named his horse, a lovely old hunting fellow who had done it all, seen it all.\n\n\"Neil, you're all in black near the shed,\" said Tazio. \"If the wagons need to move along, you call Lolly. Hopefully, no one will see you as our secret traffic manager.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Neil nodded to Tazio.\n\n\"The wagons pass the hayfield, large rolls stacked together. There will be a green-eyed goblin on top\u2014again courtesy of our high-tech guys. Then, the evil Jason and his chainsaw, meaning you, Blair\"\u2014she tipped her paper toward Little Mim's husband\u2014\"will jump out from behind the tall obelisk in the graveyard.\"\n\n\"And I'll turn on the ghost noises and wails from the graveyard before I jump out,\" Blair added with enthusiasm.\n\n\"We've got lights on one bony arm coming up from a fake grave\u2014we didn't want to desecrate a real one,\" said Tazio. \"We were going to have a witch in the graveyard, but after Hester's death that seemed insensitive.\"\n\n\"Good thinking,\" Neil complimented her. \"Jason beheads the vampire, Count Dracula, who is the undead, so of course he just puts his head back on.\"\n\n\"You've always had a good head on your shoulders.\" Reverend Jones laughed at Barry Betz, the batting coach whom Cooper had started dating. Barry would portray Dracula this evening.\n\nAs Cooper had talked him into it, everyone assumed the relationship between them was heating up. They were right.\n\n\"Any questions?\" asked Tazio.\n\n\"We aren't allowed to drink inside the meeting room at Mount Carmel, right?\" Wesley asked.\n\n\"Now, Wesley, when has anyone been allowed to drink inside a church building?\" Reverend Jones winked at him.\n\n\"Right.\" Wesley smiled.\n\n\"The second hay wagon, the one pulled by the team of Belgians, has a full bar under the driver's seat, since we knew how parched some of you can get from your labors.\" Tazio smiled broadly.\n\n\"Belgians...?\" Neil looked for direction.\n\n\"The cream-colored draft horses,\" Paul informed him.\n\n\"Ah.\" Neil nodded. \"I'm glad to know the Belgian is a horse of a different color.\"\n\n\"We've got this covered,\" said Tazio. \"It's going to be the most exciting Halloween Hayride this county has ever seen.\" She laughed. \"And I'm the Fallen Angel who appears as the hay wagon reaches Mount Carmel, holding up a crucifix to our vampire, head back on, who shrinks and screams in horror, vanquished at last. Hey, we've thought of everything.\"\n\n\"What about the kids who wet their pants?\" Wesley joked.\n\n\"That's up to Mom and Dad. By now they should know to bring Handi Wipes and towels.\"\n\n#\n\nWaiting back in the last wagon, which was being pulled by the Haristeens' truck, Pewter complained as she shifted to find a comfortable spot on the hay bale. _\"By the time we get to the church, there won't be any food left. We're the caboose.\"_\n\n_\"Sure there will be,\"_ said Tucker, an expert on dropped treats. She confidently predicted, _\"Stuff falls on the floor.\"_\n\n_\"Tucker, here's a frightening Halloween idea: I'll jump on the table and make everyone scream, 'Get the cat off the table!' Now, that's really scary.\"_\n\nMrs. Murphy laughed. _\"Pewter, you jump on that table and Mom will smack you. Then you'll be the one screaming and that will scare the children.\"_\n\n_\"I'm going inside the truck,\"_ said Pewter, who leapt from the wagon's hay bale to the truck bed, also full of hay. She started smacking the sliding window. _\"Release me from these trolls!\"_\n\nHarry moved forward in the fluffed hay to also knock on the window. In the driver's seat, Fair turned around and slid it open.\n\n\"Honey, Pewter's being a pill. Will you take her with you?\" Then she said to Susan's husband, Ned, sitting in the passenger seat, \"Ned, she'll be on your lap.\"\n\n\"Fine with me as long as she doesn't drive.\"\n\nHarry grunted as she picked up the fat cat, passing her through the open back window.\n\nFair asked, \"Do you have the .38?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\nNed looked at Fair with alarm. \"What's going on?\"\n\nHarry nonchalantly replied, \"Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.\"\n\nSusan, sitting next to Miss Mona in the wagon bed, patted the old lady's hand. Miss Mona's walker was strapped to the back tailgate. A stroke had affected her mobility, which sometimes embarrassed her, but the group of old friends pretended she was the Miss Mona they knew in childhood. She was, except that she couldn't get around like she used to.\n\nBoomBoom tended to Colonel Friend, also very old. Colonel Friend was a bemedaled World War II vet. Bunny Biedecke, another World War II vet, leaned against a small hay bale as he sat in the sweet-smelling fluffed hay. Dear old Bunny was already asleep. BoomBoom's partner, Alicia, sat next to him. Bunny had to have been tired, because he was the kind of fellow who would normally revel in the experience of sitting next to a beautiful woman. Come to think of it, most of the men in Crozet fit into that category.\n\nTazio had interspersed the trucks with the horse-drawn wagons. If a horse threw a shoe, the people could get back to a truck wagon; these held fewer people but there was also room in the truck's bed. Most people wanted to ride in the horse-drawn wagons, but some enjoyed the truck-drawn ride, mostly because all the kids were clustered together, noisy with excitement, in the horse-drawn wagons.\n\nAunt Tally hotly refused getting stuck with \"old people,\" as she called them. She sat in the first horse-drawn wagon up with the driver, regaling him, so she thought, with stories of her youth and her own \"excellent\" driving abilities. Big Mim grimly sat behind, fearing Aunt Tally had hidden a small flask in her heavy cardigan sweater.\n\nAs the mercury dropped, the screams rose up. Waiting to move forward, Harry and the passengers in the last wagon could hear them as they pierced the night in sequence. The temperature fell into the mid-forties. The beautiful stillness of this velvet black Halloween meant they could even hear the bellows of fright from the graveyard, a good mile and a half distant.\n\nChecking his texts, Ned noted when the seventh wagon had been challenged by the Headless Horseman. \"Okay, Fair, roll,\" he ordered. \"Lolly says we're up. Neil said wagon number seven just passed him.\"\n\nWatch in hand, Lolly was standing just outside the first schoolhouse. She had wanted to do something to honor her boss's memory, so she had volunteered for the job of starter in Hester's pet project. Lolly was good with details. Dressed in a skeleton costume, the young woman checked and rechecked her watch and various texts. Naturally, some wagons clattered along more slowly than others, but in the main, the evening's planned event was running quite smoothly. All seriousness, Lolly would call out each passing wagon's number and say, \"Move out.\"\n\nIn the last wagon, driving at fifteen miles an hour, the cats, dogs, and humans passed the middle schoolhouse. Eerie lights showed a large beaker bubbling froth in green light. Dr. Frankenstein's Monster lifted his bulky head. The doctor poised over him, gigantic hypodermic needle in hand. _Snap_ , the bonds broke, falling away as the monster reached up with his right hand, grabbing Dr. Frankenstein by the throat. The furious struggle was enhanced by the green light. The contents of the giant needle shot upward in the air as the doctor helplessly sank to his knees. The monster threw up his hands in triumph, not unlike a football player in the end zone. He whipped his head around as best he could, despite the spike in his neck, then crashed out the side door, roaring as he did, rushing at the wagon. Hearing the riders' screams, he then turned to disappear into the cornfield. As the wagon moved forward, one could hear the cornstalks bending and rustling.\n\n\"Good scream,\" Susan complimented Harry.\n\nPewter, on Fair's lap, pupils wide, meowed, _\"I don't like the monster's face.\"_\n\nThe back window, left open so Harry and Susan could holler at their husbands, allowed Mrs. Murphy and Tucker to hear Pewter. It sounded like a tiny meow to the two men in the cab.\n\n_\"Scaredy-cat,\"_ the two animals teased.\n\n_\"Piffle,\"_ the gray cat replied. _\"I just don't like Frankenstein's face. I'm not scared.\"_\n\nThe truck crept forward and for a moment they heard the far-off clip-clop of the draft horses pulling the cart in front of them, so still was the night.\n\n\"Don't you love the sound of hoofbeats?\" Shawl wrapped around her shoulders, Miss Mona smiled.\n\n\"I do.\" Harry held one hand while Susan held the other. \"Miss Mona, your hand is cold. Let's put on your gloves.\"\n\nAs they did that, two glowing goblins and two ghosts fluttered above the cornfield, moving from side to side, then up, only to sink back down.\n\nAhead, they heard an explosive scream of fright.\n\n\"Must be really scary,\" Miss Mona said to Colonel Friend.\n\n\"We'll see.\" His voice quavered, but as he'd fought his way through Europe, it's doubtful too much could rattle the colonel.\n\nAs they were poised between the two trees, branches twisting into the night, out flew Jeepers Creepers. So sudden and silent was this attacking nasty bird\/human, wings outstretched, strange face looking down with a snarl, that even Harry drew deeper into the hay.\n\n_\"Kill! That bird wants to kill us!\"_ Pewter screamed.\n\nEven Tucker barked in surprise, then breathed out in relief. _\"It's Coop!\"_ The corgi had recognized Cooper's scent.\n\nMrs. Murphy inhaled the crisp air. _\"So it is. She scared me.\"_\n\nHigh in the tree, Cooper folded her wings and gazed over the scene. She could see a little bit around the curve, back to the schoolhouses, which stood like clapboard rectangles in the darkness. Buddy was running through the cornfield, charged by Count Dracula. This seemed to be an impromptu scare as the last wagon rolled by. Now that Harry, Fair, and the others had passed, Cooper prepared to push off hard on the zipline and swoop in the opposite direction to get back into the tree and climb down.\n\nAs Fair slowly took his passengers around the big curve, out charged the Headless Horseman with a menacing howl, cape flying behind him, hoofbeats clattering.\n\nThrough the fake neck, Paul could see pretty well. His horse, Dinny, wondered why they just kept going into the shed again and again. His job was to chase hounds who were chasing foxes. This back-and-forth stuff was boring, but being a good soul, he did as he was asked, ears twitching as people screamed. What a racket!\n\nNext to Fair in the cab, Ned remarked, \"That horse could be in a movie.\"\n\nFair, Dinny's physician, chuckled. \"Dinny is dipped in gold.\"\n\nSighing, Ned absentmindedly stroked Pewter's head as she chose to grace his lap with her large presence. \"I've been a horse husband for twenty-three years,\" said Ned. \"I'll bet I've spent more money on horses, tack, and membership fees to hunt clubs than I did on my children's college educations.\"\n\n\"No doubt, but you have a happy wife,\" said Fair. \"Think of the men who don't.\"\n\nNed laughed. \"Point well taken.\"\n\nMiss Mona, ears still keen, said to Susan, \"I hear screams behind us.\"\n\nSusan nodded. \"Over in the hayfield.\"\n\nThe jack-o'-lantern flickered ominously, on the fence post at the end of the hayfield.\n\nBuddy Janss, still dressed as Frankenstein's Monster, clambered up one of the hay rolls, kicking the man dressed as Dracula as he tried to follow. Finally, the faux vampire grasped his ankle, pulling down the huge fellow. From a distance, Dracula appeared to bite the monster in the neck as Frankenstein bellowed, then fell still. Dracula opened his cape, slipping his knife into his belt. He also carried a small pistol but didn't use it on Frankenstein. The noise would have proven too distracting. As it was, those viewing the drama thought Frankenstein had been bitten, which he was. He was stabbed, too.\n\nBloodcurdling screams filled the air, the perfect cover for real mayhem. This Halloween Hayride was topping all prior ones for thrills.\n\nThe big square churchyard, hand-laid stone fence surrounding it, hove into view. The obelisk shone silver. As they approached, Harry could read the name on the monument: VILLION.\n\nFrom behind the obelisk, movie villain Jason appeared, chain saw in hand, white mask in place. Swinging the saw around like a hammer throw, he advanced toward them. The chain saw was not turned on, but that didn't lessen the startling effect. As he rushed them, wailing ghost noises from the graveyard added to the drama.\n\nFrom the hayfield, Count Dracula ran hard, jumping the low stone wall at the other end of the graveyard, fangs dripping blood as he headed toward Jason.\n\n\"Oh, look at the bony arm reaching out from the grave.\" Miss Mona shivered a moment.\n\nThe colonel nodded, for he had seen this sort of thing in real life. He'd seen much, maybe too much.\n\nDespite the screams, Bunny Biedecke remained asleep.\n\nJason turned to meet his attacker and swept the chain saw at Dracula, whose head tumbled off backward. But being undead, the Count picked it up, put it right back on. The two creatures struggled; the Count grappled with Jason, biting him in the neck. Jason fell to the ground, grabbing his neck, fake blood shooting through his fingers.\n\nUsing one hand, Dracula vaulted over the graveyard stone wall to disappear. As the wagon slowly passed, Jason rose up, returning to the graveyard.\n\nHearing a strangled cry, Little Mim's husband, Blair, pulled off his Jason mask and walked to peer over the other side of the graveyard wall. On his side, trying to clear his throat and his head, was Barry Betz, the original Dracula.\n\n\"Barry! Barry!\" Blair said, hopping over.\n\nThe young man couldn't yet speak. Blair looked over the field and beheld another person dressed as Count Dracula running toward Tazio, as had been planned.\n\n\"Watch out!\" Blair shouted to Tazio.\n\nShe turned, holding up her cross as the Fallen Angel, but this final time Dracula did not shrink back as scripted. Instead, he struck her hard enough to knock her sideways. Grabbing her, he pulled her up; she struggled to escape until he put a gun to her temple. He dragged her to a dip in the land where he had hidden a dirt bike.\n\n\"Get on the bike,\" he ordered.\n\nTazio did as she was told. He sat behind her, gun still to her temple. He started the dirt bike. Given that the gas was on the right handlebar, he had to slip the gun into his belt alongside the knife. As the bike picked up speed, Tazio sat still.\n\nFrom her perch, Cooper could only dimly see the unplanned drama. She didn't have time to punch in numbers on her cellphone, and pulled out the whistle instead.\n\nThe piercing note carried across the fields, over the assembled wagons. Dabny fired up the truck, roaring out of the side farm road. He screeched to a halt beneath a tree.\n\n\"Get me outta here!\" said Cooper. \"Something's wrong.\"\n\nDabny backed the truck under the tree and stepped up into the bed. He lifted himself from the bed onto the cab and reached a limb. Swinging himself up, he climbed toward Cooper, who was on her way down.\n\n\"It's these damned wings.\"\n\nDabny unfastened her wings as she tore off the mask. Then they both backed down the tree and got into the truck.\n\n\"Graveyard,\" was all she said.\n\nWithin minutes they reached the graveyard, where Blair was helping out an injured Barry.\n\nFrom the Haristeens' truck bed, Harry shouted to Cooper, \"Some maniac's got Taz!\" Harry hopped off the truck and started running after the dirt bike, now churning away from the graveyard. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker leapt off to follow. In the cab, Pewter thought they were crazy. She stayed put, hoping Ned wouldn't join in the ridiculous tumult.\n\nDabny turned the truck around and headed in the direction in which they last saw the fleeing vampire, with Cooper sitting next to him, straining to see anything.\n\nRiding Dinny back to the schoolhouse, Paul caught a glimpse of Dracula on his bike, carrying the Fallen Angel. The abductor dipped down the other side of a swale in the hayfield.\n\nLeaning forward on the solid horse, Paul galloped toward the spot. When he reached the cusp of the swale, he saw below him what he assumed to be a crazed idiot stop to position Tazio so he could hold her tighter. Without a second of hesitation Paul charged down the low rise and came alongside the dirt bike, which hadn't picked up speed with its cargo. Leaning over, he tried to climb on, and grabbed Dracula's shoulder; Dracula reached for his gun. Paul slid off Dinny like a calf roper and the horse stopped cold.\n\nPaul wrestled the fake vampire to the ground, the bike's wheels spinning as they went over. The young man shoved Dracula away, then grabbed Tazio. Dracula retrieved his gun and remounted his bike. He buzzed off.\n\nTazio's eyes fluttered as Paul lifted her into his arms.\n\n\"It's all right, honey. You're safe.\" Paul hoisted her onto Dinny's saddle and Tazio slumped forward on the animal's neck. Holding the reins, Paul walked them up the rise, across the northern end of the hayfield. Ahead, he saw Buddy Janss as Frankenstein's Monster, sprawled on a hay bale.\n\nFlagging down Cooper and Dabny, Paul asked for help for Buddy.\n\n\"I'll call an ambulance,\" said Dabny. \"Which way did Dracula go?\" he asked Paul, who pointed west.\n\nDabny drove alongside the field in the direction Paul pointed.\n\nNow in the hayfield, Harry ran toward the fiend dressed as Dracula, who pushed the dirt bike for more speed. Evidently, he was still a bit wobbly from Paul's blow.\n\nAfter loading Barry into the truck, Fair ran, keeping pace about two hundred yards behind Harry, but she was lighter and faster.\n\nAfter looking over his shoulder to see Harry in pursuit, the attacker circled in the hayfield. He steered his bike behind the hay bales, cutting his engine.\n\nHarry flew through the hay stubble faster than she'd ever run when she was on her college track team.\n\nThe dirt-bike Dracula saw that Harry was high up and behind him, but he couldn't see Fair even farther behind. Slowly, he pushed his bike around the hay bales, darkness shielding him.\n\nThe darkness also shielded Taz on Dinny's back, but as the attacker pushed his bike he now saw them.\n\nThe vampire pulled out a gun and leveled it.\n\nHarry boomed out, \"Paul, move!\"\n\nTazio's abductor stopped for a moment as Harry barely touched the earth, heading straight at him, Tucker and Mrs. Murphy in front of her.\n\nFiring, he missed Tazio, then turned and restarted the bike. Switching his gun to his left hand, he revved the engine. He roared straight for Harry, cape flying, mask in place, fangs showing.\n\nAs the bike hurtled at her, he fired his revolver with his left hand, wide of the mark. Harry hit the ground and rolled. Cunning, she pulled out the .38. She figured he would be ineffective firing the gun with his left hand.\n\nThen Dracula spotted Fair running at him, but he slowed and made a one-eighty, again barreling straight for Harry, now back on her feet.\n\nShe kept her eyes on his right hand. He had to take his hand off the throttle and switch the gun to his right hand to accurately fire the weapon. That gave her a ray of hope. Bending down, she picked up a handful of dirt and hay stubble with her left hand.\n\nNearly upon her, he slowed and pulled out his gun.\n\nHarry fired one shot from the .38 at his torso and sent another bullet for the front wheel, too. The tire blew; the bike lurched, then toppled over.\n\nAs the rider screamed, Mrs. Murphy leapt onto his arm. Harry threw dirt in the eyeholes of his mask. With her front claws, the cat ripped the mask. He coughed, trying to hold on to the gun. With everything she had, Harry threw herself onto him, smashing the butt of the .38 into his masked head.\n\nIn her jaws, Tucker grabbed the man's neck. Blood was running inside his mask where the animals had torn through. Bright crimson blood now poured from the deep fang marks the corgi made, and more blood oozed from Harry's bullet, which had hit a lung. The dog continued biting as Mrs. Murphy nipped and nipped, her sharp claws lethal on small prey and painful on large.\n\nFair caught up with them. Hauling the man to his feet as he started to come to, Fair hit him so hard Harry heard the man's jaw break.\n\nHaving followed the bike's high revs, Cooper and Dabny now arrived, driving across the hayfield, dirt churning behind the truck.\n\nCooper pulled out her service revolver as Dabny took the snubnose .38 from Harry.\n\n\"Tucker, Mrs. Murphy, enough!\" Harry commanded.\n\nThe cat sank her claws into the mask and pulled at it before it snapped back.\n\nCooper leaned down and yanked it off.\n\nHarry couldn't believe it. \"Neil Jordan!\"\n\nHis jaw hung, the break obvious, teeth missing.\n\n\"You could have been killed!\" Fair exclaimed to his wife. \"Why would you do something like that?\"\n\n\"He was going to kill Taz,\" she said to her husband, Cooper, and Dabny. \"And I had Dad's .38. You told me to use it if necessary. I always do what you tell me.\"\n\n#\n\n\"Four people taken away to the hospital,\" said Harry. \"What a Halloween.\" She, Fair, and Cooper were sitting at the kitchen table.\n\n_\"Buddy, Taz, Barry, and Neil\u2014and Neil under guard,\"_ growled Tucker, sitting on the floor nearby. _\"If I could have had just a little more time, I could have killed him,\"_ bragged the corgi. Perhaps it was true.\n\nMrs. Murphy sat on Harry's lap. _\"He's blind in one eye.\"_\n\n_\"If I'd been with you, I'd have gotten the other one,\"_ said Pewter, in Fair's lap.\n\nTucker laughed at her. _\"Chicken, you stayed in the truck.\"_\n\n_\"I jumped in the bed because Miss Mona had a spell while tending to Barry,\"_ Pewter explained, or tried to. _\"She used to be a nurse, you know, back in the 1950s, but it was too much for her.\"_ The gray paused. _\"I had to help.\"_\n\nWhile this was wishful thinking, neither Mrs. Murphy nor Tucker teased her, because Cooper was now telling the assembled humans just what had happened after the ambulances left.\n\n\"We walked into Mount Carmel, told everyone gathered there in the church to stay still, and we counted heads. Wesley Speer was missing. So we drove to the schoolhouse. No Wesley. Put out an alert and picked him up the next morning, boarding a 6:10 A.M. flight to Phoenix out of Dulles. Wesley admits to being an accessory for the first two killings. Said he opposed killing Tazio and Harry. When he heard the shots, he knew Neil was out there. He got scared and ran. He swears he tried to talk Neil out of it on their cellphones. Swears Neil threatened him. Said he turned into a maniac after killing Josh and Hester. Mind you, I take this with a grain of salt. He wants to save his own skin.\" Cooper paused. \"I told Rick we should give Dinny, Mrs. Murphy, and Tucker an award for service to the public.\"\n\n_\"Hey, hey, I helped Miss Mona.\"_ Pewter put her paws on the table, which Fair removed, settling her back in his lap. _\"I did my part,\"_ she insisted, vainly and in vain.\n\nIt was Monday morning, and Cooper had stopped by the farm before going to work.\n\n\"How's Buddy?\" asked Harry. \"I don't want to call Georgia. She's got to be on overload.\" Georgia was Buddy's wife.\n\n\"He'll be okay. Neil stabbed him in the back and must've thought he'd killed him, but Buddy is big, has a lot of muscle as well as fat, and the knife didn't puncture anything vital. That deep wound will take time to heal, but he'll be fine. He goes home today. He had no idea what any of this was about.\"\n\n\"Did Neil confess?\" Fair asked.\n\n\"Not so far, but his jaw is wired shut. He's blind in one eye. One lung has collapsed. He'll live. Can't talk. We'll get him to write answers to our questions once he's not so drugged up. If he cooperates, that is. I expect he'll lie like a rug.\" Cooper smiled. \"Mrs. Murphy and Tucker did as much damage as you did, Harry. I have never seen anyone run as fast as you once I caught sight of you in the hayfield. Go, girl!\"\n\n\"Luckily I had my .38. It's amazing what you can do when you have to.\"\n\n\"Brave. And foolish. He had a gun, too.\" Cooper admired Harry, even though her neighbor had once again taken a wild risk.\n\nHarry shrugged. \"So did Wesley say anything else?\"\n\n\"He did,\" said Cooper. \"Wesley said they stood to realize between twenty to twenty-four million dollars if they could have developed that property behind Random Row. They thought they could get the schoolhouses and develop them, too.\"\n\n\"But Buddy hadn't agreed to sell,\" Fair said. \"Or had he?\"\n\n\"He was weighing the options,\" Cooper said. \"They kept throwing money at Buddy and figured he'd cave at two and a half million. They'd pay the taxes. That's a big chunk of change.\"\n\n\"Sure is.\" Harry's eyes widened. \"But why kill Hester and Josh? They hadn't yet raised money or gathered people who might raise opposition.\" Harry knew she would always miss Hester.\n\n\"One, they certainly would have done so. With Tazio on board, they would have been a formidable team. Hard to deny the worth of their cause. Each could make a strong argument for return of the schoolhouses and a portion of the lands. There goes the profit from a potential development. That didn't sit well with Wesley and Neil, who were figuring they could snap those schoolhouses up, especially as the county tax base continues to shrink. Wesley said when we've reached the point where some factions start talking about selling off Yellowstone Park, anything is up for grabs. Neil and Wesley thought they could get the whole package by June of next year. They already had the money, and they removed their two greatest obstacles.\"\n\n_\"What matters to humans? Is it always money?\"_ Mrs. Murphy wondered.\n\n_\"Money certainly drove Wesley and Neil,\"_ Tucker answered.\n\nCooper continued, \"Wesley is already turning against Neil, obviously. He says Buddy was out there in the field because he was going to walk to Mount Carmel in costume to scare more people after the last wagon took off. I don't believe it for a minute. Buddy says Wesley offered him another big sum for his land, Buddy refused, and Wesley threatened him. Wesley pulled a gun, Buddy deflected it, then ran out of the schoolhouse. Wesley, shrewdly, called Neil to intercept Buddy. At least that's what I believe. If they killed him, the men figured they could break down Buddy's wife by throwing money at her. After all, being a widow would probably have reduced her income. Wesley swears that when he heard the shots, he fled. He knew Neil had lost it. Once Neil can talk, we'll have his side of the story.\"\n\n\"Idolatrous capital,\" Harry said, then noticed their blank stares. \"Mother used to say that. People worship capital, money. Things are more important than people.\"\n\n\"That's nothing new,\" Fair quietly said.\n\n\"Tazio and Harry really were the last impediments. Tazio might not have been, except they killed Hester. Tazio picked up the torch,\" Cooper said. \"As for Harry, Wesley knew she was on the trail and getting way too close.\"\n\nHarry said, \"Taz's okay, by the way. A knot on the head and the doctors think she might have had a slight concussion, so she has to be a little careful.\"\n\n\"Barry will be fine, too,\" Coop reported. \"He said he heard the dirt bike, heard it stop somewhere behind him, but not close to him. He didn't hear the footsteps, no surprise given all the screams. You know what I think about? They might have gotten away with it. They killed and dressed both Josh and Hester. Wesley says they did it to create confusion, make us think the killer was mad, nuts. But you know, I think they both got caught up in it, the theater of it. It became a high for them. Neil, getting arrogant, figured he could pull this off without too much trouble. Wesley says he tried to talk him out of it, but I doubt he tried too hard.\"\n\nCooper exhaled. \"Anyway, I expect they've brought about what they most feared. Once all this is out in the open, the public will clamor for Random Row to become a museum. The lynchpin will be Buddy. Will he give up the forty acres that used to belong to the Monacans?\"\n\n\"Buddy usually does the right thing.\" Harry stroked Mrs. Murphy's soft fur. \"I do think the animals should get something.\"\n\n\"I'll work on it.\" Cooper smiled.\n\n\"You know what surprised me the most?\" Harry suddenly said. \"Neil and Wesley are Lutherans. Really.\"\n\nFair burst out laughing. \"Honey, I'm certain Lutherans have committed heinous crimes in the past.\"\n\nThe humans laughed, then Pewter piped up, _\"Murphy, see if you can get them to understand you don't want a medal. Tuna! We want tuna and catnip.\"_\n\n_\"Or bones,\"_ Tucker remarked.\n\n_\"Tuna is better. You can eat tuna. Bones you just chew.\"_\n\n_\"Pewter, who says I'm going to share?\"_ Mrs. Murphy replied.\n\n_\"Of course you will, because I am your very best friend.\"_ Pewter purred this with uncommon sweetness.\n\nThe tiger cat and corgi just looked at each other.\n\nFinally, Mrs. Murphy said, _\"If you promise to help Mom and Tazio fulfill Hester's dream, save the schoolhouses and the land, I will share lots.\"_\n\nWithout hesitation, Pewter passionately agreed. _\"Of course I will. You know very well Mom can't do anything without me.\"_\n\n#\n\nDear Reader,\n\nThe Monacan Indian Nation celebrates an annual powwow usually during high spring. Kathleen King, a friend made way-back-when through basset hunting, often attends. The dancing, food, storytelling, paintings, carvings, baskets, and more underscore this old culture that has survived despite all.\n\nThanks to Kathleen and her research, I became interested. The federal government's refusal to acknowledge the Virginia tribes took me by surprise. Then I got mad. Perhaps you will, too.\n\nMany nations on earth have subjugated others at one time in their history and often with astonishing brutality. Each government, each nation, has to study its errors and learn from it all, and redress the sorrows where possible.\n\nAs Americans we are in a better position than most to do this. We live and work in the light of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.\n\nLet's live up to them.\n\nAlways and Ever,\n\n#\n\nDear Reader,\n\nWhile it is true that Kathleen King provided much information, I really did all the work.\n\nYours,\n\n#\n\nDear Reader,\n\nLiar!\n\nThe true artist,\n\n#\n\nTo Whom It May Concern,\n\nCats are crazy.\n\nYours,\n\nFor  \nKathleen King  \nWho knows the past is always with us.\n_Books by Rita Mae Brown & Sneaky Pie Brown_\n\nWISH YOU WERE HERE \u2022 REST IN PIECES \u2022 MURDER AT MONTICELLO  \nPAY DIRT \u2022 MURDER, SHE MEOWED \u2022 MURDER ON THE PROWL  \nCAT ON THE SCENT  \nSNEAKY PIE'S COOKBOOK FOR MYSTERY LOVERS  \nPAWING THROUGH THE PAST \u2022 CLAWS AND EFFECT  \nCATCH AS CAT CAN \u2022 THE TAIL OF THE TIP-OFF  \nWHISKER OF EVIL \u2022 CAT'S EYEWITNESS \u2022 SOUR PUSS  \nPUSS 'N CAHOOTS \u2022 THE PURRFECT MURDER \u2022 SANTA CLAWED  \nCAT OF THE CENTURY \u2022 HISS OF DEATH \u2022 THE BIG CAT NAP  \nSNEAKY PIE FOR PRESIDENT \u2022 THE LITTER OF THE LAW\n\n_Books by Rita Mae Brown featuring \"Sister\" Jane Arnold_\n\nOUTFOXED \u2022 HOTSPUR \u2022 FULL CRY \u2022 THE HUNT BALL  \nTHE HOUNDS AND THE FURY \u2022 THE TELL-TALE HORSE  \nHOUNDED TO DEATH \u2022 FOX TRACKS\n\n_The Mags Rogers Books_\n\nMURDER UNLEASHED \u2022 A NOSE FOR JUSTICE\n\n_Books by Rita Mae Brown_\n\nANIMAL MAGNETISM: MY LIFE WITH CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL  \nTHE HAND THAT CRADLES THE ROCK  \nSONGS TO A HANDSOME WOMAN \u2022 THE PLAIN BROWN RAPPER  \nRUBYFRUIT JUNGLE \u2022 IN HER DAY \u2022 SIX OF ONE  \nSOUTHERN DISCOMFORT \u2022 SUDDEN DEATH \u2022 HIGH HEARTS  \nSTARTED FROM SCRATCH: A DIFFERENT KIND OF WRITER'S MANUAL  \nBINGO \u2022 VENUS ENVY  \nDOLLEY: A NOVEL OF DOLLEY MADISON IN LOVE AND WAR  \nRIDING SHOTGUN \u2022 RITA WILL: MEMOIR OF A LITERARY RABBLE-ROUSER  \nLOOSE LIPS \u2022 ALMA MATER \u2022 SAND CASTLE\n\n# About the Authors\n\nRITA MAE BROWN has written many bestsellers and received two Emmy nominations. In addition to the Mrs. Murphy series, she has authored _A Nose for Justice_ and _Murder Unleashed_ , the first two mysteries in a new dog series, and the Sister Jane foxhunting series, as well as many other acclaimed books. She and Sneaky Pie live with several other rescued animals.\n\nSNEAKY PIE BROWN, a tiger cat rescue, has written many mysteries\u2014witness the list at the front of this novel. Having to share credit with the above-named human is a small irritant, but she manages it. Anything is better than typing, which is what \"Big Brown\" does for the series. Sneaky calls her human that name behind her back, after the wonderful Thoroughbred racehorse. As her human is rather small, it brings giggles among the other animals. Sneaky's main character\u2014Mrs. Murphy, a tiger cat\u2014is a bit sweeter than Miss Pie, who can be caustic.\n\nwww.ritamaebrown.com\n\n#\n\nTurn the page for an exclusive sneak peek at Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown's next Mrs. Murphy Mystery\n\n_**Nine Lives to Die**_\n\nAvailable in hardcover and eBook from Bantam\n\n#\n\n_\"G_ in!\"\n\n\"I don't believe it.\" Susan Tucker stared at the cards that her childhood friend, Harriett Haristeen, \"Harry,\" had smacked down.\n\nThe six other women in the room, all slack-jawed, came over to view the winning card.\n\n\"Well, Susan, she did,\" BoomBoom Craycroft, another childhood friend, said and smiled.\n\n\"Harry can't play cards worth squat,\" Susan complained.\n\n\"Well, I did tonight.\" Harry beamed. \"Susan, mark your calendar, Tuesday, December third, my best friend Harry knocked the stuffing out of me at gin.\"\n\nJessica Hexham was petite and middle-aged, well dressed even though the evening was relaxed. She murmured, \"Maybe something less exuberant for the calendar\u2014just a red-letter day?\"\n\n\"Do you remember when Miss Donleavey lectured us about red-letter days on the ancient Roman calendar?\" Susan rolled her eyes.\n\nBoomBoom, Susan, and Harry had been in the same class at old Crozet High School. While the buildings still stood, students now attended Western Albemarle High School, a large school consolidating former small community schools. Jessica Hexham, Alicia Palmer, Charlene Vavilov, Arden Higham had not. Jessica had attended Miss Porter's; Alicia, Orange High School; Arden, Buckingham High; and Charlene, older than the others, attended St. Catherine's in Richmond.\n\nWith the exception of Jessica, all were central Virginia natives. Jessica, born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, often found them amusing while contradictory at times, and they were reliably solid friends.\n\n_\"Alea jacta est,\"_ Susan pronounced with emphasis.\n\nHarry translated. \"The die is cast. Said when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. at the head of the Thirteenth Legion. He knew civil war would follow.\"\n\n\"Talk about a red-letter day,\" said Boom Boom.\n\n\"Isn't it something, though, how a device thousands of years old still works, I mean, a red-letter day? God bless Miss Donleavey. She taught us well.\"\n\nJessica also recalled her Latin teacher at the expensive private school, perhaps less fondly. \"I would never bless Miss Greely.\"\n\nThe others laughed.\n\n\"Charlene, bet you took Latin at St. Catherine's,\" Alicia wondered.\n\n\"You couldn't go to college without two years of it,\" said Charlene. \"I took four. It's helped me more than I could know when I hated memorizing those conjugations.\" She laughed.\n\n\"Funny, isn't it?\" the uncommonly beautiful Alicia said. \"What we use? What we remember?\"\n\n\"What I remember, apart from _amo, amas, amat_ , was Miss Donleavey's mysterious disappearance. Never found her.\" Harry picked up the cards to shuffle.\n\nSusan reached across the card table, placing her hand on Harry's forearm. \"Don't you dare.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" Harry blinked.\n\n\"I'll shuffle.\"\n\n\"Are you calling me a cheat?\" Harry's voice rose.\n\n\"No, but you won the last hand, so it's my turn to shuffle. Plus, what if you have a hot hand?\" Susan used the gambling term.\n\n\"I'd better tell that to my husband.\"\n\nThis evoked more laughter.\n\nThe lights flickered, once, twice, then no light.\n\n\"Dammit,\" Susan cursed the dark. \"Stay put, ladies. I'll get the candles.\"\n\n\"You need my little flashlight.\" Harry reached into her pocket, pulling out a two-and-a-half-inch LED flashlight made in China.\n\nSusan pressed the button. \"Wow.\"\n\n\"What else do you have in your pocket?\" Jessica asked.\n\n\"One pocketknife,\" BoomBoom answered for Harry. \"She always has a pocketknife and a little money.\"\n\n\"The emphasis is on _little_ ,\" said Harry, emptying her pockets onto the card table as Susan returned with candles.\n\n\"Let me help you.\" Thanks to the tiny LED flashlight, Alicia could see. She reached for some candles.\n\n\"There's a hurricane glass lamp. Well, here, let's do it together. Girls, we'll be right back.\"\n\nTrue to her word, Susan and Alicia returned to the living room with small brass candleholders, which they placed about and lit. The large hurricane candleholder glowed on the card table. All held six- to eight-inch candles.\n\nSusan noticed the small pile of debris.\n\n\"Harry, what's your stuff doing on the card table?\"\n\n\"Jessica wanted to know what was in my pocket.\"\n\n\"In the dark?\" Susan questioned.\n\n\"We knew there'd be light,\" Harry shot back.\n\nJessica dutifully investigated the contents: one Case pocketknife, a folded cotton handkerchief, twenty-two dollars in small bills, one dog cookie.\n\nHarry pointed out the cookie. \"Never know when I might get hungry.\"\n\nThe ladies laughed again as Alicia walked to the large triple-sash windows. \"Girls, we're in for it.\"\n\n\"No kidding?\" Harry hurried over, as did the others.\n\n\"The storm's early.\" BoomBoom, like all country people, paid intense attention to the weather.\n\n\"We have a little time before we need to worry about the roads,\" Harry confidently predicted. \"Everyone has four-wheel drive, right?\"\n\n\"If not, I'm happy to sell you one.\" Charlene smiled. She and her husband, Pete, owned the Ford dealership.\n\n\"We're good,\" the others replied.\n\n\"Well, let's not play cards by candlelight. Ladies, I whipped up vegetable hors d'oeuvres, and they're really tasty, if I do say so myself. I can't eat them all. You have to help me. Harry, use your flashlight again and let's bring the food out from the kitchen. BoomBoom, you know where the bar is. Give the girls what they want.\"\n\nBoomBoom picked up a candle as she glided to the well-stocked bar. Susan's husband, Ned, was a delegate to the state legislature in Richmond, and the couple entertained frequently. In this part of the world, good liquor was considered an essential by any host and hostess. Southerners did drink wine, but many still preferred a high-octane bourbon or scotch, and then there were the legions of vodka drinkers who believed it didn't linger on their breath.\n\nOnce settled in the living room, comfortable in decidedly not-modern d\u00e9cor, Jessica, curious, asked, \"So what did happen to your Latin teacher?\"\n\n\"Nobody knows.\" BoomBoom shrugged. \"She disappeared after a Friday-night football game. Her car was in the parking lot. Monday, she didn't come to school.\"\n\n\"We played the Louisa Dragons that night,\" Harry recalled. \"Good game. Miss Donleavey never missed a football game.\"\n\n\"She dated the coach, Mr. Toth,\" Susan filled in. \"Handsome, handsome, handsome.\"\n\n\"Coach Toth? That Toth?\" Jessica asked. \"Silver Linings?\" She mentioned a youth organization the coach supported, as did all the husbands of the women in the room. Apart from helping young men, business leaders and former athletes ran Silver Linings. To belong was beneficial to one's career.\n\n\"Jessica, this must be irritating, being in the middle of a bunch of old friends.\" Harry handed her a napkin.\n\n\"No, it's fascinating. A vanished Latin teacher.\"\n\n\"You know the stereotype of the old-maid Latin teacher? Well, not Miss Donleavey. She was voluptuous, raven-haired, so pretty,\" BoomBoom noted, herself voluptuous.\n\n\"Suspects?\" Jessica's eyebrows raised.\n\nMiranda answered. \"At first, people thought it might have been a rival of the coach's. Men were crazy for her.\"\n\nSusan added, \"Lots of men were questioned. Everyone had an alibi.\"\n\n\"Anyone else?\" Jessica persisted.\n\n\"Esther Mercier. Hated Miss Donleavey, just hated her.\" Harry bit into a carrot incised with a tiny trench filled with rich cream cheese.\n\n\"In love with Coach Toth.\" BoomBoom filled in facts. \"An attractive enough woman, but not in Miss Donleavey's league.\"\n\n\"What was her first name?\" Jessica asked. \"Miss Donleavey?\"\n\n\"Uh, Margaret. It's funny, but I still have a hard time calling my teachers by their first names. I mean, Coach Toth is always Coach Toth.\" Susan smiled. \"And eventually he did marry Miss Mercier, one of the math teachers.\"\n\n\"You'd think someone would have known something. Crozet is still a small place,\" Charlene wondered.\n\n\"If they did, no one noticed. Crozet, like any place anywhere in the world, is full of secrets which people take to their graves,\" Harry remarked. \"Miss Donleavey's kin, all older, are gone. It's one of those persistent small-town mysteries.\"\n\n\"Well, people don't just disappear off the face of the earth.\" Alicia twirled a fresh bit of broccoli.\n\n\"The Black Dahlia,\" BoomBoom countered.\n\n\"You're right, to a degree,\" said Alicia. \"'Course, I wasn't in Hollywood then. And she didn't disappear, Sweetie. They never found the killer.\"\n\n\"You're right.\" BoomBoom got up and walked over to the window, nose almost on the windowpane. \"It's really coming down now. We'd all better head home.\"\n\n\"Let me help you clean up,\" Harry offered.\n\n\"A tray of vegetables and a couple of glasses? Anyway, no power, no water. Go on. If your cellphones don't work you can still text if you have a Droid.\"\n\nArden said, \"I hope the Silver Linings fund-raiser isn't canceled.\"\n\n\"We'll cross our fingers.\" Charlene crossed hers.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nAfter a long, careful drive, Harry slowly finally drove down her long farm driveway, windshield wipers flipping as fast as they could. She pulled in front of the old white frame farmhouse, cut the motor, the lights with it.\n\nGolden candlelight cascaded over the snow. The frosted windows glowed pale gold, the wavy imperfections of the hand-blown glass all the more obvious with the candles behind her.\n\n_\"Mom's home.\"_ Inside the house, Tucker the corgi barked joyfully.\n\nPewter flopped on the kitchen table, lifted her head. _\"About time.\"_\n\nMrs. Murphy, the tiger cat, walked alongside Fair, Harry's husband, as he opened the kitchen door to the porch. He carried a huge flashlight, which he focused on the path to the back porch, screened-in in summer, glassed-in in winter.\n\n\"Honey, I'm glad you're home.\" He stepped into the snow.\n\n\"Fair, get back inside. I can see.\"\n\nHe didn't, of course, kissing her as she hurried onto the porch, Tucker and Mrs. Murphy at her feet.\n\nPewter considered a welcoming meow when Harry walked into the kitchen, then thought better of it. It's never wise to indulge humans.\n\nHarry stamped her feet again. \"Boy, it's really snowing.\"\n\n\"I'll get the generator going. Just got home myself about ten minutes ago. Buried in paperwork today.\"\n\nHanging up her coat on one of the Shaker pegs inside by the kitchen door, she shook her head free of snow. \"Honey, do you have your Droid?\"\n\n\"Yeah, sure.\"\n\n\"May I borrow it?\"\n\nFair retrieved the device, which he'd placed on a kitchen counter when he walked into the kitchen, handing it to his wife.\n\nHarry texted Susan, \"I won.\"\n\nShe then recounted her small triumph with her husband, who celebrated with her.\n\nTucker also laughed, for she knew how frequently Harry lost at cards.\n\n_\"I shredded a pack of cards once,\"_ Pewter crowed. _\"Good cards, they had Susan's initials on them.\"_\n\n_\"We know,\"_ both Mrs. Murphy and Tucker replied. _\"Thanks to you, the girls won't play cards here,\"_ Tucker added.\n\n_\"Who cares?\"_ Pewter saucily called down from the table.\n\n_\"I do,\"_ the intelligent corgi said. _\"The girls always drop food.\"_\n\n_\"Well\u2014\"_ Pewter had no comeback for that.\n\nFire blazing, Harry and Fair cuddled on the sofa.\n\n\"First big snow of the season. Even though it creates all manner of problems, I do love it.\" Fair smiled.\n\n\"Any horses at the clinic?\" Harry asked. Fair was an equine vet.\n\n\"No, which is why I can enjoy the snow. I don't have to drive back there until the roads are plowed.\" He glanced out the window. \"They'll have their work cut out for them.\"\n\n\"At least the refrigerator is running with the generator, and the stove is on propane gas.\"\n\nFair pulled Harry closer. \"I like the candlelight.\"\n\n\"Me, too, and I like the silence, especially when the fridge cuts off. Say, we got to talking about Miss Donleavey.\"\n\n\"Haven't thought of her in years. That was a good game the night she disappeared. We creamed Louisa. And someone got away with murder.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Harry's voice, light, lifted a bit higher.\n\n\"Oh, honey, she's gone forever.\"\n\nBut she wasn't.\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9780345538574\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nGILLES DELEUZE\n\nSPINOZA\n\nET LE PROBL\u00c8ME\n\nDE L'EXPRESSION\n\n_ARGUMENTS_\n\nLES \u00c9DITIONS DE MINUIT\n\u00a9 1968 by LES \u00c9DITIONS DE MINUIT pour l'\u00e9dition papier\n\n\u00a9 2013 by LES \u00c9DITIONS DE MINUIT pour la pr\u00e9sente \u00e9dition \u00e9lectronique\n\nwww.leseditionsdeminuit.fr\n\nISBN 9782707330222\n\n# Sommaire\n\nAVANT-PROPOS\n\nINTRODUCTION - R\u00d4LE ET IMPORTANCE DE L'EXPRESSION\n\nPREMI\u00c8RE PARTIE - LES TRIADES DE LA SUBSTANCE\n\nCHAPITRE PREMIER - DISTINCTION NUM\u00c9RIQUE ET DISTINCTION R\u00c9ELLE\n\nCHAPITRE II - L'ATTRIBUT COMME EXPRESSION\n\nCHAPITRE III - ATTRIBUTS ET NOMS DIVINS\n\nCHAPITRE IV - L'ABSOLU\n\nCHAPITRE V - LA PUISSANCE\n\nDEUXI\u00c8ME PARTIE - LE PARALL\u00c9LISME ET L'IMMANENCE\n\nCHAPITRE VI - L'EXPRESSION DANS LE PARALL\u00c9LISME\n\nCHAPITRE VII - LES DEUX PUISSANCES ET L'ID\u00c9E DE DIEU\n\nCHAPITRE VIII - EXPRESSION ET ID\u00c9E\n\nCHAPITRE IX - L'INAD\u00c9QUAT\n\nCHAPITRE X - SPINOZA CONTRE DESCARTES\n\nCHAPITRE XI - L'IMMANENCE ET LES \u00c9L\u00c9MENTS HISTORIQUES DE L'EXPRESSION\n\nTROISI\u00c8ME PARTIE - TH\u00c9ORIE DU MODE FINI\n\nCHAPITRE XII - L'ESSENCE DE MODE : PASSAGE DE L'INFINI AU FINI\n\nCHAPITRE XIII - L'EXISTENCE DU MODE\n\nCHAPITRE XIV - QU'EST-CE QUE PEUT UN CORPS ?\n\nCHAPITRE XV - LES TROIS ORDRES ET LE PROBL\u00c8ME DU MAL\n\nCHAPITRE XVI - VISION \u00c9THIQUE DU MONDE\n\nCHAPITRE XVII - LES NOTIONS COMMUNES\n\nCHAPITRE XVIII - VERS LE TROISI\u00c8ME GENRE\n\nCHAPITRE XIX - B\u00c9ATITUDE\n\nCONCLUSION - TH\u00c9ORIE DE L'EXPRESSION CHEZ LEIBNIZ ET SPINOZA (L'expressionnisme en philosophie)\n\nAPPENDICE - \u00c9TUDE FORMELLE DU PLAN DE L'\u00c9THIQUE ET DU R\u00d4LE DES SCOLIES DANS LA R\u00c9ALISATION DE CE PLAN : LES DEUX \u00c9THIQUES\n\nINDEX DES NOMS PROPRES\n\nTABLE DES MATI\u00c8RES\n\n# _AVANT-PROPOS_\n\n _Nous d\u00e9signons les \u0153uvres de Spinoza par des abr\u00e9viations_ : CT ( _pour_ Court Trait\u00e9), TRE ( _pour le_ Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme), PPD ( _pour les_ Principes de la philosophie de Descartes), PM ( _pour les_ Pens\u00e9es m\u00e9taphysiques), TTP ( _pour le_ Trait\u00e9 th\u00e9ologico-politique), \u00c9 ( _pour_ \u00c9thique), TP ( _pour le_ Trait\u00e9 politique).\n\n _Quant aux textes que nous citons : chaque fois que les chiffres sont assez d\u00e9taill\u00e9s et permettent de retrouver facilement le passage dans les \u00e9ditions courantes, nous ne donnons pas d'autres indications. Mais pour les lettres et pour le_ Trait\u00e9 th\u00e9ologico-politique _, nous indiquons la r\u00e9f\u00e9rence \u00e0 l'\u00e9dition Van Vloten et Land, en quatre tomes r\u00e9unis en deux volumes. C'est nous qui soulignons certains passages ou certains mots dans les citations._\n\n _Sauf exceptions, les traductions sont emprunt\u00e9es \u00e0 A. Gu\u00e9rinot pour l'_ \u00c9thique _(\u00e9d. Pelletan), \u00e0 A. Koyr\u00e9 pour le_ Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme _(\u00e9d. Vrin), \u00e0 C. Appuhn (\u00e9d. Garnier) pour les autres \u0153uvres._\n\n _Ce livre a \u00e9t\u00e9 pr\u00e9sent\u00e9 comme th\u00e8se compl\u00e9mentaire sous le titre \u00ab L'id\u00e9e d'expression dans la philosophie de Spinoza_ \u00bb.\n\n# INTRODUCTION\n\n# R\u00d4LE ET IMPORTANCE DE L'EXPRESSION\n\nDans le premier livre de l' _\u00c9thique_ , l'id\u00e9e d'expression appara\u00eet d\u00e8s la d\u00e9finition 6 : \u00ab Par Dieu j'entends un \u00eatre absolument infini, c'est-\u00e0-dire une substance consistant en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs, dont chacun _exprime_ une essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie. \u00bb Cette id\u00e9e prend par la suite une importance de plus en plus grande. Elle est reprise dans des contextes vari\u00e9s. Tant\u00f4t Spinoza dit : chaque attribut exprime _une certaine essence_ \u00e9ternelle et infinie, une essence correspondant au genre de l'attribut. Tant\u00f4t : chaque attribut exprime _l'essence_ de la substance, son \u00eatre ou sa r\u00e9alit\u00e9. Tant\u00f4t enfin : chaque attribut exprime l'infinit\u00e9 et la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de _l'existence_ substantielle, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'\u00e9ternit\u00e91. Et, sans doute, Spinoza montre bien comment l'on passe d'une formule \u00e0 l'autre. Chaque attribut exprime une essence, mais en tant qu'il exprime en son genre l'essence de la substance ; et l'essence de la substance enveloppant n\u00e9cessairement l'existence, il appartient \u00e0 chaque attribut d'exprimer, avec l'essence de Dieu, son existence \u00e9ternelle2. Il n'en reste pas moins que l'id\u00e9e d'expression r\u00e9sume toutes les difficult\u00e9s concernant l'unit\u00e9 de la substance et la diversit\u00e9 des attributs. La nature expressive des attributs appara\u00eet alors comme un th\u00e8me fondamental dans le premier livre de l' _\u00c9thique_.\n\nLe mode, \u00e0 son tour, est expressif : \u00ab Tout ce qui existe exprime la nature de Dieu, autrement dit son essence, d'une fa\u00e7on certaine et d\u00e9termin\u00e9e \u00bb (c'est-\u00e0-dire sous un mode d\u00e9fini)3. Nous devons donc distinguer un second niveau de l'expression, une sorte d'expression de l'expression. En premier lieu, la substance s'exprime dans ses attributs, et chaque attribut exprime une essence. Mais, en second lieu, les attributs s'expriment \u00e0 leur tour : ils s'expriment dans les modes qui en d\u00e9pendent, et chaque mode exprime une modification. Nous verrons que le premier niveau doit \u00eatre compris comme une v\u00e9ritable constitution, presque une g\u00e9n\u00e9alogie de l'essence de la substance. Le second doit \u00eatre compris comme une v\u00e9ritable production des choses. En effet, Dieu produit une infinit\u00e9 de choses parce que son essence est infinie ; mais parce qu'il a une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs, il produit n\u00e9cessairement ces choses en une infinit\u00e9 de modes dont chacun renvoie \u00e0 l'attribut dans lequel il est contenu4. L'expression n'est pas en elle-m\u00eame une production, mais le devient \u00e0 son second niveau, quand c'est l'attribut qui s'exprime \u00e0 son tour. Inversement, l'expression-production trouve son fondement dans une expression premi\u00e8re. Dieu s'exprime par soi-m\u00eame \u00ab avant \u00bb de s'exprimer dans ses effets ; Dieu s'exprime en constituant par soi la nature naturante, avant de s'exprimer en produisant en soi la nature natur\u00e9e.\n\nLa notion d'expression n'a pas seulement une port\u00e9e ontologique, mais aussi gnos\u00e9ologique. On ne s'en \u00e9tonnera pas, puisque l'id\u00e9e est un mode de la pens\u00e9e : \u00ab Les pens\u00e9es singuli\u00e8res, autrement dit cette pens\u00e9e-ci, ou celle-l\u00e0, sont des modes qui expriment la nature de Dieu d'une fa\u00e7on certaine et d\u00e9termin\u00e9e5. \u00bb Mais ainsi la connaissance devient une esp\u00e8ce de l'expression. La connaissance des choses a le m\u00eame rapport avec la connaissance de Dieu que les choses en elles-m\u00eames, avec Dieu : \u00ab Puisque rien ne peut \u00eatre ni \u00eatre con\u00e7u sans Dieu, il est certain que tous les \u00eatres de la nature _enveloppent et expriment_ le concept de Dieu, en proportion de leur essence et de leur perfection ; il est donc certain que, plus nous connaissons de choses dans la nature, plus grande et plus parfaite est la connaissance de Dieu que nous acqu\u00e9rons6. \u00bb L'id\u00e9e de Dieu s'exprime dans toutes nos id\u00e9es, comme leur source et leur cause, si bien que l'ensemble des id\u00e9es reproduit exactement l'ordre de la nature enti\u00e8re. Et l'id\u00e9e, \u00e0 son tour, exprime l'essence, la nature ou perfection de son objet : la d\u00e9finition ou l'id\u00e9e sont dites exprimer la nature de la chose telle qu'elle est en elle-m\u00eame. Les id\u00e9es sont d'autant plus parfaites qu'elles expriment d'un objet plus de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection ; les id\u00e9es que l'esprit forme \u00ab absolument \u00bb expriment donc l'infinit\u00e97. L'esprit con\u00e7oit les choses sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9, mais parce qu'il poss\u00e8de une id\u00e9e qui, sous cette esp\u00e8ce, exprime l'essence du corps8. Il semble que la conception de l'ad\u00e9quat chez Spinoza ne se s\u00e9pare pas d'une telle nature expressive de l'id\u00e9e. D\u00e9j\u00e0 le _Court Trait\u00e9_ \u00e9tait \u00e0 la recherche d'un concept capable de rendre compte de la connaissance, non pas comme d'une op\u00e9ration qui resterait ext\u00e9rieure \u00e0 la chose, mais comme d'une r\u00e9flexion, d'une expression de la chose dans l'esprit. L' _\u00c9thique_ t\u00e9moigne toujours de cette exigence, bien qu'elle l'interpr\u00e8te d'une nouvelle mani\u00e8re. De toutes fa\u00e7ons, il ne suffit pas de dire que le vrai est pr\u00e9sent dans l'id\u00e9e. Nous devons demander encore : qu'est-ce qui est pr\u00e9sent dans l'id\u00e9e vraie ? Qu'est-ce qui s'exprime dans une id\u00e9e vraie, qu'est-ce qu'elle exprime ? Si Spinoza d\u00e9passe la conception cart\u00e9sienne du clair et du distinct, s'il forme sa th\u00e9orie de l'ad\u00e9quat, c'est toujours en fonction de ce probl\u00e8me de l'expression.\n\nLe mot \u00ab exprimer \u00bb a des synonymes. Les textes hollandais du _Court Trait\u00e9_ emploient _uytdrukken-uytbeelden_ (exprimer), mais pr\u00e9f\u00e8rent _vertoonen_ (\u00e0 la fois manifester et d\u00e9montrer) : la chose pensante _s'exprime_ en une infinit\u00e9 d'id\u00e9es correspondant \u00e0 une infinit\u00e9 d'objets ; mais aussi bien l'id\u00e9e d'un corps _manifeste_ Dieu imm\u00e9diatement ; et les attributs _se manifestent_ eux-m\u00eames par eux-m\u00eames9. Dans le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ , les attributs manifestent l'essence de Dieu : _ostendere_10. Mais les synonymes ne sont pas le plus important. Plus importants sont les corr\u00e9latifs, qui pr\u00e9cisent, accompagnent l'id\u00e9e d'expression. Ces corr\u00e9latifs sont _explicare_ et _involvere._ Ainsi, la d\u00e9finition n'est pas seulement dite exprimer la nature de la chose d\u00e9finie, mais _l'envelopper_ et _l'expliquer_11. Les attributs n'expriment pas seulement l'essence de la substance, tant\u00f4t ils l'expliquent, tant\u00f4t ils l'enveloppent12. Les modes enveloppent le concept de Dieu en m\u00eame temps qu'ils l'expriment, si bien que les id\u00e9es correspondantes enveloppent elles-m\u00eames l'essence \u00e9ternelle de Dieu13.\n\nExpliquer, c'est d\u00e9velopper. Envelopper, c'est impliquer. Les deux termes pourtant ne sont pas contraires : ils indiquent seulement deux aspects de l'expression. D'une part, l'expression est une explication : d\u00e9veloppement de ce qui s'exprime, manifestation de l'Un dans le multiple (manifestation de la substance dans ses attributs, puis, des attributs dans leurs modes). Mais d'autre part, l'expression multiple enveloppe l'Un. L'Un reste envelopp\u00e9 dans ce qui l'exprime, imprim\u00e9 dans ce qui le d\u00e9veloppe, immanent \u00e0 tout ce qui le manifeste : en ce sens, l'expression est un enveloppement. Entre les deux termes il n'y a pas d'opposition, sauf dans un cas pr\u00e9cis que nous analyserons plus tard, au niveau du mode fini et de ses passions14. Mais, en r\u00e8gle g\u00e9n\u00e9rale, l'expression enveloppe, implique ce qu'elle exprime, en m\u00eame temps qu'elle l'explique et le d\u00e9veloppe.\n\nImplication et explication, enveloppement et d\u00e9veloppement, sont des termes h\u00e9rit\u00e9s d'une longue tradition philosophique, toujours accus\u00e9e de panth\u00e9isme. Pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce que ces concepts ne s'opposent pas, ils renvoient eux-m\u00eames \u00e0 un principe synth\u00e9tique : la _complicatio._ Dans le n\u00e9o-platonisme, il arrive souvent que la _complication_ d\u00e9signe \u00e0 la fois la pr\u00e9sence du multiple dans l'Un et de l'Un dans le multiple. Dieu, c'est la Nature \u00ab complicative \u00bb ; et cette nature explique et implique Dieu, enveloppe et d\u00e9veloppe Dieu. Dieu \u00ab complique \u00bb toute chose, mais toute chose l'explique et l'enveloppe. Cet embo\u00eetement de notions constitue l'expression ; en ce sens il caract\u00e9rise une des formes essentielles du n\u00e9o-platonisme chr\u00e9tien et juif, tel qu'il \u00e9volue durant le Moyen Age et la Renaissance. On a pu dire, de ce point de vue, que l'expression \u00e9tait une cat\u00e9gorie fondamentale de la pens\u00e9e de la Renaissance15. Or, chez Spinoza la Nature comprend tout, contient tout, en m\u00eame temps qu'elle est expliqu\u00e9e et impliqu\u00e9e par chaque chose. Les attributs enveloppent et expliquent la substance, mais celle-ci comprend tous les attributs. Les modes enveloppent et expliquent l'attribut dont ils d\u00e9pendent, mais l'attribut contient toutes les essences de modes correspondantes. Nous devons demander comment Spinoza s'ins\u00e8re dans la tradition expressionniste, dans quelle mesure il en est tributaire et comment il la renouvelle.\n\nCette question est d'autant plus importante que Leibniz lui-m\u00eame fait de l'expression un de ses concepts fondamentaux. Chez Leibniz comme chez Spinoza, l'expression a une port\u00e9e \u00e0 la fois th\u00e9ologique, ontologique et gnos\u00e9ologique. Elle anime la th\u00e9orie de Dieu, des cr\u00e9atures et de la connaissance. Ind\u00e9pendamment l'un de l'autre, les deux philosophes semblent compter sur l'id\u00e9e d'expression pour d\u00e9passer les difficult\u00e9s du cart\u00e9sianisme, pour restaurer une philosophie de la Nature, et m\u00eame pour int\u00e9grer les acquis de Descartes dans des syst\u00e8mes profond\u00e9ment hostiles \u00e0 la vision cart\u00e9sienne du monde. Dans la mesure o\u00f9 l'on peut parler d'un anticart\u00e9sianisme de Leibniz et de Spinoza, cet anticart\u00e9sianisme se fonde sur l'id\u00e9e d'expression.\n\nNous supposons que l'id\u00e9e d'expression est importante, \u00e0 la fois pour la compr\u00e9hension du syst\u00e8me de Spinoza, pour la d\u00e9termination de son rapport avec le syst\u00e8me de Leibniz, pour les origines et la formation des deux syst\u00e8mes. D\u00e8s lors, pourquoi les meilleurs commentateurs n'ont-ils pas tenu compte (ou gu\u00e8re) d'une telle notion dans la philosophie de Spinoza ? Les uns n'en parlent pas du tout. D'autres y attachent une certaine importance, mais indirecte ; ils y voient le synonyme d'un terme plus profond. Expression ne serait qu'une fa\u00e7on de dire \u00ab \u00e9manation \u00bb. Leibniz le sugg\u00e9rait d\u00e9j\u00e0, reprochant \u00e0 Spinoza d'avoir interpr\u00e9t\u00e9 l'expression dans un sens conforme \u00e0 la Kabbale et de l'avoir r\u00e9duite \u00e0 une sorte d'\u00e9manation16. Ou bien exprimer serait un synonyme d' _expliquer._ Les postkantiens semblaient les mieux plac\u00e9s pour reconna\u00eetre dans le spinozisme la pr\u00e9sence d'un mouvement de gen\u00e8se et d'autod\u00e9veloppement dont ils cherchaient partout le signe pr\u00e9curseur. Mais le terme \u00ab expliquer \u00bb les confirme dans l'id\u00e9e que Spinoza n'a pas su concevoir un v\u00e9ritable d\u00e9veloppement de la substance, pas plus qu'il n'a su penser le passage de l'infini dans le fini. La substance spinoziste leur para\u00eet morte : l'expression spinoziste leur parait intellectuelle et abstraite ; les attributs leur paraissent \u00ab attribu\u00e9s \u00bb \u00e0 la substance par un entendement lui-m\u00eame explicatif17. M\u00eame Schelling, quand il \u00e9labore sa philosophie de la manifestation _(Offenbarung)_ , ne se r\u00e9clame pas de Spinoza, mais de Boehme : c'est de Boehme, et non de Spinoza ni m\u00eame de Leibniz, que lui vient l'id\u00e9e d'expression _(Ausdruck)._\n\nOn ne r\u00e9duit pas l'expression \u00e0 une simple explication de l'entendement sans tomber dans un contresens historique. Car expliquer, loin de d\u00e9signer l'op\u00e9ration d'un entendement qui reste ext\u00e9rieur \u00e0 la chose, d\u00e9signe d'abord le d\u00e9veloppement de la chose en elle-m\u00eame et dans la vie. Le couple traditionnel _explicatio-complicatio_ t\u00e9moigne historiquement d'un vitalisme toujours proche du panth\u00e9isme. Loin qu'on puisse comprendre l'expression \u00e0 partir de l'explication, il nous semble au contraire que l'explication, chez Spinoza comme chez ses devanciers, suppose une certaine id\u00e9e de l'expression. Si les attributs renvoient essentiellement \u00e0 un entendement qui les per\u00e7oit ou les comprend, c'est d'abord parce qu'ils expriment l'essence de la substance, et que l'essence infinie n'est pas exprim\u00e9e sans se manifester \u00ab objectivement \u00bb dans l'entendement divin. C'est l'expression qui fonde le rapport \u00e0 l'entendement, non pas l'inverse. Quant \u00e0 l'\u00e9manation, il est certain qu'on en trouvera des traces, non moins que de la participation, chez Spinoza. Pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment la th\u00e9orie de l'expression et de l'explication, \u00e0 la Renaissance comme au Moyen \u00c2ge, s'est form\u00e9e chez des auteurs fort inspir\u00e9s de n\u00e9o-platonisme. Reste qu'elle avait pour but et pour effet de transformer profond\u00e9ment ce n\u00e9o-platonisme, de lui ouvrir des voies toutes nouvelles, \u00e9loign\u00e9es de celles de l'\u00e9manation, m\u00eame quand les deux th\u00e8mes coexistaient. De l'\u00e9manation aussi, nous dirions donc qu'elle n'est pas apte \u00e0 nous faire comprendre l'id\u00e9e d'expression. Au contraire, c'est l'id\u00e9e d'expression qui peut montrer comment le n\u00e9o-platonisme \u00e9volua jusqu'\u00e0 changer de nature, en particulier comment la cause \u00e9manative tendit de plus en plus \u00e0 devenir une cause immanente.\n\nCertains commentateurs modernes consid\u00e8rent directement l'id\u00e9e d'expression chez Spinoza. Kaufmann y voit un fil pour le \u00ab labyrinthe spinoziste \u00bb, mais insiste sur l'aspect mystique et esth\u00e9tique de la notion prise en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, ind\u00e9pendamment de l'usage qu'en fait Spinoza18. D'une autre mani\u00e8re, Darbon consacre \u00e0 l'expression une page tr\u00e8s belle, mais d\u00e9clare finalement qu'elle reste inintelligible. \u00ab Pour expliquer l'unit\u00e9 de la substance, Spinoza nous dit seulement que chacun des attributs exprime son essence. Loin de nous \u00e9clairer, l'explication soul\u00e8ve un monde de difficult\u00e9s. D'abord _ce qui est exprim\u00e9_ devrait \u00eatre distinct de _ce qui s'exprime... \u00bb_ , et Darbon conclut : \u00ab Les attributs expriment tous l'essence infinie et \u00e9ternelle de Dieu ; encore ne pouvons-nous distinguer entre _ce qui est exprim\u00e9_ et _ce qui l'exprime._ On comprend que la t\u00e2che du commentateur soit difficile, et que la question des rapports de la substance et des attributs dans le spinozisme ait donn\u00e9 lieu \u00e0 beaucoup d'interpr\u00e9tations diff\u00e9rentes19. \u00bb\n\nSans doute y a-t-il une raison \u00e0 cette situation du commentaire. C'est que l'id\u00e9e d'expression chez Spinoza n'est objet ni de d\u00e9finition ni de d\u00e9monstration, et ne peut pas l'\u00eatre. Elle appara\u00eet dans la d\u00e9finition 6 ; mais elle n'est pas plus d\u00e9finie qu'elle ne sert \u00e0 d\u00e9finir. Elle ne d\u00e9finit ni la substance ni l'attribut, puisque ceux-ci le sont d\u00e9j\u00e0 (3 et 4). Pas davantage Dieu, dont la d\u00e9finition peut se passer de toute r\u00e9f\u00e9rence \u00e0 l'expression. Dans le _Court Trait\u00e9_ comme dans les lettres, Spinoza dit souvent que Dieu est une substance consistant en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs dont chacun est infini20. Il semble donc que l'id\u00e9e d'expression surgisse seulement comme la d\u00e9termination du rapport dans lequel entrent l'attribut, la substance et l'essence, quand Dieu pour son compte est d\u00e9fini comme une substance consistant en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs eux-m\u00eames infinis. L'expression ne concerne pas la substance ou l'attribut en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, dans des conditions ind\u00e9termin\u00e9es. Quand la substance est absolument infinie, quand elle poss\u00e8de une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs, alors, et alors seulement, les attributs sont dits exprimer l'essence, parce que la substance aussi bien s'exprime dans les attributs. Il serait inexact d'invoquer les d\u00e9finitions 3 et 4 pour en d\u00e9duire aussit\u00f4t la nature du rapport entre la substance et l'attribut tel qu'il doit \u00eatre en Dieu, puisque Dieu suffit \u00e0 \u00ab transformer \u00bb ce rapport, l'\u00e9levant \u00e0 l'absolu. _Les d\u00e9finitions 3 et 4 sont seulement nominales ; seule la d\u00e9finition 6 est r\u00e9elle_ et nous dit ce qui s'ensuit pour la substance, l'attribut et l'essence. Mais que signifie \u00ab transformer le rapport \u00bb ? On le comprendra mieux si l'on demande pourquoi l'expression n'est pas davantage objet de d\u00e9monstration.\n\n\u00c0 Tschirnhaus qui s'inqui\u00e8te de la c\u00e9l\u00e8bre proposition 16 (livre I de l' _\u00c9thique_ ), Spinoza fait une importante concession : il y a une diff\u00e9rence certaine entre le d\u00e9veloppement philosophique et la d\u00e9monstration math\u00e9matique21. \u00c0 partir d'une d\u00e9finition, le math\u00e9maticien ne peut conclure ordinairement qu'une seule propri\u00e9t\u00e9 ; pour en conna\u00eetre plusieurs, il doit multiplier les points de vue et rapprocher \u00ab la chose d\u00e9finie d'autres objets \u00bb. La m\u00e9thode g\u00e9om\u00e9trique est donc soumise \u00e0 deux limitations : l'ext\u00e9riorit\u00e9 des points de vue, le caract\u00e8re distributif des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s. Hegel ne disait pas autre chose lorsqu'il soutenait, pensant \u00e0 Spinoza, que la m\u00e9thode g\u00e9om\u00e9trique \u00e9tait inapte \u00e0 comprendre le mouvement organique ou l'autod\u00e9veloppement qui convient seul avec l'absolu. Soit la d\u00e9monstration des trois angles = deux droits, o\u00f9 l'on commence par prolonger la base du triangle. Il est clair que cette base n'est pas comme une plante qui pousserait toute seule : il faut le g\u00e9om\u00e8tre pour la prolonger, le g\u00e9om\u00e8tre encore doit consid\u00e9rer d'un nouveau point de vue le c\u00f4t\u00e9 du triangle auquel il m\u00e8ne une parall\u00e8le, etc. On ne peut pas penser que Spinoza lui-m\u00eame ait ignor\u00e9 ces objections ; ce sont celles de Tschirnhaus.\n\nLa r\u00e9ponse de Spinoza risque de d\u00e9cevoir : quand la m\u00e9thode g\u00e9om\u00e9trique s'applique \u00e0 des \u00eatres r\u00e9els et, \u00e0 plus forte raison, \u00e0 l'\u00eatre absolu, nous avons le moyen de d\u00e9duire \u00e0 la fois plusieurs propri\u00e9t\u00e9s. Sans doute avons-nous l'impression que Spinoza s'accorde ce qui est en question. Mais nous ne sommes d\u00e9\u00e7us que parce que nous confondons des probl\u00e8mes tr\u00e8s divers soulev\u00e9s par la m\u00e9thode. Spinoza demande : Y a-t-il un moyen par lequel des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s, conclues une par une, peuvent \u00eatre consid\u00e9r\u00e9es collectivement, et par lequel des points de vue, pris \u00e0 l'ext\u00e9rieur d'une d\u00e9finition, peuvent \u00eatre situ\u00e9s \u00e0 l'int\u00e9rieur de la chose d\u00e9finie ? Or, dans la _R\u00e9forme de l'entendement_ , Spinoza a montr\u00e9 que les figures en g\u00e9om\u00e9trie pouvaient \u00eatre d\u00e9finies par une cause prochaine ou faire l'objet de d\u00e9finitions g\u00e9n\u00e9tiques22. Le cercle n'est pas seulement le lieu des points situ\u00e9s \u00e0 \u00e9gale distance d'un m\u00eame point appel\u00e9 centre, mais une figure d\u00e9crite par toute ligne dont une extr\u00e9mit\u00e9 est fixe, et l'autre, mobile. De m\u00eame la sph\u00e8re est une figure d\u00e9crite par tout demi-cercle qui tourne autour de son axe. Il est vrai qu'en g\u00e9om\u00e9trie ces causes sont fictives : _fingo ad libitum._ Comme dirait Hegel, mais comme Spinoza le dit aussi, le demi-cercle ne tourne pas tout seul. Mais si ces causes sont fictives ou imagin\u00e9es, c'est dans la mesure o\u00f9 elles n'ont de v\u00e9rit\u00e9 que parce qu'elles sont inf\u00e9r\u00e9es \u00e0 partir de leurs effets. Elles se pr\u00e9sentent comme des moyens, des artifices, des fictions, parce que les figures sont ici des \u00eatres de raison. Il n'en est pas moins vrai que les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s, qui sont r\u00e9ellement conclues une \u00e0 une par le g\u00e9om\u00e8tre, acqui\u00e8rent un \u00eatre collectif par rapport \u00e0 ces causes et au moyen de ces fictions23. Or, dans le cas de l'absolu, il n'y a plus rien de fictif : la cause n'est plus inf\u00e9r\u00e9e de son effet. En affirmant que l'Absolument infini est cause, nous n'affirmons pas, comme pour la rotation du demi-cercle, quelque chose qui ne serait pas contenu dans son concept. Il n'est donc pas besoin de fiction pour que les modes en leur infinit\u00e9 soient assimil\u00e9s \u00e0 des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s collectivement conclues de la d\u00e9finition de la substance, et les attributs, \u00e0 des points de vue int\u00e9rieurs \u00e0 cette substance sur laquelle ils ont prise. D\u00e8s lors, si la philosophie est justiciable des math\u00e9matiques, c'est parce que les math\u00e9matiques trouvent dans la philosophie la suppression de leurs limites ordinaires. La m\u00e9thode g\u00e9om\u00e9trique ne rencontre pas de difficult\u00e9 quand elle s'applique \u00e0 l'absolu ; au contraire, elle trouve le moyen naturel de surmonter les difficult\u00e9s qui grevaient son exercice, tant qu'elle s'appliquait \u00e0 des \u00eatres de raison.\n\nLes attributs sont comme des points de vue sur la substance ; mais, dans l'absolu, les points de vue cessent d'\u00eatre ext\u00e9rieurs, la substance comprend en soi l'infinit\u00e9 de ses propres points de vue. Les modes se d\u00e9duisent de la substance, comme les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s se d\u00e9duisent d'une chose d\u00e9finie ; mais, dans l'absolu, les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s acqui\u00e8rent un \u00eatre collectif infini. Ce n'est plus l'entendement fini qui conclut des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s une par une, qui r\u00e9fl\u00e9chit sur la chose et l'explique en la rapportant \u00e0 d'autres objets. C'est la chose qui s'exprime, c'est elle qui s'explique. Alors les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s toutes ensemble \u00ab tombent sous un entendement infini \u00bb. L'expression n'a donc pas \u00e0 \u00eatre objet de d\u00e9monstration ; c'est elle qui met la d\u00e9monstration dans l'absolu, qui fait de la d\u00e9monstration la _manifestation imm\u00e9diate_ de la substance absolument infinie. Il est impossible de comprendre les attributs sans d\u00e9monstration ; celle-ci est la manifestation de ce qui n'est pas visible, et aussi le regard sous lequel tombe ce qui se manifeste. C'est en ce sens que les d\u00e9monstrations, dit Spinoza, sont des yeux de l'esprit par lesquels nous percevons24.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  Les formules correspondantes sont, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ : 1o) _aeternam et infinitam certam essentiam exprimit_ (I, 10, sc.). 2o) _divinae substantiae essentiam exprimit_ (I, 19 dem.) ; _realitatem sive esse substantiae exprimit_ (I, 10, sc.). 3o) _existentiam exprimunt_ (I, 10, c.). Les trois types de formules se trouvent r\u00e9unis en I, 10, sc. Ce texte comporte \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard des nuances et des glissements extr\u00eamement subtils.\n\n2.  _\u00c9_ , I, 19 et 20, dem.\n\n3.  _\u00c9_ , I, 36, dem. (et 25, cor. : _Modi quibus Dei attributa certo et determinato modo exprimuntur._ )\n\n4.  _\u00c9_ , I, 16, dem.\n\n5.  _\u00c9_ , II, 1, dem.\n\n6.  _TTP_ , ch. 4 (II, p. _136)._\n\n7.  _TRE_ , 108 ( _infinitatem exprimunt_ ).\n\n8.  _\u00c9_ , V, 29, prop. et dem.\n\n9.  Cf. _CT_ , II, ch. 20, 4 ( _uytgedrukt_ ) ; I, second dialogue, 12 ( _vertoonen_ ) ; I, ch. 7, 10 ( _vertoond_ ).\n\n10.  _TRE_ , 76.\n\n11.  _\u00c9_ , I, 8, sc. 2 : ... _Veram uniuscujusque rei definitionem nihil involvere neque exprimere praeter definitae naturam. TRE_ , 95, _Definitio, ut dicatur perfecta, debebit intimam essentiam rei explicare._\n\n12.  _\u00c9_ , I, 19, dem. ; 20, dem.\n\n13.  _\u00c9_ , II, 45 et 46, dem.\n\n14.  Cf. chapitre IX.\n\n15.  Cf. A. KOYR\u00c9, _La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme_ (Vrin, 1929), et surtout _Mystiques, spirituels, alchimistes du XVIe si\u00e8cle allemand_ (Armand Colin, 1947).\n\n16.  Cf. Foucher de CAREIL, _Leibniz, Descartes et Spinoza_ (1862). Parmi les interpr\u00e8tes r\u00e9cents, \u00c9. LASBAX est un de ceux qui poussent le plus loin l'identification de l'expression spinoziste avec une \u00e9manation n\u00e9o-platonicienne : _La Hi\u00e9rarchie dans l'Univers chez Spinoza_ (Vrin, 1919.)\n\n17.  C'est sous l'influence de Hegel que E. Erdmann interpr\u00e8te les attributs spinozistes tant\u00f4t comme des formes de l'entendement, tant\u00f4t comme des formes de la sensibilit\u00e9 ( _Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der neueren Philosophie_ , 1836 ; _Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie_ , 1866).\n\n18.  Fritz KAUFMANN, _Spinoza's system as theory of expression_ (Philosophy and phenomenological research, Universit\u00e9 de Buffalo, sept. 1940).\n\n19.  Andr\u00e9 DARBON, _\u00c9tudes spinozistes_ (P.U.F., 1946, pp. 117-118).\n\n20.  _Lettres 2 et 4, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 5 et p. 11). Et _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 1.\n\n21.  _Lettres 82, de Tschirnhaus, et 83, \u00e0 Tschirnhaus._\n\n22.  _TRE_ , 72 et 95.\n\n23.  _TRE_ , 72 : \u00ab Pour former le concept de la sph\u00e8re, je forme arbitrairement la fiction d'une cause, \u00e0 savoir qu'un demi-cercle tourne autour de son centre et que la sph\u00e8re est comme engendr\u00e9e par sa rotation. Cette id\u00e9e est certainement vraie et, bien que nous sachions qu'aucune sph\u00e8re ne fut jamais engendr\u00e9e ainsi dans la nature, c'est l\u00e0 n\u00e9anmoins une perception vraie, et la mani\u00e8re la plus facile de former le concept de la sph\u00e8re. Il faut noter en outre que cette perception affirme que le demi-cercle tourne, affirmation qui serait fausse si elle n'\u00e9tait jointe au concept de la sph\u00e8re... \u00bb\n\n24.  _\u00c9_ , V, 23, sc. _TTP_ , ch. 13 (II, p. 240) : \u00ab Dira-t-on qu'il n'est pas besoin de conna\u00eetre les attributs de Dieu, mais uniquement de croire, simplement et sans d\u00e9monstration ? C'est pure frivolit\u00e9. Car les choses invisibles, et qui sont objets de la seule pens\u00e9e ne peuvent \u00eatre vues par d'autres yeux que les d\u00e9monstrations. Qui donc n'a pas de d\u00e9monstrations ne voit absolument rien de ces choses. \u00bb\n\n# PREMI\u00c8RE PARTIE\n\n# LES TRIADES DE LA SUBSTANCE\n\n## CHAPITRE PREMIER\n\n## DISTINCTION NUM\u00c9RIQUE\n\n## ET DISTINCTION R\u00c9ELLE\n\nL'expression se pr\u00e9sente comme une triade. Nous devons distinguer la substance, les attributs, l'essence. La substance s'exprime, les attributs sont des expressions, l'essence est exprim\u00e9e. L'id\u00e9e d'expression reste inintelligible tant qu'on voit seulement deux termes dans le rapport qu'elle pr\u00e9sente. Nous confondons substance et attribut, attribut et essence, essence et substance, tant que nous ne tenons pas compte de la pr\u00e9sence et de l'interm\u00e9diaire du troisi\u00e8me. La substance et les attributs se distinguent, mais en tant que chaque attribut exprime une certaine essence. L'attribut et l'essence se distinguent, mais en tant que chaque essence est exprim\u00e9e comme essence de la substance et non de l'attribut. L'originalit\u00e9 du concept d'expression se manifeste ici : l'essence, en tant qu'elle existe, n'existe pas hors de l'attribut qui l'exprime ; mais, en tant qu'elle est essence, elle ne se rapporte qu'\u00e0 la substance. Une essence est exprim\u00e9e par chaque attribut mais comme essence de la substance elle-m\u00eame. Les essences infinies se distinguent dans les attributs o\u00f9 elles existent, mais s'identifient dans la substance \u00e0 laquelle elles se rapportent. Nous retrouverons toujours la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de distinguer trois termes : la substance qui s'exprime, l'attribut qui l'exprime, l'essence qui est exprim\u00e9e. C'est par les attributs que l'essence est distingu\u00e9e de la substance, mais c'est par l'essence que la substance elle-m\u00eame est distingu\u00e9e des attributs. La triade est telle que chacun de ses termes, en trois syllogismes, est apte \u00e0 servir de moyen par rapport aux deux autres.\n\nL'expression convient avec la substance, en tant que la substance est absolument infinie ; elle convient avec les attributs, en tant qu'ils sont une infinit\u00e9 ; elle convient avec l'essence, en tant que chaque essence est infinie dans un attribut. Il y a donc une nature de l'infini. Merleau-Ponty a bien marqu\u00e9 ce qui nous para\u00eet aujourd'hui le plus difficile \u00e0 comprendre dans les philosophies du XVIIe si\u00e8cle : l'id\u00e9e de l'infini positif comme \u00ab secret du grand rationalisme \u00bb, \u00ab une mani\u00e8re innocente de penser \u00e0 partir de l'infini \u00bb, qui trouve sa perfection dans le spinozisme1. L'innocence, il est vrai, n'exclut pas le travail du concept. Il fallait \u00e0 Spinoza toutes les ressources d'un \u00e9l\u00e9ment conceptuel original pour exposer la puissance et l'actualit\u00e9 de l'infini positif. Si l'id\u00e9e d'expression remplit ce r\u00f4le, c'est dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle porte dans l'infini certaines distinctions qui correspondent \u00e0 ces trois termes : substance, attributs, essence. Quel est le type de distinction dans l'infini ? Quel type de distinction peut-on porter dans l'absolu, dans la nature de Dieu ? Tel est le premier probl\u00e8me pos\u00e9 par l'id\u00e9e d'expression ; il domine le premier livre de l' _\u00c9thique._\n\nD\u00e8s le d\u00e9but de l' _\u00c9thique_ Spinoza demande comment deux choses, au sens le plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ral du mot, peuvent se distinguer, puis comment deux substances, au sens pr\u00e9cis du mot, doivent se distinguer. La premi\u00e8re question pr\u00e9pare la seconde. La r\u00e9ponse \u00e0 cette seconde question semble sans \u00e9quivoque : s'il est vrai que deux choses en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral diff\u00e8rent par les attributs des substances ou bien par les modes, deux substances \u00e0 leur tour ne peuvent pas se distinguer par le mode, mais seulement par l'attribut. Donc il est impossible qu'il y ait deux ou plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut2. Que Spinoza prenne ici son point de d\u00e9part dans un domaine cart\u00e9sien n'est pas douteux. Mais ce qu'il accepte de Descartes, ce qu'il en refuse, et surtout ce qu'il accepte pour le retourner contre Descartes, tout cela doit \u00eatre \u00e9valu\u00e9 soigneusement.\n\nQu'il n'existe que des substances et des modes, le mode \u00e9tant en autre chose et la substance en soi, on en trouve le principe explicite chez Descartes3. Et si les modes supposent toujours une substance qu'ils suffisent \u00e0 nous faire conna\u00eetre, c'est par l'interm\u00e9diaire d'un attribut principal qu'ils impliquent et qui constitue l'essence de la substance elle-m\u00eame : ainsi deux ou plusieurs substances se distinguent et sont connues distinctement par leurs attributs principaux4. Descartes en conclut que nous concevons une distinction r\u00e9elle entre deux substances, une distinction modale entre la substance et le mode qui la suppose sans r\u00e9ciprocit\u00e9, une distinction de raison entre la substance et l'attribut sans lequel nous ne pourrions en avoir une connaissance distincte5. L'exclusion, l'implication unilat\u00e9rale et l'abstraction sont les crit\u00e8res correspondants dans l'id\u00e9e, ou plut\u00f4t les donn\u00e9es \u00e9l\u00e9mentaires de la repr\u00e9sentation qui permettent de d\u00e9finir et de reconna\u00eetre ces types de distinction. La d\u00e9termination et l'application de ces types jouent un r\u00f4le essentiel dans le cart\u00e9sianisme. Et sans doute Descartes profitait de l'effort pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent de Suarez pour mettre de l'ordre dans un probl\u00e8me si compliqu\u00e96. Mais l'usage qu'il fait lui-m\u00eame des trois distinctions semble, par sa richesse, comporter encore de nombreuses \u00e9quivoques.\n\nUne premi\u00e8re ambigu\u00eft\u00e9, de l'aveu de Descartes, concerne la distinction de raison, la distinction modale et leur rapport. Elle appara\u00eet d\u00e9j\u00e0 dans l'emploi des mots \u00ab mode \u00bb, \u00ab attribut \u00bb, \u00ab qualit\u00e9 \u00bb. Un attribut quelconque \u00e9tant donn\u00e9, il est qualit\u00e9 parce qu'il qualifie la substance comme telle ou telle, mais il est aussi bien mode en tant qu'il la diversifie7. Quelle est de ce point de vue la situation de l'attribut principal ? Je ne peux s\u00e9parer la substance de cet attribut que par abstraction. Mais aussi je peux distinguer cet attribut de la substance, \u00e0 condition de ne pas en faire quelque chose de subsistant par soi, \u00e0 condition d'en faire seulement la propri\u00e9t\u00e9 que la substance a de changer (c'est-\u00e0-dire d'avoir des figures variables ou des pens\u00e9es diverses). C'est pourquoi Descartes dit que l'extension et la pens\u00e9e peuvent \u00eatre con\u00e7ues distinctement de deux fa\u00e7ons : \u00ab en tant que l'une constitue la nature du corps, et l'autre celle de l'\u00e2me \u00bb ; mais aussi en les distinguant de leurs substances, en les prenant simplement pour des \u00ab modes \u00bb ou des \u00ab d\u00e9pendances \u00bb8. Or, si dans le premier cas les attributs distinguent des substances qu'ils qualifient, il semble bien que, dans le second cas, les modes distinguent des substances de m\u00eame attribut. Ainsi des figures variables renvoient \u00e0 tel ou tel corps r\u00e9ellement distinct des autres ; et les pens\u00e9es diverses, \u00e0 une \u00e2me r\u00e9ellement distincte. L'attribut constitue l'essence de la substance qu'il qualifie, mais n'en constitue pas moins aussi l'essence des modes qu'il rapporte aux substances de m\u00eame attribut. Ce double aspect soul\u00e8ve de grandes difficult\u00e9s dans le cart\u00e9sianisme9. Nous pouvons seulement en retenir la cons\u00e9quence : _qu'il y a des substances de m\u00eame attribut. En d'autres termes, il y a des distinctions num\u00e9riques qui sont en m\u00eame temps r\u00e9elles ou substantielles_.\n\nLa seconde difficult\u00e9 concerne la distinction r\u00e9elle en elle-m\u00eame. Celle-ci, non moins que les autres, est une donn\u00e9e de la repr\u00e9sentation. Deux choses sont r\u00e9ellement distinctes quand on peut concevoir clairement et distinctement l'une en excluant tout ce qui appartient au concept de l'autre. C'est en ce sens que Descartes explique \u00e0 Arnauld que le crit\u00e8re de la distinction r\u00e9elle est seulement l' _id\u00e9e_ comme compl\u00e8te. Il rappelle \u00e0 bon droit qu'il n'a jamais confondu les choses con\u00e7ues comme r\u00e9ellement distinctes avec les choses r\u00e9ellement distingu\u00e9es. Pourtant, le passage des unes aux autres lui para\u00eet n\u00e9cessairement l\u00e9gitime ; ce n'est qu'une question de moment. Il suffit, dans l'ordre des M\u00e9ditations, d'en arriver au Dieu cr\u00e9ateur, pour conclure qu'il manquerait singuli\u00e8rement de v\u00e9racit\u00e9 s'il cr\u00e9ait les choses autrement qu'il ne nous en donne l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte. La distinction r\u00e9elle ne poss\u00e8de pas en soi la raison du distingu\u00e9 ; mais cette raison se trouve fournie par la causalit\u00e9 divine, ext\u00e9rieure et transcendante, qui cr\u00e9e les substances conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 la mani\u00e8re dont nous les concevons comme possibles. L\u00e0 encore, toutes sortes de difficult\u00e9s naissent en rapport avec l'id\u00e9e de cr\u00e9ation. L'ambigu\u00eft\u00e9 principale est dans la d\u00e9finition de la substance : \u00ab une chose qui peut exister par soi-m\u00eame \u00bb10. N'y a-t-il pas contradiction \u00e0 poser l'existence par soi comme n'\u00e9tant en soi qu'une simple possibilit\u00e9 ? Nous pouvons ici retenir une seconde cons\u00e9quence : le Dieu cr\u00e9ateur nous fait passer des substances con\u00e7ues comme r\u00e9ellement distinctes aux substances r\u00e9ellement distingu\u00e9es. _La distinction r\u00e9elle_ , soit entre substances d'attributs diff\u00e9rents, soit entre substances de m\u00eame attribut, _s'accompagne d'une division des choses, c'est-\u00e0-dire d'une distinction num\u00e9rique qui lui correspond._\n\nC'est en fonction de ces deux points que s'organise le d\u00e9but de l' _\u00c9thique._ Spinoza demande : En quoi consiste l'erreur, quand nous posons plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut ? Cette erreur, Spinoza la d\u00e9nonce de deux fa\u00e7ons, suivant un proc\u00e9d\u00e9 qui lui est cher. D'abord dans une d\u00e9monstration par l'absurde, puis dans une d\u00e9monstration plus complexe. S'il y avait plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut, elles devraient se distinguer par les modes, ce qui est absurde, puisque la substance par nature est ant\u00e9rieure \u00e0 ses modes et ne les implique pas : telle est la voie br\u00e8ve, en I, 5. Mais la d\u00e9monstration positive appara\u00eet plus loin, dans un scolie de 8 : deux substances de m\u00eame attribut seraient seulement distinctes _in numero_ ; or les caract\u00e8res de la distinction num\u00e9rique excluent la possibilit\u00e9 d'en faire une distinction r\u00e9elle ou substantielle.\n\nD'apr\u00e8s ce scolie, une distinction ne serait pas num\u00e9rique si les choses n'avaient pas le m\u00eame concept ou la m\u00eame d\u00e9finition ; mais ces choses ne seraient pas distinctes s'il n'y avait hors de la d\u00e9finition une cause ext\u00e9rieure par laquelle elles existent en tel nombre. Deux ou plusieurs choses num\u00e9riquement distinctes supposent donc autre chose que leur concept. C'est pourquoi des substances ne pourraient \u00eatre num\u00e9riquement distinctes qu'en renvoyant \u00e0 une causalit\u00e9 externe capable de les produire. Or, quand nous affirmons que des substances sont produites, nous avons beaucoup d'id\u00e9es confuses \u00e0 la fois. Nous disons qu'elles ont une cause, mais que nous ne savons pas comment cette cause proc\u00e8de ; nous pr\u00e9tendons avoir de ces substances une id\u00e9e vraie, puisqu'elles sont con\u00e7ues par elles-m\u00eames, mais nous doutons que cette id\u00e9e soit vraie, puisque nous ne savons pas par elles-m\u00eames si elles existent. On retrouve ici la critique de l'\u00e9trange formule cart\u00e9sienne : ce qui _peut_ exister par soi. La causalit\u00e9 externe a un sens, mais seulement \u00e0 l'\u00e9gard des modes existants finis : chaque mode existant renvoie \u00e0 un autre mode, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce qu'il _ne peut pas_ exister par soi. Quand nous appliquons cette causalit\u00e9 aux substances, nous la faisons jouer hors des conditions qui la l\u00e9gitiment et la d\u00e9terminent. Nous l'affirmons, mais dans le vide, en lui retirant toute d\u00e9termination. Bref, la causalit\u00e9 externe et la distinction num\u00e9rique ont un sort commun : elles s'appliquent aux modes et seulement aux modes.\n\nL'argument du scolie 8 se pr\u00e9sente donc sous la forme suivante : 1o) la distinction num\u00e9rique exige une cause ext\u00e9rieure \u00e0 laquelle elle renvoie ; 2o) or il est impossible d'appliquer une cause ext\u00e9rieure \u00e0 une substance, en raison de la contradiction contenue dans un tel usage du principe de causalit\u00e9 ; 3o) deux ou plusieurs substances ne peuvent donc pas se distinguer _in numero_ , il n'y a pas deux substances de m\u00eame attribut. L'argument des huit premi\u00e8res d\u00e9monstrations n'a pas la m\u00eame structure : 1o) deux ou plusieurs substances ne peuvent pas avoir le m\u00eame attribut, parce qu'elles devraient se distinguer par les modes, ce qui est absurde ; 2o) une substance ne peut donc pas avoir une cause externe, elle ne peut pas \u00eatre produite ou limit\u00e9e par une autre substance, car toutes deux devraient avoir la m\u00eame nature ou le m\u00eame attribut ; 3o) il n'y a donc pas de distinction num\u00e9rique dans une substance de quelque attribut, \u00ab toute substance est n\u00e9cessairement infinie \u00bb11.\n\nTout \u00e0 l'heure, de la nature de la distinction num\u00e9rique, on concluait son impuissance \u00e0 s'appliquer \u00e0 la substance. Maintenant, de la nature de la substance, nous concluons son infinit\u00e9, donc l'impossibilit\u00e9 de lui appliquer des distinctions num\u00e9riques. De toutes fa\u00e7ons, la distinction num\u00e9rique ne distingue jamais des substances, mais seulement des modes enveloppant le m\u00eame attribut. Car le nombre exprime \u00e0 sa fa\u00e7on les caract\u00e8res du mode existant : la composition des parties, la limitation par autre chose de m\u00eame nature, la d\u00e9termination externe. En ce sens il peut aller \u00e0 l'infini. Mais la question est : peut-il \u00eatre port\u00e9 dans l'infini lui-m\u00eame ? Ou, comme dit Spinoza : m\u00eame dans le cas des modes, est-ce de la multitude des parties que nous concluons qu'elles sont une infinit\u00e912 ? Quand nous faisons de la distinction num\u00e9rique une distinction r\u00e9elle ou substantielle, nous la portons dans l'infini, ne serait-ce que pour assurer la conversion devenue n\u00e9cessaire entre l'attribut comme tel et l'infinit\u00e9 de parties finies que nous y distinguons. En sortent de grandes absurdit\u00e9s : \u00ab Si une quantit\u00e9 infinie est mesur\u00e9e en parties \u00e9gales \u00e0 un pied, elle devra consister en une infinit\u00e9 de telles parties ; et de m\u00eame si elle est mesur\u00e9e en parties \u00e9gales \u00e0 un doigt ; et par suite un nombre infini sera douze fois plus grand qu'un autre nombre infini13. \u00bb L'absurdit\u00e9 ne consiste pas, ainsi que le croyait Descartes, \u00e0 hypostasier l'\u00e9tendue comme attribut, mais au contraire \u00e0 la concevoir comme mesurable et compos\u00e9e de parties finies avec lesquelles on pr\u00e9tend la convertir. La physique, ici, vient confirmer les droits de la logique : qu'il n'y ait pas de vide dans la nature signifie seulement que la division des parties n'est pas une distinction r\u00e9elle. La distinction num\u00e9rique est une division, mais la division n'a lieu que dans le mode, seul le mode est divis\u00e914.\n\n_Il n'y a pas plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut._ D'o\u00f9 l'on conclut, du point de vue de la relation, qu'une substance n'est pas produite par une autre ; du point de vue de la modalit\u00e9, qu'il appartient \u00e0 la nature de la substance d'exister ; du point de vue de la qualit\u00e9, que toute substance est n\u00e9cessairement infinie15. Mais ces r\u00e9sultats sont comme envelopp\u00e9s dans l'argument de la distinction num\u00e9rique. C'est lui qui nous ram\u00e8ne au point de d\u00e9part : \u00ab Il n'existe qu'une seule substance de m\u00eame attribut16. \u00bb Or, \u00e0 partir de la proposition 9, il semble que Spinoza change d'objet. Il s'agit de d\u00e9montrer, non plus qu'il y a seulement une substance par attribut, mais qu'il y a seulement une substance pour tous les attributs. L'encha\u00eenement des deux th\u00e8mes semble difficile \u00e0 saisir. Car, dans cette nouvelle perspective, quelle port\u00e9e faut-il accorder aux huit premi\u00e8res propositions ? Le probl\u00e8me gagne en clart\u00e9 si nous consid\u00e9rons que, pour passer d'un th\u00e8me \u00e0 l'autre, il suffit d'op\u00e9rer ce qu'on appelle en logique la conversion d'une universelle n\u00e9gative. La distinction num\u00e9rique n'est jamais r\u00e9elle ; r\u00e9ciproquement, la distinction r\u00e9elle n'est jamais num\u00e9rique. L'argument de Spinoza devient le suivant : les attributs sont r\u00e9ellement distincts ; or la distinction r\u00e9elle n'est pas num\u00e9rique ; donc il n'y a qu'une substance pour tous les attributs.\n\nSpinoza dit que les attributs sont \u00ab con\u00e7us comme r\u00e9ellement distincts \u00bb17. Dans cette formule on ne verra pas un usage affaibli de la distinction r\u00e9elle. Spinoza ne sugg\u00e8re pas que les attributs sont autres qu'on ne les con\u00e7oit, ni qu'ils soient de simples conceptions qu'on se fait de la substance. Pas davantage on ne croira que Spinoza fasse de la distinction r\u00e9elle un usage seulement hypoth\u00e9tique ou pol\u00e9mique18. La distinction r\u00e9elle, au sens le plus strict, est toujours une donn\u00e9e de la repr\u00e9sentation : deux choses sont r\u00e9ellement distinctes lorsqu'elles sont _con\u00e7ues_ comme telles, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00ab l'une sans le secours de l'autre \u00bb, de telle mani\u00e8re que l'on _con\u00e7oive_ l'une en niant tout ce qui appartient au _concept_ de l'autre. \u00c0 cet \u00e9gard Spinoza ne diff\u00e8re nullement de Descartes : il en accepte le crit\u00e8re et la d\u00e9finition. Le seul probl\u00e8me est de savoir si la distinction r\u00e9elle ainsi comprise s'accompagne ou non d'une division dans les choses. Chez Descartes, seule l'hypoth\u00e8se d'un Dieu cr\u00e9ateur fondait cette concomitance. Suivant Spinoza, on ne fera correspondre une division \u00e0 la distinction r\u00e9elle qu'en faisant de celle-ci une distinction num\u00e9rique au moins possible, donc en la confondant d\u00e9j\u00e0 avec la distinction modale. Or il est impossible que la distinction r\u00e9elle soit num\u00e9rique ou modale.\n\nQuand on demande \u00e0 Spinoza comment il arrive \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e d'une seule substance pour tous les attributs, il rappelle qu'il a propos\u00e9 deux arguments : plus un \u00eatre a de r\u00e9alit\u00e9, plus il faut lui reconna\u00eetre d'attributs ; plus on reconna\u00eet d'attributs \u00e0 un \u00eatre, plus il faut lui accorder l'existence19. Or, aucun de ces arguments ne serait suffisant s'il n'\u00e9tait garanti par l'analyse de la distinction r\u00e9elle. Seule cette analyse, en effet, montre qu'il est _possible_ d'accorder tous les attributs \u00e0 un \u00eatre, donc de passer de l'infinit\u00e9 de chaque attribut \u00e0 l'absoluit\u00e9 d'un \u00eatre qui les poss\u00e8de tous. Et ce passage, \u00e9tant possible ou n'impliquant pas contradiction, se r\u00e9v\u00e8le n\u00e9cessaire, selon la preuve de l'existence de Dieu. Bien plus, c'est encore l'argument de la distinction r\u00e9elle qui montre que _tous_ les attributs sont une infinit\u00e9. Car nous ne pourrions pas passer par l'interm\u00e9diaire de trois ou quatre attributs sans r\u00e9introduire dans l'absolu cette m\u00eame distinction num\u00e9rique que nous venons d'exclure de l'infini20.\n\nSi l'on divisait la substance conform\u00e9ment aux attributs, il faudrait la traiter comme un genre, et les attributs comme des diff\u00e9rences sp\u00e9cifiques. La substance serait pos\u00e9e comme un genre qui ne nous ferait rien conna\u00eetre en particulier ; alors elle serait distincte des attributs, comme le genre de ses diff\u00e9rences, et les attributs seraient distincts des substances correspondantes, comme les diff\u00e9rences sp\u00e9cifiques et les esp\u00e8ces elles-m\u00eames. C'est ainsi qu'en faisant de la distinction r\u00e9elle entre attributs une distinction num\u00e9rique entre substances, on porte de simples _distinctions de raison_ dans la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 substantielle. Il ne peut y avoir de n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 d'exister pour une substance de m\u00eame \u00ab esp\u00e8ce \u00bb que l'attribut ; une diff\u00e9rence sp\u00e9cifique ne d\u00e9termine que l'existence possible d'objets qui lui correspondent dans le genre. Voil\u00e0 toujours la substance r\u00e9duite \u00e0 une simple possibilit\u00e9 d'exister, l'attribut n'\u00e9tant que _l'indication, le signe_ d'une telle existence possible. La premi\u00e8re critique \u00e0 laquelle Spinoza soumet la notion de signe dans l' _\u00c9thique_ appara\u00eet pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment \u00e0 propos de la distinction r\u00e9elle21. La distinction r\u00e9elle entre attributs n'est pas plus \u00ab signe \u00bb d'une diversit\u00e9 de substances que chaque attribut n'est le caract\u00e8re sp\u00e9cifique d'une substance qui lui correspondrait ou pourrait lui correspondre. Ni la substance n'est genre, ni les attributs ne sont des diff\u00e9rences, ni les substances qualifi\u00e9es ne sont des esp\u00e8ces22. Sont \u00e9galement condamn\u00e9es chez Spinoza la pens\u00e9e qui proc\u00e8de par genre et diff\u00e9rence, la pens\u00e9e qui proc\u00e8de par signes.\n\nDans un livre o\u00f9 il d\u00e9fend Descartes contre Spinoza, R\u00e9gis invoque l'existence de deux sortes d'attributs, les uns \u00ab sp\u00e9cifiques \u00bb, qui distinguent les substances d'esp\u00e8ce diff\u00e9rente, les autres \u00ab num\u00e9riques \u00bb, qui distinguent des substances de m\u00eame esp\u00e8ce23. Mais c'est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment ce que Spinoza reproche au cart\u00e9sianisme. Selon Spinoza, l'attribut n'est jamais sp\u00e9cifique ni num\u00e9rique. Il semble que nous puissions ainsi r\u00e9sumer la th\u00e8se de Spinoza : 1o) quand nous posons plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut, nous faisons de la distinction num\u00e9rique une distinction r\u00e9elle, mais alors nous confondons la distinction r\u00e9elle et la distinction modale, nous traitons les modes comme des substances ; 2o) et quand nous posons autant de substances qu'il y a d'attributs diff\u00e9rents, nous faisons de la distinction r\u00e9elle une distinction num\u00e9rique, nous confondons la distinction r\u00e9elle non seulement avec une distinction modale mais encore avec des distinctions de raison.\n\nDans ce contexte, _il semble difficile de consid\u00e9rer que les huit premi\u00e8res propositions n'aient qu'un sens hypoth\u00e9tique._ On fait parfois comme si Spinoza commen\u00e7ait par raisonner dans une hypoth\u00e8se qui n'\u00e9tait pas la sienne, comme s'il partait d'une hypoth\u00e8se qu'il avait l'intention de r\u00e9futer. On laisse ainsi \u00e9chapper le sens cat\u00e9gorique des huit premi\u00e8res propositions. Il n'y a pas plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut, la distinction num\u00e9rique n'est pas r\u00e9elle : nous ne nous trouvons pas devant une hypoth\u00e8se provisoire, valable tant qu'on n'a pas encore d\u00e9couvert la substance absolument infinie ; au contraire nous sommes en pr\u00e9sence d'une gen\u00e8se qui nous conduit n\u00e9cessairement \u00e0 la position d'une telle substance. Et le sens cat\u00e9gorique des premi\u00e8res propositions n'est pas seulement n\u00e9gatif. Comme dit Spinoza, \u00ab il n'existe qu'une substance de m\u00eame nature \u00bb. L'identification de l'attribut \u00e0 une substance infiniment parfaite, aussi bien dans l' _\u00c9thique_ que dans le _Court Trait\u00e9_ , n'est pas elle-m\u00eame une hypoth\u00e8se provisoire. Elle doit s'interpr\u00e9ter positivement du point de vue de la _qualit\u00e9._ Il y a une substance par attribut du point de vue de la qualit\u00e9, mais une seule substance pour tous les attributs du point de vue de la _quantit\u00e9._ Que signifie cette multiplicit\u00e9 purement qualitative ? Cette formule obscure marque les difficult\u00e9s de l'entendement fini s'\u00e9levant \u00e0 la compr\u00e9hension de la substance absolument infinie. Elle est justifi\u00e9e par le nouveau statut de la distinction r\u00e9elle. Elle veut dire : les substances qualifi\u00e9es se distinguent qualitativement, non pas quantitativement. Ou, mieux encore, elles se distinguent \u00ab formellement \u00bb, \u00ab quidditativement \u00bb, non pas \u00ab ontologiquement \u00bb.\n\nL'anti-cart\u00e9sianisme de Spinoza trouve une de ses sources dans la th\u00e9orie des distinctions. Dans les _Pens\u00e9es m\u00e9taphysiques_ , Spinoza exposait la conception cart\u00e9sienne : \u00ab Il y a trois sortes de distinctions entre les choses, r\u00e9elle, modale et de raison \u00bb. Et il semblait l'approuver : \u00ab Nous n'avons cure d'ailleurs du fatras des distinctions des P\u00e9ripat\u00e9ticiens \u00bb24. Mais ce qui compte, c'est moins la liste des distinctions reconnues que leur sens et leur distribution d\u00e9termin\u00e9e. \u00c0 cet \u00e9gard, il n'y a plus rien de cart\u00e9sien chez Spinoza. Le nouveau statut de la distinction r\u00e9elle est essentiel : purement qualitative, quidditative ou formelle, la distinction r\u00e9elle exclut toute division. N'est-ce pas, sous un nom cart\u00e9sien, le retour d'une de ces distinctions p\u00e9ripat\u00e9ticiennes en apparence m\u00e9pris\u00e9es ? Que la distinction r\u00e9elle n'est pas num\u00e9rique et ne peut pas l'\u00eatre, nous semble un des motifs principaux de l' _\u00c9thique_. En suit un bouleversement profond des autres distinctions. Non seulement la distinction r\u00e9elle ne renvoie plus \u00e0 des substances _possibles_ distingu\u00e9es _in numero_ , mais la distinction modale, \u00e0 son tour, ne renvoie plus \u00e0 des accidents comme \u00e0 des d\u00e9terminations _contingentes._ Chez Descartes une certaine contingence des modes fait \u00e9cho \u00e0 la simple possibilit\u00e9 des substances. Descartes a beau rappeler que les accidents ne sont pas r\u00e9els, la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 substantielle n'en a pas moins des accidents. Les modes, pour \u00eatre produits, ont besoin d'autre chose que de la substance \u00e0 laquelle ils se rapportent, soit d'une autre substance qui les mette dans la premi\u00e8re, soit de Dieu qui cr\u00e9e la premi\u00e8re avec ses d\u00e9pendances. Tout autre est la vision spinoziste : il n'y a pas plus de contingence du mode par rapport \u00e0 la substance, que de possibilit\u00e9 de la substance par rapport \u00e0 l'attribut. Tout est n\u00e9cessaire, ou bien par son essence ou bien par sa cause : la N\u00e9cessit\u00e9 est la seule affection de l'\u00catre, la seule modalit\u00e9. La distinction de raison, \u00e0 son tour, en est elle-m\u00eame transform\u00e9e. Nous verrons qu'il n'est pas un axiome cart\u00e9sien (le n\u00e9ant n'a pas de propri\u00e9t\u00e9s, etc.) qui ne prenne un nouveau sens, hostile au cart\u00e9sianisme, \u00e0 partir de la nouvelle th\u00e9orie des distinctions. Cette th\u00e9orie trouve son principe dans le statut qualitatif de la distinction r\u00e9elle. Dissoci\u00e9e de toute distinction num\u00e9rique, la distinction r\u00e9elle est port\u00e9e dans l'absolu. Elle devient capable d'exprimer la diff\u00e9rence dans l'\u00eatre, elle entra\u00eene en cons\u00e9quence le remaniement des autres distinctions.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  Cf. M. MERLEAU-PONTY, in _Les Philosophes c\u00e9l\u00e8bres_ (Mazenod \u00e9d., p. 136).\n\n2.  _\u00c9_ , I, 5, prop et dem.\n\n3.  Spinoza expose ainsi la th\u00e8se cart\u00e9sienne, _PM_ , II, 5 : \u00ab ... Il faut se rappeler ce que Descartes a indiqu\u00e9 dans les _Principes de philosophie_ (partie I, articles 48 et 49), \u00e0 savoir qu'il n'y a rien dans la nature en dehors des substances et de leurs modes ; d'o\u00f9 est d\u00e9duite une triple distinction (articles 60, 61 et 62), c'est-\u00e0-dire la r\u00e9elle, la modale et la distinction de raison. \u00bb\n\n4.  DESCARTES, _Principes_ , I, 53.\n\n5.  DESCARTES, _Principes_ , I, 60, 61 et 62.\n\n6.  Cf. SUAREZ, _Metaphysicarum disputationum_ , D VII. Suarez ne reconna\u00eet que les distinctions r\u00e9elle, modale et de raison, et critique la distinction formelle de Duns Scot dans des termes tr\u00e8s voisins de ceux que Descartes utilisera.\n\n7.  DESCARTES, _Principes_ , I, 56.\n\n8.  DESCARTES, _Principes_ , I, 63 et 64.\n\n9.  Sur ces paragraphes 63 et 64, cf. la discussion entre F. ALQUI\u00c9 et M. GU\u00c9ROULT, _Descartes, Cahiers de Royaumont_ (\u00e9d. de Minuit, 1967), pp. 32-56.\n\n10.  DESCARTES, _R\u00e9ponses aux quatri\u00e8mes objections_ (AT, IX, p. 175).\n\n11.  Cette division tripartite est expos\u00e9e dans la _Lettre 2, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 5).\n\n12.  _Lettre 81, \u00e0 Tschirnhaus_ (III, p. 241). Cf. aussi _Lettre 12, \u00e0 Meyer_ (III, p. 41) : le nombre n'exprime pas ad\u00e9quatement la nature des modes en tant qu'ils sont une infinit\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire en tant qu'ils d\u00e9coulent de la substance.\n\n13.  _\u00c9_ , I, 15, sc.\n\n14.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 19-22.\n\n15.  _\u00c9_ , I, 5, 6, 7 et 8, prop.\n\n16.  _\u00c9_ , I, 8, sc. 2.\n\n17.  _\u00c9_ , I, 10, sc.\n\n18.  Cf. l'interpr\u00e9tation de P. LACHI\u00c8ZE-REY, _Les Origines cart\u00e9siennes du Dieu de Spinoza_ (Vrin, 2e \u00e9d., p. 151) : \u00ab L'usage fait ainsi de cette distinction n'implique d'ailleurs nullement son admission de la part de Spinoza ; elle reste uniquement un moyen de d\u00e9monstration utilis\u00e9 en partant de l'hypoth\u00e8se d'une pluralit\u00e9 de substances et destin\u00e9 \u00e0 annuler les effets possibles de cette hypoth\u00e9tique pluralit\u00e9. \u00bb\n\n19.  _Lettre 9, \u00e0 De Vries_ (III, p. 32). Dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , le premier argument se retrouve presque litt\u00e9ralement en I, 9 ; le second, moins nettement, en I, 11, sc.\n\n20.  Cf. _Lettre 64, \u00e0 Schuller_ (III, p. 206).\n\n21.  _\u00c9_ , I, 10, sc. \u00ab Si quelqu'un demande maintenant \u00e0 quel signe nous pourrons reconna\u00eetre la diversit\u00e9 des substances, qu'il lise les propositions suivantes, qui montrent qu'il n'existe dans la Nature qu'une substance unique et qu'elle est absolument infinie, ce pourquoi on chercherait en vain le signe en question. \u00bb\n\n22.  _CT_ , I, ch. 7, 9-10.\n\n23.  Cf. R\u00c9GIS, _R\u00e9futation de l'opinion de Spinoza touchant l'existence et la nature de Dieu_ , 1704.\n\n24.  _PM_ , II, 5.\n\n## CHAPITRE II\n\n## L'ATTRIBUT COMME EXPRESSION\n\nSpinoza ne dit pas que les attributs existent par soi, ni qu'ils soient con\u00e7us de telle fa\u00e7on que l'existence suive ou d\u00e9coule de leur essence. Il ne dit pas non plus que l'attribut est en soi et est con\u00e7u par soi, comme la substance. Il dit seulement que l'attribut est con\u00e7u par soi et en soi1. Le statut de l'attribut s'\u00e9bauche \u00e0 travers les formules tr\u00e8s complexes du _Court Trait\u00e9._ Si complexes, il est vrai, que le lecteur a le choix entre plusieurs hypoth\u00e8ses : pr\u00e9sumer des dates diverses de leur r\u00e9daction ; rappeler de toutes fa\u00e7ons l'imperfection des manuscrits ; ou m\u00eame invoquer l'\u00e9tat encore h\u00e9sitant de la pens\u00e9e de Spinoza. Toutefois, ces arguments ne peuvent intervenir que s'il est av\u00e9r\u00e9 que les formules du _Court Trait\u00e9_ ne s'accordent pas entre elles, et ne s'accordent pas davantage avec les donn\u00e9es ult\u00e9rieures de l' _\u00c9thique_. Or il ne semble pas en \u00eatre ainsi. Les textes du _Court Trait\u00e9_ ne seront pas d\u00e9pass\u00e9s par l' _\u00c9thique_ , mais plut\u00f4t transform\u00e9s. Et cela, gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 une utilisation plus syst\u00e9matique de l'id\u00e9e d'expression. Inversement donc, ils peuvent nous renseigner sur le contenu conceptuel inform\u00e9 par cette id\u00e9e d'expression chez Spinoza.\n\nCes textes disent tour \u00e0 tour : 1o) \u00ab \u00e0 l'essence des attributs appartient l'existence, en sorte qu'en dehors d'eux n'existe aucune essence ou aucun \u00eatre \u00bb ; 2o) \u00ab nous les concevons seulement dans leur essence et non dans leur existence, nous ne les concevons pas de telle sorte que l'existence d\u00e9coule de leur essence \u00bb ; \u00ab tu ne les con\u00e7ois pas comme subsistant par eux-m\u00eames \u00bb ; 3o) ils existent \u00ab formellement \u00bb et \u00ab en acte \u00bb ; \u00ab nous d\u00e9montrons a priori qu'ils existent \u00bb2.\n\nD'apr\u00e8s la premi\u00e8re formule, l'essence en tant qu'essence n'existe pas hors des attributs qui la constituent. L'essence se distingue donc _dans_ les attributs o\u00f9 elle existe. Elle existe toujours en un genre, en autant de genres qu'il y a d'attributs. Chaque attribut d\u00e8s lors est l'existence d'une essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie, d'une \u00ab essence particuli\u00e8re \u00bb3. C'est en ce sens que Spinoza peut dire : \u00e0 l'essence des attributs il appartient d'exister, mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment d'exister dans les attributs. Ou m\u00eame : \u00ab L'existence des attributs ne diff\u00e8re pas de leur essence4. \u00bb L'id\u00e9e d'expression, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , recueillera ce premier moment : l'essence de la substance n'existe pas hors des attributs qui l'expriment, si bien que chaque attribut exprime une certaine essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie. L'exprim\u00e9 n'existe pas hors de ses expressions, chaque expression est comme l'existence de l'exprim\u00e9. (C'est ce m\u00eame principe qu'on retrouve chez Leibniz, si diff\u00e9rent que soit le contexte : chaque monade est l'expression du monde, mais le monde exprim\u00e9 n'existe pas hors des monades qui l'expriment.)\n\nComment peut-on dire que les attributs expriment, non seulement une certaine essence, mais l'essence de la substance ? L'essence est exprim\u00e9e comme essence de la substance, et non de l'attribut. Les essences sont donc distinctes dans les attributs o\u00f9 elles existent, mais ne font qu'un dans la substance dont elles sont l'essence. La r\u00e8gle de convertibilit\u00e9 affirme : toute essence est essence de quelque chose. Les essences sont r\u00e9ellement distinctes du point de vue des attributs, mais l'essence est une du point de vue de l'objet avec lequel elle se r\u00e9ciproque. Les attributs ne sont pas attribu\u00e9s \u00e0 des substances correspondantes, de m\u00eame genre ou de m\u00eame esp\u00e8ce qu'eux-m\u00eames. Au contraire, ils attribuent leur essence \u00e0 _autre chose_ , qui reste donc la m\u00eame pour tous les attributs. C'est pourquoi Spinoza va jusqu'\u00e0 dire : \u00ab Aussi longtemps qu'une substance est con\u00e7ue \u00e0 part, il s'ensuit qu'elle ne peut \u00eatre une chose qui existe \u00e0 part, mais doit \u00eatre une chose telle qu'un attribut d'une _autre_ , qui est l'\u00eatre unique ou le tout... Aucune substance existant en acte ne peut \u00eatre con\u00e7ue comme existant en elle-m\u00eame, mais elle doit appartenir \u00e0 quelque _autre chose_5. \u00bb Toutes les essences existantes sont donc exprim\u00e9es par les attributs dans lesquels elles existent, mais comme l'essence d'autre chose, c'est-\u00e0-dire d'une seule et m\u00eame chose pour tous les attributs. Nous demandons alors : Qu'est-ce qui existe par soi, de telle fa\u00e7on que l'existence d\u00e9coule de son essence ? Il est clair que c'est la substance, le corr\u00e9lat de l'essence, et non l'attribut dans lequel l'essence existait seulement comme essence. On ne confondra pas l'existence de l'essence avec l'existence de son corr\u00e9lat. Toutes les essences existantes sont rapport\u00e9es ou attribu\u00e9es \u00e0 la substance, mais comme au seul \u00eatre dont l'existence d\u00e9coule n\u00e9cessairement de l'essence. La substance a le privil\u00e8ge d'exister par soi : existe par soi, _non pas l'attribut_ , mais ce \u00e0 quoi chaque attribut rapporte son essence, de telle mani\u00e8re que l'existence d\u00e9coule n\u00e9cessairement de l'essence ainsi constitu\u00e9e. Des attributs consid\u00e9r\u00e9s en eux-m\u00eames, Spinoza dira donc de mani\u00e8re parfaitement coh\u00e9rente : \u00ab Nous les concevons seulement dans leur essence et non dans leur existence, nous ne les concevons pas de telle sorte que l'existence d\u00e9coule de leur essence. \u00bb Ce second type de formule ne contredit pas le pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent, mais mesure l'approfondissement d'un probl\u00e8me ou son changement de perspective.\n\nL'exprim\u00e9 n'existe pas hors de son expression, mais il est exprim\u00e9 comme l'essence de ce qui s'exprime. Nous retrouvons toujours la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de distinguer ces trois termes : la substance qui s'exprime, les attributs qui sont des expressions, l'essence exprim\u00e9e. Mais enfin, s'il est vrai que les attributs expriment l'essence de la substance, comment n'exprimeraient-ils pas aussi l'existence qui en d\u00e9coule n\u00e9cessairement ? Ces m\u00eames attributs auxquels on refuse l'existence par soi n'en ont pas moins, en tant qu'attributs, une existence actuelle et n\u00e9cessaire. Bien plus, en d\u00e9montrant que quelque chose est attribut, nous d\u00e9montrons a priori qu'il existe. La diversit\u00e9 des formules du _Court Trait\u00e9_ doit donc s'interpr\u00e9ter ainsi : elles concernent tour \u00e0 tour _l'existence de l'essence, l'existence de la substance, l'existence de l'attribut lui-m\u00eame._ Et dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , c'est l'id\u00e9e d'expression qui recueille ces trois temps, leur donnant une forme syst\u00e9matique.\n\nLe probl\u00e8me des attributs de Dieu fut toujours en \u00e9troit rapport avec celui des noms divins. Comment pourrions-nous nommer Dieu si nous n'en avions pas une connaissance quelconque ? Mais comment le conna\u00eetrions-nous s'il ne se faisait lui-m\u00eame conna\u00eetre en quelque fa\u00e7on, se r\u00e9v\u00e9lant et s'exprimant ? La Parole divine, le Verbe divin, scelle l'alliance des attributs et des noms. Les noms sont des attributs, pour autant que les attributs sont des expressions. Il est vrai que toute la question est de savoir ce qu'ils expriment : la nature m\u00eame de Dieu telle qu'elle est en soi, ou seulement des actions de Dieu comme cr\u00e9ateur, ou m\u00eame de simples qualit\u00e9s divines extrins\u00e8ques, relatives aux cr\u00e9atures ? Spinoza ne manque pas de recueillir ce probl\u00e8me traditionnel. Trop habile grammairien pour n\u00e9gliger la parent\u00e9 des noms et des attributs. Le _Trait\u00e9 th\u00e9ologico-politique_ demande sous quels noms ou par quels attributs Dieu \u00ab se r\u00e9v\u00e8le \u00bb dans l'\u00c9criture ; il demande ce qu'est la parole de Dieu, quelle valeur expressive il faut reconna\u00eetre \u00e0 la voix de Dieu. Et quand Spinoza veut illustrer ce qu'il entend personnellement par attribut, lui vient \u00e0 l'esprit l'exemple des noms propres : \u00ab J'entends par Isra\u00ebl le troisi\u00e8me patriarche, et par Jacob le m\u00eame personnage auquel ce nom a \u00e9t\u00e9 donn\u00e9 parce qu'il a saisi le talon de son fr\u00e8re6. \u00bb Le rapport du spinozisme avec la th\u00e9orie des noms doit \u00eatre \u00e9valu\u00e9 de deux fa\u00e7ons. Comment Spinoza s'ins\u00e8re-t-il dans la tradition ? Mais, surtout, comment la renouvelle-t-il ? On peut d\u00e9j\u00e0 pr\u00e9voir qu'il la renouvelle doublement : parce qu'il con\u00e7oit autrement ce qu'est le nom ou l'attribut, parce qu'il d\u00e9termine autrement ce qui est attribut.\n\nLes attributs chez Spinoza sont des formes dynamiques et actives. Et voil\u00e0 bien ce qui parait essentiel : l'attribut n'est plus attribu\u00e9, il est en quelque sorte \u00ab attributeur \u00bb. Chaque attribut exprime une essence, et l'attribue \u00e0 la substance. Toutes les essences attribu\u00e9es se confondent dans la substance dont elles sont l'essence. Tant que nous concevons l'attribut comme quelque chose d'attribu\u00e9, nous concevons par-l\u00e0 m\u00eame une substance qui serait de m\u00eame esp\u00e8ce ou de m\u00eame genre que lui ; cette substance, alors, n'a par soi qu'une existence possible, puisqu'il d\u00e9pend de la bonne volont\u00e9 d'un Dieu transcendant de la faire exister conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 l'attribut qui nous la fait conna\u00eetre. Au contraire, d\u00e8s que nous posons l'attribut comme \u00ab attributeur \u00bb, nous le concevons en m\u00eame temps comme attribuant son essence \u00e0 quelque chose qui reste identique pour tous les attributs, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00e0 une substance qui existe n\u00e9cessairement. L'attribut rapporte son essence \u00e0 un Dieu immanent, \u00e0 la fois principe et r\u00e9sultat d'une n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 m\u00e9taphysique. En ce sens les attributs chez Spinoza sont de v\u00e9ritables _verbes_ , ayant une valeur expressive : dynamiques, ils ne sont plus attribu\u00e9s \u00e0 des substances variables, ils attribuent quelque chose \u00e0 une substance unique.\n\nMais qu'est-ce qu'ils attribuent, qu'est-ce qu'ils expriment ? Chaque attribut exprime une essence infinie, c'est-\u00e0-dire une qualit\u00e9 illimit\u00e9e. Ces qualit\u00e9s sont substantielles, parce qu'elles qualifient toutes une m\u00eame substance ayant tous les attributs. Aussi bien y a-t-il deux mani\u00e8res de reconna\u00eetre ce qui est attribut : ou bien l'on cherche a priori quelles sont les qualit\u00e9s que l'on con\u00e7oit comme illimit\u00e9es. Ou bien, partant de ce qui est limit\u00e9, nous cherchons a posteriori quelles qualit\u00e9s sont susceptibles d'\u00eatres port\u00e9es \u00e0 l'infini, qui sont comme \u00ab envelopp\u00e9es \u00bb dans les limites du fini : \u00e0 partir de cette pens\u00e9e-ci ou de cette pens\u00e9e-l\u00e0, nous concluons \u00e0 la pens\u00e9e comme attribut infini de Dieu ; \u00e0 partir de tel ou tel corps, \u00e0 l'\u00e9tendue comme attribut infini7.\n\nCette derni\u00e8re m\u00e9thode, a posteriori, doit \u00eatre \u00e9tudi\u00e9e de pr\u00e8s : elle pose tout le probl\u00e8me d'un enveloppement de l'infini. Elle consiste \u00e0 nous faire conna\u00eetre les attributs de Dieu \u00e0 partir des \u00ab cr\u00e9atures \u00bb. Mais, dans cette voie, elle ne proc\u00e8de ni par abstraction, ni par analogie. Les attributs ne sont pas abstraits des choses particuli\u00e8res, encore moins transf\u00e9r\u00e9s \u00e0 Dieu de mani\u00e8re analogique. _Les attributs sont directement atteints comme des formes d'\u00eatre communes aux cr\u00e9atures et \u00e0 Dieu, communes aux modes et \u00e0 la substance._ On voit bien le pr\u00e9tendu danger d'un tel proc\u00e9d\u00e9 : l'anthropomorphisme, et plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement la confusion du fini et de l'infini. Dans une m\u00e9thode d'analogie, on se propose explicitement d'\u00e9viter l'anthropomorphisme : suivant saint Thomas, les qualit\u00e9s qu'on attribue \u00e0 Dieu n'impliquent pas une communaut\u00e9 de forme entre la substance divine et les cr\u00e9atures, mais seulement une analogie, une \u00ab convenance \u00bb de proportion ou de proportionnalit\u00e9. Tant\u00f4t Dieu poss\u00e8de formellement une perfection qui reste extrins\u00e8que dans les cr\u00e9atures, tant\u00f4t il poss\u00e8de \u00e9minemment une perfection qui convient formellement aux cr\u00e9atures. Or l'importance du spinozisme, ici, doit \u00eatre jug\u00e9e \u00e0 la mani\u00e8re dont il renverse le probl\u00e8me. Chaque fois que nous proc\u00e9dons par analogie, nous empruntons certains caract\u00e8res aux cr\u00e9atures, pour les attribuer \u00e0 Dieu soit de mani\u00e8re \u00e9quivoque, soit de mani\u00e8re \u00e9minente. Dieu aurait Vouloir et Entendement, Bont\u00e9 et Sagesse, etc., mais \u00e9quivoquement ou \u00e9minemment8. L'analogie ne peut se passer ni de l'\u00e9quivocit\u00e9 ni de l'\u00e9minence et, par l\u00e0, contient un anthropomorphisme subtil, aussi dangereux que l'anthropomorphisme na\u00eff. Il va de soi qu'un triangle, s'il pouvait parler, dirait que Dieu est \u00e9minemment triangulaire. La m\u00e9thode d'analogie nie qu'il y ait des formes communes \u00e0 Dieu et aux cr\u00e9atures ; mais, loin d'\u00e9chapper au danger qu'elle d\u00e9nonce, elle confond constamment les essences de cr\u00e9atures et l'essence de Dieu. Tant\u00f4t elle supprime l'essence des choses, r\u00e9duisant leurs qualit\u00e9s \u00e0 des d\u00e9terminations qui ne conviennent intrins\u00e8quement qu'\u00e0 Dieu. Tant\u00f4t elle supprime l'essence de Dieu, lui pr\u00eatant \u00e9minemment ce que les cr\u00e9atures poss\u00e8dent formellement. Au contraire, Spinoza affirme l'identit\u00e9 de forme entre les cr\u00e9atures et Dieu, mais s'interdit toute confusion d'essence.\n\nLes attributs constituent l'essence de la substance, mais ils ne constituent nullement l'essence des modes ou des cr\u00e9atures. _Ce sont pourtant des formes communes_ , parce que les cr\u00e9atures les impliquent dans leur propre essence comme dans leur existence. D'o\u00f9 l'importance de la r\u00e8gle de convertibilit\u00e9 : l'essence n'est pas seulement ce sans quoi la chose ne peut ni \u00eatre ni \u00eatre con\u00e7ue, mais r\u00e9ciproquement ce qui ne peut, sans la chose, ni \u00eatre ni \u00eatre con\u00e7u. C'est d'apr\u00e8s cette r\u00e8gle que les attributs sont bien l'essence de la substance, mais ne sont nullement l'essence des modes, par exemple de l'homme : ils peuvent fort bien \u00eatre con\u00e7us sans les modes9. Reste que les modes les enveloppent ou les impliquent, et _les impliquent pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment sous cette forme qui leur est propre en tant qu'ils constituent l'essence de Dieu._ Ce qui revient \u00e0 dire que les attributs \u00e0 leur tour contiennent ou comprennent les essences de mode, et les comprennent formellement, non pas \u00e9minemment. _Les attributs sont donc des formes communes \u00e0 Dieu dont ils constituent l'essence, et aux modes ou cr\u00e9atures qui les impliquent essentiellement._ Les m\u00eames formes s'affirment de Dieu et des cr\u00e9atures, bien que les cr\u00e9atures et Dieu diff\u00e9rent en essence autant qu'en existence. Pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, la diff\u00e9rence consiste en ceci : les modes sont seulement compris sous ces formes, qui se r\u00e9ciproquent au contraire avec Dieu. Cette diff\u00e9rence n'affecte pas la raison formelle de l'attribut prise en tant que telle.\n\nSpinoza, sur ce point, est fort conscient de son originalit\u00e9. Sous pr\u00e9texte que les cr\u00e9atures diff\u00e8rent de Dieu tant par l'essence que par l'existence, on veut que Dieu n'ait rien de commun formellement avec les cr\u00e9atures. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, c'est tout le contraire : les m\u00eames attributs se disent de Dieu qui s'explique en eux, et des modes qui les impliquent \u2013 qui les impliquent sous la m\u00eame forme que celle qui convient \u00e0 Dieu. Bien plus : tant qu'on refuse la communaut\u00e9 formelle, on se condamne \u00e0 confondre les essences ; on les confond par analogie. Mais d\u00e8s qu'on pose la communaut\u00e9 formelle, on se donne le moyen de les distinguer. C'est pourquoi Spinoza ne se vante pas seulement d'avoir r\u00e9duit \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat de cr\u00e9atures des choses que l'on consid\u00e9rait jusqu'\u00e0 lui comme des attributs de Dieu, mais en m\u00eame temps d'avoir \u00e9lev\u00e9 \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat d'attributs de Dieu des choses que l'on consid\u00e9rait comme des cr\u00e9atures10. En r\u00e8gle g\u00e9n\u00e9rale, Spinoza ne voit aucune contradiction entre l'affirmation d'une communaut\u00e9 de forme et la position d'une distinction d'essences. Il dira dans des textes voisins : 1o) si des choses n'ont rien de commun entre elles, l'une ne peut \u00eatre la cause de l'autre ; 2o) si une chose est cause de l'essence et de l'existence d'une autre, elle doit en diff\u00e9rer tant en raison de l'essence qu'en raison de l'existence11. La conciliation de ces textes ne nous para\u00eet soulever aucun probl\u00e8me particulier dans le spinozisme. Quand les correspondants de Spinoza s'\u00e9tonnent, Spinoza s'\u00e9tonne \u00e0 son tour : il rappelle qu'il a toutes raisons pour dire \u00e0 la fois que les cr\u00e9atures diff\u00e8rent de Dieu en essence et en existence, _et_ que Dieu a quelque chose de commun formellement avec les cr\u00e9atures12.\n\nLa m\u00e9thode de Spinoza n'est ni abstraite ni analogique. C'est une m\u00e9thode formelle et de communaut\u00e9. Elle op\u00e8re par notions communes ; or toute la th\u00e9orie spinoziste des notions communes trouve pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment son principe dans ce statut de l'attribut. S'il faut enfin donner un nom \u00e0 cette m\u00e9thode, comme \u00e0 la th\u00e9orie sous-jacente, on y reconna\u00eetra facilement la grande tradition de l'univocit\u00e9. Nous croyons que _la philosophie de Spinoza reste en partie inintelligible, si l'on n'y voit pas une lutte constante contre les trois notions d'\u00e9quivocit\u00e9, d'\u00e9minence et d'analogie._ Les attributs, selon Spinoza, sont des formes d'\u00eatre univoques, qui ne changent pas de nature en changeant de \u00ab sujet \u00bb, c'est-\u00e0-dire quand on les pr\u00e9dique de l'\u00eatre infini et des \u00eatres finis, de la substance et des modes, de Dieu et des cr\u00e9atures. Nous croyons n'\u00f4ter rien \u00e0 l'originalit\u00e9 de Spinoza en le repla\u00e7ant dans une perspective qui \u00e9tait d\u00e9j\u00e0 celle de Duns Scot. Comment Spinoza pour son compte interpr\u00e8te la notion d'univocit\u00e9, comment il la comprend d'une tout autre fa\u00e7on que Duns Scot, nous devons remettre \u00e0 plus tard cette analyse. Il nous suffit pour le moment de r\u00e9unir les premi\u00e8res d\u00e9terminations de l'attribut. Les attributs sont des formes d'\u00eatre infinies, des raisons formelles illimit\u00e9es, ultimes, irr\u00e9ductibles ; ces formes sont communes \u00e0 Dieu dont elles constituent l'essence et aux modes qui les impliquent dans leur propre essence. Les attributs sont des verbes exprimant des qualit\u00e9s illimit\u00e9es ; ces qualit\u00e9s sont comme envelopp\u00e9es dans les limites du fini. Les attributs sont des expressions de Dieu ; ces expressions de Dieu sont univoques, elles constituent la nature m\u00eame de Dieu comme Nature naturante, elles sont envelopp\u00e9es dans la nature des choses ou Nature natur\u00e9e qui, d'une certaine fa\u00e7on, les r\u00e9-exprime \u00e0 son tour.\n\nSpinoza, d\u00e8s lors, est en mesure de distinguer les attributs et les propres. Le point de d\u00e9part est aristot\u00e9licien : le propre est ce qui appartient \u00e0 une chose, mais n'explique jamais ce qu'elle est. Les propres de Dieu sont donc seulement des \u00ab adjectifs \u00bb qui ne nous font rien conna\u00eetre substantiellement ; Dieu ne serait pas Dieu sans eux, mais n'est pas Dieu par eux13. Spinoza peut, conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 une longue tradition, donner aux propres le nom d'attributs ; il n'y en aura pas moins, selon lui, diff\u00e9rence de nature entre deux sortes d'attributs. Mais que veut dire Spinoza, quand il ajoute que les propres de Dieu ne sont que \u00ab des modes qui peuvent lui \u00eatre imput\u00e9s14 \u00bb ? Mode, ici, ne doit pas \u00eatre pris au sens particulier que Spinoza lui donne souvent, mais en un sens plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, au sens scolastique de \u00ab modalit\u00e9 de l'essence \u00bb. Infini, parfait, immuable, \u00e9ternel sont des propres qui se disent de tous les attributs. Omniscient, omnipr\u00e9sent, des propres qui se disent d'un attribut d\u00e9termin\u00e9 (la pens\u00e9e, l'\u00e9tendue). En effet, tous les attributs expriment l'essence de la substance, chaque attribut exprime une essence de substance. Mais les propres n'expriment rien : \u00ab Nous ne pouvons pas savoir par ces propres quelle est l'essence et quels sont les attributs de l'\u00eatre auxquels appartiennent ces propres15. \u00bb Ils ne constituent pas la nature de la substance, mais se disent de ce qui constitue cette nature. Ils ne forment donc pas l'essence d'un \u00catre, mais seulement la modalit\u00e9 de cette essence telle qu'elle est form\u00e9e. Infini est le propre de la substance, c'est-\u00e0-dire la modalit\u00e9 de chaque attribut qui en constitue l'essence. Omniscient est le propre de la substance pensante, c'est-\u00e0-dire la modalit\u00e9 infinie de cet attribut pens\u00e9e qui exprime une essence de substance. Les propres ne sont pas des attributs, \u00e0 proprement parler, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce qu'ils ne sont pas _expressifs._ Ils seraient plut\u00f4t comme des \u00ab notions impresses \u00bb, comme des caract\u00e8res imprim\u00e9s, soit dans tous les attributs, soit dans tel ou tel d'entre eux. L'opposition des attributs et des propres porte donc sur deux points. Les attributs sont des verbes exprimant des essences ou des qualit\u00e9s substantielles ; mais les propres sont seulement des adjectifs indiquant la modalit\u00e9 de ces essences ou de ces qualit\u00e9s. Les attributs de Dieu sont des formes communes, communes \u00e0 la substance qui se r\u00e9ciproque avec elles, et aux modes qui les impliquent sans r\u00e9ciprocit\u00e9 ; mais les propres de Dieu sont vraiment propres \u00e0 Dieu, ils ne se disent pas des modes mais seulement des attributs.\n\nUne seconde cat\u00e9gorie de propres concerne Dieu comme cause, en tant qu'il agit ou produit : non plus infini, parfait, \u00e9ternel, immuable, mais cause de toutes choses, pr\u00e9destination, providence16. Or, puisque Dieu produit dans ses attributs, ces propres sont soumis au m\u00eame principe que les pr\u00e9c\u00e9dents. Certains se disent de tous les attributs ; d'autres, de tel ou tel. Ces seconds propres sont encore des adjectifs ; mais au lieu d'indiquer des modalit\u00e9s, ils indiquent des relations, relations de Dieu \u00e0 ses cr\u00e9atures ou \u00e0 ses produits. Enfin, une troisi\u00e8me cat\u00e9gorie d\u00e9signe des propres qui n'appartiennent m\u00eame pas \u00e0 Dieu : Dieu comme souverain bien, comme mis\u00e9ricordieux, comme juste et charitable17. \u00c0 cet \u00e9gard, c'est surtout le _Trait\u00e9 th\u00e9ologico-politique_ qui peut nous \u00e9clairer. Ce Trait\u00e9 parle de la justice et de la charit\u00e9 divines comme d'\u00ab attributs qui peuvent servir de mod\u00e8le \u00e0 une certaine mani\u00e8re de vivre18 \u00bb. Ces propres n'appartiennent pas \u00e0 Dieu comme cause ; il ne s'agit plus d'un rapport de Dieu avec ses cr\u00e9atures, mais de d\u00e9terminations extrins\u00e8ques qui indiquent seulement la fa\u00e7on dont les cr\u00e9atures imaginent Dieu. Il est vrai que ces d\u00e9nominations ont des sens et des valeurs extr\u00eamement variables : on va jusqu'\u00e0 pr\u00eater \u00e0 Dieu des \u00e9minences en tous genres, une bouche et des yeux divins, des qualit\u00e9s morales et des passions sublimes, des montagnes et des cieux. Mais, m\u00eame \u00e0 s'en tenir \u00e0 la justice et \u00e0 la charit\u00e9, on n'atteint rien de la nature de Dieu, ni de ses op\u00e9rations comme Cause. Adam, Abraham, Mo\u00efse ignorent non seulement les vrais attributs divins, mais aussi la plupart des propres de la premi\u00e8re et de la seconde esp\u00e8ce19. Dieu se r\u00e9v\u00e8le \u00e0 eux sous des d\u00e9nominations extrins\u00e8ques qui leur servent d'avertissements, de commandements, de r\u00e8gles ou de mod\u00e8le de vie. Plus que jamais, il faut dire que ces troisi\u00e8mes propres n'ont rien d'expressif. Ce ne sont pas des expressions divines, mais des notions imprim\u00e9es dans l'imagination pour nous faire ob\u00e9ir, nous faire servir un Dieu dont nous ignorons la nature.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _Lettre 2, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 5) : _quod concipitur per se et in se._ Il ne semble donc pas que Delbos soit fond\u00e9 \u00e0 dire que, dans cette lettre 2, l'attribut se d\u00e9finit comme la substance (cf. \u00ab La Doctrine spinoziste des attributs de Dieu \u00bb, _Ann\u00e9e philosophique_ , 1912).\n\n2.  Cf. 1o) _CT_ , Appendice I, 4, cor. 2o) _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 17 et note 5 ; et premier dialogue, 9. 3o) _CT_ , I, ch. 2, passim et 17 (note 5).\n\n3.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 17.\n\n4.  _Lettre 10, \u00e0 De Vries_ (III, p. 34).\n\n5.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 17, note 5.\n\n6.  _Lettre 9, \u00e0 De Vries_ (III, p. 33).\n\n7.  _\u00c9_ , II, 1 et 2 : Spinoza d\u00e9montre que la pens\u00e9e et l'\u00e9tendue sont des attributs. Le proc\u00e9d\u00e9 a posteriori appara\u00eet dans la d\u00e9monstration m\u00eame, le proc\u00e9d\u00e9 a priori, dans le scolie.\n\n8.  Sur la critique de l'\u00e9quivocit\u00e9, cf. _\u00c9_ , I, 17, cor. 2. (Si la volont\u00e9 et l'entendement s'attribuaient essentiellement \u00e0 Dieu, ce serait de mani\u00e8re \u00e9quivoque, donc toute verbale, \u00e0 peu pr\u00e8s comme le mot \u00ab chien \u00bb d\u00e9signe une constellation c\u00e9leste.) Sur la critique de l'\u00e9minence, cf. _Lettre 56, \u00e0 Boxel_ , III, p. 190. (Si le triangle pouvait parler, il dirait que Dieu est triangulaire \u00e9minemment... Spinoza r\u00e9pond ici \u00e0 Boxel qui pensait que l'\u00e9minence et l'analogie \u00e9taient seules capables de nous sauver de l'anthropomorphisme.)\n\n9.  _\u00c9_ , II, 10, scolie du corollaire. La d\u00e9finition insuffisante de l'essence (ce sans quoi la chose ne peut ni \u00eatre ni \u00eatre con\u00e7ue) se trouve dans Suarez : cf. \u00c9. GILSON, _Index scolastico-cart\u00e9sien_ , pp. 105-106.\n\n10.  _Lettre 6, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 25).\n\n11.  Cf. 1o) _\u00c9_ , I, 3, prop. ; 2o) _\u00c9_ , I, 17, sc. [Pour concilier ces textes, on a parfois cherch\u00e9 des diff\u00e9rences de points de vue (causalit\u00e9 immanente et causalit\u00e9 transitive, etc.) : cf. LACHI\u00c8ZE-REY, _op. cit._ , pp. 156-159, note.]\n\n12.  _Lettre 4, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 11) : \u00ab Quant \u00e0 ce que vous dites, que Dieu n'a rien de commun formellement avec les choses cr\u00e9\u00e9es, j'ai pos\u00e9 le contraire dans ma d\u00e9finition \u00bb (il s'agit de la d\u00e9finition de Dieu comme substance consistant en une infinit\u00e9 d' _attributs_ ). _Lettre 64, \u00e0 Schuller_ (III, p. 206) : \u00ab Est-il possible qu'une chose soit produite par une autre dont elle diff\u00e8re tant par l'essence que par l'existence ? Et, en effet, des choses diff\u00e9rant ainsi l'une de l'autre _semblent_ n'avoir rien de commun. _Mais_ comme toutes les choses singuli\u00e8res, \u00e0 part celles qui sont produites par leurs semblables, diff\u00e9rent de leurs causes tant par l'essence que par l'existence, je ne vois ici rien de douteux \u00bb. (Spinoza renvoie alors \u00e0 la d\u00e9finition du _mode_ , _\u00c9_ , I, 25, cor.)\n\n13.  _CT_ , I, ch. 7, 6 (cf. aussi I, ch. 1, 9, note 4 ; ch. 3, 1, note 1).\n\n14.  _CT_ , I, ch. 7, 1, note 1.\n\n15.  _CT_ , I, ch. 7, 6.\n\n16.  Cf. _CT_ , I, chapitres 3, 4, 5, et 6.\n\n17.  _CT_ , I, ch. 7.\n\n18.  _TTP_ , ch. 13 (III, p. 241).\n\n19.  _TTP_ , ch. 2 (II, p. 115) : Adam par exemple sait que Dieu est cause de toutes choses, mais il ne sait pas que Dieu est omniscient et omnipr\u00e9sent.\n\n## CHAPITRE III\n\n## ATTRIBUTS ET NOMS DIVINS\n\nD'apr\u00e8s une longue tradition, les noms divins se rapportent \u00e0 des manifestations de Dieu. Inversement, les manifestations divines sont des paroles par lesquelles Dieu se fait conna\u00eetre sous tel ou tel nom. Il revient donc au m\u00eame de demander si les noms qui d\u00e9signent Dieu sont des affirmations ou des n\u00e9gations, si les qualit\u00e9s qui le manifestent et les attributs qui lui conviennent sont positifs ou n\u00e9gatifs. Le concept d'expression, \u00e0 la fois parole et manifestation, lumi\u00e8re et son, semble avoir une logique propre qui favorise les deux hypoth\u00e8ses. On insistera tant\u00f4t sur la positivit\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire sur l'immanence de l'exprim\u00e9 dans l'expression, tant\u00f4t sur la \u00ab n\u00e9gativit\u00e9 \u00bb, c'est-\u00e0-dire sur la transcendance de ce qui s'exprime par rapport \u00e0 toutes les expressions. Ce qui cache exprime aussi, mais ce qui exprime cache encore. C'est pourquoi, dans le probl\u00e8me des noms divins ou des attributs de Dieu, tout est question de nuance. La th\u00e9ologie dite n\u00e9gative admet que des affirmations sont capables de d\u00e9signer Dieu comme cause, sous des r\u00e8gles d'immanence qui vont du plus proche au plus lointain. Mais Dieu comme substance ou essence ne peut \u00eatre d\u00e9fini que n\u00e9gativement, suivant des r\u00e8gles de transcendance o\u00f9 l'on nie tour \u00e0 tour les noms les plus lointains, puis les plus proches. Et enfin, la d\u00e9it\u00e9 suprasubstantielle ou suressentielle se tient splendide, aussi loin des n\u00e9gations que des affirmations. La th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative combine donc la m\u00e9thode n\u00e9gative avec la m\u00e9thode affirmative, et pr\u00e9tend les d\u00e9passer toutes deux. Comment saurait-on ce qu'il faut nier de Dieu comme essence, si l'on ne savait d'abord ce qu'on doit en affirmer comme cause ? On ne peut donc d\u00e9finir la th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative que par son dynamisme : les affirmations se d\u00e9passent dans des n\u00e9gations, les affirmations et les n\u00e9gations se d\u00e9passent dans une \u00e9minence t\u00e9n\u00e9breuse.\n\nUne th\u00e9ologie d'ambition plus positive, comme celle de saint Thomas, compte sur l'analogie pour fonder de nouvelles r\u00e8gles affirmatives. Les qualit\u00e9s positives ne d\u00e9signent pas seulement Dieu comme cause, mais lui conviennent substantiellement, \u00e0 condition de subir un traitement analogique. Dieu est bon ne signifie pas que Dieu est non mauvais ; ni qu'il est cause de bont\u00e9. Mais en v\u00e9rit\u00e9 : ce que nous appelons bont\u00e9 dans les cr\u00e9atures \u00ab pr\u00e9existe \u00bb en Dieu, suivant une modalit\u00e9 plus haute qui convient avec la substance divine. L\u00e0 encore, c'est un dynamisme qui d\u00e9finit la nouvelle m\u00e9thode. Ce dynamisme, \u00e0 son tour, maintient les droits du n\u00e9gatif et de l'\u00e9minent, mais les comprend dans l'analogie : on remonte d'une n\u00e9gation pr\u00e9alable \u00e0 un attribut positif, cet attribut s'appliquant \u00e0 Dieu _formaliter eminenter_1.\n\nLa philosophie arabe, la philosophie juive se heurtaient au m\u00eame probl\u00e8me. Comment des noms s'appliqueraient-ils, non seulement \u00e0 Dieu comme cause, mais \u00e0 l'essence de Dieu ? Faut-il les prendre n\u00e9gativement, les nier d'apr\u00e8s certaines r\u00e8gles ? Faut-il les affirmer, d'apr\u00e8s d'autres r\u00e8gles ? Or, si nous nous pla\u00e7ons du point de vue du spinozisme, les deux tendances paraissent \u00e9galement fausses, parce que le probl\u00e8me auquel elles se rapportent est lui-m\u00eame enti\u00e8rement faux.\n\nIl est \u00e9vident que la division tripartite des propres chez Spinoza reproduit une classification traditionnelle des attributs de Dieu : 1o) d\u00e9nominations symboliques, formes et figures, signes et rites, m\u00e9tonymies du sensible au divin ; 2o) attributs d'action ; 3o) attributs d'essence. Soit une liste ordinaire d'attributs divins : bont\u00e9, essence, raison, vie, intelligence, sagesse, vertu, b\u00e9atitude, v\u00e9rit\u00e9, \u00e9ternit\u00e9 ; ou bien grandeur, amour, paix, unit\u00e9, perfection. On demande si ces attributs conviennent avec l'essence de Dieu ; s'il faut les comprendre comme des affirmations conditionnelles, ou comme des n\u00e9gations qui marqueraient seulement l'ablation d'un privatif. Mais selon Spinoza, ces questions ne se posent pas, parce que la plupart de ces attributs sont seulement des propres. Et ceux qui ne le sont pas sont des \u00eatres de raison. Ils n'expriment rien de la nature de Dieu, ni n\u00e9gativement ni positivement. _Dieu n'est pas plus cach\u00e9 en eux qu'exprim\u00e9 par eux_. Les propres ne sont ni n\u00e9gatifs ni affirmatifs ; en style kantien, on dirait qu'ils sont ind\u00e9finis. Quand on confond la nature divine avec les propres, il est in\u00e9vitable qu'on ait de Dieu une id\u00e9e elle-m\u00eame ind\u00e9finie. On oscille alors entre une conception \u00e9minente de la n\u00e9gation et une conception analogique de l'affirmation. Chacune, dans son dynamisme, implique un peu de l'autre. On se fait une fausse conception de la n\u00e9gation parce qu'on introduit l'analogie dans l'affirm\u00e9. Mais l'affirmation n'en est plus une quand elle cesse d'\u00eatre univoque, ou de s'affirmer formellement de ses objets.\n\nQue la nature de Dieu n'a jamais \u00e9t\u00e9 d\u00e9finie, parce qu'elle fut toujours confondue avec les \u00ab propres \u00bb, c'est une des th\u00e8ses principales de Spinoza. Elle explique son attitude \u00e0 l'\u00e9gard des _th\u00e9ologiens_. Mais les philosophes ont suivi la th\u00e9ologie : Descartes lui-m\u00eame croit que la nature de Dieu consiste dans l'infiniment parfait. L'infiniment parfait, pourtant, n'est qu'une modalit\u00e9 de ce qui constitue la nature divine. Seuls les attributs au vrai sens du mot, la pens\u00e9e, l'\u00e9tendue, sont les \u00e9l\u00e9ments constitutifs de Dieu, ses expressions constituantes, ses affirmations, ses raisons positives et formelles, en un mot sa nature. Mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, n'\u00e9tant pas cach\u00e9s par vocation, on se demandera pourquoi ces attributs furent ignor\u00e9s, pourquoi Dieu fut d\u00e9natur\u00e9, confondu avec ses propres qui en donnaient une image ind\u00e9finie. Il faut trouver une raison capable d'expliquer pourquoi, malgr\u00e9 tout leur g\u00e9nie, les pr\u00e9d\u00e9cesseurs de Spinoza s'en tinrent aux propri\u00e9t\u00e9s et ne surent pas d\u00e9couvrir la nature de Dieu.\n\nLa r\u00e9ponse de Spinoza est simple : on manquait d'une m\u00e9thode historique, critique et interne, capable d'interpr\u00e9ter l'\u00c9criture2. On ne se demandait pas quel \u00e9tait le projet des textes sacr\u00e9s. On les consid\u00e9rait comme la Parole de Dieu, la mani\u00e8re dont Dieu s'exprimait. Ce qu'ils disaient de Dieu nous en paraissait tout l'\u00ab exprim\u00e9 \u00bb, ce qu'ils ne disaient pas semblait inexprimable3. \u00c0 aucun moment nous ne demandions : la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation religieuse porte-t-elle sur la nature de Dieu ? A-t-elle pour but de nous faire conna\u00eetre cette nature ? Est-elle justiciable des traitements, positif ou n\u00e9gatif, qu'on pr\u00e9tend lui appliquer pour achever la d\u00e9termination de cette nature ? En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation concerne seulement certains propres. Elle ne se propose nullement de nous faire conna\u00eetre la nature divine et ses attributs. Sans doute les donn\u00e9es de l'\u00c9criture sont-elles h\u00e9t\u00e9rog\u00e8nes : nous nous trouvons tant\u00f4t devant des enseignements rituels particuliers, tant\u00f4t devant des enseignements moraux universels, tant\u00f4t m\u00eame devant un enseignement sp\u00e9culatif, le minimum de sp\u00e9culation n\u00e9cessaire \u00e0 l'enseignement moral. Mais nul attribut de Dieu n'est jamais r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9. Rien que des \u00ab signes \u00bb variables, d\u00e9nominations extrins\u00e8ques qui garantissent un commandement divin. Au mieux, des \u00ab propres \u00bb, comme l'existence divine, l'unit\u00e9, l'omniscience et l'omnipr\u00e9sence, qui garantissent un enseignement moral4. Car le but de l'\u00c9criture est de nous soumettre \u00e0 des mod\u00e8les de vie, de nous faire ob\u00e9ir et de fonder l'ob\u00e9issance. Il serait absurde, alors, de croire que la connaissance puisse se substituer \u00e0 la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation : comment la nature divine suppos\u00e9e connue pourrait-elle servir de r\u00e8gle pratique dans la vie quotidienne ? Mais il est plus absurde encore de croire que la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation nous fasse conna\u00eetre quelque chose de la nature ou de l'essence de Dieu. Cette absurdit\u00e9 pourtant traverse toute la th\u00e9ologie. _Et, de l\u00e0, elle compromet la philosophie tout enti\u00e8re_. Tant\u00f4t l'on fait subir aux propres de la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation un traitement sp\u00e9cial qui les r\u00e9concilie avec la raison ; tant\u00f4t m\u00eame on d\u00e9couvre des propres de la raison, distincts de ceux de la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation. Mais on ne sort pas ainsi de la th\u00e9ologie ; toujours on compte sur des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s pour exprimer la nature de Dieu. On m\u00e9conna\u00eet leur diff\u00e9rence de nature avec les v\u00e9ritables attributs. Or il est in\u00e9vitable que Dieu soit toujours \u00e9minent par rapport \u00e0 ses propres. D\u00e8s qu'on leur pr\u00eate une valeur expressive qu'ils n'ont pas, on pr\u00eate \u00e0 la substance divine une nature inexprimable qu'elle n'a pas davantage.\n\nJamais ne fut pouss\u00e9 plus loin l'effort pour distinguer deux domaines : la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation et l'expression. Ou deux relations h\u00e9t\u00e9rog\u00e8nes : celle du signe et du signifi\u00e9, celle de l'expression et de l'exprim\u00e9. _Le signe se rattache toujours \u00e0 un propre_ ; il signifie toujours un commandement ; et il fonde notre ob\u00e9issance. _L'expression concerne toujours un attribut_ ; elle exprime une essence, c'est-\u00e0-dire une nature \u00e0 l'infinitif ; elle nous la fait conna\u00eetre. Si bien que la \u00ab Parole de Dieu \u00bb a deux sens tr\u00e8s divers : une Parole expressive, qui n'a pas besoin de mots ni de signes, mais seulement de l'essence de Dieu et de l'entendement de l'homme. Une Parole impresse, imp\u00e9rative, op\u00e9rant par signe et commandement : elle n'est pas expressive, mais frappe notre imagination et nous inspire la soumission n\u00e9cessaire5. Dira-t-on au moins que les commandements \u00ab expriment \u00bb les volont\u00e9s de Dieu ? Ce serait encore pr\u00e9juger de la volont\u00e9 comme appartenant \u00e0 la nature de Dieu, prendre un \u00eatre de raison, une d\u00e9termination extrins\u00e8que, pour un attribut divin. Tout m\u00e9lange des deux domaines est ruineux. Chaque fois qu'on fait d'un signe une expression, on voit des myst\u00e8res partout, d'abord et y compris dans l'\u00c9criture elle-m\u00eame. Tels les Juifs qui pensent que tout exprime Dieu, sans condition6. On se fait alors une conception mystique de l'expression : celle-ci ne nous para\u00eet pas moins cacher que r\u00e9v\u00e9ler ce qu'elle exprime. Les \u00e9nigmes, les paraboles, les symboles, les analogies, les m\u00e9tonymies viennent ainsi troubler l'ordre rationnel et positif de l'expression pure. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9 l'\u00c9criture est bien Parole de Dieu, mais parole de commandement : imp\u00e9rative, elle n'exprime rien, parce qu'elle ne fait conna\u00eetre aucun attribut divin.\n\nL'analyse de Spinoza ne se contente pas de marquer l'irr\u00e9ductibilit\u00e9 des domaines. Elle propose une explication des signes, qui est comme la gen\u00e8se d'une illusion. Il n'est pas faux de dire, en effet, que chaque chose exprime Dieu. L'ordre de la nature enti\u00e8re est expressif. Mais il suffit de mal comprendre une loi naturelle pour la saisir comme un imp\u00e9ratif ou un commandement. Quand Spinoza illustrera les diff\u00e9rents genres de connaissance par l'exemple fameux des nombres proportionnels, il montrera que, au plus bas degr\u00e9, nous ne comprenons pas la r\u00e8gle de proportionnalit\u00e9 : alors nous en retenons un signe, qui nous dit quelle op\u00e9ration nous _devons_ faire sur ces nombres. M\u00eame les r\u00e8gles techniques prennent un aspect moral quand nous ignorons leur sens et n'en retenons qu'un signe. \u00c0 plus forte raison les lois de nature. Dieu r\u00e9v\u00e8le \u00e0 Adam que l'ingestion de la pomme aurait pour lui des cons\u00e9quences funestes ; mais Adam, impuissant \u00e0 saisir les rapports constitutifs des choses, imagine cette loi de nature comme une loi morale qui lui d\u00e9fend de manger du fruit, et Dieu lui-m\u00eame comme un souverain qui le sanctionne parce qu'il en a mang\u00e97. Le signe est la chose des proph\u00e8tes ; mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment les proph\u00e8tes ont l'imagination forte et l'entendement faible8. Les expressions de Dieu ne tombent jamais dans l'imagination ; celle-ci saisit tout sous l'aspect du signe et du commandement.\n\nDieu ne s'exprime ni par des signes, ni dans des propres. Quand nous lisons dans l' _Exode_ que Dieu s'est r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9 \u00e0 Abraham, \u00e0 Isaac et \u00e0 Jacob, mais comme _Dieu Sada\u00ef_ (suffisant aux besoins de chacun) et non comme J\u00e9hovah, nous ne devons pas conclure au myst\u00e8re du t\u00e9tragramme, ni \u00e0 la sur\u00e9minence de Dieu pris dans sa nature absolue. Nous devons conclure plut\u00f4t que la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation n'a pas pour objet d'exprimer cette nature ou essence9. En revanche, la connaissance naturelle implique l'essence de Dieu ; et elle l'implique, parce qu'elle est connaissance des attributs qui expriment effectivement cette essence. Dieu s'exprime dans ses attributs, les attributs s'expriment dans les modes qui en d\u00e9pendent : c'est par l\u00e0 que l'ordre de la nature manifeste Dieu. Les seuls noms expressifs de Dieu, les seules expressions divines sont donc les attributs : formes communes qui se disent de la substance et des modes. Si nous n'en connaissons que deux, c'est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce que nous sommes constitu\u00e9s par un mode de l'\u00e9tendue et un mode de la pens\u00e9e. Du moins ces attributs ne supposent-ils aucune r\u00e9v\u00e9lation ; ils renvoient \u00e0 la lumi\u00e8re naturelle. Nous les connaissons tels qu'ils sont en Dieu, dans leur \u00eatre commun \u00e0 la substance et aux modes. Spinoza insiste sur ce point, en citant un texte de saint Paul dont il fait presque un manifeste de l'univocit\u00e9 : \u00ab Les choses divines cach\u00e9es depuis les fondements du monde sont aper\u00e7ues par l'entendement dans les cr\u00e9atures de Dieu10... \u00bb Il semble que l'univocit\u00e9 des attributs se confonde avec leur expressivit\u00e9 : de mani\u00e8re indissoluble, les attributs sont expressifs et univoques.\n\nLes attributs ne servent pas \u00e0 nier, pas plus qu'on ne les nie de l'essence. Pas davantage on ne les affirme de Dieu par analogie. Une affirmation par analogie ne vaut pas mieux qu'une n\u00e9gation par \u00e9minence (il y a encore de l'\u00e9minence dans le premier cas, d\u00e9j\u00e0 de l'analogie dans le second). Il est vrai, dit Spinoza, qu'un attribut est _ni\u00e9_ d'un autre11. Mais en quel sens ? \u00ab Si l'on dit que l'\u00e9tendue n'est pas limit\u00e9e par l'\u00e9tendue, mais par la pens\u00e9e, cela ne revient-il pas \u00e0 dire que l'\u00e9tendue n'est pas infinie absolument, mais seulement en tant qu'\u00e9tendue12 ? \u00bb La n\u00e9gation, ici, n'implique donc aucune opposition ni privation. L'\u00e9tendue comme telle ne souffre d'aucune imperfection ou limitation qui d\u00e9pendrait de sa nature ; aussi bien est-il vain d'imaginer un Dieu qui poss\u00e9derait \u00ab \u00e9minemment \u00bb l'\u00e9tendue13. Inversement, en quel sens l'attribut est-il affirm\u00e9 de la substance ? Spinoza insiste souvent sur ce point : les substances ou les attributs existent _formellement_ dans la Nature. Or, parmi les nombreux sens du mot \u00ab formel \u00bb, nous devons tenir compte de celui par lequel il s'oppose \u00e0 \u00ab \u00e9minent \u00bb ou \u00e0 \u00ab analogue \u00bb. Jamais la substance ne doit \u00eatre pens\u00e9e comme comprenant \u00e9minemment ses attributs ; \u00e0 leur tour, les attributs ne doivent pas \u00eatre pens\u00e9s comme contenant \u00e9minemment les essences de mode. Les attributs s'affirment formellement de la substance. Les attributs se disent formellement de la substance dont ils constituent l'essence, et des modes dont ils contiennent les essences. Spinoza ne cesse de rappeler le caract\u00e8re affirmatif des attributs qui d\u00e9finissent la substance, comme la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 pour toute bonne d\u00e9finition d'\u00eatre elle-m\u00eame affirmative14. Les attributs sont des affirmations. Mais l'affirmation, dans son essence, est toujours formelle, actuelle, univoque : c'est en ce sens qu'elle est expressive.\n\nLa philosophie de Spinoza est une philosophie de l'affirmation pure. L'affirmation est le principe sp\u00e9culatif dont toute l' _\u00c9thique_ d\u00e9pend. \u00c0 ce point, nous pouvons chercher comment Spinoza rencontre, pour s'en servir, une id\u00e9e cart\u00e9sienne. Car la distinction r\u00e9elle tendait \u00e0 donner au concept d'affirmation une v\u00e9ritable logique. En effet, la distinction r\u00e9elle telle que Descartes l'utilisait nous mettait sur la voie d'une d\u00e9couverte profonde : les termes distingu\u00e9s conservaient toute leur positivit\u00e9 respective, au lieu de se d\u00e9finir par opposition l'un avec l'autre. _Non opposita sed diversa_ , telle \u00e9tait la formule de la nouvelle logique15. La distinction r\u00e9elle semblait annoncer une nouvelle conception du n\u00e9gatif, sans opposition ni privation, mais aussi une nouvelle conception de l'affirmation, sans \u00e9minence et sans analogie. Or si cette voie n'aboutit pas dans le cart\u00e9sianisme, c'est pour une raison que nous avons vue pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment : Descartes donne encore \u00e0 la distinction r\u00e9elle une valeur num\u00e9rique, une fonction de division substantielle dans la nature et dans les choses. Il con\u00e7oit toute qualit\u00e9 comme positive, toute r\u00e9alit\u00e9 comme perfection ; mais tout n'est pas r\u00e9alit\u00e9 dans une substance qualifi\u00e9e et distingu\u00e9e, tout n'est pas perfection dans la nature d'une chose. C'est \u00e0 Descartes, entre autres, que Spinoza pense quand il \u00e9crit : \u00ab Dire que la nature de la chose exigeait la limitation et par suite ne pouvait \u00eatre autrement, c'est ne rien dire, car la nature d'une chose ne peut rien exiger tant qu'elle n'est pas16. \u00bb Chez Descartes, il y a des limitations que la chose \u00ab exige \u00bb en vertu de sa nature, des id\u00e9es qui ont si peu de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 qu'on pourrait presque dire qu'elles proc\u00e8dent du n\u00e9ant, des natures auxquelles manque quelque chose. Par l\u00e0 se r\u00e9introduit tout ce que la logique de la distinction r\u00e9elle \u00e9tait cens\u00e9e chasser : la privation, l'\u00e9minence. Nous verrons que _l'\u00e9minence, l'analogie, m\u00eame une certaine \u00e9quivocit\u00e9 restent des cat\u00e9gories presque spontan\u00e9es de la pens\u00e9e cart\u00e9sienne_. Au contraire, pour d\u00e9gager les cons\u00e9quences extr\u00eames de la distinction r\u00e9elle con\u00e7ue comme logique de l'affirmation, il fallait s'\u00e9lever jusqu'\u00e0 l'id\u00e9e d'une seule substance ayant tous les attributs r\u00e9ellement distincts. Il fallait d'abord \u00e9viter toute confusion, non seulement des attributs et des modes, mais des attributs et des propres.\n\nLes attributs sont les affirmations de Dieu, les _logoi_ ou les vrais noms divins. Revenons au texte o\u00f9 Spinoza invoque l'exemple d'Isra\u00ebl, ainsi nomm\u00e9 comme patriarche, mais appel\u00e9 Jacob par rapport \u00e0 son fr\u00e8re17. D'apr\u00e8s le contexte, il s'agit d'illustrer la distinction de raison telle qu'elle est entre la substance et l'attribut : Isra\u00ebl est dit Jacob ( _Supplantator_ ) par rapport \u00e0 son fr\u00e8re, comme \u00ab plan \u00bb est dit \u00ab blanc \u00bb par rapport \u00e0 un homme qui le regarde, comme la substance est dite telle ou telle par rapport \u00e0 l'entendement qui lui \u00ab attribue \u00bb telle ou telle essence. Il est certain que ce passage favorise une interpr\u00e9tation intellectualiste ou m\u00eame id\u00e9aliste des attributs. Mais un philosophe est toujours amen\u00e9 \u00e0 simplifier sa pens\u00e9e dans certaines occasions, ou \u00e0 la formuler partiellement. Spinoza ne manque pas de souligner l'ambigu\u00eft\u00e9 des exemples qu'il cite. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9 l'attribut n'est pas une simple fa\u00e7on de voir ou de concevoir ; sa relation avec l'entendement est bien fondamentale, mais s'interpr\u00e8te autrement. C'est parce que les attributs sont eux-m\u00eames des _expressions_ qu'ils renvoient n\u00e9cessairement \u00e0 l'entendement comme \u00e0 la seule instance qui per\u00e7oit _l'exprim\u00e9_. C'est parce que les attributs expliquent la substance, qu'ils sont, par l\u00e0-m\u00eame, relatifs \u00e0 un entendement dans lequel toutes les explications se reproduisent, ou \u00ab s'expliquent \u00bb elles-m\u00eames objectivement. Alors le probl\u00e8me tend \u00e0 se pr\u00e9ciser : les attributs sont des expressions, mais comment des expressions diff\u00e9rentes peuvent-elles d\u00e9signer une seule et m\u00eame chose ? Comment des noms diff\u00e9rents peuvent-ils avoir un m\u00eame d\u00e9sign\u00e9 ? \u00ab Vous d\u00e9sirez que je montre par un exemple comment une seule et m\u00eame chose peut \u00eatre d\u00e9sign\u00e9e ( _insigniri_ ) par deux noms. \u00bb\n\nLe r\u00f4le de l'entendement est celui qui lui revient dans une logique de l'expression. Cette logique est le r\u00e9sultat d'une longue tradition, sto\u00efcienne et m\u00e9di\u00e9vale. On distingue dans une expression (par exemple dans une proposition) ce qu'elle exprime et ce qu'elle d\u00e9signe18. L'exprim\u00e9 est comme le sens qui n'existe pas hors de l'expression ; il renvoie donc \u00e0 un entendement qui le saisit objectivement, c'est-\u00e0-dire id\u00e9alement. Mais il se dit de la chose, et non de l'expression elle-m\u00eame ; l'entendement le rapporte \u00e0 l'objet d\u00e9sign\u00e9, comme l'essence de cet objet. On con\u00e7oit d\u00e8s lors que des noms puissent se distinguer par leur sens, mais que ces sens diff\u00e9rents soient rapport\u00e9s au m\u00eame objet d\u00e9sign\u00e9 dont ils constituent l'essence. Il y a dans la conception spinoziste des attributs une sorte de transposition de cette th\u00e9orie du sens. Chaque attribut est un nom ou une expression distincte ; ce qu'il exprime est comme son sens ; mais s'il est vrai que l'exprim\u00e9 n'existe pas hors de l'attribut, il n'en est pas moins rapport\u00e9 \u00e0 la substance comme \u00e0 l'objet d\u00e9sign\u00e9 par tous les attributs ; ainsi tous les sens exprim\u00e9s forment l'\u00ab exprimable \u00bb ou l'essence de la substance. Celle-ci sera dite \u00e0 son tour s'exprimer dans les attributs.\n\nIl est vrai qu'en assimilant la substance \u00e0 l'objet d\u00e9sign\u00e9 par diff\u00e9rents noms, nous ne r\u00e9solvons pas le probl\u00e8me essentiel, celui de la diff\u00e9rence entre ces noms. Bien plus, la difficult\u00e9 augmente dans la mesure o\u00f9 ces noms sont univoques et positifs, donc s'appliquent formellement \u00e0 ce qu'ils d\u00e9signent : leur sens respectif semble introduire dans l'unit\u00e9 du d\u00e9sign\u00e9 une multiplicit\u00e9 n\u00e9cessairement actuelle. Il n'en est pas ainsi dans une vision analogique : les noms s'appliquent \u00e0 Dieu par analogie, leur sens \u00ab pr\u00e9existe \u00bb en lui sur un mode \u00e9minent qui en assure l'inconcevable unit\u00e9, l'inexprimable unit\u00e9. Mais que faire si les noms divins ont le m\u00eame sens, tels qu'ils sont appliqu\u00e9s \u00e0 Dieu et tels qu'ils sont impliqu\u00e9s dans les cr\u00e9atures, c'est-\u00e0-dire dans tous les emplois qu'on en fait, si bien que leur distinction ne peut plus se fonder sur les choses cr\u00e9\u00e9es, mais doit \u00eatre fond\u00e9e dans ce Dieu qu'ils d\u00e9signent ? On sait que Duns Scot, au Moyen \u00c2ge, avait pos\u00e9 ce probl\u00e8me et lui avait donn\u00e9 une solution profonde. Duns Scot sans doute est celui qui mena le plus loin l'entreprise d'une th\u00e9ologie positive. Il d\u00e9nonce \u00e0 la fois l'\u00e9minence n\u00e9gative des n\u00e9o-platoniciens, la pseudo-affirmation des thomistes. Il leur oppose l'univocit\u00e9 de l'\u00catre : _l'\u00eatre se dit au m\u00eame sens_ de tout ce qui est, infini ou fini, bien que ce ne soit pas sous la m\u00eame \u00ab modalit\u00e9 \u00bb. Mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, l'\u00eatre ne change pas de nature en changeant de modalit\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire quand son concept est pr\u00e9diqu\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre infini et des \u00eatres finis (d\u00e9j\u00e0 chez Scot, l'univocit\u00e9 n'entra\u00eene donc aucune confusion d'essences)19. Et l'univocit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre entra\u00eene elle-m\u00eame l'univocit\u00e9 des attributs divins : le concept d'un attribut qui peut \u00eatre \u00e9lev\u00e9 \u00e0 l'infini est commun lui-m\u00eame \u00e0 Dieu et aux cr\u00e9atures, \u00e0 condition d'\u00eatre pris dans sa raison formelle ou dans sa quiddit\u00e9, car \u00ab l'infinit\u00e9 ne supprime nullement la raison formelle de ce \u00e0 quoi on l'ajoute20 \u00bb. Mais, se disant formellement et positivement de Dieu, comment les attributs infinis ou les noms divins n'introduiraient-ils pas en Dieu une pluralit\u00e9 correspondante \u00e0 leurs raisons formelles, \u00e0 leurs quiddit\u00e9s distinctes ?\n\nC'est \u00e0 ce probl\u00e8me que Scot applique un de ses concepts les plus originaux, qui vient compl\u00e9ter celui de l'univocit\u00e9 : l'id\u00e9e de la distinction formelle21. Celle-ci concerne l'appr\u00e9hension de quiddit\u00e9s distinctes qui n'en appartiennent pas moins \u00e0 un m\u00eame sujet. Elle renvoie \u00e9videmment \u00e0 un acte de l'entendement. Mais l'entendement ne se contente pas ici d'exprimer une m\u00eame r\u00e9alit\u00e9 sous deux aspects qui pourraient exister \u00e0 part dans d'autres sujets, ni d'exprimer une m\u00eame chose \u00e0 divers degr\u00e9s d'abstraction, ni d'exprimer quelque chose analogiquement par rapport \u00e0 d'autres r\u00e9alit\u00e9s. Il appr\u00e9hende objectivement des formes actuellement distinctes, mais qui, comme telles, composent un seul et m\u00eame sujet. Entre animal et raisonnable, il n'y a pas seulement une distinction de raison comme entre _homo-humanitas_ ; il faut que la chose elle-m\u00eame soit d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00ab structur\u00e9e selon la diversit\u00e9 pensable du genre et de l'esp\u00e8ce22 \u00bb. La distinction formelle est bien une distinction r\u00e9elle, parce qu'elle exprime les diff\u00e9rentes couches de r\u00e9alit\u00e9s qui forment ou constituent un \u00eatre. En ce sens elle est dite _formalis a parte rei_ ou _actualis ex natura rei_. Mais elle est un minimum de distinction r\u00e9elle, parce que les deux quiddit\u00e9s r\u00e9ellement distinctes se coordonnent et composent un \u00eatre unique23. _R\u00e9elle et pourtant non num\u00e9rique_ , tel est le statut de la distinction formelle24. Encore doit-on reconna\u00eetre que, dans le fini, deux quiddit\u00e9s comme animal et raisonnable ne communiquent que par le troisi\u00e8me terme auquel elles sont identiques. Mais il n'en est pas de m\u00eame dans l'infini. Deux attributs port\u00e9s \u00e0 l'infini seront encore formellement distincts, tout en \u00e9tant ontologiquement identiques. Comme dit \u00c9. Gilson, \u00ab parce qu'elle est une modalit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre (et non un attribut), l'infinit\u00e9 peut \u00eatre commune \u00e0 des raisons formelles quidditativement irr\u00e9ductibles, et leur conf\u00e9rer l'identit\u00e9 dans l'\u00eatre sans supprimer leur distinction dans la formalit\u00e925. \u00bb Deux attributs de Dieu, par exemple Justice et Bont\u00e9, sont donc des noms divins qui d\u00e9signent un Dieu absolument un, tout en signifiant des quiddit\u00e9s distinctes. Il y a l\u00e0 comme deux ordres, l'ordre de la raison formelle et l'ordre de l'\u00eatre, la pluralit\u00e9 de l'un se conciliant parfaitement avec la simplicit\u00e9 de l'autre.\n\nC'est ce statut qui trouve en Suarez un adversaire d\u00e9clar\u00e9. Celui-ci ne voit pas comment la distinction formelle ne se r\u00e9duirait pas soit \u00e0 une distinction de raison, soit \u00e0 une distinction modale26. Elle en dit trop ou pas assez : trop pour une distinction de raison, mais pas assez pour une distinction r\u00e9elle. Descartes, \u00e0 l'occasion, a la m\u00eame attitude27. Nous retrouvons toujours chez Descartes la m\u00eame r\u00e9pugnance \u00e0 concevoir une distinction r\u00e9elle entre choses qui ne seraient pas dans des sujets diff\u00e9rents, c'est-\u00e0-dire qui ne s'accompagneraient pas d'une division dans l'\u00eatre ou d'une distinction num\u00e9rique. Or, il n'en est pas de m\u00eame chez Spinoza : dans sa conception d'une distinction r\u00e9elle non num\u00e9rique, on n'aura pas de peine \u00e0 retrouver la distinction formelle de Scot. Bien plus, la distinction formelle cesse avec Spinoza d'\u00eatre un minimum de distinction r\u00e9elle, elle devient toute la distinction r\u00e9elle, donnant \u00e0 celle-ci un statut exclusif.\n\n1o) Les attributs chez Spinoza sont r\u00e9ellement distincts, ou con\u00e7us comme r\u00e9ellement distincts. En effet, ils ont des raisons formelles irr\u00e9ductibles ; chaque attribut exprime une essence infinie comme sa raison formelle ou sa quiddit\u00e9. Les attributs se distinguent donc \u00ab quidditativement \u00bb, formellement : ce sont bien des substances, en un sens purement qualitatif ; 2o) Chacun attribue son essence \u00e0 la substance comme \u00e0 _autre chose_. Fa\u00e7on de dire que, \u00e0 la distinction formelle entre attributs, ne correspond aucune division dans l'\u00eatre. La substance n'est pas un genre, les attributs ne sont pas des diff\u00e9rences sp\u00e9cifiques : il n'y a donc pas de substances de _m\u00eame_ esp\u00e8ce que les attributs, il n'y a pas de substance qui serait _la m\u00eame chose_ ( _res_ ) que chaque attribut ( _formalitas_ ) ; 3o) Cette \u00ab autre chose \u00bb est donc _la m\u00eame pour_ tous les attributs. Bien plus : elle est _la m\u00eame que_ tous les attributs. Cette derni\u00e8re d\u00e9termination ne contredit nullement la pr\u00e9c\u00e9dente. Tous les attributs formellement distincts sont rapport\u00e9s par l'entendement \u00e0 une substance ontologiquement une. Mais l'entendement ne fait que reproduire objectivement la nature des formes qu'il appr\u00e9hende. Toutes les essences formelles forment l'essence d'une substance absolument une. Toutes les substances qualifi\u00e9es forment une seule substance du point de vue de la quantit\u00e9. Si bien que les attributs eux-m\u00eames ont \u00e0 la fois l'identit\u00e9 dans l'\u00eatre, la distinction dans la formalit\u00e9 ; ontologiquement un, formellement divers, tel est le statut des attributs.\n\nMalgr\u00e9 son allusion au \u00ab fatras des distinctions p\u00e9ripat\u00e9ticiennes \u00bb, Spinoza restaure la distinction formelle, lui assurant m\u00eame une port\u00e9e qu'elle n'avait pas chez Scot. _C'est la distinction formelle qui donne un concept absolument coh\u00e9rent de l'unit\u00e9 de la substance et de la pluralit\u00e9 des attributs, c'est elle qui donne \u00e0 la distinction r\u00e9elle une nouvelle logique_. On demandera alors pourquoi Spinoza n'emploie jamais ce terme, mais parle seulement de distinction r\u00e9elle. C'est que la distinction formelle est bien une distinction r\u00e9elle. Ensuite, Spinoza avait tout avantage \u00e0 utiliser un terme que Descartes, par l'emploi qu'il en avait fait, avait en quelque sorte neutralis\u00e9 th\u00e9ologiquement ; le terme \u00ab distinction r\u00e9elle \u00bb permettait alors les plus grandes audaces, sans ressusciter d'anciennes pol\u00e9miques que Spinoza jugeait sans doute inutiles et m\u00eame nuisibles. Nous ne croyons pas que le pr\u00e9tendu cart\u00e9sianisme de Spinoza aille plus loin : toute sa th\u00e9orie des distinctions est profond\u00e9ment anticart\u00e9sienne.\n\n\u00c0 proposer l'image d'un Spinoza scotiste et non cart\u00e9sien, nous risquons de tomber dans certaines exag\u00e9rations. En fait, nous voulons dire que les th\u00e9ories scotistes furent certainement connues de Spinoza, et qu'elles particip\u00e8rent, avec d'autres th\u00e8mes, \u00e0 la formation de son panth\u00e9isme28. Le plus int\u00e9ressant d\u00e8s lors est la mani\u00e8re dont Spinoza utilise et renouvelle les notions de distinction formelle et d'univocit\u00e9. Qu'est-ce que Duns Scot, en effet, appelait \u00ab attribut \u00bb ? Justice, bont\u00e9, sagesse, etc., bref des propres. Sans doute reconnaissait-il que l'essence divine peut \u00eatre con\u00e7ue sans ces attributs ; mais il d\u00e9finissait l'essence de Dieu par des perfections intrins\u00e8ques, entendement et volont\u00e9. Scot \u00e9tait \u00ab th\u00e9ologien \u00bb et, \u00e0 ce titre, restait aux prises avec des propres et des \u00eatres de raison. C'est pourquoi, chez lui, la distinction formelle n'avait pas toute sa port\u00e9e, s'exer\u00e7ant toujours sur des \u00eatres de raison, comme les genres et les esp\u00e8ces, comme les facult\u00e9s de l'\u00e2me, ou bien sur des propres, comme ces pr\u00e9tendus attributs de Dieu. Plus encore, l'univocit\u00e9 chez Scot semblait compromise par le souci d'\u00e9viter le panth\u00e9isme. Car la perspective th\u00e9ologique, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00ab cr\u00e9ationniste \u00bb, le for\u00e7ait \u00e0 concevoir l'\u00catre univoque comme un concept _neutralis\u00e9, indiff\u00e9rent_. Indiff\u00e9rent au fini et \u00e0 l'infini, au singulier et \u00e0 l'universel, au parfait et \u00e0 l'imparfait, au cr\u00e9\u00e9 et \u00e0 l'incr\u00e9\u00e929. Chez Spinoza au contraire, l'\u00catre univoque est parfaitement d\u00e9termin\u00e9 dans son concept comme ce qui se dit en un seul et m\u00eame sens de la substance qui est en soi, et des modes qui sont en autre chose. Avec Spinoza, l'univocit\u00e9 devient l'objet d'affirmation pure. La m\u00eame chose, _formaliter_ , constitue l'essence de la substance et contient les essences de mode. C'est donc l'id\u00e9e de cause immanente qui, chez Spinoza, prend le relais de l'univocit\u00e9, lib\u00e9rant celle-ci de l'indiff\u00e9rence et de la neutralit\u00e9 o\u00f9 la maintenait la th\u00e9orie d'une cr\u00e9ation divine. Et c'est dans l'immanence que l'univocit\u00e9 trouvera sa formule proprement spinoziste : Dieu est dit cause de toutes choses _au sens m\u00eame_ ( _eo sensu_ ) o\u00f9 il est dit cause de soi.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  Sur tous ces points, cf. M. de GANDILLAC, _Introduction aux \u0153uvres compl\u00e8tes du Pseudo-Denys_ (Aubier, 1941) ; et _La Philosophie de Nicolas de Cues_ (Aubier, 1943). Dans ce dernier ouvrage, M. de Gandillac montre bien comment la th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative d'une part, l'analogie d'autre part combinent toutes deux les affirmations et les n\u00e9gations, mais dans un rapport inverse : \u00ab \u00c0 l'inverse donc de Denys, qui r\u00e9duisait les affirmations elles-m\u00eames \u00e0 des n\u00e9gations d\u00e9guis\u00e9es, saint Thomas... usera surtout de l'apophase pour remonter de telle ou telle n\u00e9gation pr\u00e9alable \u00e0 quelque attribut positif. De l'impossibilit\u00e9 du mouvement divin, il tirera par exemple une preuve de l'\u00c9ternit\u00e9 divine ; de l'exclusion de la mati\u00e8re, il fera un argument d\u00e9cisif en faveur de la co\u00efncidence en Dieu de l'essence et de l'existence \u00bb (p. 272.)\n\n2.  _TTP_ , ch. 7 (II ; p. 185) \u00ab ... La voie que (cette m\u00e9thode) enseigne, qui est la droite et la vraie, n'a jamais \u00e9t\u00e9 suivie ni fray\u00e9e par les hommes, de sorte qu'\u00e0 la longue elle est devenue tr\u00e8s ardue et presque impraticable. \u00bb Et ch. 8 (II, p. 191) : \u00ab Je crains toutefois que ma tentative ne survienne trop tard... \u00bb\n\n3.  _TTP_ , ch. 2 (II, p. 113) : \u00ab Avec une surprenante pr\u00e9cipitation, tout le monde s'est persuad\u00e9 que les proph\u00e8tes ont eu la science de tout ce que l'entendement humain peut saisir. Et, bien que certains passages de l'\u00c9criture nous disent le plus clairement que les proph\u00e8tes ont ignor\u00e9 certaines choses, on aime mieux d\u00e9clarer qu'on n'entend pas ces passages que d'accorder que les proph\u00e8tes aient ignor\u00e9 quelque chose, ou bien l'on s'efforce de torturer les textes de l'\u00c9criture pour lui faire dire ce que manifestement elle ne veut pas dire. \u00bb\n\n4.  Cf. _TTP_ , ch. 14 : la liste des \u00ab dogmes de la foi \u00bb. On remarquera que, m\u00eame du point de vue des \u00ab propres \u00bb, la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation reste limit\u00e9e. Tout est centr\u00e9 sur justice et charit\u00e9. L'infinit\u00e9, notamment, ne semble pas r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9e dans l'\u00c9criture ; cf. ch. 2, o\u00f9 Spinoza expose les ignorances d'Adam, d'Abraham et de Mo\u00efse.\n\n5.  Sur les deux sens de la \u00ab Parole de Dieu \u00bb, cf. _TTP_ , ch. 12. D\u00e9j\u00e0 le _Court Trait\u00e9_ opposait la communication imm\u00e9diate \u00e0 la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation par signes : II, ch. 24, 9-11.\n\n6.  _TTP_ , ch. 1 (II, p. 95).\n\n7.  _TTP_ , ch. 4 (II, p. 139). _Lettre 19, \u00e0 Blyenbergh_ (III, p. 65).\n\n8.  Cf. _TTP_ , chapitres 2 et 3.\n\n9.  _TTP_ , ch. 13 (II, pp. 239-240).\n\n10.  _TTP_ , ch. 4 (II, p. 144).\n\n11.  _\u00c9_ , I, def. 6, expl. : \u00ab De ce qui est infini seulement en son genre, nous pouvons nier une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs. \u00bb\n\n12.  _Lettre 4, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 10).\n\n13.  _CT_ , II, ch. 19, 5.\n\n14.  Cf. les formules constantes du _Court Trait\u00e9_ (surtout I, ch. 2) d'apr\u00e8s lesquelles les attributs s'affirment, et s'affirment d'une Nature elle-m\u00eame positive. Et _TRE_ 96 : \u00ab Toute d\u00e9finition doit \u00eatre affirmative. \u00bb\n\n15.  Cf. les remarques de Lewis Robinson \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard, et les textes des Cart\u00e9siens qu'il cite : _Kommentar zu Spinozas Ethik_ , Leipzig, 1928.\n\n16.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 5, note. Sur l'imperfection de l'\u00e9tendue selon Descartes, cf. par exemple _Principes_ , I, 23.\n\n17.  _Lettre 9, \u00e0 De Vries_ (III, p. 33).\n\n18.  La distinction de \u00ab l'exprim\u00e9 \u00bb (sens) et du \u00ab d\u00e9sign\u00e9 \u00bb ( _designatum, denominatum_ ) n'est pas r\u00e9cente dans une logique des propositions, bien qu'elle r\u00e9apparaisse chez beaucoup de philosophes modernes. L'origine en est dans la logique sto\u00efcienne, qui distingue l' _exprimable_ et l'objet. Ockham \u00e0 son tour distingue la chose en tant que telle ( _extra animam_ ) et la chose comme _exprim\u00e9e_ dans la proposition ( _declaratio, explicatio, significatio_ sont des synonymes d' _expressio_ ). Certains disciples d'Ockham poussent encore plus loin la distinction, et rejoignent les paradoxes sto\u00efciens, faisant de \u00ab l'exprim\u00e9 \u00bb une entit\u00e9 non existante, irr\u00e9ductible \u00e0 la chose et \u00e0 la proposition : cf. H. \u00c9LIE, _Le Complexe significabile_ (Vrin, 1936). Ces paradoxes de l'expression jouent un grand r\u00f4le dans la logique moderne (Meinong, Frege, Husserl), mais leur source est ancienne.\n\n19.  Duns SCOT, _Opus oxoniense_ (\u00e9d. Viv\u00e8s) : sur la critique de l'\u00e9minence et de l'analogie, I. D3, q. 1, 2 et 3 ; sur l'univocit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre, I, D8, q. 3. On a souvent remarqu\u00e9 que l'\u00catre univoque laisse subsister la distinction de ses \u00ab modes \u00bb : quand on le consid\u00e8re, non plus dans sa nature en tant qu'\u00catre, mais dans ses modalit\u00e9s individuantes (infini, fini), il cesse d'\u00eatre univoque. Cf. \u00c9. GILSON, _Jean Duns Scot_ , Vrin, 1952, pp. 89, 629.\n\n20.  _Op. ox_ , I, D8, q. 4 (a. 2, n. 13).\n\n21.  _Op. ox_ , I, D2, q. 4 ; D8, q. 4 (cf. \u00c9. GILSON, ch. 3).\n\n22.  M. de GANDILLAC, \u00ab Duns Scot et la Via antiqua \u00bb, in _Le Mouvement doctrinal du IXe au XIVe si\u00e8cle_ (Bloud et Gay, 1951), p. 339.\n\n23.  _Op. ox._ , I, D2, q. 4 (a. 5, n. 43) : La distinction formelle est _minima in suo ordine, id est inter omnes quae praecedunt intellectionem._\n\n24.  _Op. ox._ , II, D3, q. 1 : La forme distincte a une entit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle, _ista unitas est realis, non autem singularis nel numeralis._\n\n25.  \u00c9. Gilson, p. 251.\n\n26.  SUAREZ, _Metaphysicarum Disputationum_ , D7.\n\n27.  CATERUS, dans les _Premi\u00e8res objections_ , avait invoqu\u00e9 la distinction formelle \u00e0 propos de l'\u00e2me et du corps. Descartes r\u00e9pond : \u00ab Pour ce qui regarde la distinction formelle que ce tr\u00e8s docte th\u00e9ologien dit avoir prise de Scot, je r\u00e9ponds bri\u00e8vement qu'elle ne diff\u00e8re point de la modale, et qu'elle ne s'\u00e9tend que sur les \u00eatres incomplets... \u00bb (AT, IX, pp. 94-95).\n\n28.  Il n'y a vraiment pas lieu de se demander si Spinoza a lu Duns Scot. Il est peu vraisemblable qu'il l'ait lu. Mais nous savons, ne serait-ce que par l'inventaire de ce qui restait de sa biblioth\u00e8que, le go\u00fbt de Spinoza pour les trait\u00e9s de m\u00e9taphysique et de logique, du type _quaestiones disputatae_ ; or, ces trait\u00e9s comportent toujours des expos\u00e9s de l'univocit\u00e9 et de la distinction formelle scotistes. De tels expos\u00e9s font partie des lieux communs de la logique et de l'ontologie des XVIe et XVIIe si\u00e8cles (cf. par exemple Heereboord dans son _Collegium logicum_ ). Nous savons aussi, gr\u00e2ce aux travaux de Gebhardt et de R\u00e9vah, l'influence probable de Juan de Prado sur Spinoza ; or Juan de Prado avait une connaissance certaine de Duns Scot (cf. I.S. R\u00c9VAH, _Spinoza et Juan de Prado_ , \u00e9d. Mouton, 1959, p. 45).\n\nOn ajoutera que les probl\u00e8mes d'une th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative ou positive, d'une analogie ou d'une univocit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre, et d'un statut correspondant des distinctions, ne sont nullement propres \u00e0 la pens\u00e9e chr\u00e9tienne. On les trouve, aussi vivaces, dans la pens\u00e9e juive du Moyen \u00c2ge. Certains commentateurs ont soulign\u00e9 l'influence de Hasda\u00ef Crescas sur Spinoza, en ce qui concerne la th\u00e9orie de l'\u00e9tendue. Mais plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement, Crescas semble avoir \u00e9labor\u00e9 une th\u00e9ologie positive, comportant l'\u00e9quivalent d'une distinction formelle entre attributs de Dieu (cf. G. VADJA, _Introduction \u00e0 la pens\u00e9e juive du Moyen \u00c2ge_ , Vrin, 1947, p. 174).\n\n29.  _Op. ox._ , I, D3, q. 2 (a. 4, n. 6) : _Et ita neuter ex se, sed in utroque illorum includitur ; ergo univocus._\n\n## CHAPITRE IV\n\n## L'ABSOLU\n\nSpinoza d\u00e9montre avec soin que toute substance (qualifi\u00e9e) doit \u00eatre illimit\u00e9e. L'ensemble des arguments du _Court Trait\u00e9_ et de l' _\u00c9thique_ se pr\u00e9sente ainsi : si une substance \u00e9tait limit\u00e9e, elle devrait l'\u00eatre ou bien par elle-m\u00eame, ou bien par une substance de m\u00eame nature, ou bien par Dieu qui lui aurait donn\u00e9 une nature imparfaite1. Or elle ne peut \u00eatre limit\u00e9e par elle-m\u00eame, car \u00ab elle aurait d\u00fb changer toute sa nature \u00bb. Ni par une autre, car il y aurait deux substances de m\u00eame attribut. Ni par Dieu, parce que Dieu n'a rien d'imparfait ni de limit\u00e9, et \u00e0 plus forte raison ne se trouve pas devant des choses qui \u00ab exigeraient \u00bb ou impliqueraient une limitation quelconque avant d'\u00eatre cr\u00e9\u00e9es. L'importance de ces th\u00e8mes est indiqu\u00e9e par Spinoza, mais de mani\u00e8re elliptique : \u00ab Si nous pouvons d\u00e9montrer qu'il ne peut y avoir aucune substance limit\u00e9e, toute substance doit alors appartenir sans limitation \u00e0 l'\u00eatre divin. \u00bb La transition semble \u00eatre celle-ci : si toute substance est illimit\u00e9e, nous devons reconna\u00eetre que chacune en son genre ou dans sa forme est infiniment parfaite ; il y a donc _\u00e9galit\u00e9_ entre toutes les formes ou tous les genres d'\u00eatre ; aucune forme d'\u00eatre n'est inf\u00e9rieure \u00e0 une autre, aucune n'est sup\u00e9rieure. C'est cette transition que Spinoza formule explicitement dans un autre texte : \u00ab Il n'y a entre les attributs aucune sorte d'in\u00e9galit\u00e9. \u00bb2\n\nD\u00e8s lors on ne pourra pas penser que Dieu contienne la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou perfection d'un effet sous une forme meilleure que celle dont d\u00e9pend l'effet ; car il n'y a pas de forme qui soit meilleure qu'une autre. On en conclut : toutes les formes \u00e9tant \u00e9gales (attributs), Dieu ne peut pas poss\u00e9der l'une sans poss\u00e9der les autres ; il ne peut pas en poss\u00e9der une qui vaudrait pour une autre \u00e9minemment. Toutes les formes d'\u00eatre \u00e9tant _infiniment parfaites_ , elles doivent sans limitation appartenir \u00e0 Dieu comme \u00e0 un \u00catre _absolument infini_.\n\nCe principe d'une \u00e9galit\u00e9 des formes ou des attributs n'est qu'un autre aspect du principe d'univocit\u00e9, et du principe de distinction formelle. Il n'en a pas moins une application particuli\u00e8re : il nous force \u00e0 passer de l'Infini \u00e0 l'Absolu, de l'infiniment parfait \u00e0 l'absolument infini. Les formes d'\u00eatre \u00e9tant toutes parfaites et illimit\u00e9es, donc infiniment parfaites, elles ne peuvent constituer des substances in\u00e9gales qui renverraient \u00e0 l'infiniment parfait comme \u00e0 un \u00eatre distinct jouant le r\u00f4le d'une cause \u00e9minente et efficiente. Pas davantage elles ne peuvent former des substances elles-m\u00eames \u00e9gales ; car des substances \u00e9gales ne pourraient l'\u00eatre que num\u00e9riquement, elles devraient avoir la m\u00eame forme, \u00ab l'une devrait n\u00e9cessairement limiter l'autre et ne pourrait par suite \u00eatre infinie3. \u00bb Les formes \u00e9galement illimit\u00e9es sont donc les attributs d'une seule substance qui les poss\u00e8de toutes, et les poss\u00e8de actuellement. Mais alors, la plus grande erreur serait de croire que l'infiniment parfait suffise \u00e0 d\u00e9finir la \u00ab nature \u00bb de Dieu. L'infiniment parfait est la modalit\u00e9 de chaque attribut, c'est-\u00e0-dire le \u00ab propre \u00bb de Dieu. Mais la nature de Dieu consiste en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs, c'est-\u00e0-dire dans l'absolument infini.\n\nOn peut pr\u00e9voir d\u00e9j\u00e0 la transformation que Spinoza, contre Descartes, va faire subir aux preuves de l'existence de Dieu. Car toutes les preuves cart\u00e9siennes proc\u00e8dent par l'infiniment parfait. Et non seulement elles proc\u00e8dent ainsi, mais elles se meuvent dans l'infiniment parfait, l'identifiant \u00e0 la nature de Dieu. La preuve a posteriori, dans sa premi\u00e8re formulation, dit : \u00ab L'id\u00e9e que j'ai d'un \u00eatre plus parfait que le mien doit n\u00e9cessairement avoir \u00e9t\u00e9 mise en moi par un \u00eatre qui soit en effet plus parfait. \u00bb La seconde formulation est : \u00ab De cela seul que j'existe, et que l'id\u00e9e d'un \u00eatre souverainement parfait (c'est-\u00e0-dire de Dieu) est en moi, l'existence de Dieu est tr\u00e8s \u00e9videmment d\u00e9montr\u00e9e4. \u00bb La preuve ontologique ou _a priori_ s'\u00e9nonce enfin : \u00ab Ce que nous concevons clairement et distinctement appartenir \u00e0 la nature ou \u00e0 l'essence, ou \u00e0 la forme immuable et vraie de quelque chose, cela peut \u00eatre dit ou affirm\u00e9 avec v\u00e9rit\u00e9 de cette chose ; mais apr\u00e8s que nous avons assez soigneusement recherch\u00e9 ce que c'est que Dieu, nous concevons clairement et distinctement qu'il appartient \u00e0 sa vraie et immuable nature qu'il existe ; donc alors nous pouvons affirmer avec v\u00e9rit\u00e9 qu'il existe5. \u00bb Or, dans la mineure, la recherche \u00e0 laquelle Descartes fait allusion consiste pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment \u00e0 d\u00e9terminer le \u00ab souverainement parfait \u00bb comme la forme, l'essence ou la nature de Dieu. L'existence, \u00e9tant une perfection, appartient \u00e0 cette nature. Gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 la majeure, on en conclut que Dieu existe effectivement.\n\nLa preuve ontologique elle-m\u00eame implique donc l'identification de l'infiniment parfait avec la nature de Dieu. En effet, consid\u00e9rons les secondes objections faites \u00e0 Descartes. On lui reproche de ne pas avoir d\u00e9montr\u00e9, dans la mineure, que la nature de Dieu \u00e9tait possible ou n'impliquait pas contradiction. On lui oppose : Dieu existe, _s'il est possible_. Leibniz reprendra l'objection dans des textes c\u00e9l\u00e8bres6. Descartes r\u00e9pond : La difficult\u00e9 qu'on pr\u00e9tend d\u00e9noncer dans la mineure est d\u00e9j\u00e0 r\u00e9solue dans la majeure. Car la majeure ne signifie pas : Ce que nous concevons clairement et distinctement appartenir \u00e0 la nature d'une chose peut \u00eatre dit avec v\u00e9rit\u00e9 appartenir \u00e0 la nature de cette chose. Ce serait une simple tautologie. La majeure signifie : \u00ab Ce que clairement et distinctement nous concevons appartenir \u00e0 la nature de quelque chose, cela peut \u00eatre dit ou affirm\u00e9 avec v\u00e9rit\u00e9 _de cette chose_. \u00bb Or cette proposition garantit la possibilit\u00e9 de tout ce que nous concevons clairement et distinctement. Si l'on r\u00e9clame un autre crit\u00e8re de possibilit\u00e9, qui serait comme une raison suffisante du c\u00f4t\u00e9 de l'objet, nous avouons notre ignorance, comme l'impuissance de l'entendement \u00e0 atteindre cette raison7.\n\nIl semble que Descartes pressente le sens de l'objection, et pourtant ne le comprenne pas ou ne veuille pas le comprendre. On lui reproche de ne pas avoir d\u00e9montr\u00e9 la possibilit\u00e9 de la nature d'un \u00eatre _dont l'_ \u00ab _infiniment parfait_ \u00bb _ne peut \u00eatre que le propre._ Une telle d\u00e9monstration, peut-\u00eatre, n'est pas possible elle-m\u00eame : mais en ce cas, l'argument ontologique n'est pas concluant8. De toute mani\u00e8re, l'infiniment parfait ne nous fait rien conna\u00eetre de la nature de l'\u00eatre auquel il appartient. Si Descartes pense avoir r\u00e9solu toutes les difficult\u00e9s dans la majeure, c'est d'abord parce qu'il confond la nature de Dieu avec un propre : il pense alors que la conception claire et distincte du propre suffit \u00e0 garantir la possibilit\u00e9 de la _nature_ correspondante. Sans doute arrive-t-il \u00e0 Descartes d'opposer l'aspect sous lequel Dieu est pr\u00e9sent\u00e9 dans l'\u00c9criture (\u00ab fa\u00e7ons de parler... qui contiennent bien quelque v\u00e9rit\u00e9, mais seulement en tant qu'elle est rapport\u00e9e aux hommes \u00bb) et l'aspect sous lequel Dieu appara\u00eet lui-m\u00eame \u00e0 la lumi\u00e8re naturelle9. Mais ainsi, il oppose seulement des propres d'une esp\u00e8ce \u00e0 ceux d'une autre. Concernant un \u00eatre qui a pour propri\u00e9t\u00e9 rationnelle d'\u00eatre infiniment parfait, la question subsiste enti\u00e8rement : un tel \u00eatre est-il possible ? Si l'on demande enfin pourquoi Descartes, de son point de vue, peut identifier le propre avec la nature de Dieu, nous croyons que, l\u00e0 encore, la raison en est dans sa mani\u00e8re d'invoquer l'\u00e9minence et l'analogie. Descartes rappelle que, \u00ab des choses que nous concevons \u00eatre en Dieu et en nous \u00bb, aucune n'est _univoque_10. Or, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment dans la mesure o\u00f9 l'on admet une in\u00e9galit\u00e9 fonci\u00e8re entre les formes d'\u00eatre, l'infiniment parfait peut d\u00e9signer une forme sup\u00e9rieure qui se confond avec la nature de Dieu. D\u00e9finissant Dieu, Descartes donne une liste de propri\u00e9t\u00e9s : \u00ab Par le nom de Dieu, j'entends une substance infinie, \u00e9ternelle, immuable, ind\u00e9pendante, toute-connaissante, toute-puissante11... \u00bb C'est dans la brume de leur \u00e9minence que ces propri\u00e9t\u00e9s, consid\u00e9r\u00e9es toutes ensemble, peuvent para\u00eetre assimilables \u00e0 une nature simple.\n\nChez Leibniz, deux th\u00e8mes sont profond\u00e9ment li\u00e9s : l'infiniment parfait ne suffit pas \u00e0 constituer la nature de Dieu ; l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte ne suffit pas \u00e0 garantir sa propre r\u00e9alit\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire la possibilit\u00e9 de son objet. Les deux th\u00e8mes se rejoignent dans l'exigence d'une raison suffisante ou d'une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle. Infini et parfait sont seulement des marques distinctives ; la connaissance claire et distincte que nous en avons ne nous apprend nullement si ces caract\u00e8res sont compatibles ; peut-\u00eatre y a-t-il contradiction dans l' _ens perfectissimum_ comme dans \u00ab le plus grand nombre \u00bb ou \u00ab la plus grande vitesse \u00bb. L'essence d'un tel \u00eatre est seulement conjectur\u00e9e ; toute d\u00e9finition de Dieu par la simple perfection reste donc une d\u00e9finition nominale. D'o\u00f9 la critique extr\u00eame de Leibniz : Descartes en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral ne d\u00e9passe pas Hobbes, il n'y a pas de raisons de se fier \u00e0 des crit\u00e8res de la conscience psychologique (le clair et le distinct), plut\u00f4t qu'\u00e0 de simples combinaisons de mots12. Il semble, que dans un tout autre contexte, ces th\u00e8mes sont aussi ceux de Spinoza. On ne s'\u00e9tonnera pas qu'il y ait des points communs fondamentaux dans la r\u00e9action anticart\u00e9sienne de la fin du XVIIe si\u00e8cle. Selon Spinoza, l'infiniment parfait n'est qu'un propre. Cette propri\u00e9t\u00e9 ne nous apprend rien sur la nature de l'\u00eatre auquel elle appartient ; elle ne suffit pas \u00e0 d\u00e9montrer que cet \u00eatre n'enveloppe pas contradiction. Tant qu'une id\u00e9e claire et distincte n'est pas saisie comme \u00ab ad\u00e9quate \u00bb, on pourra douter de sa r\u00e9alit\u00e9 comme de la possibilit\u00e9 de son objet. Tant qu'on ne donne pas une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle, portant sur l'essence d'une chose et non sur des _propria_ , on reste dans l'arbitraire de ce qui est simplement con\u00e7u, sans rapport avec la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 de la chose telle qu'elle est hors de l'entendement13. Chez Spinoza non moins que chez Leibniz, il semble donc que la raison suffisante fasse valoir ses exigences. Spinoza posera l'ad\u00e9quation comme raison suffisante de l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte, l'absolument infini comme raison suffisante de l'infiniment parfait. La preuve ontologique chez Spinoza ne portera plus sur un \u00eatre ind\u00e9termin\u00e9 qui serait infiniment parfait, mais sur l'absolument infini, d\u00e9termin\u00e9 comme ce qui consiste en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs. (L'infiniment parfait sera seulement le mode de chacun de ces attributs, la modalit\u00e9 de l'essence exprim\u00e9e par chaque attribut.)\n\nToutefois, si notre hypoth\u00e8se est juste, on est en droit de s'\u00e9tonner de la mani\u00e8re dont Spinoza d\u00e9montre _a priori_ que l'absolument infini, c'est-\u00e0-dire une substance consistant en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs, existe n\u00e9cessairement14. Une premi\u00e8re d\u00e9monstration dit : S'il n'existait pas, ce ne serait pas une substance, puisque toute substance existe n\u00e9cessairement. Seconde d\u00e9monstration : Si l'\u00eatre absolument infini n'existait pas, il devrait y avoir une raison de cette non-existence ; cette raison devrait \u00eatre interne, l'absolument infini devrait donc impliquer contradiction ; \u00ab or il est absurde d'affirmer cela de l'\u00eatre absolument infini et souverainement parfait \u00bb. Il est clair que ces raisonnements proc\u00e8dent encore par l'infiniment parfait. L'absolument infini (substance consistant en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs) existe n\u00e9cessairement, sinon ce ne serait pas une substance ; sinon il ne serait pas infiniment parfait. Mais le lecteur est en droit de r\u00e9clamer une d\u00e9monstration plus profonde, et pr\u00e9alable. Il faut d\u00e9montrer qu'une substance, qui existe n\u00e9cessairement, a pour nature de consister en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs ou, ce qui revient au m\u00eame, que l'infiniment parfait a pour raison l'absolument infini.\n\nMais ce que le lecteur est en droit de demander, Spinoza l'a pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment fait. L'id\u00e9e selon laquelle, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , Spinoza \u00ab s'installe \u00bb en Dieu et \u00ab commence \u00bb par Dieu, n'est qu'une id\u00e9e approximative, litt\u00e9ralement inexacte. Nous verrons d'ailleurs que, selon Spinoza, il est tout \u00e0 fait impossible de _partir_ de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. La d\u00e9monstration de l'existence de Dieu appara\u00eet dans la 11e proposition. Or les dix premi\u00e8res ont montr\u00e9 ceci : _la distinction num\u00e9rique n'\u00e9tant pas r\u00e9elle, toute substance r\u00e9ellement distincte est illimit\u00e9e et infiniment parfaite ; inversement, la distinction r\u00e9elle n'\u00e9tant pas num\u00e9rique, toutes les substances infiniment parfaites composent une substance absolument infinie dont elles sont les attributs ; l'infiniment parfait est donc le propre de l'absolument infini, et l'absolument infini, la nature ou raison de l'infiniment parfait._ D'o\u00f9 l'importance de ces premi\u00e8res d\u00e9monstrations, qui n'ont rien d'hypoth\u00e9tique. D'o\u00f9 l'importance des consid\u00e9rations sur la distinction num\u00e9rique et la distinction r\u00e9elle. C'est seulement \u00e0 ces conditions que la proposition 11 est en droit de conclure : la substance absolument infinie, n'impliquant pas contradiction, existe n\u00e9cessairement ; si elle n'existait pas, elle n'aurait pas pour propri\u00e9t\u00e9 l'infiniment parfait, pas plus qu'elle ne serait une substance.\n\nLe plan du d\u00e9but de l' _\u00c9thique_ est donc le suivant : 1o) _D\u00e9finitions 1-5_ : ce sont de simples d\u00e9finitions nominales, n\u00e9cessaires au m\u00e9canisme des d\u00e9monstrations futures ; 2o) _D\u00e9finition 6_ : c'est la d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle de Dieu, comme \u00catre absolument infini, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00ab substance consistant en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs dont chacun exprime une essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie \u00bb. Cette d\u00e9finition reprend les termes substance et attribut, pour leur donner un statut r\u00e9el. Mais que cette d\u00e9finition soit elle-m\u00eame r\u00e9elle ne signifie pas qu'elle montre imm\u00e9diatement la possibilit\u00e9 de son objet. Pour qu'une d\u00e9finition soit r\u00e9elle, il suffit qu'on puisse d\u00e9montrer la possibilit\u00e9 de l'objet tel qu'il est d\u00e9fini. On prouve en m\u00eame temps la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou v\u00e9rit\u00e9 de la d\u00e9finition ; 3o) _Propositions 1-8_ , premi\u00e8re \u00e9tape de la d\u00e9monstration de la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 de la d\u00e9finition : la distinction num\u00e9rique n'\u00e9tant pas r\u00e9elle, chaque attribut r\u00e9ellement distinct est infiniment parfait, chaque substance qualifi\u00e9e est unique, n\u00e9cessaire et infinie. Cette s\u00e9rie, \u00e9videmment, doit s'appuyer seulement sur les cinq premi\u00e8res d\u00e9finitions ; 4o) _Propositions 9 et 10_ , seconde \u00e9tape : la distinction r\u00e9elle n'\u00e9tant pas num\u00e9rique, les attributs distincts ou substances qualifi\u00e9es forment une seule et m\u00eame substance ayant toutes les qualifications, c'est-\u00e0-dire tous les attributs. Cette seconde s\u00e9rie s'ach\u00e8ve dans le scolie de 10 ; celui-ci constate qu'une substance absolument infinie n'implique pas contradiction. La d\u00e9finition 6 est donc une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle15 ; 5o) _Proposition 11_ : l'absolument infini existe n\u00e9cessairement ; sinon il ne pourrait pas \u00eatre une substance, il ne pourrait pas avoir comme propri\u00e9t\u00e9 l'infiniment parfait.\n\nUne contre-\u00e9preuve serait donn\u00e9e par l'examen du _Court Trait\u00e9_. Car ce qu'on dit \u00e0 tort de l' _\u00c9thique_ s'applique bien au _Court Trait\u00e9_ : celui-ci commence par Dieu, s'installe dans l'existence de Dieu. Spinoza, \u00e0 ce moment, croyait encore qu'il \u00e9tait possible de partir d'une id\u00e9e de Dieu. L'argument a priori re\u00e7oit donc une premi\u00e8re formulation enti\u00e8rement conforme \u00e0 l'\u00e9nonc\u00e9 de Descartes16. Mais, ainsi, l'argument se meut tout entier dans l'infiniment parfait, et ne nous donne aucun moyen de conna\u00eetre la nature de l'\u00eatre correspondant. Telle qu'elle est plac\u00e9e en t\u00eate du _Court Trait\u00e9_ , la preuve ontologique ne sert strictement \u00e0 rien. Aussi voit-on Spinoza y joindre un second \u00e9nonc\u00e9 fort obscur (\u00ab L'existence de Dieu est essence \u00bb)17. Nous croyons que cette formule, prise litt\u00e9ralement, ne peut s'interpr\u00e9ter que du point de vue de l'absolument infini, non plus de l'infiniment parfait. En effet, pour que l'existence de Dieu soit essence, il faut que les m\u00eames \u00ab attributs \u00bb qui constituent son essence constituent en m\u00eame temps son existence. C'est pourquoi Spinoza joint une note explicative, anticipant sur la suite du _Court Trait\u00e9_ , et invoquant d\u00e9j\u00e0 les attributs d'une substance absolument infinie : \u00ab \u00c0 la nature d'un \u00eatre qui a des attributs infinis appartient un attribut qui est \u00catre18. \u00bb Les diff\u00e9rences du _Court Trait\u00e9_ avec l' _\u00c9thique_ nous semblent les suivantes : 1o Le _Court Trait\u00e9_ commence par \u00ab Que Dieu est \u00bb, avant toute d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle de Dieu. Il ne dispose donc en droit que de la preuve cart\u00e9sienne. Alors, il est forc\u00e9 de juxtaposer \u00e0 l'\u00e9nonc\u00e9 orthodoxe de cette preuve un tout autre \u00e9nonc\u00e9 qui anticipe sur le second chapitre (\u00ab Ce que Dieu est \u00bb) ; 2o Au lieu de juxtaposer deux \u00e9nonc\u00e9s, l'un proc\u00e9dant par l'infiniment parfait, l'autre par l'absolument infini, l' _\u00c9thique_ propose une preuve qui proc\u00e8de encore par l'infiniment parfait, mais qui est tout enti\u00e8re subordonn\u00e9e \u00e0 la position pr\u00e9alable et bien fond\u00e9e de l'absolument infini. Alors le deuxi\u00e8me \u00e9nonc\u00e9 du _Court Trait\u00e9_ perd sa n\u00e9cessit\u00e9, en m\u00eame temps que son caract\u00e8re obscur et d\u00e9sordonn\u00e9. Il aura son \u00e9quivalent dans l' _\u00c9thique_ : mais non plus comme preuve de l'existence, simplement comme preuve de l'immutabilit\u00e9 de Dieu19.\n\n\u00c0 ce point, nous ne pouvons faire aucune diff\u00e9rence entre les exigences de Leibniz et celles de Spinoza : m\u00eame r\u00e9clamation d'une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle pour Dieu, d'une nature ou raison pour l'infiniment parfait. M\u00eame subordination de la preuve ontologique \u00e0 une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle de Dieu, et \u00e0 la d\u00e9monstration que cette d\u00e9finition est bien r\u00e9elle. On s'\u00e9tonnera d'autant plus de la mani\u00e8re dont Leibniz raconte l'histoire. Nous disposons de deux textes \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard. D'abord une note jointe au manuscrit _Quod Ens perfectissimum existit_ , o\u00f9 Leibniz parle de ses entrevues avec Spinoza de 1676 : \u00ab J'ai montr\u00e9 \u00e0 Spinoza, lorsque j'\u00e9tais \u00e0 La Haye, cette argumentation qu'il jugea solide. Comme il l'avait d'abord contredite, j'\u00e9crivis et lui lus ce feuillet20. \u00bb D'autre part les annotations de Leibniz concernant l' _\u00c9thique_ : il reproche \u00e0 la d\u00e9finition 6 de _ne pas_ \u00eatre une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle. Elle ne montre pas l'\u00e9quivalence des termes \u00ab absolument infini \u00bb et \u00ab consistant en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs \u00bb ; elle ne montre pas la compatibilit\u00e9 des attributs entre eux ; elle ne montre pas la possibilit\u00e9 de l'objet d\u00e9fini21. Ou bien Leibniz veut dire que la d\u00e9finition 6 ne montre pas imm\u00e9diatement la possibilit\u00e9 du d\u00e9fini ; mais Leibniz lui-m\u00eame ne croit pas plus que Spinoza \u00e0 l'existence d'une telle intuition de Dieu. Ou bien il veut dire que Spinoza ne s'est pas aper\u00e7u qu'il fallait d\u00e9montrer la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 de la d\u00e9finition ; alors cette critique m\u00e9conna\u00eet enti\u00e8rement le projet g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de l' _\u00c9thique_ et le sens des dix premi\u00e8res propositions. En fait, si l'on consid\u00e8re les formules par lesquelles Leibniz d\u00e9montre lui-m\u00eame la possibilit\u00e9 de Dieu, on n'y verra au premier abord aucune diff\u00e9rence avec celles de Spinoza.\n\nSuivant Leibniz, Dieu est possible, parce que l'infiniment parfait est le propre d'un \u00ab \u00catre absolu \u00bb, qui renferme en soi tous les \u00ab attributs \u00bb, \u00ab toutes les formes simples absolument prises \u00bb, toutes les \u00ab natures qui sont susceptibles du dernier degr\u00e9 \u00bb, \u00ab toutes les qualit\u00e9s positives exprimant une chose sans aucune limite22 \u00bb. Comment ces formes suffisent-elles \u00e0 d\u00e9montrer la possibilit\u00e9 de Dieu ? Chacune est simple et irr\u00e9ductible, con\u00e7ue par soi, _index sui_. Leibniz dit : c'est leur disparit\u00e9 m\u00eame qui assure leur compatibilit\u00e9 (l'impossibilit\u00e9 de leur contradiction) ; c'est leur compatibilit\u00e9 qui assure la possibilit\u00e9 de l'\u00catre auquel elles appartiennent. Rien n'oppose ici Leibniz et Spinoza. Tout leur est commun litt\u00e9ralement, y compris l'utilisation de l'id\u00e9e d'expression, y compris la th\u00e8se selon laquelle les formes expressives sont \u00ab la source des choses \u00bb. \u00c0 cet \u00e9gard au moins, Leibniz ne pouvait rien apprendre \u00e0 Spinoza. Nous devons penser que Leibniz ne rapporte pas exactement la conversation de La Haye. Ou bien Spinoza \u00e9couta, et parla peu, constatant \u00e0 part soi la co\u00efncidence des id\u00e9es de Leibniz avec les siennes. Ou bien le d\u00e9saccord se d\u00e9clara, mais portant sur la mani\u00e8re respective dont chacun interpr\u00e9tait les formes ou qualit\u00e9s positives infinies. Car Leibniz con\u00e7oit celles-ci comme de premiers possibles dans l'entendement de Dieu. D'autre part ces premiers possibles, \u00ab notions absolument simples \u00bb, \u00e9chappent \u00e0 notre connaissance : nous savons qu'ils sont n\u00e9cessairement compatibles, sans savoir ce qu'ils sont. Ils semblent ant\u00e9rieurs et sup\u00e9rieurs \u00e0 toute relation logique : la connaissance atteint seulement des \u00ab notions relativement simples \u00bb qui servent de termes \u00e0 notre pens\u00e9e, et dont, peut-\u00eatre, on dirait au mieux qu'elles symbolisent avec les premiers simples23. Par l\u00e0 Leibniz \u00e9chappe \u00e0 la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 absolue qu'il d\u00e9nonce comme le danger du spinozisme : il emp\u00eache la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 \u00ab m\u00e9taphysique \u00bb de sortir de Dieu et de se communiquer aux cr\u00e9atures. Il introduit une esp\u00e8ce de finalit\u00e9, un principe du maximum, dans la preuve ontologique elle-m\u00eame. D\u00e8s ses rencontres avec Spinoza, Leibniz pense que la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 absolue est l'ennemi. Mais, inversement, Spinoza ne pouvait-il penser que, pour sauver les cr\u00e9atures et la cr\u00e9ation, Leibniz conservait toutes les perspectives de l'\u00e9minence, de l'analogie, du symbolisme en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral ? Peut-\u00eatre Leibniz ne d\u00e9passe-t-il qu'en apparence l'infiniment parfait, peut-\u00eatre n'atteint-il qu'en apparence une nature ou raison.\n\nSpinoza pense que la d\u00e9finition de Dieu telle qu'il la donne est une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle. Par d\u00e9monstration de la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 de la d\u00e9finition, il faut entendre une v\u00e9ritable gen\u00e8se de l'objet d\u00e9fini. Tel est le sens des premi\u00e8res propositions de l' _\u00c9thique : non pas hypoth\u00e9tique, mais g\u00e9n\u00e9tique._ Parce que les attributs sont r\u00e9ellement distincts, irr\u00e9ductibles les uns aux autres, ultimes dans leur forme respective ou dans leur genre, parce que chacun est con\u00e7u par soi, ils ne peuvent pas se contredire. Ils sont n\u00e9cessairement compatibles, et la substance qu'ils forment est possible. \u00ab Il est de la nature de la substance que chacun de ses attributs soit con\u00e7u par soi, puisque tous les attributs qu'elle poss\u00e8de ont toujours \u00e9t\u00e9 en m\u00eame temps en elle, et que l'un n'a pu \u00eatre produit par l'autre, mais que chacun exprime la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou l'\u00eatre de la substance. Il s'en faut donc de beaucoup qu'il soit absurde d'attribuer plusieurs attributs \u00e0 une seule et m\u00eame substance24. \u00bb Avec les attributs nous atteignons les \u00e9l\u00e9ments premiers et substantiels, notions irr\u00e9ductibles de la substance unique. Appara\u00eet ici l'id\u00e9e d'une constitution logique de la substance, \u00ab composition \u00bb qui n'a rien de physique. L'irr\u00e9ductibilit\u00e9 des attributs non seulement prouve mais constitue la non-impossibilit\u00e9 de Dieu comme substance unique ayant tous les attributs. Il ne peut y avoir contradiction qu'entre termes dont l'un, au moins, n'est pas con\u00e7u par soi. Et la compatibilit\u00e9 des attributs ne se fonde pas, chez Spinoza, dans une r\u00e9gion de l'entendement divin sup\u00e9rieure aux relations logiques elles-m\u00eames, mais _dans une logique propre \u00e0 la distinction r\u00e9elle_. C'est la nature de la distinction r\u00e9elle entre attributs qui exclut toute division de substances ; c'est cette nature de la distinction r\u00e9elle qui conserve aux termes distincts toute leur positivit\u00e9 respective, interdisant de les d\u00e9finir en opposition l'un avec l'autre, et les rapportant tous \u00e0 une m\u00eame substance indivisible. Spinoza semble \u00eatre celui qui va le plus loin dans la voie de cette nouvelle logique : logique de l'affirmation pure, de la qualit\u00e9 illimit\u00e9e, et, par l\u00e0, de la totalit\u00e9 inconditionn\u00e9e qui poss\u00e8de toutes les qualit\u00e9s, c'est-\u00e0-dire logique de l'absolu. Les attributs doivent \u00eatre compris comme les \u00e9l\u00e9ments de cette composition dans l'absolu.\n\nLes attributs comme expressions ne sont pas seulement des \u00ab miroirs \u00bb. La philosophie expressionniste nous rapporte deux m\u00e9taphores traditionnelles : celle du miroir qui refl\u00e8te ou r\u00e9fl\u00e9chit une image, mais aussi celle du germe qui \u00ab exprime \u00bb l'arbre tout entier. Les attributs sont l'un et l'autre, suivant le point de vue o\u00f9 l'on se place. D'une part, l'essence se r\u00e9fl\u00e9chit et se multiplie dans les attributs, les attributs sont des miroirs dont chacun exprime en son genre l'essence de la substance : ils renvoient n\u00e9cessairement \u00e0 l'entendement, comme les miroirs \u00e0 l'\u0153il qui voit l'image. Mais, aussi bien, l'exprim\u00e9 est envelopp\u00e9 dans l'expression, comme l'arbre dans le germe : l'essence de la substance est moins r\u00e9fl\u00e9chie dans les attributs que constitu\u00e9e par les attributs qui l'expriment ; les attributs sont moins des miroirs que des \u00e9l\u00e9ments dynamiques ou g\u00e9n\u00e9tiques.\n\nLa nature de Dieu ( _nature naturante_ ) est expressive. Dieu s'exprime dans les fondements du monde, qui forment son essence, avant de s'exprimer dans le monde. Et l'expression n'est pas manifestation sans \u00eatre aussi constitution de Dieu lui-m\u00eame. La Vie, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'expressivit\u00e9, est port\u00e9e dans l'absolu. Il y a dans la substance une unit\u00e9 du divers, dans les attributs une diversit\u00e9 actuelle de l'Un : la distinction r\u00e9elle s'applique \u00e0 l'absolu, parce qu'elle r\u00e9unit ces deux moments et les rapporte l'un \u00e0 l'autre. Aussi ne suffit-il pas de dire que Spinoza privil\u00e9gie l' _Ens necessarium_ sur l' _Ens perfectissimum._ En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, l'essentiel, c'est l' _Ens absolutum. Perfectissimum_ est seulement un propre, propre dont on part comme de la modalit\u00e9 de chaque attribut. _Necessarium_ est encore un propre, propre auquel on arrive comme \u00e0 la modalit\u00e9 de la substance ayant tous les attributs. Mais entre les deux, se fait la d\u00e9couverte de la nature ou de l'absolu : substance \u00e0 laquelle on rapporte la pens\u00e9e, l'\u00e9tendue, etc., toutes les formes d'\u00eatre univoques. C'est pourquoi, dans ses lettres, Spinoza insiste sur la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de ne pas perdre de vue la d\u00e9finition 6, d'y revenir constamment25. Cette d\u00e9finition est la seule qui nous livre une nature, cette nature est la nature expressive de l'absolu. Revenir \u00e0 cette d\u00e9finition n'est pas seulement la garder dans sa m\u00e9moire, mais y revenir comme \u00e0 une d\u00e9finition dont, entre-temps, on a d\u00e9montr\u00e9 qu'elle \u00e9tait r\u00e9elle. Et cette d\u00e9monstration n'est pas comme une op\u00e9ration de l'entendement qui resterait ext\u00e9rieure \u00e0 la substance ; elle se confond avec la vie de la substance elle-m\u00eame, avec la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de sa constitution a priori.\n\n\u00ab Quand je d\u00e9finis Dieu : l'\u00catre souverainement parfait, comme cette d\u00e9finition n'exprime pas une cause efficiente (j'entends une cause efficiente tant interne qu'externe), je ne pourrai en d\u00e9duire toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de Dieu. Au contraire, quand je d\u00e9finis Dieu : un \u00catre, etc. (voir _\u00c9thique_ , partie I, d\u00e9finition 6)26. \u00bb Telle est la transformation de la preuve a priori : Spinoza d\u00e9passe l'infiniment parfait vers l'absolument infini, dans lequel il d\u00e9couvre la Nature ou Raison suffisante. _Cette d\u00e9marche aboutit \u00e0 une seconde triade de la substance_. 1o) toutes les formes d'\u00eatre sont \u00e9gales et \u00e9galement parfaites, il n'y a pas d'in\u00e9galit\u00e9 de perfection entre les attributs ; 2o) chaque forme est donc illimit\u00e9e, chaque attribut exprime une essence infinie ; 3o) toutes les formes appartiennent donc \u00e0 une seule et m\u00eame substance, tous les attributs s'affirment \u00e9galement sans limitation d'une substance absolument infinie. La premi\u00e8re triade \u00e9tait : attribut-essence-substance. La seconde : parfait-infini-absolu. La premi\u00e8re se fondait sur un argument pol\u00e9mique : la distinction r\u00e9elle ne peut pas \u00eatre num\u00e9rique. Et sur un argument positif : la distinction r\u00e9elle est une distinction formelle entre attributs qui s'affirment d'une seule et m\u00eame substance. La seconde triade a pour argument pol\u00e9mique : les propres ne constituent pas une nature. Et pour argument positif : tout est perfection dans la nature. Il n'y a pas de \u00ab nature \u00bb \u00e0 laquelle manque quelque chose ; toutes les formes d'\u00eatre s'affirment sans limitation, donc s'attribuent \u00e0 quelque chose d'absolu, l'absolu dans sa nature \u00e9tant infini sous toutes les formes. La triade de l'absolu compl\u00e8te ainsi celle de la substance : elle la relaie, nous menant \u00e0 la d\u00e9couverte d'une troisi\u00e8me et derni\u00e8re d\u00e9termination de Dieu.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 2-5 (et notes 2 et 3). _\u00c9_ , I, 8, dem.\n\n2.  _CT_ , Appendice II, 11.\n\n3.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 6. Qu'il n'y ait pas \u00ab deux substances \u00e9gales \u00bb ne contredit pas l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des attributs : les deux th\u00e8mes s'impliquent.\n\n4.  DESCARTES, _M\u00e9ditation III_ , AT IX, p. 38, p. 40.\n\n5.  _R\u00e9ponses aux premi\u00e8res objections_ , AT IX, p. 91.\n\n6.  Les premiers textes de Leibniz, \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard, sont de 1672 ( _Leibnitiana_ , \u00e9d. Jagodinsky, p. 112). Cf. aussi la note de 1676, _Quod ens perfectissimum existit_ (Gerhardt VII, p. 261).\n\n7.  _R\u00e9ponses aux secondes objections_ , AT, IX, p. 118 : \u00ab ... Ou bien vous feignez quelque autre possibilit\u00e9, de la part de l'objet m\u00eame, laquelle, si elle ne convient pas avec la pr\u00e9c\u00e9dente, ne peut jamais \u00eatre connue par l'entendement humain... \u00bb\n\n8.  Telle semble \u00eatre la position des auteurs des secondes objections (cf. AT, IX, p. 101).\n\n9.  _R\u00e9ponses aux secondes objections_ , AT, IX, p. 112.\n\n10.  _R\u00e9ponses aux secondes objections_ , AT, IX, p. 108. C'est un des principes fondamentaux du thomisme : _De Deo et creaturis nil univoce praedicatur._\n\n11.  _M\u00e9ditation_ III, AT, IX, p. 36.\n\n12.  Cf. LEIBNIZ, _Lettre \u00e0 la princesse \u00c9lisabeth_ , 1678, et _M\u00e9ditations sur la connaissance, la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 et les id\u00e9es_ , 1684.\n\n13.  Sur le caract\u00e8re nominal d'une d\u00e9finition de Dieu par l'infiniment parfait, cf. _Lettre 60, \u00e0 Tschirnhaus_ (III, p. 200).\n\n14.  _\u00c9_ , I, 11, les deux premi\u00e8res d\u00e9monstrations.\n\n15.  _\u00c9_ , I, 10, sc. : \u00ab Il s'en faut de beaucoup qu'il soit absurde d'attribuer plusieurs attributs \u00e0 une seule substance... \u00bb\n\n16.  _CT_ , I, ch. 1, 1.\n\n17.  _CT_ , I, ch. 1, 2 (Sur l'ambigu\u00eft\u00e9 de la formule et sa traduction, cf. la note d'Appuhn, \u00e9d. Garnier, p. 506).\n\n18.  _CT_ , I, ch. 1, 2, note 2.\n\n19.  _\u00c9_ , I, 20, dem. et cor.\n\n20.  Cf. G. FRIEDMANN, _Leibniz et Spinoza_ (NRF, 1946), pp. 66-70.\n\n21.  LEIBNIZ, _Ad \u00c9thicam..._ (Gerhardt, I), pp. 139-152.\n\n22.  Cf. _Quod ens..., Lettre \u00e0 la princesse \u00c9lisabeth, M\u00e9ditations sur la connaissance..._\n\n23.  Cf. LEIBNIZ, _Elementa calculi, Plan de la science g\u00e9n\u00e9rale, Introductio ad Encyclopaediam Arcanam_ (\u00e9d. Conturat). Sur les absolument simples, qui sont de purs \u00ab disparates \u00bb, ant\u00e9rieurs aux relations logiques, cf. M. GU\u00c9ROULT, \u00ab La Constitution de la substance chez Leibniz \u00bb ( _Revue de m\u00e9taphysique et de morale_ , 1947).\n\n24.  _\u00c9_ , I, 10, sc.\n\n25.  _Lettre 2, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 5) ; _Lettre 4, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, pp. 10-11) ; _Lettres 35 et 36, \u00e0 Hudde_ (III, pp. 129-132).\n\n26.  _Lettre 60, \u00e0 Tschirnhaus_ (III, p. 200).\n\n## CHAPITRE V\n\n## LA PUISSANCE\n\nDans toutes les critiques de Leibniz contre Descartes, un th\u00e8me revient constamment : Descartes va \u00ab trop vite \u00bb. Descartes a cru que la consid\u00e9ration de l'infiniment parfait suffisait dans l'ordre de l'\u00eatre, que la possession d'une id\u00e9e claire et distincte suffisait dans l'ordre de la connaissance, que l'examen des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection suffisait \u00e0 nous faire passer de la connaissance \u00e0 l'\u00eatre. Leibniz aime \u00e0 retourner contre Descartes l'accusation de pr\u00e9cipitation. Toujours Descartes est entra\u00een\u00e9, par sa rapidit\u00e9, \u00e0 confondre le relatif avec l'absolu1. Si nous cherchons encore ce qu'il y a de commun dans la r\u00e9action anticart\u00e9sienne, nous voyons que Spinoza, de son c\u00f4t\u00e9, s'en prend \u00e0 la _facilit\u00e9_ chez Descartes. La complaisance de Descartes \u00e0 faire un usage philosophique des notions de \u00ab facile \u00bb et de \u00ab difficile \u00bb avait inqui\u00e9t\u00e9 d\u00e9j\u00e0 beaucoup de ses contemporains. Quand Spinoza se heurte \u00e0 l'emploi cart\u00e9sien du mot facile, il perd sa s\u00e9r\u00e9nit\u00e9 de professeur qui s'\u00e9tait promis d'exposer les _Principes_ sans rien dire qui en differ\u00e2t de \u00ab la largeur d'un ongle \u00bb ; il manifeste m\u00eame une sorte d'indignation2. Sans doute n'est-il pas le premier \u00e0 d\u00e9noncer cette facilit\u00e9, pas plus que Leibniz n'est le premier \u00e0 d\u00e9noncer cette rapidit\u00e9. Mais c'est avec Leibniz et avec Spinoza que la critique prend son aspect le plus complet, le plus riche et le plus efficace.\n\nDescartes donne deux \u00e9nonc\u00e9s de la preuve a posteriori de l'existence de Dieu : Dieu existe, parce que son id\u00e9e est en nous ; et aussi parce que nous-m\u00eames, qui avons son id\u00e9e, existons. La premi\u00e8re d\u00e9monstration se fonde imm\u00e9diatement sur la consid\u00e9ration des quantit\u00e9s de perfection ou de r\u00e9alit\u00e9. Une cause doit avoir au moins autant de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 que son effet ; la cause d'une id\u00e9e doit avoir au moins autant de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 formelle que cette id\u00e9e contient de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 objective. Or j'ai l'id\u00e9e d'un \u00eatre infiniment parfait (c'est-\u00e0-dire une id\u00e9e qui contient \u00ab plus de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 objective qu'aucune autre \u00bb)3. La seconde d\u00e9monstration est plus complexe, parce qu'elle proc\u00e8de d'une hypoth\u00e8se absurde : Si j'avais le pouvoir de me produire, il me serait encore plus facile de me donner les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s dont j'ai l'id\u00e9e ; et il ne me serait pas plus difficile de me conserver que de me produire ou de me cr\u00e9er4. Cette fois, le principe est : Qui peut le plus peut le moins. \u00ab Ce qui peut faire le plus ou le plus difficile peut aussi faire le moins5. \u00bb Or s'il est plus difficile de cr\u00e9er ou de conserver une substance que de cr\u00e9er ou de conserver des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s, c'est parce que la substance a plus de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 que les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s elles-m\u00eames. On objectera que la substance se confond avec ses propri\u00e9t\u00e9s consid\u00e9r\u00e9es collectivement. Mais \u00ab distributivement \u00bb, les attributs sont comme les parties d'un tout ; c'est en ce sens qu'ils sont plus faciles \u00e0 produire. On objecte en second lieu que la comparaison ne peut pas se faire entre une substance (par exemple finie) et les attributs d'une autre substance (par exemple infinie). Mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, si j'avais le pouvoir de me produire comme substance, les perfections dont j'ai l'id\u00e9e feraient partie de moi-m\u00eame, il me serait donc plus facile de me les donner que de me produire ou de me conserver tout entier. On objecte enfin qu'une cause d\u00e9termin\u00e9e, destin\u00e9e par nature \u00e0 produire tel effet, ne peut pas produire \u00ab plus facilement \u00bb un autre effet, m\u00eame de quantit\u00e9 moindre. Mais, du point de vue d'une cause premi\u00e8re, les quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 qui correspondent aux attributs et aux modes entrent dans des rapports de tout \u00e0 partie qui permettent de d\u00e9terminer le plus et le moins, le plus difficile et le plus facile6.\n\nIl est clair qu'un m\u00eame argument anime les deux d\u00e9monstrations. Ou bien Descartes rapporte des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 objective \u00e0 des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 formelle, ou bien il fait entrer les quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 dans des rapports de tout \u00e0 partie. L'ensemble de la preuve a posteriori proc\u00e8de en tout cas par examen des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection prises en tant que telles. Quand Spinoza expose Descartes, il ne se retient pas d'attaquer la seconde d\u00e9monstration ; il retrouve ou reprend les objections contre la notion de \u00ab facile \u00bb. Mais la mani\u00e8re dont il le fait laisse penser que, lorsqu'il parle pour son compte, il n'a pas plus d'indulgence pour la premi\u00e8re d\u00e9monstration. En effet, l'on trouve dans l'\u0153uvre de Spinoza beaucoup de versions d'une preuve a posteriori de l'existence de Dieu. Nous croyons qu'elles ont toutes quelque chose de commun, les unes enveloppant une critique de la premi\u00e8re d\u00e9monstration cart\u00e9sienne, les autres enveloppant une critique de la seconde, _mais toutes ayant pour but de substituer un argument des puissances \u00e0 l'argument des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9_. Tout se passe comme si, de fa\u00e7ons tr\u00e8s diverses, Spinoza sugg\u00e9rait toujours une m\u00eame critique : Descartes a pris le relatif pour l'absolu. Dans la preuve a priori, Descartes a confondu l'absolu avec l'infiniment parfait ; mais l'infiniment parfait n'est qu'un relatif. Dans la preuve a posteriori, Descartes prend la quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection pour un absolu ; mais celle-ci encore n'est qu'un relatif. L'absolument infini comme raison suffisante et nature de l'infiniment parfait ; la puissance comme raison suffisante de la quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 : telles sont les transformations corr\u00e9latives que Spinoza fait subir aux preuves cart\u00e9siennes.\n\nLe _Court Trait\u00e9_ ne contient aucune trace du deuxi\u00e8me \u00e9nonc\u00e9 cart\u00e9sien ; mais il conserve le premier, dans des termes semblables \u00e0 ceux de Descartes : \u00ab Si une id\u00e9e de Dieu est donn\u00e9e, la cause de cette id\u00e9e doit exister formellement et contenir en elle tout ce que l'id\u00e9e contient objectivement ; or une id\u00e9e de Dieu est donn\u00e9e7. \u00bb Toutefois, c'est la d\u00e9monstration de ce premier \u00e9nonc\u00e9 qui se trouve profond\u00e9ment modifi\u00e9e. On assiste \u00e0 une multiplication de syllogismes, t\u00e9moignant d'un \u00e9tat de la pens\u00e9e de Spinoza, si obscur soit-il, o\u00f9 celui-ci tente d\u00e9j\u00e0 de d\u00e9passer l'argument de la quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 pour y substituer un argument fond\u00e9 sur la puissance. Le raisonnement est le suivant : Un entendement fini n'a pas par lui-m\u00eame \u00ab le pouvoir \u00bb de conna\u00eetre l'infini, ni de conna\u00eetre ceci plut\u00f4t que cela ; or il \u00ab peut \u00bb conna\u00eetre quelque chose ; il faut donc qu'un objet existe formellement, qui le d\u00e9termine \u00e0 conna\u00eetre ceci plut\u00f4t que cela ; et il \u00ab peut \u00bb concevoir l'infini ; il faut donc que Dieu lui-m\u00eame existe formellement. En d'autres termes, Spinoza demande : pourquoi la cause de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu doit-elle contenir formellement tout ce que cette id\u00e9e contient objectivement ? C'est dire que l'axiome de Descartes ne le satisfait pas. L'axiome cart\u00e9sien \u00e9tait : il doit y avoir \u00ab au moins autant \u00bb de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 formelle dans la cause d'une id\u00e9e que de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 objective dans l'id\u00e9e elle-m\u00eame. (Ce qui suffisait \u00e0 garantir qu'il n'y en avait pas \u00ab plus \u00bb, dans le cas d'une quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 objective infinie). Or nous pouvons pressentir que Spinoza cherche une raison plus profonde. Le texte du _Court Trait\u00e9_ pr\u00e9pare d\u00e9j\u00e0 certains \u00e9l\u00e9ments qui feront partie d'un _axiome des puissances_ : l'entendement n'a pas plus de puissance pour conna\u00eetre que ses objets pour exister et agir ; la puissance de penser et de conna\u00eetre ne peut pas \u00eatre plus grande qu'une puissance d'exister n\u00e9cessairement corr\u00e9lative.\n\nS'agira-t-il, \u00e0 proprement parler, d'un _axiome_ ? Un autre texte du _Court Trait\u00e9_ , certainement plus tardif, \u00e9nonce : \u00ab Il n'y a aucune chose dont l'id\u00e9e ne soit dans la chose pensante, et aucune id\u00e9e ne peut \u00eatre sans que la chose ne soit aussi8. \u00bb Cette formule sera fondamentale dans tout le spinozisme. Pour autant qu'elle peut \u00eatre d\u00e9montr\u00e9e, elle m\u00e8ne \u00e0 l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 de deux puissances. Il est vrai que la premi\u00e8re partie de la formule est difficilement d\u00e9montrable, si l'on ne se donne pas d\u00e9j\u00e0 l'existence de Dieu. Mais la seconde partie se laisse ais\u00e9ment d\u00e9montrer. Une id\u00e9e qui ne serait pas l'id\u00e9e de quelque chose d'existant n'aurait aucune distinction, ne serait pas l'id\u00e9e de ceci ou de cela. Ou bien, meilleure d\u00e9monstration \u00e0 laquelle Spinoza arrivera : Conna\u00eetre, c'est conna\u00eetre par la cause, donc aucune chose ne peut \u00eatre connue sans une cause qui la fait \u00eatre, en existence ou en essence. De cet argument, on peut d\u00e9j\u00e0 conclure que la puissance de penser, dont participent toutes les id\u00e9es, n'est pas sup\u00e9rieure \u00e0 une puissance d'exister et d'agir dont toutes les choses participent. Et c'est l'essentiel, du point de vue d'une preuve a posteriori.\n\nNous avons une id\u00e9e de Dieu ; nous devons donc affirmer une puissance infinie de penser comme correspondant \u00e0 cette id\u00e9e ; or la puissance de penser n'est pas plus grande que la puissance d'exister et d'agir ; nous devons donc affirmer une puissance infinie d'exister comme correspondant \u00e0 la nature de Dieu. De l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, on n'inf\u00e8re plus imm\u00e9diatement l'existence de Dieu ; _on passe par le d\u00e9tour des puissances_ pour trouver, dans la puissance de penser, la raison de la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 objective contenue dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, et dans la puissance d'exister, la raison de la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 formelle en Dieu lui-m\u00eame. Le _Court Trait\u00e9_ nous semble d\u00e9j\u00e0 pr\u00e9parer les \u00e9l\u00e9ments d'une preuve de ce genre. Puis le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ en donne une formule explicite9. Mais c'est dans une lettre que Spinoza r\u00e9v\u00e8le le plus nettement ce qu'il cherchait depuis le _Court Trait\u00e9_ : substituer un axiome des puissances \u00e0 l'axiome cart\u00e9sien des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9, jug\u00e9 obscur. \u00ab La puissance de penser n'est pas plus grande pour penser que la puissance de la nature, pour exister et agir. C'est l\u00e0 un axiome clair et vrai, \u00e0 partir duquel l'existence de Dieu suit de son id\u00e9e, de mani\u00e8re tr\u00e8s claire et efficace10. \u00bb\n\nNous devons remarquer toutefois que Spinoza parvient tardivement \u00e0 la possession de son \u00ab axiome \u00bb. Bien plus, il ne lui donne pas son plein \u00e9nonc\u00e9, lequel impliquerait une stricte \u00e9galit\u00e9 des deux puissances. Bien plus, il pr\u00e9sente comme axiome une proposition qu'il sait d\u00e9montrable en partie. \u00c0 toutes ces ambigu\u00eft\u00e9s, il y a une raison. L'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des puissances est d'autant mieux d\u00e9montr\u00e9e qu'on part d'un Dieu d\u00e9j\u00e0 existant. Donc, \u00e0 mesure que Spinoza parvient \u00e0 une possession plus parfaite de cette formule d'\u00e9galit\u00e9, il cesse de s'en servir pour \u00e9tablir a posteriori l'existence de Dieu ; il lui r\u00e9serve un autre usage, un autre domaine. En effet, l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des puissances jouera un r\u00f4le fondamental dans le livre II de l' _\u00c9thique_ ; mais ce r\u00f4le, elle l'aura comme facteur d\u00e9cisif dans la d\u00e9monstration du parall\u00e9lisme, une fois prouv\u00e9e l'existence de Dieu.\n\nOn ne doit donc pas s'\u00e9tonner que la preuve a posteriori de l' _\u00c9thique_ soit d'une autre esp\u00e8ce que celle du _Court Trait\u00e9_ et du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_. Elle n'en proc\u00e8de pas moins par la puissance. Mais elle ne passe plus par l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, ni par une puissance de penser correspondante, pour conclure \u00e0 une puissance infinie d'exister. Elle op\u00e8re imm\u00e9diatement dans l'existence, par la puissance d'exister. En ce sens l' _\u00c9thique_ se sert des indications que Spinoza donnait d\u00e9j\u00e0 dans sa version remani\u00e9e des _Principes_. Dans les _Principes_ , Spinoza exposait la premi\u00e8re d\u00e9monstration cart\u00e9sienne, sans commentaires ni corrections ; mais c'\u00e9tait la seconde d\u00e9monstration qui se trouvait profond\u00e9ment remani\u00e9e. Spinoza s'en prenait violemment \u00e0 l'emploi du mot \u00ab facile \u00bb chez Descartes. Il proposait un tout autre raisonnement : 1o) Plus une chose a de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection, plus grande est l'existence qu'elle enveloppe (existence possible correspondant aux degr\u00e9s finis de perfection, existence n\u00e9cessaire correspondant \u00e0 l'infiniment parfait). 2o) Qui a la _puissance_ ( _potentiam_ ou _vim_ ) de se conserver n'a besoin d'aucune cause pour exister, non seulement pour exister \u00ab d'existence possible \u00bb, mais \u00ab d'existence n\u00e9cessaire \u00bb. Qui a la puissance de se conserver existe donc n\u00e9cessairement. 3o) Je suis imparfait, donc n'ai pas l'existence n\u00e9cessaire, donc n'ai pas la puissance de me conserver ; je suis conserv\u00e9 par un autre, mais par un autre qui a n\u00e9cessairement le pouvoir de se conserver lui-m\u00eame, donc qui existe n\u00e9cessairement11.\n\nDans le _Court Trait\u00e9_ , il n'y a pas trace du deuxi\u00e8me \u00e9nonc\u00e9 de Descartes ; le premier est conserv\u00e9, mais d\u00e9montr\u00e9 d'une tout autre fa\u00e7on. Dans l' _\u00c9thique_ au contraire, il n'y a plus trace du premier (pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce que l'argument des puissances est r\u00e9serv\u00e9 maintenant pour un meilleur usage). Mais on trouve, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , une version de la preuve a posteriori qui renvoie au second \u00e9nonc\u00e9 de Descartes, ne serait-ce que par les critiques implicites et les remaniements qu'elle propose. Spinoza d\u00e9nonce ceux qui pensent que, plus il appartient \u00e0 une chose, plus elle est difficile \u00e0 produire12. Mais il va plus loin que dans les _Principes_. L'expos\u00e9 des _Principes_ ne disait pas le plus important : l'existence, possible ou n\u00e9cessaire, est elle-m\u00eame puissance ; _la puissance est identique \u00e0 l'essence elle-m\u00eame_. C'est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce que l'essence est puissance que l'existence possible (dans l'essence) est autre chose qu'une \u00ab possibilit\u00e9 \u00bb. L' _\u00c9thique_ pr\u00e9sentera donc l'argument suivant : 1o) Pouvoir exister, c'est puissance (il s'agit de l'existence possible envelopp\u00e9e dans l'essence d'une chose finie). 2o) Or un \u00eatre fini existe d\u00e9j\u00e0 n\u00e9cessairement (c'est-\u00e0-dire en vertu d'une cause ext\u00e9rieure qui le d\u00e9termine \u00e0 exister). 3o) Si l'\u00catre absolument infini n'existait pas n\u00e9cessairement lui aussi, il serait moins puissant que les \u00eatres finis : ce qui est absurde. 4o) Mais l'existence n\u00e9cessaire de l'absolument infini ne peut pas \u00eatre en vertu d'une cause ext\u00e9rieure ; c'est donc par lui-m\u00eame que l'\u00eatre absolument infini existe n\u00e9cessairement13. Ainsi fond\u00e9e sur la puissance d'exister, la preuve a posteriori donne lieu \u00e0 une nouvelle preuve a priori : plus il appartient de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection \u00e0 la nature d'une chose, plus elle a de puissance, c'est-\u00e0-dire de forces pour exister ( _virium... ut existat_ ) ; \u00ab Dieu a donc par soi-m\u00eame une puissance absolument infinie d'exister, et par suite il existe absolument14. \u00bb\n\nL'argument de la puissance a donc deux aspects chez Spinoza, l'un renvoyant \u00e0 la critique du premier \u00e9nonc\u00e9 de Descartes, l'autre \u00e0 la critique du second. Mais dans les deux cas, et surtout dans le deuxi\u00e8me qui repr\u00e9sente l'\u00e9tat d\u00e9finitif de la pens\u00e9e de Spinoza, nous devons chercher la signification de cet argument. On attribue \u00e0 un \u00eatre fini une puissance d'exister comme identique \u00e0 son essence. Sans doute un \u00eatre fini n'existe-t-il pas par sa propre essence ou puissance, mais en vertu d'une cause externe. Il n'en a pas moins une puissance qui lui est propre, bien que cette puissance soit n\u00e9cessairement effectu\u00e9e sous l'action de choses ext\u00e9rieures. Raison de plus pour demander : \u00e0 quelle condition attribuons-nous \u00e0 un \u00eatre fini, qui n'existe pas par soi, une _puissance d'exister et d'agir_ identique \u00e0 son essence15 ? La r\u00e9ponse de Spinoza semble \u00eatre celle-ci : Nous affirmons cette puissance d'un \u00eatre fini dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous consid\u00e9rons cet \u00eatre comme la partie d'un tout, comme le mode d'un attribut, la modification d'une substance. Donc cette substance a pour son compte une puissance infinie d'exister, d'autant plus de puissance qu'elle a plus d'attributs. Le m\u00eame raisonnement vaut pour la puissance de penser : nous attribuons \u00e0 une id\u00e9e distincte une puissance de conna\u00eetre, mais dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous consid\u00e9rons cette id\u00e9e comme la partie d'un tout, le mode d'un attribut pens\u00e9e, la modification d'une substance pensante qui, pour son compte, poss\u00e8de une puissance infinie de penser16.\n\nAppara\u00eet plus clairement comment la preuve a posteriori de l' _\u00c9thique_ donne lieu \u00e0 une preuve a priori. Il suffit de constater que Dieu, ayant tous les attributs, poss\u00e8de a priori _toutes les conditions_ sous lesquelles on affirme de quelque chose une puissance : il a donc une puissance \u00ab absolument infinie d'exister, il _existe_ \u00ab absolument \u00bb et par soi. Bien plus, nous verrons que Dieu, ayant un attribut qui est la pens\u00e9e, poss\u00e8de \u00e9galement une puissance absolue infinie de penser17. En tout ceci les attributs semblent avoir un r\u00f4le essentiellement dynamique. Non pas qu'ils soient eux-m\u00eames puissances. Mais, pris collectivement, ce sont les conditions sous lesquelles on attribue \u00e0 la substance absolue une puissance absolument infinie d'exister et d'agir, identique \u00e0 son essence formelle. Pris distributivement, ce sont les conditions sous lesquelles on attribue \u00e0 des \u00eatres finis une puissance identique \u00e0 leur essence formelle, en tant que cette essence est contenue dans tel ou tel attribut. D'autre part, l'attribut pens\u00e9e pris en lui-m\u00eame est la condition sous laquelle on rapporte \u00e0 la substance absolue une puissance absolument infinie de penser identique \u00e0 son essence objective ; sous laquelle, aussi, on attribue aux id\u00e9es une puissance de conna\u00eetre identique \u00e0 l'essence objective qui les d\u00e9finit respectivement. C'est en ce sens que les \u00eatres finis sont conditionn\u00e9s, \u00e9tant n\u00e9cessairement modifications de la substance ou modes d'un attribut ; la substance est comme la totalit\u00e9 inconditionn\u00e9e, parce qu'elle poss\u00e8de ou remplit a priori l'infinit\u00e9 des conditions ; les attributs sont des conditions communes, communes \u00e0 la substance qui les poss\u00e8de collectivement et aux modes qui les impliquent distributivement. Comme dit Spinoza, ce n'est pas par des attributs humains (bont\u00e9, justice, charit\u00e9...) que Dieu \u00ab communique \u00bb aux cr\u00e9atures humaines les perfections qu'elles poss\u00e8dent18. Au contraire, c'est par ses propres attributs que Dieu communique \u00e0 toutes les cr\u00e9atures la puissance qui leur est propre.\n\nLe _Trait\u00e9 politique_ expose une preuve a posteriori de la m\u00eame famille que celle des _Principes_ et de l' _\u00c9thique_ ; les \u00eatres finis n'existent et ne se conservent pas par leur propre puissance ; pour exister et se conserver, ils ont besoin de la puissance d'un \u00eatre capable de se conserver soi-m\u00eame et d'exister par soi ; la puissance par laquelle un \u00eatre fini existe, se conserve et agit est donc la puissance de Dieu lui-m\u00eame19. \u00c0 certains \u00e9gards, on pourrait croire qu'un tel texte tend \u00e0 supprimer toute puissance propre aux cr\u00e9atures. Il n'en est rien. Tout le spinozisme s'accorde pour reconna\u00eetre aux \u00eatres finis une puissance d'exister, d'agir et de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer ; et le contexte m\u00eame du _Trait\u00e9 politique_ souligne que les choses ont une puissance propre, identique \u00e0 leur essence et constitutive de leur \u00ab droit \u00bb. Spinoza ne veut pas dire qu'un \u00eatre qui n'existe pas par soi n'a pas de puissance ; il veut dire qu'il n'a de puissance propre qu'en tant qu'il est la partie d'un tout, c'est-\u00e0-dire une partie de la puissance d'un \u00eatre qui, lui, existe par soi. (Toute la preuve a posteriori repose sur ce raisonnement, qui va du conditionn\u00e9 \u00e0 l'inconditionn\u00e9.) Spinoza dit, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ : la puissance de l'homme est \u00ab une partie de la puissance infinie de Dieu20 \u00bb. Mais la partie se r\u00e9v\u00e8le irr\u00e9ductible, degr\u00e9 de puissance original et distinct de tous les autres. Nous sommes une partie de la puissance de Dieu, mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment dans la mesure o\u00f9 cette puissance est \u00ab expliqu\u00e9e \u00bb par notre essence elle-m\u00eame21. La participation chez Spinoza sera toujours pens\u00e9e comme une participation des puissances. Mais jamais la participation des puissances ne supprime la distinction des essences. Jamais Spinoza ne confond une essence de mode et une essence de substance : ma puissance reste ma propre essence, la puissance de Dieu reste sa propre essence, au moment m\u00eame o\u00f9 ma puissance est une partie de la puissance de Dieu22.\n\nComment est-ce possible ? Comment concilier la distinction des essences et la participation des puissances ? Si la puissance ou l'essence de Dieu peut \u00eatre \u00ab expliqu\u00e9e \u00bb par une essence finie, c'est parce que les attributs sont des formes communes \u00e0 Dieu dont ils constituent l'essence, et aux choses finies dont ils contiennent les essences. La puissance de Dieu se divise ou s'explique dans chaque attribut suivant les essences comprises dans cet attribut. _C'est en ce sens que le rapport tout-partie tend \u00e0 se confondre avec le rapport attribut-mode, substance-modification._ Les choses finies sont des parties de la puissance divine parce qu'elles sont les modes des attributs de Dieu. Mais la r\u00e9duction des \u00ab cr\u00e9atures \u00bb \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat de modes, loin de leur retirer toute puissance propre, montre au contraire comment une part de puissance leur revient en propre, conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 leur essence. L'identit\u00e9 de la puissance et de l'essence s'affirme \u00e9galement (sous les m\u00eames conditions) des modes et de la substance. Ces conditions sont les attributs, par lesquels la substance poss\u00e8de une toute-puissance identique \u00e0 son essence, sous lequel les modes poss\u00e8dent une part de cette puissance, identique \u00e0 leur essence. C'est pourquoi les modes, impliquant ces m\u00eames attributs qui constituent l'essence de Dieu, sont dits \u00ab expliquer \u00bb ou \u00ab exprimer \u00bb la puissance divine23. R\u00e9duire les choses \u00e0 des modes d'une substance unique n'est pas un moyen d'en faire des apparences, des fant\u00f4mes, comme Leibniz le croyait ou feignait de le croire, mais au contraire le seul moyen, selon Spinoza, d'en faire des \u00eatres \u00ab naturels \u00bb, dou\u00e9s de force ou de puissance.\n\nL'identit\u00e9 de la puissance et de l'essence signifie ceci : la puissance est toujours acte ou, du moins, en acte. Une longue tradition th\u00e9ologique affirmait d\u00e9j\u00e0 l'identit\u00e9 de la puissance et de l'acte, non seulement en Dieu, mais dans la nature24. D'autre part, une longue tradition physique et mat\u00e9rialiste affirmait, dans les choses cr\u00e9\u00e9es elles-m\u00eames, le caract\u00e8re actuel de toute puissance : \u00e0 la distinction de la puissance et de l'acte, on substituait la corr\u00e9lation d'une puissance d'agir et d'une puissance de p\u00e2tir, toutes deux actuelles25. Chez Spinoza les deux courants se rejoignent, l'un renvoyant \u00e0 l'essence de la substance, l'autre \u00e0 l'essence du mode. C'est que, dans le spinozisme, toute puissance entra\u00eene un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 qui lui correspond et en est ins\u00e9parable. Or ce pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 est toujours et n\u00e9cessairement rempli. \u00c0 la _potentia_ correspond une _aptitudo_ ou _potestas_ ; mais il n'y a pas d'aptitude ou de pouvoir qui ne soit effectu\u00e9s, donc pas de puissance qui ne soit actuelle26.\n\nUne essence de mode est puissance ; lui correspond dans le mode un certain pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Mais parce que le mode est une partie de la nature, son pouvoir est toujours rempli, soit par des affections produites par les choses ext\u00e9rieures (affections dites passives), soit par des affections qui s'expliquent par sa propre essence (affections dites actives). Ainsi la distinction de la puissance et de l'acte, au niveau du mode, dispara\u00eet au profit d'une corr\u00e9lation entre deux puissances \u00e9galement actuelles, puissance d'agir et puissance de p\u00e2tir, qui varient en raison inverse, mais dont la somme est constante et constamment effectu\u00e9e. C'est pourquoi Spinoza peut pr\u00e9senter la puissance du mode, tant\u00f4t comme un invariant identique \u00e0 l'essence, puisque le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 reste constant, tant\u00f4t comme sujette \u00e0 des variations, puisque la puissance d'agir (ou force d'exister) \u00ab augmente \u00bb ou \u00ab diminue \u00bb suivant la proportion des affections actives qui contribuent \u00e0 remplir ce pouvoir \u00e0 chaque instant27. Reste que le mode, de toute mani\u00e8re, n'a d'autre puissance qu'actuelle : \u00e0 chaque instant il est tout ce qu'il peut \u00eatre, sa puissance est son essence.\n\n\u00c0 l'autre p\u00f4le, l'essence de la substance est puissance. Cette puissance absolument infinie d'exister entra\u00eene un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'une infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons. Mais cette fois, le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 ne peut \u00eatre rempli que par des affections actives. Comment la substance absolument infinie aurait-elle une puissance de p\u00e2tir, celle-ci supposant \u00e9videmment une limitation de la puissance d'agir ? \u00c9tant toute-puissante en elle-m\u00eame et par elle-m\u00eame, la substance est n\u00e9cessairement capable d'une infinit\u00e9 d'affections, et cause active de toutes les affections dont elle est capable. Dire que l'essence de Dieu est puissance, c'est dire que Dieu produit une infinit\u00e9 de choses, en vertu de cette m\u00eame puissance par laquelle il existe. _Il les produit donc comme il existe._ Cause de toutes choses \u00ab au m\u00eame sens \u00bb que cause de soi, il produit toutes choses dans ses attributs, puisque ses attributs constituent \u00e0 la fois son essence et son existence. Il ne suffira donc pas de dire que la puissance de Dieu est actuelle : elle est n\u00e9cessairement active, elle est acte. L'essence de Dieu n'est pas puissance sans qu'une infinit\u00e9 de choses n'en d\u00e9coulent, et n'en d\u00e9coulent pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment dans ces attributs qui la constituent. Aussi bien les modes sont-ils les affections de Dieu ; mais jamais Dieu ne p\u00e2tit de ses modes, il n'a d'affections qu'actives28.\n\nToute essence est essence de quelque chose. On distinguera donc : l'essence comme puissance ; ce dont elle est l'essence ; le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 qui lui correspond. Ce dont l'essence est l'essence, c'est toujours une quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection. Mais une chose a d'autant plus de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection qu'elle peut \u00eatre affect\u00e9e d'un plus grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons : _la quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 trouve toujours sa raison dans une puissance identique \u00e0 l'essence._ La preuve a posteriori part de la puissance propre aux \u00eatre finis : on cherche la condition sous laquelle un \u00eatre fini a une puissance, on s'\u00e9l\u00e8ve jusqu'\u00e0 la puissance inconditionn\u00e9e d'une substance absolument infinie. En effet, une essence d'\u00eatre fini n'est puissance que par rapport \u00e0 une substance dont cet \u00eatre est le mode. Mais cette d\u00e9marche a posteriori n'est qu'une fa\u00e7on, pour nous, d'arriver \u00e0 une d\u00e9marche a priori plus profonde. L'essence de la substance absolument infinie est toute-puissance, parce que la substance poss\u00e8de a priori toutes les conditions sous lesquelles on attribue la puissance \u00e0 quelque chose. Or, s'il est vrai que les modes, en vertu de leur puissance, se disent par rapport \u00e0 la substance, la substance, en vertu de la sienne, se dit en rapport avec les modes : elle n'a pas une puissance absolument infinie d'exister sans remplir, par une infinit\u00e9 de choses en une infinit\u00e9 de modes, le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 qui correspond \u00e0 cette puissance.\n\nC'est en ce sens que Spinoza nous conduit \u00e0 une derni\u00e8re triade de la substance. Partant des preuves de la puissance, la d\u00e9couverte de cette triade occupe toute la fin du premier livre de l' _\u00c9thique_. Elle se pr\u00e9sente ainsi : l'essence de la substance comme puissance absolument infinie d'exister ; la substance comme _ens realissimum_ existant par soi ; un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'une _infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons_ , correspondant \u00e0 cette puissance, n\u00e9cessairement rempli par des affections dont la substance m\u00eame est la cause active. Cette troisi\u00e8me triade vient prendre place \u00e0 c\u00f4t\u00e9 des deux pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes. Elle ne signifie pas, comme la premi\u00e8re, la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 d'une substance ayant tous les attributs ; ni, comme la seconde, la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 pour cette substance d'exister absolument. Elle signifie la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9, pour cette substance existante, de produire une infinit\u00e9 de choses. Et elle ne se contente pas de nous faire passer aux modes, elle s'applique ou se communique \u00e0 eux. Si bien que le mode lui-m\u00eame pr\u00e9sentera la triade suivante : essence de mode comme puissance ; mode existant d\u00e9fini par sa quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection ; pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'un _grand nombre_ de fa\u00e7ons. Ainsi le premier livre de l' _\u00c9thique_ est comme le d\u00e9veloppement de trois triades, qui trouvent leur principe dans l'expression : la substance, l'absolu, la puissance.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  LEIBNIZ, _Lettre \u00e0 la princesse \u00c9lisabeth_ , 1678 : \u00ab II faut avouer que ces raisonnements [les preuves cart\u00e9siennes de l'existence de Dieu] sont un peu suspects parce qu'ils vont trop vite et nous font violence sans nous \u00e9clairer. \u00bb Le th\u00e8me \u00ab trop vite \u00bb revient constamment : contre Descartes, Leibniz invoque son propre go\u00fbt pour l'esprit lent et pesant, son go\u00fbt du continu qui interdit les \u00ab bonds \u00bb, son go\u00fbt des d\u00e9finitions r\u00e9elles et des polysyllogismes, son go\u00fbt pour un art d'inventer qui prend du temps. Quand Leibniz reproche \u00e0 Descartes d'avoir cru que la quantit\u00e9 de mouvement se conservait, il faut voir dans cette critique un cas particulier (sans doute particuli\u00e8rement important) d'une objection tr\u00e8s g\u00e9n\u00e9rale : Descartes, dans tous les domaines, prend le relatif pour l'absolu, \u00e0 force d'aller trop vite.\n\n2.  _PPD_ , I, 7, sc. : \u00ab Je ne sais pas ce qu'il veut dire par l\u00e0. Qu'appelle-t-il facile et difficile en effet ?... L'araign\u00e9e tisse facilement une toile que les hommes ne pourraient tisser sans de tr\u00e8s grandes difficult\u00e9s... \u00bb\n\n3.  DESCARTES, _M\u00e9ditation III_ et _Principes_ I, 17-18.\n\n4.  _M\u00e9ditation III_ et _Principes_ , I, 20-21 (le texte des _Principes_ , toutefois, \u00e9vite oute r\u00e9f\u00e9rence explicite aux notions de facile et de difficile).\n\n5.  _Abr\u00e9g\u00e9 g\u00e9om\u00e9trique des secondes r\u00e9ponses_ , axiome 8, AT IX, p. 128.\n\n6.  Sur toutes ces objections faites \u00e0 Descartes par certains de ses correspondants, et sur les r\u00e9ponses de Descartes, cf. l' _Entretien avec Burman_ , et aussi la _Lettre 347, \u00e0 Mesland_ , AT, IV, p. 111.\n\n7.  _CT_ , I, ch. 1, 3-9.\n\n8.  _CT_ , II, ch. 20, 4, note 3.\n\n9.  _TRE_ , 76 et note 2 : \u00ab Comme la source de la Nature... ne peut s'\u00e9tendre dans l'entendement plus loin que dans la r\u00e9alit\u00e9..., on ne doit craindre aucune confusion au sujet de son id\u00e9e... \u00bb ; \u00ab Si un tel \u00eatre n'existait pas, il ne pourrait jamais \u00eatre produit, et l'esprit pourrait comprendre plus que la Nature ne pourrait pr\u00e9senter. \u00bb\n\n10.  _Lettre 40, \u00e0 Jelles_ , mars 1667 (III, p. 142).\n\n11.  _PPD_ , I, 7, lemmes 1 et 2, et d\u00e9monstration de 7.\n\n12.  _\u00c9_ , I, 11, sc.\n\n13.  _\u00c9_ , 1, 11 3e dem.\n\n14.  _\u00c9_ , I, 11, sc.\n\n15.  Sans doute Spinoza parle-t-il plus souvent d'un effort de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'\u00eatre. Mais ce _conatus_ est lui-m\u00eame _potentia agendi._ Cf. _\u00c9_ , III, 57, dem. : _potentia seu conatus. \u00c9_ , III, d\u00e9finition g\u00e9n\u00e9rale des affects : _agendi potentia sive existendi vis. \u00c9_ , IV, 29, dem. : _hominis potentia qua existet et operatur._\n\n16.  _CT_ , II, ch. 20, 4, note 3 : \u00ab Cette id\u00e9e, isol\u00e9e, consid\u00e9r\u00e9e en dehors des autres id\u00e9es, ne peut rien \u00eatre de plus qu'une id\u00e9e d'une certaine chose, et elle ne peut avoir une id\u00e9e de cette chose ; attendu qu'une id\u00e9e ainsi consid\u00e9r\u00e9e, _n'\u00e9tant qu'une partie_ , ne peut avoir d'elle-m\u00eame et de son objet aucune connaissance claire et distincte ; cela n'est possible qu'\u00e0 la chose pensante qui, seule, est la Nature enti\u00e8re, car un fragment consid\u00e9r\u00e9 en dehors du tout auquel il appartient ne peut, etc. \u00bb.\n\n17.  _\u00c9_ , II, _5_ , dem.\n\n18.  _Lettre 21_ , _\u00e0 Blyenbergh_ (III, p. 86).\n\n19.  _TP_ , ch. 2, 2-3.\n\n20.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 4, dem.\n\n21.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 4, dem.\n\n22.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 4, dem. : \u00ab La puissance de l'homme, en tant qu'elle s'explique par _son_ essence actuelle, est une partie de la puissance infinie de Dieu ou de la Nature, c'est-\u00e0-dire de _son_ essence. \u00bb\n\n23.  _\u00c9_ , I, 36, dem.\n\n24.  L'identit\u00e9 de la puissance et de l'acte, au moins dans le No\u00fbs, est un th\u00e8me fr\u00e9quent du n\u00e9o-platonisme. On le retrouve dans la pens\u00e9e chr\u00e9tienne aussi bien que dans la pens\u00e9e juive. Nicolas de Cues en tire la notion de _Possest_ , qu'il applique \u00e0 Dieu ( _\u0152uvres choisies_ , Aubier \u00e9d., pp. 543-546 ; et M. de Gandillac, _La Philosophie de Nicolas de Cues_ , pp. 298-306). Cette identit\u00e9 de l'acte et de la puissance en Dieu, Bruno l'\u00e9tend au \u00ab simulacre \u00bb, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00e0 l'univers ou \u00e0 la Nature ( _Cause, Principe, Unit\u00e9_ , Alcan \u00e9d., 3e dialogue).\n\n25.  Cette tradition trouve d\u00e9j\u00e0 un aboutissement chez Hobbes (cf. _De Corpore_ , ch. X).\n\n26.  Spinoza parle souvent d'une _aptitude_ du corps, qui correspond \u00e0 sa puissance : le corps est apte ( _aptus_ ) \u00e0 agir et \u00e0 p\u00e2tir ( _\u00c9_ , II, 13, sc.) ; il _peut_ \u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'un grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons ( _\u00c9_ , III, postulat 1), l'excellence de l'homme vient de ce que son corps est \u00ab apte au plus grand nombre de choses \u00bb ( _\u00c9_ , V, 39). D'autre part, une _potestas_ correspond \u00e0 la puissance de Dieu ( _potentia_ ) ; Dieu peut \u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'une infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons, et produit n\u00e9cessairement toutes les affections dont il a le pouvoir ( _\u00c9_ , I, 35).\n\n27.  Sur les variations de la _vis existendi_ , cf. _\u00c9_ , III, d\u00e9f. g\u00e9n\u00e9rale des affects.\n\n28.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 22-25. _\u00c9_ , I, 15, sc.\n\n# DEUXI\u00c8ME PARTIE\n\n# LE PARALL\u00c9LISME\n\n# ET L'IMMANENCE\n\n## CHAPITRE VI\n\n## L'EXPRESSION DANS LE PARALL\u00c9LISME\n\nPourquoi Dieu produit-il ? Le probl\u00e8me d'une raison suffisante de la production ne dispara\u00eet pas dans le spinozisme ; au contraire il gagne en urgence. Car la nature de Dieu est expressive en elle-m\u00eame, comme nature naturante. Cette expression est tellement naturelle ou essentielle \u00e0 Dieu qu'elle ne se contente pas de refl\u00e9ter un Dieu tout fait, mais forme une esp\u00e8ce de d\u00e9veloppement du divin, une constitution logique et g\u00e9n\u00e9tique de la substance divine. Chaque attribut exprime une essence formelle ; toutes les essences formelles sont exprim\u00e9es comme l'essence absolue d'une seule et m\u00eame substance dont l'existence d\u00e9coule n\u00e9cessairement ; cette existence elle-m\u00eame est donc exprim\u00e9e par les attributs. Ces moments sont les v\u00e9ritables moments de la substance ; l'expression est, en Dieu, la vie m\u00eame de Dieu. D\u00e8s lors on ne pourra pas dire que Dieu produise le monde, l'univers ou la nature natur\u00e9e, _pour_ s'exprimer. Non seulement la raison suffisante doit \u00eatre n\u00e9cessaire, excluant tout argument de finalit\u00e9, mais Dieu s'exprime en lui-m\u00eame, dans sa propre nature, dans les attributs qui le constituent. Il n'a nul \u00ab besoin \u00bb de produire, ne manquant de rien. Il faut prendre \u00e0 la lettre une m\u00e9taphore de Spinoza qui montre que le monde produit n'ajoute rien \u00e0 l'essence de Dieu : quand un artisan sculpte des t\u00eates et des poitrines, puis joint une poitrine \u00e0 une t\u00eate, cette addition n'ajoute rien \u00e0 l'essence de la t\u00eate1. Celle-ci garde la m\u00eame essence, _la m\u00eame expression._ Si Dieu s'exprime en lui-m\u00eame, l'univers ne peut \u00eatre qu'une expression au second degr\u00e9. La substance s'exprime d\u00e9j\u00e0 dans les attributs qui constituent la nature naturante, mais les attributs s'expriment \u00e0 leur tour dans les modes, qui constituent la nature natur\u00e9e. Raison de plus pour demander : pourquoi ce second niveau ? Pourquoi Dieu produit-il un univers modal ?\n\nPour rendre compte a priori de la production, Spinoza invoque un premier argument. Dieu agit, ou produit, comme il se comprend ( _seipsum intelligit_ ) : se comprenant n\u00e9cessairement, il agit n\u00e9cessairement2. Un deuxi\u00e8me argument appara\u00eet tant\u00f4t comme d\u00e9pendant du premier, tant\u00f4t comme distinct et conjoint. Dieu produit comme il existe ; existant n\u00e9cessairement, il produit n\u00e9cessairement3.\n\nQuel est le sens du premier argument ? Que signifie \u00ab se comprendre \u00bb ? Dieu ne con\u00e7oit pas des _possibilit\u00e9s_ dans son entendement, mais comprend la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de sa propre nature. L'entendement infini n'est pas le lieu des possibles, mais la forme de l'id\u00e9e que Dieu a n\u00e9cessairement de lui-m\u00eame ou de sa propre essence. La science de Dieu n'est pas une science des possibles, mais la science que Dieu a de soi-m\u00eame et de sa propre nature. Comprendre s'oppose donc \u00e0 concevoir quelque chose comme possible. Mais comprendre, en ce sens, c'est d\u00e9duire des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s \u00e0 partir de ce qu'on appr\u00e9hende comme n\u00e9cessaire. Ainsi, \u00e0 partir de la d\u00e9finition du cercle, nous d\u00e9duisons plusieurs propri\u00e9t\u00e9s qui suivent r\u00e9ellement de cette d\u00e9finition. Dieu se comprend lui-m\u00eame ; une infinit\u00e9 de propri\u00e9t\u00e9s s'ensuivent, qui tombent n\u00e9cessairement sous l'entendement de Dieu. Dieu ne peut pas comprendre sa propre essence sans produire une infinit\u00e9 de choses, qui d\u00e9coulent de celle-ci _comme les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s d\u00e9coulent d'une d\u00e9finition._ On voit que, dans cet argument, les modes sont assimil\u00e9s \u00e0 des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s logiquement n\u00e9cessaires qui suivent de l'essence de Dieu telle qu'elle est comprise. Quand Spinoza f\u00e9licite certains H\u00e9breux d'avoir entrevu que Dieu, l'entendement de Dieu et les choses comprises par lui \u00e9taient une seule et m\u00eame chose, il veut dire \u00e0 la fois que l'entendement de Dieu est la science que Dieu a de sa propre nature, et que cette science comprend une infinit\u00e9 de choses qui en d\u00e9coulent n\u00e9cessairement4.\n\nMais pourquoi Dieu se comprend-il ? Il arrive \u00e0 Spinoza de pr\u00e9senter cette proposition comme une sorte d'axiomes5. Cet axiome renvoie \u00e0 des conceptions aristot\u00e9liciennes : Dieu se pense lui-m\u00eame, il est lui-m\u00eame objet de sa pens\u00e9e, sa science n'a d'autre objet que lui-m\u00eame. Tel est le principe qu'on oppose \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e d'un entendement divin qui penserait des \u00ab possibles \u00bb. Et beaucoup de commentateurs pouvaient r\u00e9unir des arguments convaincants pour montrer que le Dieu d'Aristote, se pensant lui-m\u00eame, pense aussi toutes les autres choses qui en d\u00e9coulent n\u00e9cessairement : la tradition aristot\u00e9licienne tendait ainsi vers un th\u00e9isme, parfois m\u00eame vers un panth\u00e9isme, identifiant le connaissant, la connaissance et le connu (les H\u00e9breux invoqu\u00e9s par Spinoza sont des philosophes juifs aristot\u00e9liciens).\n\nToutefois la th\u00e9orie spinoziste de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu est trop originale pour se fonder sur un simple axiome ou se r\u00e9clamer d'une tradition. Que Dieu se comprenne lui-m\u00eame, cela doit suivre de la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de la nature divine6. Or, de ce point de vue, la notion d'expression joue un r\u00f4le d\u00e9terminant. Dieu ne s'exprime pas sans se comprendre en tant qu'il s'exprime. Dieu ne s'exprime pas formellement dans ses attributs sans se comprendre objectivement dans une id\u00e9e. L'essence de Dieu n'est pas exprim\u00e9e dans les attributs comme essence formelle, sans \u00eatre exprim\u00e9e dans une id\u00e9e comme essence objective. C'est pourquoi, d\u00e8s la d\u00e9finition de l'attribut, Spinoza se r\u00e9f\u00e9rait \u00e0 un entendement capable de percevoir. Non pas que l'attribut soit \u00ab attribu\u00e9 \u00bb par l'entendement : le mot \u00ab percevoir \u00bb indique suffisamment que l'entendement ne saisit rien qui ne soit dans la nature. Mais les attributs n'expriment pas l'essence de la substance sans se rapporter n\u00e9cessairement \u00e0 un entendement qui les comprend objectivement, c'est-\u00e0-dire qui per\u00e7oit ce qu'ils expriment. Ainsi l'id\u00e9e de Dieu se trouve fond\u00e9e dans la nature divine elle-m\u00eame : parce que Dieu a pour nature une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs dont chacun \u00ab exprime \u00bb une essence infinie, il suit de cette nature expressive que Dieu se comprenne et, se comprenant, produise toutes les choses qui \u00ab tombent \u00bb sous un entendement infini7. Les expressions sont toujours des explications. Mais les explications faites par l'entendement sont seulement des perceptions. Ce n'est pas l'entendement qui explique la substance, mais les explications de la substance renvoient n\u00e9cessairement \u00e0 un entendement qui les comprend. Dieu se comprend n\u00e9cessairement, comme il s'explique ou s'exprime.\n\nConsid\u00e9rons le deuxi\u00e8me argument : Dieu produit comme il existe. Les modes, ici, ne sont plus assimil\u00e9s \u00e0 des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s logiques, mais plut\u00f4t \u00e0 des affections physiques. Le d\u00e9veloppement autonome de cet argument est donc fond\u00e9 sur la puissance : plus une chose a de puissance, plus elle peut \u00eatre affect\u00e9e d'un grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons ; or nous avons d\u00e9montr\u00e9, soit a posteriori, soit a priori, que Dieu avait une puissance absolument infinie d'exister. Dieu a donc un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'une infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons, _potestas_ qui correspond \u00e0 sa puissance ou _potentia._ Ce pouvoir est n\u00e9cessairement rempli, mais ne peut pas l'\u00eatre par des affections qui viendraient d'autre chose que de Dieu ; donc Dieu produit n\u00e9cessairement et activement une infinit\u00e9 de choses qui l'affectent d'une infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons.\n\nQue Dieu produise n\u00e9cessairement nous dit en m\u00eame temps comment il produit. Se comprenant comme substance compos\u00e9e d'une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs, existant comme substance compos\u00e9e d'une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs, Dieu agit comme il se comprend et comme il existe, donc _dans_ ces attributs qui expriment \u00e0 la fois son essence et son existence. Il produit une infinit\u00e9 de choses, mais \u00ab en une infinit\u00e9 de modes \u00bb. C'est-\u00e0-dire : les choses produites n'existent pas hors des attributs qui les contiennent. Les attributs sont les conditions univoques sous lesquelles Dieu existe, mais aussi sous lesquelles il agit. Les attributs sont des formes univoques et communes : ils se disent, sous la m\u00eame forme, des cr\u00e9atures et du cr\u00e9ateur, des produits et du producteur, constituant formellement l'essence de l'un, contenant formellement l'essence des autres. Le principe de la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de la production renvoie donc \u00e0 une double univocit\u00e9. Univocit\u00e9 de la cause : Dieu est cause de toutes choses _au m\u00eame sens_ que cause de soi. Univocit\u00e9 des attributs : Dieu produit par et dans ces m\u00eames attributs qui constituent son essence. C'est pourquoi Spinoza poursuit une constante pol\u00e9mique : il ne cesse de montrer l'absurdit\u00e9 d'un Dieu qui produirait par des attributs moraux, comme bont\u00e9, justice ou charit\u00e9, ou m\u00eame par des attributs humains, comme entendement et volont\u00e9.\n\nSupposons, par _analogie_ avec l'homme, que l'entendement et la volont\u00e9 soient des attributs de Dieu lui-m\u00eame8. Nous aurons beau faire, nous n'attribuons \u00e0 Dieu volont\u00e9 et entendement que de mani\u00e8re \u00e9quivoque : en vertu de la distinction d'essence entre l'homme et Dieu, la volont\u00e9 et l'entendement divins n'auront avec l'humain qu'une \u00ab communaut\u00e9 de nom \u00bb, comme le Chien-constellation avec le chien-animal aboyant. En sortent de nombreuses absurdit\u00e9s, d'apr\u00e8s lesquelles Dieu devra contenir \u00e9minemment les perfections sous lesquelles il produit les cr\u00e9atures. 1o) Du point de vue de l'entendement : on dira que Dieu est \u00ab tout-puissant \u00bb pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce qu'il \u00ab ne peut pas \u00bb cr\u00e9er les choses avec les m\u00eames perfections qu'il les entend, c'est-\u00e0-dire sous les m\u00eames formes que celles qui lui appartiennent. Ainsi l'on pr\u00e9tend prouver la toute-puissance de Dieu par une impuissance9. 2o) Du point de vue de la volont\u00e9 : on dira que Dieu aurait pu vouloir autre chose, ou que les choses auraient pu \u00eatre d'une autre nature si Dieu l'avait voulu. On attribue \u00e0 Dieu la volont\u00e9, on en fait donc l'essence de Dieu ; mais on suppose en m\u00eame temps que Dieu aurait pu avoir une autre volont\u00e9, donc une autre essence (\u00e0 moins de faire de la volont\u00e9 divine un pur \u00eatre de raison, auquel cas les contradictions redoublent) ; d\u00e8s lors on suppose que deux ou plusieurs dieux pourraient \u00eatre donn\u00e9s. Cette fois, on met en Dieu variabilit\u00e9 et pluralit\u00e9 pour prouver son \u00e9minence10.\n\nNous simplifions les critiques de Spinoza. Mais chaque fois qu'il s'attaque \u00e0 l'image d'un Dieu qui serait essentiellement dou\u00e9 d'entendement et de volont\u00e9, nous croyons qu'il d\u00e9veloppe les implications critiques de sa th\u00e9orie de l'univocit\u00e9. Il veut montrer que l'entendement et la volont\u00e9 ne pourraient \u00eatre consid\u00e9r\u00e9s comme attributs de Dieu que par analogie. Mais l'analogie ne r\u00e9ussit pas \u00e0 cacher l'\u00e9quivocit\u00e9 dont elle part, l'\u00e9minence \u00e0 laquelle elle arrive. Or des perfections \u00e9minentes en Dieu, comme des attributs \u00e9quivoques, entra\u00eenent toutes sortes de contradictions. Seules sont attribu\u00e9es \u00e0 Dieu ces formes qui sont aussi parfaites dans les cr\u00e9atures qui les impliquent et en Dieu qui les comprend. Dieu ne produit pas parce qu'il veut, mais parce qu'il est. Il ne produit pas parce qu'il con\u00e7oit, c'est-\u00e0-dire parce qu'il con\u00e7oit des choses comme possibles, mais parce qu'il se comprend lui-m\u00eame, parce qu'il comprend n\u00e9cessairement sa propre nature. En un mot, Dieu agit \u00ab d'apr\u00e8s les seules lois de sa nature \u00bb : il n'aurait pu produire autre chose, ni produire les choses dans un autre ordre, sans avoir une autre nature11. On remarquera que Spinoza, en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, n'a gu\u00e8re besoin de d\u00e9noncer directement les incoh\u00e9rences de l'id\u00e9e de cr\u00e9ation. Il lui suffit de demander : Comment Dieu produit-il, dans quelles conditions ? Les conditions m\u00eames de la production font de celle-ci autre chose qu'une cr\u00e9ation, et des \u00ab cr\u00e9atures \u00bb autre chose que des cr\u00e9atures. Dieu produisant n\u00e9cessairement, et dans ses propres attributs, les produits sont n\u00e9cessairement des modes de ces attributs qui constituent la nature de Dieu.\n\nTout se passe comme si l'expression avait une logique qui l'amenait \u00e0 se redoubler. Spinoza est trop soucieux de grammaire pour qu'on puisse n\u00e9gliger les origines linguistiques de l'\u00ab expression \u00bb. Nous avons vu que les attributs \u00e9taient des noms : des verbes plut\u00f4t que des adjectifs. Chaque attribut est un verbe, une proposition premi\u00e8re infinitive, une expression dou\u00e9e d'un sens distinct ; mais tous les attributs d\u00e9signent la substance comme une seule et m\u00eame chose. La distinction traditionnelle entre le sens exprim\u00e9 et l'objet d\u00e9sign\u00e9 (qui s'exprime) trouve donc dans le spinozisme un champ d'application imm\u00e9diate. Mais cette distinction fonde n\u00e9cessairement un certain mouvement de l'expression. Car il faut que le sens d'une proposition primaire devienne \u00e0 son tour le d\u00e9sign\u00e9 d'une proposition secondaire, ayant elle-m\u00eame un nouveau sens, etc. Ainsi la substance d\u00e9sign\u00e9e s'exprimait dans les attributs, les attributs exprimaient une essence. Maintenant les attributs s'expriment \u00e0 leur tour : ils s'expriment dans les modes qui les d\u00e9signent, ces modes expriment une modification. Les modes sont de v\u00e9ritables propositions \u00ab participiales \u00bb, qui d\u00e9rivent des propositions infinitives principales. C'est en ce sens que l'expression, par son propre mouvement, engendre une expression du second degr\u00e9. L'expression poss\u00e8de en soi la raison suffisante d'une re-expression. Ce second degr\u00e9 d\u00e9finit la production elle-m\u00eame : Dieu est dit produire, en m\u00eame temps que ses attributs s'expriment. Si bien qu'en derni\u00e8re instance c'est toujours Dieu qui se trouve d\u00e9sign\u00e9 par toutes choses, \u00e0 la diff\u00e9rence de niveau pr\u00e8s. Les attributs d\u00e9signent Dieu, mais les modes le d\u00e9signent encore sous l'attribut dont ils d\u00e9pendent. \u00ab Ce que certains H\u00e9breux semblent avoir vu comme \u00e0 travers un nuage, puisqu'ils admettent que Dieu, l'entendement de Dieu et les choses comprises par lui sont une seule et m\u00eame chose12. \u00bb\n\nIl y a un _ordre_ dans lequel Dieu produit n\u00e9cessairement. Cet ordre est celui de l'expression des attributs. D'abord chaque attribut s'exprime dans sa nature absolue : un mode infini imm\u00e9diat est donc la premi\u00e8re expression de l'attribut. Puis l'attribut modifi\u00e9 s'exprime, dans un mode infini m\u00e9diat. Enfin l'attribut s'exprime \u00ab d'une fa\u00e7on certaine et d\u00e9termin\u00e9e \u00bb, ou plut\u00f4t d'une infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons qui constituent les modes existants finis13. Ce dernier niveau resterait inexplicable si les modes infinis, dans le genre de chaque attribut, ne contenaient des lois ou des principes de lois d'apr\u00e8s lesquels les modes finis correspondants sont eux-m\u00eames d\u00e9termin\u00e9s et ordonn\u00e9s.\n\nS'il existe un ordre de production, cet ordre est le m\u00eame pour tous les attributs. En effet, Dieu produit \u00e0 la fois dans tous les attributs qui constituent sa nature. Les attributs s'expriment donc dans un seul et m\u00eame ordre : jusqu'aux modes finis, qui doivent avoir le m\u00eame ordre dans les attributs divers. Cette identit\u00e9 d'ordre d\u00e9finit une correspondance des modes : \u00e0 tout mode d'un attribut correspond n\u00e9cessairement un mode de chacun des autres attributs. Cette identit\u00e9 d'ordre exclut tout rapport de causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle. Les attributs sont irr\u00e9ductibles et r\u00e9ellement distincts ; aucun n'est cause de l'autre, ni d'une chose quelconque dans l'autre. Les modes enveloppent donc exclusivement le concept de leur attribut, non pas celui d'un autre14. L'identit\u00e9 d'ordre, la correspondance entre modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents, exclut donc tout rapport de causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle active entre ces modes, comme entre ces attributs. Et \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard, nous n'avons aucune raison s\u00e9rieuse de croire \u00e0 un changement dans la pens\u00e9e de Spinoza : les textes c\u00e9l\u00e8bres du _Court Trait\u00e9_ o\u00f9 Spinoza parle d'une action d'un attribut sur un autre, d'un effet d'un attribut dans un autre, d'une interaction de modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents, ne semblent pas devoir s'interpr\u00e9ter en termes de causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle15. Le contexte pr\u00e9cise que deux attributs (la pens\u00e9e et l'\u00e9tendue) agissent l'un sur l'autre quand ils sont \u00ab pris tous deux ensemble \u00bb, ou que deux modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents (l'\u00e2me et le corps) agissent l'un sur l'autre dans la mesure o\u00f9 ils forment \u00ab les parties d'un tout \u00bb. Rien, ici, ne d\u00e9passe r\u00e9ellement l'affirmation d'une correspondance : deux choses \u00e9tant les parties d'un tout, rien ne peut changer dans l'une qui n'ait son correspondant dans l'autre, et aucune ne peut changer sans que le tout lui-m\u00eame ne change16. Tout au plus verra-t-on dans ces textes la marque d'un moment o\u00f9 Spinoza n'exprime pas encore ad\u00e9quatement la diff\u00e9rence de sa propre doctrine avec des doctrines en apparence voisines (causalit\u00e9 occasionnelle, causalit\u00e9 id\u00e9ale). Il ne semble pas que Spinoza ait jamais admis une causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle active pour rendre compte du rapport entre modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents.\n\nLes principes pr\u00e9c\u00e9dents m\u00e8nent \u00e0 un r\u00e9sultat dans lequel on reconna\u00eetra la premi\u00e8re formule du parall\u00e9lisme de Spinoza : il y a une _identit\u00e9 d'ordre_ ou _correspondance_ entre modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents. On peut appeler \u00ab parall\u00e8les \u00bb, en effet, deux choses ou deux s\u00e9ries de choses qui sont dans un rapport constant, tel qu'il n'y ait rien dans l'une qui n'ait dans l'autre un correspondant, toute causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle entre les deux se trouvant exclue. Mais on se m\u00e9fiera du mot \u00ab parall\u00e9lisme \u00bb, qui n'est pas de Spinoza. C'est, Leibniz qui le cr\u00e9e, semble-t-il, et qui l'emploie pour son propre compte, afin de d\u00e9signer cette correspondance entre s\u00e9ries autonomes ou ind\u00e9pendantes17. Nous devons donc penser que l'identit\u00e9 d'ordre ne suffit pas \u00e0 distinguer le syst\u00e8me spinoziste ; en un sens, elle se retrouve plus ou moins dans toutes les doctrines qui refusent d'interpr\u00e9ter les correspondances en termes de causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle. Si le mot parall\u00e9lisme d\u00e9signe ad\u00e9quatement la philosophie de Spinoza, c'est parce qu'il implique lui-m\u00eame autre chose qu'une simple identit\u00e9 d'ordre, autre chose qu'une correspondance. Et, en m\u00eame temps, parce que Spinoza ne se contente pas de cette correspondance ou de cette identit\u00e9 pour d\u00e9finir le lien qui unit les modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents.\n\nPr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment Spinoza donne deux autres formules qui prolongent la premi\u00e8re : _identit\u00e9 de connexion ou \u00e9galit\u00e9 de principe, identit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre ou unit\u00e9 ontologique._ La th\u00e9orie proprement spinoziste s'\u00e9nonce donc ainsi : \u00ab Un seul et m\u00eame ordre, c'est-\u00e0-dire une seule et m\u00eame connexion de causes, autrement dit les m\u00eames choses se suivant les unes les autres18. \u00bb Surtout l'on ne doit pas se h\u00e2ter de consid\u00e9rer l'ordre et la connexion ( _connexio_ ou _concatenatio_ ) comme strictement synonymes. Il est certain que, dans le texte que nous venons de citer, l'affirmation d'une identit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre dit quelque chose de plus que la simple identit\u00e9 de connexion ; il est donc vraisemblable que la connexion, d\u00e9j\u00e0, implique quelque chose de plus que l'ordre. En effet, l'identit\u00e9 de connexion ne signifie pas seulement une autonomie des s\u00e9ries correspondantes, mais une isonomie, c'est-\u00e0-dire une \u00e9galit\u00e9 de principe entre s\u00e9ries autonomes ou ind\u00e9pendantes. Supposons deux s\u00e9ries correspondantes, mais dont les principes soient in\u00e9gaux, le principe de l'une \u00e9tant en quelque mani\u00e8re \u00e9minent par rapport \u00e0 celui de l'autre : entre un solide et sa projection, entre une ligne et l'asymptote, il y a bien identit\u00e9 d'ordre ou correspondance, il n'y a pas \u00e0 proprement parler \u00ab identit\u00e9 de connexion \u00bb. Les points d'une courbe ne s'encha\u00eenent pas ( _concatenantur_ ) comme ceux d'une droite. Dans de tels cas, on ne pourra parler de parall\u00e9lisme qu'en un sens tr\u00e8s vague. Les \u00ab parall\u00e8les \u00bb, au sens pr\u00e9cis, exigent une \u00e9galit\u00e9 de principe entre les deux s\u00e9ries de points correspondants. Lorsque Spinoza affirme que les modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents n'ont pas seulement le m\u00eame ordre, mais aussi la m\u00eame connexion ou concat\u00e9nation, il veut dire que les principes dont ils d\u00e9pendent sont eux-m\u00eames \u00e9gaux. D\u00e9j\u00e0, dans les textes du _Court Trait\u00e9_ , si deux attributs ou deux modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents sont \u00ab pris ensemble \u00bb c'est parce qu'ils forment les parties \u00e9gales ou les moiti\u00e9s d'un tout. C'est l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des attributs qui donne au parall\u00e9lisme son sens strict, garantissant que la connexion est la m\u00eame, entre choses dont l'ordre est le m\u00eame.\n\nAinsi Leibniz cr\u00e9e le mot \u00ab parall\u00e9lisme \u00bb, mais, pour son compte, il l'invoque de mani\u00e8re tr\u00e8s g\u00e9n\u00e9rale et peu ad\u00e9quate : le syst\u00e8me de Leibniz implique bien une correspondance entre s\u00e9ries autonomes, substances et ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes, solides et projections, mais les principes de ces s\u00e9ries sont singuli\u00e8rement in\u00e9gaux. (Aussi bien Leibniz, quand il parle plus pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, invoque-t-il l'image de la projection plut\u00f4t que celle des parall\u00e8les.) Inversement, Spinoza n'emploie pas le mot \u00ab parall\u00e9lisme \u00bb ; mais ce mot convient \u00e0 son syst\u00e8me, parce qu'il pose l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des principes dont d\u00e9coulent les s\u00e9ries ind\u00e9pendantes et correspondantes. On voit bien, l\u00e0 encore, quelles sont les intentions pol\u00e9miques de Spinoza. Par son strict parall\u00e9lisme, Spinoza refuse toute analogie, toute \u00e9minence, toute forme de sup\u00e9riorit\u00e9 d'une s\u00e9rie sur l'autre, toute action id\u00e9ale qui supposerait une pr\u00e9\u00e9minence : il n'y a pas plus de sup\u00e9riorit\u00e9 de l'\u00e2me sur le corps que de l'attribut pens\u00e9e sur l'attribut \u00e9tendue. Et la troisi\u00e8me formule du parall\u00e9lisme, celle qui affirme l'identit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre, ira encore plus loin dans le m\u00eame sens : les modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents n'ont pas seulement le m\u00eame ordre et la m\u00eame connexion, mais le m\u00eame \u00eatre ; ce sont les _m\u00eames choses_ qui se distinguent seulement par l'attribut dont elles enveloppent le concept. Les modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents sont une seule et m\u00eame modification qui diff\u00e8re seulement par l'attribut. Par cette identit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre ou unit\u00e9 ontologique, Spinoza refuse l'intervention d'un Dieu transcendant qui mettrait en accord chaque terme d'une s\u00e9rie avec un terme de l'autre ou, m\u00eame, qui accorderait les s\u00e9ries l'une sur l'autre en fonction de leurs principes in\u00e9gaux. La doctrine de Spinoza est bien nomm\u00e9e \u00ab parall\u00e9lisme \u00bb, mais parce qu'elle exclut toute analogie, toute \u00e9minence, toute transcendance. Le parall\u00e9lisme, \u00e0 strictement parler, ne se comprend ni du point de vue d'une cause occasionnelle, ni du point de vue d'une causalit\u00e9 id\u00e9ale, mais seulement du point de vue d'un Dieu immanent et d'une causalit\u00e9 immanente.\n\nL'essence de l'expression se trouve en jeu dans tout ceci. Car le rapport d'expression d\u00e9borde le rapport de causalit\u00e9 : il vaut pour des choses ind\u00e9pendantes ou des s\u00e9ries autonomes, qui n'en ont pas moins l'une avec l'autre une correspondance d\u00e9termin\u00e9e, constante et r\u00e9gl\u00e9e. Si la philosophie de Spinoza et celle de Leibniz trouvent un terrain d'affrontement naturel, c'est dans l'id\u00e9e d'expression, dans l'usage qu'ils font respectivement de cette id\u00e9e. Or nous verrons que le mod\u00e8le \u00ab expressif \u00bb de Leibniz est toujours celui de l'asymptote ou de la projection. Tout autre est le mod\u00e8le expressif qui se d\u00e9gage de la th\u00e9orie de Spinoza : mod\u00e8le \u00ab parall\u00e9liste \u00bb, il implique l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 de deux choses qui en expriment une m\u00eame troisi\u00e8me, et l'identit\u00e9 de cette troisi\u00e8me telle qu'elle est exprim\u00e9e dans les deux autres. L'id\u00e9e d'expression chez Spinoza recueille et fonde \u00e0 la fois les trois aspects du parall\u00e9lisme.\n\nLe parall\u00e9lisme doit se dire des modes, et seulement des modes. Mais il se fonde sur la substance et les attributs de la substance. Dieu produit en m\u00eame temps dans tous les attributs : il produit dans le m\u00eame ordre, il y a donc correspondance entre modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents. Mais, parce que ces attributs sont r\u00e9ellement distincts, cette correspondance ou identit\u00e9 d'ordre exclut toute action causale des uns sur les autres. Parce que ces attributs sont tous \u00e9gaux, il y a identit\u00e9 de connexion entre ces modes qui diff\u00e9rent par l'attribut. Parce que ces attributs constituent une seule et m\u00eame substance, ces modes qui diff\u00e8rent par l'attribut forment une seule et m\u00eame modification. On voit en quelque sorte la triade de la substance \u00ab descendre \u00bb dans les attributs et se communiquer aux modes. La substance s'exprimait dans les attributs, chaque attribut \u00e9tait une expression, l'essence de la substance \u00e9tait exprim\u00e9e. Maintenant, chaque attribut s'exprime, les modes qui en d\u00e9pendent sont des expressions, une modification est exprim\u00e9e. On se rappelle que l'essence exprim\u00e9e n'existait pas hors des attributs, mais \u00e9tait exprim\u00e9e comme l'essence absolue de la substance, la m\u00eame pour tous les attributs. Il en est de m\u00eame ici : la modification n'existe pas hors du mode qui l'exprime dans chaque attribut, mais elle est exprim\u00e9e comme modification de la substance, la m\u00eame pour tous les modes qui diff\u00e9rent par l'attribut. Une seule et m\u00eame modification se trouve donc exprim\u00e9e dans l'infinit\u00e9 des attributs sous \u00ab une infinit\u00e9 de modes \u00bb, qui ne diff\u00e8rent que par l'attribut. C'est pourquoi nous devons attacher de l'importance aux termes \u00ab mode \u00bb et \u00ab modification \u00bb. En principe, le mode est une affection d'un attribut, la modification une affection de la substance. L'un se comprend formellement, l'autre ontologiquement. Tout mode est la forme d'une modification dans un attribut, toute modification est l'\u00eatre en soi des modes qui diff\u00e8rent par l'attribut (l'\u00eatre en soi ne s'oppose pas ici \u00e0 un \u00eatre pour nous, mais \u00e0 un \u00eatre formel). Leur corr\u00e9lation s'\u00e9nonce ainsi : les modes qui diff\u00e9rent par l'attribut expriment une seule et m\u00eame modification, mais cette modification n'existe pas hors des modes qui s'expriment dans les attributs divers. D'o\u00f9 une formule que Spinoza lui-m\u00eame pr\u00e9sente comme obscure : \u00ab Dieu est r\u00e9ellement cause des choses comme elles sont en soi ( _ut in se sunt_ ), en tant qu'il consiste en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs ; et je ne puis pour le moment expliquer cela plus clairement \u00bb19. \u00ab En soi \u00bb ne signifie \u00e9videmment pas que les choses produites par Dieu sont des substances. La _res in se_ est la modification substantielle ; or Dieu ne produit pas cette modification hors des modes qui l'expriment \u00e0 la fois dans tous les attributs. Nous voyons donc la triade de la substance se prolonger dans une triade du mode (attribut-mode-modification). Et c'est bien ainsi que, dans la scolie de II 7, Spinoza d\u00e9montre le parall\u00e9lisme : De m\u00eame qu'une seule et m\u00eame substance est \u00ab comprise \u00bb sous les divers attributs, une seule et m\u00eame chose (modification) est \u00ab exprim\u00e9e \u00bb dans tous les attributs ; comme cette chose n'existe pas hors du mode qui l'exprime dans chaque attribut, les modes qui diff\u00e8rent par l'attribut ont un m\u00eame ordre, une m\u00eame connexion, un m\u00eame \u00eatre en soi.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _CT_ , I, second dialogue, 5.\n\n2.  _\u00c9_ , II, 3, sc.\n\n3.  _\u00c9_ , I, 25, sc. : \u00ab Au sens o\u00f9 Dieu est dit cause de soi, il doit \u00eatre dit aussi cause de toutes choses. \u00bb II, 3, sc. : \u00ab Il nous est aussi impossible de concevoir Dieu n'agissant pas que Dieu n'existant pas. \u00bb IV, pr\u00e9face : \u00ab Dieu ou la nature agit avec la m\u00eame n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 qu'il existe \u00bb.\n\n4.  _\u00c9_ , II, 7, sc.\n\n5.  _\u00c9_ , II, 3, sc. : \u00ab Ainsi que tous l'admettent d'une voix unanime... \u00bb (De m\u00eame _Lettre 75, \u00e0 Oldenburg, III_ , p. 228).\n\n6.  C'est d\u00e9j\u00e0 ce qui appara\u00eet dans la _d\u00e9monstration_ de II, 3, qui se r\u00e9clame de I, 16. Et la scolie elle-m\u00eame souligne cette r\u00e9f\u00e9rence (\u00ab _Il suit de la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de la nature_ divine... que Dieu se comprenne lui-m\u00eame. \u00bb).\n\n7.  _\u00c9_ , I, 16, prop. et dem.\n\n8.  _\u00c9_ , I, 17, sc.\n\n9.  _\u00c9_ , I, 17, sc., et I, 33, sc. 2. _CT_ , I, ch. 4, 1-5.\n\n10.  _\u00c9_ , I, 33, dem. et sc. 2. _CT_ , I, ch. 4, 7-9.\n\n11.  _\u00c9_ , I, 17 et 33, prop. et dem.\n\n12.  _\u00c9_ , II, 7, sc. Nous avons vu pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment (ch. III) comment Spinoza, dans sa th\u00e9orie de l'expression, retrouvait certains th\u00e8mes d'une logique des propositions, d'origine sto\u00efcienne et renouvel\u00e9e par l'\u00e9cole d'Ockham. Mais il faudrait tenir compte d'autres facteurs ; et notamment de la langue h\u00e9bra\u00efque. Dans son _Compendium grammatices linguae hebrae_ , Spinoza d\u00e9gage certains caract\u00e8res qui forment une v\u00e9ritable logique de l'expression d'apr\u00e8s les structures grammaticales de l'h\u00e9breu, et qui fondent une th\u00e9orie des propositions. Faute d'une \u00e9dition comment\u00e9e, ce livre est peu compr\u00e9hensible pour le lecteur qui ne conna\u00eet pas la langue. Nous ne pouvons donc en saisir que certaines donn\u00e9es simples : 1o) le caract\u00e8re intemporel de l'infinitif (ch. 5, ch. 13) ; 2o) le caract\u00e8re participial des modes (ch. 5, ch. 33) ; 3o) la d\u00e9termination de diverses esp\u00e8ces d'infinitifs, dont l'une exprime l'action rapport\u00e9e \u00e0 une cause principale (l'\u00e9quivalent de _constituere aliquem regnantem_ ou _constitui ut regnaret_ , cf. ch. 12).\n\n13.  _\u00c9._ , I, 21-23. prop. et dem.\n\n14.  _\u00c9_ , II, 6, dem.\n\n15.  _CT_ , II, ch. 19, 7 sq., ch. 20, 4-5. (D\u00e9j\u00e0 Albert L\u00e9on montrait que les textes du _Court Trait\u00e9_ n'impliquaient pas n\u00e9cessairement l'hypoth\u00e8se d'une causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle entre attributs, ou entre l'\u00e2me et le corps : cf. _Les \u00e9l\u00e9ments cart\u00e9siens de la doctrine spinoziste sur les rapports de la pens\u00e9e et de son objet_ , Alcan, 1907, p. 200.)\n\n16.  _CT_ , II, ch. 20, 4, note 3 : \u00ab L'objet ne peut \u00e9prouver de changement que l'id\u00e9e n'en \u00e9prouve un, et vice versa... \u00bb.\n\n17.  Par \u00ab parall\u00e9lisme \u00bb, Leibniz entend une conception de l'\u00e2me et du corps, qui les rend ins\u00e9parables d'une certaine mani\u00e8re, tout en excluant un rapport de causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle entre les deux. Mais c'est _sa propre_ conception qu'il d\u00e9signe ainsi. Cf. _Consid\u00e9rations sur la doctrine d'un Esprit universel_ , 1702, \u00a7 12.\n\n18.  _\u00c9_ , II, 7, sc.\n\n19.  _\u00c9_ , II, 7, sc.\n\n## CHAPITRE VII\n\n## LES DEUX PUISSANCES ET L'ID\u00c9E DE DIEU\n\nIl semblerait donc que le parall\u00e9lisme soit facile \u00e0 d\u00e9montrer. Il suffirait de transf\u00e9rer l'unit\u00e9 de la substance \u00e0 la modification, et le caract\u00e8re expressif des attributs aux modes. Ce transfert se fonderait sur la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de la production (second niveau d'expression). Mais, consid\u00e9rant l'ensemble de la proposition 7 du livre II, nous sommes d\u00e9concert\u00e9s parce que nous nous trouvons devant une op\u00e9ration beaucoup plus complexe. 1o) Le texte de la proposition, la d\u00e9monstration et le corollaire affirment bien une identit\u00e9 d'ordre, de connexion et m\u00eame d'\u00eatre ; mais non pas entre des modes qui exprimeraient la m\u00eame modification dans chaque attribut. La triple identit\u00e9 s'affirme seulement de l'id\u00e9e, qui est un mode de la pens\u00e9e, et de la chose repr\u00e9sent\u00e9e, qui est un mode d'un certain attribut. Ce parall\u00e9lisme est donc _\u00e9pist\u00e9mologique_ : il s'\u00e9tablit entre l'id\u00e9e et son \u00ab objet \u00bb ( _res ideata, objectum ideae_ ). 2o) En revanche, le scolie suit la d\u00e9marche indiqu\u00e9e pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment : elle conclut \u00e0 un parall\u00e9lisme _ontologique_ entre tous les modes qui diff\u00e8rent par l'attribut. Mais il n'arrive lui-m\u00eame \u00e0 cette conclusion que par la voie de la d\u00e9monstration et du corollaire : il g\u00e9n\u00e9ralise le cas de l'id\u00e9e et de son objet, il l'\u00e9tend \u00e0 _tous_ les modes qui diff\u00e8rent par l'attribut1.\n\nPlusieurs questions se posent. D'une part, \u00e0 supposer que les deux parall\u00e9lismes s'accordent, pourquoi faut-il passer d'abord par le d\u00e9tour \u00ab \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique \u00bb ? Est-ce seulement un d\u00e9tour ? Quel en est le sens et l'importance dans l'ensemble de l' _\u00c9thique_ ? Mais surtout, les deux parall\u00e9lismes sont-ils conciliables ? Le point de vue \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique signifie : un mode \u00e9tant donn\u00e9 dans un attribut, une id\u00e9e lui correspond dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e, qui repr\u00e9sente ce mode et ne repr\u00e9sente que lui2. Loin de nous mener \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 d'une \u00ab modification \u00bb exprim\u00e9e par tous les modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents, le parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique nous conduit \u00e0 la simple unit\u00e9 d'un \u00ab individu \u00bb form\u00e9 par le mode d'un certain attribut et l'id\u00e9e qui repr\u00e9sente exclusivement ce mode3. Loin de nous mener \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 de tous les modes qui diff\u00e8rent par leur attribut, il nous conduit \u00e0 la multiplicit\u00e9 des id\u00e9es qui correspondent aux modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents. C'est en ce sens que le parall\u00e9lisme \u00ab psycho-physique \u00bb est un cas particulier du parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique : l'\u00e2me est l'id\u00e9e du corps, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'id\u00e9e d'un certain mode de l'\u00e9tendue, et seulement de ce mode. Le point de vue \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique se pr\u00e9sente donc ainsi : un seul et m\u00eame individu est exprim\u00e9 par un certain mode et par l'id\u00e9e qui lui correspond. Mais le point de vue ontologique : une seule et m\u00eame modification est exprim\u00e9e par tous les modes correspondants qui diff\u00e8rent par l'attribut. De tous les \u00e9l\u00e8ves et amis de Spinoza, Tschirnhaus est celui qui souligne le mieux la difficult\u00e9, s'apercevant qu'elle est au c\u0153ur du syst\u00e8me de l' _expression_4. Comment concilier les deux points de vue ? D'autant plus que l'\u00e9pist\u00e9mologie nous force \u00e0 conf\u00e9rer \u00e0 l'attribut pens\u00e9e un singulier privil\u00e8ge : cet attribut doit contenir autant d'id\u00e9es irr\u00e9ductibles qu'il y a de modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents, bien plus, autant d'id\u00e9es qu'il y a d'attributs. Ce privil\u00e8ge appara\u00eet en contradiction flagrante avec toutes les exigences du parall\u00e9lisme ontologique.\n\nIl est donc n\u00e9cessaire d'examiner en d\u00e9tail la d\u00e9monstration et le corollaire de la proposition 7 : \u00ab L'ordre et la connexion des id\u00e9es sont les m\u00eames que l'ordre et la connexion des choses. \u00bb La d\u00e9monstration est simple ; elle se contente d'invoquer un axiome, \u00ab la connaissance de l'effet d\u00e9pend de la connaissance de la cause et l'enveloppe \u00bb. Ce qui nous renvoie encore \u00e0 un principe aristot\u00e9licien : conna\u00eetre, c'est conna\u00eetre par la cause. Dans une perspective spinoziste, on conclut : 1o) \u00e0 toute id\u00e9e correspond quelque chose (en effet, aucune chose ne peut \u00eatre connue sans une cause qui la fait \u00eatre, en essence ou en existence) ; 2o) l'ordre des id\u00e9es est le m\u00eame que l'ordre des choses (une chose n'est connue que par la connaissance de sa cause).\n\nToutefois, cette perspective proprement spinoziste n'implique pas seulement l'axiome d'Aristote. On ne comprendrait pas pourquoi Aristote lui-m\u00eame et beaucoup d'autres n'arriv\u00e8rent pas \u00e0 la th\u00e9orie du parall\u00e9lisme. Spinoza le reconna\u00eet volontiers : \u00ab Nous avons montr\u00e9 que l'id\u00e9e vraie... manifeste comment et pourquoi quelque chose est ou a \u00e9t\u00e9 fait, et que ses effets objectifs dans l'\u00e2me proc\u00e9dent en conformit\u00e9 avec l'essence formelle de l'objet. Ce qui est la m\u00eame chose que ce qu'ont dit les Anciens, \u00e0 savoir que la science vraie proc\u00e8de de la cause aux effets. \u00c0 cela pr\u00e8s que jamais, autant que je sache, ils n'ont con\u00e7u, comme nous l'avons fait ici, l'\u00e2me agissant selon des lois d\u00e9termin\u00e9es et comme un automate spirituel5. \u00bb \u00ab Automate spirituel \u00bb signifie d'abord qu'une id\u00e9e, \u00e9tant un mode de la pens\u00e9e, ne trouve pas sa cause (efficiente et formelle) ailleurs que dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e. De m\u00eame, un objet quel qu'il soit ne trouve sa cause efficiente et formelle que dans l'attribut dont il est le mode et dont il enveloppe le concept. Voil\u00e0 donc ce qui s\u00e9pare Spinoza de la tradition antique : toute causalit\u00e9 efficiente ou formelle (\u00e0 plus forte raison mat\u00e9rielle et finale) est exclue entre les id\u00e9es et les choses, les choses et les id\u00e9es. Cette double exclusion ne renvoie pas \u00e0 un axiome, mais est objet de d\u00e9monstrations qui occupent le d\u00e9but du livre II de l' _\u00c9thique_6. Spinoza peut donc affirmer l'ind\u00e9pendance des deux s\u00e9ries, s\u00e9rie des choses et s\u00e9rie des id\u00e9es. Que, \u00e0 toute id\u00e9e, corresponde quelque chose est dans ces conditions un premier \u00e9l\u00e9ment du parall\u00e9lisme.\n\nMais seulement un premier \u00e9l\u00e9ment. Pour que les id\u00e9es aient la m\u00eame connexion que les choses, il faut encore qu'\u00e0 toute chose corresponde une id\u00e9e. Nous retrouvons les deux formules du _Court Trait\u00e9_ : \u00ab Aucune id\u00e9e ne peut \u00eatre sans que la chose ne soit \u00bb, mais aussi \u00ab il n'y a aucune chose dont l'id\u00e9e ne soit dans la chose pensante7 \u00bb. Or, pour d\u00e9montrer que toute chose est l'objet d'une id\u00e9e, nous ne nous heurtons plus aux difficult\u00e9s qui nous avaient arr\u00eat\u00e9s dans la preuve a posteriori. Car nous partons maintenant d'un Dieu existant. Nous savons que ce Dieu se comprend lui-m\u00eame : il forme une id\u00e9e de soi-m\u00eame, il poss\u00e8de un entendement infini. Mais il suffit que ce Dieu se comprenne pour qu'il produise et, produisant, comprenne tout ce qu'il produit.\n\nDans la mesure o\u00f9 Dieu produit comme il se comprend, tout ce qu'il produit \u00ab tombe \u00bb n\u00e9cessairement sous son entendement infini. Dieu ne se comprend pas, lui-m\u00eame et sa propre essence, sans comprendre aussi tout ce qui d\u00e9coule de son essence. C'est pourquoi l'entendement infini comprend tous les attributs de Dieu, mais aussi toutes les affections8. L'id\u00e9e que Dieu forme est l'id\u00e9e de sa propre essence ; mais aussi l'id\u00e9e de tout ce que Dieu produit formellement dans ses attributs. Il y a donc autant d'id\u00e9es que de choses, toute chose est l'objet d'une id\u00e9e. On appelle \u00ab chose \u00bb, en effet, tout ce qui suit formellement de la substance divine ; la chose s'explique par tel attribut dont elle est le mode. Mais parce que Dieu comprend tout ce qu'il produit, une id\u00e9e dans l'entendement de Dieu correspond \u00e0 chaque mode qui suit d'un attribut. C'est en ce sens que les id\u00e9es elles-m\u00eames d\u00e9coulent de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, _comme_ les modes suivent ou d\u00e9coulent de leur attribut respectif ; l'id\u00e9e de Dieu sera donc cause de toutes les id\u00e9es, comme Dieu lui-m\u00eame est cause de toutes choses.\n\n\u00c0 toute id\u00e9e correspond quelque chose, et \u00e0 toute chose une id\u00e9e. C'est bien ce th\u00e8me qui permet \u00e0 Spinoza d'affirmer une _\u00e9galit\u00e9 de principe_ : il y a en Dieu deux puissances \u00e9gales. Dans la proposition 7, le corollaire s'encha\u00eene avec la d\u00e9monstration, en reconnaissant pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment cette \u00e9galit\u00e9 de puissances : \u00ab Il suit de l\u00e0 que la puissance de penser de Dieu est \u00e9gale \u00e0 sa puissance actuelle d'agir. \u00bb L'argument des puissances ne sert donc plus \u00e0 prouver a posteriori l'existence de Dieu, mais joue un r\u00f4le d\u00e9cisif dans la d\u00e9termination du parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique. Il nous permet d'aller encore plus loin, d'affirmer enfin une _identit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre_ entre les objets et les id\u00e9es. Telle est la fin du corollaire : la m\u00eame chose suit formellement (c'est-\u00e0-dire dans tel ou tel attribut) de la nature infinie de Dieu, et suit objectivement de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. Un seul et m\u00eame \u00eatre est formel dans l'attribut dont il d\u00e9pend sous la puissance d'exister et d'agir, objectif dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu dont il d\u00e9pend sous la puissance de penser. Un mode d'un attribut et l'id\u00e9e de ce mode sont une seule et m\u00eame chose exprim\u00e9e de deux fa\u00e7ons, sous deux puissances. Dans l'ensemble de la d\u00e9monstration et du corollaire, nous retrouvons donc les trois temps du parall\u00e9lisme : identit\u00e9 d'ordre, identit\u00e9 de connexion ou \u00e9galit\u00e9 de principe, identit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre, mais qui ne s'appliquent ici qu'aux rapports de l'id\u00e9e et de son objet.\n\nLe Dieu de Spinoza est un Dieu qui est et qui produit tout, comme l'Un-Tout des Platoniciens ; mais aussi un Dieu qui se pense et qui pense tout, comme le Premier moteur d'Aristote. D'une part nous devons attribuer \u00e0 Dieu une puissance d'exister et d'agir identique \u00e0 son essence formelle ou correspondant \u00e0 sa nature. Mais d'autre part nous devons \u00e9galement lui attribuer une puissance de penser, identique \u00e0 son essence objective ou correspondant \u00e0 son id\u00e9e. Or ce principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des puissances m\u00e9rite un examen minutieux, parce que nous risquons de la confondre avec un autre principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9, qui concerne seulement les attributs. Pourtant, _la distinction des puissances et des attributs a une importance essentielle dans le spinozisme._ Dieu, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'absolument infini, poss\u00e8de deux puissances \u00e9gales : puissance d'exister et d'agir, puissance de penser et de conna\u00eetre. Si l'on peut se servir d'une formule bergsonienne, l'absolu a deux \u00ab c\u00f4t\u00e9s \u00bb, deux moiti\u00e9s. Si l'absolu poss\u00e8de ainsi deux puissances, c'est en soi et par soi, les enveloppant dans son unit\u00e9 radicale. Il n'en est pas de m\u00eame des attributs : l'absolu poss\u00e8de une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs. Nous n'en connaissons que deux, l'\u00e9tendue et la pens\u00e9e, mais parce que notre connaissance est limit\u00e9e, parce que nous sommes constitu\u00e9s par un mode de l'\u00e9tendue et un mode de la pens\u00e9e. La d\u00e9termination des deux puissances, au contraire, n'est nullement relative aux limites de notre connaissance, pas plus qu'elle ne d\u00e9pend de l'\u00e9tat de notre constitution. La puissance d'exister que nous affirmons de Dieu est une puissance absolument infinie : Dieu existe \u00ab absolument \u00bb, et produit une infinit\u00e9 de choses dans \u00ab l'infinit\u00e9 absolue \u00bb de ses attributs (donc en une infinit\u00e9 de modes)9. De m\u00eame la puissance de penser est absolument infinie. Spinoza ne se contente pas de dire qu'elle est infiniment parfaite ; Dieu se pense absolument, et pense une infinit\u00e9 de choses en une infinit\u00e9 de modes10. D'o\u00f9 l'expression _absoluta cogitatio_ pour d\u00e9signer la puissance de penser ; _intellectus absolute infinitus_ , pour d\u00e9signer l'entendement infini ; et la th\u00e8se selon laquelle, de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, suivent (objectivement) une infinit\u00e9 de choses en une infinit\u00e9 de modes11. Les deux puissances n'ont donc rien de relatif : ce sont les moiti\u00e9s de l'absolu, les dimensions de l'absolu, les puissances de l'absolu. Schelling est spinoziste quand il d\u00e9veloppe une th\u00e9orie de l'absolu, repr\u00e9sentant Dieu par le symbole A3 qui comprend le r\u00e9el et l'id\u00e9al comme ses puissances12.\n\nOn demandera : _\u00c0 quelles conditions_ affirme-t-on de Dieu une puissance absolument infinie d'exister et d'agir qui correspond \u00e0 sa nature ? \u00c0 condition qu'il ait une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs formellement distincts qui, tous ensemble, constituent cette nature elle-m\u00eame. Il est vrai que nous ne connaissons que deux attributs. Mais nous savons que la puissance d'exister ne se confond pas avec l'attribut \u00e9tendue : une id\u00e9e n'existe pas moins qu'un corps, la pens\u00e9e n'est pas moins que l'\u00e9tendue forme d'existence ou \u00ab genre \u00bb. Et la pens\u00e9e et l'\u00e9tendue prises ensemble ne suffisent pas davantage \u00e0 \u00e9puiser ni \u00e0 remplir une puissance absolue d'exister. Nous atteignons ici la raison positive pour laquelle Dieu a une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs. Dans un texte important du _Court Trait\u00e9_ , Spinoza affirme que \u00ab nous trouvons en nous quelque chose qui nous r\u00e9v\u00e8le clairement l'existence non seulement d'un plus grand nombre, mais encore d'une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs parfaits \u00bb ; les attributs inconnus \u00ab nous disent qu'ils sont sans nous dire ce qu'ils sont13 \u00bb. En d'autres termes : le fait m\u00eame de notre existence nous r\u00e9v\u00e8le que l'existence ne se laisse pas \u00e9puiser par les attributs que nous connaissons. L'infiniment parfait n'ayant pas sa raison en lui-m\u00eame, Dieu doit avoir une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs infiniment parfaits, tous \u00e9gaux entre eux, chacun constituant une forme d'existence ultime ou irr\u00e9ductible. Nous savons qu'aucun n'\u00e9puise cette puissance absolue d'exister qui revient \u00e0 Dieu comme raison suffisante.\n\nL'absolument infini consiste d'abord en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs formellement ou r\u00e9ellement distincts. Tous les attributs sont \u00e9gaux, aucun n'est sup\u00e9rieur ou inf\u00e9rieur \u00e0 l'autre, chacun exprime une essence infiniment parfaite. Toutes ces essences formelles sont exprim\u00e9es par les attributs comme l'essence absolue de la substance, c'est-\u00e0-dire s'identifient dans la substance ontologiquement une. L'essence formelle est l'essence de Dieu telle qu'elle existe dans chaque attribut. L'essence absolue est la m\u00eame essence, telle qu'elle se rapporte \u00e0 une substance dont l'existence d\u00e9coule n\u00e9cessairement, substance qui poss\u00e8de donc tous les attributs. L'expression se pr\u00e9sente ici comme le rapport de la forme et de l'absolu : chaque forme exprime, explique ou d\u00e9veloppe l'absolu, mais l'absolu contient ou \u00ab complique \u00bb une infinit\u00e9 de formes. L'essence absolue de Dieu est puissance absolument infinie d'exister et d'agir ; mais, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, si nous affirmons cette premi\u00e8re puissance comme identique \u00e0 l'essence de Dieu, c'est _sous la condition_ d'une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs formellement ou r\u00e9ellement distincts. La puissance d'exister et d'agir est donc l'essence formelle-absolue. Et c'est ainsi qu'il faut comprendre le principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des attributs : tous les attributs sont \u00e9gaux par rapport \u00e0 cette puissance d'exister et d'agir qu'ils conditionnent.\n\nMais l'absolu a une seconde puissance, comme une seconde formule ou \u00ab p\u00e9riode \u00bb de l'expression : Dieu se comprend ou s'exprime objectivement. L'essence absolue de Dieu est formelle dans les attributs qui constituent sa nature, objective dans l'id\u00e9e qui repr\u00e9sente n\u00e9cessairement cette nature. C'est pourquoi l'id\u00e9e de Dieu repr\u00e9sente tous les attributs formellement ou r\u00e9ellement distincts, au point qu'une \u00e2me ou une id\u00e9e distincte correspond \u00e0 chacun14. Les m\u00eames attributs qui se distinguent formellement en Dieu se distinguent objectivement dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. Mais cette id\u00e9e n'en est pas moins absolument une, comme la substance constitu\u00e9e par tous les attributs15. L'essence objective-absolue est donc la seconde puissance de l'absolu lui-m\u00eame : nous ne posons pas un \u00eatre comme la cause de toutes choses sans que son essence objective ne soit aussi la cause de toutes les id\u00e9es16. L'essence absolue de Dieu est objectivement puissance de penser et de conna\u00eetre, comme elle est formellement puissance d'exister et d'agir. Raison de plus pour demander, dans ce nouveau cas : \u00e0 quelles conditions attribuons-nous \u00e0 Dieu cette puissance absolument infinie de penser comme identique \u00e0 l'essence objective ?\n\n _Pas plus que l'attribut \u00e9tendue ne se confond avec la puissance d'exister, l'attribut pens\u00e9e ne se confond en droit avec la puissance de penser._ Pourtant, un texte de Spinoza semble dire express\u00e9ment le contraire, identifiant l'attribut pens\u00e9e avec _l'absoluta cogitatio_17. Mais Spinoza pr\u00e9cisera en quel sens cette identification doit \u00eatre interpr\u00e9t\u00e9e : c'est seulement parce que la puissance de penser n'a pas d'autre condition que l'attribut pens\u00e9e. En effet, il arrive \u00e0 Spinoza de s'interroger sur la condition de la puissance de penser ou, ce qui revient au m\u00eame, sur la _possibilit\u00e9_ de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu : pour que Dieu puisse penser une infinit\u00e9 de choses en une infinit\u00e9 de modes, pour qu'il ait la possibilit\u00e9 de former une id\u00e9e de son essence et de tout ce qui s'ensuit, il faut et il suffit qu'il ait un attribut qui est la pens\u00e9e18. Ainsi, l'attribut pens\u00e9e suffit \u00e0 conditionner une puissance de penser \u00e9gale \u00e0 la puissance d'exister, laquelle est pourtant conditionn\u00e9e par tous les attributs (y compris la pens\u00e9e). On ne se h\u00e2tera pas de d\u00e9noncer les incoh\u00e9rences du spinozisme. Car on ne trouve d'incoh\u00e9rence qu'\u00e0 force de confondre, chez Spinoza, deux principes d'\u00e9galit\u00e9 tr\u00e8s diff\u00e9rents. D'une part tous les attributs sont \u00e9gaux ; mais cela doit se comprendre par rapport \u00e0 la puissance d'exister et d'agir. D'autre part, cette puissance d'exister n'est qu'une moiti\u00e9 de l'absolu, l'autre moiti\u00e9 est une puissance de penser qui lui est \u00e9gale : c'est par rapport \u00e0 cette seconde puissance que l'attribut pens\u00e9e jouit de privil\u00e8ges. \u00c0 lui seul il conditionne une puissance \u00e9gale \u00e0 celle que tous les attributs conditionnent. Il n'y a l\u00e0, semble-t-il, aucune contradiction, mais plut\u00f4t un _fait ultime_. Ce fait ne concerne nullement notre constitution, ni la limitation de notre connaissance. Ce fait serait plut\u00f4t celui de la constitution divine ou du d\u00e9veloppement de l'absolu. \u00ab Le fait est \u00bb qu'aucun attribut ne suffit \u00e0 remplir la puissance d'exister : quelque chose peut exister et agir, sans \u00eatre \u00e9tendu ni pensant. Au contraire, rien ne peut \u00eatre connu sauf par la pens\u00e9e ; la puissance de penser et de conna\u00eetre est effectivement remplie par l'attribut pens\u00e9e. Il y aurait contradiction si Spinoza posait d'abord l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 de tous les attributs, puis, d'un m\u00eame point de vue, donnait \u00e0 l'attribut pens\u00e9e des pouvoirs et des fonctions contraires \u00e0 cette \u00e9galit\u00e9. Mais Spinoza ne proc\u00e8de pas ainsi : c'est l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des puissances qui conf\u00e8re \u00e0 l'attribut pens\u00e9e des pouvoirs particuliers, dans un domaine qui n'est plus celui de l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des attributs. _L'attribut pens\u00e9e est \u00e0 la puissance de penser ce que tous les attributs (y compris la pens\u00e9e) sont \u00e0 la puissance d'exister et d'agir._\n\nDu rapport (donc aussi de la diff\u00e9rence) entre la puissance de penser et l'attribut pens\u00e9e, trois cons\u00e9quences d\u00e9coulent. D'abord la puissance de penser s'affirme, par nature ou participation, de tout ce qui est \u00ab objectif \u00bb. L'essence objective de Dieu est puissance absolument infinie de penser ; et tout ce qui d\u00e9coule de cette essence participe \u00e0 cette puissance. _Mais l'\u00eatre objectif ne serait rien s'il n'avait lui-m\u00eame un \u00eatre formel dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e._ Non seulement l'essence objective de ce qui est produit par Dieu, mais aussi les essences objectives d'attributs, l'essence objective de Dieu lui-m\u00eame, sont soumises \u00e0 la condition d'\u00eatre \u00ab form\u00e9es \u00bb dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e19. _C'est en ce sens que l'id\u00e9e de Dieu n'est qu'un mode de la pens\u00e9e_ et fait partie de la nature natur\u00e9e. Ce qui est mode de l'attribut pens\u00e9e, ce n'est pas, \u00e0 proprement parler, l'essence objective ou l'\u00eatre objectif de l'id\u00e9e comme tel. Ce qui est mode ou produit, c'est toujours l'id\u00e9e prise dans son \u00eatre formel. C'est pourquoi Spinoza prend grand soin de donner au premier mode de la pens\u00e9e le nom d'entendement infini : car l'entendement infini, ce n'est pas l'id\u00e9e de Dieu sous n'importe quel point de vue, c'est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment l'\u00eatre formel de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu20. Il est vrai, et nous devons insister sur ce point, que l'\u00eatre objectif ne serait rien s'il n'avait cet \u00eatre formel par lequel il est un mode de l'attribut pens\u00e9e. Ou, si l'on pr\u00e9f\u00e8re, il serait seulement en puissance sans que cette puissance soit effectu\u00e9e.\n\nReste que nous devons distinguer deux points de vue : _d'apr\u00e8s sa n\u00e9cessit\u00e9_ , l'id\u00e9e de Dieu se trouve fond\u00e9e dans la nature naturante. Car il appartient \u00e0 Dieu, pris dans sa nature absolue, de se comprendre n\u00e9cessairement. Lui revient une puissance absolue de penser identique \u00e0 son essence objective ou correspondant \u00e0 son id\u00e9e. L'id\u00e9e de Dieu est donc principe objectif, principe absolu de tout ce qui suit objectivement en Dieu. Mais _d'apr\u00e8s sa possibilit\u00e9_ , l'id\u00e9e de Dieu n'est fond\u00e9e que dans la nature natur\u00e9e \u00e0 laquelle elle appartient. Elle ne peut \u00eatre \u00ab form\u00e9e \u00bb que dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e, elle trouve dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e le principe formel dont elle d\u00e9pend, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce que cet attribut est la condition sous laquelle on affirme de Dieu la puissance absolument infinie de penser. La distinction des deux points de vue, n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 et possibilit\u00e9, nous para\u00eet importante dans la th\u00e9orie de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu21. La nature de Dieu, \u00e0 laquelle correspond la puissance d'exister et d'agir, est fond\u00e9e _\u00e0 la fois_ en n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 et en possibilit\u00e9 : sa possibilit\u00e9 se trouve \u00e9tablie par les attributs formellement distincts, et sa n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 par ces m\u00eames attributs pris ensemble, ontologiquement \u00ab un \u00bb. Il n'en est pas de m\u00eame de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu : sa n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 objective est \u00e9tablie dans la nature de Dieu, mais sa possibilit\u00e9 formelle dans le seul attribut pens\u00e9e, auquel, d\u00e8s lors, elle appartient comme un mode. On se souvient que la puissance divine est toujours acte ; mais justement, la puissance de penser qui correspond \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu ne serait pas actuelle si Dieu ne produisait l'entendement infini comme l'\u00eatre formel de cette id\u00e9e. Aussi bien l'entendement infini est-il appel\u00e9 le fils de Dieu, le Christ22. Or, dans l'image fort peu chr\u00e9tienne que Spinoza propose du Christ, comme Sagesse, Parole ou Voix de Dieu, on distingue un aspect par lequel il s'accorde objectivement avec la nature absolue de Dieu, un aspect par lequel il d\u00e9coule formellement de la nature divine envisag\u00e9e sous le seul attribut pens\u00e9e23. C'est pourquoi la question de savoir si le Dieu spinoziste se pense lui-m\u00eame en lui-m\u00eame est une question d\u00e9licate, qui n'est pas r\u00e9solue pour autant qu'on rappelle que l'entendement infini n'est qu'un mode24. Car, si Dieu a une sagesse ou une science, c'est une science de soi-m\u00eame et de sa propre nature ; s'il se comprend n\u00e9cessairement, c'est en vertu de sa propre nature : la puissance de penser, et de se penser, lui appartient donc en propre absolument. Mais cette puissance resterait en puissance si Dieu ne cr\u00e9ait pas dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e l'\u00eatre formel de l'id\u00e9e dans laquelle il se pense. C'est pourquoi l'entendement de Dieu n'appartient pas \u00e0 sa nature, alors que la puissance de penser appartient \u00e0 cette nature. Dieu produit comme il se comprend objectivement ; mais se comprendre a n\u00e9cessairement une forme qui, elle, est un produit25.\n\nTel est le premier privil\u00e8ge de l'attribut pens\u00e9e : il contient formellement des modes qui, pris objectivement, repr\u00e9sentent les attributs eux-m\u00eames. On ne confondra pas ce premier privil\u00e8ge avec un autre, qui en d\u00e9coule. Un mode qui d\u00e9pend d'un attribut d\u00e9termin\u00e9 est repr\u00e9sent\u00e9 par une id\u00e9e dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e ; mais un mode qui diff\u00e8re du pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent par l'attribut doit \u00eatre repr\u00e9sent\u00e9 par _une autre id\u00e9e._ En effet, tout ce qui participe \u00e0 la puissance d'exister et d'agir, sous tel ou tel attribut, participe aussi \u00e0 la puissance de penser, mais dans le m\u00eame attribut pens\u00e9e. Comme dit Schuller, \u00ab l'attribut de la pens\u00e9e a une extension bien plus grande que les autres attributs26 \u00bb. Si l'on suppose une modification substantielle, elle sera exprim\u00e9e une seule fois dans chacun des autres attributs, mais une infinit\u00e9 de fois dans l'entendement infini, donc dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e27. Et chaque id\u00e9e qui l'exprimera dans la pens\u00e9e repr\u00e9sentera le mode de tel attribut, non d'un autre. Si bien qu'entre ces id\u00e9es il y aura autant de distinction qu'entre les attributs eux-m\u00eames ou les modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents : elles n'auront \u00ab aucune connexion28 \u00bb. Il y aura donc une distinction objective entre id\u00e9es, \u00e9quivalente \u00e0 la distinction r\u00e9elle-formelle entre attributs ou modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents. Bien plus, cette distinction entre id\u00e9es sera elle-m\u00eame objective-formelle, pour autant qu'on la rapportera \u00e0 l'\u00eatre formel des id\u00e9es elles-m\u00eames. Il y aura donc dans la pens\u00e9e des modes qui, appartenant \u00e0 un m\u00eame attribut, ne se distingueront pourtant pas modalement, mais formellement ou r\u00e9ellement. L\u00e0 encore, ce privil\u00e8ge resterait inintelligible si l'on ne faisait intervenir le rapport particulier de l'attribut pens\u00e9e avec la puissance de penser. _La distinction objective-formelle est dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu le corr\u00e9lat n\u00e9cessaire de la distinction r\u00e9elle-formelle_ , telle qu'elle est dans la nature de Dieu ; elle d\u00e9signe l'acte de l'entendement infini quand il saisit des attributs divers ou des modes correspondants d'attributs divers.\n\nEn troisi\u00e8me lieu, tout ce qui existe formellement a une id\u00e9e qui lui correspond objectivement. Mais l'attribut pens\u00e9e est lui-m\u00eame une forme d'existence, et toute id\u00e9e a un \u00eatre formel dans cet attribut. C'est pourquoi toute id\u00e9e, \u00e0 son tour, est l'objet d'une id\u00e9e qui la repr\u00e9sente ; cette autre id\u00e9e, l'objet d'une troisi\u00e8me, \u00e0 l'infini. En d'autres termes : s'il est vrai que toute id\u00e9e qui participe \u00e0 la puissance de penser appartient formellement \u00e0 l'attribut pens\u00e9e, inversement toute id\u00e9e qui appartient \u00e0 l'attribut pens\u00e9e est l'objet d'une id\u00e9e qui participe \u00e0 la puissance de penser. D'o\u00f9 ce dernier privil\u00e8ge apparent de l'attribut pens\u00e9e, qui fonde une capacit\u00e9 de l'id\u00e9e de se r\u00e9fl\u00e9chir \u00e0 l'infini. Il arrive \u00e0 Spinoza de dire que l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e a, avec l'id\u00e9e, le m\u00eame rapport que l'id\u00e9e avec son objet. On s'en \u00e9tonne, dans la mesure o\u00f9 l'id\u00e9e et son objet sont une m\u00eame chose con\u00e7ue sous deux attributs, tandis que l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e et l'id\u00e9e sont une m\u00eame chose sous un seul attribut29. Mais l'objet et l'id\u00e9e ne renvoient pas seulement \u00e0 deux attributs, ils renvoient aussi \u00e0 deux puissances, puissance d'exister et d'agir, puissance de penser et de conna\u00eetre. De m\u00eame l'id\u00e9e et l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e : sans doute renvoient-elles \u00e0 un seul attribut, mais aussi \u00e0 deux puissances, puisque l'attribut pens\u00e9e est d'une part une forme d'existence, d'autre part la condition de la puissance de penser.\n\nOn comprend, d\u00e8s lors, que la th\u00e9orie de l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e se d\u00e9veloppe dans deux directions diff\u00e9rentes. Car l'id\u00e9e et l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e se distinguent pour autant que nous consid\u00e9rons l'une dans son \u00eatre formel, par rapport \u00e0 la puissance d'exister, et l'autre dans son \u00eatre objectif, par rapport \u00e0 la puissance de penser : le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ pr\u00e9sentera l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e comme une autre id\u00e9e, distincte de la premi\u00e8re30. Mais d'autre part, toute id\u00e9e se rapporte \u00e0 la puissance de penser : m\u00eame son \u00eatre formel n'est que la condition sous laquelle elle participe \u00e0 cette puissance. Appara\u00eet de ce point de vue l'unit\u00e9 de l'id\u00e9e et de l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e, en tant qu'elles sont donn\u00e9es en Dieu avec la m\u00eame n\u00e9cessit\u00e9, _de la m\u00eame puissance de penser_31. D\u00e8s lors, il n'y a plus qu'une distinction de raison entre les deux id\u00e9es : l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e, c'est la forme de l'id\u00e9e, rapport\u00e9e comme telle \u00e0 la puissance de penser.\n\nLes pseudo-contradictions du parall\u00e9lisme s'\u00e9vanouissent si l'on distingue deux arguments tr\u00e8s diff\u00e9rents : celui des puissances et de leur \u00e9galit\u00e9, celui des attributs et de leur \u00e9galit\u00e9. Le parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique d\u00e9coule de l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des puissances. Le parall\u00e9lisme ontologique d\u00e9coule de l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des attributs (par rapport \u00e0 la puissance d'exister). Pourtant, une difficult\u00e9 subsiste encore. La scolie de II 7 passe du parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique au parall\u00e9lisme ontologique. Dans ce passage, il proc\u00e8de par simple g\u00e9n\u00e9ralisation : \u00ab Et je l'entends de m\u00eame pour les autres attributs. \u00bb Mais comment rendre compte de ce passage ? De ce qu'un objet (dans un attribut quelconque) et une id\u00e9e (dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e) sont une seule et m\u00eame chose (individu), Spinoza conclut que des objets dans tous les attributs sont une seule et m\u00eame chose (modification). Or il semblerait que l'argumentation d\u00fbt nous conduire, non pas \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 d'une modification, mais au contraire \u00e0 une pluralit\u00e9 irr\u00e9ductible et infinie de couples \u00ab id\u00e9e-objet \u00bb.\n\nLa difficult\u00e9 ne se r\u00e9sout que si l'on consid\u00e8re le statut complexe de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. Du point de vue de sa n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 objective, l'id\u00e9e de Dieu est principe absolu, et n'a pas moins d'unit\u00e9 que la substance absolument infinie. Du point de vue de sa possibilit\u00e9 formelle, elle est seulement un mode qui trouve son principe dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e. Voil\u00e0 donc que l'id\u00e9e de Dieu est apte \u00e0 communiquer aux modes quelque chose de l'unit\u00e9 substantielle. En effet il y aura une unit\u00e9 proprement modale dans les id\u00e9es qui d\u00e9coulent de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu elle-m\u00eame, c'est-\u00e0-dire dans les modes de penser qui font partie de l'entendement infini. C'est donc une m\u00eame modification qui s'exprimera en une infinit\u00e9 de mani\u00e8res dans l'entendement infini de Dieu. _D\u00e8s lors_ , les objets que ces id\u00e9es repr\u00e9sentent seront des objets ne diff\u00e9rant que par l'attribut : de m\u00eame que leurs id\u00e9es, ils exprimeront une seule et m\u00eame modification. Un mode dans tel attribut forme avec l'id\u00e9e que le repr\u00e9sente un \u00ab individu \u00bb irr\u00e9ductible ; et aussi une id\u00e9e, dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e, avec l'objet qu'elle repr\u00e9sente. Mais cette infinit\u00e9 d'individus correspondent, en ce qu'ils expriment une seule modification. Ainsi la m\u00eame modification n'existe pas seulement en une infinit\u00e9 de modes, mais en une infinit\u00e9 d'individus, dont chacun est constitu\u00e9 par un mode et par l'id\u00e9e de ce mode.\n\nMais pourquoi fallait-il passer par le parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique ? Pourquoi ne pas conclure directement de l'unit\u00e9 de la substance \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 d'une modification substantielle ? C'est que Dieu produit dans les attributs formellement ou r\u00e9ellement distincts ; il est certain que les attributs s'expriment, mais chacun s'exprime pour son compte, en tant que forme ultime et irr\u00e9ductible. Sans doute, tout nous fait penser que la production b\u00e9n\u00e9ficiera d'une unit\u00e9 d\u00e9rivant de la substance elle-m\u00eame. Car, si chaque attribut s'exprime pour son compte, Dieu n'en produit pas moins dans tous les attributs \u00e0 la fois. Tout laisse donc pr\u00e9voir qu'il y aura dans les diff\u00e9rents attributs des modes exprimant la m\u00eame modification. Pourtant, nous n'en avons pas une certitude absolue. \u00c0 la limite, on pourrait concevoir autant de mondes qu'il y a d'attributs. La Nature serait une dans sa substance, mais multiple dans ses modifications, ce qui est produit dans un attribut restant absolument diff\u00e9rent de ce qui est produit dans un autre. C'est parce que les modes ont une consistance propre, une sp\u00e9cificit\u00e9, que nous sommes forc\u00e9s de chercher une raison particuli\u00e8re de l'unit\u00e9 dont ils sont capables. Kant reprochait au spinozisme de ne pas avoir cherch\u00e9 un principe sp\u00e9cifique pour l'unit\u00e9 du divers dans le mode32. (Il pensait \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 des modes dans un m\u00eame attribut, mais le m\u00eame probl\u00e8me se pose pour l'unit\u00e9 d'une modification par rapport aux modes d'attributs diff\u00e9rents.) Or l'objection ne semble pas l\u00e9gitime. Spinoza fut parfaitement conscient d'un probl\u00e8me particulier de l'unit\u00e9 des modes, et de la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de faire appel \u00e0 des principes originaux pour rendre compte du passage de l'unit\u00e9 substantielle \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 modale.\n\nC'est bien l'id\u00e9e de Dieu qui nous donne un tel principe, en vertu de son double aspect. On passe de l'unit\u00e9 de la substance, constitu\u00e9e par tous les attributs qui en expriment l'essence, \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 d'une modification comprise dans l'entendement infini, mais constitu\u00e9e par des modes qui l'expriment dans chaque attribut. \u00c0 la question : pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas autant de mondes que d'attributs de Dieu ?, Spinoza r\u00e9pond seulement en renvoyant le lecteur au scolie de II, 733. Or, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, ce texte implique un argument qui proc\u00e8de par l'entendement infini (d'o\u00f9 l'importance de l'allusion \u00e0 \u00ab certains H\u00e9breux \u00bb) : l'entendement de Dieu n'a pas moins d'unit\u00e9 que la substance divine, d\u00e8s lors les choses comprises par lui n'ont pas moins d'unit\u00e9 que lui-m\u00eame.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _\u00c9_ , II, 7, sc. : \u00ab Et je l'entends de m\u00eame pour les autres attributs... \u00bb.\n\n2.  Ainsi l'\u00e2me est une id\u00e9e qui repr\u00e9sente exclusivement un certain mode de l'\u00e9tendue : cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 13, prop.\n\n3.  Sur cet emploi du mot \u00ab individu \u00bb signifiant l'unit\u00e9 d'une id\u00e9e et de son objet, cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 21, sc.\n\n4.  _Lettre 65, de Tschirnhaus_ (III, p. 207).\n\n5.  _TRE_ , 85.\n\n6.  _\u00c9_ , II, 5 et 6.\n\n7.  _CT_ , II, ch. 20, 4, note 3.\n\n8.  _\u00c9_ , I, 30, prop.\n\n9.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , I, 16, dem. : _infinita absolute attributa._\n\n10.  _\u00c9_ , II, 3, prop. et dem\n\n11.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , I, 31, dem. : _absoluta cogitatio. Lettre 64, \u00e0 Schuller_ (III, p. 206) : _intellectus absolute infinitus._\n\n12.  SCHELLING, \u00ab Conf\u00e9rences de Stuttgart \u00bb, 1810 (tr. fr. in _Essais_ , Aubier \u00e9d., pp. 309-310) : \u00ab Les deux unit\u00e9s ou puissances se trouvent \u00e0 nouveau unies dans l'Unit\u00e9 absolue, la position commune de la premi\u00e8re et de la deuxi\u00e8me puissances sera donc A3... Les puissances sont d\u00e9sormais pos\u00e9es \u00e9galement comme des p\u00e9riodes de la _r\u00e9v\u00e9lation_ de Dieu. \u00bb\n\n13.  _CT_ , I, ch. 1, 7, note 3.\n\n14.  _CT_ , Appendice II, 9 : \u00ab Tous les attributs infinis qui ont une \u00e2me aussi bien que l'\u00e9tendue... \u00bb\n\n15.  _\u00c9_ , II, 4, prop. et dem.\n\n16.  _TRE_ , 99 : Il faut que \u00ab nous recherchions s'il y a un \u00catre, et aussi quel il est, qui soit la cause de toutes choses, de telle sorte que son essence objective soit aussi la cause de toutes nos id\u00e9es \u00bb.\n\n17.  _\u00c9_ , I, 31, d\u00e9m. : L'entendement, \u00e9tant un mode de penser, \u00ab doit \u00eatre con\u00e7u par la _pens\u00e9e absolue_ , autrement dit il doit \u00eatre con\u00e7u par quelque _attribut_ de Dieu qui exprime l'essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie de Dieu, de telle sorte que sans cet attribut il ne puisse ni \u00eatre ni \u00eatre con\u00e7u \u00bb.\n\n18.  _\u00c9_ , II, 1, sc. \u00ab Un \u00eatre qui peut penser une infinit\u00e9 de choses en une infinit\u00e9 de modes est n\u00e9cessairement infini par la vertu de penser. \u00bb (C'est-\u00e0-dire : un \u00eatre qui a une puissance _absolue_ de penser a n\u00e9cessairement un attribut _infini_ qui est la pens\u00e9e.) _\u00c9_ , II, 5, dem. : \u00ab Nous concluions que Dieu peut former l'id\u00e9e de son essence et de tout ce qui en suit n\u00e9cessairement, et nous le concluions de cela seul que Dieu est chose pensante. \u00bb\n\n19.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 5, dem. : _Deum ideam suae essentiae... formare posse._\n\n20.  C'est l'entendement infini, non pas l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, qui est dit un mode : _\u00c9_ , I, 31 prop. et dem. ; _CT_ , I, ch. 9, 3.\n\n21.  Les commentateurs ont souvent distingu\u00e9 plusieurs aspects de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu _ou_ de l'entendement infini. Georg Busolt a \u00e9t\u00e9 le plus loin, posant que l'entendement infini appartient \u00e0 la nature natur\u00e9e comme principe des modes intellectuels finis, mais \u00e0 la nature naturante en tant qu'on le consid\u00e8re en lui-m\u00eame ( _Die Grundz\u00fcge der Erkenntnisstheorie und Metaphysik Spinoza's_ , Berlin, 1895, II, pp. 127 sq.). Cette distinction toutefois nous para\u00eet mal fond\u00e9e, car, en tant que principe de ce qui suit objectivement en Dieu, l'id\u00e9e de Dieu devrait au contraire appartenir \u00e0 la nature naturante. C'est pourquoi nous croyons plus l\u00e9gitime une distinction entre l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, prise objectivement, _et_ l'entendement infini, pris formellement.\n\n22.  Cf. _CT_ , I, ch. 9, 3. _Lettre 73, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 226).\n\n23.  Cf. _CT_ , II, ch. 22, 4, note 1 : \u00ab L'entendement infini, que nous appelions le fils de Dieu, doit \u00eatre de toute \u00e9ternit\u00e9 dans la nature, car, puisque Dieu a \u00e9t\u00e9 de toute \u00e9ternit\u00e9, son id\u00e9e aussi doit \u00eatre aussi dans la chose pensante ou en lui-m\u00eame \u00e9ternellement, _laquelle id\u00e9e s'accorde_ objectivement avec lui. \u00bb\n\n24.  Victor Brochard exprimait d\u00e9j\u00e0 des doutes \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard : cf. _Le Dieu de Spinoza_ (\u00c9tudes de philosophie ancienne et de philosophie moderne, Vrin), pp. 332-370.\n\n25.  Aux deux th\u00e8ses pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment expos\u00e9es \u2013 Dieu produit comme il se comprend, Dieu comprend tout ce qu'il produit \u2013, il faut donc ajouter cette troisi\u00e8me : Dieu produit la forme sous laquelle il se comprend et comprend tout. Les trois s'accordent sur un point fondamental : l'entendement infini n'est pas un lieu qui contiendrait des possibles.\n\n26.  _Lettre 70, de Schuller_ (III, p. 221).\n\n27.  _Lettre 66, \u00e0 Tschirnhaus_ (III, p. 207).\n\n28.  _Lettre 66, \u00e0 Tschirnhaus_ (III, p. 208).\n\n29.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 21, sc. Albert L\u00e9on r\u00e9sume la difficult\u00e9 : \u00ab Comment sortir de ce dilemme ? Ou bien l'id\u00e9e et l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e sont dans le m\u00eame rapport qu'un objet \u00e9tranger \u00e0 la pens\u00e9e et l'id\u00e9e qui le repr\u00e9sente, et elles sont alors deux expressions d'un m\u00eame contenu sous des attributs diff\u00e9rents ; ou leur contenu commun est exprim\u00e9 sous un seul et m\u00eame attribut, et alors l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e est absolument identique \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e consid\u00e9r\u00e9e, la conscience absolument identique \u00e0 la pens\u00e9e, et celle-ci ne saurait se d\u00e9finir en dehors de celle-l\u00e0. \u00bb ( _Les \u00c9l\u00e9ments cart\u00e9siens de la doctrine spinoziste sur les rapports de la pens\u00e9e et de son objet_ , p. 154.)\n\n30.  _TRE_ , 34-35 : _altera idea_ ou _altera essentia objectiva_ sont dits trois fois. La distinction de l'id\u00e9e et de l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e est m\u00eame assimil\u00e9e \u00e0 celle de l'id\u00e9e de triangle et de l'id\u00e9e de cercle.\n\n31.  _\u00c9_ , II, 21, sc. (sur l'existence d'une simple distinction de raison entre l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e et l'id\u00e9e. Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, _8_ , dem. et V. 3, dem.).\n\n32.  Kant, _Critique du Jugement_ , \u00a7 73.\n\n33.  C'est Schuller qui posait la question, _Lettre 63_ (III, p. 203).\n\n## CHAPITRE VIII\n\n## EXPRESSION ET ID\u00c9E\n\nLa philosophie de Spinoza est une \u00ab logique \u00bb. La nature et les r\u00e8gles de cette logique font l'objet de la m\u00e9thode. La question de savoir si la m\u00e9thode et la logique du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ sont tout enti\u00e8res conserv\u00e9es dans l' _\u00c9thique_ est une question importante ; mais elle ne peut \u00eatre r\u00e9solue que par l'examen du _Trait\u00e9_ lui-m\u00eame. Or celui-ci nous pr\u00e9sente deux parties distinctes. La premi\u00e8re partie concerne le but de la m\u00e9thode ou de la philosophie, le but final de la pens\u00e9e : elle porte en principe sur la forme de l'id\u00e9e vraie1. La seconde partie concerne surtout les moyens d'atteindre ce but ; elle porte sur le contenu de l'id\u00e9e vraie2. La premi\u00e8re partie anticipe n\u00e9cessairement sur la seconde, comme le but pr\u00e9d\u00e9termine les moyens gr\u00e2ce auxquels on l'atteint. C'est chacun de ces points qu'il faut analyser.\n\nLe but de la philosophie ou la premi\u00e8re partie de la m\u00e9thode ne consistent pas \u00e0 nous faire conna\u00eetre quelque chose ; mais \u00e0 nous faire conna\u00eetre notre puissance de comprendre. Non pas nous faire conna\u00eetre la Nature, mais nous faire concevoir et acqu\u00e9rir une nature humaine sup\u00e9rieure3. C'est dire que la m\u00e9thode, sous son premier aspect, est essentiellement r\u00e9flexive : elle consiste dans la seule connaissance de l'entendement pur, de sa nature, de ses lois et de ses forces4. \u00ab La m\u00e9thode n'est rien d'autre que la connaissance r\u00e9flexive ou l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e \u00bb5. \u00c0 cet \u00e9gard, on ne verra nulle diff\u00e9rence entre l' _\u00c9thique_ et le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_. L'objet de la m\u00e9thode est aussi bien le but final de la philosophie. Le livre V de l' _\u00c9thique_ d\u00e9crit ce but, non pas comme la connaissance de quelque chose, mais comme la connaissance de notre puissance de comprendre ou de notre entendement ; on en d\u00e9duit les conditions de la b\u00e9atitude, comme pleine effectuation de cette puissance. D'o\u00f9 le titre du livre V : _De potentia intellectus seu de libertate humana._\n\n\u00ab Puisque la m\u00e9thode est la connaissance r\u00e9flexive elle-m\u00eame, ce principe qui doit diriger nos pens\u00e9es ne peut \u00eatre rien d'autre que la connaissance de ce qui constitue la _forme_ de la v\u00e9rit\u00e96. \u00bb En quoi consiste ce rapport de la forme et de la r\u00e9flexion ? La connaissance r\u00e9flexive est l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e. Nous avons vu que l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e se distinguait de l'id\u00e9e, pour autant que nous rapportions celle-ci dans son \u00eatre formel \u00e0 la puissance d'exister, celle-l\u00e0 dans son \u00eatre objectif \u00e0 la puissance de penser. Mais, d'un autre point de vue, l'id\u00e9e prise dans son \u00eatre formel se rapporte d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e0 la puissance de penser. En effet, l'\u00eatre formel de l'id\u00e9e, c'est son existence dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e. Or cet attribut n'est pas seulement un genre d'existence, c'est aussi la condition sous laquelle on rapporte \u00e0 quelque chose une puissance de penser, de comprendre ou de conna\u00eetre. Dieu sous l'attribut pens\u00e9e a une puissance absolument infinie de penser. Une id\u00e9e dans l'attribut pens\u00e9e a une puissance d\u00e9termin\u00e9e de conna\u00eetre ou de comprendre. La puissance de comprendre qui appartient \u00e0 une id\u00e9e, c'est la puissance de penser de Dieu lui-m\u00eame, en tant qu'elle \u00ab s'explique \u00bb par cette id\u00e9e. On voit donc que l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e, c'est l'id\u00e9e consid\u00e9r\u00e9e dans sa forme, en tant qu'elle poss\u00e8de une puissance de comprendre ou de conna\u00eetre (comme partie de la puissance absolue de penser). En ce sens, forme et r\u00e9flexion s'impliquent.\n\nLa forme est donc toujours forme d'une id\u00e9e que nous _avons_. Encore faut-il pr\u00e9ciser : il n'y a de forme que de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9. Si la fausset\u00e9 avait une forme, il nous serait impossible de prendre le faux pour le vrai, donc de nous tromper7. La forme est donc toujours forme d'une id\u00e9e vraie que nous avons. Il suffit d'avoir une id\u00e9e vraie pour qu'elle se r\u00e9fl\u00e9chisse, et r\u00e9fl\u00e9chisse sa puissance de conna\u00eetre ; il suffit de savoir pour savoir qu'on sait8. C'est pourquoi la m\u00e9thode suppose qu'on ait une id\u00e9e vraie quelconque. Elle suppose une \u00ab force inn\u00e9e \u00bb de l'entendement qui ne peut pas manquer, parmi toutes ses id\u00e9es, _d'en avoir une au moins qui soit vraie_9. La m\u00e9thode n'a nullement pour but de nous faire acqu\u00e9rir une telle id\u00e9e, mais de nous faire \u00ab r\u00e9fl\u00e9chir \u00bb celle que nous avons, ou de nous faire comprendre notre puissance de conna\u00eetre.\n\nMais en quoi consiste cette r\u00e9flexion ? La forme ne s'oppose pas au contenu en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral. L'\u00eatre formel s'oppose \u00e0 l'\u00eatre objectif ou repr\u00e9sentatif : l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e, c'est l'id\u00e9e dans sa forme, ind\u00e9pendamment de l'objet qu'elle repr\u00e9sente. En effet, comme tous les attributs, la pens\u00e9e est autonome ; les modes de la pens\u00e9e, les id\u00e9es, sont donc automates. C'est dire qu'ils d\u00e9pendent uniquement de l'attribut pens\u00e9e dans leur \u00eatre formel : ils sont consid\u00e9r\u00e9s \u00ab sans relation \u00e0 un objet10 \u00bb. La forme de l'id\u00e9e s'oppose donc \u00e0 son contenu objectif ou repr\u00e9sentatif. Mais elle ne s'oppose nullement \u00e0 un autre contenu que l'id\u00e9e poss\u00e9derait elle-m\u00eame ind\u00e9pendamment de l'objet qu'elle repr\u00e9sente. En fait, nous devons nous garder d'une double erreur concernant le contenu, mais aussi la forme de l'id\u00e9e. Soit la d\u00e9finition de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 comme correspondance d'une id\u00e9e et de son objet. Il est certain qu'elle ne nous apprend rien sur la forme de l'id\u00e9e vraie : d'o\u00f9 pourrait-on savoir qu'une id\u00e9e convient avec l'objet ? Mais elle ne nous apprend rien, non plus, sur le contenu de l'id\u00e9e vraie ; car une id\u00e9e vraie, d'apr\u00e8s cette d\u00e9finition, n'aurait pas plus de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection interne qu'une fausse11. La conception de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 comme correspondance ne nous donne aucune d\u00e9finition du vrai, ni mat\u00e9rielle ni formelle ; elle nous propose seulement une d\u00e9finition nominale, une d\u00e9nomination extrins\u00e8que. Or on pensera peut-\u00eatre que \u00ab le clair et le distinct \u00bb nous donnent une meilleure d\u00e9termination, c'est-\u00e0-dire une caract\u00e9ristique interne du vrai tel qu'il est _dans_ l'id\u00e9e. En fait, il n'en est rien. Pris en eux-m\u00eames, le clair et le distinct portent bien sur le contenu de l'id\u00e9e, mais seulement sur son contenu \u00ab objectif \u00bb ou \u00ab repr\u00e9sentatif \u00bb. Ils portent \u00e9galement sur la forme, mais seulement sur la forme d'une \u00ab conscience psychologique \u00bb de l'id\u00e9e. _Ainsi ils nous permettent de reconna\u00eetre une id\u00e9e vraie, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment celle que la m\u00e9thode suppose_ , mais ne nous donne aucune connaissance du contenu mat\u00e9riel de cette id\u00e9e ni de sa forme logique. Bien plus, le clair et le distinct sont incapables de d\u00e9passer la dualit\u00e9 de la forme et du contenu. La clart\u00e9 cart\u00e9sienne n'est pas une, mais double ; Descartes nous invite lui-m\u00eame \u00e0 distinguer une \u00e9vidence mat\u00e9rielle, qui serait comme la clart\u00e9 et la distinction du contenu objectif de l'id\u00e9e, et une \u00e9vidence formelle, clart\u00e9 qui porte sur la \u00ab raison \u00bb de notre croyance \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e12. C'est ce dualisme qui se prolongera dans la division cart\u00e9sienne de l'entendement et de la volont\u00e9. Bref, il manque au cart\u00e9sianisme, non seulement de concevoir le vrai contenu, comme contenu mat\u00e9riel, et la vraie forme, comme forme logique de l'id\u00e9e, mais de s'\u00e9lever jusqu'\u00e0 la position de \u00ab l'automate spirituel \u00bb impliquant l'identit\u00e9 des deux.\n\nIl y a un formalisme logique, qui ne se confond pas avec la forme de la conscience psychologique. Il y a un contenu mat\u00e9riel de l'id\u00e9e, qui ne se confond pas avec un contenu repr\u00e9sentatif. Il suffit d'acc\u00e9der \u00e0 cette vraie forme et \u00e0 ce vrai contenu pour concevoir en m\u00eame temps l'unit\u00e9 des deux : l'\u00e2me ou l'entendement comme \u00ab automate spirituel \u00bb. _La forme, en tant que forme de v\u00e9rit\u00e9, ne fait qu'un avec le contenu de l'id\u00e9e vraie quelconque_ : c'est en pensant le contenu d'une id\u00e9e vraie que nous avons que nous r\u00e9fl\u00e9chissons l'id\u00e9e dans sa forme, et que nous comprenons notre puissance de conna\u00eetre. D\u00e8s lors, on voit pourquoi la m\u00e9thode comporte une seconde partie, et pourquoi la premi\u00e8re anticipe n\u00e9cessairement sur cette seconde. La premi\u00e8re partie de la m\u00e9thode ou le but final concerne la forme de l'id\u00e9e vraie, l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e ou l'id\u00e9e r\u00e9flexive. La seconde partie concerne le contenu de l'id\u00e9e vraie, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. Cette seconde partie est comme le moyen subordonn\u00e9 au but, mais aussi comme le moyen dont d\u00e9pend la r\u00e9alisation du but. Elle demande : En quoi consiste le contenu de l'id\u00e9e, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'id\u00e9e comme ad\u00e9quate ?\n\nL'id\u00e9e vraie est, du point de vue de la forme, l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e ; et du point de vue de la mati\u00e8re, l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. De m\u00eame que l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e se d\u00e9finit comme _id\u00e9e r\u00e9flexive_ , l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate se d\u00e9finit comme _id\u00e9e expressive_. Le terme \u00ab ad\u00e9quat \u00bb, chez Spinoza, ne signifie jamais la correspondance de l'id\u00e9e avec l'objet qu'elle repr\u00e9sente ou d\u00e9signe, mais la convenance interne de l'id\u00e9e avec quelque chose qu'elle exprime. Qu'est-ce qu'elle exprime ? Consid\u00e9rons d'abord l'id\u00e9e comme la connaissance de quelque chose. Elle n'est une vraie connaissance que dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle porte sur l'essence de la chose : elle doit \u00ab expliquer \u00bb cette essence. Mais elle n'explique l'essence que dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle comprend la chose par sa cause prochaine : elle doit \u00ab exprimer \u00bb cette cause m\u00eame, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00ab envelopper \u00bb la connaissance de la cause13. Tout est aristot\u00e9licien dans cette conception de la connaissance. Spinoza ne veut pas dire simplement que les effets connus d\u00e9pendent des causes. Il veut dire \u00e0 la mani\u00e8re d'Aristote que la connaissance d'un effet d\u00e9pend elle-m\u00eame de la connaissance de la cause. Mais ce principe aristot\u00e9licien se trouve renouvel\u00e9 par l'inspiration parall\u00e9liste : que la connaissance aille ainsi de la cause \u00e0 l'effet doit se comprendre comme la loi d'une pens\u00e9e autonome, l'expression d'une puissance absolue dont toutes les id\u00e9es d\u00e9pendent. Il revient donc au m\u00eame de dire que la connaissance de l'effet, prise objectivement, \u00ab enveloppe \u00bb la connaissance de la cause, ou que l'id\u00e9e, prise formellement, \u00ab exprime \u00bb sa propre cause14. _L'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, c'est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment l'id\u00e9e comme exprimant sa cause_. C'est en ce sens que Spinoza rappelle que sa m\u00e9thode se fonde sur la possibilit\u00e9 d'encha\u00eener les id\u00e9es les unes aux autres, l'une \u00e9tant \u00ab cause compl\u00e8te \u00bb d'une autre15. Tant que nous en restons \u00e0 une id\u00e9e claire et distincte, nous n'avons que la connaissance d'un effet ; ou si l'on pr\u00e9f\u00e8re, nous ne connaissons qu'une propri\u00e9t\u00e9 de la chose16. Seule l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, en tant qu'expressive, nous fait conna\u00eetre par la cause, ou nous fait conna\u00eetre l'essence de la chose.\n\nOn voit d\u00e8s lors en quoi consiste la seconde partie de la m\u00e9thode. Nous sommes toujours suppos\u00e9s avoir une id\u00e9e vraie, nous la reconnaissons \u00e0 sa clart\u00e9. Mais, m\u00eame si la \u00ab force inn\u00e9e \u00bb de l'entendement nous assure \u00e0 la fois cette reconnaissance et cette possession, nous restons encore dans le simple \u00e9l\u00e9ment du hasard ( _fortuna_ ). Nous n'avons pas encore une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. Tout le probl\u00e8me de la m\u00e9thode devient celui-ci : Comment arracher au hasard nos pens\u00e9es vraies ? C'est-\u00e0-dire : comment faire d'une pens\u00e9e vraie une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, qui s'encha\u00eene avec d'autres id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates ? Nous partons donc d'une id\u00e9e vraie. _Nous avons m\u00eame avantage, en fonction de notre dessein, \u00e0 choisir une id\u00e9e vraie, claire et distincte, qui d\u00e9pende en toute \u00e9vidence de notre puissance de penser, n'ayant aucun objet dans la nature, par exemple l'id\u00e9e de sph\u00e8re_ ( _ou de cercle_ )17. Cette id\u00e9e, nous devons la rendre ad\u00e9quate, donc la rattacher \u00e0 sa propre cause. Il ne s'agit pas, comme dans la m\u00e9thode cart\u00e9sienne, de conna\u00eetre la cause \u00e0 partir de l'effet ; une telle d\u00e9marche ne nous ferait rien conna\u00eetre de la cause, sauf pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment ce que nous consid\u00e9rons dans l'effet. Il s'agit, au contraire, de comprendre la connaissance que nous avons de l'effet par une connaissance elle-m\u00eame plus parfaite de la cause.\n\nOn objectera que, de toutes mani\u00e8res, nous partons d'un effet connu, c'est-\u00e0-dire d'une id\u00e9e suppos\u00e9e donn\u00e9e18. Mais nous n'allons pas des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de l'effet \u00e0 certaines propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de la cause, lesquelles seraient seulement comme des conditions n\u00e9cessaires en fonction de cet effet. Partant de l'effet, nous d\u00e9terminons la cause, _serait-ce par_ \u00ab _fiction_ \u00bb, comme la _raison suffisante_ de toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s que nous concevons qu'il poss\u00e8de19. C'est en ce sens que nous connaissons _par_ la cause, ou que la cause est mieux connue que l'effet. La m\u00e9thode cart\u00e9sienne est une m\u00e9thode r\u00e9gressive et analytique. La m\u00e9thode spinoziste est une m\u00e9thode r\u00e9flexive et synth\u00e9tique : r\u00e9flexive parce qu'elle comprend la connaissance de l'effet par la connaissance de la cause ; synth\u00e9tique parce qu'elle engendre toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de l'effet \u00e0 partir de la cause connue comme raison suffisante. Nous avons une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate dans la mesure o\u00f9, de la chose dont nous concevons clairement certaines propri\u00e9t\u00e9s, nous donnons une d\u00e9finition _g\u00e9n\u00e9tique_ , d'o\u00f9 d\u00e9coulent au moins toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s connues (et m\u00eame d'autres que nous ne connaissions pas). On a souvent remarqu\u00e9 que les math\u00e9matiques chez Spinoza avaient exclusivement le r\u00f4le d'un tel processus g\u00e9n\u00e9tique20. La cause comme raison suffisante est ce qui, \u00e9tant donn\u00e9, fait que toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de la chose le sont aussi, et, \u00e9tant supprim\u00e9, fait que les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s le sont toutes \u00e9galement21. Nous d\u00e9finissons le plan par le mouvement de la ligne, le cercle par le mouvement d'une ligne dont une extr\u00e9mit\u00e9 est fixe, la sph\u00e8re par le mouvement d'un demi-cercle. Dans la mesure o\u00f9 la d\u00e9finition de la chose exprime la cause efficiente ou la gen\u00e8se du d\u00e9fini, l'id\u00e9e m\u00eame de la chose exprime sa propre cause : nous avons fait de l'id\u00e9e quelque chose d'ad\u00e9quat. C'est en ce sens que Spinoza dit que la seconde partie de la m\u00e9thode est d'abord une th\u00e9orie de la d\u00e9finition : \u00ab Le point principal de toute cette seconde partie de la m\u00e9thode se rapporte exclusivement \u00e0 la connaissance des conditions d'une bonne d\u00e9finition22... \u00bb\n\nD'apr\u00e8s ce qui pr\u00e9c\u00e8de, la m\u00e9thode spinoziste se distingue d\u00e9j\u00e0 de toute d\u00e9marche analytique ; pourtant elle n'est pas sans une apparence r\u00e9gressive. La r\u00e9flexion emprunte la m\u00eame apparence que l'analyse, puisque nous \u00ab supposons \u00bb d'abord une id\u00e9e, puisque nous partons de la connaissance suppos\u00e9e d'un effet. Nous supposons connues clairement certaines propri\u00e9t\u00e9s du cercle ; nous nous \u00e9levons jusqu'\u00e0 la raison suffisante d'o\u00f9 toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s d\u00e9coulent. Mais en d\u00e9terminant la raison du cercle comme le mouvement d'une ligne autour d'une de ses extr\u00e9mit\u00e9s nous n'atteignons pas encore une pens\u00e9e qui serait form\u00e9e par elle-m\u00eame ou \u00ab absolument \u00bb. En effet, un tel mouvement n'est pas contenu dans le concept de ligne, il est lui-m\u00eame _fictif_ et r\u00e9clame une cause qui le d\u00e9termine. C'est pourquoi, si la seconde partie de la m\u00e9thode consiste d'abord dans la th\u00e9orie de la d\u00e9finition, elle ne se r\u00e9duit pas \u00e0 cette th\u00e9orie. Un dernier probl\u00e8me se pr\u00e9sente : _Comment conjurer la supposition dont on est parti ?_ Par-l\u00e0 m\u00eame, comment sortir d'un encha\u00eenement fictif ? Comment construire le r\u00e9el lui-m\u00eame, au lieu d'en rester au niveau des choses math\u00e9matiques ou des \u00eatres de raison ? Nous arrivons \u00e0 la position d'un principe \u00e0 partir d'une hypoth\u00e8se ; _mais il faut que le principe soit d'une nature telle qu'il s'affranchisse enti\u00e8rement de l'hypoth\u00e8se_ , qu'il se fonde lui-m\u00eame et fonde le mouvement par lequel nous y arrivons ; il faut qu'il rende caduc, _aussit\u00f4t que possible_ , le pr\u00e9suppos\u00e9 dont nous sommes partis pour le d\u00e9couvrir. La m\u00e9thode spinoziste, dans son opposition \u00e0 Descartes, pose un probl\u00e8me tr\u00e8s analogue \u00e0 celui de Fichte dans sa r\u00e9action contre Kant23.\n\nSpinoza reconna\u00eet qu'il ne peut pas imm\u00e9diatement exposer \u00ab les v\u00e9rit\u00e9s de la nature \u00bb dans l'ordre d\u00fb24. C'est-\u00e0-dire : il ne peut pas imm\u00e9diatement encha\u00eener les id\u00e9es comme elles doivent l'\u00eatre pour que le R\u00e9el soit reproduit par la seule puissance de la pens\u00e9e. On n'y verra pas une insuffisance de la m\u00e9thode, mais une exigence de la m\u00e9thode spinoziste, sa mani\u00e8re \u00e0 elle de prendre du temps. Car, en revanche, Spinoza reconna\u00eet aussi qu'il peut _tr\u00e8s vite_ arriver au principe absolu dont toutes les id\u00e9es d\u00e9coulent dans l'ordre d\u00fb : la m\u00e9thode ne sera parfaite que lorsque nous poss\u00e9derons l'id\u00e9e de l'\u00catre parfait ; \u00ab d\u00e8s le d\u00e9but donc il nous faudra veiller \u00e0 ce que nous arrivions _le plus rapidement possible_ \u00e0 la connaissance d'un tel \u00eatre \u00bb. Il faut que \u00ab nous commencions, _aussit\u00f4t que faire se peut_ , par les premiers \u00e9l\u00e9ments, c'est-\u00e0-dire par la source et l'origine de la Nature \u00bb ; \u00ab conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 l'ordre, et pour que toutes nos perceptions soient ordonn\u00e9es et unifi\u00e9es, il faut que, _aussi rapidement que faire se peut et que la raison l'exige_ , nous recherchions s'il y a un \u00catre, et aussi quel il est, qui soit la cause de toutes choses, afin que son essence objective soit aussi la cause de toutes nos id\u00e9es25 \u00bb. Il arrive que les interpr\u00e8tes d\u00e9forment ces textes. Il arrive aussi qu'on les explique comme s'ils se rapportaient \u00e0 un moment imparfait dans la pens\u00e9e de Spinoza. Il n'en est pas ainsi : qu'on ne puisse pas partir de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, qu'on ne puisse pas d\u00e8s le d\u00e9but s'installer en Dieu, est une constante du spinozisme. Les diff\u00e9rences de l' _\u00c9thique_ avec le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ sont r\u00e9elles, mais elles ne portent pas sur ce point (elles porteront seulement sur les moyens utilis\u00e9s pour arriver le plus vite possible \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu).\n\nQuelle est la th\u00e9orie du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme ?_ Si nous consid\u00e9rons une r\u00e9gression \u00e0 l'infini, c'est-\u00e0-dire un encha\u00eenement infini de choses qui n'existent pas par leur propre nature ou dont les id\u00e9es ne sont pas form\u00e9es par elles-m\u00eames, nous reconnaissons que le concept de cette r\u00e9gression n'a rien d'absurde. Mais en m\u00eame temps, et c'est l\u00e0 le vrai sens de la preuve a posteriori classique, il serait absurde de ne pas reconna\u00eetre ceci : que les choses qui n'existent pas par leur nature sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9es \u00e0 exister (et \u00e0 produire leur effet) par une chose qui, elle, existe n\u00e9cessairement et produit ses effets par soi. C'est toujours Dieu qui d\u00e9termine une cause quelconque \u00e0 produire son effet ; aussi bien Dieu n'est-il jamais, \u00e0 proprement parler, cause \u00ab lointaine \u00bb ou \u00ab \u00e9loign\u00e9e \u00bb26. Nous ne partons donc pas de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, mais nous y arrivons tr\u00e8s vite, d\u00e8s le d\u00e9but de la r\u00e9gression ; sinon, nous ne pourrions m\u00eame pas comprendre la possibilit\u00e9 d'une s\u00e9rie, son efficience et son actualit\u00e9. _Peu importe, d\u00e8s lors, que nous passions par une fiction_. Et m\u00eame, il peut \u00eatre avantageux d'invoquer une fiction pour arriver le plus vite possible \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu sans tomber dans les pi\u00e8ges d'une r\u00e9gression infinie. Par exemple, nous concevons la sph\u00e8re, nous formons une id\u00e9e \u00e0 laquelle aucun objet ne correspond dans la nature. Nous l'expliquons par le mouvement du demi-cercle : cette cause est bien fictive, puisqu'il n'y a rien dans la nature qui soit produit de cette fa\u00e7on ; elle n'en est pas moins une \u00ab perception vraie \u00bb, mais dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle est jointe \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme au principe qui d\u00e9termine id\u00e9alement le demi-cercle \u00e0 se mouvoir, c'est-\u00e0-dire qui d\u00e9termine cette cause \u00e0 produire l'id\u00e9e de sph\u00e8re.\n\nOr tout change d\u00e8s que nous arrivons ainsi \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. Car cette id\u00e9e, nous la formons par elle-m\u00eame et absolument. \u00ab S'il y a un Dieu ou quelque \u00eatre omniscient, il ne peut former absolument aucune fiction27. \u00bb \u00c0 partir de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, nous d\u00e9duisons toutes les id\u00e9es les unes des autres dans \u00ab l'ordre d\u00fb \u00bb. Non seulement l'ordre est maintenant celui d'une synth\u00e8se progressive ; mais, prises dans cet ordre, les id\u00e9es ne peuvent plus consister en \u00eatres de raison, et excluent toute fiction. Ce sont n\u00e9cessairement des id\u00e9es de \u00ab choses r\u00e9elles ou vraies \u00bb, des id\u00e9es auxquelles correspond quelque chose dans la nature28. \u00c0 partir de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, la production des id\u00e9es est en elle-m\u00eame une reproduction des choses de la nature ; l'encha\u00eenement des id\u00e9es n'a pas \u00e0 copier l'encha\u00eenement des choses, il reproduit automatiquement cet encha\u00eenement, dans la mesure o\u00f9 les id\u00e9es sont produites, elles-m\u00eames et pour leur compte, \u00e0 partir de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu29.\n\nIl est certain que les id\u00e9es \u00ab repr\u00e9sentent \u00bb quelque chose, mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, elles ne repr\u00e9sentent quelque chose que parce qu'elles \u00ab expriment \u00bb leur propre cause, et expriment l'essence de Dieu qui d\u00e9termine cette cause. Toute les id\u00e9es, dit Spinoza, expriment ou enveloppent l'essence de Dieu, et, en tant que telles, sont des id\u00e9es de choses r\u00e9elles ou vraies30. Nous ne sommes plus dans le processus r\u00e9gressif qui rattache une id\u00e9e vraie \u00e0 sa cause, m\u00eame par fiction, pour s'\u00e9lever aussi vite que possible \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu : ce processus d\u00e9terminait seulement en droit le contenu de l'id\u00e9e vraie. Nous suivons maintenant une d\u00e9marche progressive, excluant toute fiction, allant d'un \u00eatre r\u00e9el \u00e0 un autre, d\u00e9duisant les id\u00e9es les unes des autres \u00e0 partir de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu : alors, les id\u00e9es s'encha\u00eenent conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 leur contenu propre ; mais aussi leur contenu se trouve d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par cet encha\u00eenement ; _nous saisissons l'identit\u00e9 de la forme et du contenu_ , nous sommes certains que l'encha\u00eenement des id\u00e9es reproduit la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 comme telle. Comment cette d\u00e9duction se fait en d\u00e9tail, nous le verrons plus tard. Il nous suffit pour le moment de consid\u00e9rer que l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, comme principe absolu, s'affranchit de l'hypoth\u00e8se dont nous \u00e9tions partis pour nous \u00e9lever jusqu'\u00e0 elle, et fonde un encha\u00eenement des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates identique \u00e0 la construction du r\u00e9el. Donc la seconde partie de la m\u00e9thode ne se contente pas d'une th\u00e9orie de la d\u00e9finition g\u00e9n\u00e9tique, mais doit s'achever dans la th\u00e9orie d'une d\u00e9duction productive.\n\nLa m\u00e9thode de Spinoza comporte donc trois grands chapitres, chacun \u00e9troitement impliqu\u00e9 par les autres. La premi\u00e8re partie de la m\u00e9thode concerne la fin de la pens\u00e9e : celle-ci consiste moins \u00e0 conna\u00eetre quelque chose qu'\u00e0 conna\u00eetre notre puissance de conna\u00eetre. De ce point de vue, la pens\u00e9e est consid\u00e9r\u00e9e dans sa forme : la forme de l'id\u00e9e vraie, c'est l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e ou l'id\u00e9e r\u00e9flexive. La d\u00e9finition formelle de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 est la suivante : l'id\u00e9e vraie, c'est l'id\u00e9e _en tant qu'elle s'explique par notre puissance de conna\u00eetre_. La m\u00e9thode, sous ce premier aspect, est elle-m\u00eame r\u00e9flexive.\n\nLa deuxi\u00e8me partie de la m\u00e9thode concerne le moyen de r\u00e9aliser cette fin : une id\u00e9e vraie quelconque est suppos\u00e9e donn\u00e9e, mais nous devons en faire une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. L'ad\u00e9quation constitue la mati\u00e8re du vrai. La d\u00e9finition de l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate (d\u00e9finition mat\u00e9rielle de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9) se pr\u00e9sente ainsi : l'id\u00e9e _en tant qu'elle exprime sa propre cause, et en tant qu'elle exprime l'essence de Dieu comme d\u00e9terminant cette cause_. L'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, c'est donc l'id\u00e9e expressive. Sous ce second aspect, la m\u00e9thode est g\u00e9n\u00e9tique : on d\u00e9termine la cause de l'id\u00e9e comme la raison suffisante de toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de la chose. C'est cette partie de la m\u00e9thode qui nous m\u00e8ne \u00e0 la plus haute pens\u00e9e, c'est-\u00e0-dire qui nous conduit le plus vite possible \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu.\n\nLa seconde partie s'ach\u00e8ve dans un troisi\u00e8me et dernier chapitre, qui concerne l'unit\u00e9 de la forme et du contenu, du but et du moyen. Il en est chez Spinoza comme chez Aristote, o\u00f9 la d\u00e9finition formelle et la d\u00e9finition mat\u00e9rielle en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral morcellent l'unit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle d'une d\u00e9finition compl\u00e8te. Entre l'id\u00e9e et l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e, il n'y a qu'une distinction de raison : l'id\u00e9e r\u00e9flexive et l'id\u00e9e expressive sont une seule et m\u00eame chose en r\u00e9alit\u00e9.\n\nComment comprendre cette unit\u00e9 derni\u00e8re ? Jamais une id\u00e9e n'a pour cause l'objet qu'elle repr\u00e9sente ; au contraire, elle repr\u00e9sente un objet parce qu'elle exprime _sa propre_ cause. Il y a donc un contenu de l'id\u00e9e, contenu expressif et non repr\u00e9sentatif, qui renvoie seulement \u00e0 la puissance de penser. Mais la puissance de penser est ce qui constitue la forme de l'id\u00e9e comme telle. L'unit\u00e9 concr\u00e8te des deux se manifeste quand toutes les id\u00e9es se d\u00e9duisent les unes des autres, mat\u00e9riellement \u00e0 partir de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, formellement sous la seule puissance de penser. De ce point de vue, la m\u00e9thode est d\u00e9ductive : la forme, comme forme logique, et le contenu, comme contenu expressif, se r\u00e9unissent dans l'encha\u00eenement des id\u00e9es. On remarquera combien Spinoza insiste sur cette unit\u00e9 dans l'encha\u00eenement. Au moment m\u00eame o\u00f9 il dit que la m\u00e9thode ne se propose pas de nous faire conna\u00eetre quelque chose mais de nous faire conna\u00eetre notre puissance de comprendre, il ajoute que nous ne connaissons celle-ci que dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous connaissons le plus de choses possible li\u00e9es les unes aux autres31. Inversement, quand il montre que nos id\u00e9es sont causes les unes des autres, il en conclut que toutes ont pour cause notre puissance de comprendre ou de penser32. Mais surtout, le terme \u00ab automate spirituel \u00bb t\u00e9moigne de l'unit\u00e9. L'\u00e2me est une esp\u00e8ce d'automate spirituel, c'est-\u00e0-dire : En pensant nous n'ob\u00e9issons qu'aux lois de la pens\u00e9e, lois qui d\u00e9terminent \u00e0 la fois la forme et le contenu de l'id\u00e9e vraie, qui nous font encha\u00eener les id\u00e9es d'apr\u00e8s leurs propres causes et suivant notre propre puissance, si bien que nous ne connaissons pas notre puissance de comprendre sans conna\u00eetre par les causes toutes les choses qui tombent sous cette puissance33.\n\nEn quel sens l'id\u00e9e de Dieu est-elle \u00ab vraie \u00bb ? On ne dira pas d'elle qu'elle exprime sa propre cause : form\u00e9e absolument, c'est-\u00e0-dire sans l'aide d'autres id\u00e9es, elle _exprime l'infini_. C'est donc \u00e0 propos de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu que Spinoza d\u00e9clare : \u00ab La forme de la pens\u00e9e vraie doit r\u00e9sider dans cette pens\u00e9e m\u00eame, sans aucun rapport avec d'autres pens\u00e9es34. \u00bb Il peut para\u00eetre \u00e9trange, cependant, que Spinoza ne r\u00e9serve pas l'application d'un tel principe \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, mais l'\u00e9tende \u00e0 toutes les pens\u00e9es. Au point qu'il ajoute : \u00ab Il ne faut pas dire que la diff\u00e9rence (du vrai et du faux) provient de ce que la pens\u00e9e vraie consiste \u00e0 conna\u00eetre les choses par leurs causes premi\u00e8res, en quoi certes elle diff\u00e9rerait d\u00e9j\u00e0 beaucoup de la fausse. \u00bb Nous croyons que ce texte obscur doit s'interpr\u00e9ter ainsi : Spinoza reconna\u00eet que la connaissance vraie se fait par la cause, mais il estime qu'il n'y a l\u00e0 encore qu'une d\u00e9finition mat\u00e9rielle du vrai. L'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, c'est l'id\u00e9e comme exprimant la cause ; mais nous ne savons pas encore ce qui constitue la forme du vrai, ce qui donne de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 m\u00eame une d\u00e9finition formelle. L\u00e0 comme ailleurs, nous ne devons pas confondre absolument _ce qui s'exprime_ et _l'exprim\u00e9_ : l'exprim\u00e9, c'est la cause, mais ce qui s'exprime, c'est toujours notre puissance de conna\u00eetre ou de comprendre, la puissance de notre entendement. C'est pourquoi Spinoza dit : \u00ab Ce qui constitue la forme de la pens\u00e9e vraie doit \u00eatre cherch\u00e9 dans cette pens\u00e9e m\u00eame et \u00eatre d\u00e9duit de la nature de l'entendement35. \u00bb C'est pourquoi aussi il dira que le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance n'a pas d'autre cause formelle que l'\u00e2me ou l'entendement lui-m\u00eame36. Il en est de m\u00eame de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu : l'exprim\u00e9, c'est l'infini, mais ce qui s'exprime est la puissance absolue de penser. Il fallait donc joindre le point de vue de la forme \u00e0 celui de la mati\u00e8re, pour concevoir finalement l'unit\u00e9 concr\u00e8te des deux telle que la manifeste l'encha\u00eenement des id\u00e9es. C'est seulement de cette fa\u00e7on que nous parvenons \u00e0 la d\u00e9finition compl\u00e8te du vrai, et que nous comprenons le ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne total de l'expression dans l'id\u00e9e. Non seulement l'id\u00e9e de Dieu mais toutes les id\u00e9es s'expliquent formellement par la puissance de penser. Le contenu de l'id\u00e9e se r\u00e9fl\u00e9chit dans la forme, exactement comme l'exprim\u00e9 se rapporte ou s'attribue \u00e0 ce qui s'exprime. C'est en m\u00eame temps que toutes les id\u00e9es d\u00e9coulent mat\u00e9riellement de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, et formellement de la puissance de penser : leur encha\u00eenement traduit l'unit\u00e9 des deux d\u00e9rivations.\n\nNous n'avons une puissance de conna\u00eetre, de comprendre ou de penser que dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous participons \u00e0 la puissance absolue de penser. Ce qui implique \u00e0 la fois que notre \u00e2me est un mode de l'attribut pens\u00e9e, et une partie de l'entendement infini. Ces deux points concernent et renouvellent un probl\u00e8me classique : Quelle est la nature de notre id\u00e9e de Dieu ? Selon Descartes, par exemple, nous ne \u00ab comprenons \u00bb pas Dieu, mais nous n'en avons pas moins une id\u00e9e claire et distincte ; car nous \u00ab entendons \u00bb l'infinit\u00e9, ne serait-ce que n\u00e9gativement, et nous \u00ab concevons \u00bb la chose infinie de fa\u00e7on positive, ne serait-ce que partiellement. Notre connaissance de Dieu n'est donc limit\u00e9e que de deux fa\u00e7ons : parce que nous ne connaissons pas Dieu tout entier, parce que nous ne savons pas comment ce que nous connaissons de lui se trouve compris dans son \u00e9minente unit\u00e937. Il n'est certes pas question de dire que Spinoza supprime toute limitation. Mais, bien qu'il s'exprime parfois d'une mani\u00e8re proche de celle de Descartes, il interpr\u00e8te les limites de notre connaissance dans un contexte enti\u00e8rement nouveau.\n\nD'une part, la conception cart\u00e9sienne pr\u00e9sente ce m\u00e9lange de n\u00e9gation et d'affirmation qu'on retrouve toujours dans les m\u00e9thodes d'analogie (on se rappelle les d\u00e9clarations explicites de Descartes contre l'univocit\u00e9). Chez Spinoza, au contraire, la critique radicale de l'\u00e9minence, la position de l'univocit\u00e9 des attributs, ont une cons\u00e9quence imm\u00e9diate : notre id\u00e9e de Dieu n'est pas seulement claire et distincte, mais ad\u00e9quate. En effet, les choses que nous connaissons de Dieu appartiennent \u00e0 Dieu sous cette m\u00eame forme o\u00f9 nous les connaissons, c'est-\u00e0-dire sous une forme commune \u00e0 Dieu qui les poss\u00e8de et aux cr\u00e9atures qui les impliquent et les connaissent. Il n'en reste pas moins que, chez Spinoza comme chez Descartes, nous ne connaissons qu'une partie de Dieu : nous ne connaissons que deux de ces formes, deux attributs seulement, puisque notre corps n'implique rien d'autre que l'attribut \u00e9tendue, notre id\u00e9e, rien d'autre que l'attribut pens\u00e9e. \u00ab Et par suite l'id\u00e9e du corps enveloppe la connaissance de Dieu en tant seulement qu'il est consid\u00e9r\u00e9 sous l'attribut de l'\u00e9tendue... et par suite l'id\u00e9e de cette id\u00e9e enveloppe la connaissance de Dieu en tant qu'il est consid\u00e9r\u00e9 sous l'attribut de la pens\u00e9e et non sous un autre38. \u00bb Bien plus, chez Spinoza, l'id\u00e9e m\u00eame de parties de Dieu est mieux fond\u00e9e que chez Descartes, l'unit\u00e9 divine \u00e9tant parfaitement concili\u00e9e avec une distinction r\u00e9elle entre attributs.\n\nPourtant, m\u00eame sur ce second point, la diff\u00e9rence entre Descartes et Spinoza reste fondamentale. Car, avant de conna\u00eetre une partie de Dieu, notre \u00e2me est elle-m\u00eame \u00ab une partie de l'entendement infini de Dieu \u00bb : nous n'avons en effet de puissance de comprendre ou de conna\u00eetre que dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous participons \u00e0 la puissance absolue de penser qui correspond \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. D\u00e8s lors, _il suffit qu'il y ait quelque chose de commun au tout et \u00e0 la partie pour que ce quelque chose nous donne de Dieu une id\u00e9e, non seulement claire et distincte, mais ad\u00e9quate_39. Cette id\u00e9e qui nous est donn\u00e9e n'est pas l'id\u00e9e de Dieu tout enti\u00e8re. Elle est pourtant ad\u00e9quate, parce qu'elle est dans la partie comme dans le tout. On ne s'\u00e9tonnera donc pas qu'il arrive \u00e0 Spinoza de dire que l'existence de Dieu ne nous est pas connue par elle-m\u00eame : il veut dire que cette connaissance nous est n\u00e9cessairement donn\u00e9e par des \u00ab notions communes \u00bb, sans lesquelles elle ne serait m\u00eame pas claire et distincte, mais gr\u00e2ce auxquelles elle est ad\u00e9quate40. Quand Spinoza rappelle au contraire que Dieu se fait conna\u00eetre imm\u00e9diatement, qu'il est connu par lui-m\u00eame et non par autre chose, il veut dire que la connaissance de Dieu n'a besoin ni de signes, ni de proc\u00e9d\u00e9s analogiques : cette connaissance est ad\u00e9quate parce que Dieu poss\u00e8de toutes les choses que nous connaissons lui appartenir, et les poss\u00e8de sous la forme m\u00eame o\u00f9 nous les connaissons41. Quel rapport y a-t-il entre ces notions communes qui nous donnent la connaissance de Dieu et ces formes elles-m\u00eames communes ou univoques sous lesquelles nous connaissons Dieu ? Nous devons encore remettre \u00e0 plus tard cette derni\u00e8re analyse : elle d\u00e9borde les limites du probl\u00e8me de l'ad\u00e9quation.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  Cf. _TRE_ , 39 : _Una methodi pars_ ; 106 : _Praecipua nostrae methodi pars._ Suivant les d\u00e9clarations de Spinoza, l'expos\u00e9 de cette premi\u00e8re partie se termine en 91-94.\n\n2.  _TRE_ , 91 : _Secundam partem._ Et 94.\n\n3.  _TRE_ , 37 (et 13 : _Naturam aliquam humanam sua multo firmiorem_ ).\n\n4.  _TRE_ , 106 : _Vires et potentiam intellectus. Lettre 37, \u00e0 Bouwmeester_ (III, p. 135) : \u00ab On voit clairement quelle doit \u00eatre la vraie m\u00e9thode, et en quoi elle consiste essentiellement, \u00e0 savoir dans la seule connaissance de l'entendement pur, de sa nature et de ses lois. \u00bb\n\n5.  _TRE_ , 38.\n\n6.  _TRE_ , 105.\n\n7.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 33, dem.\n\n8.  _\u00c9_ , II, 43, prop. (Ce texte se concilie parfaitement avec celui du _Trait\u00e9 de la R\u00e9forme_ , 34-35, selon lequel, inversement, il n'est pas besoin de savoir qu'on sait pour savoir.)\n\n9.  _TRE_ , 33 : \u00ab L'id\u00e9e vraie, car nous avons une id\u00e9e vraie... \u00bb ; 39 : \u00ab Avant toute chose doit exister en nous une id\u00e9e vraie, comme _instrument inn\u00e9_... \u00bb Cette id\u00e9e vraie suppos\u00e9e par la m\u00e9thode ne pose pas de probl\u00e8me particulier : nous l'avons et la reconnaissons par la \u00ab force inn\u00e9e de l'entendement \u00bb ( _TRE_ , 31) c'est pourquoi Spinoza peut dire que la m\u00e9thode n'exige rien d'autre qu'une \u00ab toute petite connaissance de l'esprit \u00bb ( _mentis historialam_ ), du genre de celle qu'enseigne Bacon : cf. _Lettre 37, \u00e0 Bouwmeester_ (III, p. 135).\n\n10.  _\u00c9_ , II, _21_ sc.\n\n11.  Cf. _CT_ , II, ch. 15, 2.\n\n12.  Dans ses _R\u00e9ponses aux secondes objections_ , Descartes pr\u00e9sente un principe g\u00e9n\u00e9ral : \u00ab Il faut distinguer entre la _mati\u00e8re_ ou la chose \u00e0 laquelle nous donnons notre cr\u00e9ance, et la _raison formelle_ qui meut notre volont\u00e9 \u00e0 la donner \u00bb (AT, IX, p. 115). Ce principe explique selon Descartes que la mati\u00e8re \u00e9tant obscure (mati\u00e8re de religion), nous n'en ayons pas moins une raison claire de donner notre adh\u00e9sion (lumi\u00e8re de la gr\u00e2ce). Mais il s'applique aussi dans le cas de la connaissance naturelle : la mati\u00e8re claire et distincte ne se confond pas avec la raison formelle, elle-m\u00eame claire et distincte, de notre croyance (lumi\u00e8re naturelle).\n\n13.  La d\u00e9finition (ou le concept) _explique_ l'essence et _comprend_ la cause prochaine : _TRE_ , 95-96. Elle _exprime_ la cause efficiente : _Lettre 60, \u00e0 Tschirnhaus_ (III, p. 200). La connaissance de l'effet (id\u00e9e) _enveloppe_ la connaissance de la cause : _\u00c9_ , I, axiome 4, et II, 7, dem.\n\n14.  _TRE_ , 92 : \u00ab La connaissance de l'effet consiste exclusivement \u00e0 acqu\u00e9rir une connaissance plus parfaite de la cause. \u00bb\n\n15.  _Lettre 37, \u00e0 Bouwmeester_ (III, p. 135). Telle est la _concatenatio intellectus_ ( _TRE_ , 95).\n\n16.  _TRE_ , 19 et 21 (sur cette insuffisance de l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte, cf. chapitre suivant).\n\n17.  _TRE_ , 72.\n\n18.  Par exemple nous avons l'id\u00e9e du cercle comme d'une figure dont tous les rayons sont \u00e9gaux : ce n'est que l'id\u00e9e claire d'une \u00ab propri\u00e9t\u00e9 \u00bb du cercle ( _TRE_ , 95). De m\u00eame dans la recherche finale d'une d\u00e9finition de l'entendement, nous devons partir des _propri\u00e9t\u00e9s_ de l'entendement _clairement_ connues : _TRE_ , 106-110. Tel est, nous l'avons vu, le _requisit_ de la m\u00e9thode.\n\n19.  Ainsi, _\u00e0 partir du_ cercle comme figure aux rayons \u00e9gaux, nous formons la _fiction_ d'une cause, \u00e0 savoir qu'une ligne droite se meut autour d'une de ses extr\u00e9mit\u00e9s : _fingo ad libitum_ ( _TRE_ , 72).\n\n20.  Ce qui int\u00e9resse Spinoza dans les math\u00e9matiques n'est nullement la g\u00e9om\u00e9trie analytique de Descartes mais la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique d'Euclide et les conceptions g\u00e9n\u00e9tiques de Hobbes : Cf. LEWIS ROBINSON, _Kommentar zu Spinozas Ethik_ , Leipzig, 1928, pp. 270-273.\n\n21.  _TRE_ , 110.\n\n22.  _TRE_ , 94.\n\n23.  Fichte, non moins que Kant, part d'une \u00ab hypoth\u00e8se \u00bb. Mais, contrairement \u00e0 Kant, il pr\u00e9tend arriver \u00e0 un principe absolu qui fait dispara\u00eetre l'hypoth\u00e8se de d\u00e9part : ainsi, d\u00e8s que le principe est d\u00e9couvert, le donn\u00e9 doit faire place \u00e0 une construction du donn\u00e9, le \u00ab jugement hypoth\u00e9tique \u00bb \u00e0 un \u00ab jugement th\u00e9tique \u00bb, l'analyse \u00e0 une gen\u00e8se. M. Gu\u00e9roult dit fort bien : \u00ab \u00c0 quelque moment que ce soit, [ _La Doctrine de la science_ ] affirme toujours que, le principe devant valoir \u00e0 lui seul, la m\u00e9thode analytique ne doit pas poursuivre d'autre fin que sa propre suppression ; elle entend donc bien que toute l'efficacit\u00e9 doit rester \u00e0 la seule m\u00e9thode constructive. \u00bb ( _L'\u00c9volution et la structure de la Doctrine de la science chez Fichte_ , Les Belles-Lettres, 1930, t. I, p. 174.)\n\n24.  Spinoza a invoqu\u00e9 \u00ab l'ordre d\u00fb \u00bb ( _debito ordine_ ) _TRE_ , 44. En 46, il ajoute : \u00ab Si par hasard quelqu'un demande pourquoi moi-m\u00eame n'ai pas tout d'abord et avant tout expos\u00e9 dans cet ordre les v\u00e9rit\u00e9s de la Nature, une fois dit que la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 se manifeste elle-m\u00eame, je lui r\u00e9ponds, et en m\u00eame temps lui conseille... de bien vouloir d'abord consid\u00e9rer l'ordre de notre d\u00e9monstration. \u00bb [La plupart des traducteurs supposent qu'il y a une lacune dans ce dernier texte. Et ils consid\u00e8rent que Spinoza se fait \u00e0 lui-m\u00eame une \u00ab objection pertinente \u00bb. Ils consid\u00e8rent que, plus tard, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , Spinoza aurait trouv\u00e9 le moyen d'exposer les v\u00e9rit\u00e9s \u00ab dans l'ordre d\u00fb \u00bb (Cf. KOYR\u00c9, trad. du _TRE_ , Vrin, p. 105). Il ne nous semble pas qu'il y ait la moindre lacune : Spinoza dit qu'il ne peut pas _d\u00e8s le d\u00e9but_ suivre l'ordre d\u00fb, parce que cet ordre ne peut \u00eatre atteint qu' _\u00e0 un certain moment_ dans l'ordre des d\u00e9monstrations. Et loin que l' _\u00c9thique_ corrige ce point, elle le maintient rigoureusement, comme nous le verrons au chapitre XVIII.]\n\n25.  _TRE_ , 49, 75, 99. [Dans ce dernier texte aussi, beaucoup de traducteurs d\u00e9placent _et ratio postulat_ pour le faire porter sur l'ensemble de la phrase.]\n\n26.  _\u00c9_ , I, _26_ , prop.\n\n27.  _TRE_ , 54.\n\n28.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 30, dem. : \u00ab ... Concevoir les choses en tant qu'elles se con\u00e7oivent par l'essence de Dieu comme des \u00eatres r\u00e9els. \u00bb\n\n29.  _TRE_ , 42.\n\n30.  _\u00c9_ , II, 45, prop. : \u00ab Toute id\u00e9e de quelque corps ou de chose singuli\u00e8re existant en acte enveloppe n\u00e9cessairement l'essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie de Dieu. \u00bb (Dans le scolie, et aussi dans le scolie de V, 29, Spinoza pr\u00e9cise que les choses existant en acte d\u00e9signent ici les choses comme \u00ab vraies ou r\u00e9elles \u00bb telles qu'elles d\u00e9coulent de la nature divine, leurs id\u00e9es sont donc les id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates.)\n\n31.  _TRE_ , 40-41.\n\n32.  _Lettre 37 \u00e0 Bouwmeester_ (III, p. 135).\n\n33.  L'\u00ab automate spirituel \u00bb appara\u00eet en _TRE_ , 85. Leibniz pour son compte, qui n'emploie pas l'expression avant le _Syst\u00e8me nouveau_ de 1695, semble bien l'emprunter \u00e0 Spinoza. Et malgr\u00e9 la diff\u00e9rence des deux interpr\u00e9tations, l'automate spirituel a un aspect commun chez Leibniz et chez Spinoza : il d\u00e9signe la nouvelle forme logique de l'id\u00e9e, le nouveau contenu expressif de l'id\u00e9e, et l'unit\u00e9 de cette forme et de ce contenu.\n\n34.  Cf. _TRE_ , 70-71.\n\n35.  _TRE_ , 71.\n\n36.  _\u00c9_ , V, 31, prop.\n\n37.  Sur la distinction entre l'infinit\u00e9 (entendue n\u00e9gativement) et la chose infinie (con\u00e7ue positivement, mais non pas enti\u00e8rement), cf. DESCARTES, _R\u00e9ponses aux premi\u00e8res objections_ , AT, IX, p. 90. La distinction cart\u00e9sienne des _quatri\u00e8mes r\u00e9ponses_ , entre conception compl\u00e8te et conception enti\u00e8re s'applique aussi dans une certaine mesure au probl\u00e8me de la connaissance de Dieu : la _M\u00e9ditation IV_ parlait de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme celle d'un \u00ab \u00eatre complet \u00bb (AT, IX, p. 42), bien que nous n'en ayons pas une connaissance enti\u00e8re.\n\n38.  _Lettre 64, \u00e0 Schuller_ (III, p. 205).\n\n39.  _\u00c9_ , II, 46, dem. : \u00ab Ce qui donne la connaissance de l'essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie de Dieu est commun \u00e0 toutes choses et est \u00e9galement dans la partie et dans le tout ; par cons\u00e9quent cette connaissance sera ad\u00e9quate. \u00bb\n\n40.  _TTP_ , ch. 6 (II, p. 159) : \u00ab L'existence de Dieu, n'\u00e9tant pas connue par elle-m\u00eame, doit n\u00e9cessairement se conclure de notions dont la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 soit si ferme et in\u00e9branlable... \u00bb et la note 6 du _TTP_ (II, p. 315) rappelle que ces notions sont les notions communes.\n\n41.  Cf. _CT_ , II, ch. 24, 9-13.\n\n## CHAPITRE IX\n\n## L'INAD\u00c9QUAT\n\nQuelles sont les cons\u00e9quences de cette th\u00e9orie spinoziste de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 ? Nous devons d'abord en chercher la contre-\u00e9preuve dans la conception de l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate. _L'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate, c'est l'id\u00e9e inexpressive_. Mais comment est-il possible que nous ayons des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates ? Cette possibilit\u00e9 n'appara\u00eet que si l'on d\u00e9termine les conditions sous lesquelles nous avons des id\u00e9es en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral.\n\nNotre \u00e2me elle-m\u00eame est une id\u00e9e. En ce sens, notre \u00e2me est une affection ou modification de Dieu sous l'attribut pens\u00e9e, comme notre corps, une affection ou modification de Dieu sous l'attribut \u00e9tendue. Cette id\u00e9e qui constitue notre \u00e2me ou notre esprit est donn\u00e9e en Dieu. Il la poss\u00e8de, mais il la poss\u00e8de pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment en tant qu'il est affect\u00e9 d'une autre id\u00e9e, cause de celle-ci. Il l'a, mais en tant qu'il a \u00ab conjointement \u00bb une autre id\u00e9e, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'id\u00e9e d'autre chose. \u00ab La cause de l'id\u00e9e d'une chose particuli\u00e8re, c'est une autre id\u00e9e, autrement dit Dieu en tant qu'il est consid\u00e9r\u00e9 comme affect\u00e9 d'une autre id\u00e9e, et de celle-ci encore il est cause en tant qu'il est affect\u00e9 d'une autre, et ainsi \u00e0 l'infini1. \u00bb Non seulement Dieu poss\u00e8de toutes les id\u00e9es, autant qu'il y a de choses ; mais toutes les id\u00e9es, telles qu'elles sont en Dieu, expriment leur propre cause et l'essence de Dieu qui d\u00e9termine cette cause. \u00ab Toutes les id\u00e9es sont en Dieu, et en tant qu'elles sont rapport\u00e9es \u00e0 Dieu, sont vraies et ad\u00e9quates2. \u00bb En revanche, nous pouvons d\u00e9j\u00e0 pressentir que cette id\u00e9e qui constitue notre \u00e2me, _nous nel'avons pas_. Du moins nous ne l'avons pas imm\u00e9diatement ; car elle est en Dieu, mais seulement en tant qu'il poss\u00e8de aussi l'id\u00e9e d'autre chose.\n\nCe qui est mode participe \u00e0 la puissance de Dieu : de m\u00eame que notre corps participe \u00e0 la puissance d'exister, notre \u00e2me participe \u00e0 la puissance de penser. Ce qui est mode est en m\u00eame temps partie, partie de la puissance de Dieu, partie de la Nature. Il subit donc n\u00e9cessairement l'influence des autres parties. N\u00e9cessairement les autres id\u00e9es agissent sur notre \u00e2me, comme les autres corps sur notre corps. Apparaissent ici des \u00ab affections \u00bb d'une seconde esp\u00e8ce : il ne s'agit plus du corps lui-m\u00eame, mais de ce qui arrive dans le corps ; il ne s'agit plus de l'\u00e2me (id\u00e9e du corps), mais de ce qui arrive dans l'\u00e2me (id\u00e9e de ce qui arrive dans le corps)3. Or, c'est en ce sens que _nous avons_ des id\u00e9es ; car les id\u00e9es de ces affections sont en Dieu, mais en tant qu'il s'explique par notre \u00e2me seule, ind\u00e9pendamment des autres id\u00e9es qu'il a ; elles sont donc en nous4. Si nous avons une connaissance des corps ext\u00e9rieurs, de notre propre corps, de notre \u00e2me elle-m\u00eame, c'est uniquement par ces id\u00e9es d'affections. Elles seules nous sont donn\u00e9es : nous ne percevons les corps ext\u00e9rieurs qu'en tant qu'ils nous affectent, nous ne percevons notre corps qu'en tant qu'il est affect\u00e9, nous percevons notre \u00e2me par l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e de l'affection5. Ce que nous appelons \u00ab objet \u00bb, c'est seulement l'effet qu'un objet a sur notre corps ; ce que nous appelons \u00ab moi \u00bb, c'est seulement l'id\u00e9e que nous avons de notre corps et de notre \u00e2me en tant qu'ils subissent un effet. Le donn\u00e9 se pr\u00e9sente ici comme la relation la plus intime et la plus v\u00e9cue, la plus confuse aussi, entre la connaissance des corps, la connaissance du corps et la connaissance de soi.\n\nConsid\u00e9rons ces id\u00e9es que nous avons, et qui correspondent \u00e0 l'effet d'un objet sur notre corps. D'une part, elles d\u00e9pendent de notre puissance de conna\u00eetre, c'est-\u00e0-dire de notre \u00e2me ou de notre esprit, comme de leur cause formelle. Mais nous n'avons pas l'id\u00e9e de notre corps, ni de notre \u00e2me, ind\u00e9pendamment de l'effet subi. Nous ne sommes donc pas en \u00e9tat de nous comprendre comme la cause formelle des id\u00e9es que nous avons ; elles apparaissent au plus haut comme le fruit du hasard6. D'autre part, elles ont pour causes mat\u00e9rielles des id\u00e9es de choses ext\u00e9rieures. Mais ces id\u00e9es de choses ext\u00e9rieures, nous ne les avons pas davantage ; elles sont en Dieu, mais non pas en tant qu'il constitue notre \u00e2me ou notre esprit. Donc, nous ne poss\u00e9dons pas nos id\u00e9es dans des conditions telles qu'elles puissent exprimer leur propre cause (mat\u00e9rielle). Sans doute nos id\u00e9es d'affections \u00ab enveloppent-elles \u00bb leur propre cause, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'essence objective du corps ext\u00e9rieur ; mais elles ne l'\u00ab expriment \u00bb pas, ne \u00ab l'expliquent \u00bb pas. De m\u00eame, elles enveloppent notre puissance de conna\u00eetre, mais elles ne s'expliquent pas par elle, et renvoient au hasard. _Voil\u00e0 que, dans ce cas, le mot_ \u00ab _envelopper_ \u00bb _n'est plus un corr\u00e9latif de_ \u00ab _expliquer_ \u00bb _ou_ \u00ab _exprimer_ \u00bb, mais s'oppose \u00e0 eux, d\u00e9signant le m\u00e9lange du corps ext\u00e9rieur et de notre corps dans l'affection dont nous avons l'id\u00e9e. La formule employ\u00e9e le plus souvent par Spinoza est la suivante : nos id\u00e9es d'affections _indiquent_ un \u00e9tat de notre corps, mais _n'expliquent_ pas la nature ou l'essence du corps ext\u00e9rieur7. C'est dire que les id\u00e9es que nous avons sont des signes, des images indicatives imprim\u00e9es en nous, non pas des id\u00e9es expressives et form\u00e9es par nous ; des perceptions ou des imaginations, non pas des compr\u00e9hensions.\n\nAu sens le plus pr\u00e9cis, l'image est l'empreinte, la trace ou l'impression physique, l'affection du corps elle-m\u00eame, l'effet d'un corps sur les parties fluides et molles du n\u00f4tre ; au sens figur\u00e9, l'image est l'id\u00e9e de l'affection, qui nous fait seulement conna\u00eetre l'objet par son effet. Mais une telle connaissance n'en est pas une, tout au plus une r\u00e9cognition. De l\u00e0 d\u00e9coulent les caract\u00e8res de l'indication en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral : le premier \u00ab indiqu\u00e9 \u00bb n'est jamais notre essence, mais un \u00e9tat momentan\u00e9 de notre constitution variable ; l'indiqu\u00e9 secondaire (indirect) n'est jamais l'essence ou la nature d'une chose ext\u00e9rieure, mais l'apparence qui nous permet seulement de reconna\u00eetre la chose \u00e0 partir de son effet, donc d'en affirmer la simple pr\u00e9sence, \u00e0 tort ou \u00e0 raison8. Fruits du hasard et des rencontres, servant \u00e0 la r\u00e9cognition, purement indicatives, les id\u00e9es que nous avons sont inexpressives, c'est-\u00e0-dire inad\u00e9quates. L'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate n'est ni privation absolue ni ignorance absolue : elle enveloppe une privation de connaissance9.\n\nCette connaissance dont nous sommes priv\u00e9s est double : connaissance de nous-m\u00eames, et de l'objet qui produit en nous l'affection dont nous avons l'id\u00e9e. L'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate est donc une id\u00e9e qui enveloppe la privation de la connaissance de sa propre cause, tant formellement que mat\u00e9riellement. C'est en ce sens qu'elle reste inexpressive : \u00ab tronqu\u00e9e \u00bb, comme une cons\u00e9quence sans ses pr\u00e9misses10. Or l'essentiel est que Spinoza ait montr\u00e9 _comment_ une cons\u00e9quence pouvait, ainsi, \u00eatre s\u00e9par\u00e9e de ses deux pr\u00e9misses. Nous sommes naturellement dans une situation telle que les id\u00e9es qui nous sont donn\u00e9es sont n\u00e9cessairement inad\u00e9quates, parce qu'elles ne peuvent pas exprimer leur cause ni s'expliquer par notre puissance de conna\u00eetre. Sur tous les points, connaissance des parties de notre corps et de notre corps lui-m\u00eame, connaissance des corps ext\u00e9rieurs, connaissance de notre \u00e2me ou de notre esprit, connaissance de notre dur\u00e9e et de celle des choses, nous n'avons que des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates11. \u00ab Lorsque nous regardons le soleil, nous imaginons qu'il est \u00e9loign\u00e9 de nous de deux cents pieds environ ; et cette erreur ne consiste pas dans cette seule imagination, mais en ce que, tandis que nous imaginons ainsi le soleil, nous ignorons sa vraie distance, ainsi que _la cause de cette imagination_12. \u00bb L'image, en ce sens, est une id\u00e9e qui ne peut pas exprimer sa propre cause, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'id\u00e9e dont elle d\u00e9rive en nous, qui ne nous est pas donn\u00e9e : il s'agit de la cause mat\u00e9rielle. Mais l'image n'exprime pas davantage sa cause formelle, et ne peut pas s'expliquer par notre puissance de conna\u00eetre. C'est pourquoi Spinoza dit que l'image, ou l'id\u00e9e d'affection, est comme une cons\u00e9quence sans ses pr\u00e9misses : il y a bien deux pr\u00e9misses, mat\u00e9rielle et formelle, dont l'image enveloppe la privation de connaissance.\n\nNotre probl\u00e8me se transforme donc. La question n'est plus : Pourquoi avons-nous des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates ? Mais au contraire : Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 former des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates ? Chez Spinoza, il en est de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 comme de la libert\u00e9 : elles ne sont pas donn\u00e9es en principe, mais apparaissent comme le r\u00e9sultat d'une longue activit\u00e9 par laquelle nous produisons des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates, \u00e9chappant \u00e0 l'encha\u00eenement d'une n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 externe13. Par l\u00e0, l'inspiration spinoziste est profond\u00e9ment empiriste. Il est toujours frappant de constater la diff\u00e9rence d'inspiration entre les empiristes et les rationalites. Les uns s'\u00e9tonnent de ce qui n'\u00e9tonne pas les autres. \u00c0 entendre les rationalistes, la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 et la libert\u00e9 sont avant tout des droits ; ils se demandent comment nous pouvons d\u00e9choir de ces droits, tomber dans l'erreur ou perdre la libert\u00e9. C'est pourquoi le rationalisme a trouv\u00e9 dans la tradition adamique, posant en principe l'image d'un Adam libre et raisonnable, un th\u00e8me qui convenait particuli\u00e8rement avec ses pr\u00e9occupations. Dans une perspective empiriste, tout est renvers\u00e9 : l'\u00e9tonnant, c'est que les hommes arrivent parfois \u00e0 comprendre le vrai, parfois \u00e0 se comprendre entre eux, parfois \u00e0 se lib\u00e9rer de ce qui les encha\u00eene. \u00c0 la vigueur avec laquelle Spinoza s'oppose constamment \u00e0 la tradition adamique, on reconna\u00eet d\u00e9j\u00e0 l'inspiration empiriste, qui con\u00e7oit la libert\u00e9 et la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 comme des produits ultimes surgissant \u00e0 la fin. Un des paradoxes de Spinoza, et ce n'est pas le seul cas o\u00f9 nous le verrons s'exercer, est d'avoir retrouv\u00e9 les forces concr\u00e8tes de l'empirisme pour les mettre au service d'un nouveau rationalisme, un des plus rigoureux qu'on ait jamais con\u00e7us. Spinoza demande : Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 former et produire des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates, alors que tant d'id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates nous sont n\u00e9cessairement donn\u00e9es, qui distraient notre puissance et nous s\u00e9parent de ce que nous pouvons ?\n\nNous devons distinguer deux aspects dans l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate : elle \u00ab enveloppe la privation \u00bb de la connaissance de sa cause, mais aussi elle est un effet qui \u00ab enveloppe \u00bb cette cause en quelque mani\u00e8re. Sous son premier aspect, l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate est fausse ; mais, sous le deuxi\u00e8me, elle contient _quelque chose de positif_ , donc quelque chose de vrai14. Par exemple nous imaginons que le soleil est distant de deux cents pieds. Cette id\u00e9e d'affection n'est pas en \u00e9tat d'exprimer sa propre cause : elle n'explique pas la nature ou l'essence du soleil. Reste qu'elle enveloppe cette essence \u00ab en tant que le corps en est affect\u00e9 \u00bb. Nous aurons beau savoir la vraie distance du soleil, il continuera \u00e0 nous affecter dans de telles conditions que nous le verrons toujours \u00e0 deux cents pieds : comme dit Spinoza, l'erreur sera supprim\u00e9e, mais non l'imagination. Il y a donc quelque chose de positif dans l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate, une sorte d'indication qu'on peut saisir clairement. C'est m\u00eame ainsi que nous pouvons avoir quelque id\u00e9e de la cause : apr\u00e8s avoir saisi clairement les conditions sous lesquelles nous voyons le soleil, nous en inf\u00e9rons clairement qu'il est un objet suffisamment \u00e9loign\u00e9 pour para\u00eetre petit, non pas un objet petit qui serait vu de pr\u00e8s15. Si l'on ne tient pas compte de cette positivit\u00e9, plusieurs th\u00e8ses de Spinoza deviennent inintelligibles : d'abord, que l'on puisse avoir naturellement une id\u00e9e vraie, conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 ce que la m\u00e9thode exige avant son exercice. Mais, surtout, le faux n'ayant pas de forme, on ne comprendrait pas que l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate donne lieu elle-m\u00eame \u00e0 une id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e, c'est-\u00e0-dire ait une forme qui renvoie \u00e0 notre puissance de penser16. La facult\u00e9 d'imaginer se d\u00e9finit par les conditions sous lesquelles nous avons naturellement des id\u00e9es, donc des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates ; elle n'en est pas moins une _vertu_ par un de ses aspects ; elle enveloppe notre puissance de penser, bien qu'elle ne s'explique pas par elle ; l'image enveloppe sa propre cause, bien qu'elle ne l'exprime pas17.\n\nCertes, pour avoir une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, il ne suffit pas de saisir ce qu'il y a de positif dans une id\u00e9e d'affection. C'est pourtant le premier pas. Car, \u00e0 partir de cette positivit\u00e9, nous pourrons former l'id\u00e9e de _ce qui est commun_ au corps affectant et au corps affect\u00e9, au corps ext\u00e9rieur et au n\u00f4tre. Or nous verrons que cette \u00ab notion commune \u00bb, elle, est n\u00e9cessairement ad\u00e9quate : elle est dans l'id\u00e9e de notre corps comme elle est dans l'id\u00e9e du corps ext\u00e9rieur ; elle est donc en nous comme elle est en Dieu ; elle exprime Dieu et s'explique par notre puissance de penser. Mais de cette notion commune d\u00e9coule \u00e0 son tour une id\u00e9e d'affection, elle-m\u00eame ad\u00e9quate : la notion commune est n\u00e9cessairement cause d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate d'affection, qui ne se distingue que par une \u00ab raison \u00bb de l'id\u00e9e d'affection dont nous \u00e9tions partis. Ce m\u00e9canisme complexe ne consistera donc pas \u00e0 supprimer l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate que nous avons, mais \u00e0 utiliser ce qu'il y a de positif en elle pour former le plus grand nombre possible d'id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates, et faire que les id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates subsistantes n'occupent enfin que la plus petite partie de nous-m\u00eames. Bref, nous devons nous-m\u00eames acc\u00e9der \u00e0 des conditions telles que nous puissions produire des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates.\n\nNotre but n'est pas encore d'analyser ce m\u00e9canisme par lequel nous arrivons aux id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates. Notre probl\u00e8me \u00e9tait seulement : Qu'est-ce que l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate ? Et, par contre-\u00e9preuve : Qu'est-ce que l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate ? L'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, c'est l'id\u00e9e qui exprime sa propre cause et qui s'explique par notre propre puissance. L'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate, c'est l'id\u00e9e inexpressive et non expliqu\u00e9e : l'impression qui n'est pas encore expression, l'indication qui n'est pas encore explication. Se d\u00e9gage ainsi l'intention qui pr\u00e9side \u00e0 toute la doctrine spinoziste de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 : _il s'agit de substituer la conception de l'ad\u00e9quat \u00e0 la conception cart\u00e9sienne du clair et du distinct._ Et sans doute, \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard, Spinoza utilise une terminologie variable : tant\u00f4t il emploie le mot \u00ab ad\u00e9quat \u00bb pour marquer l'insuffisance du clair et du distinct, soulignant ainsi la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de d\u00e9passer les crit\u00e8res cart\u00e9siens ; tant\u00f4t il se sert pour son compte des mots \u00ab clair et distinct \u00bb, mais les applique seulement \u00e0 des id\u00e9es qui d\u00e9coulent d'une id\u00e9e elle-m\u00eame ad\u00e9quate ; tant\u00f4t enfin il s'en sert pour d\u00e9signer cette id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, mais, \u00e0 plus forte raison, leur donne alors une signification implicite tout \u00e0 fait diff\u00e9rente de celle de Descartes18.\n\nDe toute mani\u00e8re, la doctrine de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 chez Spinoza ne se s\u00e9pare pas d'une pol\u00e9mique, directe ou indirecte, dirig\u00e9e contre la th\u00e9orie cart\u00e9sienne. Pris en eux-m\u00eames, le clair et le distinct nous permettent tout au plus de reconna\u00eetre une id\u00e9e vraie que nous avons, c'est-\u00e0-dire ce qu'il y a de positif dans une id\u00e9e encore inad\u00e9quate. Mais former une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate nous entra\u00eene au-del\u00e0 du clair et du distinct. L'id\u00e9e claire et distincte par elle-m\u00eame ne constitue pas une v\u00e9ritable connaissance, pas plus qu'elle ne contient en elle-m\u00eame sa propre raison : le clair et le distinct ne trouvent leur raison suffisante que dans l'ad\u00e9quat, l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte ne forme une v\u00e9ritable connaissance que dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle d\u00e9coule d'une id\u00e9e elle-m\u00eame ad\u00e9quate.\n\nNous trouvons \u00e0 nouveau un point commun entre Spinoza et Leibniz, qui contribue \u00e0 d\u00e9finir la r\u00e9action anticart\u00e9sienne. Le mot de Leibniz : _la connaissance est une esp\u00e8ce de l'expression_ , pourrait \u00eatre sign\u00e9 de Spinoza19. Sans doute ne con\u00e7oivent-ils pas de la m\u00eame mani\u00e8re la nature de l'ad\u00e9quat, parce qu'ils ne comprennent ni n'utilisent de la m\u00eame mani\u00e8re le concept d'expression. Mais, sur trois chapitres essentiels, leur accord involontaire est r\u00e9el. D'une part, Descartes, dans sa conception du clair et du distinct, s'en est tenu au contenu repr\u00e9sentatif de l'id\u00e9e ; il ne s'est pas \u00e9lev\u00e9 jusqu'\u00e0 un contenu expressif infiniment plus profond. Il n'a pas con\u00e7u d'ad\u00e9quat comme raison n\u00e9cessaire et suffisante du clair et du distinct : c'est-\u00e0-dire l'expression comme fondement de la repr\u00e9sentation. D'autre part, Descartes n'a pas d\u00e9pass\u00e9 la forme d'une conscience psychologique de l'id\u00e9e ; il n'a pas atteint la forme logique par laquelle l'id\u00e9e s'explique, d'apr\u00e8s laquelle aussi les id\u00e9es s'encha\u00eeneront les unes les autres. Enfin, Descartes n'a pas con\u00e7u l'unit\u00e9 de la forme et du contenu, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'\u00ab automate spirituel \u00bb qui reproduit le r\u00e9el en produisant ses id\u00e9es dans l'ordre d\u00fb. Descartes nous a appris que le vrai \u00e9tait pr\u00e9sent dans l'id\u00e9e. Mais de quoi nous sert ce savoir tant que nous ne savons pas ce qui est pr\u00e9sent dans l'id\u00e9e vraie ? L'id\u00e9e claire et distincte est encore inexpressive, et reste inexpliqu\u00e9e. Bonne pour la r\u00e9cognition, mais incapable de fournir un v\u00e9ritable principe de connaissance.\n\nNous avons vu les trois acquis principaux de la th\u00e9orie de l'id\u00e9e chez Spinoza : le contenu repr\u00e9sentatif n'est qu'une apparence, en fonction d'un contenu expressif plus profond ; la forme d'une conscience psychologique est superficielle, par rapport \u00e0 la vraie forme logique ; l'automate spirituel tel qu'il se manifeste dans l'encha\u00eenement des id\u00e9es est l'unit\u00e9 de la forme logique et du contenu expressif. Or ces trois points forment aussi les grandes th\u00e8ses de Leibniz. C'est pourquoi Leibniz aime le mot de Spinoza, \u00ab automate spirituel \u00bb. Pour son compte, il l'interpr\u00e8te au sens d'une autonomie des substances pensantes individuelles. Mais, m\u00eame pour Spinoza, l'automatisme d'un mode de la pens\u00e9e n'exclut pas une sorte d'autonomie de sa puissance de comprendre (en effet, la puissance de comprendre est une partie de la puissance absolue de penser, mais en tant que celle-ci s'explique par celle-l\u00e0). Toutes les diff\u00e9rences entre Leibniz et Spinoza n'\u00f4tent rien \u00e0 leur accord sur ces th\u00e8ses fondamentales, qui constituent la r\u00e9volution anticart\u00e9sienne par excellence.\n\nLa critique de Descartes par Leibniz est c\u00e9l\u00e8bre : le clair et le distinct en eux-m\u00eames nous permettent seulement de _reconna\u00eetre_ un objet, mais ne nous donnent pas de cet objet une connaissance v\u00e9ritable ; ils n'atteignent pas l'essence, mais portent seulement sur des apparences externes ou sur des caract\u00e8res extrins\u00e8ques \u00e0 travers lesquels nous ne pouvons que \u00ab conjecturer \u00bb l'essence ; ils n'atteignent pas la cause qui nous montre pourquoi la chose est n\u00e9cessairement ce qu'elle est20. Pour \u00eatre moins remarqu\u00e9e, la critique spinoziste n'en proc\u00e8de pas moins de la m\u00eame fa\u00e7on, d\u00e9non\u00e7ant avant tout l'insuffisance de l'id\u00e9e cart\u00e9sienne : pris en eux-m\u00eames, le clair et le distinct ne nous donnent qu'une connaissance ind\u00e9termin\u00e9e ; ils n'atteignent pas l'essence de la chose, mais portent seulement sur des _propria_ ; ils n'atteignent pas une cause dont toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de la chose d\u00e9couleraient \u00e0 la fois, mais nous font seulement reconna\u00eetre un objet, la pr\u00e9sence d'un objet, d'apr\u00e8s l'effet qu'il a sur nous ; l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte n'exprime pas sa propre cause, elle ne nous fait rien comprendre de la cause \u00ab en dehors de ce que nous consid\u00e9rons dans l'effet21. \u00bb En tout ceci, Spinoza et Leibniz m\u00e8nent un combat commun, la continuation de celui qui les opposait d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e0 la preuve ontologique cart\u00e9sienne, la recherche d'une raison suffisante qui manque singuli\u00e8rement dans tout le cart\u00e9sianisme. L'un et l'autre, par des processus diff\u00e9rents, d\u00e9couvrent _le contenu expressif de l'id\u00e9e, la forme explicative de l'id\u00e9e._\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _\u00c9_ , II, 9, dem. Et II, 11, cor. : Dieu \u00ab en tant qu'il poss\u00e8de _conjointement_ avec l'esprit humain l'id\u00e9e d'une autre chose... \u00bb ; III, 1, dem. : Dieu \u00ab en tant qu'il contient en m\u00eame temps les esprits des autres choses \u00bb.\n\n2.  _\u00c9_ , II, 36, dem.\n\n3.  _\u00c9_ , II, 9, cor. : \u00ab ce qui arrive ( _contingit_ ) dans l'objet singulier d'une id\u00e9e quelconque... \u00bb.\n\n4.  _\u00c9_ , II, 12, dem. : \u00ab Tout ce qui arrive dans l'objet de l'id\u00e9e constituant l'esprit humain, la connaissance en est n\u00e9cessairement donn\u00e9e en Dieu en tant qu'il constitue la nature de l'esprit humain ; c'est-\u00e0-dire la connaissance de cette chose sera n\u00e9cessairement dans l'esprit, autrement dit l'esprit la per\u00e7oit. \u00bb\n\n5.  _\u00c9_ , II, 19, 23 et 26.\n\n6.  Sur le r\u00f4le du hasard ( _fortuna_ ) dans les perceptions qui ne sont pas ad\u00e9quates, cf. _Lettre 37, \u00e0 Bouwmeester_ (III, p. 135).\n\n7.  _Indicare : \u00c9_ , II, 16, cor. 2 ; IV, 1 sc. _Indiquer_ ou _envelopper_ s'opposent alors \u00e0 _expliquer_. Ainsi l'id\u00e9e de Pierre telle qu'elle est en Paul \u00ab indique l'\u00e9tat du corps de Paul \u00bb, tandis que l'id\u00e9e de Pierre en elle-m\u00eame \u00ab explique directement l'essence du corps de Pierre \u00bb (II, 17, sc.). De m\u00eame les id\u00e9es \u00ab qui ne font qu'envelopper la nature de choses ext\u00e9rieures au corps humain \u00bb s'opposent aux id\u00e9es \u00ab qui expliquent la nature de ces m\u00eames choses \u00bb (II, 18, sc.).\n\n8.  Sur l'indiqu\u00e9 principal : nos id\u00e9es d'affections indiquent en premier lieu la constitution de notre corps, constitution _pr\u00e9sente_ et variable _(\u00c9_ , II, 16, cor. 2 ; III, d\u00e9f. g\u00e9n\u00e9rale des affects ; IV, 1, sc.). Sur l'indiqu\u00e9 secondaire ou indirect : nos id\u00e9es d'affections enveloppent la nature d'un corps ext\u00e9rieur, mais indirectement, de telle fa\u00e7on que nous ne faisons que croire \u00e0 la _pr\u00e9sence_ de ce corps tant que notre affection dure ( _\u00c9_ , II, 16, dem. ; II, 17, prop., dem. et cor.).\n\n9.  _\u00c9_ , II, 35, prop. et dem.\n\n10.  _\u00c9_ , II, 28, dem.\n\n11.  _\u00c9_ , II, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31.\n\n12.  _\u00c9_ , II, 35, sc.\n\n13.  Il y a en effet un encha\u00eenement ( _ordo_ et _concatenatio_ ) des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates entre elles, qui s'oppose \u00e0 l'ordre et \u00e0 l'encha\u00eenement de l'entendement. Les id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates, s'encha\u00eenent dans l'ordre o\u00f9 elles s'impriment en nous. C'est l'ordre de la M\u00e9moire. Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 18, sc.\n\n14.  _\u00c9_ , II, 33, prop. et dem. ; II, 35, sc. ; IV, 1, prop., dem. et sc.\n\n15.  Exemple analogue, _TRE_ , 21.\n\n16.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 22 et 23.\n\n17.  _\u00c9_ , II, 17, sc. : \u00ab Car si l'esprit, pendant qu'il imagine comme lui \u00e9tant pr\u00e9sentes des choses qui n'existent pas, savait en m\u00eame temps que ces choses n'existent pas en r\u00e9alit\u00e9, il regarderait certes cette puissance d'imaginer comme une vertu de sa nature et non comme un vice, surtout si cette facult\u00e9 d'imaginer d\u00e9pendait de sa nature seule. \u00bb (C'est-\u00e0-dire : _si cette facult\u00e9 ne se contentait pas d'envelopper notre puissance de penser, mais s'expliquait par elle._ )\n\n18.  Cf. la _Lettre 37, \u00e0 Bouwmeester_ , o\u00f9 Spinoza se sert des mots \u00ab clair et distinct \u00bb pour d\u00e9signer l'ad\u00e9quat lui-m\u00eame. En un sens plus pr\u00e9cis, Spinoza entend par \u00ab clair et distinct \u00bb ce qui suit de l'ad\u00e9quat, donc ce qui doit trouver sa raison dans l'ad\u00e9quat : \u00ab Tout ce qui suit d'une id\u00e9e qui est ad\u00e9quate en nous, nous le comprenons clairement et distinctement \u00bb ( _\u00c9_ , V, 4, sc.). Mais ce texte se r\u00e9clame de II, 40, qui disait que tout ce qui suit d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate est ad\u00e9quat aussi.\n\n19.  LEIBNIZ, _Lettre \u00e0 Arnauld_ (Janet, t. I, p. 593) : \u00ab L'expression est commune \u00e0 toutes les formes, et c'est un genre dont la perception naturelle, le sentiment animal et la connaissance intellectuelle sont des esp\u00e8ces. \u00bb\n\n20.  Cf. LEIBNIZ, _M\u00e9ditations sur la connaissance..._ ; Discours de m\u00e9taphysique, \u00a7 24.\n\n21.  La critique de l'id\u00e9e claire est men\u00e9e par Spinoza de mani\u00e8re explicite en _TRE_ , 19 et note, 21 et note. Il est vrai que Spinoza ne dit pas \u00ab clair et distinct \u00bb. Mais c'est qu'il se r\u00e9serve d'employer ces mots pour son compte en un tout autre sens que Descartes. Nous verrons dans le chapitre suivant comment la critique spinoziste porte en fait sur l'ensemble de la conception cart\u00e9sienne.\n\n## CHAPITRE X\n\n## SPINOZA CONTRE DESCARTES\n\nLe cart\u00e9sianisme repose sur une certaine suffisance de l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte. Cette suffisance fonde la m\u00e9thode de Descartes, mais d'autre part est prouv\u00e9e par l'exercice de cette m\u00e9thode elle-m\u00eame. Descartes affirme sa pr\u00e9f\u00e9rence pour l' _analyse_. Dans un texte important, il dit que la m\u00e9thode analytique a le m\u00e9rite de nous faire voir \u00ab comment les effets d\u00e9pendent des causes1 \u00bb. Cette d\u00e9claration pourrait sembler paradoxale, pr\u00eatant \u00e0 l'analyse ce qui revient \u00e0 la synth\u00e8se, si l'on n'en mesurait pas l'exacte port\u00e9e. Suivant Descartes, nous avons une connaissance claire et distincte d'un effet _avant_ d'avoir une connaissance claire et distincte de la cause. Par exemple, je sais que j'existe comme \u00eatre pensant avant de conna\u00eetre la cause par laquelle j'existe. Sans doute, la connaissance claire et distincte de l'effet suppose une certaine connaissance de la cause, mais seulement une connaissance confuse. \u00ab Si je dis 4 + 3 = 7, cette conception est n\u00e9cessaire, parce que nous ne concevons pas distinctement le nombre 7 sans y inclure 3 et 4 _confusa quadam ratione_2. \u00bb La connaissance claire et distincte de l'effet suppose donc une connaissance confuse de la cause, mais en aucun cas ne d\u00e9pend d'une connaissance plus parfaite de la cause. Au contraire, c'est la connaissance claire et distincte de la cause qui d\u00e9pend de la connaissance claire et distincte de l'effet. Telle est la base des _M\u00e9ditations_ , de leur ordre en particulier et de la m\u00e9thode analytique en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral : m\u00e9thode d'inf\u00e9rence ou d'implication.\n\nD\u00e8s lors, si cette m\u00e9thode nous fait voir comment les effets d\u00e9pendent des causes, c'est de la mani\u00e8re suivante : \u00e0 partir d'une connaissance claire de l'effet, nous tirons au clair la connaissance de la cause qu'elle impliquait confus\u00e9ment, et par l\u00e0, nous montrons que l'effet ne serait pas ce que nous le connaissons \u00eatre s'il n'avait telle cause dont il d\u00e9pend n\u00e9cessairement3. Chez Descartes, donc, deux th\u00e8mes sont fondamentalement li\u00e9s : la suffisance th\u00e9orique de l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte, la possibilit\u00e9 pratique d'aller d'une connaissance claire et distincte de l'effet \u00e0 une connaissance claire et distincte de la cause.\n\nQue l'effet d\u00e9pende de la cause n'est pas en question. La question porte sur la meilleure mani\u00e8re de le montrer. Spinoza dit : Il nous est possible de partir d'une connaissance claire d'un effet ; mais ainsi nous ne parviendrons qu'\u00e0 une connaissance claire de la cause, nous ne conna\u00eetrons rien de la cause en dehors de ce que nous consid\u00e9rons dans l'effet, jamais nous n'obtiendrons une connaissance ad\u00e9quate. Le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ contient une critique fondamentale de la m\u00e9thode cart\u00e9sienne, du proc\u00e9d\u00e9 d'inf\u00e9rence ou d'implication dont elle se sert, de la pr\u00e9tendue suffisance du clair et du distinct dont elle se r\u00e9clame. L'id\u00e9e claire ne nous donne rien, sinon une certaine connaissance des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de la chose, et ne nous m\u00e8ne \u00e0 rien, sinon \u00e0 une connaissance n\u00e9gative de la cause. \u00ab Il y a une perception o\u00f9 l'essence d'une chose est inf\u00e9r\u00e9e d'une autre chose, mais non pas de mani\u00e8re ad\u00e9quate \u00bb ; \u00ab Nous ne comprenons rien de la cause en dehors de ce que nous consid\u00e9rons dans l'effet : ce qui se voit suffisamment du fait que la cause, alors, n'est d\u00e9sign\u00e9e que par les termes les plus g\u00e9n\u00e9raux, comme _il y a donc quelque chose_ , _il y a donc quelque puissance_ , etc. Ou aussi du fait qu'on la d\u00e9signe d'une fa\u00e7on n\u00e9gative, _par cons\u00e9quent ce n'est pas ceci ou cela, etc._ \u00bb ; \u00ab Nous inf\u00e9rons une chose d'une autre de la mani\u00e8re suivante : apr\u00e8s avoir clairement per\u00e7u que nous sentons tel corps et nul autre, nous en inf\u00e9rons clairement, dis-je, que l'\u00e2me est unie au corps, et que cette union est la cause d'une telle sensation. Mais quelle est cette sensation et cette union, nous ne pouvons pas le comprendre par l\u00e0 d'une fa\u00e7on absolue \u00bb ; \u00ab Une telle conclusion, bien que certaine, n'est pas assez s\u00fbre4. \u00bb Dans ces citations, il n'y a pas une ligne qui ne soit dirig\u00e9e contre Descartes et sa m\u00e9thode. Spinoza ne croit pas \u00e0 la suffisance du clair et du distinct, parce qu'il ne croit pas qu'on puisse de mani\u00e8re satisfaisante aller d'une connaissance de l'effet \u00e0 une connaissance de la cause.\n\nIl ne suffit pas d'une id\u00e9e claire et distincte, il faut aller jusqu'\u00e0 l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. C'est-\u00e0-dire : il ne suffit pas de montrer comment les effets d\u00e9pendent des causes, il faut montrer comment la connaissance vraie de l'effet d\u00e9pend elle-m\u00eame de la connaissance de la cause. Telle est la d\u00e9finition de la m\u00e9thode _synth\u00e9tique_. Sur tous ces points, Spinoza se retrouve aristot\u00e9licien, contre Descartes : \u00ab Ce qui est la m\u00eame chose que ce que les Anciens ont dit, \u00e0 savoir que la science vraie proc\u00e8de de la cause aux effets5. \u00bb Aristote montrait que la connaissance scientifique est par la cause. Il ne disait pas seulement que la connaissance doit d\u00e9couvrir la cause, s'\u00e9lever jusqu'\u00e0 la cause dont un effet connu d\u00e9pend ; il disait que l'effet n'est connu que dans la mesure o\u00f9 la cause est elle-m\u00eame et d'abord mieux connue. La cause n'est pas seulement ant\u00e9rieure \u00e0 l'effet parce qu'elle en est la cause, elle est ant\u00e9rieure aussi du point de vue de la connaissance, devant \u00eatre plus connue que l'effet6. Spinoza reprend cette th\u00e8se : \u00ab La connaissance de l'effet n'est en r\u00e9alit\u00e9 rien d'autre que l'acquisition d'une connaissance plus parfaite de la cause7. \u00bb Entendons : non pas \u00ab plus parfaite \u00bb que celle que nous avions d'abord, mais plus parfaite que celle que nous avons de l'effet lui-m\u00eame, ant\u00e9rieure \u00e0 celle que nous avons de l'effet. La connaissance de l'effet peut \u00eatre dite claire et distincte, mais la connaissance de la cause est plus parfaite, c'est-\u00e0-dire ad\u00e9quate ; et le clair et le distinct ne sont fond\u00e9s que pour autant qu'ils d\u00e9coulent de l'ad\u00e9quat en tant que tel.\n\nConna\u00eetre par la cause est le seul moyen de conna\u00eetre l'essence. La cause est comme le moyen terme qui fonde la connexion de l'attribut avec le sujet, le principe ou la raison dont d\u00e9coulent toutes les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s qui reviennent \u00e0 la chose. C'est pourquoi, suivant Aristote, se confondent la recherche de la cause et la recherche de la d\u00e9finition. D'o\u00f9 l'importance du syllogisme scientifique dont les pr\u00e9misses nous donnent la cause ou la d\u00e9finition formelles d'un ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne, et la conclusion, la cause ou la d\u00e9finition mat\u00e9rielles. La d\u00e9finition totale est celle qui r\u00e9unit la forme et la mati\u00e8re dans une \u00e9nonciation continue, de telle fa\u00e7on que l'unit\u00e9 de l'objet ne soit plus fragment\u00e9e, mais au contraire affirm\u00e9e dans un concept intuitif. Sur tous ces points, Spinoza reste en apparence aristot\u00e9licien : il souligne l'importance de la th\u00e9orie de la d\u00e9finition, il pose l'identit\u00e9 de la recherche de la d\u00e9finition et de la recherche des causes, il affirme l'unit\u00e9 concr\u00e8te d'une d\u00e9finition totale englobant la cause formelle et la cause mat\u00e9rielle de l'id\u00e9e vraie.\n\nDescartes n'ignore pas les pr\u00e9tentions d'une m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique de type aristot\u00e9licien : la preuve qu'elle contient, dit-il, est souvent \u00ab des effets par les causes8 \u00bb. Descartes veut dire : la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique pr\u00e9tend toujours conna\u00eetre par la cause, mais elle n'y r\u00e9ussit pas toujours. L'objection fondamentale est la suivante : Comment la cause elle-m\u00eame serait-elle connue ? En g\u00e9om\u00e9trie, nous pouvons conna\u00eetre _par_ la cause, mais parce que la mati\u00e8re est claire et convient avec les sens. Descartes l'admet (d'o\u00f9 son emploi du mot \u00ab souvent \u00bb)9. De m\u00eame Aristote : le point, la ligne, m\u00eame l'unit\u00e9, sont des principes ou des \u00ab genres-sujets \u00bb, des indivisibles atteints par l'intuition ; leur existence est connue, en m\u00eame temps que leur signification, comprise10. Mais que se passe-t-il dans les autres cas, par exemple en m\u00e9taphysique, quand il s'agit d'\u00eatres r\u00e9els ? Comment la cause, le principe ou le moyen-terme sont-ils trouv\u00e9s ? Il semble bien qu'Aristote nous renvoie lui-m\u00eame \u00e0 un processus inductif, qui ne se distingue gu\u00e8re d'une abstraction et qui trouve son point de d\u00e9part dans une perception confuse de l'effet. En ce sens, c'est l'effet qui est le plus connu, le plus connu pour nous, par opposition au \u00ab plus connu absolument \u00bb. Quand Aristote d\u00e9taille les moyens de parvenir au moyen-terme ou \u00e0 la d\u00e9finition causale, il part d'un ensemble confus pour en abstraire un universel \u00ab proportionn\u00e9 \u00bb. C'est pourquoi la cause formelle est toujours un caract\u00e8re sp\u00e9cifique abstrait, qui trouve son origine dans une mati\u00e8re sensible et confuse. De ce point de vue, l'unit\u00e9 de la cause formelle et de la cause mat\u00e9rielle reste un pur id\u00e9al chez Aristote, au m\u00eame titre que l'unit\u00e9 du concept intuitif.\n\nLa th\u00e8se de Descartes se pr\u00e9sente donc ainsi : la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique a une ambition d\u00e9mesur\u00e9e ; mais elle ne nous donne aucun moyen de conna\u00eetre les causes r\u00e9elles. En fait, elle part d'une connaissance confuse de l'effet, et s'\u00e9l\u00e8ve \u00e0 des abstraits qu'elle nous pr\u00e9sente \u00e0 tort comme des causes ; c'est pourquoi, malgr\u00e9 ses pr\u00e9tentions, elle se contente d'examiner les causes par les effets11. La m\u00e9thode analytique, au contraire, est d'intention plus modeste. Mais, parce qu'elle d\u00e9gage d'abord une perception claire et distincte de l'effet, elle nous donne le moyen d'inf\u00e9rer de cette perception une connaissance v\u00e9ritable de la cause ; c'est pourquoi elle est apte \u00e0 montrer comment les effets eux-m\u00eames d\u00e9pendent des causes. La m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique n'est donc l\u00e9gitime qu'\u00e0 une condition : quand elle n'est pas livr\u00e9e \u00e0 elle-m\u00eame, quand elle vient apr\u00e8s la m\u00e9thode analytique, quand elle s'appuie sur une connaissance pr\u00e9alable des causes r\u00e9elles. La m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique ne nous fait rien conna\u00eetre par elle-m\u00eame, elle n'est pas une m\u00e9thode d'invention ; elle trouve son utilit\u00e9 dans l'exposition de la connaissance, dans l'exposition de ce qui est d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00ab invent\u00e9 \u00bb.\n\nOn remarquera que jamais Descartes ne songe \u00e0 d\u00e9partager les deux m\u00e9thodes en rapportant la synth\u00e8se \u00e0 l'ordre de l'\u00eatre, l'analyse, \u00e0 l'ordre de la connaissance. Pas davantage Spinoza. Il serait donc insuffisant, et inexact, d'opposer Descartes \u00e0 Spinoza en disant que le premier suit l'ordre de la connaissance, le second l'ordre de l'\u00eatre. Sans doute d\u00e9coule-t-il de la d\u00e9finition de la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique qu'elle co\u00efncide avec l'\u00eatre. Mais cette cons\u00e9quence a peu d'importance. Le seul probl\u00e8me est de savoir si la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique est capable, d'abord et par elle-m\u00eame, de nous faire conna\u00eetre les principes qu'elle suppose. Peut-elle, en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, nous _faire conna\u00eetre_ ce qui est ? Le seul probl\u00e8me est donc : Quelle est la vraie m\u00e9thode du point de vue de la connaissance12 ? Alors l'anti-cart\u00e9sianisme de Spinoza se manifeste pleinement : selon Spinoza, la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique est la seule m\u00e9thode d'invention v\u00e9ritable, la seule m\u00e9thode qui vaille dans l'ordre de la connaissance13. Or, une telle position n'est tenable que si Spinoza estime avoir les moyens, non seulement de retourner les objections de Descartes, mais aussi de surmonter les difficult\u00e9s de l'aristot\u00e9lisme. Pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, quand il pr\u00e9sente ce qu'il appelle le troisi\u00e8me \u00ab mode de perception \u00bb dans le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ , il groupe sous ce mode ou dans ce genre _imparfait_ deux proc\u00e9d\u00e9s tr\u00e8s divers, dont il d\u00e9nonce \u00e9galement l'insuffisance14. Le premier consiste \u00e0 inf\u00e9rer une cause \u00e0 partir d'un effet clairement per\u00e7u : on reconna\u00eet ici la m\u00e9thode analytique de Descartes et son processus d'implication. Mais le second consiste \u00e0 \u00ab tirer une conclusion d'un universel qui est toujours accompagn\u00e9 d'une certaine propri\u00e9t\u00e9 \u00bb : on reconna\u00eet la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique d'Aristote, son processus d\u00e9ductif \u00e0 partir du moyen-terme con\u00e7u comme caract\u00e8re sp\u00e9cifique. Si Spinoza, non sans ironie, peut ainsi r\u00e9unir Descartes et Aristote, _c'est parce qu'il revient au m\u00eame, \u00e0 peu pr\u00e8s, d'abstraire un universel \u00e0 partir d'une connaissance confuse de l'effet, ou d'inf\u00e9rer une cause \u00e0 partir d'une connaissance claire de l'effet_. Aucun de ces proc\u00e9d\u00e9s ne m\u00e8ne \u00e0 l'ad\u00e9quat. La m\u00e9thode analytique de Descartes est insuffisante, mais Aristote n'a pas su davantage concevoir la suffisance de la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique.\n\nCe qui manque aux Anciens, dit Spinoza, c'est de concevoir l'\u00e2me comme une esp\u00e8ce d'automate spirituel, c'est-\u00e0-dire la pens\u00e9e comme d\u00e9termin\u00e9e par ses propres lois15. C'est donc le parall\u00e9lisme qui donne \u00e0 Spinoza le moyen de d\u00e9passer les difficult\u00e9s de l'aristot\u00e9lisme. La cause formelle d'une id\u00e9e n'est jamais un universel abstrait. Les universaux, genres ou esp\u00e8ces, renvoient bien \u00e0 une puissance d'imaginer, mais cette puissance diminue au fur et \u00e0 mesure que nous comprenons plus de choses. La cause formelle de l'id\u00e9e vraie, c'est notre puissance de comprendre ; et plus nous comprenons de choses, moins nous formons ces fictions de genres et d'esp\u00e8ces16. Si Aristote identifie la cause formelle avec l'universel sp\u00e9cifique, c'est parce qu'il en reste _au plus bas degr\u00e9_ de la puissance de penser, sans d\u00e9couvrir les lois qui permettent \u00e0 celle-ci d'aller d'un \u00eatre r\u00e9el \u00e0 un autre r\u00e9el \u00ab sans passer par les choses abstraites \u00bb. D'autre part, la cause mat\u00e9rielle d'une id\u00e9e n'est pas une perception sensible confuse : une id\u00e9e de chose particuli\u00e8re trouve toujours sa cause dans une autre id\u00e9e de chose particuli\u00e8re d\u00e9termin\u00e9e \u00e0 la produire.\n\nFace au mod\u00e8le aristot\u00e9licien, Descartes ne pouvait saisir les possibilit\u00e9s de la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique. Il est vrai que celle-ci, sous un de ses aspects, ne nous fait pas conna\u00eetre quelque chose ; mais on aurait tort d'en conclure qu'elle a seulement un r\u00f4le d'exposition. Sous son premier aspect, la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique est r\u00e9flexive, c'est-\u00e0-dire nous fait conna\u00eetre notre puissance de comprendre. Il est vrai aussi que la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique _forge ou feint_ une cause en fonction d'un effet ; mais loin d'y voir une contradiction, nous devons reconna\u00eetre ici le minimum de r\u00e9gression qui nous permet, _le plus vite possible_ , d'atteindre \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme \u00e0 la source de toutes les autres id\u00e9es. Sous ce second aspect, la m\u00e9thode est constructive ou g\u00e9n\u00e9tique. Enfin, les id\u00e9es qui d\u00e9coulent de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu sont des id\u00e9es d'\u00eatres r\u00e9els : leur production est en m\u00eame temps la d\u00e9duction du r\u00e9el, la forme et la mati\u00e8re du vrai s'identifient dans l'encha\u00eenement des id\u00e9es. La m\u00e9thode, sous ce troisi\u00e8me aspect, est d\u00e9ductive. R\u00e9flexion, gen\u00e8se et d\u00e9duction, ces trois moments constituent tous ensemble la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique. C'est sur eux que Spinoza compte, \u00e0 la fois pour d\u00e9passer le cart\u00e9sianisme et pour pallier les insuffisances de l'aristot\u00e9lisme.\n\nConsid\u00e9rons maintenant la th\u00e9orie de l'\u00eatre : nous voyons que l'opposition de Spinoza \u00e0 Descartes se d\u00e9place, mais ne cesse pas d'\u00eatre radicale. Aussi bien serait-il \u00e9tonnant que la m\u00e9thode analytique et la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique impliquent une m\u00eame conception de l'\u00eatre. L'ontologie de Spinoza est domin\u00e9e par les notions de _cause de soi, en soi_ et _par soi_. Ces termes \u00e9taient pr\u00e9sents chez Descartes lui-m\u00eame ; mais les difficult\u00e9s qu'il rencontrait dans leur emploi doivent nous renseigner sur les incompatibilit\u00e9s du cart\u00e9sianisme et du spinozisme.\n\nContre Descartes, Caterus et Arnauld objectaient d\u00e9j\u00e0 : \u00ab par soi \u00bb se dit n\u00e9gativement et ne signifie que l'absence de cause17. M\u00eame en admettant avec Arnauld que, si Dieu n'a pas de cause, c'est en raison de la pleine positivit\u00e9 de son essence et non pas en fonction de l'imperfection de notre entendement, on n'en conclura pas qu'il est par soi \u00ab positivement comme par une cause \u00bb, c'est-\u00e0-dire, qu'il est cause de soi. Descartes, il est vrai, estime que cette pol\u00e9mique est surtout verbale. Il demande seulement qu'on lui accorde la pleine positivit\u00e9 de l'essence de Dieu : d\u00e8s lors, on reconna\u00eetra que cette essence joue un r\u00f4le _analogue_ \u00e0 celui d'une cause. Il y a une raison positive pour laquelle Dieu n'a pas de cause, donc une cause formelle par laquelle il n'a pas de cause efficiente. Descartes pr\u00e9cise sa th\u00e8se dans les termes suivants : Dieu est cause de soi, mais _en un autre sens_ qu'une cause efficiente est cause de son effet ; il est cause de soi au sens o\u00f9 son essence est cause formelle ; et son essence est dite cause formelle, non pas directement, mais par analogie, dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle joue par rapport \u00e0 l'existence un r\u00f4le analogue \u00e0 celui d'une cause efficiente par rapport \u00e0 son effet18.\n\nCette th\u00e9orie repose sur trois notions intimement li\u00e9es : _l'\u00e9quivocit\u00e9_ (Dieu est cause de soi, mais en un autre sens qu'il n'est cause efficiente des choses qu'il cr\u00e9e ; d\u00e8s lors, l'\u00eatre ne se dit pas au m\u00eame sens de tout ce qui est, substance divine et substances cr\u00e9\u00e9es, substances et modes, etc.) ; _l'\u00e9minence_ (Dieu contient donc toute la r\u00e9alit\u00e9, mais \u00e9minemment, sous une autre forme que celle des choses qu'il cr\u00e9e) ; _l'analogie_ (Dieu comme cause de soi n'est donc pas atteint en lui-m\u00eame, mais par analogie : c'est par analogie avec la cause efficiente que Dieu peut \u00eatre dit cause de soi, ou par soi \u00ab comme \u00bb par une cause). Ces th\u00e8ses sont moins formul\u00e9es explicitement par Descartes qu'elles ne sont re\u00e7ues et accept\u00e9es comme un h\u00e9ritage scolastique et thomiste. Mais, pour n'\u00eatre jamais discut\u00e9es, elles n'en ont pas moins une importance essentielle, partout pr\u00e9sentes chez Descartes, indispensables \u00e0 sa th\u00e9orie de l'\u00eatre, de Dieu et des cr\u00e9atures. Sa m\u00e9taphysique ne trouve pas son sens en elles ; mais, sans elles elle perdrait beaucoup de son sens. C'est pourquoi les Cart\u00e9siens pr\u00e9sentent si volontiers une th\u00e9orie de l'analogie : plus qu'ils ne tentent de r\u00e9concilier l'\u0153uvre du ma\u00eetre et le thomisme, ils d\u00e9veloppent alors une pi\u00e8ce essentielle du cart\u00e9sianisme qui restait implicite chez Descartes lui-m\u00eame.\n\nIl est toujours possible d'imaginer, entre Descartes et Spinoza, des filiations fantaisistes. Par exemple, dans une d\u00e9finition cart\u00e9sienne de la substance (\u00ab ce qui n'a besoin que de soi-m\u00eame pour exister \u00bb), on pr\u00e9tend d\u00e9couvrir une tentation moniste et m\u00eame panth\u00e9iste. C'est n\u00e9gliger le r\u00f4le implicite de l'analogie dans la philosophie de Descartes, qui suffit \u00e0 la pr\u00e9munir contre toute tentation de ce genre : comme chez saint Thomas, l'acte d'exister sera par rapport aux substances cr\u00e9\u00e9es quelque chose d'analogue \u00e0 ce qu'il est par rapport \u00e0 la substance divine19. Et il semble bien que la m\u00e9thode analytique d\u00e9bouche naturellement dans une conception analogique de l'\u00eatre ; son proc\u00e9d\u00e9 lui-m\u00eame conduit spontan\u00e9ment \u00e0 la position d'un \u00eatre analogue. On ne s'\u00e9tonnera donc pas que le cart\u00e9sianisme retrouve \u00e0 sa mani\u00e8re une difficult\u00e9 d\u00e9j\u00e0 pr\u00e9sente dans le thomisme le plus orthodoxe : malgr\u00e9 ses ambitions, l'analogie n'arrive pas \u00e0 se d\u00e9gager de l'\u00e9quivocit\u00e9 dont elle part, de l'\u00e9minence \u00e0 laquelle elle arrive.\n\nSelon Spinoza, Dieu n'est pas cause de soi en un autre sens que cause de toutes choses. _Au contraire, il est cause de toutes choses au m\u00eame sens que cause de soi_20. Descartes en dit trop ou n'en dit pas assez : trop pour Arnauld, mais pas assez pour Spinoza. Car il n'est pas possible d'employer \u00ab par soi \u00bb positivement, tout en usant de \u00ab cause de soi \u00bb par simple analogie. Descartes reconna\u00eet que, si l'essence de Dieu est cause de son existence, c'est au sens de cause formelle, non pas de cause efficiente. La cause formelle, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, est l'essence immanente, coexistante \u00e0 son effet, ins\u00e9parable de son effet. Encore faut-il une raison positive pour laquelle l'existence de Dieu n'a pas de cause efficiente et ne fait qu'un avec l'essence. Or, cette raison, Descartes la trouve dans une simple propri\u00e9t\u00e9 : l'immensit\u00e9 de Dieu, sa surabondance ou son infinit\u00e9. Mais une telle propri\u00e9t\u00e9 ne peut jouer que le r\u00f4le d'une r\u00e8gle de proportionnalit\u00e9 dans un jugement analogique. Parce que cette propri\u00e9t\u00e9 ne d\u00e9signe rien de la nature de Dieu, Descartes en reste \u00e0 une d\u00e9termination indirecte de la cause de soi : celle-ci se dit en un autre sens que la cause efficiente, mais aussi se dit par analogie avec elle. Ce qui manque chez Descartes, c'est donc une raison sous laquelle la cause de soi puisse \u00eatre atteinte en elle-m\u00eame et directement fond\u00e9e dans le concept ou dans la nature de Dieu. C'est cette raison que Spinoza d\u00e9couvre quand il distingue la nature divine et les propres, l'absolu et l'infini. Les attributs sont les \u00e9l\u00e9ments formels immanents qui constituent la nature absolue de Dieu. Ces attributs ne constituent pas l'essence de Dieu sans en constituer l'existence ; ils n'expriment pas l'essence sans exprimer l'existence qui en d\u00e9coule n\u00e9cessairement ; c'est pourquoi l'existence ne fait qu'un avec l'essence21. Ainsi les attributs constituent la raison formelle qui fait de la substance en elle-m\u00eame une cause de soi, directement, non plus par analogie.\n\nLa cause de soi est d'abord atteinte en elle-m\u00eame ; c'est \u00e0 cette condition que \u00ab en soi \u00bb et \u00ab par soi \u00bb prennent une signification parfaitement positive. En d\u00e9coule la cons\u00e9quence suivante : La cause de soi ne se dit plus _en un autre sens_ que la cause efficiente, c'est la cause efficiente au contraire qui se dit au m\u00eame sens que la cause de soi. Dieu produit donc comme il existe : d'une part il produit n\u00e9cessairement, d'autre part il produit n\u00e9cessairement dans ces m\u00eames attributs qui constituent son essence. On retrouve ici les deux aspects de l'univocit\u00e9 spinoziste, l'univocit\u00e9 de la cause et l'univocit\u00e9 des attributs. Depuis le commencement de nos analyses, il nous a sembl\u00e9 que le spinozisme n'\u00e9tait pas s\u00e9parable du combat qu'il menait contre la th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative, mais aussi contre toute m\u00e9thode proc\u00e9dant par \u00e9quivocit\u00e9, \u00e9minence et analogie. Non seulement Spinoza d\u00e9nonce l'introduction du n\u00e9gatif dans l'\u00eatre, mais toutes les fausses conceptions de l'affirmation dans lesquelles le n\u00e9gatif survit. Ce sont ces survivances que Spinoza retrouve et combat, chez Descartes et chez les Cart\u00e9siens. Le concept spinoziste d'immanence n'a pas d'autre sens : il exprime la double univocit\u00e9 de la cause et des attributs, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'unit\u00e9 de la cause efficiente avec la cause formelle, l'identit\u00e9 de l'attribut tel qu'il constitue l'essence de la substance et tel qu'il est impliqu\u00e9 par les essences de cr\u00e9atures.\n\nOn ne croira pas qu'en r\u00e9duisant ainsi les cr\u00e9atures \u00e0 des modifications ou \u00e0 des modes Spinoza leur retire toute essence propre ou toute puissance. L'univocit\u00e9 de la cause ne signifie pas _que la cause de soi et la cause efficiente aient un seul et m\u00eame sens, mais que toutes deux se disent au m\u00eame sens de ce qui est cause_. L'univocit\u00e9 des attributs ne signifie pas que la substance et les modes aient le m\u00eame \u00eatre ou la m\u00eame perfection : la substance est en soi, les modifications sont dans la substance comme dans autre chose. Ce qui est en autre chose et ce qui est en soi ne se disent pas au m\u00eame sens, mais l'\u00eatre se dit formellement au m\u00eame sens de ce qui est en soi et de ce qui est en autre chose : les m\u00eames attributs, pris au m\u00eame sens, constituent l'essence de l'un et sont impliqu\u00e9s par l'essence de l'autre. Bien plus, cet \u00eatre commun n'est pas chez Spinoza, comme chez Duns Scot, un \u00catre neutralis\u00e9, indiff\u00e9rent au fini et \u00e0 l'infini, \u00e0 l' _in-se_ et \u00e0 l' _in-alio_. Au contraire, c'est l'\u00catre qualifi\u00e9 de la substance, dans lequel la substance reste en soi, mais aussi dans lequel les modes restent comme dans autre chose. L'immanence est donc la nouvelle figure que prend la th\u00e9orie de l'univocit\u00e9 chez Spinoza. La m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique conduit naturellement \u00e0 la position de cet \u00eatre commun ou de cette cause immanente.\n\nDans la philosophie de Descartes, certains axiomes reviennent constamment. Le principal est que le n\u00e9ant n'a pas de propri\u00e9t\u00e9s. Il en d\u00e9coule, du point de vue de la quantit\u00e9, que toute propri\u00e9t\u00e9 est propri\u00e9t\u00e9 d'un \u00eatre : donc, tout est \u00eatre ou propri\u00e9t\u00e9, substance ou mode. Et aussi, du point de vue de la qualit\u00e9, toute r\u00e9alit\u00e9 est perfection. Du point de vue de la causalit\u00e9, il doit y avoir au moins autant de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 dans la cause que dans l'effet ; sinon quelque chose serait produit par le n\u00e9ant. Enfin, du point de vue de la modalit\u00e9, il ne peut y avoir d'accident \u00e0 proprement parler, l'accident \u00e9tant une propri\u00e9t\u00e9 qui n'impliquerait pas n\u00e9cessairement l'\u00eatre auquel on le rapporte. De tous ces axiomes, il appartient \u00e0 Spinoza de donner une interpr\u00e9tation nouvelle, conforme \u00e0 la th\u00e9orie de l'immanence et aux exigences de la m\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique. Et il semble bien \u00e0 Spinoza que Descartes n'a pas saisi le sens et les cons\u00e9quences de la proposition : Le n\u00e9ant n'a pas de propri\u00e9t\u00e9s. D'une part, toute pluralit\u00e9 de substances devient impossible : il n'y a ni substances in\u00e9gales et limit\u00e9es, ni substances illimit\u00e9es \u00e9gales, car \u00ab elles devraient tirer quelque chose du n\u00e9ant22 \u00bb. D'autre part, on ne se contentera pas de dire que toute r\u00e9alit\u00e9 est perfection. On doit reconna\u00eetre aussi que tout dans la nature d'une chose est r\u00e9alit\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire perfection ; \u00ab dire \u00e0 ce sujet que la nature d'une chose exigeait (la limitation) et par suite ne pouvait \u00eatre autrement, c'est ne rien dire, car la nature d'une chose ne peut rien exiger tant qu'elle n'est pas23. \u00bb On \u00e9vitera donc de croire qu'une substance subisse une limitation de nature en vertu de sa propre possibilit\u00e9.\n\nPas plus qu'il n'y a de possibilit\u00e9 d'une substance en fonction de son attribut, il n'y a de contingence des modes par rapport \u00e0 la substance. Il ne suffit pas de montrer, avec Descartes, que les accidents ne sont pas r\u00e9els. Les modes d'une substance restent accidentels chez Descartes, parce qu'ils ont besoin d'une causalit\u00e9 externe qui, en quelque mani\u00e8re, les \u00ab mette \u00bb dans cette substance elle-m\u00eame. Mais, en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, l'opposition du mode et de l'accident montre d\u00e9j\u00e0 que la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 est la seule affection de l'\u00eatre, sa seule modalit\u00e9 : Dieu est cause de toutes choses au m\u00eame sens que cause de soi ; donc tout est n\u00e9cessaire, par son essence ou par sa cause. Enfin, il est vrai que la cause est plus parfaite que l'effet, la substance plus parfaite que les modes ; mais, bien qu'elle ait plus de r\u00e9alit\u00e9, jamais la cause ne contient la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 de son effet sous une autre forme ni d'une autre mani\u00e8re que celle dont d\u00e9pend l'effet lui-m\u00eame. Avec Descartes, on passe de la sup\u00e9riorit\u00e9 de la cause \u00e0 la sup\u00e9riorit\u00e9 de certaines formes d'\u00eatre sur d'autres, donc \u00e0 l'\u00e9quivocit\u00e9 ou \u00e0 l'analogie du r\u00e9el (puisque Dieu contient la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 sous une forme sup\u00e9rieure \u00e0 celle qui se trouve impliqu\u00e9e dans les cr\u00e9atures). C'est ce passage qui fonde le concept d'\u00e9minence ; mais ce passage est radicalement ill\u00e9gitime. Contre Descartes, Spinoza pose l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 de toutes les formes d'\u00eatre, et l'univocit\u00e9 du r\u00e9el qui d\u00e9coule de cette \u00e9galit\u00e9. De tous les points de vue, la philosophie de l'immanence appara\u00eet comme la th\u00e9orie de l'\u00catre-un, de l'\u00catre-\u00e9gal, de l'\u00catre univoque et commun. Elle cherche les conditions d'une affirmation v\u00e9ritable, d\u00e9non\u00e7ant tous les traitements qui retirent \u00e0 l'\u00eatre sa pleine positivit\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire sa communaut\u00e9 formelle.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  DESCARTES, _R\u00e9ponses aux secondes objections_ , AT, IX, p. 121. Ce texte, qui n'existe que dans la traduction fran\u00e7aise de Clerselier, suscite de grandes difficult\u00e9s : F. Alqui\u00e9 les souligne dans son \u00e9dition de Descartes (Garnier, t. II, p. 582). Nous demandons toutefois, dans les pages suivantes, si le texte ne peut pas \u00eatre interpr\u00e9t\u00e9 \u00e0 la lettre.\n\n2.  DESCARTES, _Regulae_ , R\u00e8gle 12 (AT, X, p. 421). Constamment chez Descartes, une connaissance claire et distincte implique, en tant que telle, une perception confuse de la cause ou du principe. Laporte donne toutes sortes d'exemples, dans _Le Rationalisme de Descartes_ (P.U.F. 1945, pp. 98-99). Quand Descartes dit : \u00ab J'ai _en quelque fa\u00e7on_ premi\u00e8rement en moi la notion de l'infini que du fini \u00bb ( _M\u00e9d._ III), il faut entendre que l'id\u00e9e de Dieu est impliqu\u00e9e par celle du moi, mais confus\u00e9ment ou implicitement ; un peu comme 4 et 3 sont impliqu\u00e9s dans 7.\n\n3.  Par exemple, _M\u00e9ditation_ III, AT, IX, p. 41 : \u00ab ... je reconnais qu'il ne serait pas possible que ma nature f\u00fbt telle qu'elle est, c'est-\u00e0-dire que j'eusse en moi l'id\u00e9e d'un Dieu, si Dieu n'existait pas v\u00e9ritablement. \u00bb\n\n4.  _TRE_ , 19 (\u00a7 III) et 21 (et notes correspondantes). Tous ces textes d\u00e9crivent une partie de ce que Spinoza appelle le troisi\u00e8me \u00ab mode de perception \u00bb. _Il ne s'agit pas d'un proc\u00e9d\u00e9 d'induction_ : l'induction appartient au deuxi\u00e8me mode, et se trouve d\u00e9crite et critiqu\u00e9e en _TRE_ , 20. Ici au contraire, il s'agit d'un proc\u00e9d\u00e9 d'inf\u00e9rence ou d'implication de type cart\u00e9sien.\n\n5.  _TRE_ , 85.\n\n6.  Cf. ARISTOTE, _Seconds Analytiques_ , I, 2, 71 b, 30.\n\n7.  _TRE_ , 92.\n\n8.  DESCARTES, _R\u00e9ponses aux secondes objections_ , AT, IV, p. 122 (l\u00e0 encore, ce texte est de la traduction Clerselier).\n\n9.  _Ibid._\n\n10.  Cf. ARISTOTE, _Seconds Analytiques_ , I, 32, 88 b, 25-30.\n\n11.  DESCARTES, _R\u00e9ponses aux secondes objections_ , AT, IX, p. 122 : \u00ab La synth\u00e8se au contraire, par une voie tout autre, et comme en examinant les causes par leurs effets (bien que la preuve qu'elle contient soit souvent aussi des effets par les causes)... \u00bb\n\n12.  F. Alqui\u00e9, dans une intervention orale au sujet de Descartes, met bien ce point en lumi\u00e8re : \u00ab Je ne vois nulle part que l'ordre synth\u00e9tique soit l'ordre de la chose... La chose est vraiment l'unit\u00e9 ; c'est l'\u00eatre, c'est l'unit\u00e9 confuse ; c'est moi qui mets un ordre lorsque je connais. Et ce qu'il faut \u00e9tablir, c'est que l'ordre de ma connaissance, et qui est toujours un ordre de connaissance, _qu'il soit synth\u00e9tique ou analytique_ , est vrai \u00bb. ( _Descartes, Cahiers de Royaumont_ , \u00e9d. de Minuit, 1957, p. 125.)\n\n13.  _TRE_ , 94 : \u00ab La voie correcte de l' _invention_ consiste \u00e0 former les pens\u00e9es en partant de quelque d\u00e9finition donn\u00e9e. \u00bb\n\n14.  _TRE_ , 19, \u00a7 III.\n\n15.  _TRE, 85._\n\n16.  _TRE_ , 58 : \u00ab L'esprit poss\u00e8de une puissance d'autant plus grande de former des fictions qu'il comprend moins..., et plus il comprend, plus cette puissance diminue. \u00bb En effet, plus l'esprit imagine, plus sa puissance de comprendre reste _envelopp\u00e9e_ , donc moins il comprend effectivement.\n\n17.  Cf. _Premi\u00e8res objections_ , AT, IX, p. 76 ; _Quatri\u00e8mes objections_ , AT, IX, pp. 162-166.\n\n18.  DESCARTES, _R\u00e9ponses aux premi\u00e8res objections_ , AT, IX, pp. 87-88 : Ceux qui ne s'attachent \u00ab qu'\u00e0 la propre et \u00e9troite signification d'efficient \u00bb, \u00ab ne remarquent ici aucun autre genre de cause qui ait _rapport et analogie_ avec la cause efficiente \u00bb. Ils ne remarquent pas que \u00ab il nous est tout-\u00e0-fait loisible de penser que (Dieu) fait _en quelque fa\u00e7on_ la m\u00eame chose \u00e0 l'\u00e9gard de soi-m\u00eame que la cause efficiente \u00e0 l'\u00e9gard de son effet. \u00bb _R\u00e9ponses aux quatri\u00e8mes objections_ , AT, IX, pp. 182-188 (\u00ab toutes ces mani\u00e8res de parler qui ont rapport et analogie avec la cause efficiente... \u00bb)\n\n19.  DESCARTES, _Principes_ , I, 51 (\u00ab Ce que c'est que la substance ; et que c'est un nom qu'on ne peut attribuer \u00e0 Dieu et aux cr\u00e9atures en m\u00eame sens \u00bb).\n\n20.  _\u00c9_ , I, 25, sc. Il est curieux que P. Lachi\u00e8ze-Rey, citant ce texte de Spinoza, en inverse l'ordre. Il fait comme si Spinoza avait dit que Dieu \u00e9tait cause de soi au sens o\u00f9 il \u00e9tait cause des choses. Dans la citation ainsi d\u00e9form\u00e9e, il n'y a pas un simple lapsus, mais la survivance d'une perspective \u00ab analogique \u00bb, invoquant _d'abord_ la causabilit\u00e9 efficiente. (Cf. _Les Origines cart\u00e9siennes du Dieu de Spinoza_ , pp. 33-34).\n\n21.  _\u00c9_ , I, 20, d\u00e9m.\n\n22.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 2, note 2.\n\n23.  _CT_ , I. ch. 2, 5, note 3.\n\n## CHAPITRE XI\n\n## L'IMMANENCE ET LES \u00c9L\u00c9MENTS HISTORIQUES\n\n## DE L'EXPRESSION\n\nDeux probl\u00e8mes se posent. Quels sont les liens logiques de l'immanence et de l'expression ? Et : Comment l'id\u00e9e d'une immanence expressive s'est-elle form\u00e9e historiquement dans certaines traditions philosophiques ? Il n'est pas exclu que ces traditions ne soient complexes et ne r\u00e9unissent elles-m\u00eames des inspirations tr\u00e8s diverses.\n\nTout commence, semble-t-il, avec le probl\u00e8me platonicien de la participation. Platon pr\u00e9sentait, \u00e0 titre d'hypoth\u00e8ses, plusieurs sch\u00e9mas de participation : participer, c'est prendre part ; mais aussi, c'est imiter ; et encore, c'est recevoir d'un d\u00e9mon... Suivant ces sch\u00e9mas, la participation se trouve interpr\u00e9t\u00e9e tant\u00f4t de fa\u00e7on mat\u00e9rielle, tant\u00f4t de mani\u00e8re imitative, tant\u00f4t de mani\u00e8re \u00ab d\u00e9monique \u00bb. Mais, dans tous les cas, les difficult\u00e9s semblent avoir une m\u00eame raison : chez Platon, le principe de participation est avant tout cherch\u00e9 du c\u00f4t\u00e9 du participant. La participation appara\u00eet le plus souvent comme une aventure qui survient du dehors au particip\u00e9, comme une violence subie par le particip\u00e9. Si la participation consiste \u00e0 prendre part, on voit mal comment le particip\u00e9 ne souffrirait pas d'une division ou d'une s\u00e9paration. Si participer, c'est imiter, il faut un artiste ext\u00e9rieur qui prend l'Id\u00e9e pour mod\u00e8le. Et l'on voit mal enfin quel est le r\u00f4le d'un interm\u00e9diaire en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, artiste ou d\u00e9mon, sinon forcer le sensible \u00e0 reproduire l'intelligible, mais aussi forcer l'Id\u00e9e \u00e0 se laisser participer par quelque chose qui r\u00e9pugne \u00e0 sa nature. M\u00eame lorsque Platon traite de la participation des Id\u00e9es entre elles, la puissance correspondante est saisie comme puissance de participer, plut\u00f4t que d'\u00eatre particip\u00e9e.\n\nLa t\u00e2che post-platonicienne par excellence exige un renversement du probl\u00e8me. On cherche un principe qui rende possible la participation, mais qui la rende possible du point de vue du particip\u00e9 lui-m\u00eame. Les N\u00e9o-platoniciens ne partent plus des caract\u00e8res du participant (multiple, sensible, etc.) pour se demander sous quelle violence la participation devient possible. Ils tentent de d\u00e9couvrir, au contraire, le principe et le mouvement interne qui fondent la participation dans le particip\u00e9 comme tel, du c\u00f4t\u00e9 du particip\u00e9 comme tel. Plotin reproche \u00e0 Platon d'avoir vu la participation du petit c\u00f4t\u00e91. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, ce n'est pas le particip\u00e9 qui passe dans le participant. Le particip\u00e9 reste en soi ; il est particip\u00e9 pour autant qu'il produit, il produit pour autant qu'il donne. Mais il n'a pas \u00e0 sortir de soi pour donner ni produire. Tel est le programme formul\u00e9 par Plotin : partir du plus haut, subordonner l'imitation \u00e0 une gen\u00e8se ou production, substituer l'id\u00e9e d'un _don_ \u00e0 celle d'une violence. Le particip\u00e9 ne se divise pas, n'est pas imit\u00e9 du dehors, ni contraint par des interm\u00e9diaires qui feraient violence \u00e0 sa nature. La participation n'est ni mat\u00e9rielle, ni imitative, ni d\u00e9monique : elle est \u00e9manative. \u00c9manation signifie \u00e0 la fois cause et don : causalit\u00e9 par donation, mais aussi donation productrice. La v\u00e9ritable activit\u00e9 est celle du particip\u00e9 ; le participant n'est qu'un effet, et re\u00e7oit ce que la cause lui donne. La cause \u00e9manative est la Cause qui donne, le Bien qui donne, la Vertu qui donne.\n\nQuand nous cherchons le principe interne de participation _du c\u00f4t\u00e9_ du particip\u00e9, nous devons n\u00e9cessairement le trouver \u00ab au-del\u00e0 \u00bb ou \u00ab au-dessus \u00bb. Il n'est pas question que le principe qui rend la participation possible soit lui-m\u00eame particip\u00e9 ou participable. De ce principe, tout \u00e9mane ; il donne tout. Mais il n'est pas lui-m\u00eame particip\u00e9, car la participation se fait seulement suivant ce qu'il donne, et \u00e0 ce qu'il donne. C'est en ce sens que Proclus \u00e9laborait sa profonde th\u00e9orie de l'Imparticipable ; il n'y a de participation que par un principe lui-m\u00eame imparticipable, mais qui donne \u00e0 participer. Et d\u00e9j\u00e0 Plotin montrait que l'Un est n\u00e9cessairement sup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 ses dons, qu'il donne ce qu'il n'a pas, ou qu'il n'est pas ce qu'il donne2. L'\u00e9manation en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral se pr\u00e9sentera sous forme d'une triade : le donateur, ce qui est donn\u00e9, ce qui re\u00e7oit. Participer, c'est toujours participer suivant ce qui est donn\u00e9. Donc nous ne devons pas seulement parler d'une gen\u00e8se du participant, mais d'une gen\u00e8se du particip\u00e9 lui-m\u00eame, qui rend compte de ce fait qu'il est particip\u00e9. Double gen\u00e8se, du donn\u00e9 et de ce qui re\u00e7oit : l'effet qui re\u00e7oit d\u00e9termine son existence quand il poss\u00e8de pleinement ce qui lui est donn\u00e9 ; mais il ne le poss\u00e8de pleinement qu'en se retournant vers le donateur. Le donateur est sup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 ses dons comme \u00e0 ses produits, participable d'apr\u00e8s ce qu'il donne, imparticipable en lui-m\u00eame ou selon lui-m\u00eame ; et, par l\u00e0, fondant la participation.\n\nNous pouvons d\u00e9j\u00e0 d\u00e9terminer des caract\u00e8res d'apr\u00e8s lesquels la cause \u00e9manative et la cause immanente ont logiquement quelque chose de commun, mais aussi des diff\u00e9rences profondes. Leur caract\u00e8re commun, c'est qu'elles ne sortent pas de soi : _elles restent en soi_ pour produire3. Quand Spinoza d\u00e9finit la cause immanente, il insiste sur cette d\u00e9finition qui fonde une certaine assimilation de l'immanence et de l'\u00e9manation4. Mais la diff\u00e9rence porte sur la mani\u00e8re dont les deux causes produisent. _Si la cause \u00e9manative reste en soi, l'effet produit n'est pas en elle et ne reste pas en elle._ De l'Un comme premier principe ou comme cause des causes, Plotin dit : \u00ab C'est parce que _rien n'est en lui_ que tout vient de lui5. \u00bb Quand il rappelle que l'effet n'est jamais s\u00e9par\u00e9 de la cause, il pense \u00e0 la continuit\u00e9 d'un flux et d'un rayonnement, non pas \u00e0 l'inh\u00e9rence actuelle d'un contenu. La cause \u00e9manative produit d'apr\u00e8s ce qu'elle donne, mais elle est au-del\u00e0 de ce qu'elle donne : si bien que l'effet sort de la cause, n'existe qu'en sortant de la cause, et ne d\u00e9termine son existence qu'en se retournant vers la cause dont il est sorti. C'est pourquoi la d\u00e9termination de l'existence de l'effet n'est pas s\u00e9parable d'une conversion, o\u00f9 la cause appara\u00eet comme Bien dans une perspective de finalit\u00e9 transcendante. Une cause est immanente, au contraire, quand l'effet lui-m\u00eame est \u00ab imman\u00e9 \u00bb dans la cause au lieu d'en \u00e9maner. Ce qui d\u00e9finit la cause immanente, c'est que l'effet est en elle, sans doute comme dans autre chose, mais est et reste en elle. L'effet ne reste pas moins dans la cause que la cause ne reste en elle-m\u00eame. De ce point de vue, jamais la distinction d'essence entre la cause et l'effet ne sera interpr\u00e9t\u00e9e comme une d\u00e9gradation. Du point de vue de l'immanence, la distinction d'essence n'exclut pas, mais implique une \u00e9galit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre : c'est le m\u00eame \u00eatre qui reste en soi dans la cause, mais aussi dans lequel l'effet reste comme dans autre chose.\n\nPlotin dit encore : l'Un n'a \u00ab rien de commun \u00bb avec les choses qui viennent apr\u00e8s lui6. Car la cause \u00e9manative n'est pas seulement sup\u00e9rieure \u00e0 l'effet, mais \u00e0 ce qu'elle donne \u00e0 l'effet. Mais pourquoi la cause premi\u00e8re est-elle pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment l'Un ? Donnant l'\u00eatre \u00e0 tout ce qui est, elle est n\u00e9cessairement au-del\u00e0 de l'\u00eatre ou de la substance. Aussi l'\u00e9manation, dans son \u00e9tat pur, n'est-elle pas s\u00e9parable d'un syst\u00e8me de l'Unsup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 l'\u00eatre ; la premi\u00e8re hypoth\u00e8se du _Parm\u00e9nide_ domine tout le n\u00e9o-platonisme7. Et l'\u00e9manation n'est pas davantage s\u00e9parable d'une th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative, ou d'une m\u00e9thode d'analogie qui respecte l'\u00e9minence du principe ou de la cause. Proclus montre que, dans le cas de l'Un lui-m\u00eame, la n\u00e9gation est g\u00e9n\u00e9ratrice des affirmations qui s'appliquent \u00e0 ce que l'un donne et \u00e0 ce qui proc\u00e8de de l'Un. Bien plus, \u00e0 chaque stade de l'\u00e9manation, on doit reconna\u00eetre la pr\u00e9sence d'un imparticipable dont les choses proc\u00e8dent et auquel elles se convertissent. L'\u00e9manation sert donc de principe \u00e0 un univers hi\u00e9rarchis\u00e9 ; la diff\u00e9rence des \u00eatres en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral y est con\u00e7ue comme diff\u00e9rence hi\u00e9rarchique ; chaque terme est comme l'image du terme sup\u00e9rieur qui le pr\u00e9c\u00e8de, et se d\u00e9finit par le degr\u00e9 d'\u00e9loignement qui le s\u00e9pare de la cause premi\u00e8re ou du premier principe.\n\nEntre la cause \u00e9manative et la cause immanente, une seconde diff\u00e9rence appara\u00eet donc. L'immanence implique pour son compte une pure ontologie, une th\u00e9orie de l'\u00catre o\u00f9 l'Un n'est que la propri\u00e9t\u00e9 de la substance et de ce qui est. Et encore, l'immanence \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat pur exige le principe d'une \u00e9galit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre ou la position d'un \u00catre-\u00e9gal : non seulement l'\u00eatre est \u00e9gal en soi, mais l'\u00eatre appara\u00eet \u00e9galement pr\u00e9sent dans tous les \u00eatres. Et la Cause, \u00e9galement proche partout : il n'y a pas de cause \u00e9loign\u00e9e. Les \u00eatres ne sont pas d\u00e9finis par leur rang dans une hi\u00e9rarchie, ne sont pas plus ou moins \u00e9loign\u00e9s de l'Un, mais chacun d\u00e9pend directement de Dieu, participant \u00e0 l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre, recevant imm\u00e9diatement tout ce qu'il peut en recevoir d'apr\u00e8s l'aptitude de son essence, ind\u00e9pendamment de toute proximit\u00e9 et de tout \u00e9loignement. Bien plus, l'immanence \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat pur exige un \u00catre univoque qui forme une Nature, et qui consiste en formes positives, communes au producteur et au produit, \u00e0 la cause et \u00e0 l'effet. Nous savons que l'immanence ne supprime pas la distinction des essences ; mais il faut des formes communes qui constituent l'essence de la substance comme cause, alors qu'elles contiennent les essences de modes en tant qu'effets. C'est pourquoi la sup\u00e9riorit\u00e9 de la cause subsiste du point de vue de l'immanence, mais n'entra\u00eene aucune \u00e9minence, c'est-\u00e0-dire aucune position d'un principe au-del\u00e0 des formes qui sont elles-m\u00eames pr\u00e9sentes dans l'effet. L'immanence s'oppose \u00e0 toute \u00e9minence de la cause, \u00e0 toute th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative, \u00e0 toute m\u00e9thode d'analogie, \u00e0 toute conception hi\u00e9rarchique du monde. Tout est affirmation dans l'immanence. La Cause est sup\u00e9rieure \u00e0 l'effet, mais non pas sup\u00e9rieure \u00e0 ce qu'elle donne \u00e0 l'effet. Ou plut\u00f4t, elle ne \u00ab donne \u00bb rien \u00e0 l'effet. La participation doit \u00eatre pens\u00e9e de mani\u00e8re enti\u00e8rement positive, non pas \u00e0 partir d'un don \u00e9minent, mais \u00e0 partir d'une communaut\u00e9 formelle qui laisse subsister la distinction des essences.\n\nS'il y a tant de diff\u00e9rence entre l'\u00e9manation et l'immanence, comment peut-on les assimiler historiquement, ne serait-ce que de fa\u00e7on partielle ? C'est que, dans le n\u00e9o-platonisme lui-m\u00eame, et sous des influences sto\u00efciennes, une cause v\u00e9ritablement immanente se joint en fait \u00e0 la cause \u00e9manative8. D\u00e9j\u00e0 au niveau de l'Un, la m\u00e9taphore de la sph\u00e8re et du rayonnement corrigent singuli\u00e8rement la stricte th\u00e9orie de la hi\u00e9rarchie. Mais surtout, la premi\u00e8re \u00e9manation nous donne l'id\u00e9e d'une cause immanente. De l'Un, \u00e9mane l'Intelligence ou l'\u00catre ; or il n'y a pas seulement immanence mutuelle de l'\u00eatre et de l'intelligence, mais l'intelligence contient toutes les intelligences et tous les intelligibles, comme l'\u00eatre contient tous les \u00eatres et tous les genres d'\u00eatre. \u00ab Pleine des \u00eatres qu'elle a engendr\u00e9s, l'intelligence les engloutit en quelque sorte en les retenant en elle-m\u00eame9. \u00bb Sans doute, de l'intelligence \u00e0 son tour, \u00e9mane une nouvelle hypostase. Mais l'intelligence n'agit ainsi comme cause \u00e9manative que dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle atteint son point de perfection ; et elle l'atteint seulement comme cause immanente. L'\u00eatre et l'intelligence sont encore l'Un, mais l'Un qui est et qui conna\u00eet, l'Un de la seconde hypoth\u00e8se du _Parm\u00e9nide_ , Un dans lequel le multiple est pr\u00e9sent et qui, lui-m\u00eame, est pr\u00e9sent dans le multiple. Plotin montre que l'\u00eatre est identique au nombre \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat d'union, les \u00eatres, identiques au nombre \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat de d\u00e9veloppement (c'est-\u00e0-dire au nombre \u00ab expliqu\u00e9 \u00bb)10. D\u00e9j\u00e0 chez Plotin, il y a une \u00e9galit\u00e9 de l'\u00catre qui se conjugue avec la sur\u00e9minence de l'Un11. Damascius pousse tr\u00e8s loin la description de cet \u00e9tat de l'\u00catre, o\u00f9 le multiple est ramass\u00e9, concentr\u00e9, _compris_ dans l'Un, mais aussi o\u00f9 l'Un _s'explique_ dans les plusieurs.\n\nTelle est l'origine d'un couple de notions qui prendra une importance de plus en plus grande \u00e0 travers les philosophies du Moyen \u00c2ge et de la Renaissance : _complicare-explicare_12. Toutes choses sont pr\u00e9sentes \u00e0 Dieu qui les complique, Dieu est pr\u00e9sent \u00e0 toutes choses qui l'expliquent et l'impliquent. \u00c0 la s\u00e9rie des \u00e9manations successives et subordonn\u00e9es se substitue la co-pr\u00e9sence de deux mouvements corr\u00e9latifs. Car les choses ne restent pas moins en Dieu, en tant qu'elles l'expliquent ou l'impliquent, que Dieu ne reste en soi pour compliquer les choses. La pr\u00e9sence des choses \u00e0 Dieu constitue l'inh\u00e9rence, comme la pr\u00e9sence de Dieu aux choses constitue l'implication. \u00c0 la hi\u00e9rarchie des hypostases se substitue l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre ; car c'est le m\u00eame \u00eatre auquel les choses sont pr\u00e9sentes et qui, lui-m\u00eame, est pr\u00e9sent dans les choses. L'immanence se d\u00e9finit par l'ensemble de la complication et de l'explication, de l'inh\u00e9rence et de l'implication. Les choses restent inh\u00e9rentes au Dieu qui les complique, comme Dieu reste impliqu\u00e9 par les choses qui l'expliquent. C'est Dieu compliquant qui s'explique \u00e0 travers toutes choses : \u00ab Dieu est la complication universelle, en ce sens que tout est en lui ; et l'universelle explication, en ce sens qu'il est en tout13. \u00bb La participation trouve son principe, non plus dans une \u00e9manation dont l'Un serait la source plus ou moins proche, mais dans l'expression imm\u00e9diate et ad\u00e9quate d'un \u00catre absolu qui comprend tous les \u00eatres et s'explique par l'essence de chacun. L'expression comprend tous ces aspects : complication, explication, inh\u00e9rence, implication. Ces aspects de l'expression sont aussi les cat\u00e9gories de l'immanence ; l'immanence se r\u00e9v\u00e8le expressive, l'expression immanente, dans un syst\u00e8me de relations logiques o\u00f9 les deux notions sont corr\u00e9latives.\n\nDe ce point de vue, l'id\u00e9e d'expression rend compte de la v\u00e9ritable activit\u00e9 du particip\u00e9, et de la possibilit\u00e9 de la participation. C'est dans l'id\u00e9e d'expression que le nouveau principe d'immanence s'affirme. L'expression appara\u00eet comme l'unit\u00e9 du multiple, comme la complication du multiple et l'explication de l'Un. Dieu s'exprime lui-m\u00eame dans le monde ; le monde est l'expression, l'explication d'un Dieu-\u00eatre ou de l'Un qui est. Le monde est promu en Dieu, de telle mani\u00e8re qu'il perd ses limites ou sa finitude, et participe imm\u00e9diatement de l'infinit\u00e9 divine. La m\u00e9taphore du cercle dont le centre est partout et la circonf\u00e9rence nulle part convient au monde lui-m\u00eame. Entre Dieu et le monde le rapport d'expression fonde, non pas une identit\u00e9 d'essence, mais une \u00e9galit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre. Car le m\u00eame \u00eatre est pr\u00e9sent en Dieu qui complique toutes choses suivant sa propre essence, et dans les choses qui l'expliquent suivant leur propre essence ou leur mode. Si bien que Dieu doit \u00eatre d\u00e9fini comme identique \u00e0 la Nature _complicative_ , et la Nature comme identique \u00e0 Dieu _explicative_. Mais cette \u00e9galit\u00e9, ou identit\u00e9 dans la distinction, constitue deux moments pour l'ensemble de l'expression : Dieu s'exprime dans son Verbe, son Verbe exprime l'essence divine ; mais le Verbe s'exprime \u00e0 son tour dans l'univers, l'univers exprimant toutes choses suivant le mode qui revient \u00e0 chacune essentiellement. Le Verbe est l'expression de Dieu, expression-langage ; l'Univers est l'expression de cette expression, expression-figure ou physionomie. (Ce th\u00e8me classique d'une double expression se retrouve chez Eckhart : Dieu s'exprime dans le Verbe, qui est parole int\u00e9rieure et silencieuse ; le Verbe s'exprime dans le monde, qui est figure ou parole ext\u00e9rioris\u00e9e14.)\n\nNous avons essay\u00e9 de montrer comment une immanence expressive de l'\u00catre se greffait sur la transcendance \u00e9manative de l'Un. Toutefois, chez Plotin et ses successeurs, cette cause immanente reste subordonn\u00e9e \u00e0 la cause \u00e9manative. Il est vrai que l'\u00eatre ou l'intelligence \u00ab s'expliquent \u00bb ; mais seul s'explique ce qui est d\u00e9j\u00e0 multiple, et qui n'est pas premier principe. \u00ab L'intelligence s'explique. C'est qu'elle veut poss\u00e9der tous les \u00eatres ; mais il e\u00fbt \u00e9t\u00e9 meilleur pour elle de ne pas le vouloir, car ainsi elle devient second principe15. \u00bb L'\u00eatre immanent, la pens\u00e9e immanente ne peuvent former un absolu mais supposent un premier principe, cause \u00e9manative et fin transcendante dont tout d\u00e9coule et \u00e0 quoi tout se convertit. Sans doute ce premier principe, l'Un sup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 l'\u00eatre, contient-il virtuellement toutes choses : _il est expliqu\u00e9_ , mais il _ne s'explique pas lui-m\u00eame_ , contrairement \u00e0 l'intelligence, contrairement \u00e0 l'\u00eatre16. Il n'est pas affect\u00e9 par ce qui l'exprime. Aussi faut-il attendre l'extr\u00eame \u00e9volution du n\u00e9o-platonisme pendant le Moyen \u00c2ge, la Renaissance et la R\u00e9forme, pour voir la cause immanente prendre une importance de plus en plus grande, l'\u00catre rivaliser avec l'un, l'expression rivaliser avec l'\u00e9manation et parfois tendre \u00e0 la supplanter. On a souvent cherch\u00e9 ce qui faisait de la philosophie de la Renaissance une philosophie moderne ; nous suivons pleinement la th\u00e8se d'Alexandre Koyr\u00e9, pour qui la cat\u00e9gorie sp\u00e9cifique de l'expression caract\u00e9rise le mode de penser de cette philosophie.\n\nEt pourtant il est certain que cette tendance expressionniste n'aboutit pas pleinement. C'est le christianisme qui la favorise, par sa th\u00e9orie du Verbe, et surtout par ses exigences ontologiques qui font du premier principe un \u00catre. Mais c'est lui qui la refoule, par l'exigence encore plus puissante de maintenir la transcendance de l'\u00eatre divin. Aussi voit-on toujours l'accusation d'immanence et de panth\u00e9isme menacer les philosophes, et les philosophes se soucier avant tout d'\u00e9chapper \u00e0 cette accusation. D\u00e9j\u00e0 dans Scot \u00c9rig\u00e8ne il faut admirer les combinaisons philosophiquement subtiles o\u00f9 se trouvent concili\u00e9s les droits d'une immanence expressive, d'une transcendance \u00e9manative et d'une cr\u00e9ation exemplaire _ex nihilo_. En fait, la transcendance d'un Dieu cr\u00e9ateur est sauv\u00e9e gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 une conception analogique de l'\u00catre, ou du moins gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 une conception \u00e9minente de Dieu qui limite la port\u00e9e de l'\u00catre-\u00e9gal. Le principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9 de l'\u00catre est lui-m\u00eame interpr\u00e9t\u00e9 de mani\u00e8re analogique ; toutes les ressources du symbolisme pr\u00e9servent la transcendance. L'inexprimable est donc maintenu au sein de l'expression elle-m\u00eame. Non pas qu'on revienne \u00e0 Plotin ; non pas qu'on revienne \u00e0 la position de l'Un ineffable et sup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 l'\u00catre. Car c'est le m\u00eame Dieu, le m\u00eame \u00eatre infini, qui s'affirme et s'exprime dans le monde comme cause immanente, et qui reste inexprimable et transcendant comme objet d'une th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative qui nie de lui tout ce qu'on affirmait de son immanence. Or, m\u00eame dans ces conditions, l'immanence appara\u00eet comme une th\u00e9orie-limite, corrig\u00e9e par les perspectives de l'\u00e9manation et de la cr\u00e9ation. La raison en est simple : l'immanence expressive ne peut se suffire \u00e0 elle-m\u00eame tant qu'elle ne s'accompagne pas d'une pleine conception de l'univocit\u00e9, d'une pleine affirmation de l'\u00catre univoque.\n\nL'immanence expressive vient se greffer sur le th\u00e8me de l'\u00e9manation, qui la favorise en partie, qui la refoule en partie. Mais elle n'interf\u00e8re pas moins, dans des conditions analogues, avec le th\u00e8me de la cr\u00e9ation. La Cr\u00e9ation, sous un de ses aspects, semble r\u00e9pondre au m\u00eame souci que l'\u00c9manation ; il s'agit toujours de trouver un principe de participation du c\u00f4t\u00e9 du particip\u00e9 lui-m\u00eame. On met les Id\u00e9es en Dieu : au lieu de renvoyer \u00e0 une instance inf\u00e9rieure qui les prendrait pour mod\u00e8les ou les forcerait \u00e0 descendre dans le sensible, elles ont elles-m\u00eames une valeur exemplaire. Repr\u00e9sentant l'\u00eatre infini de Dieu, elles repr\u00e9sentent aussi tout ce que Dieu veut faire et peut faire. Les Id\u00e9es en Dieu _sont des similitudes exemplaires_ ; les choses cr\u00e9\u00e9es _ex nihilo_ sont des _similitudes imitatives_. La participation est une imitation, mais le principe de l'imitation se trouve du c\u00f4t\u00e9 du mod\u00e8le ou de l'imit\u00e9 : les Id\u00e9es ne se distinguent pas par rapport \u00e0 Dieu, mais se distinguent par rapport aux choses dont elles fondent la participation possible \u00e0 Dieu lui-m\u00eame. (Malebranche d\u00e9finira les Id\u00e9es en Dieu comme principes d'expression, repr\u00e9sentant Dieu participable ou imitable.)\n\nCette voie fut trac\u00e9e par saint Augustin. Or, l\u00e0 encore, le concept d'expression surgit pour d\u00e9terminer \u00e0 la fois le statut de la similitude exemplaire et de la similitude imitative. Saint Bonaventure, \u00e0 la suite de saint Augustin, est celui qui donne le plus d'importance \u00e0 cette double d\u00e9termination : les deux similitudes forment l'ensemble concret de la similitude \u00ab expressive \u00bb. Dieu s'exprime dans son Verbe ou dans l'Id\u00e9e exemplaire ; mais l'Id\u00e9e exemplaire exprime la multiplicit\u00e9 des choses cr\u00e9ables et cr\u00e9\u00e9es. Tel est le paradoxe de l'expression comme telle : intrins\u00e8que et \u00e9ternelle, elle est une par rapport \u00e0 ce qui s'exprime, multiple par rapport \u00e0 l'exprim\u00e917. L'expression est comme une radiation qui nous conduit de Dieu, qui s'exprime, aux choses exprim\u00e9es. \u00c9tant elle-m\u00eame exprimante (et non exprim\u00e9e), elle s'\u00e9tend \u00e9galement \u00e0 tout, sans limitation, comme l'essence divine elle-m\u00eame. Nous retrouvons un principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9 d'apr\u00e8s lequel saint Bonaventure nie toute hi\u00e9rarchie entre les Id\u00e9es telles qu'elles sont en Dieu. En effet, la th\u00e9orie d'une similitude expressive implique une certaine immanence. Les id\u00e9es sont en Dieu ; donc les choses sont en Dieu, d'apr\u00e8s leurs similitudes exemplaires. Mais ne faut-il pas encore que les choses elles-m\u00eames soient en Dieu, comme imitations ? N'y a-t-il pas une certaine inh\u00e9rence de la copie au mod\u00e8le18 ? On ne peut \u00e9chapper \u00e0 cette cons\u00e9quence qu'en maintenant une conception strictement analogique de l'\u00eatre. (Saint Bonaventure lui-m\u00eame oppose constamment la similitude expressive et la similitude univoque ou d'univocation.)\n\nLa plupart des auteurs invoqu\u00e9s pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment se rattachent aux deux traditions \u00e0 la fois : \u00e9manation et imitation, cause \u00e9manative et cause exemplaire, Pseudo-Denys et saint Augustin. Mais l'important, c'est que ces deux voies se rejoignent dans le concept d'expression. On le voit d\u00e9j\u00e0 chez Scot \u00c9rig\u00e8ne, qui forge une philosophie de l'expression tant\u00f4t \u00ab similitudinaire \u00bb, tant\u00f4t \u00ab \u00e9manative \u00bb. _L'\u00e9manation nous m\u00e8ne \u00e0 une expression-explication. La cr\u00e9ation nous m\u00e8ne \u00e0 une expression-similitude._ Et l'expression, en effet, a ce double aspect : d'une part elle est miroir, mod\u00e8le et ressemblance ; d'autre part germe, arbre et rameau. Mais jamais ces m\u00e9taphores n'aboutissent. L'id\u00e9e d'expression se trouve refoul\u00e9e d\u00e8s qu'elle est suscit\u00e9e. C'est que les th\u00e8mes de la cr\u00e9ation ou de l'\u00e9manation ne peuvent pas se passer d'un minimum de transcendance, qui emp\u00eache l'\u00ab expressionnisme \u00bb d'aller jusqu'au bout de l'immanence qu'il implique. L'immanence est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment le vertige philosophique, ins\u00e9parable du concept d'expression (double immanence de l'expression dans ce qui s'exprime, et de l'exprim\u00e9 dans l'expression).\n\nLa signification du spinozisme nous semble la suivante : affirmer l'immanence comme principe ; d\u00e9gager l'expression de toute subordination \u00e0 l'\u00e9gard d'une cause \u00e9manative ou exemplaire. _L'expression elle-m\u00eame cesse d'\u00e9maner, comme de ressembler_. Or, un tel r\u00e9sultat ne peut \u00eatre obtenu que dans une perspective d'univocit\u00e9. Dieu est cause de toutes choses au m\u00eame sens que cause de soi ; il produit comme il existe formellement, ou comme il se comprend objectivement. Il produit donc les choses dans les formes m\u00eames qui constituent sa propre essence, et les id\u00e9es dans l'id\u00e9e de sa propre essence. Mais les m\u00eames attributs qui constituent formellement l'essence de Dieu contiennent toutes les essences formelles de modes, l'id\u00e9e de l'essence de Dieu comprend toutes les essences objectives ou toutes les id\u00e9es. Les choses en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral sont des modes de l'\u00eatre divin, c'est-\u00e0-dire impliquent les m\u00eames attributs que ceux qui constituent la nature de cet \u00eatre. En ce sens, toute similitude est d'univocation, se d\u00e9finissant par la pr\u00e9sence d'une qualit\u00e9 commune \u00e0 la cause et \u00e0 l'effet. Les choses produites ne sont pas des imitations, pas plus que les id\u00e9es ne sont des mod\u00e8les. M\u00eame l'id\u00e9e de Dieu n'a rien d'exemplaire, \u00e9tant elle-m\u00eame produite dans son \u00eatre formel. Inversement, les id\u00e9es n'imitent pas les choses. Dans leur \u00eatre formel elles suivent de l'attribut pens\u00e9e ; et si elles sont repr\u00e9sentatives, c'est seulement dans la mesure o\u00f9 elles participent \u00e0 une puissance absolue de penser qui, par elle-m\u00eame est \u00e9gale \u00e0 la puissance absolue de produire ou d'agir. Ainsi toute similitude imitative ou exemplaire est exclue du rapport expressif. Dieu s'exprime dans les formes qui constituent son essence, comme dans l'Id\u00e9e qui r\u00e9fl\u00e9chit cette essence. L'expression se dit \u00e0 la fois de l'\u00eatre et du conna\u00eetre. Mais seul l'\u00eatre univoque, seule la connaissance univoque est expressive. La substance et les modes, la cause et les effets ne sont et ne sont connus que par les formes communes qui constituent actuellement l'essence de l'une, et qui contiennent actuellement l'essence des autres.\n\nC'est pourquoi Spinoza oppose deux domaines, toujours confondus dans les traditions pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes : celui de l'expression, et de la connaissance expressive, seule ad\u00e9quate ; celui des signes, et de la connaissance par signes, par apophase ou par analogie. Spinoza distingue diff\u00e9rentes sortes de signes : des signes indicatifs, qui nous font conclure \u00e0 quelque chose d'apr\u00e8s l'\u00e9tat de notre corps ; des signes imp\u00e9ratifs, qui nous font saisir des lois comme lois morales ; des signes de r\u00e9v\u00e9lation, qui nous font eux-m\u00eames ob\u00e9ir et qui, tout au plus, nous d\u00e9couvrent certains \u00ab propres \u00bb de Dieu. Mais, de toutes fa\u00e7ons, la connaissance par signes n'est jamais expressive, et reste du premier genre. L'indication n'est pas une expression, mais un \u00e9tat confus d'enveloppement dans lequel l'id\u00e9e reste impuissante \u00e0 s'expliquer ou \u00e0 exprimer sa propre cause. L'imp\u00e9ratif n'est pas une expression, mais une impression confuse qui nous fait croire que les vraies expressions de Dieu, les lois de la nature, sont autant de commandements. La r\u00e9v\u00e9lation n'est pas une expression, mais une culture de l'inexprimable, une connaissance confuse et relative par laquelle nous pr\u00eatons \u00e0 Dieu des d\u00e9terminations analogues aux n\u00f4tres (Entendement, Volont\u00e9), quitte \u00e0 sauver la sup\u00e9riorit\u00e9 de Dieu dans une \u00e9minence en tous genres (l'Un sur\u00e9minent, etc.). Gr\u00e2ce \u00e0 l'univocit\u00e9, Spinoza donne un contenu positif \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e d'expression, l'opposant aux trois sortes de signes. L'opposition des expressions et des signes est une des th\u00e8ses fondamentales du spinozisme.\n\nEncore fallait-il lib\u00e9rer l'expression de toute trace d'\u00e9manation. Le n\u00e9o-platonisme tirait une partie de sa force de la th\u00e8se suivante : que la production ne se fait pas par composition (addition d'esp\u00e8ce au genre, r\u00e9ception d'une forme dans une mati\u00e8re), mais par distinction et diff\u00e9renciation. Mais le n\u00e9o-platonisme se trouvait pris dans des exigences diverses : il fallait que la distinction f\u00fbt produite \u00e0 partir de l'Indistinct ou de l'absolument Un, et pourtant qu'elle f\u00fbt actuelle ; il fallait qu'elle f\u00fbt actuelle, et pourtant non num\u00e9rique. Ces exigences expliquent les efforts du n\u00e9o-platonisme pour d\u00e9finir l'\u00e9tat de distinctions indistinctes, de divisions indivises, de pluralit\u00e9s implurifiables. Spinoza, au contraire, trouve une autre voie dans sa th\u00e9orie des distinctions. En rapport avec l'univocit\u00e9, l'id\u00e9e d'une distinction formelle, c'est-\u00e0-dire d'une distinction r\u00e9elle qui n'est pas et ne peut pas \u00eatre num\u00e9rique, lui permet de concilier imm\u00e9diatement l'unit\u00e9 ontologique de la substance avec la pluralit\u00e9 qualitative des attributs. Loin d'\u00e9maner d'une Unit\u00e9 \u00e9minente, les attributs r\u00e9ellement distincts constituent l'essence de la substance absolument une. La substance n'est pas comme l'Un dont proc\u00e9derait une distinction paradoxale ; les attributs ne sont pas des \u00e9manations. L'unit\u00e9 de la substance et la distinction des attributs sont des corr\u00e9latifs qui constituent l'expression dans son ensemble. La distinction des attributs ne fait qu'un avec la composition qualitative d'une substance ontologiquement une ; la substance se distingue en une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs, qui sont comme ses formes actuelles ou ses qualit\u00e9s composantes. Avant toute production, il y a donc une distinction, mais cette distinction est aussi bien composition de la substance elle-m\u00eame.\n\nIl est vrai que la production des modes se fait par diff\u00e9renciation. Mais il s'agit alors d'une diff\u00e9renciation purement quantitative. Si la distinction r\u00e9elle n'est jamais num\u00e9rique, inversement la distinction num\u00e9rique est essentiellement modale. Sans doute le nombre convient-il mieux aux \u00eatres de raison qu'aux modes eux-m\u00eames. Reste que la distinction modale est quantitative, m\u00eame si le nombre exprime mal la nature de cette quantit\u00e9. On le voit bien dans la conception spinoziste de la participation19. Les th\u00e9ories de l'\u00e9manation et de la cr\u00e9ation s'accordaient pour refuser \u00e0 la participation tout sens mat\u00e9riel. Au contraire, chez Spinoza, c'est le principe m\u00eame de la participation qui nous oblige \u00e0 interpr\u00e9ter celle-ci comme une participation mat\u00e9rielle et quantitative. Participer, c'est avoir part, \u00eatre une part. Les attributs sont comme des qualit\u00e9s dynamiques auxquelles correspond la puissance absolue de Dieu. Un mode dans son essence est toujours un certain degr\u00e9, une certaine quantit\u00e9 d'une qualit\u00e9. Par-l\u00e0 m\u00eame il est, dans l'attribut qui le contient, comme une partie de la puissance de Dieu. \u00c9tant des formes communes, les attributs sont les conditions sous lesquelles la substance poss\u00e8de une toute-puissance identique \u00e0 son essence, sous lesquelles aussi les modes poss\u00e8dent une partie de cette puissance identique \u00e0 leur essence. La puissance de Dieu s'exprime ou s'explique modalement, mais seulement par et dans cette diff\u00e9renciation quantitative. C'est pourquoi dans le spinozisme l'homme perd tous les privil\u00e8ges qu'il devait \u00e0 une pr\u00e9tendue qualit\u00e9 propre, et qui lui appartenaient seulement du point de vue d'une participation imitative. Les modes se distinguent quantitativement : chaque mode exprime ou explique l'essence de Dieu, pour autant que cette essence s'explique elle-m\u00eame par l'essence du mode, c'est-\u00e0-dire se divise suivant la quantit\u00e9 correspondant \u00e0 ce mode20.\n\nLes modes d'un m\u00eame attribut ne se distinguent pas par leur rang, par leur proximit\u00e9 ou leur \u00e9loignement de Dieu. Ils se distinguent quantitativement, par la quantit\u00e9 ou capacit\u00e9 de leur essence respective qui participe toujours directement \u00e0 la substance divine. Sans doute une hi\u00e9rarchie semble subsister chez Spinoza entre le mode infini imm\u00e9diat, le mode fini m\u00e9diat et les modes finis. Mais Spinoza rappelle constamment que _Dieu n'est jamais, \u00e0 proprement parler, cause \u00e9loign\u00e9e_21. Dieu, consid\u00e9r\u00e9 sous tel attribut, est cause prochaine du mode infini imm\u00e9diat correspondant. Quant au mode infini que Spinoza appelle m\u00e9diat, il d\u00e9coule de l'attribut d\u00e9j\u00e0 modifi\u00e9 ; _mais la premi\u00e8re modification n'intervient pas comme une cause interm\u00e9diaire dans un syst\u00e8me d'\u00e9manations_ , elle se pr\u00e9sente comme la modalit\u00e9 sous laquelle Dieu lui-m\u00eame produit en lui-m\u00eame la seconde modification. Si nous consid\u00e9rons les essences de modes finis, nous voyons qu'elles ne forment pas un syst\u00e8me hi\u00e9rarchique o\u00f9 les moins puissantes d\u00e9pendraient des plus puissantes, mais une collection actuellement infinie, un syst\u00e8me d'implications mutuelles o\u00f9 chaque essence convient avec toutes les autres, et o\u00f9 toutes les essences sont comprises dans la production de chacune. Ainsi Dieu produit directement chaque essence avec toutes les autres. Enfin, les modes existants eux-m\u00eames ont Dieu pour cause directe. Sans doute un mode existant fini renvoie-t-il \u00e0 autre chose que l'attribut ; il trouve une cause dans un autre mode existant ; celui-ci \u00e0 son tour dans un autre, \u00e0 l'infini. Mais, pour chaque mode, Dieu est la puissance qui d\u00e9termine la cause \u00e0 avoir tel effet. Jamais nous n'entrons dans une r\u00e9gression \u00e0 l'infini ; il suffit de consid\u00e9rer un mode avec sa cause pour arriver directement \u00e0 Dieu comme au principe qui d\u00e9termine cette cause \u00e0 avoir tel effet. C'est en ce sens que Dieu n'est jamais cause \u00e9loign\u00e9e, m\u00eame des modes existants. D'o\u00f9 la c\u00e9l\u00e8bre formule spinoziste \u00ab en tant que... \u00bb. C'est toujours Dieu qui produit directement, mais sous des modalit\u00e9s diverses : en tant qu'il est infini, en tant qu'il est modifi\u00e9 d'une modification elle-m\u00eame infinie ; en tant qu'il est affect\u00e9 d'une modification particuli\u00e8re. \u00c0 la hi\u00e9rarchie des \u00e9manations se substitue une hi\u00e9rarchie des modalit\u00e9s en Dieu lui-m\u00eame ; mais, sous chaque modalit\u00e9, Dieu s'exprime imm\u00e9diatement, ou produit directement ses effets. C'est pourquoi tout effet est en Dieu et reste en Dieu, c'est pourquoi Dieu lui-m\u00eame est pr\u00e9sent dans chacun de ses effets.\n\n _La substance s'exprime d'abord en soi-m\u00eame_. Cette premi\u00e8re expression est formelle ou qualitative. La substance s'exprime dans les attributs formellement distincts, qualitativement distincts, r\u00e9ellement distincts ; chaque attribut exprime l'essence de la substance. On retrouve ici le double mouvement de la complication et de l'explication : la substance \u00ab complique \u00bb les attributs, chaque attribut explique l'essence de la substance, la substance s'explique par tous les attributs. Cette premi\u00e8re expression, avant toute production, est comme la constitution de la substance elle-m\u00eame. Appara\u00eet ici la premi\u00e8re application d'un principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9 : non seulement la substance est \u00e9gale \u00e0 tous les attributs, mais tout attribut est \u00e9gal aux autres, aucun n'est sup\u00e9rieur ou inf\u00e9rieur. _La substance s'exprime pour soi-m\u00eame_. Elle s'exprime dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, qui comprend tous les attributs. Dieu ne s'exprime pas, ne s'explique pas sans se comprendre. Cette seconde expression est objective. Elle implique un nouvel usage du principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9 : la puissance de penser, qui correspond \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, est \u00e9gale \u00e0 la puissance d'exister, qui correspond aux attributs. L'id\u00e9e de Dieu (le Fils ou le Verbe) a un statut complexe : objectivement \u00e9gale \u00e0 la substance, elle n'est qu'un produit dans son \u00eatre formel. Aussi nous conduit-elle \u00e0 une troisi\u00e8me expression : _La substance se r\u00e9-exprime, les attributs s'expriment \u00e0 leur tour dans les modes_. Cette expression est la production des modes eux-m\u00eames : Dieu produit comme il se comprend ; il ne se comprend pas sans produire une infinit\u00e9 de choses, sans comprendre aussi tout ce qu'il produit. Dieu produit dans ces m\u00eames attributs qui constituent son essence, il pense tout ce qu'il produit dans cette m\u00eame id\u00e9e qui comprend son essence. Ainsi tous les modes sont expressifs, et les id\u00e9es qui correspondent \u00e0 ces modes. Les attributs \u00ab compliquent \u00bb les essences de modes, et s'expliquent par elles, comme l'Id\u00e9e de Dieu comprend toutes les id\u00e9es et s'explique par elles. Cette troisi\u00e8me expression est quantitative. Aussi aura-t-elle deux formes, comme la quantit\u00e9 elle-m\u00eame : intensive dans les essences de modes, extensive quand les modes passent \u00e0 l'existence. Le principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9 trouve ici sa derni\u00e8re application : non pas que les modes soient \u00e9gaux \u00e0 la substance elle-m\u00eame, mais la sup\u00e9riorit\u00e9 de la substance n'entra\u00eene aucune \u00e9minence. Les modes sont pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment expressifs en tant qu'ils impliquent les m\u00eames formes qualitatives que celles qui constituent l'essence de la substance.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  PLOTIN, VI, 6, IV, \u00a7 2, 27-32 : \u00ab Nous [c'est-\u00e0-dire les Platoniciens], nous posons l'\u00eatre dans le sensible, puis nous mettons _l\u00e0-bas_ ce qui devrait \u00eatre partout ; alors, imaginant le sensible comme quelque chose de grand, nous nous demandons comment cette nature qui est l\u00e0-bas peut venir s'\u00e9tendre dans une chose aussi grande. Mais en fait, ce que l'on nomme grand est petit ; et ce que l'on croit petit est grand, puisque tout entier il arrive le premier pr\u00e8s de chaque partie du sensible... \u00bb Plotin souligne ici la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de renverser le probl\u00e8me platonicien, et de partir du particip\u00e9, et m\u00eame de ce qui fonde la participation dans le particip\u00e9.\n\n2.  Cf. PLOTIN, VI, 7, \u00a7 17, 3-6. La th\u00e9orie de l'Imparticipable, du donateur et du don, est constamment d\u00e9velopp\u00e9e et approfondie par Proclus et par Damascius, dans leurs commentaires du Parm\u00e9nide.\n\n3.  Sur la Cause ou Raison qui \u00ab reste en soi \u00bb pour produire, et sur l'importance de ce th\u00e8me chez Plotin, cf. R. ARNOU, _Praxis et Theoria_ , Alcan, 1921, pp. 8-12.\n\n4.  Le _Court Trait\u00e9_ d\u00e9finit la cause immanente comme agissant _en elle-m\u00eame_ (I, ch. 2, 24). Par l\u00e0 elle est semblable \u00e0 une cause \u00e9manative, et Spinoza rapproche les deux dans son \u00e9tude des cat\u00e9gories de la cause ( _CT_ , I, ch. 3, 2). M\u00eame dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , il emploiera _effluere_ pour indiquer la mani\u00e8re dont les modes suivent de la substance (I, 17, sc.) ; et dans la lettre 43, \u00e0 Osten (III, p. 161) _omnia necessario a Dei natura emanare._ Spinoza semble en retrait sur une distinction traditionnelle qu'il conna\u00eet bien : on dit que la cause immanente a une causalit\u00e9 qui se distingue de son existence, tandis que la causalit\u00e9 \u00e9manative ne se distingue pas de l'existence de la cause (cf. HEEREBOORD, _Meletemata philosophica_ , t. II, p. 229). Mais, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, Spinoza ne peut pas accepter cette diff\u00e9rence-l\u00e0.\n\n5.  PLOTIN, V, II, \u00a7 1, 5.\n\n6.  PLOTIN, V, 5, \u00a7 4. Sans doute y a-t-il, selon Plotin, une forme commune \u00e0 toutes choses ; mais c'est une forme de finalit\u00e9, la forme du Bien, qui doit s'interpr\u00e9ter en un sens analogique.\n\n7.  Cf. \u00c9. GILSON, _L'\u00catre et l'essence_ , Vrin, 1948, p. 42 : \u00ab Dans une doctrine de l'\u00catre, l'inf\u00e9rieur n'est qu'en vertu de l'\u00eatre du sup\u00e9rieur. Dans une doctrine de l'Un, c'est au contraire un principe g\u00e9n\u00e9ral que l'inf\u00e9rieur n'est qu'en vertu de ce que le sup\u00e9rieur n'est pas ; en effet le sup\u00e9rieur ne donne jamais que ce qu'il n'a pas, puisque, pour pouvoir donner cette chose, il faut qu'il soit au-dessus d'elle. \u00bb\n\n8.  M. de GANDILLAC a analys\u00e9 ce th\u00e8me dans _La Philosophie de Nicolas de Cues_ , Aubier, 1942.\n\n9.  PLOTIN, V, 1, \u00a7 7, 30.\n\n10.  PLOTIN, VI, 6, \u00a7 9. Le terme _exelittein_ (expliquer, d\u00e9velopper) a une grande importance chez Plotin et ses successeurs, au niveau d'une th\u00e9orie de l'\u00catre et de l'Intelligence.\n\n11.  Cf. PLOTIN, VI, 2, \u00a7 11, 15 : \u00ab Une chose peut n'avoir pas moins d'\u00eatre qu'une autre, tout en ayant moins d'unit\u00e9. \u00bb\n\n12.  Bo\u00e8ce applique \u00e0 l'\u00catre \u00e9ternel les termes _comprehendere, complectiri_ (cf. _Consolation de la philosophie_ , prose 6). Le couple de substantifs _complicatio \u2013 explicatio_ , ou d'adverbes _complicative \u2013 explicative_ , prend une grande importance chez les commentateurs de Bo\u00e8ce, et notamment dans l'\u00e9cole de Chartres au XIIe si\u00e8cle. Mais c'est surtout avec Nicolas de Cues et avec Bruno que ces notions acqui\u00e8rent un statut philosophique rigoureux : cf. M. de GANDILLAC, _op. cit._\n\n13.  Nicolas de CUES, _Docte Ignorance_ , II, ch. 3.\n\n14.  Sur la cat\u00e9gorie de l'expression chez Eckhart, cf. LOSSKY, _Th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative et connaissance de Dieu chez ma\u00eetre Eckhart_ (Vrin, 1960).\n\n15.  PLOTIN, III, 8, \u00a7 8. Et V, 3 \u00a7 10 : \u00ab Ce qui s'explique est multiple \u00bb.\n\n16.  PLOTIN, VI, 8, \u00a7 18, 18 : \u00ab Le centre se manifeste \u00e0 travers les rayons, tel qu'il est, tel qu'il est expliqu\u00e9, mais sans s'expliquer soi-m\u00eame. \u00bb\n\n17.  Saint Bonaventure d\u00e9veloppe une triade de l'expression, qui comprend la V\u00e9rit\u00e9 qui s'exprime, la chose exprim\u00e9e, l'expression m\u00eame : _In hac autem expressione est tria intelligere, scilicet ipsam veritatem, ipsam expressionem et ipsam rem. Veritas exprimens una sola est et re et ratione ; ipsae autem res quae exprimuntur habent multiformitatem vel actualem vel possibilem ; expressio vero, secundum id quod est, nihil aliud est quam ipsa veritas ; sed secundum id ad quod est, tenet se ex parte rerum quae exprimuntur_ ( _De Scienta Christi_ , Opera omnia, V, 14 a). Sur les mots \u00ab exprimer \u00bb, \u00ab expression \u00bb chez saint Augustin et saint Bonaventure, cf. \u00c9. GILSON, _La Philosophie de saint Bonaventure_ (Vrin, 3e \u00e9d.), pp. 124-125.\n\n18.  C'est en ce sens que Nicolas de CUES remarque : \u00ab Il faut bien que l'image soit contenue dans son mod\u00e8le, sans quoi elle ne serait pas v\u00e9ritablement image... Le mod\u00e8le par cons\u00e9quent est dans toutes les images, et en lui sont toutes les images. Ainsi aucune image n'est ni plus ni moins que le mod\u00e8le. Et c'est pourquoi toutes les images sont images d'un unique mod\u00e8le \u00bb (\u00ab Le Jeu de la boule \u00bb, _\u0152uvres choisies_ , Aubier, p. 530).\n\n19.  Le mot et la notion de Participation (participation \u00e0 la nature de Dieu, \u00e0 la puissance de Dieu) forment un th\u00e8me constant de l' _\u00c9thique_ et des _Lettres._\n\n20.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 4, dem.\n\n21.  Chaque fois que Spinoza parle de \u00ab cause derni\u00e8re ou \u00e9loign\u00e9e \u00bb, il pr\u00e9cise que la formule ne doit pas \u00eatre prise \u00e0 la lettre : cf. _CT_ , I, ch. 3, 2 ; _\u00c9_ , I, 28, sc.\n\n# TROISI\u00c8ME PARTIE\n\n# TH\u00c9ORIE DU MODE FINI\n\n## CHAPITRE XII\n\n## L'ESSENCE DE MODE :\n\n## PASSAGE DE L'INFINI AU FINI\n\nOn retrouve chez Spinoza l'identit\u00e9 classique de l'attribut et de la qualit\u00e9. Les attributs sont des qualit\u00e9s \u00e9ternelles et infinies : c'est en ce sens qu'ils sont indivisibles. L'\u00e9tendue est indivisible, en tant que qualit\u00e9 substantielle ou attribut. Chaque attribut est indivisible en tant que qualit\u00e9. Mais aussi chaque attribut-qualit\u00e9 a une quantit\u00e9 infinie, qui, elle, est divisible sous certaines conditions. Cette quantit\u00e9 infinie d'un attribut forme une mati\u00e8re, mais une mati\u00e8re seulement modale. Un attribut se divise donc modalement, non pas r\u00e9ellement. Il a des parties qui se distinguent modalement : des parties modales, non pas r\u00e9elles ou substantielles. Ceci est valable pour l'\u00e9tendue comme pour les autres attributs : \u00ab N'y a-t-il pas des parties dans l'\u00e9tendue avant qu'il y ait des modes ? En aucune fa\u00e7on, dis-je1. \u00bb\n\nMais il appara\u00eet dans l' _\u00c9thique_ que le mot \u00ab partie \u00bb doit \u00eatre compris de deux fa\u00e7ons. Tant\u00f4t il s'agit de parties de puissance, c'est-\u00e0-dire de parties intrins\u00e8ques ou intensives, v\u00e9ritables degr\u00e9s, degr\u00e9s de puissance ou d'intensit\u00e9. Ainsi les essences de modes se d\u00e9finissent comme des degr\u00e9s de puissance (Spinoza retrouve une longue tradition scolastique, selon laquelle _modus intrinsecus = gradus = intensio_ )2. Mais, tant\u00f4t aussi, il s'agit de parties extrins\u00e8ques ou extensives, ext\u00e9rieures les unes aux autres, agissant du dehors les unes sur les autres. C'est ainsi que les corps les plus simples sont les ultimes divisions modales extensives de l'\u00e9tendue. (On \u00e9vitera de croire que l'extension soit un privil\u00e8ge de l'\u00e9tendue : les modes de l'\u00e9tendue se d\u00e9finissent essentiellement par des degr\u00e9s de puissance, et inversement un attribut comme la pens\u00e9e a lui-m\u00eame des parties modales extensives, des id\u00e9es qui correspondent aux corps les plus simples3.)\n\nTout se passe donc comme si chaque attribut \u00e9tait affect\u00e9 de deux quantit\u00e9s elles-m\u00eames infinies, mais divisibles sous certaines conditions, chacune \u00e0 sa mani\u00e8re : une quantit\u00e9 intensive, qui se divise en parties intensives ou en degr\u00e9s ; une quantit\u00e9 extensive, qui se divise en parties extensives. On ne s'\u00e9tonnera donc pas que, outre l'infini qualitatif des attributs qui se rapportent \u00e0 la substance, Spinoza fasse allusion \u00e0 deux infinis quantitatifs proprement modaux. Il \u00e9crit, dans la lettre \u00e0 Meyer : \u00ab Certaines choses sont (infinies) par la vertu de la cause dont elles d\u00e9pendent, et toutefois, quand on les con\u00e7oit abstraitement, elles peuvent \u00eatre divis\u00e9es en parties et \u00eatre consid\u00e9r\u00e9es comme finies ; _certaines autres_ enfin peuvent \u00eatre dites infinies ou, si vous pr\u00e9f\u00e9rez, ind\u00e9finies, parce qu'elles ne peuvent \u00eatre \u00e9gal\u00e9es par aucun nombre, bien qu'on puisse les concevoir comme plus grandes ou plus petites4. \u00bb Mais alors beaucoup de probl\u00e8mes se posent : En quoi consistent ces deux infinis ? Comment et sous quelles conditions se laissent-ils diviser en parties ? Quels sont leurs rapports, et quels sont les rapports de leurs parties respectives ?\n\nQu'est-ce que Spinoza appelle une essence de mode, essence particuli\u00e8re ou singuli\u00e8re ? Sa th\u00e8se se r\u00e9sume ainsi : les essences de modes ne sont ni des possibilit\u00e9s logiques, ni des structures math\u00e9matiques, ni des entit\u00e9s m\u00e9taphysiques, mais des r\u00e9alit\u00e9s physiques, des _res physicae_. Spinoza veut dire que l'essence, en tant qu'essence, a une existence. _Une essence de mode a une existence qui ne se confond pas avec l'existence du mode correspondant._ Une essence de mode existe, elle est r\u00e9elle et actuelle, m\u00eame si n'existe pas actuellement le mode dont elle est l'essence. D'o\u00f9 la conception que Spinoza se fait du mode non-existant : celui-ci n'est jamais quelque chose de possible, mais un objet dont l'id\u00e9e est n\u00e9cessairement comprise dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, comme son essence est n\u00e9cessairement contenue dans un attribut5. L'id\u00e9e d'un mode inexistant est donc le corr\u00e9lat objectif n\u00e9cessaire d'une essence de mode. Toute essence est essence de quelque chose ; une essence de mode est l'essence de quelque chose qui doit \u00eatre con\u00e7u dans l'entendement infini. De l'essence elle-m\u00eame, on ne dira pas qu'elle est un possible ; on ne dira pas davantage que le mode non-existant tende, en vertu de son essence, \u00e0 passer \u00e0 l'existence. Sur ces deux points, l'opposition est radicale entre Spinoza et Leibniz : chez Leibniz, l'essence ou la notion individuelle est une possibilit\u00e9 logique, et ne se s\u00e9pare pas d'une certaine r\u00e9alit\u00e9 m\u00e9taphysique, c'est-\u00e0-dire d'une \u00ab exigence d'existence \u00bb, d'une tendance \u00e0 l'existence6. Il n'en est pas ainsi chez Spinoza : l'essence n'est pas une possibilit\u00e9, mais poss\u00e8de une existence r\u00e9elle qui lui revient en propre ; le mode non-existant ne manque de rien et n'exige rien, mais est con\u00e7u dans l'entendement de Dieu comme le corr\u00e9lat de l'essence r\u00e9elle. Ni r\u00e9alit\u00e9 m\u00e9taphysique ni possibilit\u00e9 logique, _l'essence de mode est pure r\u00e9alit\u00e9 physique._\n\nC'est pourquoi les essences de modes n'ont pas moins une cause efficiente que les modes existants. \u00ab Dieu n'est pas seulement cause efficiente de l'existence des choses, mais encore de leur essence7. \u00bb Lorsque Spinoza montre que l'essence d'un mode n'enveloppe pas l'existence, certes il veut dire d'abord que l'essence n'est pas cause de l'existence du mode. Mais il veut dire aussi que l'essence n'est pas cause de sa propre existence8.\n\nNon pas qu'il y ait une distinction r\u00e9elle entre l'essence et _sa propre_ existence ; la distinction de l'essence et de l'existence est suffisamment fond\u00e9e d\u00e8s qu'on accorde que l'essence a une cause elle-m\u00eame distincte. Alors, en effet, l'essence existe n\u00e9cessairement, mais elle existe en vertu de sa cause (et non par soi). On reconna\u00eet ici le principe d'une th\u00e8se c\u00e9l\u00e8bre de Duns Scot et, plus lointainement, d'Avicenne : l'existence accompagne n\u00e9cessairement l'essence, mais en vertu de la cause de celle-ci ; elle n'est donc pas incluse ou envelopp\u00e9e dans l'essence ; elle s'y ajoute. Elle ne s'y ajoute pas comme un acte r\u00e9ellement distinct, mais seulement comme une sorte de d\u00e9termination ultime qui r\u00e9sulte de la cause de l'essence9. En un mot, l'essence a toujours l'existence qu'elle m\u00e9rite en vertu de sa cause. C'est pourquoi, chez Spinoza, s'unissent les deux propositions suivantes : _Les essences ont une existence ou r\u00e9alit\u00e9 physique ; Dieu est cause efficiente des essences._ L'existence de l'essence ne fait qu'un avec l'\u00eatre-caus\u00e9 de l'essence. Donc on ne confondra pas la th\u00e9orie spinoziste avec une th\u00e9orie cart\u00e9sienne en apparence analogue : lorsque Descartes dit que Dieu produit m\u00eame les essences, il veut dire que Dieu n'est assujetti \u00e0 aucune loi, qu'il cr\u00e9e tout, m\u00eame le possible. Spinoza veut dire au contraire que les essences ne sont pas des possibles, mais qu'elles ont une existence pleinement actuelle qui leur revient en vertu de leur cause. Les essences de modes ne peuvent \u00eatre assimil\u00e9es \u00e0 des possibles que dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous les consid\u00e9rons abstraitement, c'est-\u00e0-dire o\u00f9 nous les s\u00e9parons de la cause qui les pose comme des choses r\u00e9elles ou existantes.\n\nSi toutes les essences _conviennent_ , c'est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce qu'elles ne sont pas causes les unes des autres, mais, toutes ont Dieu pour cause. Quand nous les consid\u00e9rons concr\u00e8tement, les rapportant \u00e0 la cause dont elles d\u00e9pendent, nous les posons toutes ensemble, coexistantes et convenantes10. Toutes les essences conviennent par l'existence ou r\u00e9alit\u00e9 qui r\u00e9sulte de leur cause. Une essence ne peut \u00eatre s\u00e9par\u00e9e des autres qu'abstraitement, quand on la consid\u00e8re ind\u00e9pendamment du principe de production qui les comprend toutes. C'est pourquoi les essences forment un syst\u00e8me total, un ensemble actuellement infini. De cet ensemble on dira, comme dans la _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer_ , qu'il est infini par sa cause. Nous devons donc demander : Comment les essences de modes se distinguent-elles, elles qui sont ins\u00e9parables les unes des autres ? Comment sont-elles singuli\u00e8res, alors qu'elles forment un ensemble infini ? Ce qui revient \u00e0 demander : En quoi consiste la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 physique des essences en tant que telles ? On sait que ce probl\u00e8me, \u00e0 la fois de l'individualit\u00e9 et de la r\u00e9alit\u00e9, soul\u00e8ve beaucoup de difficult\u00e9s dans le spinozisme.\n\nIl ne semble pas que Spinoza ait eu d\u00e8s le d\u00e9but une solution claire, ni m\u00eame une claire position du probl\u00e8me. Deux textes c\u00e9l\u00e8bres du _Court Trait\u00e9_ soutiennent que, tant que les modes eux-m\u00eames n'existent pas, leurs essences ne se distinguent pas de l'attribut qui les contient, pas davantage ne se distinguent les unes des autres ; qu'elles n'ont donc en elles-m\u00eames aucun principe d'individualit\u00e911. L'individuation se ferait seulement par l'existence du mode, non par son essence. (Pourtant le _Court Trait\u00e9_ a d\u00e9j\u00e0 besoin de l'hypoth\u00e8se d'essences de modes singuli\u00e8res en elles-m\u00eames, et utilise pleinement cette hypoth\u00e8se.)\n\nMais peut-\u00eatre les deux textes du _Court Trait\u00e9_ sont-ils ambigus, plut\u00f4t qu'ils n'excluent radicalement toute singularit\u00e9 et toute distinction des essences en tant que telles. Car le premier texte semble dire ceci : Tant qu'un mode n'existe pas, son essence existe seulement comme contenue _dans_ l'attribut ; or l'id\u00e9e de l'essence ne peut pas avoir elle-m\u00eame une distinction qui ne serait pas dans la nature ; elle ne peut donc pas repr\u00e9senter le mode non-existant comme s'il se distinguait _de_ l'attribut et des autres modes. De m\u00eame le second texte : Tant qu'un mode n'existe pas, l'id\u00e9e de son essence ne peut pas envelopper une existence distincte ; tant que la muraille est toute blanche, on ne peut rien appr\u00e9hender qui se distingue d'elle ou qui se distingue en elle. (M\u00eame dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , cette th\u00e8se n'est pas abandonn\u00e9e : tant qu'un mode n'existe pas, son essence est contenue dans l'attribut, son id\u00e9e est comprise dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu ; cette id\u00e9e ne peut donc pas envelopper une existence distincte, ni se distinguer des autres id\u00e9es)12.\n\nEn tout ceci, \u00ab se distinguer \u00bb s'oppose brutalement \u00e0 \u00ab \u00eatre contenu \u00bb. \u00c9tant seulement contenues dans l'attribut, les essences de modes ne s'en distinguent pas. _La distinction est donc prise au sens de distinction extrins\u00e8que._ L'argumentation est la suivante. Les essences de modes sont contenues dans l'attribut ; tant qu'un mode n'existe pas, aucune distinction extrins\u00e8que n'est possible entre son essence et l'attribut, ni entre son essence et les autres essences ; donc aucune id\u00e9e ne peut repr\u00e9senter ou appr\u00e9hender les essences de modes comme des parties extrins\u00e8ques de l'attribut, ni comme des parties ext\u00e9rieures les unes aux autres. Cette th\u00e8se peut para\u00eetre \u00e9trange, puisqu'elle suppose inversement que la distinction extrins\u00e8que ne r\u00e9pugne pas aux modes existants, et m\u00eame est exig\u00e9e par eux. Nous remettons \u00e0 plus tard l'analyse de ce point. Remarquons seulement que le mode existant a une dur\u00e9e ; et pour autant qu'il dure, il cesse d'\u00eatre simplement contenu dans l'attribut, comme son id\u00e9e cesse d'\u00eatre simplement comprise dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu13. C'est par la dur\u00e9e (et aussi, dans le cas des modes de l'\u00e9tendue, par la figure et par le lieu) que les modes existants ont une individuation proprement extrins\u00e8que.\n\nTant que la muraille est blanche, aucune figure ne se distingue d'elle ni en elle. C'est-\u00e0-dire : dans cet \u00e9tat, la qualit\u00e9 n'est pas affect\u00e9e par quelque chose qui se distinguerait d'elle extrins\u00e8quement. Mais la question subsiste de savoir s'il n'y a pas un autre type de distinction modale, comme un principe intrins\u00e8que d'individuation. Bien plus, tout laisse penser qu'une individuation par l'existence du mode est insuffisante. Nous ne pouvons distinguer les choses existantes que dans la mesure o\u00f9 leurs essences sont suppos\u00e9es distinctes ; de m\u00eame, toute distinction extrins\u00e8que semble bien supposer une distinction intrins\u00e8que pr\u00e9alable. Il est donc probable qu'une essence de mode est singuli\u00e8re en elle-m\u00eame, m\u00eame quand le mode correspondant n'existe pas. Mais comment ? Revenons \u00e0 Duns Scot : la blancheur, dit-il, a des intensit\u00e9s variables ; celles-ci ne s'ajoutent pas \u00e0 la blancheur comme une chose \u00e0 une autre chose, comme une figure s'ajoute \u00e0 la muraille sur laquelle on la trace ; les degr\u00e9s d'intensit\u00e9 sont des d\u00e9terminations intrins\u00e8ques, des modes intrins\u00e8ques de la blancheur, qui reste univoquement la m\u00eame sous quelque modalit\u00e9 qu'on la consid\u00e8re14.\n\nIl semble bien qu'il en soit ainsi chez Spinoza : les essences de modes sont des modes intrins\u00e8ques ou des quantit\u00e9s intensives. L'attribut-qualit\u00e9 reste univoquement ce qu'il est, contenant tous les degr\u00e9s qui l'affectent sans en modifier la raison formelle ; les essences de modes se distinguent donc de l'attribut comme l'intensit\u00e9 de la qualit\u00e9, et se distinguent entre elles comme les divers degr\u00e9s d'intensit\u00e9. Nous pouvons penser que, sans d\u00e9velopper explicitement cette th\u00e9orie, Spinoza s'oriente vers l'id\u00e9e d'une distinction ou d'une singularit\u00e9 propre aux essences de modes en tant que telles. La diff\u00e9rence des \u00eatres (essences de modes) est \u00e0 la fois intrins\u00e8que et purement quantitative ; car la quantit\u00e9 dont il s'agit ici, c'est la quantit\u00e9 intensive. Seule une distinction quantitative des \u00eatres se concilie avec l'identit\u00e9 qualitative de l'absolu. Mais cette distinction quantitative n'est pas une apparence, c'est une diff\u00e9rence interne, une diff\u00e9rence d'intensit\u00e9. Si bien que chaque \u00eatre fini doit \u00eatre dit _exprimer l'absolu_ , suivant la quantit\u00e9 intensive qui en constitue l'essence, c'est-\u00e0-dire suivant son degr\u00e9 de puissance15. L'individuation chez Spinoza n'est ni qualitative ni extrins\u00e8que, elle est quantitative-intrins\u00e8que, intensive. En ce sens, il y a bien une distinction des essences de modes, \u00e0 la fois par rapport aux attributs qui les contiennent et les unes par rapport aux autres. Les essences de modes ne se distinguent pas de mani\u00e8re extrins\u00e8que, \u00e9tant contenues dans l'attribut ; elles n'en ont pas moins un type de distinction ou de singularit\u00e9 qui leur est propre, dans l'attribut qui les contient.\n\nLa quantit\u00e9 intensive est une quantit\u00e9 infinie, le syst\u00e8me des essences est une s\u00e9rie actuellement infinie. Il s'agit d'un infini \u00ab par la cause \u00bb. C'est en ce sens que l'attribut contient, c'est-\u00e0-dire complique toutes les essences de modes ; il les contient comme la s\u00e9rie infinie des degr\u00e9s qui correspondent \u00e0 sa quantit\u00e9 intensive. Or on voit bien que cet infini, en un sens, n'est pas divisible : on ne peut pas le diviser en parties extensives ou extrins\u00e8ques, sauf par abstraction. (Mais par abstraction, nous s\u00e9parons les essences de leur cause et de l'attribut qui les contient, nous les consid\u00e9rons comme de simples possibilit\u00e9s logiques, nous leur retirons toute r\u00e9alit\u00e9 physique). En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, les essences de modes sont donc ins\u00e9parables, elles se d\u00e9finissent par leur convenance totale. Mais elles n'en sont pas moins singuli\u00e8res ou particuli\u00e8res, et distinctes les unes des autres par une distinction intrins\u00e8que. Dans leur syst\u00e8me concret, toutes les essences sont comprises dans la production de chacune : non seulement les essences de degr\u00e9 inf\u00e9rieur, mais aussi de degr\u00e9 sup\u00e9rieur, puisque la s\u00e9rie est actuellement infinie. Pourtant, dans ce syst\u00e8me concret, chaque essence est produite comme un degr\u00e9 irr\u00e9ductible, n\u00e9cessairement appr\u00e9hend\u00e9 comme unit\u00e9 singuli\u00e8re. Tel est le syst\u00e8me de la \u00ab complication \u00bb des essences.\n\nLes essences de modes sont bien les parties d'une s\u00e9rie infinie. Mais en un sens tr\u00e8s sp\u00e9cial : parties intensives ou intrins\u00e8ques. On \u00e9vitera de donner des essences particuli\u00e8res spinozistes une interpr\u00e9tation leibnizienne. Les essences particuli\u00e8res ne sont pas des microcosmes. Elles ne sont pas toutes contenues dans chacune, mais toutes sont contenues dans la production de chacune. Une essence de mode est une _pars intensiva_ , non pas une _pars totalis_16. Comme telle, elle a un pouvoir expressif, mais ce pouvoir expressif doit \u00eatre compris d'une mani\u00e8re tr\u00e8s diff\u00e9rente de celle de Leibniz. Car le statut des essences de modes renvoie \u00e0 un probl\u00e8me proprement spinoziste, dans la perspective d'une substance absolument infinie. Ce probl\u00e8me est celui du passage de l'infini au fini. La substance est comme l'identit\u00e9 ontologique absolue de toutes les qualit\u00e9s, la puissance absolument infinie, puissance d'exister sous toutes les formes et de penser toutes les formes ; les attributs sont les formes ou qualit\u00e9s infinies, comme telles indivisibles. Le fini n'est donc ni substantiel ni qualitatif. Mais il n'est pas davantage apparence : il est modal, c'est-\u00e0-dire quantitatif. Chaque qualit\u00e9 substantielle a une quantit\u00e9 modale-intensive, elle-m\u00eame infinie, qui se divise actuellement en une infinit\u00e9 de modes intrins\u00e8ques. Ces modes intrins\u00e8ques, contenus tous ensemble dans l'attribut, sont les parties intensives de l'attribut lui-m\u00eame. Par-l\u00e0 m\u00eame, ils sont les parties de la puissance de Dieu, sous l'attribut qui les contient. C'est en ce sens, d\u00e9j\u00e0, que nous avions vu que les modes d'un attribut divin participaient n\u00e9cessairement \u00e0 la puissance de Dieu : leur essence m\u00eame est une partie de la puissance de Dieu, c'est-\u00e0-dire un degr\u00e9 de puissance ou partie intensive. L\u00e0 encore, la r\u00e9duction des cr\u00e9atures \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat de modes appara\u00eet comme la condition sous laquelle leur essence est puissance, c'est-\u00e0-dire partie irr\u00e9ductible de la puissance de Dieu. Ainsi les modes dans leur essence sont expressifs : ils expriment l'essence de Dieu, chacun selon le degr\u00e9 de puissance qui constitue son essence. L'individuation du fini chez Spinoza ne va pas du genre ou de l'esp\u00e8ce \u00e0 l'individu, du g\u00e9n\u00e9ral au particulier ; elle va de la qualit\u00e9 infinie \u00e0 la quantit\u00e9 correspondante, qui se divise en parties irr\u00e9ductibles, intrins\u00e8ques ou intensives.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, 19, note 6.\n\n2.  Le probl\u00e8me de l'intensit\u00e9 ou du degr\u00e9 joue un r\u00f4le important, notamment aux XIIIe et XIVe si\u00e8cles : une qualit\u00e9 peut-elle, sans changer de raison formelle ou d'essence, \u00eatre affect\u00e9e par des degr\u00e9s divers ? Et ces affections appartiennent-elles \u00e0 l'essence elle-m\u00eame, ou seulement \u00e0 l'existence ? La th\u00e9orie du mode intrins\u00e8que ou du degr\u00e9 est particuli\u00e8rement d\u00e9velopp\u00e9e dans le scotisme.\n\n3.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 15, prop. et dem.\n\n4.  _Lettre 12, \u00e0 Meyer_ (III, p. 42).\n\n5.  _\u00c9_ , II, 8, prop. et cor. (Et I, 8, sc. 2 : nous avons des id\u00e9es vraies des modifications non-existantes, parce que \u00ab leur essence est comprise en une autre chose, de telle sorte qu'elles peuvent \u00eatre con\u00e7ues par cette chose \u00bb.)\n\n6.  LEIBNIZ, _De l'origine radicale des choses_ : \u00ab Il y a dans les choses possibles, c'est-\u00e0-dire dans la possibilit\u00e9 m\u00eame ou l'essence, quelque exigence d'existence ou, pour ainsi dire, quelque pr\u00e9tention \u00e0 l'existence, et pour le renfermer en un mot, l'essence tend d'elle-m\u00eame \u00e0 l'existence. \u00bb\n\n7.  _\u00c9_ , I, 26, prop.\n\n8.  En _\u00c9_ , I, 24, prop. et dem., Spinoza dit que \u00ab l'essence des choses produites par Dieu n'enveloppe pas l'existence \u00bb. C'est-\u00e0-dire : l'essence d'une chose n'enveloppe pas l'existence de cette chose. Mais, dans le corollaire de I, 24, il ajoute : \u00ab Soit que les choses existent, soit qu'elles n'existent pas, toutes les fois que nous portons notre attention sur leur essence, nous trouvons qu'elle n'enveloppe ni l'existence ni la dur\u00e9e ; par cons\u00e9quent _leur essence ne peut \u00eatre cause ni de sa propre existence ni de sa propre dur\u00e9e (neque suae existentiae neque suae durationis)_ \u00bb. Les traducteurs, semble-t-il, font un contresens \u00e9tonnant lorsqu'ils font dire \u00e0 Spinoza : \u00ab Par cons\u00e9quent leur essence (l'essence des choses) ne peut \u00eatre cause ni de _leur_ existence ni de _leur_ dur\u00e9e. \u00bb M\u00eame si cette version \u00e9tait possible, ce qu'elle n'est absolument pas, on ne comprendrait plus ce que le corollaire apporte de nouveau, par rapport \u00e0 la d\u00e9monstration. Sans doute ce contresens est-il provoqu\u00e9 par l'allusion \u00e0 la dur\u00e9e. Comment Spinoza pourrait-il parler de la \u00ab dur\u00e9e \u00bb de l'essence, puisque l'essence ne dure pas ? Mais, que l'essence ne dure pas, on ne le sait pas encore en I, 24. Et m\u00eame quand Spinoza l'aura dit, il lui arrivera encore d'employer ce mot dur\u00e9e d'une mani\u00e8re tr\u00e8s g\u00e9n\u00e9rale, en un sens litt\u00e9ralement inexact : cf. V, 20 sc. L'ensemble de I, 24, nous para\u00eet donc s'organiser ainsi : 1o) l'essence d'une chose produite n'est pas cause de l'existence de la chose (d\u00e9monstration) ; 2o) mais elle n'est pas davantage cause de sa propre existence en tant qu'essence (corollaire) ; 3o) _d'o\u00f9_ I, 25, Dieu est cause, m\u00eame de l'essence des choses.\n\n9.  Dans des pages d\u00e9finitives, \u00e0 propos d'Avicenne et de Duns Scot, \u00c9. Gilson a montr\u00e9 comment la distinction de l'essence et de l'existence n'\u00e9tait pas n\u00e9cessairement une distinction r\u00e9elle (cf. _L'\u00catre et l'essence_ , Vrin, 1948, p. 134, p. 159).\n\n10.  Sur la convenance des essences, cf. _\u00c9_ , I, 17, sc.\n\n11.  a) _CT_ , App. II, 1 : \u00ab Ces modes, en tant qu'ils n'existent pas r\u00e9ellement, sont n\u00e9anmoins tous compris dans leurs attributs ; et comme il n'y a entre les attributs aucune sorte d'in\u00e9galit\u00e9, non plus qu'entre les essences des modes, il ne peut y avoir dans l'Id\u00e9e aucune distinction, puisqu'elle ne serait pas dans la nature. Mais si quelques-uns de ces modes rev\u00eatent leur existence particuli\u00e8re et se distinguent ainsi en quelque mani\u00e8re de leurs attributs (parce que l'existence particuli\u00e8re qu'ils ont dans l'attribut est alors sujet de leur essence), alors une distinction se produit entre les essences des modes, et par suite aussi entre leurs essences objectives qui sont n\u00e9cessairement contenues dans l'Id\u00e9e. \u00bb\n\nb) _CT_ , II, ch. 20, 4, note 3 : \u00ab En tant que, en d\u00e9signant une chose, on con\u00e7oit l'essence sans l'existence, l'id\u00e9e de l'essence ne peut \u00eatre consid\u00e9r\u00e9e comme quelque chose de particulier ; cela est possible seulement quand l'existence est donn\u00e9e avec l'essence, et cela parce que, alors, existe un objet qui auparavant n'existait pas. Si par exemple la muraille est toute blanche, on ne distingue en elle ni ceci ni cela. \u00bb\n\n12.  _\u00c9_ , II, 8, prop. et sc.\n\n13.  _\u00c9_ , II, 8, cor. : \u00ab Lorsqu'on dit que des choses singuli\u00e8res existent, non seulement en tant qu'elles sont comprises dans les attributs de Dieu, mais encore en tant qu'elles sont dites durer, leurs id\u00e9es aussi enveloppent l'existence par laquelle on dit qu'elles durent. \u00bb (Et II, 8, sc. : Lorsqu'on trace effectivement certains des c\u00f4t\u00e9s d'angles droits compris dans le cercle, \u00ab alors leurs id\u00e9es existent aussi, non seulement en tant qu'elles sont comprises dans l'id\u00e9e du cercle, mais encore en tant qu'elles enveloppent l'existence de ces c\u00f4t\u00e9s d'angles droits ; ce qui fait qu'elles se distinguent des autres id\u00e9es des autres c\u00f4t\u00e9s d'angles droits. \u00bb\n\n14.  Cf. Duns SCOT, _Opus exoniense_ , I, D3, q. 1 et 2, a. 4, n. 17. Le rapprochement de Spinoza avec Duns Scot ne porte ici que sur le th\u00e8me des quantit\u00e9s intensives ou des degr\u00e9s. La th\u00e9orie de l'individuation, que nous exposons dans le paragraphe suivant comme celle de Spinoza, est tout \u00e0 fait diff\u00e9rente de celle de Duns Scot.\n\n15.  On trouverait chez Fichte et chez Schelling un probl\u00e8me analogue, de la _diff\u00e9rence quantitative et de la forme de quantitabilit\u00e9_ dans leurs rapports avec la _manifestation_ de l'absolu (cf. Lettre de Fichte \u00e0 Schelling, octobre 1801, _Fichte's Leben_ II, Zweite Abth. IV, 28, p. 357).\n\n16.  On a parfois donn\u00e9, des essences selon Spinoza, une interpr\u00e9tation exag\u00e9r\u00e9ment leibnizienne. Ainsi HUAN, _Le Dieu de Spinoza_ , 1914, p. 277 : les essences \u00ab embrassent chacune d'un point de vue particulier l'infinit\u00e9 du r\u00e9el et pr\u00e9sentent dans leur nature intime une image microscopique de l'Univers entier. \u00bb\n\n## CHAPITRE XIII\n\n## L'EXISTENCE DU MODE\n\nNous savons que l'existence d'une essence de mode n'est pas l'existence du mode correspondant. Une essence de mode existe, sans que le mode lui-m\u00eame existe : l'essence n'est pas cause de l'existence du mode. L'existence du mode a donc pour cause un autre mode, lui-m\u00eame existant1. Mais cette r\u00e9gression \u00e0 l'infini ne nous dit nullement en quoi consiste l'existence. Toutefois, s'il est vrai qu'un mode existant \u00ab a besoin \u00bb d'un grand nombre d'autres modes existants, nous pouvons d\u00e9j\u00e0 pressentir qu'il est lui-m\u00eame compos\u00e9 d'un grand nombre de parties, parties qui lui viennent d'ailleurs, qui commencent \u00e0 lui appartenir d\u00e8s qu'il existe en vertu d'une cause ext\u00e9rieure, qui se renouvellent sous le jeu des causes, tant qu'il existe, et qui cessent de lui appartenir d\u00e8s qu'il meurt2. Alors, nous pouvons dire en quoi consiste l'existence du mode : _exister, c'est avoir actuellement un tr\u00e8s grand nombre de parties (plurimae)._ Ces parties composantes sont ext\u00e9rieures \u00e0 l'essence du mode, ext\u00e9rieures les unes aux autres : ce sont des parties extensives.\n\nNous croyons que, chez Spinoza, il n'y a pas de mode existant qui ne soit actuellement compos\u00e9 d'un tr\u00e8s grand nombre de parties extensives. Il n'y a pas de corps existant, dans l'\u00e9tendue, qui ne soit compos\u00e9 d'un tr\u00e8s grand nombre de corps simples. Et l'\u00e2me, en tant qu'elle est l'id\u00e9e d'un corps existant, est elle-m\u00eame compos\u00e9e d'un grand nombre d'id\u00e9es qui correspondent aux parties composantes du corps, et qui se distinguent extrins\u00e8quement3. Bien plus, les facult\u00e9s que l'\u00e2me poss\u00e8de en tant qu'elle est l'id\u00e9e d'un corps existant sont de v\u00e9ritables parties extensives, qui cessent d'appartenir \u00e0 l'\u00e2me d\u00e8s que le corps cesse lui-m\u00eame d'exister4. Voici donc, semble-t-il, les premiers \u00e9l\u00e9ments du sch\u00e9ma spinoziste : une essence de mode est un degr\u00e9 d\u00e9termin\u00e9 d'intensit\u00e9, un degr\u00e9 de puissance irr\u00e9ductible ; le mode existe, lorsqu'il poss\u00e8de actuellement un tr\u00e8s grand nombre de parties extensives qui correspondent \u00e0 son essence ou degr\u00e9 de puissance.\n\nQue signifie \u00ab un tr\u00e8s grand nombre \u00bb ? La _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer_ donne une indication pr\u00e9cieuse : il y a des grandeurs qu'on appelle infinies ou, mieux, ind\u00e9finies, parce qu'\u00ab on ne peut en d\u00e9terminer ou repr\u00e9senter les parties par aucun nombre \u00bb ; \u00ab elles ne peuvent \u00eatre \u00e9gal\u00e9es \u00e0 aucun nombre, mais d\u00e9passent tout nombre assignable5 \u00bb. Nous reconnaissons ici le second infini modal-quantitatif dont parle la lettre \u00e0 Meyer : il s'agit d'un infini proprement extensif. Spinoza donne un exemple g\u00e9om\u00e9trique : la somme des in\u00e9galit\u00e9s de distance comprises entre deux cercles non concentriques d\u00e9passe tout nombre assignable. Cette quantit\u00e9 infinie a trois caract\u00e8res originaux, n\u00e9gatifs, il est vrai, plut\u00f4t que positifs. En premier lieu, elle n'est pas constante ni \u00e9gale \u00e0 elle-m\u00eame : on peut la concevoir comme plus grande ou plus petite (Spinoza pr\u00e9cisera dans un autre texte : \u00ab Dans l'espace total compris entre deux cercles ayant des centres diff\u00e9rents, nous concevons une multitude de parties deux fois plus grande que dans la moiti\u00e9 de cet espace, et cependant le nombre des parties, aussi bien de la moiti\u00e9 de l'espace total, est plus grand que tout nombre assignable \u00bb)6. L'infini extensif est donc un infini n\u00e9cessairement con\u00e7u comme plus ou moins grand. Mais en second lieu, il n'est pas \u00e0 proprement parler \u00ab illimit\u00e9 \u00bb : il se rapporte en effet \u00e0 quelque chose de limit\u00e9 ; il y a un maximum et un minimum des distances comprises entre les deux cercles non concentriques, ces distances se rapportent \u00e0 un espace parfaitement limit\u00e9 et d\u00e9termin\u00e9. Enfin, en troisi\u00e8me lieu, cette quantit\u00e9 n'est pas infinie par la multitude de ses parties ; car, \u00ab si l'infinit\u00e9 se concluait de la multitude des parties, nous ne pourrions en concevoir une multitude plus grande, leur multitude devant \u00eatre plus grande que toute multitude donn\u00e9e \u00bb. Ce n'est pas par le nombre de ses parties que cette quantit\u00e9 est infinie ; au contraire, c'est parce qu'elle est toujours infinie qu'elle se divise en une multitude de parties qui d\u00e9passent tout nombre.\n\nOn remarquera que le nombre n'exprime jamais ad\u00e9quatement la nature des modes. Il peut \u00eatre utile d'identifier la quantit\u00e9 modale et le nombre ; c'est m\u00eame n\u00e9cessaire, par opposition \u00e0 la substance et aux qualit\u00e9s substantielles. Nous l'avons fait chaque fois que nous avons pr\u00e9sent\u00e9 la distinction modale comme une distinction num\u00e9rique. Mais en v\u00e9rit\u00e9 le nombre n'est qu'une mani\u00e8re d'imaginer la quantit\u00e9, ou une fa\u00e7on de penser abstraitement les modes. Les modes, en tant qu'ils d\u00e9coulent de la substance et des attributs, sont autre chose que des fant\u00f4mes de l'imagination, autre chose aussi que des \u00eatres de raison. Leur \u00eatre est quantitatif, non pas num\u00e9rique \u00e0 proprement parler. Si l'on consid\u00e8re le premier infini modal, l'infini intensif, il n'est pas divisible en parties extrins\u00e8ques. Les parties intensives qu'il comporte intrins\u00e8quement, les essences de modes, ne sont pas s\u00e9parables les unes des autres ; le nombre les s\u00e9pare les unes des autres, et du principe de leur production, donc les saisit abstraitement. Si l'on consid\u00e8re le second infini, l'infini extensif, sans doute est-il divisible en parties extrins\u00e8ques qui composent les existences. Mais ces parties extrins\u00e8ques vont toujours par ensembles infinis ; leur somme d\u00e9passe toujours tout nombre assignable. Quand nous les expliquons par le nombre, nous laissons \u00e9chapper l'\u00eatre r\u00e9el des modes existants, nous ne saisissons que des fictions7.\n\nLa _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer_ , entre autres choses, expose donc le cas sp\u00e9cial d'un infini modal extensif, variable et divisible. Cette exposition est importante en elle-m\u00eame ; Leibniz, \u00e0 ce propos, f\u00e9licitait Spinoza d'avoir \u00e9t\u00e9 plus loin que beaucoup de math\u00e9maticiens8. Mais, du point de vue du spinozisme lui-m\u00eame, la question est : \u00e0 quoi se rapporte cette th\u00e9orie du deuxi\u00e8me infini modal, dans l'ensemble du syst\u00e8me ? La r\u00e9ponse nous semble \u00eatre : l'infini extensif concerne l'existence des modes. En effet, lorsque Spinoza affirme, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , que le mode compos\u00e9 a un _tr\u00e8s grand nombre_ de parties, il entend bien par \u00ab tr\u00e8s grand nombre \u00bb un nombre inassignable, c'est-\u00e0-dire une multitude qui d\u00e9passe tout nombre. L'essence d'un tel mode est elle-m\u00eame un degr\u00e9 de puissance ; mais quel que soit le degr\u00e9 de puissance qui constitue son essence, le mode n'existe pas sans avoir actuellement une infinit\u00e9 de parties. Si l'on consid\u00e8re un mode dont le degr\u00e9 de puissance est double du pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent, son existence est compos\u00e9e d'une infinit\u00e9 de parties, elle-m\u00eame double de la pr\u00e9c\u00e9dente. \u00c0 la limite, il y a une infinit\u00e9 d'ensembles infinis, un ensemble de tous les ensembles, qui est comme l'ensemble de toutes les choses existantes, simultan\u00e9es et successives. Bref, les caract\u00e8res que Spinoza, dans la _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer_ , assigne au deuxi\u00e8me infini modal, ne trouvent leur application que dans la th\u00e9orie du mode existant telle qu'elle appara\u00eet dans l' _\u00c9thique_ ; et l\u00e0, ils trouvent leur pleine application. C'est le mode existant qui a une infinit\u00e9 de parties (un tr\u00e8s grand nombre) ; c'est son essence ou degr\u00e9 de puissance qui forme toujours une limite (un maximum et un minimum) ; c'est l'ensemble des modes existants, non seulement simultan\u00e9s mais successifs, qui constitue le plus grand infini, lui-m\u00eame divisible en infinis plus ou moins grands9.\n\nEncore faudrait-il savoir d'o\u00f9 viennent ces parties extensives, et en quoi elles consistent. Ce ne sont pas des atomes : non seulement les atomes impliquent le vide, mais une infinit\u00e9 d'atomes ne pourrait pas se rapporter \u00e0 quelque chose de limit\u00e9. Ce ne sont pas non plus les termes virtuels d'une divisibilit\u00e9 \u00e0 l'infini : ceux-ci ne pourraient pas former des infinis plus ou moins grands. De l'hypoth\u00e8se de l'infinie divisibilit\u00e9 \u00e0 celle des atomes, on tombe \u00ab de Charybde en Scylla10 \u00bb. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, les ultimes parties extensives sont les parties infiniment petites actuelles d'un infini lui-m\u00eame actuel. La position d'un infini actuel dans la Nature n'a pas moins d'importance chez Spinoza que chez Leibniz : il n'y a aucune contradiction entre l'id\u00e9e de parties ultimes absolument simples et le principe d'une division infinie, pour peu que cette division soit _actuellement infinie_11. Nous devons penser qu'un attribut n'a pas seulement une quantit\u00e9 intensive, mais une quantit\u00e9 extensive infinie. C'est cette quantit\u00e9 extensive qui est actuellement divis\u00e9e en une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives. Ces parties sont des parties extrins\u00e8ques, agissant du dehors les unes sur les autres et se distinguant du dehors. _Toutes ensemble et sous tous leurs rapports, elles forment un univers infiniment changeant, correspondant \u00e0 la toute-puissance de Dieu. Mais sous tel ou tel rapport d\u00e9termin\u00e9, elles forment des ensembles infinis plus ou moins grands, qui correspondent \u00e0 tel ou tel degr\u00e9 de puissance, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00e0 telle ou telle essence de mode._ Elles vont toujours par infinit\u00e9s : une infinit\u00e9 de parties correspondent toujours \u00e0 un degr\u00e9 de puissance, si petit soit-il ; l'ensemble de l'univers correspond \u00e0 la Puissance qui comprend tous les degr\u00e9s.\n\nC'est en ce sens que nous devons comprendre l'analyse des modes de l'\u00e9tendue. L'attribut \u00e9tendue a une quantit\u00e9 extensive modale qui se divise actuellement en une infinit\u00e9 de corps simples. Ces corps simples sont des parties extrins\u00e8ques qui ne se distinguent les unes des autres, et ne se rapportent les unes aux autres, que par le mouvement et le repos. Mouvement et repos sont pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment la forme de la distinction extrins\u00e8que et des rapports ext\u00e9rieurs entre les corps simples. Les corps simples sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9s du dehors au mouvement ou au repos, \u00e0 l'infini, et se distinguent par le mouvement ou le repos auxquels ils sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9s. Ils se groupent toujours par ensembles infinis, _chaque ensemble \u00e9tant d\u00e9fini par un certain rapport de mouvement et de repos._ C'est sous ce rapport qu'un ensemble infini correspond \u00e0 telle essence de mode (c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00e0 tel degr\u00e9 de puissance), donc constitue dans l'\u00e9tendue l'existence du mode lui-m\u00eame. Si l'on consid\u00e8re l'ensemble de tous les ensembles infinis sous tous les rapports, on a \u00ab la somme de toutes les variations de la mati\u00e8re en mouvement \u00bb, ou \u00ab la figure de l'univers entier \u00bb sous l'attribut \u00e9tendue. Cette figure ou cette somme correspondent \u00e0 la toute-puissance de Dieu en tant que celle-ci comprend tous les degr\u00e9s de puissance ou toutes les essences de modes dans ce m\u00eame attribut de l'\u00e9tendue12.\n\nCe sch\u00e9ma para\u00eet en mesure de dissiper certaines contradictions qu'on a cru voir dans la physique de Spinoza, ou plut\u00f4t qu'on a cru voir dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , entre la physique des corps et la th\u00e9orie des essences. Ainsi Rivaud remarquait qu'un corps simple est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 au mouvement et au repos, mais toujours et seulement d\u00e9termin\u00e9 du dehors : ce corps renvoie \u00e0 un ensemble infini de corps simples. Mais alors, comment concilier cet \u00e9tat des corps simples avec le statut des essences ? \u00ab Un corps particulier, au moins un corps simple n'a donc pas d'essence \u00e9ternelle. Sa r\u00e9alit\u00e9 para\u00eet se r\u00e9sorber dans celle du syst\u00e8me infini des causes \u00bb ; \u00ab Nous cherchions une essence particuli\u00e8re, nous ne trouvons qu'une cha\u00eene infinie de causes dont nul terme ne para\u00eet avoir de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 essentielle propre \u00bb ; \u00ab Cette solution impos\u00e9e, semble-t-il, par les textes que l'on vient de citer, para\u00eet en contradiction avec les principes les plus certains du syst\u00e8me de Spinoza. Que devient alors l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 des essences, affirm\u00e9e sans restriction \u00e0 tant de reprises ? Comment un corps, si petit soit-il, si fugitif que soit son \u00eatre, peut-il exister sans une nature propre, faute de laquelle il ne pourrait ni arr\u00eater ni transmettre le mouvement qu'il re\u00e7oit ? Ce qui n'a pas d'essence du tout ne peut exister et toute essence est, par d\u00e9finition, immuable. La bulle de savon, qui existe \u00e0 un moment donn\u00e9, a n\u00e9cessairement une essence \u00e9ternelle, sans quoi elle ne serait pas13. \u00bb\n\nIl nous semble au contraire qu'il n'y a pas lieu de chercher une essence pour chaque partie extensive. Une essence est un degr\u00e9 d'intensit\u00e9. Or les parties extensives et les degr\u00e9s d'intensit\u00e9 (parties intensives) ne se correspondent nullement terme \u00e0 terme. \u00c0 tout degr\u00e9 d'intensit\u00e9, si petit soit-il, correspondent une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives, ayant entre elles et devant avoir des rapports uniquement extrins\u00e8ques. Les parties extensives vont par infinit\u00e9s plus ou moins grandes, mais toujours par infinit\u00e9 ; il n'est pas question que chacune ait une essence, puisqu'une infinit\u00e9 de parties correspondent \u00e0 la plus petite essence. La bulle de savon a bien une essence, mais non pas chaque partie de l'ensemble infini qui la compose sous un certain rapport. En d'autres termes, chez Spinoza, _il n'y a pas de mode existant qui ne soit actuellement compos\u00e9 \u00e0 l'infini_ , quelle que soit son essence ou son degr\u00e9 de puissance. Spinoza dit que les modes compos\u00e9s ont un \u00ab tr\u00e8s grand nombre \u00bb de parties ; mais ce qu'il dit du mode compos\u00e9, il faut l'entendre de tout mode existant, car il n'y a de mode existant que compos\u00e9, toute existence est par d\u00e9finition compos\u00e9e. D\u00e8s lors, dira-t-on que les parties simples extensives existent ? Dira-t-on que les corps simples existent dans l'\u00e9tendue ? Si l'on veut dire qu'ils existent un par un, ou par un nombre, l'absurdit\u00e9 est \u00e9vidente. \u00c0 strictement parler, les parties simples n'ont ni essence ni existence qui leur soient propres. Elles n'ont pas d'essence ou de nature interne ; elles se distinguent extrins\u00e8quement les unes des autres, se rapportent extrins\u00e8quement les unes aux autres. Elles n'ont pas d'existence propre, mais composent l'existence : exister, c'est avoir actuellement une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives. Par infinit\u00e9s plus ou moins grandes, elles composent, sous des rapports divers, l'existence de modes dont l'essence est d'un degr\u00e9 plus ou moins grand. Non seulement la physique de Spinoza, mais le spinozisme tout entier deviennent inintelligibles si l'on ne distingue pas ce qui revient aux essences, ce qui revient aux existences, et le type de leur correspondance qui n'est nullement terme \u00e0 terme.\n\nNous avons des \u00e9l\u00e9ments pour r\u00e9pondre \u00e0 la question : comment une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives composent-elles l'existence d'un mode ? Par exemple, un mode existe dans l'\u00e9tendue lorsqu'une infinit\u00e9 de corps simples lui appartiennent actuellement, qui correspondent \u00e0 son essence. Mais comment peuvent-elles correspondre \u00e0 son essence, ou lui appartenir ? Depuis le _Court Trait\u00e9_ , la r\u00e9ponse de Spinoza est constante : _sous un certain rapport de mouvement et de repos_. Tel mode \u00ab vient \u00e0 exister \u00bb, il passe \u00e0 l'existence, quand une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives entrent sous _tel_ rapport ; il continue d'exister tant que ce rapport est effectu\u00e9. C'est donc sous des rapports gradu\u00e9s que les parties extensives se groupent en ensembles vari\u00e9s, correspondant \u00e0 diff\u00e9rents degr\u00e9s de puissance. Des parties extensives forment un ensemble infini plus ou moins grand, en tant qu'elles entrent dans tel ou tel rapport ; sous ce rapport, elles correspondent \u00e0 telle essence de mode et composent l'existence de ce mode lui-m\u00eame ; prises sous un autre rapport, elles font partie d'un autre ensemble, correspondent \u00e0 une autre essence de mode, composent l'existence d'un autre mode. Telle est d\u00e9j\u00e0 la doctrine du _Court Trait\u00e9_ , concernant le passage des modes \u00e0 l'existence14. L' _\u00c9thique_ dit encore plus clairement : peu importe que les parties composantes d'un mode existant se renouvellent \u00e0 chaque instant ; l'ensemble demeure le m\u00eame, tant qu'il est d\u00e9fini par un rapport sous lequel ses parties quelconques appartiennent \u00e0 telle essence de mode. Le mode existant est donc sujet \u00e0 des variations consid\u00e9rables et continuelles : peu importe aussi que la r\u00e9partition du mouvement et du repos, de la vitesse et de la lenteur, change entre les parties. Tel mode continue d'exister tant que le m\u00eame rapport subsiste dans l'ensemble infini de ses parties15.\n\nIl faut donc reconna\u00eetre qu'une essence de mode (degr\u00e9 de puissance) s'exprime \u00e9ternellement dans un certain rapport gradu\u00e9. Mais le mode ne passe pas \u00e0 l'existence avant qu'une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives ne soient actuellement d\u00e9termin\u00e9es \u00e0 entrer sous ce m\u00eame rapport. Ces parties peuvent \u00eatre d\u00e9termin\u00e9es \u00e0 entrer sous un autre rapport ; elles s'int\u00e8grent alors \u00e0 un ensemble infini, plus grand ou plus petit, qui correspond \u00e0 une autre essence de mode et compose l'existence d'un autre mode. La th\u00e9orie de l'existence chez Spinoza comporte donc trois \u00e9l\u00e9ments : _l'essence singuli\u00e8re_ , qui est un degr\u00e9 de puissance ou d'intensit\u00e9 ; _l'existence particuli\u00e8re_ , toujours compos\u00e9e d'une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives ; _la forme individuelle,_ c'est-\u00e0-dire le rapport caract\u00e9ristique ou expressif, qui correspond \u00e9ternellement \u00e0 l'essence du mode, mais aussi sous lequel une infinit\u00e9 de parties se rapportent temporairement \u00e0 cette essence. Dans un mode existant, l'essence est un degr\u00e9 de puissance ; ce degr\u00e9 s'exprime dans un rapport ; ce rapport subsume une infinit\u00e9 de parties. D'o\u00f9 la formule de Spinoza : les parties, comme \u00e9tant \u00ab sous la domination d'une seule et m\u00eame nature \u00bb, oblig\u00e9es de s'ajuster les unes aux autres suivant que l'exige cette nature16 \u00bb.\n\nUne essence de mode s'exprime \u00e9ternellement dans un rapport, mais nous ne devons pas confondre l'essence et le rapport dans lequel elle s'exprime. Une essence de mode n'est pas cause de l'existence du mode lui-m\u00eame : cette proposition reprend, en termes spinozistes, un vieux principe d'apr\u00e8s lequel l'existence d'un \u00eatre fini ne d\u00e9coule pas de son essence. Mais quel est le nouveau sens de ce principe dans les perspectives de Spinoza ? Il signifie ceci : une essence de mode a beau s'exprimer dans un rapport caract\u00e9ristique, ce n'est pas elle qui d\u00e9termine une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives \u00e0 entrer sous ce rapport. (Ce n'est pas la nature simple qui \u00e9tablit par elle-m\u00eame sa domination, ni qui oblige elle-m\u00eame des parties \u00e0 s'ajuster conform\u00e9ment au rapport dans lequel elle s'exprime.) Car les parties extensives se d\u00e9terminent les unes les autres, du dehors et \u00e0 l'infini ; elles n'ont pas d'autre d\u00e9termination qu'extrins\u00e8que. Un mode passe \u00e0 l'existence, non pas en vertu de son essence, mais en vertu de lois purement m\u00e9caniques qui d\u00e9terminent une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives quelconques \u00e0 entrer sous tel rapport pr\u00e9cis, dans lequel son essence s'exprime. Un mode cesse d'exister d\u00e8s que ses parties sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9es \u00e0 entrer sous un autre rapport, correspondant \u00e0 une autre essence. Les modes passent \u00e0 l'existence, et cessent d'exister, en vertu de lois ext\u00e9rieures \u00e0 leurs essences.\n\nQuelles sont ces lois m\u00e9caniques ? Dans le cas de l'\u00e9tendue, il s'agit en derni\u00e8re instance des lois de la communication du mouvement. Si nous consid\u00e9rons l'infinit\u00e9 des corps simples, nous voyons qu'ils se groupent en ensembles infinis toujours variables. Mais l'ensemble de tous ces ensembles reste constant, cette constance \u00e9tant d\u00e9finie par la quantit\u00e9 de mouvement, c'est-\u00e0-dire par la proportion totale qui contient une infinit\u00e9 de rapports particuliers, rapports de mouvement et de repos. Les corps simples ne sont jamais s\u00e9parables d'un de ces rapports quelconques, sous lequel ils appartiennent \u00e0 un ensemble. Or, la proportion totale restant toujours constante, ces rapports se font et se d\u00e9font, suivant des lois de composition et de d\u00e9composition.\n\nSupposons deux corps compos\u00e9s ; chacun poss\u00e8de, sous un certain rapport, une infinit\u00e9 de corps simples ou de parties. Quand ils se rencontrent, il peut arriver que les deux rapports soient directement composables. Alors les parties de l'un s'ajustent aux parties de l'autre, sous un troisi\u00e8me rapport compos\u00e9 des deux pr\u00e9c\u00e9dents. Il y a ici formation d'un corps encore plus compos\u00e9 que ceux dont nous \u00e9tions partis. Dans un texte c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, Spinoza montre comment le chyle et la lymphe composent leur rapport respectif pour former, sous un troisi\u00e8me rapport, le sang17. Mais, dans des conditions plus ou moins complexes, ce processus est celui de toute naissance ou de toute formation, c'est-\u00e0-dire de tout passage \u00e0 l'existence : des parties se rencontrent sous deux rapports diff\u00e9rents ; chacun de ces rapports correspond d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e0 une essence de mode ; les deux rapports se composent de telle mani\u00e8re que les parties qui se rencontrent entrent sous un troisi\u00e8me rapport, qui correspond \u00e0 une autre essence de mode ; le mode correspondant passe alors \u00e0 l'existence. Mais il peut arriver que les deux rapports ne soient pas directement composables. Les corps qui se rencontrent, ou bien sont indiff\u00e9rents l'un \u00e0 l'autre ; ou bien l'un, sous son rapport, d\u00e9compose le rapport de l'autre, donc d\u00e9truit l'autre corps. Il en est ainsi d'un toxique ou d'un poison, qui d\u00e9truit l'homme en d\u00e9composant le sang. Il en est ainsi de l'alimentation, mais en sens inverse : l'homme force les parties du corps dont il se nourrit \u00e0 entrer sous un nouveau rapport qui convient avec le sien, mais qui suppose la destruction du rapport sous lequel ce corps existait pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment.\n\nIl y a donc des lois de composition et de d\u00e9composition de rapports qui d\u00e9terminent le passage \u00e0 l'existence des modes et aussi la fin de leur existence. Ces lois \u00e9ternelles n'affectent nullement la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 \u00e9ternelle de chaque rapport : chaque rapport a une v\u00e9rit\u00e9 \u00e9ternelle, en tant qu'une essence s'exprime en lui. Mais les lois de composition et de d\u00e9composition d\u00e9terminent les conditions sous lesquelles un rapport est effectu\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire subsume actuellement des parties extensives, ou au contraire cesse d'\u00eatre effectu\u00e9. C'est pourquoi nous ne devons surtout pas confondre les essences et les rapports, ni la loi de production des essences et la loi de composition des rapports. Ce n'est pas l'essence qui d\u00e9termine l'effectuation du rapport dans lequel elle s'exprime. Les rapports se composent et se d\u00e9composent suivant des lois qui sont les leurs. L'ordre des essences se d\u00e9finit par une convenance totale. Il n'en est pas de m\u00eame de l'ordre des rapports : sans doute tous les rapports se combinent-ils \u00e0 l'infini, mais non pas n'importe comment. N'importe quel rapport ne se compose pas avec n'importe quel autre. Ces lois de composition qui sont propres aux rapports caract\u00e9ristiques, et qui r\u00e8glent le passage des modes \u00e0 l'existence, posent de multiples probl\u00e8mes. Ces lois ne sont pas contenues dans les essences elles-m\u00eames. Spinoza pensait-il \u00e0 elles quand il parlait d\u00e9j\u00e0, dans le _Trait\u00e9 de la R\u00e9forme_ , de lois inscrites dans les attributs et dans les modes infinis \u00ab comme dans leurs vrais codes18 \u00bb ? La complexit\u00e9 de ce texte nous interdit de l'utiliser pour le moment. D'autre part, connaissons-nous ces lois, et comment ? Spinoza semble bien admettre que nous devons passer par une \u00e9tude empirique des corps pour savoir quels sont leurs rapports et comment ils se composent19. Quoi qu'il en soit, il nous suffit provisoirement de marquer l'irr\u00e9ductibilit\u00e9 d'un ordre des rapports \u00e0 l'ordre des essences elles-m\u00eames.\n\nL'existence d'un mode ne d\u00e9coule donc pas de son essence. Lorsqu'un mode passe \u00e0 l'existence, il est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 \u00e0 le faire par une loi m\u00e9canique qui compose le rapport dans lequel il s'exprime, c'est-\u00e0-dire qui contraint une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives \u00e0 entrer sous ce rapport. Chez Spinoza, le passage \u00e0 l'existence ne doit jamais \u00eatre compris comme un passage du possible au r\u00e9el : pas plus qu'une essence de mode n'est un \u00ab possible \u00bb, un mode existant n'est la r\u00e9alisation d'un possible. Les essences existent n\u00e9cessairement, en vertu de leur cause ; les modes dont elles sont les essences passent n\u00e9cessairement \u00e0 l'existence en vertu de causes qui d\u00e9terminent des parties \u00e0 entrer sous les rapports qui correspondent \u00e0 ces essences. Partout la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 comme seule modalit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre, mais cette n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 a deux \u00e9tages. Nous avons vu que la distinction d'une essence et de sa propre existence ne devait pas s'interpr\u00e9ter comme une distinction r\u00e9elle ; pas davantage, la distinction d'une essence et de l'existence du mode lui-m\u00eame. Le mode existant, c'est l'essence m\u00eame en tant qu'elle poss\u00e8de actuellement une infinit\u00e9 de parties extensives. De m\u00eame que l'essence existe en vertu de sa cause, le mode lui-m\u00eame existe en vertu de la cause qui d\u00e9termine des parties \u00e0 lui appartenir. Mais les deux formes de causalit\u00e9 que nous sommes ainsi amen\u00e9s \u00e0 consid\u00e9rer nous forcent \u00e0 d\u00e9finir deux types de position modale, deux types de distinction modale.\n\nTant que nous consid\u00e9rions les essences de modes, nous les d\u00e9finissions comme des r\u00e9alit\u00e9s intensives. Elles ne se distinguaient pas de l'attribut, elles ne se distinguaient pas les unes des autres, sauf sous un type de distinction tr\u00e8s sp\u00e9ciale (distinction intrins\u00e8que). Elles n'existaient que comme contenues dans l'attribut, leurs id\u00e9es n'existaient que comme comprises dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. Toutes les essences \u00e9taient \u00ab compliqu\u00e9es \u00bb dans l'attribut ; c'est sous cette forme qu'elles existaient, et qu'elles exprimaient l'essence de Dieu, chacune suivant son degr\u00e9 de puissance. Mais quand les modes passent \u00e0 l'existence, ils acqui\u00e8rent des parties extensives. Ils acqui\u00e8rent une grandeur et une dur\u00e9e : chaque mode dure tant que les parties restent sous le rapport qui le caract\u00e9rise. Par l\u00e0, il faut bien reconna\u00eetre que les modes existants se distinguent _extrins\u00e8quement_ de l'attribut, et se distinguent _extrins\u00e8quement_ les uns des autres. Les _Pens\u00e9es m\u00e9taphysiques_ d\u00e9finissaient \u00ab l'\u00eatre de l'existence \u00bb comme \u00ab l'essence m\u00eame des choses en dehors de Dieu \u00bb, par opposition \u00e0 \u00ab l'\u00eatre de l'essence \u00bb qui d\u00e9signait les choses telles qu'elles sont \u00ab comprises dans les attributs de Dieu20 \u00bb. Peut-\u00eatre cette d\u00e9finition correspond-elle plus qu'on ne croit \u00e0 la pens\u00e9e de Spinoza lui-m\u00eame. Elle pr\u00e9sente \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard plusieurs caract\u00e8res importants.\n\nElle nous rappelle d'abord que la distinction de l'essence et de l'existence n'est jamais une distinction r\u00e9elle. L'\u00eatre de l'essence (existence de l'essence), c'est la position de l'essence dans un attribut de Dieu. L'\u00eatre de l'existence (existence de la chose elle-m\u00eame), c'est encore une position de l'essence, mais une position extrins\u00e8que, _hors de_ l'attribut. Or, nous ne voyons pas que l' _\u00c9thique_ renonce \u00e0 cette th\u00e8se. L'existence d'une chose particuli\u00e8re, c'est la chose m\u00eame, non plus seulement en tant qu'elle est contenue dans l'attribut, non plus seulement en tant qu'elle est comprise en Dieu, mais en tant qu'elle dure, en tant qu'elle est en relation avec un certain temps et un certain lieu distincts extrins\u00e8quement21. On objectera qu'une telle conception s'oppose radicalement \u00e0 l'immanence. Car, du point de vue de l'immanence, les modes en passant \u00e0 l'existence ne cessent pas d'appartenir \u00e0 la substance et d'\u00eatre contenus en elle. Ce point est tellement \u00e9vident qu'il faut chercher plus loin. Spinoza ne dit pas que les modes existants cessent d'\u00eatre contenus dans la substance, mais qu'ils \u00ab ne sont plus seulement \u00bb contenus dans la substance ou dans l'attribut22. La difficult\u00e9 se r\u00e9sout ais\u00e9ment _si nous consid\u00e9rons que la distinction extrins\u00e8que est encore et toujours une distinction modale._ Les modes ne cessent pas d'\u00eatre des modes quand ils sont pos\u00e9s hors de l'attribut, car cette position extrins\u00e8que est purement modale et non substantielle. Si l'on nous permet un rapprochement accidentel avec Kant, on se souviendra que Kant explique que l'espace est la forme de l'ext\u00e9riorit\u00e9, mais que cette forme d'ext\u00e9riorit\u00e9 n'est pas moins int\u00e9rieure au moi que la forme d'int\u00e9riorit\u00e9 : elle pr\u00e9sente des objets comme ext\u00e9rieurs \u00e0 nous-m\u00eames et comme ext\u00e9rieurs les uns aux autres, sans aucune illusion, mais elle-m\u00eame nous est int\u00e9rieure et nous reste int\u00e9rieure23. De m\u00eame chez Spinoza, dans un tout autre contexte, \u00e0 un tout autre sujet : la quantit\u00e9 extensive n'appartient pas moins \u00e0 l'attribut que la quantit\u00e9 intensive ; mais elle est comme une forme d'ext\u00e9riorit\u00e9 proprement modale. Elle pr\u00e9sente les modes existants comme ext\u00e9rieurs \u00e0 l'attribut, comme ext\u00e9rieurs les uns aux autres. Elle n'en est pas moins contenue, ainsi que tous les modes existants, dans l'attribut qu'elle modifie. L'id\u00e9e d'une distinction modale-extrins\u00e8que ne contredit nullement le principe de l'immanence.\n\nD\u00e8s lors, que signifie cette distinction modale extrins\u00e8que ? Quand les modes font l'objet d'une position extrins\u00e8que, ils cessent d'exister sous la forme _compliqu\u00e9e_ qui est la leur tant que leurs essences sont seulement contenues dans l'attribut. Leur nouvelle existence est une _explication_ : ils expliquent l'attribut, chacun l'explique \u00ab d'une mani\u00e8re certaine et d\u00e9termin\u00e9e \u00bb. C'est-\u00e0-dire : chaque mode existant explique l'attribut sous le rapport qui le caract\u00e9rise, d'une mani\u00e8re qui se distingue extrins\u00e8quement des autres mani\u00e8res sous d'autres rapports. C'est en ce sens que le mode existant n'est pas moins expressif que l'essence de mode, mais l'est d'une autre fa\u00e7on. L'attribut ne s'exprime plus dans les essences de mode qu'il complique ou contient, conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 leurs degr\u00e9s de puissance ; il s'exprime en outre dans des modes existants, qui l'expliquent d'une mani\u00e8re certaine et d\u00e9termin\u00e9e, c'est-\u00e0-dire conform\u00e9ment aux rapports qui correspondent \u00e0 leurs essences. L'expression modale enti\u00e8re est constitu\u00e9e par ce double mouvement de la complication et de l'explication24.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _\u00c9_ , I, 28, prop. et dem.\n\n2.  L'id\u00e9e d'un grand nombre de causes ext\u00e9rieures et celle d'un grand nombre de parties composantes forment deux th\u00e8mes qui s'encha\u00eenent : Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 19, dem.\n\n3.  _\u00c9_ , II, 15, prop. et dem. C'est ce point, entre autres, qui g\u00eane Blyenbergh ( _Lettre 24, de Blyenbergh_ , III, p. 107) : l'\u00e2me, \u00e9tant un compos\u00e9, ne se dissoudrait pas moins que le corps apr\u00e8s la mort. C'est oublier que l'\u00e2me, et aussi le corps, ont une essence intensive d'une tout autre nature que leurs parties extensives.\n\n4.  Ainsi l'imagination, la m\u00e9moire, la passion : cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 21 et 34 ; et V, 40, cor. \u00ab Quant \u00e0 cette _partie_ que nous avons montr\u00e9 qui p\u00e9rit... \u00bb)\n\n5.  _Lettre 12, \u00e0 Meyer_ (III, pp. 41-42).\n\n6.  _Lettre 81, \u00e0 Tschirnhaus_ (III, p. 241). Sur cet exemple des cercles non concentriques, et la somme des \u00ab in\u00e9galit\u00e9s de distance \u00bb, cf. M. GU\u00c9ROULT, \u00ab La Lettre de Spinoza sur l'infini \u00bb, _Revue de m\u00e9taphysique et de morale_ , octobre 1966, no 4.\n\n7.  Cf. _Lettre 12, \u00e0 Meyer_ (III, pp. 40-41).\n\n8.  Leibniz avait eu connaissance de la plus grande partie de la _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer_. Il fait des critiques de d\u00e9tail ; mais, \u00e0 propos de l'infini plus ou moins grand, il commente : \u00ab Ceci, que la plupart des math\u00e9maticiens ignor\u00e8rent, et particuli\u00e8rement Cardan, est remarquablement observ\u00e9 et tr\u00e8s soigneusement inculqu\u00e9 par notre auteur. \u00bb (Cf. Gerhardt, I, p. 137, n. 21.)\n\n9.  L'exemple g\u00e9om\u00e9trique de la _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer_ (somme des in\u00e9galit\u00e9s de distance comprises entre deux cercles) n'est pas de m\u00eame nature que celui de l' _\u00c9thique_ II, 8, sc. (ensemble des c\u00f4t\u00e9s d'angles droits compris dans un cercle). Dans le premier cas, il s'agit d'illustrer _l'\u00e9tat des modes existants_ , dont les parties forment des infinis plus ou moins grands, l'ensemble de tous ces infinis correspondant \u00e0 la Figure de l'Univers. C'est pourquoi la _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer_ assimile la somme des in\u00e9galit\u00e9s de distance \u00e0 la somme des variations de la mati\u00e8re (III, p. 42). Mais dans le second cas, celui de l' _\u00c9thique_ , il s'agit d'illustrer _l'\u00e9tat des essences_ de modes telles qu'elles sont contenues dans l'attribut.\n\n10.  _Lettre 12, \u00e0 Meyer_ (III, p. 41). De m\u00eame, la _Lettre 6, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ , refuse \u00e0 la fois le progr\u00e8s \u00e0 l'infini et l'existence du vide (\u00ab De la fluidit\u00e9 \u00bb, III, p. 22.)\n\n11.  Nous ne comprenons pas pourquoi A. Rivaud, dans son \u00e9tude sur la physique de Spinoza, voyait ici une contradiction : \u00ab Comment, dans une \u00e9tendue o\u00f9 la division actuelle est infinie, parler de corps tr\u00e8s simples ! De tels corps ne peuvent \u00eatre r\u00e9els qu'au regard de notre perception. \u00bb (\u00ab La physique de Spinoza \u00bb, _Chronicon Spinozanum_ , IV, p. 32). 1o) Il n'y aurait contradiction qu'entre l'id\u00e9e de corps simples et le principe d'une divisibilit\u00e9 \u00e0 l'infini. 2o) Les corps simples ne sont r\u00e9els qu'en de\u00e7\u00e0 de toute perception possible. Car la perception n'appartient qu'\u00e0 des modes compos\u00e9s d'une infinit\u00e9 de parties, et ne saisit elle-m\u00eame que de tels compos\u00e9s. Les parties simples ne sont pas per\u00e7ues, mais appr\u00e9hend\u00e9es par le raisonnement : cf. _Lettre 6, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, p. 21).\n\n12.  L'expos\u00e9 de la physique appara\u00eet en _\u00c9_ , II, apr\u00e8s la proposition 13. (Pour \u00e9viter toute confusion, nos r\u00e9f\u00e9rences \u00e0 cet expos\u00e9 sont pr\u00e9c\u00e9d\u00e9es d'un ast\u00e9risque.) La th\u00e9orie des corps simples occupe : * axiomes 1 et 2, lemmes 1, 2 et 3, axiomes 1 et 2. Spinoza y insiste sur la d\u00e9termination purement extrins\u00e8que ; il est vrai qu'il parle de la \u00ab nature \u00bb du corps, au niveau des corps simples, mais la \u00ab nature \u00bb signifie seulement ici l'\u00e9tat pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent.\n\n13.  A. RIVAUD, _op. cit._ , pp. 32-34.\n\n14.  _CT_ , II, pr\u00e9face, note 1, \u00a7\u00a7 VII-XIV.\n\n15.  _\u00c9_ , II, * lemmes 4, 6 et 7.\n\n16.  _Lettre 32, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (III, pp. 120-121).\n\n17.  _Lettre 32, \u00e0 Oldenburg._\n\n18.  _TRE_ , 101.\n\n19.  _Lettre 30, \u00e0 Oldenburg : \u00ab .._. J'ignore comment chacune de ces parties s'accorde avec le tout, comment elle se rattache aux autres \u00bb (III, p. 119.)\n\n20.  _PM_ , I, ch. 2.\n\n21.  _\u00c9_ , II, 8, cor. : distinction entre \u00ab exister en durant \u00bb et \u00ab exister en \u00e9tant _seulement_ contenu dans l'attribut. \u00bb _\u00c9_ , V, 29, cor. : distinction entre \u00ab exister en relation avec un certain temps et un certain lieu \u00bb et \u00ab exister comme contenu en Dieu et d\u00e9coulant de la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de sa nature. \u00bb\n\n22.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 8, cor. et sc. : _non tantum... sed etiam..._\n\n23.  Cf. KANT, _Critique de la raison pure_ , 1re \u00e9dition (\u00ab critique du quatri\u00e8me paralogisme... \u00bb) : La mati\u00e8re \u00ab est une esp\u00e8ce de repr\u00e9sentations (intuitions) qu'on appelle _ext\u00e9rieures_ , non parce qu'elles se rapportent \u00e0 des objets ext\u00e9rieurs en soi, mais parce qu'elles rapportent les perceptions \u00e0 l'espace, o\u00f9 toutes choses existent les unes en dehors des autres, _tandis que l'espace lui-m\u00eame est en nous_... L'espace lui-m\u00eame, avec tous ses ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes comme repr\u00e9sentations, n'existe qu'en moi ; dans cet espace pourtant, le r\u00e9el, ou la mati\u00e8re de tous les objets de l'intuition ext\u00e9rieure m'est donn\u00e9e v\u00e9ritablement et ind\u00e9pendamment de toute fiction. \u00bb\n\n24.  Les essences de modes, en tant qu'elles sont comprises dans l'attribut, sont d\u00e9j\u00e0 des \u00ab explications \u00bb. Ainsi Spinoza parle de l'essence de Dieu en tant qu'elle _s'explique_ par l'essence de tel ou tel mode : _\u00c9_ , IV, 4, dem. Mais il y a deux r\u00e9gimes d'explication, et le mot _expliquer_ convient particuli\u00e8rement au second.\n\n## CHAPITRE XIV\n\n## QU'EST-CE QUE PEUT UN CORPS ?\n\nLa triade expressive du mode fini se pr\u00e9sente ainsi : l'essence comme degr\u00e9 de puissance ; le rapport caract\u00e9ristique dans lequel elle s'exprime ; les parties extensives subsum\u00e9es sous ce rapport, et qui composent l'existence du mode. Mais nous voyons que, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , un strict syst\u00e8me d'\u00e9quivalences nous conduit \u00e0 une seconde triade du mode fini : l'essence comme degr\u00e9 de puissance ; un certain pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 dans lequel elle s'exprime ; des affections qui remplissent \u00e0 chaque instant ce pouvoir.\n\nQuelles sont ces \u00e9quivalences ? Un mode existant poss\u00e8de actuellement un tr\u00e8s grand nombre de parties. Or, la nature des parties extensives est telle qu'elles \u00ab s'affectent \u00bb les unes les autres \u00e0 l'infini. On en conclut que le mode existant est affect\u00e9 d'un tr\u00e8s grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons. Spinoza va des parties \u00e0 leurs affections, de leurs affections aux affections du mode existant tout entier1. Les parties extensives n'appartiennent \u00e0 tel mode que sous un certain rapport. De m\u00eame, les affections d'un mode se disent en fonction d'un certain pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Un cheval, un poisson, un homme, ou m\u00eame deux hommes compar\u00e9s l'un avec l'autre, n'ont pas le m\u00eame pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 : ils ne sont pas affect\u00e9s par les m\u00eames choses, ou ne sont pas affect\u00e9s par la m\u00eame chose de la m\u00eame fa\u00e7on2. Un mode cesse d'exister quand il ne peut plus maintenir entre ses parties le rapport qui le caract\u00e9rise ; de m\u00eame, il cesse d'exister quand \u00ab il n'est plus apte \u00e0 pouvoir \u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'un grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons3 \u00bb. Bref, un rapport n'est pas s\u00e9parable d'un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Si bien que Spinoza peut consid\u00e9rer comme \u00e9quivalentes deux questions fondamentales : _Quelle est la structure_ (fabrica) _d'un corps ? Qu'est-ce que peut un corps ?_ La structure d'un corps, c'est la composition de son rapport. Ce que peut un corps, c'est la nature et les limites de son pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e94.\n\nCette seconde triade du mode fini montre bien comment le mode exprime la substance, participe de la substance et, m\u00eame, la reproduit \u00e0 sa mani\u00e8re. Dieu se d\u00e9finissait par l'identit\u00e9 de son essence et d'une puissance absolument infinie _(potentia) ;_ comme tel, il avait une _potestas_ , c'est-\u00e0-dire un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'une infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons ; ce pouvoir \u00e9tait \u00e9ternellement et n\u00e9cessairement rempli, Dieu \u00e9tant cause de toutes choses au m\u00eame sens que cause de soi. De son c\u00f4t\u00e9, le mode existant a une essence identique \u00e0 un degr\u00e9 de puissance ; comme tel, il a une aptitude \u00e0 \u00eatre affect\u00e9, un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'un tr\u00e8s grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons ; tant qu'il existe, ce pouvoir est rempli de mani\u00e8re variable, mais toujours et n\u00e9cessairement rempli sous l'action des modes ext\u00e9rieurs.\n\nQuelle est, de tous ces points de vue, la diff\u00e9rence entre le mode existant et la substance divine ? En premier lieu, on ne confondra pas \u00ab infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons \u00bb et \u00ab tr\u00e8s grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons \u00bb. Un tr\u00e8s grand nombre, c'est une infinit\u00e9, mais d'un type sp\u00e9cial : infini plus ou moins grand, qui se rapporte \u00e0 quelque chose de limit\u00e9. Dieu, au contraire, est affect\u00e9 d'une infinit\u00e9 de fa\u00e7ons : c'est un infini par la cause, puisque Dieu est cause de toutes ses affections ; c'est un infini proprement illimit\u00e9, qui comprend toutes les essences de modes et tous les modes existants.\n\nSeconde diff\u00e9rence : Dieu est cause de toutes ses affections, donc ne peut pas en p\u00e2tir. On aurait tort, en effet, de confondre affection et passion. Une affection n'est une passion que quand elle ne s'explique pas par la nature du corps affect\u00e9 : sans doute l'enveloppe-t-elle, mais elle s'explique par l'influence d'autres corps. Si nous supposons des affections qui s'expliquent enti\u00e8rement par la nature du corps affect\u00e9, ces affections sont actives, sont elles-m\u00eames des actions5. Appliquons \u00e0 Dieu le principe de cette distinction : il n'y a pas de causes ext\u00e9rieures \u00e0 Dieu ; Dieu est n\u00e9cessairement cause de toutes ses affections, toutes ses affections s'expliquent par sa nature, donc sont des actions6. Il n'en est pas de m\u00eame des modes existants. Ceux-ci n'existent pas en vertu de leur propre nature ; leur existence est compos\u00e9e de parties extensives qui sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9es et affect\u00e9es du dehors, \u00e0 l'infini. Il est donc forc\u00e9 que chaque mode existant soit affect\u00e9 par des modes ext\u00e9rieurs, qu'il subisse des changements qui ne s'expliquent pas par sa seule nature. Ses affections sont d'abord et avant tout des passions7. Spinoza remarque que l'enfance est un \u00e9tat mis\u00e9rable, mais un \u00e9tat commun o\u00f9 nous d\u00e9pendons \u00ab au plus haut degr\u00e9 des causes ext\u00e9rieures8 \u00bb. La grande question qui se pose \u00e0 propos du mode existant fini est donc : Arrivera-t-il \u00e0 des affections actives, et comment ? Cette question est \u00e0 proprement parler la question \u00ab \u00e9thique \u00bb. Mais, m\u00eame \u00e0 supposer que le mode arrive \u00e0 produire des affections actives, tant qu'il existe il ne supprimera pas en lui toute passion, mais fera seulement que ses passions n'occupent plus qu'une petite partie de lui-m\u00eame9.\n\nUne derni\u00e8re diff\u00e9rence concerne le contenu m\u00eame du mot \u00ab affection \u00bb, suivant qu'on le rapporte \u00e0 Dieu ou aux modes. Car les affections de Dieu sont les modes eux-m\u00eames, essences de modes et modes existants. Leurs id\u00e9es expriment l'essence de Dieu comme cause. Mais les affections des modes sont comme des affections au second degr\u00e9, des affections d'affections : par exemple, une affection passive que nous \u00e9prouvons n'est que l'effet d'un corps sur le n\u00f4tre. L'id\u00e9e de cette affection n'exprime pas la cause, c'est-\u00e0-dire la nature ou l'essence du corps ext\u00e9rieur : elle indique plut\u00f4t la constitution pr\u00e9sente de notre corps, donc la mani\u00e8re dont notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve rempli \u00e0 tel moment. L'affection de notre corps est seulement une image corporelle, et l'id\u00e9e d'affection telle qu'elle est dans notre esprit, une id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate ou une imagination. Nous avons encore une autre esp\u00e8ce d'affections. D'une id\u00e9e d'affection qui nous est donn\u00e9e d\u00e9coulent n\u00e9cessairement des \u00ab affects \u00bb ou sentiments _(affectus)_10. Ces sentiments sont eux-m\u00eames des affections, ou plut\u00f4t des id\u00e9es d'affections de nature originale. On \u00e9vitera de pr\u00eater \u00e0 Spinoza des th\u00e8ses intellectualistes qui ne furent jamais les siennes. En fait, une id\u00e9e que nous avons indique l'\u00e9tat actuel de la constitution de notre corps ; tant que notre corps existe, il dure et se d\u00e9finit par la dur\u00e9e ; son \u00e9tat actuel n'est donc pas s\u00e9parable d'un \u00e9tat pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent avec lequel il s'encha\u00eene dans une dur\u00e9e continue. C'est pourquoi, _\u00e0 toute id\u00e9e qui indique un \u00e9tat de notre corps est n\u00e9cessairement li\u00e9e une autre esp\u00e8ce d'id\u00e9e qui enveloppe le rapport de cet \u00e9tat avec l'\u00e9tat pass\u00e9_. Spinoza pr\u00e9cise : on ne croira pas qu'il s'agit d'une op\u00e9ration intellectuelle abstraite, par laquelle l'esprit comparerait deux \u00e9tats11. Nos sentiments, par eux-m\u00eames, sont des id\u00e9es qui enveloppent le rapport concret du pr\u00e9sent avec le pass\u00e9 dans une dur\u00e9e continue : ils enveloppent les variations d'un mode existant qui dure.\n\nLes affections donn\u00e9es d'un mode sont donc de deux sortes : \u00e9tats du corps ou id\u00e9es qui indiquent ces \u00e9tats, variations du corps ou id\u00e9es qui enveloppent ces variations. Les secondes s'encha\u00eenent avec les premi\u00e8res, varient en m\u00eame temps qu'elles : on devine comment, \u00e0 partir d'une premi\u00e8re affection, nos sentiments s'encha\u00eenent avec nos id\u00e9es, de mani\u00e8re \u00e0 remplir \u00e0 chaque instant tout notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Mais, surtout, nous sommes toujours ramen\u00e9s \u00e0 une certaine condition du mode, qui est celle de l'homme en particulier : les id\u00e9es qui lui sont donn\u00e9es d'abord sont des affections passives, des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates ou des imaginations ; les affects ou sentiments qui en d\u00e9coulent sont donc des passions, des sentiments eux-m\u00eames passifs. On ne voit pas comment un mode fini, surtout au d\u00e9but de son existence, pourrait avoir autre chose que des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates ; on ne voit pas d\u00e8s lors comment il pourrait \u00e9prouver autre chose que des sentiments passifs. Le lien des deux est bien marqu\u00e9 par Spinoza : l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate est une id\u00e9e dont nous ne sommes pas cause (elle ne s'explique pas formellement par notre puissance de comprendre) ; cette id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate est elle-m\u00eame cause (mat\u00e9rielle et efficiente) d'un sentiment ; nous ne pouvons donc pas \u00eatre cause ad\u00e9quate de ce sentiment ; or un sentiment dont nous ne sommes pas cause ad\u00e9quate est n\u00e9cessairement une passion12. Notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve donc rempli, d\u00e8s le d\u00e9but de notre existence, par des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates et des sentiments passifs.\n\nUn lien aussi profond se v\u00e9rifierait entre des id\u00e9es suppos\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates et des sentiments actifs. Une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate en nous se d\u00e9finirait formellement comme une id\u00e9e dont nous serions cause ; elle serait cause mat\u00e9rielle et efficiente d'un sentiment ; nous serions cause ad\u00e9quate de ce sentiment lui-m\u00eame ; or un sentiment dont nous sommes cause ad\u00e9quate est une action. C'est en ce sens que Spinoza peut dire : \u00ab Dans la mesure o\u00f9 notre esprit a des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates, il est n\u00e9cessairement actif en certaines choses, et dans la mesure o\u00f9 il a des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates, il est n\u00e9cessairement passif en certaines choses \u00bb ; \u00ab Les actions de l'esprit naissent des seules id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates ; et les passions d\u00e9pendent des seules id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates13. \u00bb D\u00e8s lors, la question proprement \u00e9thique se trouve li\u00e9e \u00e0 la question m\u00e9thodologique : Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 \u00eatre actifs ? Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 produire des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates ?\n\nOn peut d\u00e9j\u00e0 pressentir l'importance extr\u00eame d'un domaine de l' _\u00c9thique_ , celui des variations existentielles du mode fini, variations expressives. Ces variations sont de plusieurs sortes, et doivent s'interpr\u00e9ter \u00e0 plusieurs niveaux. Soit un mode ayant telle essence et tel pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Ses affections passives (id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates et sentiments-passions) changent constamment. Toutefois, tant que son pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve rempli par des affections passives, ce pouvoir lui-m\u00eame se pr\u00e9sente comme une _force ou puissance de p\u00e2tir._ On appelle puissance de p\u00e2tir le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, en tant qu'il se trouve actuellement rempli par des affections passives. La puissance de p\u00e2tir du corps a pour \u00e9quivalent dans l'\u00e2me la puissance d'imaginer et d'\u00e9prouver des sentiments passifs.\n\nSupposons maintenant que le mode, \u00e0 mesure qu'il dure, arrive \u00e0 remplir (au moins partiellement) son pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 par des affections actives. Sous cet aspect, ce pouvoir se pr\u00e9sente comme _force ou puissance d'agir._ La puissance de comprendre ou de conna\u00eetre est la puissance d'agir propre \u00e0 l'\u00e2me. Mais, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, _le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 reste constant, quelle que soit la proportion des affections passives et des affections actives._ Nous arrivons donc \u00e0 l'hypoth\u00e8se suivante : La proportion des affections passives et actives serait susceptible de varier, pour un m\u00eame pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Si nous arrivons \u00e0 produire des affections actives, nos affections passives diminuent d'autant. Tant que nous restons dans des affections passives, notre puissance d'agir est \u00ab emp\u00each\u00e9e \u00bb d'autant. Bref, pour une m\u00eame essence, pour un m\u00eame pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, la puissance de p\u00e2tir et la puissance d'agir seraient susceptibles de varier en raison inversement proportionnelle. Toutes deux constituent le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, dans des proportions variables14.\n\nEn second lieu, il faut faire intervenir un autre niveau de variations possibles. Car le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 ne reste pas constant toujours, ni sous tous les points de vue. En effet, Spinoza sugg\u00e8re que le rapport qui caract\u00e9rise un mode existant dans son ensemble est dou\u00e9 d'une sorte d'\u00e9lasticit\u00e9. Bien plus, sa composition passe par tant de moments, et aussi sa d\u00e9composition, qu'on peut presque dire qu'un mode change de corps ou de rapport en sortant de l'enfance, ou en entrant dans la vieillesse. Croissance, vieillissement, maladie : nous avons peine \u00e0 reconna\u00eetre un m\u00eame individu. Et encore, est-ce bien ce m\u00eame individu ? Ces changements, insensibles ou brusques, dans le rapport qui caract\u00e9rise un corps, nous les constatons aussi dans son pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, comme si pouvoir et rapport jouissaient d'une marge, d'une limite dans laquelle ils se forment et se d\u00e9forment15. Certains passages de la _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer_ prennent ici tous leur sens, qui font allusion \u00e0 l'existence d'un maximum et d'un minimum.\n\nPr\u00e9c\u00e9demment, nous avons fait comme si la puissance de p\u00e2tir et la puissance d'agir formaient deux principes distincts, dont l'exercice \u00e9tait inversement proportionnel pour un m\u00eame pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Et c'est vrai, mais seulement dans le cadre des limites extr\u00eames de ce pouvoir. C'est vrai, tant que nous consid\u00e9rons les affections abstraitement, sans consid\u00e9rer concr\u00e8tement l'essence du mode affect\u00e9. Pourquoi ? Nous sommes au seuil d'un probl\u00e8me qui trouve son d\u00e9veloppement chez Leibniz aussi bien que chez Spinoza. Ce n'est pas par hasard que Leibniz, \u00e0 sa premi\u00e8re lecture de l' _\u00c9thique_ , d\u00e9clare admirer la th\u00e9orie des affections chez Spinoza, la conception spinoziste de l'action et de la passion. Plus qu'\u00e0 une influence de Spinoza sur Leibniz, il faut penser \u00e0 une co\u00efncidence dans le d\u00e9veloppement de leurs philosophies respectives16. Cette co\u00efncidence est d'autant plus remarquable. \u00c0 un certain niveau, Leibniz pr\u00e9sente la th\u00e8se suivante : la force d'un corps, dite \u00ab force d\u00e9rivative \u00bb, est double ; elle est force d'agir et force de p\u00e2tir, force active et force passive ; la force active reste \u00ab morte \u00bb ou devient \u00ab vive \u00bb, suivant les obstacles ou les sollicitations qu'elle rencontre, enregistr\u00e9s par la force passive. Mais, \u00e0 un niveau plus profond, Leibniz demande : la force passive doit-elle \u00eatre con\u00e7ue comme distincte de la force active ? Est-elle autonome dans son principe, a-t-elle une positivit\u00e9 quelconque, affirme-t-elle quelque chose ? La r\u00e9ponse est : seule la force active est r\u00e9elle en droit, positive et affirmative. La force passive n'affirme rien, n'exprime rien sauf l'imperfection du fini. Tout se passe comme si la force active avait h\u00e9rit\u00e9 de tout ce qui est r\u00e9el, positif ou parfait dans le fini lui-m\u00eame. La force passive n'est pas une force autonome, mais la simple limitation de la force active. Elle ne serait pas une force sans la force active qu'elle limite. Elle signifie la limitation inh\u00e9rente \u00e0 la force active ; et finalement la limitation d'une force encore plus profonde, c'est-\u00e0-dire d'une _essence_ qui s'affirme et s'exprime uniquement dans la force active en tant que telle17.\n\nSpinoza aussi pr\u00e9sente une premi\u00e8re th\u00e8se : la puissance de p\u00e2tir et la puissance d'agir sont deux puissances qui varient corr\u00e9lativement, le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 restant le m\u00eame ; la puissance d'agir est morte ou vive (Spinoza dit : emp\u00each\u00e9e ou aid\u00e9e) suivant les obstacles ou les occasions qu'elle trouve du c\u00f4t\u00e9 des affections passives. Mais cette th\u00e8se, vraie physiquement, n'est pas vraie m\u00e9taphysiquement. Chez Spinoza d\u00e9j\u00e0, \u00e0 un niveau plus profond, la puissance de p\u00e2tir n'exprime rien de positif. Dans toute affection passive, il y a quelque chose d'imaginaire qui l'emp\u00eache d'\u00eatre r\u00e9elle. Nous ne sommes passifs et passionn\u00e9s qu'en raison de notre imperfection, par notre imperfection m\u00eame. \u00ab Car il est certain que l'agent agit par ce qu'il a, et que le patient p\u00e2tit par ce qu'il n'a pas \u00bb ; \u00ab Le p\u00e2tir, dans lequel l'agent et le patient sont distincts, est une imperfection palpable18. \u00bb Nous p\u00e2tissons d'une chose ext\u00e9rieure, distincte de nous-m\u00eames ; nous avons donc nous-m\u00eames une force de p\u00e2tir et une force d'agir distinctes. Mais notre force de p\u00e2tir est seulement l'imperfection, la finitude ou la limitation de notre force d'agir en elle-m\u00eame. Notre force de p\u00e2tir n' _affirme_ rien, parce qu'elle n' _exprime_ rien du tout : elle \u00ab enveloppe \u00bb seulement notre impuissance, c'est-\u00e0-dire la limitation de notre puissance d'agir. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, notre puissance de p\u00e2tir est notre impuissance, notre servitude, c'est-\u00e0-dire _le plus bas degr\u00e9 de notre puissance d'agir_ : d'o\u00f9, le titre du livre IV de l' _\u00c9thique_ , \u00ab De la servitude de l'homme \u00bb. La puissance d'imaginer est bien une puissance ou une vertu, dit Spinoza, mais le serait encore plus si elle d\u00e9pendait de notre nature, c'est-\u00e0-dire si elle \u00e9tait active, au lieu de signifier seulement la finitude ou l'imperfection de notre puissance d'agir, bref, notre impuissance19.\n\nNous ne savons pas encore comment nous arriverons \u00e0 produire des affections actives ; nous ne savons donc pas quelle est notre puissance d'agir. Et pourtant, nous pouvons dire ceci : la puissance d'agir est la seule forme r\u00e9elle, positive et affirmative d'un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Tant que notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve rempli par des affections passives, il est r\u00e9duit \u00e0 son minimum, et manifeste seulement notre finitude ou notre limitation. Tout se passe comme si, dans l'existence du mode fini, se produisait une disjonction : le n\u00e9gatif tombe du c\u00f4t\u00e9 des affections passives, les affections actives exprimant tout le positif du mode fini. En effet, les affections actives sont les seules \u00e0 remplir r\u00e9ellement et positivement le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. La puissance d'agir, \u00e0 elle seule, est identique au pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 tout entier ; la puissance d'agir, \u00e0 elle seule, exprime l'essence, et les affections actives, elles seules, affirment l'essence. Dans le mode existant, l'essence ne fait qu'un avec la puissance d'agir, la puissance d'agir ne fait qu'un avec le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9.\n\nOn voit se concilier chez Spinoza deux inspirations fondamentales. D'apr\u00e8s l'inspiration physique : un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 reste constant pour une m\u00eame essence, qu'il soit rempli par des affections actives ou des affections passives ; le mode est donc toujours aussi parfait qu'il peut l'\u00eatre. Mais d'apr\u00e8s l'inspiration \u00e9thique, le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 n'est constant que dans des limites extr\u00eames. Tant qu'il est rempli par des affections passives, il est r\u00e9duit \u00e0 son minimum ; nous restons alors imparfaits et impuissants, nous sommes en quelque sorte s\u00e9par\u00e9s de notre essence ou de notre degr\u00e9 de puissance, s\u00e9par\u00e9s de ce que nous pouvons. Il est bien vrai que le mode existant est toujours aussi parfait qu'il peut l'\u00eatre : mais seulement en fonction des affections qui appartiennent actuellement \u00e0 son essence. Il est bien vrai que les affections passives que nous \u00e9prouvons remplissent notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 ; mais elles l'ont d'abord r\u00e9duit \u00e0 son minimum, elles nous ont d'abord s\u00e9par\u00e9s de ce que nous pouvions (puissance d'agir). Les variations expressives du mode fini ne consistent donc pas seulement en variations m\u00e9caniques des affections \u00e9prouv\u00e9es, elles consistent encore en variations dynamiques du pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, et en variations \u00ab m\u00e9taphysiques \u00bb de l'essence elle-m\u00eame : tant que le mode existe, son essence m\u00eame est susceptible de varier suivant les affections qui lui appartiennent \u00e0 tel moment20.\n\nD'o\u00f9 l'importance de la question \u00e9thique. _Nous ne savons m\u00eame pas ce que peut un corps_ , dit Spinoza21. C'est-\u00e0-dire : _Nous ne savons m\u00eame pas de quelles affections nous sommes capables, ni jusqu'o\u00f9 va notre puissance_. Comment pourrions-nous le savoir \u00e0 l'avance ? D\u00e8s le d\u00e9but de notre existence, nous sommes n\u00e9cessairement remplis d'affections passives. Le mode fini na\u00eet dans des conditions telles que, \u00e0 l'avance, il est s\u00e9par\u00e9 de son essence ou de son degr\u00e9 de puissance, s\u00e9par\u00e9 de ce qu'il peut, de sa puissance d'agir. La puissance d'agir, nous pouvons savoir par raisonnement qu'elle est la seule expression de notre essence, la seule affirmation de notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Mais ce savoir reste abstrait. Nous ne savons pas quelle est cette puissance d'agir, ni comment l'acqu\u00e9rir ou la retrouver. Et sans doute ne le saurons-nous jamais, si nous ne tentons pas concr\u00e8tement de devenir actifs. L' _\u00c9thique_ se termine sur le rappel suivant : la plupart des hommes ne se sentent exister que quand ils p\u00e2tissent. Ils ne supportent l'existence qu'en p\u00e2tissant ; \u00ab sit\u00f4t qu'il cesse de p\u00e2tir, (l'ignorant) cesse en m\u00eame temps d'\u00eatre \u00bb22.\n\nLeibniz prit l'habitude de caract\u00e9riser le syst\u00e8me de Spinoza par l'impuissance o\u00f9 les cr\u00e9atures se trouveraient r\u00e9duites : la th\u00e9orie des modes ne serait qu'un moyen de retirer aux cr\u00e9atures toute activit\u00e9, tout dynamisme, toute individualit\u00e9, toute r\u00e9alit\u00e9 authentique. Les modes seraient seulement des fantasmes, des fant\u00f4mes, des projections fantastiques d'une Substance unique. Et, de ce caract\u00e8re pr\u00e9sent\u00e9 comme crit\u00e8re, Leibniz se sert pour interpr\u00e9ter d'autres philosophies, pour y d\u00e9noncer soit les appr\u00eats d'un spinozisme \u00e9bauch\u00e9, soit les s\u00e9quelles d'un spinozisme cach\u00e9 : ainsi Descartes est le p\u00e8re du spinozisme parce qu'il croit \u00e0 l'existence d'une \u00e9tendue inerte et passive ; les occasionalistes sont spinozistes sans le vouloir dans la mesure o\u00f9 ils retirent aux choses toute action et tout principe d'agir. Cette critique d'un spinozisme g\u00e9n\u00e9ralis\u00e9e est habile ; mais il n'est pas s\u00fbr que Leibniz lui-m\u00eame y ait cru. (Sinon, pourquoi aurait-il tant admir\u00e9 la th\u00e9orie spinoziste de l'action et de la passion dans le mode ?)\n\nIl est clair, en tout cas, que tout d\u00e9ment cette interpr\u00e9tation dans l'\u0153uvre de Spinoza. Spinoza rappelle constamment qu'on ne peut pas, sans les d\u00e9naturer, confondre les modes avec des \u00eatres de raison ou avec des \u00ab auxiliaires de l'imagination \u00bb. Quand il parle des modifications, il cherche des principes sp\u00e9cifiquement modaux, soit pour conclure de l'unit\u00e9 de la substance \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 ontologique des modes qui diff\u00e8rent par l'attribut, soit pour conclure de l'unit\u00e9 de la substance \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 syst\u00e9matique des modes contenus dans un seul et m\u00eame attribut. Et surtout l'id\u00e9e m\u00eame de mode n'est jamais un moyen de retirer toute puissance propre \u00e0 la cr\u00e9ature : au contraire, selon Spinoza, c'est le seul moyen de montrer comment les choses \u00ab participent \u00bb \u00e0 la puissance de Dieu, c'est-\u00e0-dire sont des parties de la puissance divine, mais des parties singuli\u00e8res, des quantit\u00e9s intensives ou des degr\u00e9s irr\u00e9ductibles. Comme dit Spinoza, la puissance de l'homme est une \u00ab partie \u00bb de la puissance ou de l'essence de Dieu, mais seulement en tant que l'essence de Dieu _s'explique_ elle-m\u00eame par l'essence de l'homme23.\n\nEn fait Leibniz et Spinoza ont un projet commun. Leurs philosophies constituent les deux aspects d'un nouveau \u00ab naturalisme \u00bb. Ce naturalisme est le vrai sens de la r\u00e9action anticart\u00e9sienne. Dans des pages tr\u00e8s belles, Ferdinand Alqui\u00e9 a montr\u00e9 comment Descartes avait domin\u00e9 la premi\u00e8re moiti\u00e9 du XVIIe si\u00e8cle en poussant jusqu'au bout l'entreprise d'une science math\u00e9matique et m\u00e9canicienne ; le premier effet de celle-ci \u00e9tait de d\u00e9valoriser la Nature, en lui retirant toute virtualit\u00e9 ou potentialit\u00e9, tout pouvoir immanent, tout \u00eatre inh\u00e9rent. La m\u00e9taphysique cart\u00e9sienne compl\u00e8te la m\u00eame entreprise, parce qu'elle cherche l'\u00eatre hors de la nature, dans un sujet qui la pense et dans un Dieu qui la cr\u00e9e24. Dans la r\u00e9action anticart\u00e9sienne, au contraire, il s'agit de restaurer les droits d'une Nature dou\u00e9e de forces ou de puissance. Mais, aussi, il s'agit de conserver l'acquis du m\u00e9canisme cart\u00e9sien : toute puissance est actuelle et en acte ; les puissances de la nature ne sont plus des virtualit\u00e9s faisant appel \u00e0 des entit\u00e9s occultes, \u00e0 des \u00e2mes ou des esprits qui les r\u00e9alisent. Leibniz formule parfaitement ce programme : contre Descartes, redonner \u00e0 la Nature sa force d'agir et de p\u00e2tir, mais sans retomber dans une vision pa\u00efenne du monde, dans une idol\u00e2trie de la Nature25. Le programme de Spinoza est tout \u00e0 fait semblable (\u00e0 ceci pr\u00e8s qu'il ne compte pas sur le christianisme pour nous sauver de l'idol\u00e2trie). Spinoza et Leibniz s'en prennent \u00e0 Boyle comme au repr\u00e9sentant d'un m\u00e9canisme content de soi. Si Boyle voulait seulement nous apprendre que tout, dans les corps, se fait par figure et mouvement, la le\u00e7on serait mince, \u00e9tant bien connue depuis Descartes26. Mais, pour tel corps, quelles figures et quels mouvements ? Pourquoi _telle_ figure, _tel_ mouvement ? Alors on verra que le m\u00e9canisme n'exclut pas l'id\u00e9e d'une nature ou essence de chaque corps, mais l'exige au contraire, comme la raison suffisante de telle figure, de tel mouvement, de telle proportion de mouvement et de repos. La r\u00e9action anti-cart\u00e9sienne est partout recherche d'une raison suffisante : raison suffisante pour l'infiniment parfait, raison suffisante pour le clair et le distinct, enfin raison suffisante pour le m\u00e9canisme lui-m\u00eame.\n\nLe nouveau programme se r\u00e9alise, chez Leibniz, \u00e0 travers trois niveaux distincts. D'abord tout se passe dans les corps m\u00e9caniquement, par figure et mouvement. Mais les corps sont des \u00ab agr\u00e9gats \u00bb, actuellement et infiniment compos\u00e9s, r\u00e9gis par des lois. Or le mouvement ne contient aucune marque distinctive d'un corps \u00e0 un moment donn\u00e9 ; les figures qu'il constitue ne sont donc pas davantage discernables en divers moments. Ce sont les mouvements eux-m\u00eames qui supposent des forces, de p\u00e2tir et d'agir, sans lesquelles les corps ne se distingueraient pas plus que leurs figures. Ou, si l'on pr\u00e9f\u00e8re, ce sont les lois m\u00e9caniques elles-m\u00eames qui supposent une nature intime des corps qu'elles r\u00e9gissent. Car ces lois ne seraient pas \u00ab ex\u00e9cutables \u00bb si elles conf\u00e9raient aux corps une simple d\u00e9termination extrins\u00e8que et s'imposaient \u00e0 eux ind\u00e9pendamment de ce qu'ils sont : c'est en ce sens que l'effet d'une loi ne peut pas seulement \u00eatre compris dans la volont\u00e9 de Dieu, comme le croient les Occasionnalistes, mais doit l'\u00eatre aussi _dans le corps lui-m\u00eame._ D\u00e8s lors, aux agr\u00e9gats comme tels, il faut attribuer des forces d\u00e9rivatives : \u00ab la nature inh\u00e9rente aux choses ne se distingue pas de la force d'agir et de p\u00e2tir27. \u00bb Mais la force d\u00e9rivative \u00e0 son tour ne contient pas sa propre raison : elle est purement instantan\u00e9e, bien qu'elle relie l'instant aux pr\u00e9c\u00e9dents et aux futurs. Elle renvoie donc \u00e0 une loi de s\u00e9rie des instants, qui est comme une force primitive ou _essence_ individuelle. Simples et actives, ces essences sont la source des forces d\u00e9rivatives qui s'attribuent aux corps. Elles forment enfin une v\u00e9ritable m\u00e9taphysique de la nature, qui n'intervient pas dans la physique, mais qui correspond \u00e0 cette physique elle-m\u00eame.\n\nOr, chez Spinoza, la r\u00e9alisation du programme naturaliste est fort analogue. Le m\u00e9canisme r\u00e9git des corps existants infiniment compos\u00e9s. Mais ce m\u00e9canisme renvoie d'abord \u00e0 une th\u00e9orie dynamique du pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 (puissance d'agir et de p\u00e2tir) ; et, en derni\u00e8re instance, \u00e0 une th\u00e9orie de l'essence particuli\u00e8re, qui s'exprime dans les variations de cette puissance d'agir et de p\u00e2tir. Chez Spinoza comme chez Leibniz, trois niveaux se distinguent : m\u00e9canisme, force, essence. C'est pourquoi la v\u00e9ritable opposition des deux philosophes ne doit pas \u00eatre cherch\u00e9e dans la critique tr\u00e8s g\u00e9n\u00e9rale de Leibniz, quand il soutient que le Spinozisme prive les cr\u00e9atures de tout pouvoir et de toute activit\u00e9. Leibniz lui-m\u00eame r\u00e9v\u00e8le les vraies raisons de son opposition, bien qu'il les relie \u00e0 ce pr\u00e9texte. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, il s'agit de raisons pratiques, portant sur le probl\u00e8me du mal, de la providence et de la religion, portant sur la conception pratique du r\u00f4le de la philosophie dans son ensemble.\n\nToutefois, il est certain que ces divergences ont aussi une forme sp\u00e9culative. Nous croyons que l'essentiel, \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard, concerne la notion de _conatus_ chez Spinoza et chez Leibniz. Suivant Leibniz, _conatus_ a deux sens : physiquement, il d\u00e9signe la tendance d'un corps au mouvement ; m\u00e9taphysiquement, la tendance d'une essence \u00e0 l'existence. Il ne peut en \u00eatre ainsi chez Spinoza. Les essences de modes ne sont pas des \u00ab possibles \u00bb ; elles ne manquent de rien, elles sont tout ce qu'elles sont, m\u00eame quand les modes correspondants n'existent pas. Elles n'enveloppent donc aucune tendance \u00e0 passer \u00e0 l'existence. Le _conatus_ est bien l'essence du mode (ou degr\u00e9 de puissance), _mais une fois que le mode a commenc\u00e9 d'exister._ Un mode vient \u00e0 exister quand des parties extensives sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9es du dehors \u00e0 entrer sous le rapport qui le caract\u00e9rise : alors et alors seulement, son essence elle-m\u00eame est d\u00e9termin\u00e9e comme _conatus_. Le _conatus_ chez Spinoza n'est donc que l'effort de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'existence, une fois celle-ci donn\u00e9e. Il d\u00e9signe la fonction existentielle de l'essence, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'affirmation de l'essence dans l'existence du mode. C'est pourquoi, si nous consid\u00e9rons un corps existant, le _conatus_ ne peut pas davantage \u00eatre une tendance au mouvement. Les corps simples sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9s du dehors au mouvement ; ils ne pourraient pas l'\u00eatre s'ils n'\u00e9taient \u00e9galement d\u00e9terminables au repos. Chez Spinoza se retrouve constamment la th\u00e8se antique selon laquelle le mouvement ne serait rien si le repos n'\u00e9tait pas quelque chose aussi28. Le _conatus_ d'un corps simple ne peut \u00eatre qu'un effort de conserver l'\u00e9tat auquel il a \u00e9t\u00e9 d\u00e9termin\u00e9 ; le _conatus_ d'un corps compos\u00e9, un effort pour conserver le rapport de mouvement et de repos qui le d\u00e9finit, c'est-\u00e0-dire pour maintenir des parties toujours nouvelles sous ce rapport qui d\u00e9finit son existence.\n\nLes caract\u00e8res dynamiques du _conatus_ s'encha\u00eenent avec les caract\u00e8res m\u00e9caniques. Le _conatus_ d'un corps compos\u00e9 est aussi bien l'effort de maintenir ce corps apte \u00e0 \u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'un grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons29. Or, comme les affections passives remplissent \u00e0 leur mani\u00e8re notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, nous nous effor\u00e7ons de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'existence, non seulement en tant que nous sommes suppos\u00e9s avoir des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates et des sentiments actifs, mais en tant que nous avons des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates et que nous \u00e9prouvons des passions30. Le _conatus_ d'un mode existant n'est donc pas s\u00e9parable des affections que le mode \u00e9prouve \u00e0 chaque instant. Deux cons\u00e9quences s'ensuivent.\n\nUne affection, quelle qu'elle soit, est dite d\u00e9terminer le _conatus_ ou l'essence. Le _conatus_ , en tant que d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par une affection ou un sentiment qui nous est actuellement donn\u00e9, s'appelle \u00ab d\u00e9sir \u00bb ; comme tel, il s'accompagne n\u00e9cessairement de conscience31. \u00c0 la liaison des sentiments avec les id\u00e9es, nous devons joindre une nouvelle liaison, des d\u00e9sirs avec les sentiments. Tant que notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 reste rempli par des affections passives, le _conatus_ est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par des passions ou, comme dit Spinoza, nos d\u00e9sirs eux-m\u00eames \u00ab naissent \u00bb de passions. Mais, m\u00eame dans ce cas, notre puissance d'agir est mise en jeu. En effet, l'on doit distinguer ce qui nous d\u00e9termine et ce \u00e0 quoi nous sommes d\u00e9termin\u00e9s. Une affection passive \u00e9tant donn\u00e9e, elle nous d\u00e9termine \u00e0 faire ceci ou cela, \u00e0 penser \u00e0 ceci ou \u00e0 cela, par quoi nous nous effor\u00e7ons de conserver notre rapport ou de maintenir notre pouvoir. Tant\u00f4t nous nous effor\u00e7ons d'\u00e9carter une affection qui ne nous convient pas, tant\u00f4t de retenir une affection qui nous convient, et toujours avec un d\u00e9sir d'autant plus grand que l'affection m\u00eame est grande32. Mais \u00ab ce \u00e0 quoi \u00bb nous sommes ainsi d\u00e9termin\u00e9s s'explique par notre nature ou notre essence, et renvoie \u00e0 notre puissance d'agir33. Il est vrai que l'affection passive t\u00e9moigne de notre impuissance et nous s\u00e9pare de ce que nous pouvons ; mais il est vrai aussi qu'elle _enveloppe_ un degr\u00e9, si bas soit-il, de notre puissance d'agir. Si nous sommes en quelque sorte s\u00e9par\u00e9s de ce que nous pouvons, c'est parce que notre puissance d'agir est immobilis\u00e9e, fix\u00e9e, d\u00e9termin\u00e9e \u00e0 investir l'affection passive. Mais, en ce sens, le _conatus_ est toujours identique \u00e0 la puissance d'agir elle-m\u00eame. Les variations du _conatus_ en tant qu'il est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par telle ou telle affection sont les variations dynamiques de notre puissance d'agir34.\n\nQuelle est la vraie diff\u00e9rence entre Leibniz et Spinoza, d'o\u00f9 d\u00e9coulent aussi toutes les oppositions pratiques ? Chez Spinoza non moins que chez Leibniz l'id\u00e9e d'une Nature expressive est \u00e0 la base du nouveau naturalisme. Chez Spinoza non moins que chez Leibniz l'expression dans la Nature signifie que le m\u00e9canisme est d\u00e9pass\u00e9 de deux fa\u00e7ons. Le m\u00e9canisme renvoie, d'une part, \u00e0 un dynamisme du pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, d\u00e9fini par les variations d'une puissance d'agir et de p\u00e2tir ; d'autre part, \u00e0 la position d'essences singuli\u00e8res d\u00e9finies comme des degr\u00e9s de puissance. Mais les deux philosophes ne proc\u00e8dent pas du tout de la m\u00eame mani\u00e8re. Si Leibniz reconna\u00eet aux choses une force inh\u00e9rente et propre, c'est en faisant des essences individuelles autant de substances. Au contraire, chez Spinoza, c'est en d\u00e9finissant les essences particuli\u00e8res comme des essences de modes, et plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement, en faisant des choses m\u00eames les modes d'une substance unique. Mais cette diff\u00e9rence reste impr\u00e9cise. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, chez Leibniz, le m\u00e9canisme renvoie \u00e0 ce qui le d\u00e9passe comme aux exigences d'une finalit\u00e9 qui reste en partie transcendante. Si les essences sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9es comme substances, si elles ne sont pas s\u00e9parables d'une tendance \u00e0 passer \u00e0 l'existence, c'est parce qu'elles sont prises dans un ordre de finalit\u00e9 en fonction duquel elles sont choisies par Dieu, ou m\u00eame sont simplement soumises \u00e0 ce choix. Et la finalit\u00e9 qui pr\u00e9side ainsi \u00e0 la constitution du monde se retrouve dans le d\u00e9tail de ce monde : les forces d\u00e9rivatives t\u00e9moignent d'une harmonie analogue, en vertu de laquelle le monde est le meilleur jusque dans ses parties elles-m\u00eames. Et non seulement il y a des principes de finalit\u00e9 qui r\u00e9gissent les substances et les forces d\u00e9rivatives, mais il y a un accord final entre le m\u00e9canisme lui-m\u00eame et la finalit\u00e9. D\u00e8s lors, la Nature expressive chez Leibniz est une nature dont les diff\u00e9rents niveaux se hi\u00e9rarchisent, s'harmonisent et, surtout, \u00ab symbolisent entre eux \u00bb. L'expression suivant Leibniz ne sera jamais s\u00e9par\u00e9e d'une symbolisation dont le principe est toujours la finalit\u00e9 ou l'accord final.\n\nChez Spinoza, le m\u00e9canisme renvoie \u00e0 ce qui le d\u00e9passe, mais comme aux exigences d'une causalit\u00e9 pure absolument immanente. Seule la causalit\u00e9 nous fait penser l'existence ; elle suffit \u00e0 nous la faire penser. Du point de vue de la causalit\u00e9 immanente, les modes ne sont pas des apparences d\u00e9nu\u00e9es de force et d'essence. Spinoza compte sur cette causalit\u00e9 bien comprise pour doter les choses d'une force ou puissance propre, qui leur revient pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment en tant qu'elles sont des modes. \u00c0 la diff\u00e9rence de Leibniz, le dynamisme et l'\u00ab essentialisme \u00bb de Spinoza excluent d\u00e9lib\u00e9r\u00e9ment toute finalit\u00e9. La th\u00e9orie spinoziste du _conatus_ n'a pas d'autre fonction : montrer ce qu'est le dynamisme, en lui retirant toute signification finaliste. Si la Nature est expressive, ce n'est pas au sens o\u00f9 ses diff\u00e9rents niveaux symboliseraient les uns avec les autres ; signe, symbole, harmonie sont exclus des vraies puissances de la Nature. _La triade compl\u00e8te du mode se pr\u00e9sente ainsi_ : une essence de mode s'exprime dans un rapport caract\u00e9ristique ; ce rapport exprime un pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 ; ce pouvoir est rempli par des affections variables, comme ce rapport, effectu\u00e9 par des parties qui se renouvellent. Entre ces diff\u00e9rents niveaux de l'expression, on ne trouvera nulle correspondance finale, nulle harmonie morale. On ne trouvera que l'encha\u00eenement n\u00e9cessaire des diff\u00e9rents effets d'une cause immanente. Aussi bien chez Spinoza n'y a-t-il pas une m\u00e9taphysique des essences, une dynamique des forces, une m\u00e9canique des ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes. Tout est \u00ab physique \u00bb dans la Nature : physique de la quantit\u00e9 intensive qui correspond aux essences de modes ; physique de la quantit\u00e9 extensive, c'est-\u00e0-dire m\u00e9canisme par lequel les modes eux-m\u00eames passent \u00e0 l'existence ; physique de la force, c'est-\u00e0-dire dynamisme d'apr\u00e8s lequel l'essence s'affirme dans l'existence, \u00e9pousant les variations de la puissance d'agir. Les attributs s'expliquent dans les modes existants ; les essences de modes, elles-m\u00eames contenues dans les attributs, s'expliquent dans des rapports ou des pouvoirs ; ces rapports sont effectu\u00e9s par des parties, ces pouvoirs par des affections qui les expliquent \u00e0 leur tour. L'expression dans la Nature n'est jamais une symbolisation finale, mais toujours et partout une _explication_ causale.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 28, dem. : \u00ab Les affections sont les fa\u00e7ons dont les parties du corps humain, et cons\u00e9quemment le corps tout entier est affect\u00e9. \u00bb De m\u00eame II, * postulat 3.\n\n2.  _\u00c9_ , III, 51, prop. et dem., et 57 sc.\n\n3.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 39, dem.\n\n4.  _\u00c9_ , III, 2, sc. : \u00ab Personne en effet n'a jusqu'\u00e0 pr\u00e9sent d\u00e9termin\u00e9 _ce que peut_ le corps... Car personne, jusqu'\u00e0 pr\u00e9sent, n'a connu la _structure_ du corps. \u00bb\n\n5.  _\u00c9_ , III, d\u00e9f. 1-3.\n\n6.  _CT_ , II, ch. 26, 7-8.\n\n7.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 4, prop., dem. et cor.\n\n8.  _\u00c9_ , V, 6, sc. ; et 39, sc.\n\n9.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 20, sc.\n\n10.  L'affect, le sentiment, suppose une id\u00e9e et en d\u00e9coule : _CT_ , Appendice II, 7 ; _\u00c9_ , II, axiome 3.\n\n11.  _\u00c9_ , III, d\u00e9finition g\u00e9n\u00e9rale des affects : \u00ab Je n'entends pas que l'esprit compare la pr\u00e9sente constitution du corps avec une pass\u00e9e, mais que l'id\u00e9e qui constitue la forme de l'affect affirme du corps quelque chose qui enveloppe \u00e0 la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 plus ou moins de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 qu'auparavant. \u00bb\n\n12.  _Ad\u00e9quat_ et _inad\u00e9quat_ qualifient d'abord des id\u00e9es. Mais, en second lieu, ce sont les qualifications d'une cause : nous sommes \u00ab cause ad\u00e9quate \u00bb d'un sentiment qui suit d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate que nous avons.\n\n13.  _\u00c9_ , III, 1 et 3.\n\n14.  Le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se d\u00e9finit comme l'aptitude d'un corps, aussi bien \u00e0 p\u00e2tir qu'\u00e0 agir : cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 13, sc. (\u00ab plus un corps est apte, par rapport aux autres, \u00e0 agir et \u00e0 p\u00e2tir de plus de fa\u00e7ons \u00e0 la fois... \u00bb) ; IV, 38, prop. (\u00ab plus le corps est rendu apte \u00e0 \u00eatre affect\u00e9 et \u00e0 affecter d'autres corps de plusieurs fa\u00e7ons... \u00bb)\n\n15.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 39, sc. : \u00ab Il arrive parfois qu'un homme subit de tels changements que je ne dirais pas ais\u00e9ment qu'il est le m\u00eame. C'est ce que j'ai entendu raconter de certain po\u00e8te espagnol... Et si cela semble incroyable, que dirons-nous des enfants ? Un homme d'\u00e2ge avanc\u00e9 croit leur nature si diff\u00e9rente de la sienne qu'il ne pourrait se persuader qu'il a jamais \u00e9t\u00e9 enfant s'il ne conjecturait de lui-m\u00eame d'apr\u00e8s les autres. \u00bb\n\n16.  Les notes de Leibniz t\u00e9moignent d'un int\u00e9r\u00eat constant pour la th\u00e9orie de l'action et de la passion chez Spinoza : cf. par exemple un texte post\u00e9rieur \u00e0 1704, \u00e9d. Grua, t. II, pp. 667 sq. Leibniz s'exprimera souvent dans des termes analogues \u00e0 ceux de Spinoza : G. Friedmann l'a bien montr\u00e9, _Leibniz et Spinoza_ , N.R.F., 1946, p. 201.\n\n17.  Cf. LEIBNIZ, _De la nature en elle-m\u00eame..._ (1698), \u00a7 11. Ce rapport de la force passive et de la force active est analys\u00e9 par M. GU\u00c9ROULT, _Dynamique et m\u00e9taphysique leibniziennes_ , Les Belles Lettres 1934, pp. 166-169.\n\n18.  _CT_ , II, ch. 26, 7 ; et I, ch. 2, 23. Cf. _\u00c9_ , III, 3, sc. : \u00ab Les passions ne se rapportent \u00e0 l'esprit qu'en tant qu'il a quelque chose qui enveloppe une n\u00e9gation. \u00bb\n\n19.  _\u00c9_ , II, 17, sc.\n\n20.  C'est pourquoi Spinoza, en _\u00c9_ , III (d\u00e9finition du d\u00e9sir), emploie les mots : \u00ab affection _de_ l'essence \u00bb, _affectionem humanae essentiae._\n\n21.  _\u00c9_ , III, 2, sc. : \u00ab On ne sait pas ce que peut le corps ou ce que l'on peut d\u00e9duire de la seule consid\u00e9ration de sa nature. \u00bb\n\n22.  _\u00c9_ , V, 42, sc.\n\n23.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 4, dem.\n\n24.  Cf. F. ALQUI\u00c9, _Descartes, l'homme et l'\u0153uvre_ , Hatier-Boivin, 1956, pp. 54-55. Il est vrai que Descartes, dans ses derni\u00e8res \u0153uvres, revient \u00e0 des consid\u00e9rations naturalistes, mais n\u00e9gatives plut\u00f4t que positives. (F. ALQUI\u00c9, _La D\u00e9couverte m\u00e9taphysique de l'homme chez Descartes_ , P.U.F., 1950, pp. 271-272).\n\n25.  LEIBNIZ, _De la Nature en elle-m\u00eame..._ , \u00a7 2. Et \u00a7 16 : faire une philosophie \u00ab \u00e9galement distante du formalisme et du mat\u00e9rialisme. \u00bb\n\n26.  Cf. la critique de Boyle par Leibniz : _De la nature en elle-m\u00eame..._ , \u00a7 3. Par Spinoza : _Lettres 6 et 13, \u00e0 Oldenburg_ (\u00ab Pour moi je n'ai jamais pens\u00e9, et en v\u00e9rit\u00e9 il me serait impossible de croire que ce savant homme n'ait eu d'autre dessein, dans son _Trait\u00e9 du Nitre_ , que de montrer la fragilit\u00e9 de cette doctrine enfantine et ridicule des formes substantielles... \u00bb cf. _Lettre_ 13, III, p. 45).\n\n27.  LEIBNIZ, _De la nature en elle-m\u00eame..._ , \u00a7 9.\n\n28.  _CT_ , II, ch. 19, 8, note 3 : \u00ab ... deux modes parce que le repos n'est pas un pur n\u00e9ant. \u00bb Si l'on peut parler d'une \u00ab tendance \u00bb au mouvement, selon Spinoza, c'est seulement au cas o\u00f9 un corps est emp\u00each\u00e9 de suivre le mouvement auquel il est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 du dehors, par d'autres corps non moins ext\u00e9rieurs qui contrarient cette d\u00e9termination. C'est en ce sens d\u00e9j\u00e0 que Descartes parlait d'un _conatus_ : cf. _Principes_ , III, 56 et 57.\n\n29.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 38 et 39 (les deux expressions : \u00ab ce qui dispose le corps humain \u00e0 ce qu'il puisse \u00eatre affect\u00e9 de plus de fa\u00e7ons \u00bb, et \u00ab ce qui fait que le rapport de mouvement et de repos qu'ont entre elles les parties du corps humain soit conserv\u00e9. \u00bb)\n\n30.  _\u00c9_ , III, 9, prop. et dem.\n\n31.  Sur cette d\u00e9termination de l'essence et du _conatus_ par une affection _quelconque_ , cf. _\u00c9_ , III, 56, fin de la dem. ; et III, d\u00e9finition du d\u00e9sir. En III, 9, sc., Spinoza avait simplement d\u00e9fini le d\u00e9sir comme le _conatus_ ou l'app\u00e9tit \u00ab avec conscience de soi \u00bb. C'\u00e9tait une _d\u00e9finition nominale_. Au contraire, lorsqu'il montre que le _conatus_ est n\u00e9cessairement d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par une affection _dont nous avons l'id\u00e9e_ (m\u00eame inad\u00e9quate), il donne une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle, impliquant \u00ab la cause de la conscience \u00bb.\n\n32.  _\u00c9_ , III, 37, dem.\n\n33.  _\u00c9_ , III, 54, prop.\n\n34.  _\u00c9_ , III, 57, dem. : _potentia seu conatus_ ; III, d\u00e9f. g\u00e9n\u00e9rale des affects, explication : _Agendi potentia sive existendi vis_ ; IV, 24, prop. : _Agere, vivere, suum esse conservare, haec tria idem significant._\n\n## CHAPITRE XV\n\n## LES TROIS ORDRES ET LE PROBL\u00c8ME DU MAL\n\nUn attribut s'exprime de trois fa\u00e7ons : il s'exprime dans sa nature absolue (mode infini imm\u00e9diat), il s'exprime en tant que modifi\u00e9 (mode infini m\u00e9diat), il s'exprime d'une mani\u00e8re certaine et d\u00e9termin\u00e9e (mode infini existant)1. Spinoza cite lui-m\u00eame les deux modes infinis de l'\u00e9tendue : le mouvement et le repos, la figure de l'univers entier2. Quelle en est la signification ?\n\nNous savons que les rapports de mouvement et de repos doivent eux-m\u00eames \u00eatre consid\u00e9r\u00e9s de deux fa\u00e7ons : en tant qu'ils expriment \u00e9ternellement des essences de modes ; en tant qu'ils subsument temporairement des parties extensives. Du premier point de vue, le mouvement et le repos ne comprennent pas tous les rapports sans contenir aussi toutes les essences telles qu'elles sont dans l'attribut. C'est pourquoi Spinoza, dans le _Court Trait\u00e9_ , affirme que le mouvement et le repos comprennent les essences m\u00eames de choses qui n'existent pas3. Plus nettement encore, il soutient que le mouvement affecte l'\u00e9tendue avant qu'elle n'ait des parties modales extrins\u00e8ques. Pour admettre que le mouvement est bien dans le \u00ab tout infini \u00bb, il suffit de se rappeler qu'il n'y a pas de mouvement seul, mais \u00e0 la fois du mouvement et du repos4. Ce rappel est platonicien : les N\u00e9o-platoniciens insistaient souvent sur l'immanence simultan\u00e9e du mouvement et du repos, sans laquelle le mouvement lui-m\u00eame serait impensable dans le tout.\n\nDu second point de vue, les divers rapports groupent des ensembles infinis variables de parties extensives. Ils d\u00e9terminent alors les conditions sous lesquelles les modes passent \u00e0 l'existence. Chaque rapport effectu\u00e9 constitue la forme d'un individu existant. Or il n'y a pas de rapport qui ne se compose dans un autre pour former, sous un troisi\u00e8me rapport, un individu de degr\u00e9 sup\u00e9rieur. \u00c0 l'infini : si bien que l'univers tout entier est un seul individu existant, d\u00e9fini par la proportion totale du mouvement et du repos, comprenant tous les rapports qui se composent \u00e0 l'infini, subsumant l'ensemble de tous les ensembles sous tous les rapports. Cet individu, d'apr\u00e8s sa forme, est le _\u00ab facies totius universi_ , qui demeure toujours le m\u00eame bien qu'il change en une infinit\u00e9 de mani\u00e8res5 \u00bb.\n\nTous les rapports se composent \u00e0 l'infini pour former ce _facies._ Mais ils se composent suivant des lois qui leur sont propres, lois contenues dans le mode infini m\u00e9diat. C'est dire que les rapports ne se composent pas n'importe comment, n'importe quel rapport ne se compose pas avec n'importe quel autre. En ce sens les lois de composition nous ont paru pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment \u00eatre aussi des lois de d\u00e9composition ; et quand Spinoza dit que le _facies_ demeure le m\u00eame en changeant d'une infinit\u00e9 de mani\u00e8res, il ne fait pas seulement allusion aux compositions de rapports, mais \u00e0 leurs destructions ou d\u00e9compositions. Toutefois ces d\u00e9compositions (pas plus que les compositions) n'affectent la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 \u00e9ternelle des rapports ; un rapport est compos\u00e9, quand il commence \u00e0 subsumer des parties ; il se d\u00e9compose quand il cesse d'\u00eatre ainsi effectu\u00e96. D\u00e9composer, d\u00e9truire signifient donc seulement : deux rapports ne se composant pas directement, les parties subsum\u00e9es par l'un d\u00e9terminent (conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 une loi) les parties de l'autre \u00e0 entrer sous un nouveau rapport qui, lui, se compose avec le premier.\n\nNous voyons que, d'une certaine mani\u00e8re, tout est composition dans l'ordre des rapports. Tout est composition dans la Nature. Quand le poison d\u00e9compose le sang, c'est seulement d'apr\u00e8s la loi qui d\u00e9termine les parties du sang \u00e0 entrer sous un nouveau rapport qui se compose avec celui du poison. La d\u00e9composition n'est que l'envers d'une composition. Mais la question se pose toujours : Pourquoi cet envers ? Pourquoi les lois de composition s'exercent-elles aussi comme des lois de destruction ? La r\u00e9ponse doit \u00eatre : c'est parce que les corps existants ne se rencontrent pas _dans l'ordre_ o\u00f9 leurs rapports se composent. Dans toute rencontre, il y a composition de rapports, mais les rapports qui se composent ne sont pas n\u00e9cessairement ceux des corps qui se rencontrent. Les rapports se composent _suivant des lois_ ; mais les corps existants, \u00e9tant eux-m\u00eames compos\u00e9s de parties extensives, se rencontrent _de proche en proche._ Les parties d'un des corps peuvent donc \u00eatre d\u00e9termin\u00e9es \u00e0 prendre un nouveau rapport exig\u00e9 par la loi en perdant celui sous lequel elles appartenaient \u00e0 ce corps.\n\nSi nous consid\u00e9rons l'ordre des rapports en lui-m\u00eame, nous voyons que c'est un pur ordre de composition. S'il d\u00e9termine aussi des destructions, c'est parce que les corps se rencontrent suivant un ordre qui n'est pas celui des rapports. D'o\u00f9 la complexit\u00e9 de la notion spinoziste \u00ab ordre de la Nature \u00bb. Dans un mode existant, nous devions distinguer trois choses : l'essence comme degr\u00e9 de puissance ; les rapports dans lequel elle s'exprime ; les parties extensives subsum\u00e9es sous ce rapport. \u00c0 chacun de ces niveaux correspond un ordre de la Nature.\n\nEn premier lieu, il y a un ordre des essences, d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par les degr\u00e9s de puissance. Cet ordre est un ordre de convenance totale : chaque essence convient avec toutes les autres, toutes les essences \u00e9tant comprises dans la production de chacune. Elles sont \u00e9ternelles, et l'une ne pourrait pas p\u00e9rir sans que les autres ne p\u00e9rissent aussi. L'ordre des rapports est fort diff\u00e9rent : c'est un ordre de composition suivant des lois. Il d\u00e9termine les conditions \u00e9ternelles sous lesquelles les modes passent \u00e0 l'existence, et continuent d'exister tant qu'ils conservent la composition de leur rapport. Tous les rapports se composent \u00e0 l'infini, mais non pas tout rapport avec tout autre. Nous devons consid\u00e9rer, en troisi\u00e8me lieu, un ordre des rencontres. C'est un ordre de convenances et de disconvenances partielles, locales et temporaires. Les corps existants se rencontrent par leurs parties extensives, de proche en proche. Il se peut que les corps qui se rencontrent aient pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment des rapports qui se composent d'apr\u00e8s la loi (convenance) ; mais il se peut que, les deux rapports ne se composant pas, l'un des deux corps soit d\u00e9termin\u00e9 \u00e0 d\u00e9truire le rapport de l'autre (disconvenance). Cet ordre des rencontres d\u00e9termine donc effectivement le moment o\u00f9 un mode passe \u00e0 l'existence (quand les conditions fix\u00e9es par la loi sont remplies), la dur\u00e9e pendant laquelle il existe, le moment o\u00f9 il meurt ou est d\u00e9truit. Spinoza le d\u00e9finit \u00e0 la fois comme \u00ab l'ordre commun de la Nature \u00bb, comme l'ordre des \u00ab d\u00e9terminations extrins\u00e8ques \u00bb et des \u00ab rencontres fortuites \u00bb, comme l'ordre des passions7.\n\nEn effet, c'est l'ordre commun, puisque tous les modes existants y sont soumis. C'est l'ordre des passions et des d\u00e9terminations extrins\u00e8ques, puisqu'il d\u00e9termine \u00e0 chaque instant les affections que nous \u00e9prouvons, produites par les corps ext\u00e9rieurs que nous rencontrons. Enfin, il est dit \u00ab fortuit \u00bb _(fortuitus occursus)_ sans que Spinoza r\u00e9introduise ici la moindre contingence. L'ordre des rencontres, pour son compte, est parfaitement d\u00e9termin\u00e9 : sa n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 est celle des parties extensives et de leur d\u00e9termination externe \u00e0 l'infini. Mais il est fortuit par rapport \u00e0 l'ordre des rapports ; pas plus que les essences ne d\u00e9terminent les lois d'apr\u00e8s lesquelles leurs rapports se composent, les lois de composition ne d\u00e9terminent elles-m\u00eames les corps qui se rencontrent et la mani\u00e8re dont ils se rencontrent. L'existence de ce troisi\u00e8me ordre pose toutes sortes de probl\u00e8mes chez Spinoza. Car, pris dans son ensemble, il co\u00efncide avec l'ordre des rapports. Si l'on consid\u00e8re l'ensemble infini des rencontres dans la dur\u00e9e infinie de l'univers, chaque rencontre entra\u00eene une composition de rapports, et tous les rapports se composent avec toutes les rencontres. Mais les deux ordres ne co\u00efncident nullement dans le d\u00e9tail : si nous consid\u00e9rons un corps ayant tel rapport pr\u00e9cis, il rencontre n\u00e9cessairement des corps dont le rapport ne se compose pas avec le sien, et finira toujours par en rencontrer un dont le rapport d\u00e9truira le sien. Ainsi il n'y a pas de mort qui ne soit _brutale, violente et fortuite_ ; mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce qu'elle est enti\u00e8rement _n\u00e9cessaire_ dans cet ordre des rencontres.\n\nDeux cas de \u00ab rencontres \u00bb doivent \u00eatre distingu\u00e9s. D'apr\u00e8s le premier cas, je rencontre un corps dont le rapport se compose avec le mien. (Cela m\u00eame peut s'entendre de plusieurs fa\u00e7ons : tant\u00f4t le corps rencontr\u00e9 a un rapport qui se compose naturellement avec un de mes rapports composants, et par l\u00e0 m\u00eame contribue \u00e0 maintenir mon rapport global ; tant\u00f4t les rapports de deux corps conviennent si bien dans leur ensemble qu'ils forment un troisi\u00e8me rapport sous lequel les deux corps se conservent et prosp\u00e8rent.) Quoi qu'il en soit, le corps dont le rapport se conserve avec le mien est dit \u00ab convenir avec ma nature \u00bb : il m'est \u00ab bon \u00bb, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00ab utile8 \u00bb. Il produit en moi une affection qui, elle-m\u00eame, est bonne ou convient avec ma nature. Cette affection est passive parce qu'elle s'explique par le corps ext\u00e9rieur ; l'id\u00e9e de cette affection est une passion, un sentiment passif. Mais c'est un sentiment de joie, puisqu'il est produit par l'id\u00e9e d'un objet qui nous est bon ou qui convient avec notre nature9. Or, quand Spinoza se propose de d\u00e9finir \u00ab formellement \u00bb cette joie-passion, il dit : elle augmente ou aide notre puissance d'agir, elle est notre puissance d'agir elle-m\u00eame en tant qu'augment\u00e9e ou aid\u00e9e par une cause ext\u00e9rieure10. (Et nous ne connaissons le bon qu'en tant que nous percevons qu'une chose nous affecte de joie11.)\n\nQue veut dire Spinoza ? Il n'oublie certes pas que nos passions, quelles qu'elles soient, sont toujours la marque de notre impuissance : elles ne s'expliquent pas par notre essence ou puissance, mais par la puissance d'une chose ext\u00e9rieure ; par l\u00e0 elles enveloppent notre impuissance12. Toute passion nous s\u00e9pare de notre puissance d'agir ; tant que notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 est rempli par des passions, nous sommes s\u00e9par\u00e9s de ce que nous pouvons. C'est pourquoi Spinoza dit : la joie-passion n'est une passion qu'en tant que \u00ab la puissance d'agir de l'homme n'est pas augment\u00e9e jusqu'au point qu'il se con\u00e7oive lui-m\u00eame et ses actions de fa\u00e7on ad\u00e9quate13. C'est-\u00e0-dire : notre puissance d'agir n'est pas encore augment\u00e9e \u00e0 un point tel que nous soyons actifs. Nous sommes encore impuissants, encore s\u00e9par\u00e9s de notre puissance d'agir.\n\nMais notre impuissance est seulement la limitation de notre essence et de notre puissance d'agir elle-m\u00eame. Enveloppant notre impuissance, nos sentiments passifs enveloppent un degr\u00e9, si bas soit-il, de notre puissance d'agir. En effet un sentiment, quel qu'il soit, d\u00e9termine notre essence ou _conatus._ Il nous d\u00e9termine donc \u00e0 d\u00e9sirer, _c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00e0 imaginer et \u00e0 faire quelque chose qui d\u00e9coule de notre nature_. Quand le sentiment qui nous affecte convient lui-m\u00eame avec notre nature, notre puissance d'agir se trouve donc n\u00e9cessairement augment\u00e9e ou aid\u00e9e. Car cette joie _s'ajoute_ elle-m\u00eame au d\u00e9sir qui s'ensuit, si bien que la puissance de la chose ext\u00e9rieure favorise et augmente notre propre puissance14. Le _conatus_ , \u00e9tant notre effort de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'existence, est toujours recherche de ce qui nous est utile ou bon ; il comprend toujours un degr\u00e9 de notre puissance d'agir auquel il s'identifie : cette puissance augmente donc, quand le _conatus_ est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par une affection qui nous est utile ou bonne. Nous ne cessons pas d'\u00eatre passifs, nous ne cessons pas d'\u00eatre s\u00e9par\u00e9s de notre puissance d'agir, mais nous tendons \u00e0 en \u00eatre moins s\u00e9par\u00e9s, nous nous rapprochons de cette puissance. Notre joie passive est et reste une passion : elle ne \u00ab s'explique \u00bb pas par notre puissance d'agir, mais elle \u00ab enveloppe \u00bb un plus haut degr\u00e9 de cette puissance.\n\nEn tant que le sentiment de joie augmente la puissance d'agir, il nous d\u00e9termine \u00e0 d\u00e9sirer, \u00e0 imaginer, \u00e0 faire tout ce qui est notre pouvoir pour conserver cette joie m\u00eame et l'objet qui nous la procure15. C'est en ce sens que l'amour s'encha\u00eene avec la joie, d'autres passions avec l'amour, si bien que notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 est enti\u00e8rement rempli. Si nous supposons ainsi une ligne d'affections joyeuses, d\u00e9coulant les unes des autres \u00e0 partir d'un premier sentiment de joie, nous voyons que notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve rempli de telle mani\u00e8re que notre puissance d'agir augmente toujours16. Mais jamais elle n'augmente suffisamment pour que nous la poss\u00e9dions r\u00e9ellement, pour que nous soyons actifs, c'est-\u00e0-dire cause ad\u00e9quate des affections qui remplissent notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9.\n\nPassons maintenant au second cas de rencontre. Je rencontre un corps dont le rapport ne se compose pas avec le mien. Ce corps ne convient pas avec ma nature, il est contraire \u00e0 ma nature, mauvais ou nuisible. Il produit en moi une affection passive qui, elle-m\u00eame, est mauvaise ou contraire \u00e0 ma nature17. L'id\u00e9e de cette affection est un sentiment de tristesse, cette tristesse-passion se d\u00e9finit par la diminution de ma puissance d'agir. Et nous ne connaissons le mauvais qu'en tant que nous percevons une chose qui nous affecte de tristesse. Toutefois, on objectera qu'il est n\u00e9cessaire de distinguer plusieurs cas. Il semble que, dans une telle rencontre, tout d\u00e9pende de l'essence ou de la puissance respective des corps qui se rencontrent. Si mon corps poss\u00e8de essentiellement un plus grand degr\u00e9 de puissance, c'est lui qui d\u00e9truira l'autre ou d\u00e9composera le rapport de l'autre. Au contraire, s'il poss\u00e8de un plus petit degr\u00e9. Les deux cas ne semblent pas pouvoir se ramener au m\u00eame sch\u00e9ma.\n\nEn v\u00e9rit\u00e9, l'objection reste abstraite. Car, dans l'existence, nous ne pouvons pas tenir compte des degr\u00e9s de puissance absolument consid\u00e9r\u00e9s. Quand nous consid\u00e9rons les essences ou les degr\u00e9s de puissance en eux-m\u00eames, nous savons qu'aucun ne peut en d\u00e9truire un autre, et que tous conviennent. Au contraire, quand nous consid\u00e9rons les luttes et les incompatibilit\u00e9s entre modes existants, nous devons faire intervenir toutes sortes de facteurs concrets, qui nous emp\u00eachent de dire que le mode dont l'essence ou le degr\u00e9 de puissance est le plus fort gagnera certainement. En effet, les corps existants qui se rencontrent ne sont pas seulement d\u00e9finis par le rapport global qui leur est propre : se rencontrant parties par parties, de proche en proche, ils se rencontrent n\u00e9cessairement sous certains de leurs rapports partiels ou composants. Il se peut qu'un corps moins fort que le mien soit plus fort qu'un de mes composants : il suffira \u00e0 me d\u00e9truire, pour peu que ce composant me soit vital.\n\nC'est en ce sens que Spinoza rappelle que la lutte des modes, _d'apr\u00e8s_ leur degr\u00e9 de puissance, ne doit pas s'entendre de ces degr\u00e9s pris en eux-m\u00eames : il n'y a pas de lutte entre essences comme telles18. Mais inversement, quand Spinoza montre qu'il y a toujours dans l'existence des corps plus puissants que le mien qui peuvent me d\u00e9truire, il ne faut pas croire n\u00e9cessairement que ces corps aient une essence dont le degr\u00e9 de puissance est plus grand, ou qu'ils aient une plus grande perfection. Un corps peut \u00eatre d\u00e9truit par un corps d'essence moins parfaite si les conditions de la rencontre (c'est-\u00e0-dire le rapport partiel sous lequel elle se fait) sont favorables \u00e0 cette destruction. Pour savoir \u00e0 l'avance l'issue d'une lutte, il faudrait savoir exactement sous quel rapport les deux corps se rencontrent, sous quel rapport s'affrontent les rapports incomposables. Il faudrait un savoir infini de la Nature, que nous n'avons pas. En tout cas, dans toute rencontre avec un corps qui ne convient pas avec ma nature intervient toujours un sentiment de tristesse, au moins partiel, qui vient de ce que le corps me l\u00e8se toujours dans un de mes rapports partiels. Bien plus, ce sentiment de tristesse est la seule mani\u00e8re dont nous savons que l'autre corps ne convient pas avec notre nature19. Que nous devions triompher ou non, cela ne change rien : nous ne le savons pas \u00e0 l'avance. Nous triomphons, si nous arrivons \u00e0 \u00e9carter ce sentiment de tristesse, donc \u00e0 d\u00e9truire le corps qui nous affecte. Nous sommes vaincus si la tristesse nous gagne de plus en plus, sous tous nos rapports composants, marquant alors la destruction de notre rapport global.\n\nOr, comment, \u00e0 partir d'un premier sentiment de tristesse, notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve-t-il rempli ? Non moins que la joie, la tristesse d\u00e9termine le _conatus_ ou l'essence. C'est-\u00e0-dire : de la tristesse na\u00eet un d\u00e9sir, qui est la haine. Ce d\u00e9sir s'encha\u00eene avec d'autres d\u00e9sirs, d'autres passions : antipathie, d\u00e9rision, m\u00e9sestime, envie, col\u00e8re, etc. Mais l\u00e0 encore, en tant qu'elle d\u00e9termine notre essence ou _conatus_ , la tristesse enveloppe quelque chose de notre puissance d'agir. D\u00e9termin\u00e9 par la tristesse, le _conatus_ ne cesse pas d'\u00eatre recherche de ce qui nous est utile ou bon : nous nous effor\u00e7ons de triompher, c'est-\u00e0-dire de faire en sorte que les parties du corps qui nous affecte de tristesse prennent un nouveau rapport qui se concilie avec le n\u00f4tre. Nous sommes donc d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 tout faire pour \u00e9carter la tristesse et d\u00e9truire l'objet qui en est cause20. Et pourtant, dans ce cas, notre puissance d'agir est dite \u00ab diminuer \u00bb. C'est que le sentiment de tristesse ne s'ajoute pas au d\u00e9sir qui s'ensuit : ce d\u00e9sir est au contraire emp\u00each\u00e9 par ce sentiment, si bien que la puissance de la chose ext\u00e9rieure _se soustrait_ de la n\u00f4tre21. Les affections \u00e0 base de tristesse s'encha\u00eenent donc les unes les autres et remplissent notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Mais elles le font de telle mani\u00e8re que notre puissance d'agir diminue de plus en plus et tend vers son plus bas degr\u00e9.\n\nNous avons fait jusqu'\u00e0 maintenant comme si deux lignes d'affections, joyeuses et tristes, correspondaient aux deux cas de rencontres, bonnes rencontres et mauvaises rencontres. Mais cette vue reste encore abstraite. Si l'on tient compte des facteurs concrets de l'existence, on voit bien que les deux lignes interf\u00e8rent constamment : les relations extrins\u00e8ques sont telles qu'un objet peut toujours \u00eatre cause de tristesse ou de joie par accident22. Non seulement en vertu de ces relations, mais en vertu de la complexit\u00e9 des rapports qui nous composent intrins\u00e8quement, nous pouvons \u00e0 la fois aimer et ha\u00efr un m\u00eame objet23. Bien plus : une ligne de joie peut toujours \u00eatre interrompue par la destruction, ou m\u00eame par la simple tristesse de l'objet aim\u00e9. Inversement la ligne de tristesse sera interrompue par la tristesse ou la destruction de la chose ha\u00efe : \u00ab Celui qui imagine que ce qu'il a en haine est d\u00e9truit se r\u00e9jouira \u00bb, \u00ab Celui qui imagine ce qu'il a en haine comme affect\u00e9 de tristesse se r\u00e9jouira24. \u00bb Nous sommes toujours d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 chercher la destruction de l'objet qui nous rend tristes ; mais d\u00e9truire, c'est donner aux parties de l'objet un nouveau rapport qui convient avec le n\u00f4tre ; nous \u00e9prouvons donc une joie qui augmente notre puissance d'agir. C'est ainsi que, les deux lignes interf\u00e9rant constamment, notre puissance d'agir ne cesse pas de varier.\n\nNous devons encore tenir compte d'autres facteurs concrets. Car le premier cas de rencontres, les bonnes rencontres avec des corps dont le rapport se compose directement avec le n\u00f4tre, reste tout \u00e0 fait hypoth\u00e9tique. La question est la suivante : Une fois que nous existons, _avons-nous des chances de faire naturellement de bonnes rencontres et d'\u00e9prouver les affections joyeuses qui s'ensuivent ?_ En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, ces chances sont peu nombreuses. Quand nous parlons de l'existence, nous ne devons pas consid\u00e9rer absolument les essences ou degr\u00e9s de puissance ; nous ne devons pas davantage consid\u00e9rer abstraitement les rapports dans lesquels elles s'expriment. Car un mode existant existe toujours comme d\u00e9j\u00e0 affect\u00e9 par des objets, sous des rapports partiels et particuliers ; il existe comme d\u00e9j\u00e0 d\u00e9termin\u00e9 \u00e0 ceci ou \u00e0 cela. S'est fait un am\u00e9nagement des rapports partiels, entre les choses ext\u00e9rieures et lui-m\u00eame, tel que son rapport caract\u00e9ristique est \u00e0 peine saisissable ou singuli\u00e8rement d\u00e9form\u00e9. C'est ainsi que, en principe, l'homme devrait parfaitement convenir avec l'homme. Mais, en r\u00e9alit\u00e9, les hommes conviennent fort peu en nature les uns avec les autres ; et cela parce qu'ils sont tellement d\u00e9termin\u00e9s par leurs passions, par des objets qui les affectent de diverses fa\u00e7ons, qu'ils ne se rencontrent pas naturellement sous les rapports qui se composent en droit25. \u00ab Comme ils sont soumis \u00e0 des sentiments qui surpassent de beaucoup la puissance ou la vertu humaine, ils sont donc diversement entra\u00een\u00e9s et sont contraires les uns aux autres26. \u00bb Ces entra\u00eenements vont si loin qu'un homme peut, en quelque sorte, \u00eatre contraire \u00e0 lui-m\u00eame : ses rapports partiels peuvent faire l'objet de tels am\u00e9nagements, se transformer si bien sous l'action de causes ext\u00e9rieures insensibles qu'il \u00ab rev\u00eat lui-m\u00eame une autre nature contraire \u00e0 la premi\u00e8re \u00bb, autre nature qui le d\u00e9termine \u00e0 supprimer la premi\u00e8re27.\n\nNous avons donc fort peu de chances de faire naturellement de bonnes rencontres. Il semble que nous soyons d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 beaucoup lutter, beaucoup ha\u00efr, et \u00e0 n'\u00e9prouver que des joies partielles ou indirectes qui ne rompent pas suffisamment l'encha\u00eenement de nos tristesses et de nos haines. Les joies partielles sont des \u00ab chatouillements \u00bb, qui n'augmentent en un point notre puissance d'agir qu'en la diminuant partout ailleurs28. Les joies indirectes sont celles que nous \u00e9prouvons \u00e0 voir l'objet ha\u00ef triste ou d\u00e9truit ; mais ces joies restent empoisonn\u00e9es par la tristesse. La haine en effet est une tristesse, elle enveloppe elle-m\u00eame la tristesse dont elle proc\u00e8de ; les joies de la haine recouvrent cette tristesse, elles l'emp\u00eachent, mais jamais ne la suppriment29. Voil\u00e0 donc que nous semblons plus \u00e9loign\u00e9s que jamais d'acqu\u00e9rir la possession de notre puissance d'agir : notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 est rempli non seulement par des affections passives, mais surtout par les passions tristes, qui enveloppent de la puissance d'agir un degr\u00e9 de plus en plus bas. On ne s'en \u00e9tonnera pas, la Nature n'\u00e9tant pas faite pour notre utilit\u00e9, mais en fonction d'un \u00ab ordre commun \u00bb auquel l'homme est soumis comme partie de la Nature.\n\nEt pourtant nous avons fait un progr\u00e8s, m\u00eame si ce progr\u00e8s reste abstrait. Nous \u00e9tions partis d'un premier principe du Spinozisme : l'opposition des passions et des actions, des affections passives et des affections actives. Ce principe se pr\u00e9sentait lui-m\u00eame sous deux aspects. Sous un premier aspect, il s'agissait presque d'une opposition r\u00e9elle : affections passives et affections actives, donc puissance de p\u00e2tir et puissance d'agir, variaient en raison inverse pour un m\u00eame pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Mais, plus profond\u00e9ment, l'opposition r\u00e9elle \u00e9tait une simple n\u00e9gation : les affections passives t\u00e9moignaient seulement de la limitation de notre essence, elles enveloppaient notre impuissance, elles ne se rapportaient \u00e0 l'esprit qu'en tant qu'il enveloppait lui-m\u00eame une n\u00e9gation. Sous cet aspect, les affections actives \u00e9taient les seules capables de remplir effectivement ou positivement notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 ; la puissance d'agir \u00e9tait donc identique \u00e0 ce pouvoir lui-m\u00eame : quant aux affections passives, elles nous s\u00e9paraient de ce que nous pouvions.\n\nLes affections passives s'opposent aux affections actives parce qu'elles ne s'expliquent pas par notre puissance d'agir. Mais, enveloppant la limitation de notre essence, elles enveloppent en quelque sorte les plus bas degr\u00e9s de cette puissance. \u00c0 leur mani\u00e8re, elles sont notre puissance d'agir, mais \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat envelopp\u00e9, non exprim\u00e9, non expliqu\u00e9. \u00c0 leur mani\u00e8re, elles remplissent notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, mais en le r\u00e9duisant au minimum : plus nous sommes passifs, moins nous sommes aptes \u00e0 \u00eatre affect\u00e9s d'un grand nombre de fa\u00e7ons. Si les affections passives nous s\u00e9parent de ce que nous pouvons, _c'est parce que notre puissance d'agir se trouve r\u00e9duite \u00e0 en investir la trace_ , soit pour les conserver quand elles sont joyeuses, soit pour les \u00e9carter quand elles sont tristes. Or, en tant qu'elles enveloppent une puissance d'agir r\u00e9duite, tant\u00f4t elles augmentent cette puissance, tant\u00f4t elles la diminuent. L'augmentation peut se poursuivre ind\u00e9finiment, nous ne serons jamais en possession formelle de notre puissance d'agir tant que nous n'aurons pas des affections actives. Mais l'opposition des actions et des passions ne doit pas nous cacher cette autre opposition qui constitue le second principe du Spinozisme : celle des affections passives joyeuses, et des affections passives tristes, les unes augmentent notre puissance, les autres la diminuent. Nous nous rapprochons de notre puissance d'agir pour autant que nous sommes affect\u00e9s de joie. La question \u00e9thique, chez Spinoza, se trouve donc d\u00e9doubl\u00e9e : _Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 produire des affections actives ?_ Mais d'abord : _Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 \u00e9prouver un maximum de passions joyeuses ?_\n\nQu'est-ce que le mal ? Il n'y a pas d'autres maux que la diminution de notre puissance d'agir et la d\u00e9composition d'un rapport. Encore la diminution de notre puissance d'agir n'est-elle un mal que parce qu'elle menace et r\u00e9duit le rapport qui nous compose. On retiendra donc du mal la d\u00e9finition suivante : c'est la destruction, la d\u00e9composition du rapport qui caract\u00e9rise un mode. D\u00e8s lors, le mal ne peut se dire que du point de vue particulier d'un mode existant : il n'y a pas de Bien ni de Mal dans la Nature en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, mais _il y a du bon et du mauvais_ , de l'utile et du nuisible pour chaque mode existant. Le mal est le mauvais du point de vue de tel ou tel mode. \u00c9tant nous-m\u00eames hommes, nous jugeons le mal de notre point de vue ; et Spinoza rappelle souvent qu'il parle du bon et du mauvais en consid\u00e9rant la seule utilit\u00e9 de l'homme. Par exemple, nous ne songeons gu\u00e8re \u00e0 parler d'un mal lorsque, pour nous nourrir, nous d\u00e9truisons le rapport sous lequel existe un animal. Mais en deux cas, nous parlons de \u00ab mal \u00bb : lorsque notre corps est d\u00e9truit, notre rapport d\u00e9compos\u00e9, sous l'action d'autre chose ; ou bien lorsque nous-m\u00eames d\u00e9truisons un \u00eatre semblable \u00e0 nous, c'est-\u00e0-dire un \u00eatre dont la ressemblance suffit \u00e0 nous faire penser qu'il convenait en principe avec nous, et que son rapport en principe \u00e9tait composable avec le n\u00f4tre30.\n\nLe mal \u00e9tant ainsi d\u00e9fini de notre point de vue, nous voyons qu'il en est de m\u00eame de tous les autres points de vue : _le mal est toujours une mauvaise rencontre_ , le mal est toujours une d\u00e9composition de rapport. Le type de ces d\u00e9compositions, c'est l'action d'un poison sur notre corps. Selon Spinoza, le mal subi par un homme est toujours du _type indigestion, intoxication, empoisonnement._ Et le mal fait par quelque chose sur l'homme, ou par un homme sur un autre homme, agit toujours comme un poison, comme un \u00e9l\u00e9ment toxique ou indigeste. Spinoza insiste sur ce point, quand il interpr\u00e8te un exemple c\u00e9l\u00e8bre : Adam a mang\u00e9 le fruit d\u00e9fendu. Il ne faut pas croire, dit Spinoza, que Dieu ait d\u00e9fendu quelque chose \u00e0 Adam. Simplement, il lui a r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9 que ce fruit \u00e9tait capable de d\u00e9truire son corps et d'en d\u00e9composer le rapport : \u00ab C'est ainsi que nous savons par lumi\u00e8re naturelle qu'un poison donne la mort31. \u00bb La th\u00e9orie du mal chez Spinoza resterait obscure si les questions d'un de ses correspondants, Blyenbergh, ne l'avait amen\u00e9 \u00e0 pr\u00e9ciser ses th\u00e8mes. Non pas que Blyenbergh ne fasse des contresens ; et ces contresens impatientent Spinoza qui renonce \u00e0 les dissiper. Mais, sur un point essentiel, Blyenbergh comprend fort bien la pens\u00e9e de Spinoza : \u00ab Vous vous abstenez de ce que j'appelle les vices... comme on laisse de c\u00f4t\u00e9 un aliment dont notre nature a horreur32. \u00bb Le _mal-mauvaise rencontre_ , le _mal-empoisonnement_ , constituent le fond de la th\u00e9orie spinoziste.\n\nAlors, si l'on demande : En quoi le mal consiste-t-il dans l'ordre des rapports ?, on doit r\u00e9pondre que le mal n'est rien. Car, dans l'ordre des rapports, il n'y a rien d'autre que des compositions. On ne dira pas qu'une composition de rapports quelconques soit un mal : toute composition de rapports est bonne, du point de vue des rapports qui se composent, c'est-\u00e0-dire du seul point de vue positif. Quand un poison d\u00e9compose mon corps, c'est parce qu'une loi naturelle d\u00e9termine les parties de mon corps, au contact du poison, \u00e0 prendre un nouveau rapport qui se compose avec celui du corps toxique. Rien n'est un mal, ici, du point de vue de la Nature. Dans la mesure o\u00f9 le poison est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par une loi \u00e0 avoir un effet, cet effet n'est pas un mal, puisqu'il consiste en un rapport qui se compose lui-m\u00eame avec le rapport du poison. De m\u00eame quand je d\u00e9truis un corps, f\u00fbt-il semblable au mien, c'est parce que, _sous le rapport et dans les circonstances o\u00f9 je le rencontre_ , il ne convient pas avec ma nature : je suis donc d\u00e9termin\u00e9 \u00e0 faire tout ce qui est en mon pouvoir pour imposer aux parties de ce corps un nouveau rapport sous lequel elles me conviendront. Le m\u00e9chant, comme le vertueux, cherche donc ce qui lui est utile ou bon (s'il y a une diff\u00e9rence entre les deux, la diff\u00e9rence n'est pas l\u00e0). D'o\u00f9 un premier contresens de Blyenbergh qui consiste \u00e0 croire que, d'apr\u00e8s Spinoza, le m\u00e9chant est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 au mal. Il est vrai que nous sommes toujours d\u00e9termin\u00e9s ; notre _conatus_ lui-m\u00eame est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par les affections que nous \u00e9prouvons. Mais nous ne sommes jamais d\u00e9termin\u00e9s au mal ; nous sommes d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 chercher ce qui nous est bon d'apr\u00e8s les rencontres que nous faisons, et d'apr\u00e8s les circonstances de ces rencontres. Dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous sommes d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 avoir un effet, cet effet se compose n\u00e9cessairement avec sa cause, et ne contient rien qu'on puisse appeler \u00ab mal \u00bb33. Bref, le mal n'est rien parce qu'il n'exprime aucune composition de rapports, aucune loi de composition. Dans toute rencontre, que je d\u00e9truise ou que je sois d\u00e9truit, se fait une composition de rapports qui, en tant que telle, est bonne. Donc, si l'on consid\u00e8re l'ordre total des rencontres, on dira qu'il co\u00efncide avec l'ordre total des rapports. Et l'on dira que le mal n'est rien dans l'ordre des rapports eux-m\u00eames.\n\nNous demandons en second lieu : En quoi le mal consiste-t-il dans l'ordre des essences ? L\u00e0 encore, il n'est rien. Soit notre mort ou destruction : notre rapport est d\u00e9compos\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire cesse de subsumer des parties extensives. Mais les parties extensives ne constituent rien de notre essence ; notre essence m\u00eame, ayant en elle-m\u00eame sa pleine r\u00e9alit\u00e9, n'a jamais pr\u00e9sent\u00e9 la moindre tendance \u00e0 passer \u00e0 l'existence. Sans doute, une fois que nous existons, notre essence est-elle un _conatus_ , un effort de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'existence. Mais le _conatus_ est seulement l'\u00e9tat que l'essence _est d\u00e9termin\u00e9e_ \u00e0 prendre dans l'existence, en tant que cette essence ne d\u00e9termine pas l'existence elle-m\u00eame ni la dur\u00e9e de l'existence. Donc, \u00e9tant effort de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'existence ind\u00e9finiment, le _conatus_ n'enveloppe aucun temps d\u00e9fini : l'essence ne sera ni plus ni moins parfaite suivant que le mode aura r\u00e9ussi \u00e0 pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer plus ou moins de temps dans l'existence34. Ne manquant de rien quand le mode n'existe pas encore, l'essence n'est priv\u00e9e de rien quand il cesse d'exister.\n\nSoit au contraire le mal que nous faisons, quand nous d\u00e9truisons un corps semblable au n\u00f4tre. Si l'on consid\u00e8re l'action de frapper (par exemple lever le bras, serrer le poing, mouvoir le bras de haut en bas), on voit qu'elle exprime quelque chose d'une essence pour autant que le corps humain peut la faire en conservant le rapport qui le caract\u00e9rise. Mais en ce sens, cette action \u00ab est une vertu qui se con\u00e7oit par la structure du corps humain35. \u00bb Maintenant, que cette action soit agressive, qu'elle menace ou d\u00e9truise le rapport qui d\u00e9finit un autre corps, cela manifeste bien une rencontre entre deux corps dont les rapports sont incompatibles sous cet aspect, mais n'exprime rien d'une essence. On dira que l'intention elle-m\u00eame \u00e9tait m\u00e9chante. Mais _la m\u00e9chancet\u00e9 de l'intention consiste en ceci seulement que j'ai joint l'image de cette action \u00e0 l'image d'un corps dont le rapport est d\u00e9truit par cette action_36. Il n'y a \u00ab mal \u00bb que dans la mesure o\u00f9 cette action prend pour objet quelque chose ou quelqu'un dont le rapport ne se combine pas avec celui dont elle d\u00e9pend. Il s'agit toujours d'un cas analogue \u00e0 celui d'un poison.\n\nLa diff\u00e9rence entre deux matricides c\u00e9l\u00e8bres, N\u00e9ron tuant Agrippine et Oreste tuant Clytemnestre, est susceptible de nous \u00e9clairer. On estime qu'Oreste n'est pas coupable parce que Clytemnestre, ayant commenc\u00e9 par tuer Agamemnon, s'est mise elle-m\u00eame dans un rapport qui ne pouvait plus se composer avec celui d'Oreste. On estime N\u00e9ron coupable parce qu'il lui fallut de la m\u00e9chancet\u00e9 pour appr\u00e9hender Agrippine sous un rapport absolument incomposable avec le sien, et pour lier l'image d'Agrippine \u00e0 l'image d'une action qui la d\u00e9truirait. Mais en tout cela, rien n'exprime une essence37. Seule appara\u00eet la rencontre de deux corps sous des rapports incomposables, seule appara\u00eet la liaison de l'image d'un acte avec l'image d'un corps dont le rapport ne se compose pas avec celui de l'acte. Le m\u00eame geste est une vertu s'il prend pour objet quelque chose dont le rapport se compose avec le sien (c'est ainsi qu'il y a des b\u00e9n\u00e9dictions qui ont l'air de frapper). D'o\u00f9 le second contre sens de Blyenbergh. Celui-ci croit que, selon Spinoza, le mal devient un bien, le crime une vertu, pour autant qu'il exprime une essence, serait-ce celle de N\u00e9ron. Et Spinoza ne le d\u00e9trompe qu'\u00e0 moiti\u00e9. Non seulement parce que Spinoza s'impatiente des exigences maladroites ou m\u00eame insolentes de Blyenbergh, mais surtout parce qu'une th\u00e8se \u00ab amoraliste \u00bb comme celle de Spinoza ne peut se faire comprendre qu'\u00e0 l'aide d'un certain nombre de provocations38. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, le crime n'exprime rien d'une essence, il n'exprime aucune essence, pas m\u00eame celle de N\u00e9ron.\n\nLe Mal appara\u00eet donc seulement dans le troisi\u00e8me ordre, l'ordre des rencontres. Il signifie seulement que les rapports qui se composent ne sont pas toujours ceux des corps qui se rencontrent. Et encore, nous avons vu que le mal n'\u00e9tait rien dans l'ordre total des rencontres. De m\u00eame, il n'est rien dans le cas extr\u00eame o\u00f9 le rapport est d\u00e9compos\u00e9, puisque cette destruction n'affecte ni la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 de l'essence en elle-m\u00eame, ni la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 \u00e9ternelle du rapport. Reste donc un seul cas o\u00f9 le mal semble \u00eatre quelque chose. Durant son existence, d'apr\u00e8s les rencontres qu'il fait, tel mode existant passe par des variations qui sont celles de sa puissance d'agir ; or, quand la puissance d'agir diminue, le mode existant _passe \u00e0 une moindre perfection_39. Le mal n'est-il pas dans cet \u00ab acte de passer \u00e0 une perfection moindre \u00bb ? Comme dit Blyenbergh, il faut bien que le mal existe, quand on est priv\u00e9 d'une condition meilleure40. La r\u00e9ponse c\u00e9l\u00e8bre de Spinoza est : Il n'y a aucune privation dans le passage \u00e0 une moindre perfection, la privation est une simple n\u00e9gation. Le mal n'est rien m\u00eame dans ce dernier ordre. Un homme devient aveugle ; un homme, tout \u00e0 l'heure anim\u00e9 par le d\u00e9sir du bien, est saisi par un app\u00e9tit sensuel. Nous n'avons aucune raison de dire qu'il soit priv\u00e9 d'un \u00e9tat meilleur, puisque cet \u00e9tat n'appartient pas plus \u00e0 sa nature, \u00e0 l'instant consid\u00e9r\u00e9, qu'\u00e0 celle de la pierre ou du diable41.\n\nOn pressent les difficult\u00e9s de cette r\u00e9ponse. Blyenbergh reproche vivement \u00e0 Spinoza d'avoir confondu deux types de comparaison tr\u00e8s distincts : la comparaison entre choses qui n'ont pas la m\u00eame nature et la comparaison entre diff\u00e9rents \u00e9tats d'une seule et m\u00eame chose. Il est vrai qu'il n'appartient pas \u00e0 la nature de la pierre de voir ; mais la vision appartenait \u00e0 la nature de l'homme. D'o\u00f9, l'objection principale est celle-ci : Spinoza pr\u00eate \u00e0 l'essence d'un \u00eatre une instantan\u00e9it\u00e9 qu'elle ne saurait avoir ; \u00ab suivant votre opinion n'appartient \u00e0 l'essence d'une chose que ce que, _au moment consid\u00e9r\u00e9_ , on per\u00e7oit qui est en elle42. \u00bb D\u00e8s lors toute progression, toute r\u00e9gression dans le temps deviennent inintelligibles.\n\nBlyenbergh fait comme si Spinoza disait qu'un \u00eatre est toujours aussi parfait qu'il peut l'\u00eatre, _en fonction de l'essence qu'il poss\u00e8de \u00e0 tel moment._ Mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, c'est l\u00e0 son troisi\u00e8me contresens. Spinoza dit tout autre chose : Un \u00eatre est toujours aussi parfait qu'il peut l'\u00eatre, _en fonction des affections qui, \u00e0 tel moment, appartiennent \u00e0 son essence_. Il est clair que Blyenbergh confond \u00ab appartenir \u00e0 l'essence \u00bb et \u00ab constituer l'essence \u00bb. \u00c0 chaque moment les affections que j'\u00e9prouve appartiennent \u00e0 mon essence, en tant qu'elles remplissent mon pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Tant qu'un mode existe, son essence elle-m\u00eame est aussi parfaite qu'elle peut l'\u00eatre en fonction des affections qui remplissent \u00e0 tel moment le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Si telles affections remplissent \u00e0 tel moment mon pouvoir, celui-ci ne peut pas au m\u00eame moment se trouver rempli par d'autres affections : il y a incompatibilit\u00e9, exclusion, n\u00e9gation, non pas privation. Reprenons l'exemple de l'aveugle. Ou bien l'on imagine un aveugle qui aurait encore des sensations lumineuses ; mais il est aveugle en ceci qu'il ne peut plus agir d'apr\u00e8s ces sensations ; ses affections lumineuses subsistantes sont enti\u00e8rement passives. Dans ce cas, seule aura vari\u00e9 la proportion des affections actives et des affections passives pour un m\u00eame pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. Ou bien l'on imagine un aveugle ayant perdu toute affection lumineuse ; dans ce cas, son pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve effectivement r\u00e9duit. Mais la conclusion est la m\u00eame : un mode existant est aussi parfait qu'il peut l'\u00eatre en fonction des affections qui remplissent son pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 et qui le font varier dans des limites compatibles avec l'existence. Bref, chez Spinoza, nulle contradiction n'appara\u00eet entre l'inspiration \u00ab n\u00e9cessitariste \u00bb selon laquelle le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve \u00e0 chaque instant n\u00e9cessairement rempli ; et l'inspiration \u00ab \u00e9thique \u00bb selon laquelle \u00e0 chaque instant il est rempli de telle mani\u00e8re que la puissance d'agir augmente ou diminue, et qu'il varie lui-m\u00eame avec ces variations. Comme dit Spinoza, il n'y a aucune privation, mais il n'y en a pas moins des passages \u00e0 des perfections plus ou moins grandes43.\n\nEn aucun sens le Mal n'est quelque chose. \u00catre, c'est _s'exprimer, ou exprimer, ou \u00eatre exprim\u00e9._ Le mal n'est rien, n'\u00e9tant expressif en rien. Et surtout il n'exprime rien. Il n'exprime aucune loi de composition, aucune composition de rapports ; il n'exprime aucune essence ; il n'exprime aucune privation d'un \u00e9tat meilleur dans l'existence. Pour \u00e9valuer l'originalit\u00e9 de cette th\u00e8se, il faut l'opposer \u00e0 d'autres mani\u00e8res de _nier_ le mal. On peut appeler \u00ab moralisme rationaliste \u00bb (optimisme) une tradition qui trouve ses sources chez Platon, et son plein d\u00e9veloppement dans la philosophie de Leibniz ; le Mal n'est rien, parce que seul le Bien est, ou, mieux encore, parce que le Bien, sup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 l'existence, d\u00e9termine tout ce qui est. Le Bien, ou le Meilleur _font \u00eatre._ La th\u00e8se spinoziste n'a rien \u00e0 voir avec cette tradition : elle forme un \u00ab amoralisme \u00bb rationaliste. Car, selon Spinoza, le Bien n'a pas plus de sens que le Mal : il n'y a ni Bien ni Mal dans la Nature. Spinoza le rappelle constamment ; \u00ab si les hommes naissaient libres, ils ne formeraient aucun concept du bien et du mal aussi longtemps qu'ils seraient libres \u00bb44. La question de l'ath\u00e9isme de Spinoza manque singuli\u00e8rement d'int\u00e9r\u00eat tant qu'elle d\u00e9pend de l'arbitraire des d\u00e9finitions th\u00e9isme-ath\u00e9isme. Aussi cette question ne peut-elle \u00eatre pos\u00e9e qu'en fonction de ce que la plupart des gens appellent Dieu du point de vue de la religion : c'est-\u00e0-dire un Dieu ins\u00e9parable d'une _ratio boni_ , proc\u00e9dant par la loi morale, agissant comme un juge45. En ce sens, Spinoza, de toute \u00e9vidence, est ath\u00e9e : la pseudo-loi morale mesure seulement nos contresens sur les lois de la nature ; l'id\u00e9e des r\u00e9compenses et des ch\u00e2timents t\u00e9moigne seulement de notre ignorance du vrai rapport entre un acte et ses cons\u00e9quences ; le Bien et le Mal sont des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates, et ne sont con\u00e7us par nous que dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous avons des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates46.\n\nMais qu'il n'y ait ni Bien ni Mal ne signifie pas que toute diff\u00e9rence disparaisse. Il n'y a pas de Bien ni de Mal dans la Nature, mais il y a du bon et du mauvais pour chaque mode existant. L'opposition morale du Bien et du Mal dispara\u00eet, mais cette disparition ne rend pas toutes les choses \u00e9gales, ni tous les \u00eatres. Comme Nietzsche le dira, \u00ab _Par-del\u00e0 le Bien et le Mal_ , cela du moins ne veut pas dire _par-del\u00e0 le bon et le mauvais_47 \u00bb. Il y a des augmentations de la puissance d'agir, des diminutions de la puissance d'agir. La distinction du bon et du mauvais servira de principe pour une v\u00e9ritable diff\u00e9rence \u00e9thique, qui doit se substituer \u00e0 la fausse opposition morale.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _\u00c9_ , I, 21-25.\n\n2.  _Lettre 64_ , _\u00e0 Schuller_ (III, p. 206).\n\n3.  _CT_ , Appendice I, 4, dem. : \u00ab ... Toutes les essences de choses que nous voyons qui, auparavant, quand elles n'existaient pas, \u00e9taient comprises dans l'\u00e9tendue, le mouvement et le repos... \u00bb\n\n4.  _CT_ , I, ch. 2, note 6 : \u00ab Mais, objectez-vous, s'il y a du mouvement dans la mati\u00e8re, ce mouvement doit \u00eatre dans une partie de la mati\u00e8re, non dans le tout, puisque le tout est infini ; dans quelle direction en effet pourrait-il se mouvoir, puisque rien n'existe en dehors de lui ? C'est donc dans une partie. R\u00e9pondons : il n'y a pas de mouvement seul, mais \u00e0 la fois du mouvement et du repos, et ce mouvement est dans le tout... \u00bb\n\n5.  _Lettre 64, \u00e0 Schuller_ , (III, p. 206).\n\n6.  En effet, les parties qui entrent sous un rapport existaient auparavant sous d'autres rapports. Il a fallu que ces rapports se composent pour que les parties qu'ils subsumaient eux-m\u00eames soient soumises au nouveau rapport. Celui-ci, en ce sens, est donc _compos\u00e9._ Inversement, il se _d\u00e9compose_ quand il perd ses parties, qui entrent n\u00e9cessairement dans d'autres rapports.\n\n7.  _\u00c9_ , II, 29, cor. _ex communi Naturae ordine._ II, 29, sc. : _Quoties (mens) ex communi Naturae ordine res percipit, hoc est quoties externe, ex rerum nempe fortuito occursu, determinatur..._ F. Alqui\u00e9 a soulign\u00e9 l'importance de ce th\u00e8me de la rencontre ( _occursus_ ) dans la th\u00e9orie spinoziste des affections : cf. _Servitude et libert\u00e9 chez Spinoza_ , cours publi\u00e9, C.D.U., p. 42.\n\n8.  _\u00c9_ , IV, def. 1 ; IV, 31, prop. ; et surtout IV, 38 et 39, prop.\n\n9.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 8.\n\n10.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , III, 57, dem.\n\n11.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 8, prop. : \u00ab La connaissance du bon et du mauvais n'est rien d'autre qu'un sentiment de joie ou de tristesse, en tant que nous en sommes conscients. \u00bb\n\n12.  _\u00c9_ , IV, _5_ , prop. : \u00ab La force et l'accroissement d'une _passion quelconque_ , et sa pers\u00e9v\u00e9rance \u00e0 exister, ne sont pas d\u00e9finis par la puissance par laquelle nous nous effor\u00e7ons de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'existence, mais par la puissance d'une cause ext\u00e9rieure compar\u00e9e avec la n\u00f4tre. \u00bb\n\n13.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 59, dem.\n\n14.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 18, dem. : \u00ab Le d\u00e9sir qui na\u00eet de la joie est aid\u00e9 ou augment\u00e9 par ce sentiment m\u00eame de joie... Et, par cons\u00e9quent, la force du d\u00e9sir qui na\u00eet de la joie doit \u00eatre d\u00e9finie \u00e0 la fois par la puissance humaine et par la puissance d'une cause ext\u00e9rieure. \u00bb\n\n15.  _\u00c9_ , III, 37, dem.\n\n16.  En effet, l'amour est lui-m\u00eame une joie, qui s'ajoute \u00e0 la joie dont il proc\u00e8de... (cf. _\u00c9_ , III, 37, dem.).\n\n17.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 10, prop. et dem. : \u00ab affects contraires \u00e0 notre nature. \u00bb\n\n18.  _\u00c9_ , V, 37, sc.\n\n19.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 8, prop. et dem.\n\n20.  _\u00c9_ , III, 13, prop. ; III, 28, prop. Et III, 37, dem. \u00ab La puissance d'agir par laquelle l'homme, en retour, s'efforcera d'\u00e9carter la tristesse... \u00bb\n\n21.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 18, dem. : \u00ab Le d\u00e9sir qui na\u00eet de la tristesse est diminu\u00e9 ou emp\u00each\u00e9 par ce sentiment m\u00eame de tristesse. \u00bb\n\n22.  _\u00c9_ , III, 15 et 16. Pas plus que \u00ab fortuit \u00bb, \u00ab accidentel \u00bb ne s'oppose ici \u00e0 \u00ab n\u00e9cessaire \u00bb.\n\n23.  Cf. le \u00ab flottement de l'\u00e2me \u00bb, _\u00c9_ , III, 17, prop. et sc. (Il y a deux cas de _flottement_ : l'un, d\u00e9fini dans la d\u00e9monstration de cette proposition 17, s'explique par les relations extrins\u00e8ques et accidentelles entre objets ; l'autre, d\u00e9fini dans le scolie, s'explique par la diff\u00e9rence des rapports qui nous composent intrins\u00e8quement.\n\n24.  _\u00c9_ , III, 20 et 23, prop.\n\n25.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 32, 33 et 34.\n\n26.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 37, sc. 2.\n\n27.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 20, sc., l'interpr\u00e9tation spinoziste du suicide : \u00ab ... ou bien enfin, c'est parce que des causes ext\u00e9rieures cach\u00e9es disposent l'imagination et affectent le corps, de sorte qu'il rev\u00eat une autre nature contraire \u00e0 la premi\u00e8re, et dont l'id\u00e9e ne peut \u00eatre donn\u00e9e dans l'esprit. \u00bb\n\n28.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 43, prop. et dem.\n\n29.  _\u00c9_ , III, 45, dem. : \u00ab La tristesse qu'enveloppe la haine. \u00bb III, 47, prop. : \u00ab La joie qui na\u00eet de ce que nous imaginons qu'une chose est d\u00e9truite, ou affect\u00e9 d'un autre mal, ne na\u00eet pas sans quelque tristesse de l'\u00e2me. \u00bb\n\n30.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , III, 47, dem.\n\n31.  _Lettre 19, \u00e0 Blyenbergh_ (III, p. 65). M\u00eame argument en _TTP_ , ch. 4 (II, p. 139). La seule diff\u00e9rence entre cette r\u00e9v\u00e9lation divine et la lumi\u00e8re naturelle est que Dieu a r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9 \u00e0 Adam la _cons\u00e9quence_ , c'est-\u00e0-dire l'empoisonnement qui r\u00e9sulterait de l'ingestion du fruit, mais ne lui a pas r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9 la _n\u00e9cessit\u00e9_ de cette cons\u00e9quence ; ou du moins Adam n'avait pas l'entendement assez fort pour comprendre cette n\u00e9cessit\u00e9.\n\n32.  _Lettre 22, de Blyenbergh_ (III, p. 96).\n\n33.  Ce que Spinoza appelle les \u00ab \u0153uvres \u00bb, dans la correspondance avec Blyenbergh, ce sont pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment les effets auxquels nous sommes d\u00e9termin\u00e9s.\n\n34.  _\u00c9_ , III, 8, prop. : \u00ab L'effort par lequel chaque chose s'efforce de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans son \u00eatre n'enveloppe aucun temps fini, mais un temps ind\u00e9fini. \u00bb _\u00c9_ , IV, pr\u00e9face : \u00ab _Aucune chose singuli\u00e8re ne peut \u00eatre dite plus parfaite parce qu'elle a pers\u00e9v\u00e9r\u00e9 plus de temps dans l'existence._ \u00bb\n\n35.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 59, sc.\n\n36.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 59, sc. : \u00ab Si un homme, pouss\u00e9 par la col\u00e8re ou par la haine, est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 \u00e0 serrer le poing ou \u00e0 mouvoir le bras, _cela provient de ce qu'une seule et m\u00eame action peut \u00eatrejointe \u00e0 n'importe quelles images dechoses._ \u00bb\n\n37.  _Lettre 23, \u00e0 Blyenbergh_ (III, p. 99) : _nihil horum aliquid essentiae exprimere._ C'est l\u00e0 que Spinoza commente le cas d'Oreste et celui de N\u00e9ron.\n\n38.  Cf. objection de Blyenbergh, _Lettre 22_ (III, p. 96) : \u00ab Se pose donc la question de savoir si, au cas o\u00f9 il y aurait une \u00e2me \u00e0 la nature singuli\u00e8re de laquelle conviendrait la qu\u00eate des plaisirs et des crimes au lieu de lui r\u00e9pugner, si en pareil cas, dis-je, il existerait un argument de vertu, qui p\u00fbt d\u00e9terminer un pareil \u00eatre \u00e0 agir vertueusement et \u00e0 s'abstenir du mal ? \u00bb R\u00e9ponse de Spinoza, _Lettre 23_ (III, p. 101) : \u00ab C'est, \u00e0 mes yeux, comme si l'on demandait : Peut-il mieux convenir \u00e0 la nature de quelqu'un de se pendre, ou bien peut-on donner des raisons pour qu'il ne se pende pas ? Supposons cependant qu'une telle nature puisse exister..., je l'affirme alors, si quelqu'un voit qu'il peut vivre plus commod\u00e9ment suspendu au gibet qu'assis \u00e0 sa table, il agirait en insens\u00e9 en ne se pendant pas ; et de m\u00eame, qui verrait clairement qu'il peut jouir d'une vie ou d'une essence meilleure en commettant des crimes plut\u00f4t qu'en s'attachant \u00e0 la vertu, il serait insens\u00e9 lui aussi s'il ne le faisait pas. Car les crimes, au regard d'une nature humaine aussi perverse, seraient vertu. \u00bb\n\n39.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , III, d\u00e9finition de la tristesse.\n\n40.  _Lettre 20, de Blyenbergh_ (III, p. 72).\n\n41.  _Lettre 21, \u00e0 Blyenbergh_ (III, pp. 87-88).\n\n42.  _Lettre 22, de Blyenbergh_ (III, p. 94).\n\n43.  _\u00c9_ , III, d\u00e9finition de la tristesse, explic. : \u00ab Et nous ne pouvons pas dire que la tristesse consiste dans la privation d'une plus grande perfection, car une privation n'est rien, tandis que le sentiment de tristesse est un acte, qui pour cette raison ne peut \u00eatre autre que l'acte de passer \u00e0 une perfection moindre. \u00bb\n\n44.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 68, prop.\n\n45.  C'\u00e9taient les crit\u00e8res de Leibniz, et de tous ceux qui reproch\u00e8rent \u00e0 Spinoza son ath\u00e9isme.\n\n46.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 68, dem.\n\n47.  NIETZSCHE, _G\u00e9n\u00e9alogie de la morale_ , I, 17.\n\n## CHAPITRE XVI\n\n## VISION \u00c9THIQUE DU MONDE\n\nLorsque Spinoza dit : Nous ne savons m\u00eame pas ce que peut un corps, cette formule est presque un cri de guerre. Il ajoute : Nous parlons de la conscience, de l'esprit, de l'\u00e2me, du pouvoir de l'\u00e2me sur le corps. Nous bavardons ainsi, mais nous ne savons m\u00eame pas ce que peut un corps1. Le bavardage moral remplace la vraie philosophie.\n\nCette d\u00e9claration est importante \u00e0 plusieurs \u00e9gards. Tant que nous parlons d'un pouvoir de l'\u00e2me sur le corps, nous ne pensons pas vraiment en termes de pouvoir ou de puissance. Nous voulons dire en effet que l'\u00e2me, en fonction de sa nature \u00e9minente et de sa finalit\u00e9 particuli\u00e8re, a des \u00ab devoirs \u00bb sup\u00e9rieurs : elle doit faire ob\u00e9ir le corps, conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 des lois auxquelles elle est elle-m\u00eame soumise. Quant au pouvoir du corps, ou bien c'est un pouvoir d'ex\u00e9cution, ou bien c'est un pouvoir de distraire l'\u00e2me et de la d\u00e9tourner de ses devoirs. En tout ceci nous pensons moralement. La vision morale du monde appara\u00eet dans un principe qui domine la plupart des th\u00e9ories de l'union de l'\u00e2me et du corps : l'un des deux n'agirait pas sans que l'autre ne p\u00e2tisse. Tel est notamment le principe de l'action r\u00e9elle chez Descartes : le corps p\u00e2tit quand l'\u00e2me agit, le corps n'agit pas sans que l'\u00e2me ne p\u00e2tisse \u00e0 son tour2. Or, bien qu'ils nient l'action r\u00e9elle, les successeurs de Descartes ne renoncent pas \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de ce principe : l'harmonie pr\u00e9\u00e9tablie, par exemple, maintient entre l'\u00e2me et le corps une \u00ab action id\u00e9ale \u00bb d'apr\u00e8s laquelle, toujours, l'un p\u00e2tit quand l'autre agit3. Dans de telles perspectives, nous n'avons aucun moyen de _comparer_ la puissance du corps et la puissance de l'\u00e2me ; n'ayant pas le moyen de les comparer, nous n'avons aucune possibilit\u00e9 de les _\u00e9valuer_ respectivement4.\n\nSi le parall\u00e9lisme est une doctrine originale, ce n'est pas parce qu'il nie l'action r\u00e9elle de l'\u00e2me et du corps. C'est parce qu'il renverse le principe moral d'apr\u00e8s lequel les actions de l'un sont les passions de l'autre. \u00ab L'ordre des actions et des passions de notre corps va, par nature, de pair avec l'ordre des actions et des passions de l'esprit5. \u00bb Ce qui est passion dans l'\u00e2me est _aussi_ passion dans le corps, ce qui est action dans l'\u00e2me est _aussi_ action dans le corps. C'est en ce sens que le parall\u00e9lisme exclut toute \u00e9minence de l'\u00e2me, toute finalit\u00e9 spirituelle et morale, toute transcendance d'un Dieu qui r\u00e9glerait une s\u00e9rie sur l'autre. C'est en ce sens que le parall\u00e9lisme s'oppose pratiquement, non seulement \u00e0 la doctrine de l'action r\u00e9elle, mais aux th\u00e9ories de l'harmonie pr\u00e9\u00e9tablie et de l'occasionnalisme. Nous demandons : Qu'est-ce que peut un corps ? De quelles affections est-il capable, passives aussi bien qu'actives ? Jusqu'o\u00f9 va sa puissance ? Alors, et alors seulement, nous pourrons savoir ce que peut une \u00e2me en elle-m\u00eame et quelle est sa puissance. Nous aurons les moyens de \u00ab comparer \u00bb la puissance de l'\u00e2me avec la puissance du corps ; d\u00e8s lors, nous aurons les moyens d'\u00e9valuer la puissance de l'\u00e2me consid\u00e9r\u00e9e en elle-m\u00eame.\n\nPour arriver \u00e0 l' _\u00e9valuation_ de la puissance de l'\u00e2me en elle-m\u00eame, il fallait passer par la _comparaison_ des puissances : \u00ab Pour d\u00e9terminer en quoi l'esprit humain diff\u00e8re des autres et en quoi il l'emporte sur les autres, il nous est n\u00e9cessaire de conna\u00eetre la nature de son objet, c'est-\u00e0-dire du corps humain... Je dis en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral que plus un corps est apte, par rapport aux autres, \u00e0 agir et \u00e0 p\u00e2tir de plus de fa\u00e7ons \u00e0 la fois, plus son esprit est apte \u00e0 percevoir plus de choses \u00e0 la fois ; et plus les actions d'un corps d\u00e9pendent de lui seul, et moins d'autres corps concourent avec lui \u00e0 une action, plus son esprit est apte \u00e0 comprendre distinctement6. \u00bb Pour penser vraiment en termes de puissance, il fallait d'abord poser la question \u00e0 propos du corps, il fallait en premier lieu lib\u00e9rer le corps du rapport inversement proportionnel qui rend impossible toute comparaison de puissances, donc aussi qui rend impossible toute \u00e9valuation de la puissance de l'\u00e2me prise en elle-m\u00eame. Il fallait prendre pour mod\u00e8le la question : Qu'est-ce que peut un corps ? _Ce mod\u00e8le n'implique aucune d\u00e9valorisation de la pens\u00e9e par rapport \u00e0 l'\u00e9tendue, mais seulement une d\u00e9valorisation de la conscience par rapport \u00e0 la pens\u00e9e._ On se souvient que Platon disait que les mat\u00e9rialistes, s'ils \u00e9taient intelligents, parleraient de puissance au lieu de parler du corps. Mais il est vrai inversement que les dynamistes, quand ils sont intelligents, parlent d'abord du corps pour \u00ab penser \u00bb la puissance. La th\u00e9orie de la puissance, d'apr\u00e8s laquelle les actions et passions du corps vont de pair avec les actions et passions de l'\u00e2me, forme une vision \u00e9thique du monde. La substitution de l'\u00e9thique \u00e0 la morale est la cons\u00e9quence du parall\u00e9lisme, et en manifeste la v\u00e9ritable signification.\n\nLa question \u00ab Qu'est-ce que peut un corps ? \u00bb a un sens en elle-m\u00eame, parce qu'elle implique une nouvelle conception de l'individu corporel, de l'esp\u00e8ce et du genre. Sa signification biologique, nous le verrons, ne doit pas \u00eatre n\u00e9glig\u00e9e. Mais, _prise comme mod\u00e8le_ , elle a d'abord une signification juridique et \u00e9thique. Tout ce que peut un corps (sa puissance), est aussi bien son \u00ab droit naturel \u00bb. Si nous arrivons \u00e0 poser le probl\u00e8me du droit au niveau des corps, nous transformons toute la philosophie du droit, par rapport aux \u00e2mes elles-m\u00eames. Corps et \u00e2me, chacun cherche ce qui lui est utile ou bon. S'il arrive \u00e0 quelqu'un de rencontrer un corps qui se compose avec le sien sous un rapport favorable, il cherche \u00e0 s'unir avec lui. Quand quelqu'un rencontre un corps dont le rapport ne se compose pas avec le sien, un corps qui l'affecte de tristesse, il fait tout ce qui est en son pouvoir pour \u00e9carter la tristesse ou d\u00e9truire ce corps, c'est-\u00e0-dire pour imposer aux parties de ce corps un nouveau rapport qui convient avec sa propre nature. \u00c0 chaque instant donc, les affections d\u00e9terminent le _conatus_ ; mais \u00e0 chaque instant le _conatus_ est recherche de ce qui est utile en fonction des affections qui le d\u00e9terminent. _C'est pourquoi un corps va toujours aussi loin qu'il le peut, en passion comme en action_ ; et ce qu'il peut est son droit. La th\u00e9orie du droit naturel implique la double identit\u00e9 du pouvoir et de son exercice, de cet exercice et du droit. \u00ab Le droit de chacun s'\u00e9tend jusqu'aux bornes de la puissance limit\u00e9e dont il dispose7. \u00bb Le mot _loi_ n'a pas d'autre sens : la loi de nature n'est jamais une r\u00e8gle de devoirs, mais la norme d'un pouvoir, l'unit\u00e9 du droit, du pouvoir et de son effectuation8. \u00c0 cet \u00e9gard, on ne fera nulle diff\u00e9rence entre le sage et l'insens\u00e9, le raisonnable et le d\u00e9ment, le fort et le faible. Sans doute diff\u00e8rent-ils par le genre d'affections qui d\u00e9terminent leur effort \u00e0 pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'existence. Mais l'un et l'autre s'efforcent \u00e9galement de se conserver, ont autant de droit que de puissance, en fonction des affections qui remplissent actuellement leur pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. L'insens\u00e9 lui-m\u00eame est de la nature, et n'en trouble aucunement l'ordre9.\n\nCette conception du droit naturel est directement h\u00e9rit\u00e9e de Hobbes. (La question des diff\u00e9rences essentielles de Spinoza avec Hobbes se pose \u00e0 un autre niveau.) Ce que Spinoza doit \u00e0 Hobbes, c'est une conception du droit de nature qui s'oppose profond\u00e9ment \u00e0 la th\u00e9orie classique de la loi naturelle. Si nous suivons Cic\u00e9ron, qui recueille \u00e0 la fois des traditions platoniciennes, aristot\u00e9liciennes et sto\u00efciennes, nous voyons que la th\u00e9orie antique de la loi naturelle pr\u00e9sente plusieurs caract\u00e8res : 1o) Elle d\u00e9finit la nature d'un \u00eatre par sa perfection, conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 un ordre des fins (ainsi l'homme est \u00ab naturellement \u00bb raisonnable et sociable). 2o) Il s'ensuit que l'\u00e9tat de nature pour l'homme n'est pas un \u00e9tat qui pr\u00e9c\u00e9derait la soci\u00e9t\u00e9, ne serait-ce qu'en droit, mais au contraire une vie conforme \u00e0 la nature dans une \u00ab bonne \u00bb soci\u00e9t\u00e9 civile. 3o) Donc ce qui est premier et inconditionnel dans cet \u00e9tat, ce sont les \u00ab devoirs \u00bb ; car les pouvoirs naturels sont seulement en puissance, et ne sont pas s\u00e9parables d'un acte de la raison qui les d\u00e9termine et les r\u00e9alise en fonction de fins auxquelles ils doivent servir. 4o) La comp\u00e9tence du sage, par l\u00e0 m\u00eame, est fond\u00e9e ; car le sage est le meilleur juge de l'ordre des fins, des devoirs qui en d\u00e9coulent, des offices et des actions qu'il revient \u00e0 chacun de faire et de remplir. On devine quel parti le christianisme devait tirer de cette conception de la loi de nature. Avec lui, cette loi devenait ins\u00e9parable de la th\u00e9ologie naturelle et m\u00eame de la R\u00e9v\u00e9lation10.\n\nIl revient \u00e0 Hobbes d'avoir d\u00e9gag\u00e9 quatre th\u00e8ses fondamentales, qui s'opposent \u00e0 celles-l\u00e0. Ces th\u00e8ses originales transforment le probl\u00e8me philosophique du droit, mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce qu'elles prennent le corps pour mod\u00e8le m\u00e9canique et dynamique. Spinoza adopte ces th\u00e8ses, les int\u00e9grant dans son propre syst\u00e8me o\u00f9 elles trouvent des perspectives nouvelles. 1o) La loi de nature n'est plus rapport\u00e9e \u00e0 une perfection finale, mais au premier d\u00e9sir, \u00e0 \u00ab l'app\u00e9tit \u00bb le plus fort ; dissoci\u00e9e d'un ordre des fins, elle se d\u00e9duit de l'app\u00e9tit comme de sa cause efficiente. 2o) De ce point de vue la raison ne jouit d'aucun privil\u00e8ge : l'insens\u00e9 ne s'efforce pas moins que l'\u00eatre raisonnable de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans son \u00eatre, et les d\u00e9sirs ou les actions qui naissent de la raison ne manifestent pas plus cet effort que les d\u00e9sirs ou les passions de l'insens\u00e9 lui-m\u00eame. Bien plus, _personne ne na\u00eet raisonnable._ Il se peut que la raison utilise et conserve la loi de nature, en aucun cas elle n'en est le principe ou le mobile. De m\u00eame _personne ne na\u00eet citoyen_11. Il se peut que l'\u00e9tat civil conserve le droit de nature, mais l'\u00e9tat de nature en lui-m\u00eame est pr\u00e9-social, pr\u00e9-civil. Et encore, _personne ne na\u00eet religieux_ : \u00ab L'\u00e9tat de nature, par nature et dans le temps, est ant\u00e9rieur \u00e0 la religion ; la nature n'a jamais enseign\u00e9 \u00e0 personne qu'il est oblig\u00e9 d'ob\u00e9ir \u00e0 Dieu...12 \u00bb 3o) Ce qui est premier et inconditionn\u00e9, c'est donc le pouvoir ou le droit. Les \u00ab devoirs \u00bb, quels qu'ils soient, sont toujours secondaires, relatifs \u00e0 l'affirmation de notre puissance, \u00e0 l'exercice de notre pouvoir, \u00e0 la conservation de notre droit. Et la puissance ne renvoie plus \u00e0 un acte qui la d\u00e9termine et la r\u00e9alise en fonction d'un ordre des fins. Ma puissance elle-m\u00eame est en acte, parce que les affections que j'\u00e9prouve \u00e0 chaque instant la d\u00e9terminent et la remplissent de plein droit, quelles que soient ces affections. 4o) Il s'ensuit que nul n'a comp\u00e9tence pour d\u00e9cider de mon droit. Chacun dans l'\u00e9tat de nature, qu'il soit sage ou insens\u00e9, est juge de ce qui est bon et mauvais, de ce qui est n\u00e9cessaire \u00e0 sa conservation. D'o\u00f9, le droit de nature n'est contraire \u00ab ni aux luttes, ni aux haines, ni \u00e0 la col\u00e8re, ni \u00e0 la tromperie, ni \u00e0 rien absolument de ce que l'app\u00e9tit conseille13. \u00bb Et s'il arrive que nous soyons amen\u00e9s \u00e0 renoncer \u00e0 notre droit naturel, ce ne sera pas en reconnaissant la comp\u00e9tence du sage, mais en consentant par nous-m\u00eames \u00e0 ce renoncement, par crainte d'un plus grand mal ou par espoir d'un plus grand bien. Le principe du consentement (pacte ou contrat) devient principe de la philosophie politique et se substitue \u00e0 la r\u00e8gle de comp\u00e9tence.\n\nAinsi d\u00e9fini, l'\u00e9tat de nature manifeste en soi ce qui le rend invivable. L'\u00e9tat de nature n'est pas viable, tant que le droit naturel qui lui correspond reste th\u00e9orique et abstrait14. Or, dans l'\u00e9tat de nature, je vis au hasard des rencontres. Il est bien vrai que ma puissance est d\u00e9termin\u00e9e par les affections qui remplissent \u00e0 chaque instant mon pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 ; il est bien vrai que j'ai toujours toute la perfection dont je suis capable en fonction de ces affections. Mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, dans l'\u00e9tat de nature, mon pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve rempli dans de telles conditions que j'\u00e9prouve non seulement des affections passives qui me s\u00e9parent de ma puissance d'agir, mais encore des affections passives \u00e0 pr\u00e9dominance de tristesse qui ne cessent de diminuer cette puissance elle-m\u00eame. Je n'ai aucune chance de rencontrer des corps qui se composent directement avec le mien. J'aurais beau l'emporter dans plusieurs rencontres avec des corps qui me sont contraires ; ces triomphes ou ces joies de la haine ne supprimeront pas la tristesse que la haine enveloppe ; et surtout, je ne serai jamais s\u00fbr d'\u00eatre encore vainqueur \u00e0 la prochaine rencontre, je serai donc affect\u00e9 d'une crainte perp\u00e9tuelle.\n\nIl n'y aurait qu'un moyen de rendre viable l'\u00e9tat de nature : en s'effor\u00e7ant _d'organiser les rencontres._ Quel que soit le corps rencontr\u00e9, je cherche l'utile. Mais il y a une grande diff\u00e9rence entre chercher l'utile au hasard (c'est-\u00e0-dire s'efforcer de d\u00e9truire les corps qui ne conviennent pas avec le n\u00f4tre) et chercher une organisation de l'utile (s'efforcer de rencontrer les corps qui conviennent en nature avec nous, sous les rapports o\u00f9 ils conviennent). Seul ce deuxi\u00e8me effort d\u00e9finit _l'utile propre ou v\u00e9ritable_15. Sans doute cet effort a-t-il des limites : nous serons toujours d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 d\u00e9truire certains corps, ne serait-ce que pour subsister ; nous n'\u00e9viterons pas toute mauvaise rencontre, nous n'\u00e9viterons pas la mort. Mais nous nous effor\u00e7ons de nous unir \u00e0 ce qui convient avec notre nature, de composer notre rapport avec des rapports qui se combinent avec le n\u00f4tre, de joindre nos gestes et nos pens\u00e9es \u00e0 l'image de choses qui s'accordent avec nous. D'un tel effort nous sommes en droit d'attendre, par d\u00e9finition, un maximum d'affections joyeuses. Notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 sera rempli dans de telles conditions que notre puissance d'agir augmentera. Et si l'on demande en quoi consiste ce qui nous est le plus utile, on voit bien que c'est l'homme. Car l'homme, en principe, convient en nature avec l'homme ; il compose son rapport avec le sien ; l'homme est utile \u00e0 l'homme absolument ou v\u00e9ritablement. Chacun, cherchant ce qui lui est v\u00e9ritablement utile, cherche donc aussi ce qui est utile \u00e0 l'homme. Ainsi l'effort d'organiser les rencontres est d'abord l'effort de former l'association des hommes sous des rapports qui se composent16.\n\nIl n'y a pas de Bien ni de Mal dans la Nature, il n'y a pas d'opposition morale, mais il y a une diff\u00e9rence \u00e9thique. Cette diff\u00e9rence \u00e9thique se pr\u00e9sente sous plusieurs formes \u00e9quivalentes : entre le raisonnable et l'insens\u00e9, entre le sage et l'ignorant, entre l'homme libre et l'esclave, entre le fort et le faible17. Et en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, la sagesse ou la raison n'ont pas d'autre contenu que la force, la libert\u00e9. Cette diff\u00e9rence \u00e9thique ne porte pas sur le _conatus_ , puisque l'insens\u00e9 non moins que le raisonnable, le faible non moins que le fort s'efforce de pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans son \u00eatre. _Elle porte sur le genre d'affections qui d\u00e9terminent le conatus_. \u00c0 la limite, l'homme libre, fort et raisonnable se d\u00e9finira pleinement par la possession de sa puissance d'agir, par la pr\u00e9sence en lui d'id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates et d'affections actives ; au contraire, l'esclave, le faible n'ont que des passions qui d\u00e9rivent de leurs id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates, et qui les s\u00e9parent de leur puissance d'agir.\n\nMais la diff\u00e9rence \u00e9thique s'exprime d'abord \u00e0 ce niveau plus simple, pr\u00e9paratoire ou pr\u00e9liminaire. Avant d'en arriver \u00e0 la possession formelle de sa puissance, _l'homme libre et fort se_ reconna\u00eet \u00e0 ses passions joyeuses, \u00e0 ses affections qui augmentent cette puissance d'agir ; _l'esclave ou le faible_ se reconnaissent \u00e0 leurs passions tristes, aux affections \u00e0 base de tristesse qui diminuent leur puissance d'agir. Tout se passe donc comme si l'on devait distinguer deux moments de la raison ou de la libert\u00e9 : augmenter la puissance d'agir en s'effor\u00e7ant d'\u00e9prouver le maximum d'affections passives joyeuses ; et ainsi, passer au stade final o\u00f9 la puissance d'agir a si bien augment\u00e9 qu'elle devient capable de produire des affections elles-m\u00eames actives. Il est vrai que l'encha\u00eenement des deux temps nous reste encore myst\u00e9rieux. Du moins la pr\u00e9sence du premier temps n'est-elle pas douteuse. L'homme qui devient raisonnable, fort et libre, commence par faire tout ce qui est en son pouvoir pour \u00e9prouver des passions joyeuses. C'est donc lui qui s'efforce de s'arracher au hasard des rencontres et \u00e0 l'encha\u00eenement des passions tristes, d'organiser les bonnes rencontres, de composer son rapport avec les rapports qui se combinent directement avec le sien, de s'unir avec ce qui convient en nature avec lui, de former l'association raisonnable entre les hommes ; tout cela, de mani\u00e8re \u00e0 \u00eatre affect\u00e9 de joie. Dans l' _\u00c9thique_ la description du livre IV, concernant l'homme libre et raisonnable, identifie l'effort de la raison avec cet art d'organiser les rencontres, ou de former une _totalit\u00e9_ sous des rapports qui se composent18.\n\nChez Spinoza, la raison, la force ou la libert\u00e9 ne sont pas s\u00e9parables d'un devenir, d'une formation, d'une culture. Personne ne na\u00eet libre, personne ne na\u00eet raisonnable19. Et personne ne peut faire pour nous la lente exp\u00e9rience de ce qui convient avec notre nature, l'effort lent pour d\u00e9couvrir nos joies. L'enfance, dit souvent Spinoza, est un \u00e9tat d'impuissance et d'esclavage, un \u00e9tat insens\u00e9 o\u00f9 nous d\u00e9pendons au plus haut point des causes ext\u00e9rieures, et o\u00f9 nous avons n\u00e9cessairement plus de tristesses que de joies ; jamais nous ne serons autant s\u00e9par\u00e9s de notre puissance d'agir. Le premier homme, Adam, est l'enfance de l'humanit\u00e9. C'est pourquoi Spinoza s'oppose avec tant de force \u00e0 la tradition chr\u00e9tienne, puis rationaliste, qui nous pr\u00e9sente avant la faute un Adam raisonnable, libre et parfait. Au contraire, il faut imaginer Adam comme un enfant : triste, faible, esclave, ignorant, livr\u00e9 au hasard des rencontres. \u00ab Il faut reconna\u00eetre qu'il n'\u00e9tait pas au pouvoir du premier homme d'user droitement de la raison, mais qu'il a \u00e9t\u00e9, comme nous le sommes, soumis aux passions20. \u00bb C'est-\u00e0-dire : _Ce n'est pas la faute qui explique la faiblesse, c'est notre faiblesse premi\u00e8re qui explique le mythe de la faute._ Spinoza pr\u00e9sente trois th\u00e8ses concernant Adam, qui forment un ensemble syst\u00e9matique : 1o) Dieu n'a rien d\u00e9fendu \u00e0 Adam, mais lui a simplement r\u00e9v\u00e9l\u00e9 que le fruit \u00e9tait un poison qui d\u00e9truirait son corps s'il entrait en contact avec lui. 2o) Son entendement \u00e9tant faible comme celui d'un enfant, Adam a per\u00e7u cette r\u00e9v\u00e9lation comme une d\u00e9fense ; il d\u00e9sob\u00e9it comme un enfant, ne comprenant pas la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 naturelle du rapport action-cons\u00e9quence, croyant que les lois de la nature sont des lois morales qu'il est possible de violer. 3o) Comment imaginer un Adam libre et raisonnable, alors que le premier homme est n\u00e9cessairement affect\u00e9 de sentiments passifs, et n'a pas eu le temps d'entreprendre cette longue formation que la raison suppose non moins que la libert\u00e9 ?21.\n\nL'\u00e9tat de raison, tel qu'il appara\u00eet d\u00e9j\u00e0 sous son premier aspect, a un rapport complexe avec l'\u00e9tat de nature. D'une part, l'\u00e9tat de nature n'est pas soumis aux lois de la raison : la raison concerne l'utilit\u00e9 propre et v\u00e9ritable de l'homme, et tend uniquement \u00e0 sa conservation ; la nature au contraire n'a nul \u00e9gard \u00e0 la conservation de l'homme et comprend une infinit\u00e9 d'autres lois qui concernent l'univers entier, dont l'homme n'est qu'une petite partie. Mais d'autre part, l'\u00e9tat de raison n'est pas d'un autre ordre que l'\u00e9tat de nature lui-m\u00eame. M\u00eame dans ses \u00ab commandements \u00bb, la raison ne demande rien qui soit contraire \u00e0 la nature : elle demande seulement que chacun s'aime soi-m\u00eame, cherche ce qui lui est utile en propre et s'efforce de conserver son \u00eatre en augmentant sa puissance d'agir22. Aussi n'y a-t-il pas d'artifice ou de convention dans l'effort de la raison. La raison ne proc\u00e8de pas par artifice, mais par composition naturelle de rapports ; elle ne proc\u00e8de pas \u00e0 des calculs, mais \u00e0 une esp\u00e8ce de reconnaissance directe de l'homme par l'homme23. La question de savoir si des \u00eatres suppos\u00e9s raisonnables, ou en train de le devenir, ont besoin de s'engager mutuellement par une sorte de contrat, est tr\u00e8s complexe ; mais m\u00eame s'il y a contrat \u00e0 ce niveau, ce contrat n'implique aucun renoncement conventionnel au droit naturel, aucune limitation artificielle. L'\u00e9tat de raison ne fait qu'un avec la formation d'un corps sup\u00e9rieur et d'une \u00e2me sup\u00e9rieure, jouissant du droit naturel correspondant \u00e0 leur puissance : en effet, si deux individus composent enti\u00e8rement leurs rapports, ils forment naturellement un individu deux fois plus grand, ayant lui-m\u00eame un droit de nature deux fois plus grand24. L'\u00e9tat de raison ne supprime ni ne limite en rien le droit naturel, il l'\u00e9l\u00e8ve \u00e0 une puissance sans laquelle ce droit resterait irr\u00e9el et abstrait.\n\n\u00c0 quoi donc se r\u00e9duit la diff\u00e9rence entre l'\u00e9tat de raison et l'\u00e9tat de nature ? Dans l'ordre de la nature, chaque corps en rencontre d'autres, mais son rapport ne se compose pas n\u00e9cessairement avec ceux des corps qu'il rencontre. La co\u00efncidence des rencontres et des rapports se fait seulement au niveau de la nature enti\u00e8re ; elle a lieu d'ensemble \u00e0 ensemble dans le mode infini m\u00e9diat. Toutefois, quand nous nous \u00e9levons dans la s\u00e9rie des essences, nous assistons \u00e0 un effort qui pr\u00e9figure celui de la nature enti\u00e8re. Les plus hautes essences, dans l'existence, s'efforcent d\u00e9j\u00e0 de faire co\u00efncider _leurs propres_ rencontres avec des rapports qui se composent avec _le leur._ Cet effort, qui ne peut aboutir compl\u00e8tement, constitue l'effort de la raison. C'est en ce sens que l'\u00eatre raisonnable, \u00e0 sa fa\u00e7on, peut \u00eatre dit reproduire et exprimer l'effort de la nature enti\u00e8re.\n\nMais comment les hommes arriveront-ils \u00e0 se rencontrer sous des rapports qui se composent et \u00e0 former ainsi une association raisonnable ? Si l'homme convient avec l'homme, c'est seulement en tant qu'on le suppose _d\u00e9j\u00e0_ raisonnable25. Tant qu'ils vivent au hasard des rencontres, tant qu'ils sont affect\u00e9s de passions fortuites, les hommes sont diversement entra\u00een\u00e9s, et pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment n'ont aucune chance de se rencontrer sous des rapports qui conviennent : ils sont contraires les uns aux autres26. Il est vrai que nous \u00e9chappons \u00e0 la contradiction dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous invoquons une tr\u00e8s lente exp\u00e9rience, une tr\u00e8s lente formation empirique. Mais nous tombons aussit\u00f4t dans une autre difficult\u00e9. D'une part, le poids des rencontres pr\u00e9sentes est toujours l\u00e0, qui risque d'annihiler l'effort de la raison. Et surtout cet effort, au mieux, n'aboutira qu'\u00e0 la fin de la vie ; \u00ab or il faut bien vivre jusque-l\u00e027. \u00bb Voil\u00e0 pourquoi la raison ne serait rien et ne conquerrait jamais sa propre puissance si elle ne trouvait une aide dans une puissance d'un autre genre, qui se joint \u00e0 elle, qui en pr\u00e9pare et en accompagne la formation. Cette puissance d'un autre genre est celle de l'\u00c9tat ou de la cit\u00e9.\n\nEn effet, la cit\u00e9 n'est nullement une association raisonnable. Elle s'en distingue de trois fa\u00e7ons. 1o) Le mobile de sa formation n'est pas une affection de la raison, c'est-\u00e0-dire une affection produite en nous par un autre homme sous un rapport qui se compose parfaitement avec le n\u00f4tre. Le mobile en est la crainte, ou l'angoisse de l'\u00e9tat de nature, l'espoir d'un plus grand bien28. 2o) Le tout comme id\u00e9al de la raison est constitu\u00e9 par des rapports qui se composent directement et naturellement, par des puissances ou des droits qui s'additionnent naturellement. Il n'en est pas ainsi de la cit\u00e9 : les hommes n'\u00e9tant pas raisonnables, il faut que chacun \u00ab renonce \u00bb \u00e0 son droit naturel. Seule cette ali\u00e9nation rend possible la formation d'un tout qui b\u00e9n\u00e9ficie lui-m\u00eame de la somme de ces droits. Tel est le \u00ab pacte \u00bb ou le \u00ab contrat \u00bb civil29. Alors la cit\u00e9 souveraine a assez de puissance pour instituer des rapports indirects et conventionnels sous lesquels les citoyens _sont forc\u00e9s_ de convenir et de s'accorder. 3o) La raison est au principe d'une distinction \u00e9thique, entre \u00ab ceux qui vivent sous sa conduite \u00bb et ceux qui restent sous la conduite du sentiment, ceux qui se lib\u00e8rent et ceux qui restent esclaves. Mais l'\u00e9tat civil distingue seulement les justes et les injustes, suivant l'ob\u00e9issance \u00e0 ses lois. Ayant renonc\u00e9 \u00e0 leur droit de juger ce qui est bon et mauvais, les citoyens s'en remettent \u00e0 l'\u00c9tat, qui r\u00e9compense et qui ch\u00e2tie. P\u00e9ch\u00e9-ob\u00e9issance, justice-injustice sont des cat\u00e9gories proprement sociales ; l'opposition morale elle-m\u00eame a pour principe et pour milieu la soci\u00e9t\u00e930.\n\nPourtant, entre la cit\u00e9 et l'id\u00e9al de la raison, une grande ressemblance existe. Chez Spinoza comme chez Hobbes, le souverain se d\u00e9finit par son droit naturel, \u00e9gal \u00e0 sa puissance, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00e9gal \u00e0 tous les droits dont les contractants se sont dessaisis. Mais ce souverain n'est pas, comme chez Hobbes, un tiers au b\u00e9n\u00e9fice duquel se ferait le contrat des particuliers. Le souverain est le tout ; le contrat se fait entre individus, mais qui transf\u00e8rent leurs droits au tout qu'ils forment en contractant. C'est pourquoi la cit\u00e9 est d\u00e9crite par Spinoza comme une personne collective, corps commun et \u00e2me commune, \u00ab masse conduite en quelque sorte par une m\u00eame pens\u00e9e31 \u00bb. Que son proc\u00e9d\u00e9 de formation soit tr\u00e8s diff\u00e9rent de celui de la raison, qu'il soit pr\u00e9-rationnel, n'emp\u00eache pas que la cit\u00e9 n'imite et ne pr\u00e9pare la raison. En effet, il n'y a pas et il ne peut pas y avoir de totalit\u00e9 irrationnelle, contraire \u00e0 la raison. Sans doute le souverain est-il en droit de commander tout ce qu'il veut, autant qu'il a de puissance ; il est seul juge des lois qu'il institue et ne peut ni p\u00e9cher ni d\u00e9sob\u00e9ir. Mais, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce qu'il est un tout, il ne peut se conserver comme tel que dans la mesure o\u00f9 \u00ab il tend au but que la saine raison enseigne \u00e0 tous les hommes d'atteindre \u00bb : le tout ne peut se conserver que s'il tend \u00e0 quelque chose ayant au moins l'apparence de la raison32. Le contrat par lequel les individus ali\u00e8nent leur droit n'a pas d'autre ressort que l'int\u00e9r\u00eat (la crainte d'un plus grand mal, l'espoir d'un plus grand bien) ; si les citoyens se mettent \u00e0 craindre la cit\u00e9 plus que tout, ils se retrouvent \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat de nature, en m\u00eame temps que la cit\u00e9 perd de sa puissance, en butte aux factions qu'elle a suscit\u00e9es. C'est donc sa propre nature qui d\u00e9termine la cit\u00e9 \u00e0 viser autant que possible l'id\u00e9al de la raison, \u00e0 s'efforcer de conformer \u00e0 la raison l'ensemble de ses lois. Et la cit\u00e9 conviendra d'autant plus avec la raison qu'elle produira moins de passions tristes chez les citoyens (crainte ou m\u00eame espoir), s'appuyant plut\u00f4t sur des affections joyeuses33.\n\nTout cela doit se comprendre de la \u00ab bonne \u00bb cit\u00e9. Car il en est de la cit\u00e9 comme de l'individu : beaucoup de causes interviennent, parfois insensibles, qui en pervertissent la nature et en provoquent la ruine. Mais, du point de vue de la bonne cit\u00e9, deux autres arguments s'ajoutent aux pr\u00e9c\u00e9dents. D'abord, que signifie pour le citoyen \u00ab renoncer \u00e0 son droit naturel \u00bb ? Non pas \u00e9videmment renoncer \u00e0 pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'\u00eatre. Mais : renoncer \u00e0 se d\u00e9terminer d'apr\u00e8s des _affections personnelles quelconques._ Abandonnant son droit de juger personnellement ce qui est bon et mauvais, le citoyen s'engage donc \u00e0 recevoir des _affections communes et collectives._ Mais, en fonction de ces affections, il continue personnellement \u00e0 pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans son \u00eatre, \u00e0 faire tout ce qui est en son pouvoir pour conserver son existence et veiller \u00e0 ses int\u00e9r\u00eats34. C'est en ce sens que Spinoza peut dire que chacun renonce \u00e0 son droit naturel suivant la r\u00e8gle de la cit\u00e9, et pourtant conserve enti\u00e8rement ce droit naturel dans l'\u00e9tat civil35. D'autre part, les _affections de la raison_ ne rel\u00e8vent pas de la cit\u00e9 : la puissance de conna\u00eetre, de penser et d'exprimer sa pens\u00e9e reste un droit naturel inali\u00e9nable, que la cit\u00e9 ne peut pas compromettre sans r\u00e9tablir entre elle et ses sujets des rapports de simple violence36.\n\nLa \u00ab bonne \u00bb cit\u00e9 tant\u00f4t tient lieu de raison \u00e0 ceux qui n'en ont pas ; tant\u00f4t pr\u00e9pare, pr\u00e9figure et imite \u00e0 sa mani\u00e8re l'\u0153uvre de la raison. C'est elle qui rend possible la formation de la raison m\u00eame. On ne consid\u00e9rera pas comme preuves d'un optimisme exag\u00e9r\u00e9 les deux propositions de Spinoza : finalement et malgr\u00e9 tout, la cit\u00e9 est le meilleur milieu o\u00f9 l'homme puisse devenir raisonnable ; et aussi le meilleur milieu o\u00f9 l'homme raisonnable puisse vivre37.\n\nDans une vision \u00e9thique du monde, il est toujours question de pouvoir et de puissance, et il n'est pas question d'autre chose. La loi est identique au droit. Les vraies lois naturelles sont les normes du pouvoir, non pas des r\u00e8gles de devoir. C'est pourquoi la loi morale, qui pr\u00e9tend interdire et commander, implique une sorte de mystification : moins nous comprenons les lois de la nature, c'est-\u00e0-dire les normes de vie, plus nous les interpr\u00e9tons comme des ordres et des d\u00e9fenses. Au point que le philosophe doit h\u00e9siter \u00e0 se servir du mot loi, tant ce mot garde un arri\u00e8re-go\u00fbt moral : il vaut mieux parler de \u00ab v\u00e9rit\u00e9s \u00e9ternelles \u00bb. En v\u00e9rit\u00e9, les lois morales ou les devoirs sont purement civils, sociaux : seule la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 ordonne et d\u00e9fend, menace et fait esp\u00e9rer, r\u00e9compense et ch\u00e2tie. Sans doute la raison comprend-elle pour son compte une _pietas_ et une _religio_ ; sans doute y a-t-il des pr\u00e9ceptes, des r\u00e8gles ou des \u00ab commandements \u00bb de la raison. Mais la liste de ces commandements suffit \u00e0 montrer qu'il ne s'agit pas de devoirs, mais de normes de vie, concernant la \u00ab force \u00bb de l'\u00e2me et sa puissance d'agir38. Sans doute aussi peut-il arriver que ces normes co\u00efncident avec des lois de la morale ordinaire ; mais d'une part ces co\u00efncidences ne sont pas nombreuses ; d'autre part, quand la raison recommande ou d\u00e9nonce quelque chose d'analogue \u00e0 ce que la morale commande ou interdit, c'est toujours pour des raisons tr\u00e8s diff\u00e9rentes de celles de la morale39. L' _\u00c9thique_ juge des sentiments, des conduites et des intentions en les rapportant, non pas \u00e0 des valeurs transcendantes mais \u00e0 des modes d'existence qu'ils supposent ou impliquent : il y a des choses qu'on ne peut faire ou m\u00eame dire, croire, \u00e9prouver, penser, qu'\u00e0 condition d'\u00eatre faible, esclave, impuissant ; d'autres choses qu'on ne peut faire, \u00e9prouver, etc., qu'\u00e0 condition d'\u00eatre libre ou fort. _Une m\u00e9thode d'explication des modes d'existences immanents_ remplace ainsi le recours aux valeurs transcendantes. De toutes mani\u00e8res, la question est : Tel sentiment, par exemple, augmente-t-il ou non notre puissance d'agir ? Nous aide-t-il \u00e0 acqu\u00e9rir la possession formelle de cette puissance ?\n\nAller jusqu'au bout de ce qu'on peut, est la t\u00e2che proprement \u00e9thique. C'est par l\u00e0 que l' _\u00c9thique_ prend mod\u00e8le sur le corps ; car tout corps \u00e9tend sa puissance aussi loin qu'il le peut. En un sens, tout \u00eatre, \u00e0 chaque moment, va jusqu'au bout de ce qu'il peut. \u00ab Ce qu'il peut \u00bb, c'est son pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, qui se trouve n\u00e9cessairement et constamment rempli par la relation de cet \u00eatre avec les autres. Mais, en un autre sens, notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 peut \u00eatre rempli de telle fa\u00e7on que nous soyons s\u00e9par\u00e9s de notre puissance d'agir, et que celle-ci ne cesse de diminuer. En ce second sens, il arrive que nous vivions s\u00e9par\u00e9s de \u00ab ce que nous pouvons \u00bb. C'est m\u00eame le sort de la plupart des hommes, la plupart du temps. _Le faible, l'esclave, n'est pas quelqu'un dont la force est moindre, prise absolument._ Le faible est celui qui, quelle que soit sa force, reste s\u00e9par\u00e9 de sa puissance d'agir, maintenu dans l'esclavage ou l'impuissance. Aller jusqu'au bout de son pouvoir signifie deux choses : Comment remplir notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 de telle fa\u00e7on que notre puissance d'agir augmente ? Et comment augmenter cette puissance au point que, enfin, nous produisions des affections actives ? Il y a donc des faibles et des forts, des esclaves et des hommes libres. Il n'y a pas de Bien ni de Mal dans la Nature, il n'y a pas d'opposition morale, mais il y a une diff\u00e9rence \u00e9thique. Cette diff\u00e9rence est celle des modes d'existence immanents, envelopp\u00e9s dans ce que nous \u00e9prouvons, faisons, pensons.\n\nCette conception \u00e9thique a un aspect critique fondamental. Spinoza s'inscrit dans une tradition c\u00e9l\u00e8bre : la t\u00e2che pratique du philosophe consiste \u00e0 d\u00e9noncer tous les mythes, toutes les mystifications, toutes les \u00ab superstitions \u00bb, quelle qu'en soit l'origine. Cette tradition, croyons-nous, ne se s\u00e9pare pas du naturalisme comme philosophie. La _superstition_ , c'est tout ce qui nous maintient s\u00e9par\u00e9 de notre puissance d'agir et ne cesse de diminuer celle-ci. Aussi la source de la superstition est-elle l'encha\u00eenement des passions tristes, la crainte, l'espoir qui s'encha\u00eene \u00e0 la crainte, l'angoisse qui nous livre aux fant\u00f4mes40. Comme Lucr\u00e8ce, Spinoza sait qu'il n'y a pas de mythe ou de superstition joyeuse. Comme Lucr\u00e8ce, il dresse l'image d'une Nature positive contre l'incertitude des dieux : _ce qui s'oppose \u00e0 la Nature n'est pas la culture, ni l'\u00e9tat de raison, ni m\u00eame l'\u00e9tat civil, mais seulement la superstition qui menace toutes les entreprises de l'homme._ Comme Lucr\u00e8ce encore, Spinoza assigne au philosophe la t\u00e2che de d\u00e9noncer tout ce qui est tristesse, tout ce qui vit de la tristesse, tous ceux qui ont besoin de la tristesse pour asseoir leur pouvoir. \u00ab Le grand secret du r\u00e9gime monarchique et son int\u00e9r\u00eat vital consistent \u00e0 tromper les hommes en travestissant du nom de religion la crainte, dont on veut les tenir en bride ; de sorte qu'ils combattent pour leur servitude comme s'il s'agissait de leur salut... \u00bb41. La d\u00e9valorisation des passions tristes, la d\u00e9nonciation de ceux qui les cultivent et qui s'en servent, forment l'objet pratique de la philosophie. Peu de th\u00e8mes dans l' _\u00c9thique_ apparaissent aussi constamment que celui-ci : tout ce qui est triste est mauvais, et nous rend esclave ; tout ce qui enveloppe la tristesse exprime un tyran.\n\n\u00ab Aucune puissance divine, nul autre qu'un envieux ne prend plaisir \u00e0 mon impuissance et \u00e0 mon d\u00e9sagr\u00e9ment, et ne nous tient pour vertu les larmes, les sanglots, la crainte et autres manifestations de ce genre, qui sont des signes d'une \u00e2me impuissante. Mais au contraire, d'autant nous sommes affect\u00e9s d'une plus grande joie, d'autant nous passons \u00e0 une perfection plus grande, c'est-\u00e0-dire d'autant plus il est n\u00e9cessaire que nous participions de la nature divine. \u00bb \u00ab Celui qui sait bien que toutes choses suivent de la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de la nature divine et se font selon les lois et les r\u00e8gles \u00e9ternelles de la Nature, celui-l\u00e0 certes ne trouvera rien qui soit digne de haine, de ris\u00e9e ou de m\u00e9pris, et il n'aura piti\u00e9 de qui que ce soit ; mais autant que le permet la vertu humaine, il s'efforcera d'agir bien, comme on dit, et de se r\u00e9jouir. \u00bb \u00ab Les superstitieux, qui savent reprocher les vices plut\u00f4t qu'enseigner les vertus, et qui s'appliquent non \u00e0 conduire les hommes par la raison, mais \u00e0 les contenir par la crainte de fa\u00e7on qu'ils fuient le mal plut\u00f4t qu'ils n'aiment les vertus, ne tendent \u00e0 rien d'autre qu'\u00e0 rendre les hommes aussi malheureux qu'eux-m\u00eames ; aussi n'est-il pas \u00e9tonnant que la plupart du temps ils soient importuns et odieux aux hommes. \u00bb \u00ab Ceux qui sont mal re\u00e7us de leur ma\u00eetresse ne pensent \u00e0 rien qu'\u00e0 l'inconstance des femmes, \u00e0 leur esprit de tromperie et \u00e0 leurs autres vices dont on parle tant, toutes choses qu'ils oublient aussit\u00f4t d\u00e8s qu'ils sont de nouveau accueillis par leur ma\u00eetresse. C'est pourquoi celui qui s'applique \u00e0 r\u00e9gler ses sentiments et ses app\u00e9tits d'apr\u00e8s le seul amour de la libert\u00e9 s'efforcera, autant qu'il peut, de conna\u00eetre les vertus et leurs causes, et de remplir son \u00e2me du contentement qui na\u00eet de leur connaissance vraie ; mais pas du tout de consid\u00e9rer les vices des hommes, de ravaler les hommes et de se r\u00e9jouir d'une fausse apparence de libert\u00e9. \u00bb \u00ab L'homme libre ne pense \u00e0 aucune chose moins qu'\u00e0 la mort, et sa sagesse est une m\u00e9ditation non de la mort, mais de la vie42. \u00bb\n\n\u00c0 travers les scolies du livre IV, on voit Spinoza former une conception proprement \u00e9thique de l'homme, fond\u00e9e sur la joie et les passions joyeuses. Il l'oppose \u00e0 une conception superstitieuse ou satirique, qui se fonde seulement sur des passions tristes : \u00ab la plupart, au lieu d'une _\u00c9thique_ , ont \u00e9crit une satire43 \u00bb. Plus profond\u00e9ment Spinoza d\u00e9nonce les puissances oppressives qui ne peuvent r\u00e9gner qu'en inspirant \u00e0 l'homme des passions tristes dont elles profitent (\u00ab ceux qui ne savent que briser les \u00e2mes des hommes... \u00bb)44. Sans doute certaines passions tristes ont-elles une utilit\u00e9 sociale : ainsi la crainte, l'espoir, l'humilit\u00e9, m\u00eame le repentir. Mais c'est dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous ne vivons pas sous la conduite de la raison45. Reste que toute passion est mauvaise par elle-m\u00eame, en tant qu'elle enveloppe de la tristesse : m\u00eame _l'espoir_ m\u00eame _la s\u00e9curit\u00e9_46. Une cit\u00e9 est d'autant meilleure qu'elle s'appuie davantage sur des affections joyeuses ; l'amour de la libert\u00e9 doit l'emporter sur l'espoir, la crainte et la s\u00e9curit\u00e947. Le seul commandement de la raison, la seule exigence de la _pietas_ et de la _religio_ , c'est d'encha\u00eener un maximum de joies passives avec un maximum de joies actives. Car seule la joie est une affection passive qui augmente notre puissance d'agir ; et seule la joie peut \u00eatre une affection active. L'esclave se reconna\u00eet \u00e0 ses passions tristes, et l'homme libre \u00e0 ses joies, passives et actives. Le sens de la joie appara\u00eet comme le sens proprement \u00e9thique ; il est \u00e0 la pratique ce que l'affirmation elle-m\u00eame est \u00e0 la sp\u00e9culation. Le naturalisme de Spinoza se d\u00e9finit par l'affirmation sp\u00e9culative dans la th\u00e9orie de la substance, par la joie pratique dans la conception des modes. Philosophie de l'affirmation pure, l' _\u00c9thique_ est aussi philosophie de la joie qui correspond \u00e0 cette affirmation.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _\u00c9_ , III, 2, sc. Ce texte fondamental ne doit pas \u00eatre s\u00e9par\u00e9 de II, 13, sc., qui le pr\u00e9pare, et de V, pr\u00e9face, qui en d\u00e9veloppe les cons\u00e9quences.\n\n2.  DESCARTES, _Trait\u00e9 des passions_ , I, 1 et 2.\n\n3.  Leibniz explique souvent que sa th\u00e9orie de l' _action id\u00e9ale_ respecte \u00ab les sentiments \u00e9tablis \u00bb, et laisse enti\u00e8rement subsister la r\u00e9partition de l'action ou de la passion dans l'\u00e2me et dans le corps suivant la r\u00e8gle du rapport inverse. Car, de deux substances qui \u00ab symbolisent \u00bb, telles que l'\u00e2me et le corps, on doit attribuer l'action \u00e0 celle dont _l'expression_ est plus distincte, la passion \u00e0 l'autre. C'est un th\u00e8me constant des _Lettres \u00e0 Arnauld._\n\n4.  _\u00c9_ , II, 13 sc.\n\n5.  _\u00c9_ , III, 2, sc.\n\n6.  _\u00c9_ , II, 13, sc.\n\n7.  _TTP_ , ch. 16 (II, p. 258).\n\n8.  Sur l'identit\u00e9 de la \u00ab loi d'institution naturelle \u00bb avec le droit de nature, cf. _TTP_ , ch. 16, et _TP_ , ch. 2, 4.\n\n9.  _TTP_ , ch. 16 (II, pp. 258-259) ; _TP_ , ch. 2, 5.\n\n10.  Ces quatre th\u00e8ses, ainsi que les quatre th\u00e8ses contraires que nous indiquons dans le paragraphe suivant, sont bien marqu\u00e9es par L\u00e9o Strauss, dans son livre _Droit naturel et Histoire_ (tr. fr., Plon, 1953). Strauss confronte la th\u00e9orie de Hobbes, dont il souligne la nouveaut\u00e9, aux conceptions de l'antiquit\u00e9.\n\n11.  _TP_ , ch. 5, 2 : \u00ab Les hommes ne naissent pas citoyens, mais le deviennent. \u00bb\n\n12.  _TTP_ , ch. 16 (II, p. 266).\n\n13.  _TP_ , ch. 2, 8 ( _\u00c9_ , IV, 37, sc. 2 : \u00ab Par le droit supr\u00eame de la nature, chacun juge de ce qui est bon, de ce qui est mauvais... \u00bb.)\n\n14.  _TP_ , ch. 2, 15 : \u00ab Aussi longtemps que le droit naturel humain est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par la puissance de chacun, et est la chose de chacun, ce droit est en r\u00e9alit\u00e9 inexistant, plus th\u00e9orique que r\u00e9el, puisqu'on n'a nulle assurance d'en profiter. \u00bb\n\n15.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 24, prop. : _proprium utile._\n\n16.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 35, prop., dem., cor. 1 et 2, sc.\n\n17.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 66, sc. (l'homme libre et l'esclave) ; IV, 73, sc. (l'homme fort) ; V, 42, sc. (le sage et l'ignorant).\n\n18.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 67-73.\n\n19.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 68.\n\n20.  _TP_ , ch. 2, 6.\n\n21.  En _\u00c9_ , IV, 68, sc., Spinoza fait remonter \u00e0 Mo\u00efse la tradition adamique : le mythe d'un Adam raisonnable et libre s'explique dans la perspective d'une \u00ab hypoth\u00e8se \u00bb abstraite, o\u00f9 l'on consid\u00e8re Dieu \u00ab non pas en tant qu'il est infini, mais en tant seulement qu'il est la cause pour laquelle l'homme existe. \u00bb\n\n22.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 18, sc.\n\n23.  L'id\u00e9e d'un devenir ou d'une formation de la raison avait d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e9t\u00e9 d\u00e9velopp\u00e9e par Hobbes (Cf. les commentaire de R. POLIN, _Politique et philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes_ , P.U.F., 1953, pp. 26-40). Hobbes et Spinoza con\u00e7oivent tous deux l'acte de la raison comme une sorte d'addition, comme la formation d'un tout. Mais chez Hobbes, il s'agit d'un calcul ; chez Spinoza, d'une composition de rapports qui, au moins en droit, est objet d'intuition.\n\n24.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 18, sc.\n\n25.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 35.\n\n26.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 32-34.\n\n27.  _TTP_ , ch. 16 (II, p. 259).\n\n28.  _TP_ , ch. 6, 1.\n\n29.  Cf. _TTP_ , ch. 16 (Et _\u00c9_ , IV, 37, sc. 2). Quel que soit le r\u00e9gime d'une soci\u00e9t\u00e9, la d\u00e9l\u00e9gation contractuelle suivant Spinoza se fait toujours, non pas au b\u00e9n\u00e9fice d'un tiers (comme chez Hobbes), mais au b\u00e9n\u00e9fice du Tout, c'est-\u00e0-dire de la totalit\u00e9 des contractants. Mme Franc\u00e8s a raison de dire en ce sens que Spinoza annonce Rousseau (bien qu'elle minimise l'originalit\u00e9 de Rousseau dans la mani\u00e8re de concevoir la formation de ce tout) : cf. \u00ab Les R\u00e9miniscences spinozistes dans le Contrat social de Rousseau \u00bb, _Revue philosophique_ , janvier 1951, pp. 66-67. Mais s'il est vrai que le contrat transf\u00e8re la puissance \u00e0 l'ensemble de la cit\u00e9, les conditions de cette op\u00e9ration, sa diff\u00e9rence avec une op\u00e9ration de la raison pure, exigent la pr\u00e9sence d'un second moment par lequel l'ensemble de la cit\u00e9, \u00e0 son tour, transf\u00e8re sa puissance \u00e0 un roi, \u00e0 une assembl\u00e9e aristocratique ou d\u00e9mocratique. Est-ce un _second_ contrat, r\u00e9ellement distinct du premier, comme le sugg\u00e8re _TTP_ , ch. 17 ? (Spinoza en effet dit que les H\u00e9breux form\u00e8rent un tout politique en transf\u00e9rant leur puissance \u00e0 Dieu, _puis_ transf\u00e9r\u00e8rent la puissance du tout \u00e0 Mo\u00efse, pris comme interpr\u00e8te de Dieu, cf. II, p. 274). Ou bien le premier contrat n'existe-t-il qu'abstraitement, comme fondement du second ? (Dans le _Trait\u00e9 politique_ , l'\u00c9tat semble bien ne pas exister sous sa forme _absolue, absolutum imperium_ , mais \u00eatre toujours repr\u00e9sent\u00e9 dans une forme monarchique, aristocratique ou d\u00e9mocratique, la d\u00e9mocratie \u00e9tant le r\u00e9gime qui se rapproche le plus de l'\u00c9tat absolu.)\n\n30.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 37, sc. 2 ; _TP_ , ch. 2, 18, 19 et 23.\n\n31.  _TP_ , ch. 3, 2.\n\n32.  _TTP_ , ch. 16 (II, pp. 262-263). Et _TP_ , ch. 2, 21 ; ch. 3, 8 ; ch. 4, 4 ; ch. 5, 1.\n\n33.  Le mobile de formation de la cit\u00e9 est toujours la crainte et l'espoir, crainte d'un plus grand mal, espoir d'un plus grand bien. Mais ce sont des passions essentiellement tristes (cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 47, dem.). La cit\u00e9, une fois \u00e9tablie, doit susciter _l'amour de la libert\u00e9_ plut\u00f4t que la crainte des ch\u00e2timents ou m\u00eame l'espoir des r\u00e9compenses. \u00ab C'est aux esclaves, non pas aux hommes libres, qu'on donne des prix de vertu \u00bb ( _TP_ , ch. 10, 8).\n\n34.  _TP_ , ch. 3, 3 et 8.\n\n35.  En deux textes importants ( _Lettre 50, \u00e0 Jelles_ , III, p. 172, et _TP_ , ch. 3, 3), Spinoza dit que sa th\u00e9orie politique a pour caract\u00e9ristique de maintenir le droit naturel dans l'\u00e9tat civil lui-m\u00eame. Cette d\u00e9claration s'interpr\u00e8te diff\u00e9remment dans les deux cas : tant\u00f4t c'est le souverain qui se d\u00e9finit par son droit naturel, ce droit \u00e9tant \u00e9gal \u00e0 la somme des droits auxquels les sujets renoncent ; tant\u00f4t ce sont les sujets qui conservent leur droit naturel \u00e0 pers\u00e9v\u00e9rer dans l'\u00eatre, bien que ce droit soit maintenant d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par des affections communes.\n\n36.  _TTP_ , ch. 20 (III, pp. 306-307). Et _TP_ , ch. 3, 10 : \u00ab L'\u00e2me, dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle use de la raison, ne rel\u00e8ve pas du souverain, mais d'elle-m\u00eame. \u00bb\n\n37.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 35, sc. ; IV, 73, prop. et dem.\n\n38.  Sur la _pietas_ et la _religio_ , toujours relatives \u00e0 notre puissance d'agir, cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 37, sc. 1, et V, 41. Sur les \u00ab commandements \u00bb de la raison ( _dictamina_ ), cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 18, sc.\n\n39.  Par exemple, la raison d\u00e9nonce la haine et tout ce qui s'y rapporte : _\u00c9_ , IV, 45 et 46. Mais c'est uniquement parce que la haine ne se s\u00e9pare pas de la _tristesse_ qu'elle enveloppe. L'espoir, la piti\u00e9, l'humilit\u00e9, le repentir ne seront pas moins d\u00e9nonc\u00e9s, puisqu'ils enveloppent aussi de la tristesse : _\u00c9_ , IV, 47, 50, 53, 54.\n\n40.  L'analyse que Spinoza fait de la superstition, dans la pr\u00e9face du _TTP_ , est tr\u00e8s proche de celle de Lucr\u00e8ce : la superstition se d\u00e9finit essentiellement par un m\u00e9lange d'avidit\u00e9 et d'angoisse. Et la cause de la superstition n'est pas une id\u00e9e de Dieu confuse, mais la crainte, les passions tristes et leur encha\u00eenement ( _TTP_ , pr\u00e9face, II, p. 85).\n\n41.  _TTP_ , pr\u00e9face (II, p. 87).\n\n42.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 45, sc. 2 ; IV, 50, sc. ; IV, 63, sc. ; V, 10, sc. ; IV, 67.\n\n43.  _TP_ , ch. 1, 1.\n\n44.  _\u00c9_ , IV, appendice, 13.\n\n45.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 54, sc.\n\n46.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 47, sc.\n\n47.  _TP_ , ch. 10, 8.\n\n## CHAPITRE XVII\n\n## LES NOTIONS COMMUNES\n\nLe spinozisme n'est nullement une philosophie qui s'installe en Dieu, ni qui trouve dans l'id\u00e9e de Dieu son point de d\u00e9part naturel. Au contraire : les conditions sous lesquelles nous avons des id\u00e9es semblent nous condamner \u00e0 n'avoir que des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates ; les conditions sous lesquelles nous sommes affect\u00e9s semblent nous condamner \u00e0 n'\u00e9prouver que des affections passives. Les affections qui remplissent naturellement notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 sont des passions qui le r\u00e9duisent au minimum, qui nous s\u00e9parent de notre essence ou de notre puissance d'agir.\n\nDans cette \u00e9valuation pessimiste de l'existence, un premier espoir appara\u00eet pourtant : la distinction radicale de l'action et de la passion ne doit pas nous faire n\u00e9gliger une distinction pr\u00e9alable entre deux sortes de passions. Sans doute toute passion nous maintient-elle s\u00e9par\u00e9s de notre puissance d'agir ; mais plus ou moins. Tant que nous sommes affect\u00e9s de passions, nous n'avons pas la possession formelle de notre puissance d'agir. Mais les passions joyeuses nous rapprochent de cette puissance, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'augmentent ou l'aident ; les passions tristes nous en \u00e9loignent, c'est-\u00e0-dire la diminuent ou l'emp\u00eachent. La premi\u00e8re question de l' _\u00c9thique_ est donc : Que faire pour \u00eatre affect\u00e9 d'un maximum de passions joyeuses ? La Nature ne nous favorise pas \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard. Mais nous devons compter sur l'effort de la raison, effort empirique et tr\u00e8s lent qui trouve dans la cit\u00e9 les conditions qui le rendent possible : la raison, dans le principe de sa gen\u00e8se ou sous son premier aspect, est l'effort d'organiser les rencontres de telle mani\u00e8re que nous soyons affect\u00e9s d'un maximum de passions joyeuses. En effet, les passions joyeuses augmentent notre puissance d'agir ; la raison est puissance de comprendre, puissance d'agir propre \u00e0 l'\u00e2me ; les passions joyeuses conviennent donc avec la raison, nous conduisent \u00e0 comprendre ou nous d\u00e9terminent \u00e0 devenir raisonnables1.\n\nMais il ne suffit pas que notre puissance d'agir augmente. Elle pourrait augmenter ind\u00e9finiment, les passions joyeuses pourraient s'encha\u00eener avec les passions joyeuses ind\u00e9finiment, nous n'aurions pas encore la possession formelle de notre puissance d'agir. Une sommation de passions ne fait pas une action. Il ne suffit donc pas que les passions joyeuses s'accumulent ; il faut que, \u00e0 la faveur de cette accumulation, nous trouvions le moyen de conqu\u00e9rir notre puissance d'agir pour \u00e9prouver enfin des affections actives dont nous serons la cause. La deuxi\u00e8me question de l' _\u00c9thique_ sera donc : Que faire pour produire en soi des affections actives ?\n\n1o) Des affections actives, si elles existent, sont n\u00e9cessairement des affections de joie : il n'y a pas de tristesse active, puisque toute tristesse est diminution de notre puissance d'agir ; seule la joie peut \u00eatre active2. En effet, si notre puissance d'agir augmente au point que nous en ayons la possession formelle, des affections s'ensuivent, qui sont n\u00e9cessairement des joies actives3. 2o) La joie active est \u00ab un autre \u00bb sentiment que la joie passive4. Et pourtant Spinoza sugg\u00e8re que, entre les deux, la distinction n'est que de raison5. C'est que les deux sentiments se distinguent seulement par la cause ; la joie passive est produite par un objet qui convient avec nous, dont la puissance augmente notre puissance d'agir, mais dont nous n'avons pas encore une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. La joie active est produite par nous-m\u00eames, elle d\u00e9coule de notre puissance d'agir elle-m\u00eame, elle suit d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate en nous. 3o) Dans la mesure o\u00f9 les joies passives augmentent notre puissance d'agir, elles _conviennent avec_ la raison. Mais, la raison \u00e9tant la puissance d'agir de l'\u00e2me, les joies suppos\u00e9es actives _naissent_ de la raison. Quand Spinoza sugg\u00e8re que ce qui convient avec la raison peut aussi en na\u00eetre, il veut dire que toute joie passive peut donner lieu \u00e0 une joie active qui s'en distingue seulement par la cause6.\n\nSupposons deux corps qui conviennent enti\u00e8rement, c'est-\u00e0-dire qui composent tous leurs rapports : ils sont comme les parties d'un tout, le tout exerce une _fonction g\u00e9n\u00e9rale_ par rapport \u00e0 ces parties, ces parties ont une _propri\u00e9t\u00e9 commune_ par rapport au tout. Deux corps qui conviennent enti\u00e8rement ont donc une identit\u00e9 de structure. Parce qu'ils composent tous leurs rapports, ils ont une analogie, similitude ou communaut\u00e9 de composition. Supposons maintenant des corps qui conviennent de moins en moins, ou qui sont contraires : leurs rapports constitutifs ne se composent plus directement, mais pr\u00e9sentent de telles diff\u00e9rences que toute ressemblance entre ces corps para\u00eet exclue. Pourtant, il y a encore similitude ou communaut\u00e9 de composition, mais _d'un point de vue de plus en plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ral_ qui, \u00e0 la limite, met en jeu la Nature enti\u00e8re. Il faut tenir compte en effet du \u00ab tout \u00bb que ces deux corps forment, non pas directement l'un avec l'autre, mais avec tous les interm\u00e9diaires qui nous permettent de passer de l'un \u00e0 l'autre. Comme tous les rapports se composent dans la Nature enti\u00e8re, la Nature pr\u00e9sente du point de vue le plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ral une similitude de composition valable pour tous les corps. On passera d'un corps \u00e0 un autre, si diff\u00e9rent soit-il, par simple variation du rapport entre les parties ultimes de l'un. Car seuls varient les rapports, dans l'ensemble de l'univers o\u00f9 les parties restent identiques.\n\nVoil\u00e0 ce que Spinoza appelle une \u00ab notion commune \u00bb. La notion commune est toujours l'id\u00e9e d'une similitude de composition dans les modes existants. Mais en ce sens, il y a diff\u00e9rents types de notions. Spinoza dit que les notions communes sont plus ou moins utiles, plus ou moins faciles \u00e0 former ; et aussi plus ou moins universelles, c'est-\u00e0-dire qu'elles s'organisent suivant des points de vue plus ou moins g\u00e9n\u00e9raux7. En fait, on distinguera deux grandes esp\u00e8ces de notions communes. Les moins universelles (mais aussi les plus utiles) sont celles qui repr\u00e9sentent une similitude de composition entre corps qui conviennent directement et de leur propre point de vue. Par exemple, une notion commune repr\u00e9sente \u00ab ce qui est commun \u00e0 un corps humain et \u00e0 _certains_ corps ext\u00e9rieurs8 \u00bb. Ces notions nous font donc comprendre les convenances entre modes : elles n'en restent pas \u00e0 une perception externe des convenances observ\u00e9es fortuitement, mais trouvent dans la similitude de la composition une raison interne et n\u00e9cessaire de la convenance des corps.\n\n\u00c0 l'autre p\u00f4le, les notions communes les plus universelles repr\u00e9sentent une similitude ou communaut\u00e9 de composition, mais entre corps qui conviennent d'un point de vue tr\u00e8s g\u00e9n\u00e9ral et non pas de _leur propre_ point de vue. Elles repr\u00e9sentent donc \u00ab ce qui est commun \u00e0 toutes choses \u00bb, par exemple l'\u00e9tendue, le mouvement et le repos, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'universelle similitude dans les rapports qui se composent \u00e0 l'infini du point de vue de la nature enti\u00e8re9. Ces notions ont encore leur utilit\u00e9 ; car elles nous font comprendre les disconvenances elles-m\u00eames, et nous en donnent une raison interne et n\u00e9cessaire. Elles nous permettent en effet de d\u00e9terminer le point de vue \u00e0 partir duquel cesse la convenance la plus g\u00e9n\u00e9rale entre deux corps ; elles montrent comment et pourquoi la contrari\u00e9t\u00e9 appara\u00eet quand nous nous pla\u00e7ons du point de vue \u00ab moins universel \u00bb de ces deux corps eux-m\u00eames. Nous pouvons, par une exp\u00e9rience de pens\u00e9e, faire varier un rapport jusqu'au point o\u00f9 le corps correspondant rev\u00eat en quelque sorte une nature \u00ab contraire \u00bb \u00e0 la sienne ; nous pouvons par l\u00e0 comprendre la nature des disconvenances entre corps dont les rapports sont tels ou tels. C'est pourquoi, quand il assigne le r\u00f4le de toutes les notions communes prises ensemble, Spinoza dit que l'esprit est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 de l'int\u00e9rieur \u00e0 comprendre les convenances entre les choses, et aussi les diff\u00e9rences et les oppositions10.\n\nSpinoza distingue avec soin les Notions communes d'une part, d'autre part les Termes transcendantaux (\u00catre, chose, quelque chose) ou les Notions universelles (genres et esp\u00e8ces, Homme, Cheval, Chien)11. Pourtant les notions communes elles-m\u00eames sont universelles, \u00ab plus ou moins \u00bb universelles suivant leur degr\u00e9 de g\u00e9n\u00e9ralit\u00e9 ; il faut donc penser que Spinoza n'attaque pas l'universel, mais seulement une certaine conception de l'universel abstrait. De m\u00eame, Spinoza ne critique pas les notions de genre et d'esp\u00e8ce en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral ; pour son compte, il parle du Cheval ou du Chien comme de types naturels, de l'Homme lui-m\u00eame comme d'un type ou d'un mod\u00e8le normatif12. L\u00e0 encore, il faut penser que Spinoza s'attaque seulement \u00e0 une certaine d\u00e9termination abstraite des genres et des esp\u00e8ces. En effet, une id\u00e9e abstraite a deux aspects qui t\u00e9moignent de son insuffisance. D'abord, elle ne retient entre les choses que des diff\u00e9rences sensibles et grossi\u00e8res : nous choisissons un caract\u00e8re sensible, facile \u00e0 imaginer ; nous distinguons les objets qui le poss\u00e8dent et ceux qui ne le poss\u00e8dent pas ; nous identifions tous ceux qui le poss\u00e8dent ; quant aux petites diff\u00e9rences, nous les n\u00e9gligeons, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce que les objets se confondent d\u00e8s que leur nombre d\u00e9passe la capacit\u00e9 de notre imagination. D'autre part, le caract\u00e8re diff\u00e9rentiel sensible est par nature extr\u00eamement variable : il est fortuit, d\u00e9pendant de la mani\u00e8re dont les objets affectent chacun de nous au hasard des rencontres. \u00ab Ceux qui ont plus souvent consid\u00e9r\u00e9 avec admiration la stature des hommes entendront sous le nom d'homme un animal de stature droite, tandis que ceux qui ont accoutum\u00e9 de consid\u00e9rer autre chose se formeront des hommes une autre image commune : par exemple l'homme est un animal capable de rire, un animal \u00e0 deux pieds sans plumes, un animal raisonnable13. \u00bb Et le caract\u00e8re retenu ne varie pas seulement avec chaque individu, mais aussi suivant les objets qui affectent un m\u00eame individu : certains objets seront d\u00e9finis par leur forme sensible, d'autres par leur usage ou leur fonction suppos\u00e9e, par leur mani\u00e8re d'\u00eatre, etc. De toutes fa\u00e7ons, l'id\u00e9e abstraite est profond\u00e9ment inad\u00e9quate : c'est une image qui ne s'explique pas par notre puissance de penser, mais au contraire enveloppe notre impuissance ; et qui n'exprime pas la nature des choses, mais indique plut\u00f4t l'\u00e9tat variable de notre constitution.\n\nIl est clair en tout ceci que Spinoza n'attaque pas seulement les proc\u00e9d\u00e9s du sens commun, mais aussi la tradition aristot\u00e9licienne. C'est dans la biologie aristot\u00e9licienne qu'appara\u00eet l'effort pour d\u00e9finir les genres et les esp\u00e8ces par des diff\u00e9rences ; et encore ces diff\u00e9rences sensibles sont de nature tr\u00e8s variable suivant les animaux consid\u00e9r\u00e9s. Contre cette tradition, Spinoza sugg\u00e8re un grand principe : consid\u00e9rer les structures, et non plus les formes sensibles ou les fonctions14. Mais que signifie \u00ab structure \u00bb ? C'est un syst\u00e8me de rapports entre les parties d'un corps (ces parties n'\u00e9tant pas des organes, mais les \u00e9l\u00e9ments anatomiques de ces organes). On cherchera comment les rapports varient dans tel ou tel autre corps ; on aura le moyen de d\u00e9terminer directement les ressemblances entre deux corps, si \u00e9loign\u00e9s soient-ils. La forme et la fonction d'un organe, dans un animal d\u00e9termin\u00e9, d\u00e9pendent uniquement des rapports entre parties organiques, c'est-\u00e0-dire entre \u00e9l\u00e9ments anatomiques constants. \u00c0 la limite, la Nature tout enti\u00e8re est un m\u00eame Animal o\u00f9, seuls, varient les rapports entre les parties. \u00c0 l'examen des diff\u00e9rences sensibles, s'est substitu\u00e9 un examen des similitudes intelligibles, apte \u00e0 nous faire comprendre \u00ab de l'int\u00e9rieur \u00bb les ressemblances, et aussi les diff\u00e9rences entre les corps. Les notions communes chez Spinoza sont des id\u00e9es biologiques, plus encore que des id\u00e9es physiques ou math\u00e9matiques. Elles jouent v\u00e9ritablement le r\u00f4le d'Id\u00e9es dans une philosophie de la Nature dont toute finalit\u00e9 se trouve exclue. (Sans doute les indications de Spinoza sont-elles rares sur cet aspect des notions communes. Mais en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, elles sont rares sur tous les aspects des notions communes ; nous verrons pourquoi. Les indications de Spinoza suffisent toutefois \u00e0 faire de lui un pr\u00e9curseur de Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, sur la voie du grand principe d'unit\u00e9 de composition15.)\n\nLes notions communes sont des id\u00e9es _g\u00e9n\u00e9rales_ , non pas des id\u00e9es _abstraites._ Or, en tant que telles, elles sont n\u00e9cessairement \u00ab ad\u00e9quates \u00bb. Soit le cas des notions les moins universelles : ce qui est commun \u00e0 mon corps et \u00e0 certains corps ext\u00e9rieurs est \u00ab \u00e9galement \u00bb dans chacun de ces corps ; l'id\u00e9e en est donc donn\u00e9e en Dieu, non seulement en tant qu'il a l'id\u00e9e des corps ext\u00e9rieurs, mais aussi en tant qu'il a simplement l'id\u00e9e de mon corps ; j'ai donc moi-m\u00eame l'id\u00e9e de ce quelque chose de commun, et je l'ai telle qu'elle est en Dieu16. Quant aux notions les plus universelles : ce qui est commun \u00e0 toutes choses est \u00ab \u00e9galement \u00bb dans la partie et dans le tout, l'id\u00e9e en est donc donn\u00e9e en Dieu, etc17. Ces d\u00e9monstrations fondent les deux aspects sous lesquels les notions communes en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral sont n\u00e9cessairement ad\u00e9quates ; en d'autres termes, _les notions communes sont des id\u00e9es qui s'expliquent formellement par notre puissance de penser et qui, mat\u00e9riellement, expriment l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme leur cause efficiente._ Elles s'expliquent par notre puissance de penser parce que, \u00e9tant en nous comme elles sont en Dieu, elles tombent sous notre propre puissance comme elles tombent sous la puissance absolue de Dieu. Elles expriment l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme cause parce que, Dieu les poss\u00e9dant comme nous les poss\u00e9dons, elles \u00ab enveloppent \u00bb n\u00e9cessairement l'essence de Dieu. En effet, lorsque Spinoza dit que toute id\u00e9e de chose particuli\u00e8re enveloppe n\u00e9cessairement l'essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie de Dieu, il s'agit des choses particuli\u00e8res telles qu'elles sont en Dieu, donc des id\u00e9es de choses telles que Dieu les poss\u00e8de18. Parmi les id\u00e9es que nous _avons_ , les seules qui puissent exprimer l'essence de Dieu, ou envelopper la connaissance de cette essence, sont donc des id\u00e9es qui sont en nous comme elles sont en Dieu : bref, les notions communes19.\n\nD'o\u00f9 plusieurs cons\u00e9quences importantes : 1o) Nous demandions comment nous pourrions arriver \u00e0 des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates. Tout dans l'existence nous condamnait \u00e0 n'avoir que des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates : nous n'avions ni l'id\u00e9e de nous-m\u00eames, ni l'id\u00e9e des corps ext\u00e9rieurs, mais seulement des id\u00e9es d'affections, indiquant l'effet d'un corps ext\u00e9rieur sur nous. Mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, \u00e0 partir de cet effet, nous pouvons former l'id\u00e9e de ce qui est commun \u00e0 un corps ext\u00e9rieur et au n\u00f4tre. Compte tenu des conditions de notre existence c'est pour nous la seule voie capable de nous mener \u00e0 une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. _La premi\u00e8re id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate que nous ayons_ , c'est la notion commune, l'id\u00e9e de ce \u00ab quelque chose de commun \u00bb. 2o) Cette id\u00e9e s'explique par notre puissance de comprendre ou de penser. Or la puissance de comprendre, c'est la puissance d'agir de l'\u00e2me. Nous sommes donc actifs en tant que nous formons des notions communes. La formation de la notion commune marque le moment o\u00f9 nous entrons en _possession formelle_ de notre puissance d'agir. Par l\u00e0 m\u00eame, elle constitue le second moment de la raison. La raison, dans sa gen\u00e8se, est l'effort d'organiser les rencontres en fonction des convenances et des disconvenances per\u00e7ues. La raison dans son activit\u00e9 m\u00eame est l'effort de concevoir les notions communes, donc de comprendre intellectuellement les convenances et les disconvenances elles-m\u00eames. Quand nous formons une notion commune, notre \u00e2me est dite \u00ab se servir de la raison \u00bb : nous parvenons \u00e0 la possession de notre puissance d'agir ou de comprendre, nous sommes devenus des \u00eatres raisonnables. 3o) Une notion commune est notre premi\u00e8re id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. Mais quelle qu'elle soit, elle nous m\u00e8ne imm\u00e9diatement \u00e0 une autre id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. L'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate est expressive et, ce qu'elle exprime, c'est l'essence de Dieu. Une notion commune quelconque nous donne imm\u00e9diatement la connaissance de l'essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie de Dieu. Nous n'avons pas une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, c'est-\u00e0-dire expressive, sans que cette id\u00e9e ne nous donne la connaissance de ce qu'elle exprime, donc la connaissance ad\u00e9quate de l'essence m\u00eame de Dieu.\n\nToutefois, la notion commune risque d'intervenir comme un miracle tant que nous n'expliquons pas comment nous arrivons \u00e0 la former. _Comment vient-elle rompre l'encha\u00eenement des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates auxquelles nous semblions condamn\u00e9s ? \u00ab_ Commun \u00bb, sans doute, ne signifie pas seulement quelque chose de commun \u00e0 deux ou plusieurs corps, mais aussi commun aux esprits capables d'en former l'id\u00e9e. Mais, d'abord, Spinoza rappelle que les notions communes sont plus ou moins communes \u00e0 tous les esprits20. Et, m\u00eame si on les assimile \u00e0 des id\u00e9es inn\u00e9es, l'inn\u00e9it\u00e9 n'a jamais dispens\u00e9 d'un effort de formation, d'une _causa fiendi_ n\u00e9cessaire pour nous faire retrouver ce qui n'est donn\u00e9 qu'en droit. Que les notions communes soient en nous comme elles sont en Dieu signifie seulement que, si nous les formons, nous les _avons_ comme Dieu les _a_. Mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, comment les formons-nous, dans quelles circonstances favorables ? Comment arrivons-nous \u00e0 notre puissance d'agir ?\n\nTant que nous en restons \u00e0 un point de vue sp\u00e9culatif, ce probl\u00e8me reste insoluble. Deux erreurs d'interpr\u00e9tation nous semblent dangereuses dans la th\u00e9orie des notions communes : n\u00e9gliger leur sens biologique au profit de leur sens math\u00e9matique ; mais surtout n\u00e9gliger leur fonction pratique au profit de leur contenu sp\u00e9culatif. Or cette derni\u00e8re erreur trouve peut-\u00eatre son occasion dans la mani\u00e8re dont Spinoza lui-m\u00eame introduit le syst\u00e8me des notions communes. Le livre II de l' _\u00c9thique_ consid\u00e8re en effet ces notions du point de vue de la pure sp\u00e9culation ; il les expose donc dans un ordre logique, qui va des plus universelles aux moins universelles21. Mais alors, Spinoza montre seulement que, _si_ nous formons des notions communes, celles-ci sont n\u00e9cessairement des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates. La cause et l'ordre de leur formation nous \u00e9chappent encore ; de m\u00eame, la nature de leur fonction pratique, qui se trouve seulement sugg\u00e9r\u00e9e dans le livre II22.\n\nIl est vrai que tous les corps ont quelque chose de commun, ne serait-ce que l'\u00e9tendue, le mouvement et le repos. Les corps qui ne conviennent pas et qui sont contraires n'en ont pas moins quelque chose de commun, c'est-\u00e0-dire une similitude de composition tr\u00e8s g\u00e9n\u00e9rale qui met en jeu la Nature enti\u00e8re sous l'attribut de l'\u00e9tendue23. C'est m\u00eame pourquoi l'exposition des notions communes, dans l'ordre logique, se fait \u00e0 partir des plus universelles : donc, \u00e0 partir des notions qui s'appliquent \u00e0 des corps tr\u00e8s \u00e9loign\u00e9s les uns des autres et contraires les uns aux autres. Mais, s'il est vrai que deux corps contraires ont quelque chose de commun, jamais en revanche un corps ne peut \u00eatre contraire \u00e0 l'autre, mauvais pour l'autre, par ce qu'il a de commun avec lui : \u00ab Nulle chose ne peut \u00eatre mauvaise par ce qu'elle a de commun avec notre nature, mais dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle est mauvaise pour nous, elle nous est contraire24. \u00bb Quand nous \u00e9prouvons une affection mauvaise, une affection passive triste produite en nous par un corps qui ne nous convient pas, _rien ne nous induit \u00e0 former l'id\u00e9e_ de ce qui est commun \u00e0 ce corps et au n\u00f4tre. Au contraire, quand nous \u00e9prouvons une affection joyeuse : une chose nous \u00e9tant bonne dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle convient avec notre nature, l'affection joyeuse elle-m\u00eame nous induit \u00e0 former la notion commune correspondante. Les premi\u00e8res notions communes que nous formons sont donc les moins universelles, c'est-\u00e0-dire celles qui s'appliquent \u00e0 notre corps et \u00e0 un autre corps, qui convient directement avec le n\u00f4tre et qui l'affecte de joie. Si nous consid\u00e9rons l'ordre de formation des notions communes, nous devons partir des notions les moins universelles ; car les plus universelles, s'appliquant \u00e0 des corps qui sont contraires au n\u00f4tre, ne trouvent aucun _principe inducteur_ dans les affections que nous \u00e9prouvons.\n\nEn quel sens prenons-nous \u00ab induire \u00bb ? Il s'agit d'une sorte de _cause occasionnelle._ L'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate s'explique formellement par notre puissance de comprendre ou d'agir. Or tout ce qui s'explique par notre puissance d'agir d\u00e9pend de notre seule essence, donc est \u00ab inn\u00e9 \u00bb. Mais d\u00e9j\u00e0 chez Descartes l'inn\u00e9 renvoyait \u00e0 une esp\u00e8ce d'occasionalisme. L'inn\u00e9 est actif ; mais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, il ne peut devenir actuel que sil trouve une occasion favorable dans les affections qui viennent du dehors, affections passives. Il semble donc que le sch\u00e9ma de Spinoza soit le suivant :\n\nQuand nous rencontrons un corps qui convient avec le n\u00f4tre, quand nous \u00e9prouvons une affection passive joyeuse, nous sommes induits \u00e0 former l'id\u00e9e de ce qui est commun \u00e0 ce corps et au n\u00f4tre. Voil\u00e0 pourquoi, dans le livre V de l' _\u00c9thique_ , Spinoza est amen\u00e9 \u00e0 reconna\u00eetre le privil\u00e8ge des passions joyeuses dans la formation des notions communes : \u00ab _Aussi longtemps que nous ne sommes pas tourment\u00e9s par des sentiments qui sont contraires \u00e0 notre nature_ [sentiments de tristesse, provoqu\u00e9s par des objets contraires qui ne nous conviennent pas], aussi longtemps la puissance de l'esprit, par laquelle il s'efforce de comprendre les choses, n'est pas emp\u00each\u00e9e, et par cons\u00e9quent aussi longtemps il a le pouvoir de former des id\u00e9es claires et distinctes25. \u00bb En effet, il suffit que l'emp\u00eachement soit \u00f4t\u00e9 pour que la puissance d'agir passe \u00e0 l'acte, et que nous entrions en possession de ce qui nous est inn\u00e9. On voit pourquoi il ne suffisait pas d'accumuler les passions joyeuses pour devenir actif. L'amour-passion s'encha\u00eene \u00e0 la joie-passion, d'autres sentiments et d\u00e9sirs s'encha\u00eenent \u00e0 l'amour. Tous augmentent notre puissance d'agir ; mais jamais jusqu'au point o\u00f9 nous devenions actifs. Il fallait d'abord que ces sentiments fussent \u00ab assur\u00e9s \u00bb ; il nous fallait d'abord \u00e9viter les passions tristes qui diminuaient notre puissance d'agir ; tel \u00e9tait le premier effort de la raison. Mais ensuite, il fallait sortir d'un simple encha\u00eenement des passions, m\u00eame joyeuses. Car celles-ci ne nous donnent pas encore la possession de notre puissance d'agir ; nous n'avons pas l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de l'objet qui convient en nature avec nous ; les passions joyeuses elles-m\u00eames naissent d'id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates, qui indiquent seulement l'effet d'un objet sur nous. Il faut donc que, _\u00e0 la faveur des passions joyeuses_ , nous formions l'id\u00e9e de ce qui est commun entre le corps ext\u00e9rieur et le n\u00f4tre. Car cette id\u00e9e seule, cette notion commune, est ad\u00e9quate. Tel est le deuxi\u00e8me moment de la raison ; alors, et alors seulement, nous comprenons et agissons, nous sommes raisonnables : non pas par l'accumulation des passions joyeuses en tant que passions, mais par un v\u00e9ritable \u00ab saut \u00bb, qui nous met en possession d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, \u00e0 la faveur de cette accumulation.\n\nPourquoi devenons-nous actifs dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous formons une notion commune ou avons une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate ? L'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate s'explique par notre puissance de comprendre, donc par notre puissance d'agir. Elle nous met en possession de cette puissance, mais de quelle mani\u00e8re ? Il faut se rappeler qu'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, \u00e0 son tour, n'est pas s\u00e9parable d'un encha\u00eenement d'id\u00e9es qui en d\u00e9coulent. L'esprit qui forme une _id\u00e9e_ ad\u00e9quate est _cause_ ad\u00e9quate des id\u00e9es qui d\u00e9coulent de celle-ci : c'est en ce sens qu'il est actif26. Quelles sont donc ces id\u00e9es, qui suivent de la notion commune que nous formons \u00e0 la faveur des passions joyeuses ? Les passions joyeuses sont les id\u00e9es des affections produites par un corps qui convient avec le n\u00f4tre ; notre esprit lui seul forme l'id\u00e9e de ce qui est commun \u00e0 ce corps et au n\u00f4tre ; _en d\u00e9coule une id\u00e9e d'affection, un sentiment qui n'est plus passif, mais actif._ Ce sentiment n'est plus une passion, parce qu'il suit d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate en nous ; il est lui-m\u00eame id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. Il se distingue du sentiment passif dont nous \u00e9tions partis, mais s'en distingue seulement par la cause : il a pour cause, non plus l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate d'un objet qui convient avec nous, mais l'id\u00e9e n\u00e9cessairement ad\u00e9quate de ce qui est commun \u00e0 cet objet et \u00e0 nous-m\u00eames. C'est pourquoi Spinoza peut dire : \u00ab Un sentiment qui est une passion cesse d'\u00eatre une passion sit\u00f4t que nous en formons une id\u00e9e claire et distincte (ad\u00e9quate)27. \u00bb Car nous en formons une id\u00e9e claire et distincte dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous le rattachons \u00e0 la notion commune comme \u00e0 sa cause ; alors, il est actif et d\u00e9pend de notre puissance d'agir. Spinoza ne veut pas dire que toute passion disparaisse : ce qui dispara\u00eet n'est pas la joie passive elle-m\u00eame, mais toutes les passions, tous les d\u00e9sirs qui s'encha\u00eenent avec elle, li\u00e9s \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de la chose ext\u00e9rieure (amour-passion, etc.)28.\n\nUn sentiment quelconque d\u00e9termine le _conatus_ \u00e0 faire quelque chose en fonction d'une id\u00e9e d'objet ; le _conatus_ , ainsi d\u00e9termin\u00e9, s'appelle un d\u00e9sir. Mais tant que nous sommes d\u00e9termin\u00e9s par un sentiment de joie passive, nos d\u00e9sirs sont encore irrationnels, puisqu'ils naissent d'une id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate. Or, maintenant, \u00e0 la joie passive s'ajoute une joie active qui s'en distingue seulement par la cause ; de cette joie active naissent des d\u00e9sirs qui appartiennent \u00e0 la raison, parce qu'ils proc\u00e8dent d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate29. \u00ab Tous les app\u00e9tits ou d\u00e9sirs sont des passions dans la mesure o\u00f9 ils naissent d'id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates, et ils s'adjoignent \u00e0 la vertu quand ils sont provoqu\u00e9s ou engendr\u00e9s par des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates ; car tous les d\u00e9sirs par lesquels nous sommes d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 faire quelque chose peuvent na\u00eetre aussi bien d'id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates que d'id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates30. \u00bb Donc, des d\u00e9sirs de la raison remplacent les d\u00e9sirs irrationnels, ou plut\u00f4t un encha\u00eenement rationnel se substitue \u00e0 l'encha\u00eenement irrationnel des d\u00e9sirs : \u00ab Nous avons le pouvoir d'ordonner et d'encha\u00eener les affections du corps suivant un ordre conforme \u00e0 l'entendement31. \u00bb\n\nL'ensemble de l'op\u00e9ration d\u00e9crite par Spinoza pr\u00e9sente quatre moments : 1o) Joie passive qui augmente notre puissance d'agir, d'o\u00f9 d\u00e9coulent des d\u00e9sirs ou des passions, en fonction d'une id\u00e9e encore inad\u00e9quate ; 2o) \u00c0 la faveur de ces passions joyeuses, formation d'une notion commune (id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate) ; 3o) Joie active, qui suit de cette notion commune et qui s'explique par notre puissance d'agir ; 4o) Cette joie active s'ajoute \u00e0 la joie passive, mais _remplace_ les d\u00e9sirs-passions qui naissaient de celle-ci par des d\u00e9sirs qui appartiennent \u00e0 la raison, et qui sont de v\u00e9ritables actions. Ainsi se r\u00e9alise le programme de Spinoza : non pas supprimer toute passion, mais \u00e0 la faveur de la passion joyeuse, faire que les passions n'occupent plus que la plus petite partie de nous-m\u00eames et que notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 soit rempli par un maximum d'affections actives32.\n\nAu d\u00e9but du Livre V de l' _\u00c9thique_ , Spinoza montre qu'un sentiment cesse d'\u00eatre une passion sit\u00f4t que nous en formons une id\u00e9e claire et distincte (ad\u00e9quate) ; et que nous en formons une id\u00e9e claire et distincte sit\u00f4t que nous le rattachons \u00e0 une notion commune comme \u00e0 sa cause. Toutefois, Spinoza ne r\u00e9serve pas cette th\u00e8se au sentiment de joie, il l'affirme valable pour _tout_ sentiment : \u00ab Il n'est aucune affection du corps dont nous ne puissions former quelque concept clair et distinct33. \u00bb La d\u00e9monstration de cette proposition est fort concise : \u00ab Les choses qui sont communes \u00e0 toutes ne peuvent \u00eatre con\u00e7ues, sinon de fa\u00e7on ad\u00e9quate ; et par cons\u00e9quent... \u00bb Prenons donc le cas de la tristesse. \u00c9videmment, Spinoza ne veut pas dire que la tristesse, \u00e9tant une passion in\u00e9vitable, est elle-m\u00eame commune \u00e0 tous les hommes ou \u00e0 tous les \u00eatres. Spinoza n'oublie pas que la notion commune est toujours l'id\u00e9e de quelque chose de positif : rien n'est commun par simple impuissance ou par imperfection34. Spinoza veut dire que, m\u00eame dans le cas d'un corps qui ne convient pas avec le n\u00f4tre et nous affecte de tristesse, nous pouvons former l'id\u00e9e de ce qui est commun \u00e0 ce corps et au n\u00f4tre ; simplement, cette notion commune sera tr\u00e8s universelle, impliquant un point de vue beaucoup plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ral que celui des deux corps en pr\u00e9sence. Elle n'en a pas moins une fonction pratique : elle nous fait comprendre pourquoi les deux corps pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, ne conviennent pas de _leur_ propre point de vue. \u00ab Nous voyons que la tristesse provenant de la perte de quelque bien s'adoucit, sit\u00f4t que l'homme qui a perdu ce bien consid\u00e8re qu'il n'aurait pu \u00eatre conserv\u00e9 d'aucune mani\u00e8re35. \u00bb (L'homme, en effet, comprend que son propre corps et le corps ext\u00e9rieur n'auraient pu composer leurs rapports de mani\u00e8re durable que dans d'autres circonstances : si les interm\u00e9diaires avaient \u00e9t\u00e9 donn\u00e9s, mettant en jeu la Nature enti\u00e8re, du point de vue de laquelle une telle composition devenait possible.) Mais quand une notion commune tr\u00e8s universelle nous fait comprendre une disconvenance, l\u00e0 encore un sentiment de joie active en d\u00e9coule : _toujours une joie active suit de ce que nous comprenons_. \u00ab Dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous comprenons les causes de la tristesse, elle cesse d'\u00eatre une passion, c'est-\u00e0-dire qu'elle cesse d'\u00eatre tristesse36. \u00bb Il semble donc que, m\u00eame si nous partons d'une passion triste, l'essentiel du sch\u00e9ma pr\u00e9c\u00e9dent se retrouve : tristesse ; formation d'une notion commune ; joie active qui en d\u00e9coule.\n\nDans le livre II de l' _\u00c9thique_ , Spinoza consid\u00e8re les notions communes dans leur contenu sp\u00e9culatif ; il les suppose donn\u00e9es, ou donnables ; il est donc normal qu'il aille des plus universelles aux moins universelles, suivant un ordre logique. Au d\u00e9but du livre V de l' _\u00c9thique_ , Spinoza analyse la fonction pratique des notions communes suppos\u00e9es donn\u00e9es : cette fonction consiste en ceci que la notion est cause d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate d'affection, c'est-\u00e0-dire d'une joie active. Cette th\u00e8se est valable pour les notions communes les plus universelles comme pour les moins universelles : on peut donc consid\u00e9rer toutes les notions communes prises ensemble, dans l'unit\u00e9 de leur fonction pratique.\n\nMais tout change quand Spinoza demande au cours du livre V : Comment arrivons-nous \u00e0 former une notion commune, nous qui semblons condamn\u00e9s aux id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates et aux passions ? Alors, nous voyons que les premi\u00e8res notions sont n\u00e9cessairement les moins universelles. Les moins universelles, en effet, sont celles qui s'appliquent \u00e0 mon corps et \u00e0 un autre corps qui convient avec lui (ou \u00e0 quelques autres corps) ; _elles seules trouvent dans les joies passives que j'\u00e9prouve l'occasion d'\u00eatre form\u00e9es._ Les plus universelles, au contraire, s'appliquent \u00e0 tous les corps ; elles s'appliquent donc \u00e0 des corps tr\u00e8s diff\u00e9rents, contraires les uns aux autres. Mais la tristesse, ou la contrari\u00e9t\u00e9, produite en nous par un corps qui ne convient pas avec le n\u00f4tre, n'est jamais _l'occasion de former_ une notion commune. Si bien que le processus de formation des notions se pr\u00e9sente ainsi : Nous cherchons d'abord \u00e0 \u00e9prouver un maximum de passions joyeuses (premier effort de la raison). Nous cherchons donc \u00e0 \u00e9viter les passions tristes, \u00e0 \u00e9chapper \u00e0 leur encha\u00eenement, \u00e0 conjurer les mauvaises rencontres. Puis, en second lieu, nous nous servons des passions joyeuses pour former la notion commune correspondante, d'o\u00f9 d\u00e9coulent des joies actives (deuxi\u00e8me effort de la raison). Une telle notion commune est parmi les moins universelles, puisqu'elle s'applique seulement \u00e0 mon corps et \u00e0 des corps qui conviennent avec lui. Mais elle nous rend encore plus forts pour \u00e9viter les mauvaises rencontres ; et surtout elle nous met en possession de notre puissance d'agir et de comprendre. _Alors, en troisi\u00e8me lieu_ , nous sommes devenus capables de former des notions communes plus universelles, qui s'appliquent \u00e0 tous les cas, m\u00eame aux corps qui nous sont contraires ; nous sommes devenus capables de comprendre m\u00eame nos tristesses et de tirer de cette compr\u00e9hension une joie active. Nous sommes capables de faire face aux mauvaises rencontres que nous ne pouvons pas \u00e9viter, de r\u00e9duire les tristesses qui subsistent n\u00e9cessairement en nous. Mais on n'oubliera pas que, malgr\u00e9 l'identit\u00e9 g\u00e9n\u00e9rale de leur fonction pratique (produire des joies actives), les notions communes sont d'autant plus utiles, d'autant plus efficaces qu'elles proc\u00e8dent de passions joyeuses et sont moins universelles37.\n\nToutes les notions communes ont un m\u00eame contenu sp\u00e9culatif : elles impliquent une certaine g\u00e9n\u00e9ralit\u00e9 sans abstraction. Elles ont une m\u00eame fonction pratique : id\u00e9es n\u00e9cessairement ad\u00e9quates, elles sont telles qu'une joie active en d\u00e9coule. Mais leur r\u00f4le, sp\u00e9culatif et pratique, n'est pas du tout le m\u00eame si nous consid\u00e9rons les conditions de leur formation. Les premi\u00e8res notions communes que nous formons, ce sont les moins universelles, parce qu'elles trouvent dans nos passions joyeuses un principe inducteur efficace. C'est au niveau du \u00ab moins universel \u00bb que nous conqu\u00e9rons notre puissance d'agir : nous accumulons les joies passives, nous y trouvons l'occasion de former des notions communes, d'o\u00f9 d\u00e9coulent des joies actives. En ce sens, l'augmentation de notre puissance d'agir nous donne l'occasion de conqu\u00e9rir cette puissance, ou de devenir actif effectivement. Ayant conquis notre activit\u00e9 sur certains points, nous devenons capables de former des notions communes, m\u00eame dans les cas moins favorables. Il y a tout un apprentissage des notions communes, ou du _devenir-actif_ : on ne doit pas n\u00e9gliger dans le Spinozisme l'importance du probl\u00e8me d'un processus de formation ; il faut partir des notions communes les moins universelles, les premi\u00e8res que nous ayons l'occasion de former.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 59, dem. : \u00ab Dans la mesure o\u00f9 la joie est bonne, elle convient avec la raison, car elle consiste en ce que la puissance d'agir de l'homme est augment\u00e9e ou aid\u00e9e. \u00bb\n\n2.  _\u00c9_ , III, 59, prop. et dem.\n\n3.  _\u00c9_ , III, 58, prop. et dem. ; IV, 59, dem.\n\n4.  _\u00c9_ , III, 58, prop.\n\n5.  Le sentiment actif et le sentiment passif se distinguent comme l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate et l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate. Mais entre une id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate et une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate d'affection, la distinction est seulement de raison : _\u00c9_ , V, 3, dem.\n\n6.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, 51, dem.\n\n7.  Plus ou moins utiles, plus ou moins faciles \u00e0 d\u00e9couvrir ou \u00e0 former : _\u00c9_ , II, 40, sc. 1. Plus ou moins universelles ( _maxime universales, minime universalia_ ) : _TTP_ , ch. 7, II, p. 176.\n\n8.  Cas des notions communes les moins universelles : _\u00c9_ , II, 39, prop.\n\n9.  Cas des notions communes les plus universelles : _\u00c9_ , II, 37 et 38, prop.\n\n10.  _\u00c9_ , II, 29, sc. : \u00ab Toutes les fois que l'esprit est d\u00e9termin\u00e9 de l'int\u00e9rieur, c'est-\u00e0-dire parce qu'il consid\u00e8re plusieurs choses en m\u00eame temps, \u00e0 comprendre leurs convenances, leurs diff\u00e9rences et leurs oppositions, toutes les fois en effet qu'il est dispos\u00e9 de l'int\u00e9rieur de telle ou telle mani\u00e8re, alors il consid\u00e8re les choses clairement et distinctement, comme je le montrerai plus bas. \u00bb\n\n11.  _\u00c9_ , II, 40, sc. 1.\n\n12.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , IV, pr\u00e9face.\n\n13.  _\u00c9_ , II, 40, sc. 1.\n\n14.  _\u00c9_ , 2, sc. : \u00ab Car personne jusqu'ici n'a connu la structure ( _fabrica_ ) du corps si exactement qu'il ait pu en expliquer toutes les fonctions. \u00bb\n\n15.  _\u00c9tienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire_ d\u00e9finit sa \u00ab philosophie de la Nature \u00bb par le principe d'unit\u00e9 de composition. Il oppose sa m\u00e9tbhode \u00e0 la m\u00e9thode classique issue d'Aristote, qui consid\u00e8re les formes et les fonctions. Au-del\u00e0 de celles-ci, il se propose de d\u00e9terminer les rapports variables entre \u00e9l\u00e9ments anatomiques constants : les animaux diff\u00e9rents correspondent aux variations de rapport, de situation respective et de d\u00e9pendance de ces \u00e9l\u00e9ments, si bien qu'ils se r\u00e9duisent tous aux modifications d'un seul et m\u00eame Animal en soi. Aux ressemblances de formes et aux analogies de fonctions, qui restent toujours ext\u00e9rieures, Geoffroy substitue ainsi le point de vue intrins\u00e8que d'une unit\u00e9 de composition ou d'une similitude de rapports. Il aime \u00e0 se r\u00e9clamer de Leibniz, et d'un principe d'unit\u00e9 dans le divers. Il nous semble pourtant encore plus spinoziste ; car sa philosophie de la Nature est un monisme, et elle exclut radicalement tout principe de finalit\u00e9, externe ou interne. Cf. _Principes de philosophie zoologique_ , 1830, et _\u00c9tudes progressives d'un naturaliste_ , 1835.\n\n16.  _\u00c9_ , II, 39, prop. et dem.\n\n17.  _\u00c9_ , II, 38, prop. et dem.\n\n18.  _\u00c9_ , II, 45, prop. et sc.\n\n19.  _\u00c9_ , II, 46, dem. : \u00ab Donc, ce qui donne la connaissance de l'essence \u00e9ternelle et infinie de Dieu est commun \u00e0 toutes choses, et est \u00e9galement dans une partie comme dans le tout. \u00bb\n\n20.  _\u00c9_ , II, 40, sc. 1 : Par notre m\u00e9thode, on \u00e9tablirait \u00ab quelles notions sont communes, et quelles sont claires et distinctes pour ceux-l\u00e0 seulement qui ne s'embarrassent pas de pr\u00e9jug\u00e9s... \u00bb.\n\n21.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 38 et 39. De m\u00eame _TTP_ , ch. 7, o\u00f9 l'on part des notions les plus universelles (II, pp. 176-177).\n\n22.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 39, dem. : De la notion commune d\u00e9coule une id\u00e9e d'affection (telle est sa fonction pratique).\n\n23.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 29, prop. : \u00ab Et, d'une fa\u00e7on absolue, aucune chose ne peut \u00eatre bonne _ou mauvaise_ pour nous, \u00e0 moins qu'elle n'ait quelque chose de commun avec nous. \u00bb\n\n24.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 30, prop.\n\n25.  _\u00c9_ , V, 10, dem.\n\n26.  _\u00c9_ , III, 1, dem.\n\n27.  _\u00c9_ , V, 3, prop. Et la proposition suivante pr\u00e9cise le moyen de former cette id\u00e9e claire et distincte : rattacher le sentiment \u00e0 une notion commune comme \u00e0 sa cause.\n\n28.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 2, prop. et dem. Et V, 4, sc. : Ce qui est d\u00e9truit n'est pas la joie passive elle-m\u00eame, mais les amours qui en proc\u00e8dent.\n\n29.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 63, dem. du cor. : \u00ab Le d\u00e9sir qui na\u00eet de la raison peut seulement na\u00eetre d'un sentiment de joie qui n'est pas une passion. \u00bb\n\n30.  _\u00c9_ , V, 4, sc.\n\n31.  _\u00c9_ , V, 10, prop. et dem.\n\n32.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 20 sc.\n\n33.  _\u00c9_ , V, prop. et cor.\n\n34.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 32, prop. : \u00ab Dans la mesure o\u00f9 les hommes sont soumis aux passions, on ne peut dire qu'ils conviennent par nature. \u00bb Et le scolie pr\u00e9cise : \u00ab Les choses qui conviennent dans la seule n\u00e9gation, autrement dit en ce qu'elles n'ont pas, ne conviennent en r\u00e9alit\u00e9 en aucune chose. \u00bb\n\n35.  _\u00c9_ , V, 6, sc.\n\n36.  _\u00c9_ , V, 18, sc.\n\n37.  C'est l'ordre que pr\u00e9sente _\u00c9_ , V, 10. 1o) Dans la mesure o\u00f9 \u00ab nous ne sommes pas tourment\u00e9s par des sentiments contraires \u00e0 notre nature \u00bb, nous avons le pouvoir de former des id\u00e9es claires et distinctes (notions communes), et d'en d\u00e9duire les affections qui s'encha\u00eenent les unes aux autres conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 la raison. Ce sont donc les passions joyeuses (sentiments convenant avec notre nature) qui servent d'occasion premi\u00e8re \u00e0 la formation des notions communes. Nous devons _s\u00e9lectionner_ nos passions, et m\u00eame quand nous rencontrons quelque chose qui ne convient pas avec nous, nous devons nous efforcer de r\u00e9duire la tristesse au minimum (cf. scolie). 2o) Quand nous avons form\u00e9 les premi\u00e8res notions communes, nous sommes d'autant plus forts pour \u00e9viter les mauvaises rencontres et les sentiments qui nous sont contraires. Et dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous \u00e9prouvons n\u00e9cessairement encore de tels sentiments, nous sommes capables de former de nouvelles notions communes, qui nous font comprendre ces disconvenances et ces contrari\u00e9t\u00e9s elles-m\u00eames (cf. scolie).\n\n## CHAPITRE XVIII\n\n## VERS LE TROISI\u00c8ME GENRE\n\nLes genres de connaissance sont aussi des mani\u00e8res de vivre, des modes d'existence. Le premier genre (imagination) est constitu\u00e9 par toutes les id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates, par les affections passives et leur encha\u00eenement1. Ce premier genre correspond d'abord \u00e0 _l'\u00e9tat de nature_ : je per\u00e7ois les objets au hasard des rencontres, d'apr\u00e8s l'effet qu'ils ont sur moi. Cet effet n'est qu'un \u00ab signe \u00bb, une \u00ab indication \u00bb variable. Cette connaissance est par _exp\u00e9rience vague_ ; et vague, selon l'\u00e9tymologie, renvoie au caract\u00e8re hasardeux des rencontres2. Ici, nous ne connaissons de la Nature que son \u00ab ordre commun \u00bb, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'effet des rencontres entre parties suivant des d\u00e9terminations purement extrins\u00e8ques.\n\nMais l' _\u00e9tat civil_ , lui aussi, appartient au premier genre de connaissance. D\u00e8s l'\u00e9tat de nature, l'imagination forme des id\u00e9es universelles abstraites, qui retiennent de l'objet tel ou tel caract\u00e8re sensible. Ce caract\u00e8re sera d\u00e9sign\u00e9 par un nom, qui servira de signe soit par rapport \u00e0 des objets qui ressemblent au premier, soit par rapport \u00e0 des objets qui sont li\u00e9s d'habitude avec le premier3. Mais avec le langage et l'\u00e9tat civil se d\u00e9veloppe une seconde sorte de signes : non plus indicatifs, mais imp\u00e9ratifs. Des signes nous paraissent dire ce qu'il _faut_ faire pour obtenir tel r\u00e9sultat, pour r\u00e9aliser telle fin : cette connaissance est par _ou\u00ef-dire._ Ainsi, dans l'exemple fameux de Spinoza, un signe repr\u00e9sente l'op\u00e9ration que nous \u00ab devons \u00bb faire sur trois nombres pour trouver le quatri\u00e8me. Lois de la nature ou r\u00e8gles techniques, il est in\u00e9vitable que toute loi nous apparaisse sous une forme morale, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous n'en avons pas une connaissance ad\u00e9quate ; une loi nous para\u00eet morale, ou de type moral, chaque fois que nous en faisons d\u00e9pendre l'effet d'un signe imp\u00e9ratif (et non des rapports constitutifs des choses).\n\nCe qui forme l'unit\u00e9 du premier genre de connaissance, ce sont les signes. Ils d\u00e9finissent l'\u00e9tat d'une pens\u00e9e qui reste inad\u00e9quate, envelopp\u00e9e, non expliqu\u00e9e. \u00c0 ce premier genre, il faudrait m\u00eame joindre l' _\u00e9tat de religion_ , c'est-\u00e0-dire l'\u00e9tat de l'homme par rapport \u00e0 un Dieu qui lui donne une r\u00e9v\u00e9lation. Cet \u00e9tat ne diff\u00e8re pas moins de l'\u00e9tat de nature que l'\u00e9tat civil lui-m\u00eame : \u00ab La nature n'a jamais enseign\u00e9 \u00e0 personne que l'homme est oblig\u00e9 d'ob\u00e9ir \u00e0 Dieu ; aucun raisonnement m\u00eame ne saurait le lui apprendre. Seule la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation, confirm\u00e9e par des signes, le fait conna\u00eetre \u00e0 chacun4 \u00bb. Cet \u00e9tat de religion n'en est pas moins dans le premier genre : pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment parce qu'il fait partie de la connaissance inad\u00e9quate, parce qu'il est fond\u00e9 sur des signes et se manifeste sous forme de lois qui commandent et ordonnent. La R\u00e9v\u00e9lation s'explique elle-m\u00eame par le caract\u00e8re inad\u00e9quat de notre connaissance, et porte uniquement sur certains propres de Dieu. Les signes de la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation constituent une troisi\u00e8me sorte de signes et d\u00e9finissent la religion des proph\u00e8tes, religion du premier genre ou de l'imagination.\n\nLe second genre de connaissance dans l' _\u00c9thique_ correspond \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat de raison : c'est une connaissance des notions communes, et par notions communes. C'est l\u00e0, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , qu'appara\u00eet la v\u00e9ritable rupture entre les genres de connaissance : \u00ab La connaissance du second et du troisi\u00e8me genre, et non celle du premier, nous enseigne \u00e0 distinguer le vrai du faux5. \u00bb Avec les notions communes, nous entrons dans le domaine de _l'expression_ : ces notions sont nos premi\u00e8res id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates, elles nous arrachent au monde des signes inad\u00e9quats. Et parce que toute notion commune nous conduit \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu dont elle exprime l'essence, le second genre de connaissance implique lui aussi une religion. Cette religion n'est plus de l'imagination, mais de l'entendement ; l'expression de la Nature remplace les signes, l'amour remplace l'ob\u00e9issance ; ce n'est plus la religion des proph\u00e8tes, mais, \u00e0 des degr\u00e9s divers, la religion de Salomon, la religion des Ap\u00f4tres, la v\u00e9ritable religion du Christ, fond\u00e9e sur les notions communes6.\n\nMais pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, qu'est-ce que nous connaissons par ces notions ? Il est entendu que les notions communes ne constituent l'essence particuli\u00e8re d'aucune chose. Pourtant, il ne suffit pas de les d\u00e9finir par leur g\u00e9n\u00e9ralit\u00e9. _Les notions s'appliquent aux modes existants particuliers, et n'ont pas de sens ind\u00e9pendamment de cette application._ Repr\u00e9sentant (de points de vue plus ou moins g\u00e9n\u00e9raux) la similitude de composition des modes existants, elles sont pour nous le seul moyen d'arriver \u00e0 la connaissance ad\u00e9quate des rapports caract\u00e9ristiques des corps, de la composition de ces rapports et de leurs lois de composition. L\u00e0 encore, on le voit bien dans l'exemple des nombres : dans le deuxi\u00e8me genre de connaissance, nous n'appliquons plus une r\u00e8gle connue par ou\u00ef-dire, comme on ob\u00e9it \u00e0 une loi morale ; comprenant la r\u00e8gle de proportionnalit\u00e9 dans une notion commune, nous saisissons la mani\u00e8re dont se composent les rapports constitutifs des trois nombres donn\u00e9s. C'est pourquoi les notions communes nous font conna\u00eetre l'ordre positif de la Nature au sens de : ordre des rapports constitutifs ou caract\u00e9ristiques sous lesquels les corps conviennent et s'opposent. Les lois de la Nature n'apparaissent plus comme des commandements et des d\u00e9fenses, mais pour ce qu'elles sont, v\u00e9rit\u00e9s \u00e9ternelles, normes de composition, r\u00e8gles d'effectuation des pouvoirs. C'est cet ordre de la Nature qui exprime Dieu comme source ; et plus nous connaissons les choses suivant cet ordre, plus nos id\u00e9es elles-m\u00eames expriment l'essence de Dieu. Toute notre connaissance exprime Dieu, quand elle est dirig\u00e9e par les notions communes.\n\nLes notions communes sont une des d\u00e9couvertes fondamentales de l' _\u00c9thique_. Nous devons, \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard, attacher la plus grande importance \u00e0 la chronologie. Ferdinand Alqui\u00e9 insista r\u00e9cemment sur ce point : l'introduction des notions communes dans l' _\u00c9thique_ marque un moment d\u00e9cisif du spinozisme7. En effet, ni le _Court Trait\u00e9_ ni le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ n'en font \u00e9tat. Le _Court Trait\u00e9_ sait d\u00e9j\u00e0 que les choses ont des rapports caract\u00e9ristiques, mais se fie seulement au \u00ab raisonnement \u00bb pour les d\u00e9couvrir ; nulle mention des notions communes8. Aussi le correspondant du deuxi\u00e8me genre de connaissance dans le _Court Trait\u00e9_ (deuxi\u00e8me \u00ab mode de conscience \u00bb) ne constitue-t-il pas une connaissance ad\u00e9quate, mais une simple croyance droite. Dans le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ , le correspondant du deuxi\u00e8me genre (troisi\u00e8me \u00ab mode de perception \u00bb) ne constitue encore qu'une connaissance claire, non pas une connaissance ad\u00e9quate : il ne se d\u00e9finit nullement par les notions communes, mais par des inf\u00e9rences de type cart\u00e9sien et des d\u00e9ductions de type aristot\u00e9licien9.\n\nPourtant, _dans un tout autre contexte_ , on trouve dans le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ un pressentiment et une approximation de ce que seront les notions communes. Un passage c\u00e9l\u00e8bre parle, en effet, des \u00ab choses fixes et \u00e9ternelles \u00bb qui, en raison de leur omnipr\u00e9sence, sont \u00e0 notre \u00e9gard \u00ab comme des universaux ou des genres pour la d\u00e9finition des choses singuli\u00e8res changeantes \u00bb : on reconna\u00eet ici les notions les plus universelles, \u00e9tendue, mouvement, repos, qui sont communes \u00e0 toutes choses. Et la suite du texte r\u00e9clame encore d'autres \u00ab adjuvants \u00bb n\u00e9cessaires pour comprendre les choses singuli\u00e8res changeantes : on pressent alors le r\u00f4le des notions communes moins universelles10. Mais si ce texte soul\u00e8ve beaucoup de difficult\u00e9s, c'est parce qu'il est \u00e9crit du point de vue du mode de perception ou du genre de connaissance supr\u00eame, portant sur les essences elles-m\u00eames : dans les choses fixes et \u00e9ternelles, dit Spinoza, des lois sont inscrites comme dans leurs vrais codes ; or ces lois semblent aussi bien des lois de production des essences que des lois de composition des rapports11.\n\nComment expliquer que Spinoza assimile ici des sortes de lois si diff\u00e9rentes ? Nous supposons qu'il n'eut le pressentiment des notions communes qu'en avan\u00e7ant dans la r\u00e9daction du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme._ Or, \u00e0 ce moment, il avait d\u00e9j\u00e0 d\u00e9fini autrement le troisi\u00e8me mode de perception (correspondant au second genre de connaissance). D'o\u00f9, les choses fixes et \u00e9ternelles faisant fonction d'universaux ne trouvaient de place qu'au niveau du genre ou du mode supr\u00eame : elles \u00e9taient confondues d\u00e8s lors avec le principe de la connaissance des essences. Une autre place \u00e9tait possible ; mais il aurait fallu que Spinoza rev\u00eent en arri\u00e8re, et repr\u00eet la description des modes de perception en fonction de sa nouvelle id\u00e9e. Cette hypoth\u00e8se explique en partie pourquoi Spinoza renonce \u00e0 terminer le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ , pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment quand il arrive \u00e0 l'expos\u00e9 de ce qu'il appelle lui-m\u00eame une propri\u00e9t\u00e9 commune. Cette hypoth\u00e8se permettrait aussi de dater la pleine formation de la th\u00e9orie des notions communes par Spinoza entre l'abandon du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ et la r\u00e9daction de l' _\u00c9thique._ Or cette pleine possession devait lui inspirer le d\u00e9sir de modifier le _Trait\u00e9_ , de refaire la th\u00e9orie du second genre ou troisi\u00e8me mode de perception, en donnant aux notions communes leur d\u00e9veloppement autonome et distinct ; c'est pourquoi Spinoza, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , parle d'un Trait\u00e9 o\u00f9 il se propose de d\u00e9velopper ces points12.\n\nQuand Spinoza d\u00e9couvre que les notions communes sont nos premi\u00e8res id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates, un hiatus s'\u00e9tablit donc entre le premier et le second genre de connaissance. L'existence de ce hiatus ne doit pas nous faire oublier pourtant tout un syst\u00e8me de correspondances entre ces deux genres, sans lesquelles la formation d'une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate ou d'une notion commune resterait incompr\u00e9hensible. D'abord nous avons vu que l'\u00e9tat civil tenait lieu de raison, pr\u00e9parait la raison et l'imitait. Cela serait impossible si les lois morales et les signes imp\u00e9ratifs, malgr\u00e9 le contresens qu'ils impliquent, ne co\u00efncidaient d'une certaine mani\u00e8re avec l'ordre v\u00e9ritable et positif de la Nature. Ainsi ce sont bien les lois de la Nature que les proph\u00e8tes saisissent et transmettent, bien qu'ils les comprennent inad\u00e9quatement. De m\u00eame, le plus grand effort de la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 est de choisir des signes et d'instituer des lois dont l'ensemble co\u00efncide au maximum avec l'ordre de la nature et, surtout, avec la subsistance de l'homme dans cet ordre. \u00c0 cet \u00e9gard, la variabilit\u00e9 des signes devient un avantage, et nous ouvre des possibilit\u00e9s que l'entendement n'a pas par lui-m\u00eame, possibilit\u00e9s propres \u00e0 l'imagination13. Mais, de plus, la raison n'arriverait pas \u00e0 former des notions communes, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00e0 entrer en possession de sa puissance d'agir, si elle ne se cherchait elle-m\u00eame au cours de ce premier effort qui consiste \u00e0 s\u00e9lectionner les passions joyeuses. Avant de devenir actifs, il faut s\u00e9lectionner et encha\u00eener les passions qui augmentent notre puissance d'agir. Or ces passions se rapportent \u00e0 l'image d'objets qui conviennent en nature avec nous ; ces images elles-m\u00eames sont encore des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates, simples indications qui ne nous font conna\u00eetre les objets que par l'effet qu'ils ont sur nous. La raison ne se \u00ab trouverait \u00bb donc pas si son premier effort ne se dessinait dans le cadre du premier genre, utilisant toutes les ressources de l'imagination.\n\nEnvisag\u00e9es dans leur origine, les notions communes trouvent dans l'imagination les conditions m\u00eames de leur formation. Mais bien plus : envisag\u00e9es dans leur fonction pratique, elles ne s'appliquent qu'\u00e0 des choses qui peuvent \u00eatre imagin\u00e9es. C'est pourquoi elles sont elles-m\u00eames, \u00e0 certains \u00e9gards, assimilables \u00e0 des images14. _L'application des notions communes en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral implique une curieuse harmonie entre la raison et l'imagination,entre les lois de la raison et les lois de l'imagination_. Spinoza analyse diff\u00e9rents cas. Les livres III et IV de l' _\u00c9thique_ avaient montr\u00e9 sous quelles lois sp\u00e9cifiques de l'imagination une passion devient plus o\u00f9 moins intense, plus ou moins forte. Ainsi, le sentiment envers une chose que nous imaginons en elle-m\u00eame est plus fort que le sentiment que nous \u00e9prouvons, quand nous croyons qu'elle est n\u00e9cessaire ou n\u00e9cessit\u00e9e15. Or la loi sp\u00e9cifique de la raison consiste pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment \u00e0 consid\u00e9rer les choses comme n\u00e9cessaires : les notions communes nous font comprendre la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 des convenances et des disconvenances entre corps. La raison profite ici d'une disposition de l'imagination : plus nous comprenons les choses comme n\u00e9cessaires, moins les passions fond\u00e9es sur l'imagination ont de force ou d'intensit\u00e916. L'imagination, suivant sa propre loi, commence toujours par affirmer la pr\u00e9sence de son objet ; ensuite, elle est affect\u00e9e par des causes qui excluent cette pr\u00e9sence ; elle entre dans une sorte de \u00ab flottement \u00bb, et ne croit plus \u00e0 son objet que comme possible ou m\u00eame contingent. L'imagination d'un objet contient donc, avec le temps, le principe de son affaiblissement. Mais la raison, d'apr\u00e8s sa propre loi, forme des notions communes, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'id\u00e9e de propri\u00e9t\u00e9s \u00ab que nous consid\u00e9rons toujours comme pr\u00e9sentes17. \u00bb Ici la raison satisfait \u00e0 l'exigence de l'imagination mieux que celle-ci ne peut le faire elle-m\u00eame. L'imagination, entra\u00een\u00e9e par son propre destin qui l'affecte de causes diverses, n'arrive pas \u00e0 maintenir la pr\u00e9sence de son objet. Seule la raison ne se contente pas de diminuer relativement la force des passions : \u00ab eu \u00e9gard au temps \u00bb, les sentiments actifs qui naissent de la raison ou de la notion commune sont plus forts en eux-m\u00eames que tous les sentiments passifs qui naissent de l'imagination18. D'apr\u00e8s la loi de l'imagination, un sentiment est d'autant plus fort qu'il est provoqu\u00e9 par plus de causes agissant ensemble19. Mais, d'apr\u00e8s sa propre loi, la notion commune s'applique ou se rapporte \u00e0 plusieurs choses ou images de choses qui se joignent facilement \u00e0 elles : elle est donc fr\u00e9quente et vivace20. En ce sens, elle diminue l'intensit\u00e9 du sentiment de l'imagination, parce qu'elle d\u00e9termine l'esprit \u00e0 consid\u00e9rer plusieurs objets. Mais aussi, ces objets qui se joignent \u00e0 la notion sont comme des causes favorisant le sentiment de la raison qui d\u00e9coule de celle-ci21.\n\nN\u00e9cessit\u00e9, pr\u00e9sence et fr\u00e9quence sont les trois caract\u00e8res des notions communes. Or ces caract\u00e8res font qu'elles s'imposent en quelque sorte \u00e0 l'imagination, soit pour diminuer l'intensit\u00e9 des sentiments passifs, soit pour assurer la vivacit\u00e9 des sentiments actifs. Les notions communes se servent des lois de l'imagination pour nous lib\u00e9rer de l'imagination m\u00eame. Leur n\u00e9cessit\u00e9, leur pr\u00e9sence, leur fr\u00e9quence leur permettent de s'ins\u00e9rer dans le mouvement de l'imagination, et d'en d\u00e9tourner le cours \u00e0 leur profit. Il n'est pas exag\u00e9r\u00e9 de parler ici d'une _libre harmonie_ de l'imagination avec la raison.\n\n_La majeure partie de l'_ \u00c9thique _, exactement jusqu'en V 21, est \u00e9crite dans la perspective du second genre de connaissance._ Car c'est seulement par les notions communes que nous arrivons \u00e0 avoir des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates, et une connaissance ad\u00e9quate de Dieu lui-m\u00eame. Il n'y a pas l\u00e0 une condition de toute connaissance, mais une condition de notre connaissance, en tant que nous sommes des modes existants finis compos\u00e9s d'une \u00e2me et d'un corps. Nous qui n'avons d'abord que des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates et des affections passives, nous ne pouvons conqu\u00e9rir notre puissance de comprendre et d'agir qu'en formant des notions communes. Toute notre connaissance passe par ces notions. C'est pourquoi Spinoza peut dire que l'existence m\u00eame de Dieu n'est pas connue par elle-m\u00eame, mais \u00ab doit se conclure de notions dont la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 soit si ferme et si in\u00e9branlable qu'il ne puisse y avoir ni \u00eatre con\u00e7u de puissance capable de les changer22 \u00bb. M\u00eame aveu dans l' _\u00c9thique_ : le premier livre nous fait conna\u00eetre Dieu, et toutes choses comme d\u00e9pendant de Dieu ; or cette connaissance est elle-m\u00eame du second genre23.\n\nTous les corps conviennent en certaines choses, \u00e9tendue, mouvement, repos. Les id\u00e9es d'\u00e9tendue, de mouvement, de repos sont pour nous des notions communes tr\u00e8s universelles, puisqu'elles s'appliquent \u00e0 tous les corps existants. Nous demandons : faut-il consid\u00e9rer l'id\u00e9e de Dieu elle-m\u00eame comme une notion commune, la plus universelle de toutes ? Beaucoup de textes semblent le sugg\u00e9rer24. Pourtant il n'en est pas ainsi : notre id\u00e9e de Dieu est en relation \u00e9troite avec les notions communes, mais n'est pas une de ces notions. En un sens, l'id\u00e9e de Dieu s'oppose aux notions communes, parce que celles-ci s'appliquent toujours \u00e0 des choses qui peuvent \u00eatre imagin\u00e9es, tandis que Dieu ne peut pas l'\u00eatre25. Spinoza dit seulement que les notions communes nous m\u00e8nent \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, qu'elles nous _\u00ab donnent \u00bb_ n\u00e9cessairement la connaissance de Dieu, et que, sans elles, nous n'aurions pas cette connaissance26. En effet, une notion commune est une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate ; l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, c'est l'id\u00e9e comme expressive ; et ce qu'elle exprime, c'est l'essence m\u00eame de Dieu. L'id\u00e9e de Dieu est donc en relation d'expression avec les notions communes. Les notions communes expriment Dieu comme la source de tous les rapports constitutifs des choses. En tant que rapport\u00e9e \u00e0 ces notions qui l'expriment, l'id\u00e9e de Dieu fonde la religion du second genre. Car des sentiments actifs, des joies actives d\u00e9coulent des notions communes ; pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, elles en d\u00e9coulent \u00ab avec accompagnement de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu \u00bb. L'amour de Dieu n'est que cette joie avec cet accompagnement27. Le plus haut effort de la raison, en tant qu'elle con\u00e7oit des notions communes, est donc de conna\u00eetre Dieu et de l'aimer28. (Mais ce Dieu rapport\u00e9 aux notions communes n'a pas \u00e0 r\u00e9pondre \u00e0 notre amour : Dieu impassible, qui ne nous paie pas de retour. Car, si actives qu'elles soient, les joies d\u00e9coulant des notions ne sont pas s\u00e9parables de joies passives ou de donn\u00e9es de l'imagination qui, d'abord, ont augment\u00e9 notre puissance d'agir et nous ont servi de causes occasionnelles. Or Dieu lui-m\u00eame est exempt de passions : il n'\u00e9prouve aucune joie passive, ni m\u00eame aucune joie active du genre de celles qui supposent une joie passive29.)\n\nOn se souvient des exigences m\u00e9thodologiques du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ : nous ne pouvons pas partir de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, mais nous devons y arriver aussi vite que possible. Or \u00ab le plus vite possible \u00bb, dans le _Trait\u00e9_ , se pr\u00e9sentait ainsi : nous devions partir de ce qui \u00e9tait positif dans une id\u00e9e que nous avions ; nous nous efforcions de rendre cette id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate ; elle \u00e9tait ad\u00e9quate quand elle \u00e9tait rattach\u00e9e \u00e0 sa cause, quand elle exprimait sa cause ; mais elle n'exprimait pas sa cause sans exprimer aussi l'id\u00e9e de Dieu qui d\u00e9terminait cette cause \u00e0 produire un tel effet. Ainsi, nous ne risquions pas d'entrer dans une r\u00e9gression infinie de cause en cause : c'est \u00e0 chaque niveau que Dieu \u00e9tait exprim\u00e9 comme ce qui d\u00e9terminait la cause.\n\nIl nous semble inexact d'opposer sur ce point l' _\u00c9thique_ au _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme. Pas plus que le_ Trait\u00e9, _l'_ \u00c9thique _ne commence par Dieu comme substance absolument infinie._ L' _\u00c9thique_ ne part nullement de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme d'un inconditionn\u00e9 ; nous avons vu \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard le r\u00f4le des premi\u00e8res propositions. L' _\u00c9thique_ a le m\u00eame projet que le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ : s'\u00e9lever aussi vite que possible \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu sans tomber dans une r\u00e9gression infinie, sans faire de Dieu lui-m\u00eame une cause \u00e9loign\u00e9e. Si l' _\u00c9thique_ se distingue du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ , ce n'est donc pas par un changement de m\u00e9thode, encore moins par un changement de principe, mais seulement parce que l' _\u00c9thique_ a trouv\u00e9 des moyens moins artificiels et plus concrets. Ces moyens, ce sont les notions communes (jusqu'en V, 21). Nous ne partons plus de ce qui est positif dans une id\u00e9e quelconque pour essayer de former une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate : un tel proc\u00e9d\u00e9 est peu s\u00fbr et reste ind\u00e9termin\u00e9. Nous partons de ce qu'il y a de positif dans une passion joyeuse ; nous sommes alors d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 former une notion commune, notre premi\u00e8re id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate. Puis nous formons des notions communes de plus en plus g\u00e9n\u00e9rales, qui constituent le syst\u00e8me de la raison ; mais chaque notion commune, \u00e0 son propre niveau, exprime Dieu et nous conduit \u00e0 la connaissance de Dieu. Chaque notion commune exprime Dieu comme la source des rapports qui se composent dans les corps auxquels la notion s'applique. On ne dira donc pas que les notions plus universelles expriment Dieu mieux que les moins universelles. On ne dira surtout pas que l'id\u00e9e de Dieu soit elle-m\u00eame une notion commune, la plus universelle de toutes : en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, chaque notion nous y conduit, chaque notion l'exprime, les moins universelles comme les plus universelles. Dans le syst\u00e8me de l'expression, jamais Dieu n'est une cause \u00e9loign\u00e9e.\n\nC'est pourquoi l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , va jouer le r\u00f4le d'un pivot. Tout tourne autour d'elle, tout change avec elle. Spinoza annonce que, \u00ab outre \u00bb le second genre de connaissance, un troisi\u00e8me est donn\u00e930. Bien plus, il pr\u00e9sente le second genre comme \u00e9tant la cause motrice du troisi\u00e8me : c'est le second qui nous d\u00e9termine \u00e0 entrer dans le troisi\u00e8me, \u00e0 \u00ab former \u00bb le troisi\u00e8me31. La question est : Comment le second genre nous d\u00e9termine-t-il ainsi ? _Seule l'id\u00e9e de Dieu peut expliquer ce passage_ , qui appara\u00eet dans l' _\u00c9thique_ en V 20-21. 1o) Chaque notion commune nous conduit \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. Rapport\u00e9e aux notions communes qui l'expriment, l'id\u00e9e de Dieu fait elle-m\u00eame partie du second genre de connaissance. Dans cette mesure, elle repr\u00e9sente un Dieu impassible, mais cette id\u00e9e accompagne toutes les joies qui d\u00e9coulent de notre puissance de comprendre (en tant que cette puissance proc\u00e8de par notions communes). L'id\u00e9e de Dieu, en ce sens, est la pointe extr\u00eame du second genre. 2o) Mais, bien qu'elle se rapporte n\u00e9cessairement aux notions communes, l'id\u00e9e de Dieu n'est pas elle-m\u00eame une notion commune. C'est pourquoi elle nous pr\u00e9cipite dans un nouvel \u00e9l\u00e9ment. Nous ne pouvons atteindre \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu que par le second genre ; mais nous ne pouvons pas y atteindre sans \u00eatre d\u00e9termin\u00e9s \u00e0 sortir de ce second genre pour entrer dans un nouvel \u00e9tat. Dans le second genre, c'est l'id\u00e9e de Dieu qui sert de fondement au troisi\u00e8me ; par \u00ab fondement \u00bb, il faut entendre la vraie cause motrice, la _causa fiendi_32. Cette id\u00e9e de Dieu elle-m\u00eame changera donc de contenu, prendra un autre contenu, dans le troisi\u00e8me genre auquel elle nous d\u00e9termine.\n\nUne notion commune a deux caract\u00e8res : elle s'applique \u00e0 plusieurs modes existants ; elle nous fait conna\u00eetre les rapports sous lesquels les modes existants conviennent ou s'opposent. \u00c0 la limite, on comprend qu'une id\u00e9e d'attribut nous apparaisse d'abord comme une notion commune : l'id\u00e9e d'\u00e9tendue est une notion tr\u00e8s universelle en tant qu'elle s'applique \u00e0 tous les corps qui existent ; et l'id\u00e9e des modes infinis de l'\u00e9tendue nous fait conna\u00eetre la convenance de tous les corps du point de vue de la Nature enti\u00e8re. Mais l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, qui s'ajoute \u00e0 toutes les notions communes ou les \u00ab accompagne \u00bb, nous inspire une nouvelle appr\u00e9ciation des attributs et des modes. L\u00e0 encore, il en est dans l' _\u00c9thique_ comme dans le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ : l'id\u00e9e de Dieu nous introduit dans le domaine des \u00ab \u00eatres r\u00e9els \u00bb et de leur encha\u00eenement. L'attribut ne sera plus seulement compris comme une _propri\u00e9t\u00e9 commune_ \u00e0 tous les _modes existants_ qui lui correspondent, mais comme ce qui constitue _l'essence singuli\u00e8re_ de la substance divine et comme ce qui contient toutes les _essences particuli\u00e8res_ de modes. Le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance est ainsi d\u00e9fini : il s'\u00e9tend \u00ab de l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de l'essence formelle de certains attributs de Dieu \u00e0 la connaissance ad\u00e9quate de l'essence des choses \u00bb33. L'attribut est encore une forme commune mais, ce qui a chang\u00e9, c'est le sens du mot \u00ab commun \u00bb. Commun ne signifie plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, c'est-\u00e0-dire applicable \u00e0 plusieurs modes existants ou \u00e0 tous les modes existants d'un certain genre. Commun signifie univoque : l'attribut est univoque, ou commun \u00e0 Dieu dont il constitue l'essence singuli\u00e8re et aux modes dont il contient les essences particuli\u00e8res. Bref, une diff\u00e9rence fondamentale appara\u00eet entre le deuxi\u00e8me et le troisi\u00e8me genre : les id\u00e9es du second genre se d\u00e9finissent par leur fonction g\u00e9n\u00e9rale, elles s'appliquent aux modes existants, elles nous font conna\u00eetre la composition des rapports qui caract\u00e9risent ces modes existants. Les id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre se d\u00e9finissent par leur nature singuli\u00e8re, elles repr\u00e9sentent l'essence de Dieu, elles nous font conna\u00eetre les essences particuli\u00e8res telles qu'elles sont contenues en Dieu lui-m\u00eame34.\n\nNous sommes nous-m\u00eames des modes existants. Notre connaissance est soumise \u00e0 la condition suivante : nous devons passer par les notions communes pour atteindre aux id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre. Loin de pouvoir d\u00e9duire le rapport qui caract\u00e9rise un mode \u00e0 partir de son essence, nous devons d'abord conna\u00eetre le rapport pour arriver \u00e0 conna\u00eetre l'essence. De m\u00eame nous devons concevoir l'\u00e9tendue comme une notion commune avant de la comprendre comme ce qui constitue l'essence de Dieu. Le second genre est pour nous cause efficiente du troisi\u00e8me ; et dans le second genre, c'est l'id\u00e9e de Dieu qui nous fait passer du second au troisi\u00e8me. Nous commen\u00e7ons par former des notions communes qui expriment l'essence de Dieu ; alors seulement nous pouvons comprendre Dieu comme s'exprimant lui-m\u00eame dans les essences. Cette condition de notre connaissance n'est pas une condition pour toute connaissance : le vrai Christ ne passe pas par les notions communes. Il adapte, il conforme aux notions communes l'enseignement qu'il nous donne ; mais sa propre connaissance est imm\u00e9diatement du troisi\u00e8me genre ; l'existence de Dieu lui est donc connue par elle-m\u00eame, ainsi que toutes les essences, et l'ordre des essences35. C'est pourquoi Spinoza dit : contrairement au Christ, nous ne connaissons pas l'existence de Dieu par elle-m\u00eame36. Dans la situation naturelle de notre existence, nous sommes remplis d'id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates et d'affections passives ; nous n'arriverons jamais \u00e0 une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate quelconque ni \u00e0 une joie active, si nous ne formons d'abord des notions communes. Pourtant, on n'en conclura pas que Dieu ne nous soit connu qu' _indirectement._ Les notions communes n'ont rien \u00e0 voir avec des signes ; elles constituent seulement les conditions sous lesquelles nous atteignons nous-m\u00eames au troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance. Ainsi les preuves de l'existence de Dieu ne sont pas des preuves indirectes : l'id\u00e9e de Dieu y est encore saisie dans son rapport avec les notions communes, mais elle nous d\u00e9termine pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment \u00e0 \u00ab former \u00bb le troisi\u00e8me genre, ou \u00e0 conqu\u00e9rir une vision directe.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  _\u00c9_ , II, 41, dem.\n\n2.  _TRE_ , 19.\n\n3.  Sur la liaison par m\u00e9moire ou habitude : _\u00c9_ , II, 18, sc. Sur la liaison par ressemblance, qui d\u00e9finit une connaissance par signes : _\u00c9_ , II, 40, sc. 1 et sc. 2.\n\n4.  _TTP_ , ch. 16 (II, p. 266).\n\n5.  _\u00c9_ , II, 42, prop. Et V, 28, prop.\n\n6.  Cette religion du second genre ne se confond pas avec ce que Spinoza, dans le _Trait\u00e9 th\u00e9ologique-politique_ , appelle la \u00ab foi universelle \u00bb, \u00ab commune \u00e0 tous les hommes \u00bb. Telle qu'elle est d\u00e9crite ch. 14 (II, pp. 247-248) la foi universelle concerne encore l'ob\u00e9issance, et utilise abondamment les concepts moraux de faute, repentir et pardon : en fait elle m\u00e9lange des id\u00e9es du premier genre et des notions du second genre. La vraie religion du second genre, uniquement fond\u00e9e sur les notions communes, n'a d'expos\u00e9 syst\u00e9matique qu'en _\u00c9_ , V, 14-20. Mais le _TTP_ , donne des indications pr\u00e9cieuses : c'est d'abord la religion de Salomon, qui sut se guider sur la lumi\u00e8re naturelle (ch. 4, II, pp. 142-144). En un autre sens, c'est la religion du Christ : non pas que le Christ ait besoin de notions communes pour conna\u00eetre Dieu, mais il conforme son enseignement aux notions communes, au lieu de le r\u00e9gler sur des signes (il va de soi que la Passion et la R\u00e9surrection font partie du premier genre, cf. ch. 4, II, pp. 140-141, p. 144). Enfin c'est la religion des Ap\u00f4tres, mais seulement dans une part de leur enseignement et de leur activit\u00e9 (ch. 11, _passim_ ).\n\n7.  Cf. F. ALQUI\u00c9, _Nature et V\u00e9rit\u00e9 dans la philosophie de Spinoza_ , cours publi\u00e9, C.D.U. pp. 30 sq.\n\n8.  _CT_ , II, ch. 1, 2-3.\n\n9.  _TRE_ , 19-21 (cf. notre chapitre X).\n\n10.  _TRE_ , 101-102. Et le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ se termine au moment o\u00f9 Spinoza cherche une propri\u00e9t\u00e9 commune ( _aliquid commune_ ) dont d\u00e9pendraient tous les caract\u00e8res positifs de l'entendement : 110.\n\n11.  Spinoza en effet dit que \u00ab les choses fixes et \u00e9ternelles \u00bb doivent nous donner la connaissance de \u00ab l'essence intime \u00bb des choses ; nous sommes ici dans le dernier genre de connaissance. Mais d'autre part, les choses fixes doivent aussi servir d'\u00ab universaux \u00bb par rapport aux modes existants variables : nous sommes alors dans le second genre, et dans le domaine de la composition des rapports, non plus de la production des essences. Les deux ordres sont donc m\u00e9lang\u00e9s. Cf. _TRE_ , 101.\n\n12.  _\u00c9_ , II, 40, sc. 1 : \u00e0 propos du probl\u00e8me des notions, et des diff\u00e9rentes esp\u00e8ces de notions, Spinoza dit qu'il a \u00ab autrefois m\u00e9dit\u00e9 sur ces choses \u00bb. Il s'agit \u00e9videmment du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_. Mais il _ajoute_ qu'il a \u00ab r\u00e9serv\u00e9 ces sujets pour un autre trait\u00e9 \u00bb : nous supposons qu'il s'agit alors d'un remaniement du _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme_ , en fonction de la fin qui obligeait Spinoza \u00e0 tout reprendre.\n\n13.  _TTP_ , ch. 1 (II, p. 106) : \u00ab \u00c0 partir de paroles et d'images on peut combiner beaucoup plus d'id\u00e9es qu'\u00e0 partir des seuls principes et notions sur lesquels toute notre connaissance naturelle est construite. \u00bb\n\n14.  En _\u00c9_ , II, 47, sc., Spinoza signale express\u00e9ment l'affinit\u00e9 des notions communes avec les choses qui peuvent \u00eatre imagin\u00e9es, c'est-\u00e0-dire les corps. C'est m\u00eame pourquoi l'id\u00e9e de Dieu est ici distingu\u00e9e des notions communes. Spinoza parlera des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s communes que nous \u00ab imaginons \u00bb toujours de la m\u00eame fa\u00e7on ( _\u00c9_ , V, 7, dem.), ou bien \u00ab des images qui se rapportent aux choses comprises clairement et distinctement \u00bb ( _\u00c9_ , V, 12, prop.).\n\n15.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 49 ; V, 5.\n\n16.  _\u00c9_ , V, 6, prop. et dem.\n\n17.  _\u00c9_ , V, 7, dem. : \u00ab Un sentiment de la raison se rapporte n\u00e9cessairement aux propri\u00e9t\u00e9s communes des choses, que nous consid\u00e9rons toujours comme pr\u00e9sentes (car rien ne peut \u00eatre donn\u00e9 qui en exclue l'existence pr\u00e9sente) et que nous imaginons toujours de la m\u00eame fa\u00e7on. \u00bb\n\n18.  _\u00c9_ , V, 7, prop. (Ce texte se r\u00e9f\u00e8re seulement aux sentiments de l'imagination qui concernent des choses \u00ab consid\u00e9r\u00e9es comme absentes \u00bb. Mais, compte tenu du temps, il arrive _toujours_ \u00e0 l'imagination d'\u00eatre d\u00e9termin\u00e9e \u00e0 consid\u00e9rer son objet comme absent).\n\n19.  _\u00c9_ , V, 8, prop. et dem.\n\n20.  _\u00c9_ , V, 11, 12 et 13.\n\n21.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 9 et 11.\n\n22.  _TTP_ , ch. 6 (II, p. 159). Cf. aussi la note jointe \u00e0 ce texte (II, p. 315).\n\n23.  _\u00c9_ , V, 36, sc.\n\n24.  En _\u00c9_ , II, 45-47. Spinoza passe des notions communes \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu (cf. surtout 46, dem.). En V, 14-15, passage analogue : ayant montr\u00e9 qu'un grand nombre d'images se joignaient facilement \u00e0 la notion commune, Spinoza conclut que nous pouvons joindre et rapporter tourtes les images \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu.\n\n25.  _\u00c9_ , II, 47, sc. : \u00ab Que les hommes n'aient pas une connaissance \u00e9galement claire de Dieu et des notions communes, cela provient de ce qu'ils ne peuvent imaginer Dieu comme ils imaginent les corps. \u00bb\n\n26.  _\u00c9_ , II, 46, dem. ( _id quod dat_ ).\n\n27.  _\u00c9_ , V, 15, dem.\n\n28.  _\u00c9_ , IV, 28, dem.\n\n29.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 17 et 19. Spinoza rappelle explicitement que Dieu ne peut \u00e9prouver aucune augmentation de sa puissance d'agir, donc aucune joie passive. Mais il trouve ici l'occasion de nier que Dieu puisse \u00e9prouver une joie quelconque en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral : en effet, les seules joies actives qui sont connues _\u00e0 ce moment_ de l' _\u00c9thique_ sont celles du second genre. Or ces joies supposent des passions, et sont exclues de Dieu au m\u00eame titre que les passions.\n\n30.  _\u00c9_ , II, 40, sc. 2.\n\n31.  _\u00c9_ , V, 28, prop. : \u00ab L'effort ou le d\u00e9sir de conna\u00eetre les choses par le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance ne peut na\u00eetre du premier genre, mais bien du second genre de connaissance. \u00bb\n\n32.  En _\u00c9_ , V, 20 sc., Spinoza parle du \u00ab fondement \u00bb du troisi\u00e8me genre. Ce fondement est \u00ab la connaissance de Dieu \u00bb. Il ne s'agit pas, \u00e9videmment, de la connaissance de Dieu telle que le troisi\u00e8me genre nous la livrera. Comme le contexte le prouve (V, 15 et 16), il s'agit d'une connaissance de Dieu donn\u00e9e par les notions communes. De m\u00eame, en II, 47, sc., Spinoza dit que nous \u00ab formons \u00bb le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance \u00e0 partir d'une connaissance de Dieu. L\u00e0 encore, le contexte (II, 46, dem.) montre qu'il s'agit de la connaissance de Dieu telle qu'elle fait partie du second genre.\n\n33.  _\u00c9_ , II, 40, sc. 2 (cf. aussi V, 25, dem.).\n\n34.  Dans quelle mesure les id\u00e9es du deuxi\u00e8me et du troisi\u00e8me genre sont-elles les m\u00eames ? Se distinguent-elles seulement par leur fonction ou leur usage ? Le probl\u00e8me est complexe. Il est certain que les notions communes les plus universelles co\u00efncident avec les id\u00e9es des attributs. Comme notions communes, elles sont saisies dans la fonction g\u00e9n\u00e9rale qu'elles exercent par rapport aux _modes existants._ Comme id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre, elles sont pens\u00e9es dans leur essence objective, et en tant qu'elles contiennent objectivement les _essences de modes._ Toutefois, les notions communes moins universelles ne co\u00efncident pas pour leur compte avec les id\u00e9es des essences particuli\u00e8res (les rapports ne se confondent pas avec les essences, bien que les essences s'expriment dans des rapports).\n\n35.  _TTP_ , ch. 4 (II, pp. 140-141).\n\n36.  _TTP_ , ch. 1 (II, pp. 98-99).\n\n## CHAPITRE XIX\n\n## B\u00c9ATITUDE\n\nLe premier genre de connaissance a seulement pour objet les rencontres entre parties, d'apr\u00e8s leurs d\u00e9terminations extrins\u00e8ques. Le second genre s'\u00e9l\u00e8ve jusqu'\u00e0 la composition des rapports caract\u00e9ristiques. Mais seul le troisi\u00e8me genre concerne les essences \u00e9ternelles : connaissance de l'essence de Dieu, et des essences particuli\u00e8res telles qu'elles sont en Dieu et sont con\u00e7ues par Dieu. (Ainsi, dans les trois genres de connaissance, nous retrouvons les trois aspects de l'ordre de la Nature : ordre des passions, ordre de composition des rapports, ordre des essences elles-m\u00eames.) Or les essences ont plusieurs caract\u00e8res. D'abord, elles sont particuli\u00e8res, donc irr\u00e9ductibles les unes aux autres : chacune est un \u00eatre r\u00e9el, une _res physica_ , un degr\u00e9 de puissance ou d'intensit\u00e9. C'est pourquoi Spinoza peut opposer le troisi\u00e8me genre au second, en disant que le second genre nous montre en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral que toutes les choses qui existent d\u00e9pendent de Dieu, mais que seul le troisi\u00e8me genre nous fait comprendre la d\u00e9pendance de telle essence en particulier1. Pourtant, d'autre part, chaque essence convient avec toutes les autres. C'est que toutes les essences sont comprises dans la production de chacune. Il ne s'agit plus de convenances relatives, plus ou moins g\u00e9n\u00e9rales, entre modes existants, mais d'une convenance \u00e0 la fois singuli\u00e8re et absolue de chaque essence avec toutes les autres2. D\u00e8s lors, l'esprit ne conna\u00eet pas une essence, c'est-\u00e0-dire une chose sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9, sans \u00eatre d\u00e9termin\u00e9 \u00e0 conna\u00eetre encore plus de choses et \u00e0 d\u00e9sirer en conna\u00eetre de plus en plus3. Enfin, les essences sont expressives : non seulement chaque essence exprime toutes les autres dans le principe de sa production, mais elle exprime Dieu comme ce principe lui-m\u00eame qui contient toutes les essences et dont chacune d\u00e9pend en particulier. Chaque essence est une partie de la puissance de Dieu, donc est con\u00e7ue par l'essence m\u00eame de Dieu, mais en tant que l'essence de Dieu s'explique par _cette_ essence4.\n\nLa connaissance supr\u00eame comprend donc trois donn\u00e9es. Une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de nous-m\u00eames ou de notre propre essence (id\u00e9e qui exprime l'essence de notre corps sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9) : chacun forme l'id\u00e9e de sa propre essence, et c'est \u00e0 cette id\u00e9e que Spinoza pense lorsqu'il dit que le troisi\u00e8me genre montre comment une essence _en particulier_ d\u00e9pend de Dieu5. Une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate du plus grand nombre de choses possibles, toujours dans leur essence ou sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9. Une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de Dieu, en tant que Dieu contient toutes les essences, et les comprend toutes dans la production de chacune (donc dans la production de la n\u00f4tre en particulier).\n\nLe moi, les choses et Dieu sont les trois id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre. En d\u00e9coulent des joies, un d\u00e9sir et un amour. Les joies du troisi\u00e8me genre sont des joies actives : en effet, elles s'expliquent par notre propre essence et \u00ab s'accompagnent \u00bb toujours de l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de cette essence. Tout ce que nous comprenons sous le troisi\u00e8me genre, y compris l'essence des autres choses et celle de Dieu, nous le comprenons du fait que nous concevons notre essence (l'essence de notre corps) sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e96. C'est en ce sens que le troisi\u00e8me genre n'a pas d'autre _cause formelle_ que notre puissance d'agir ou de comprendre, c'est-\u00e0-dire la puissance de penser de Dieu lui-m\u00eame en tant qu'elle s'explique par notre propre essence7. Dans le troisi\u00e8me genre, toutes les id\u00e9es ont pour cause formelle notre puissance de comprendre. Toutes les affections qui suivent de ces id\u00e9es sont donc par nature des affections actives, des joies actives8. Il faut concevoir que l'essence de Dieu affecte la mienne, et que les essences s'affectent les unes les autres ; mais il n'y a pas d'affections d'une essence qui ne s'expliquent formellement par cette essence elle-m\u00eame, donc qui ne s'accompagnent de l'id\u00e9e de soi comme cause formelle ou de la consid\u00e9ration de la puissance d'agir.\n\nDe cette joie d\u00e9coulant de l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de nous-m\u00eames na\u00eet un _d\u00e9sir_ , d\u00e9sir de conna\u00eetre toujours plus de choses dans leur essence ou sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9. Mais, surtout, na\u00eet un _amour._ Car, dans le troisi\u00e8me genre, l'id\u00e9e de Dieu \u00e0 son tour est comme la cause mat\u00e9rielle de toutes les id\u00e9es. Toutes les essences expriment Dieu comme ce par quoi elles sont con\u00e7ues : l'id\u00e9e de ma propre essence repr\u00e9sente ma puissance d'agir, mais ma puissance d'agir n'est que la puissance de Dieu lui-m\u00eame en tant qu'elle s'explique par mon essence. Il n'y a donc pas de joie du troisi\u00e8me genre qui ne s'accompagne de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme cause mat\u00e9rielle : \u00ab Du troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance na\u00eet n\u00e9cessairement l'Amour intellectuel de Dieu ; car de ce genre de connaissance na\u00eet la joie qu'accompagne l'id\u00e9e de Dieu en tant que cause9 _. \u00bb_\n\nOr, comment les joies actives du troisi\u00e8me genre se distinguent-elles de celles du second ? Les joies du second genre sont d\u00e9j\u00e0 actives, parce qu'elles s'expliquent par une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate que nous avons. Elles s'expliquent donc par notre puissance de comprendre ou d'agir. Elles impliquent que nous ayons la possession formelle de cette puissance. Mais bien que celle-ci ne paraisse plus susceptible d'augmentation, lui manque encore une certaine qualit\u00e9, nuance qualitative individuelle qui correspond au degr\u00e9 de puissance ou d'intensit\u00e9 de notre essence propre. En effet, tant que nous en restons au second genre de connaissance, l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate que nous avons n'est pas encore une id\u00e9e de nous-m\u00eames, de notre essence, de l'essence de notre corps. Cette restriction para\u00eetra importante si l'on se rappelle quel est le point de d\u00e9part du probl\u00e8me de la connaissance : nous n'avons pas imm\u00e9diatement l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de nous-m\u00eames ou de notre corps parce que celle-ci n'est en Dieu qu'en tant qu'il est affect\u00e9 par des id\u00e9es d'autres corps ; nous ne connaissons donc notre corps que par des id\u00e9es d'affections, n\u00e9cessairement inad\u00e9quates, et nous ne nous connaissons nous-m\u00eames que par les id\u00e9es de ces id\u00e9es ; quant aux id\u00e9es de corps ext\u00e9rieurs, quant \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de notre propre corps ou de notre propre esprit, nous ne les _avons_ pas, dans les conditions imm\u00e9diates de notre existence. Or le second genre de connaissance nous donne bien des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates ; mais ces id\u00e9es sont seulement celles de propri\u00e9t\u00e9s communes \u00e0 notre corps et \u00e0 des corps ext\u00e9rieurs. Elles sont ad\u00e9quates parce qu'elles sont dans la partie comme dans le tout et parce qu'elles sont en nous, dans notre esprit, comme elles sont dans les id\u00e9es des autres choses. Mais elles ne constituent nullement une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de _nous-m\u00eames_ , ni une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate d'une _autre chose_10. Elles s'expliquent par notre essence, mais ne constituent pas elles-m\u00eames une id\u00e9e de cette essence. Au contraire, avec le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance, nous formons des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates de nous-m\u00eames et des autres choses telles qu'elles sont en Dieu et sont con\u00e7ues par Dieu. Les joies actives qui d\u00e9coulent des id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre sont donc d'une autre nature que celles qui d\u00e9coulent des id\u00e9es du deuxi\u00e8me. Et, plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ralement, Spinoza est en droit de distinguer deux formes d'activit\u00e9 de l'esprit, deux modes sous lesquels nous sommes actifs et nous nous sentons actifs, deux expressions de notre puissance de comprendre : \u00ab ... Il est de la nature de la raison de concevoir les choses sous une esp\u00e8ce d'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 [second genre], et il appartient aussi \u00e0 la nature de l'esprit de concevoir l'essence du corps sous une esp\u00e8ce d'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 [troisi\u00e8me genre] ; et \u00e0 part ces _deux choses_ , rien d'autre n'appartient \u00e0 l'essence de l'esprit11. \u00bb\n\nToutes les affections, passives ou actives, sont des affections de l'essence dans la mesure o\u00f9 elles remplissent le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 dans lequel l'essence s'exprime. Mais les affections passives, tristesses ou joies, sont _adventices_ puisqu'elles sont produites du dehors ; les affections actives, les joies actives sont _inn\u00e9es_ parce qu'elles s'expliquent par notre essence ou notre puissance de comprendre12. Pourtant tout se passe comme si l'inn\u00e9 avait deux dimensions diff\u00e9rentes, qui rendent compte des difficult\u00e9s que nous \u00e9prouvons \u00e0 le rejoindre ou \u00e0 le retrouver. En premier lieu, les notions communes sont elles-m\u00eames inn\u00e9es, comme les joies actives qui en d\u00e9coulent. Ce qui ne les emp\u00eache pas de devoir \u00eatre form\u00e9es, et d'\u00eatre form\u00e9es plus ou moins facilement, donc d'\u00eatre plus ou moins communes aux esprits. L'apparente contradiction dispara\u00eet, si l'on consid\u00e8re que nous naissons s\u00e9par\u00e9s de notre puissance d'agir ou de comprendre : nous devons, dans l'existence, conqu\u00e9rir ce qui appartient \u00e0 notre essence. Pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, nous ne pouvons former des notions communes, m\u00eame les plus g\u00e9n\u00e9rales, que si nous trouvons un point de d\u00e9part dans des passions joyeuses qui augmentent d'abord notre puissance d'agir. C'est en ce sens que les joies actives qui d\u00e9coulent des notions communes trouvent en quelque sorte leurs causes occasionnelles dans des affections passives de joie : inn\u00e9es en droit, elles n'en d\u00e9pendent pas moins d'affections adventices comme de causes occasionnelles. Mais Dieu lui-m\u00eame dispose imm\u00e9diatement d'une puissance d'agir infinie qui n'est susceptible d'aucune augmentation. Dieu n'\u00e9prouve donc aucune passion, m\u00eame joyeuse, pas plus qu'il n'a d'id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates. Mais se pose aussi la question de savoir si les notions communes, et les joies actives qui en d\u00e9coulent, sont en Dieu. \u00c9tant des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates, les notions communes sont bien en Dieu, mais seulement en tant qu'il a d'abord d'autres id\u00e9es qui les comprennent n\u00e9cessairement (ces autres id\u00e9es seront pour nous celles du troisi\u00e8me genre)13. Si bien que jamais Dieu, ni le Christ qui est l'expression de sa pens\u00e9e, ne pensent _par_ notions communes. Les notions communes ne peuvent donc pas, en Dieu, servir de principes \u00e0 des joies correspondantes \u00e0 celles que nous \u00e9prouvons dans le second genre : Dieu est exempt de joies passives, mais il n'\u00e9prouve m\u00eame pas les joies actives du second genre qui supposent une augmentation de la puissance d'agir comme cause occasionnelle. C'est pourquoi, _d'apr\u00e8s l'id\u00e9e du second genre_ , Dieu n'\u00e9prouve aucun sentiment de joie14.\n\nLes id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre ne s'expliquent pas seulement par notre essence, elles consistent dans l'id\u00e9e de cette essence elle-m\u00eame et de ses relations (relation avec l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, relations avec les id\u00e9es des autres choses, sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9). \u00c0 partir de l'id\u00e9e de notre essence comme cause formelle, \u00e0 partir de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme cause mat\u00e9rielle, nous concevons toutes les id\u00e9es telles qu'elles sont en Dieu. Sous le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance, nous formons des id\u00e9es et des sentiments actifs qui sont en nous comme ils sont imm\u00e9diatement et \u00e9ternellement en Dieu. Nous pensons comme Dieu pense, nous \u00e9prouvons les sentiments m\u00eames de Dieu. Nous formons l'id\u00e9e de nous-m\u00eames telle qu'elle est en Dieu, et au moins en partie nous formons l'id\u00e9e de Dieu telle qu'elle est en Dieu lui-m\u00eame : les id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre constituent donc une dimension plus profonde de l'inn\u00e9, et les joies du troisi\u00e8me genre sont les seules vraies affections de l'essence en elle-m\u00eame. Sans doute avons-nous l'air d' _arriver_ au troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance15. Mais, ici, ce qui nous sert de cause occasionnelle, ce sont les notions communes elles-m\u00eames, donc quelque chose d'ad\u00e9quat et d'actif. Le \u00ab passage \u00bb n'est plus qu'une apparence ; en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, nous nous retrouvons tels que nous sommes imm\u00e9diatement et \u00e9ternellement en Dieu. \u00ab L'esprit poss\u00e8de \u00e9ternellement ces m\u00eames perfections que nous nous sommes figur\u00e9 lui arriver16. \u00bb C'est pourquoi les joies qui suivent des id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre sont les seules \u00e0 m\u00e9riter le nom de _b\u00e9atitude_ : ce ne sont plus des joies qui augmentent notre puissance d'agir, ni m\u00eame des joies qui supposent encore une telle augmentation, ce sont des joies qui d\u00e9rivent absolument de notre essence, telle qu'elle est en Dieu et est con\u00e7ue par Dieu17.\n\nNous devons encore demander : Quelle est la diff\u00e9rence entre l'id\u00e9e de Dieu du second genre et celle du troisi\u00e8me ? L'id\u00e9e de Dieu n'appartient au second genre que dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle est rapport\u00e9e aux notions communes qui l'expriment. Et les conditions de notre connaissance sont telles que nous \u00ab arrivons \u00bb \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu par les notions communes. Mais l'id\u00e9e de Dieu n'est pas en elle-m\u00eame une de ces notions. C'est elle, donc, qui nous fait sortir du second genre de connaissance et nous r\u00e9v\u00e8le un contenu ind\u00e9pendant : non plus des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s communes, mais l'essence de Dieu, mon essence et toutes les autres qui d\u00e9pendent de Dieu. Or, tant que l'id\u00e9e de Dieu se rapporte aux notions communes, elle repr\u00e9sente un \u00eatre souverain qui n'\u00e9prouve aucun amour, aucune joie. Mais, nous d\u00e9terminant au troisi\u00e8me genre, elle re\u00e7oit elle-m\u00eame de nouvelles qualifications qui correspondent \u00e0 ce genre. Les joies actives que nous \u00e9prouvons dans le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance sont des joies que Dieu lui-m\u00eame \u00e9prouve, parce que les id\u00e9es dont elles suivent sont en nous comme elles sont \u00e9ternellement et imm\u00e9diatement en Dieu. On ne verra donc nulle contradiction entre les deux amours successivement d\u00e9crites dans le livre V de l' _\u00c9thique_ : amour pour un Dieu qui ne peut pas nous aimer, puisqu'il n'\u00e9prouve aucune joie ; amour pour un Dieu lui-m\u00eame joyeux, qui s'aime et nous aime du m\u00eame amour que celui dont nous l'aimons. Il suffit, comme le contexte l'indique, de rapporter les premiers textes au second genre de connaissance, les autres au troisi\u00e8me genre18.\n\nProc\u00e9dant de l'id\u00e9e de nous-m\u00eames telle qu'elle est en Dieu, nos joies actives sont une partie des joies de Dieu. Notre joie est la joie de Dieu lui-m\u00eame en tant qu'il s'explique par notre essence. Et l'amour du troisi\u00e8me genre que nous \u00e9prouvons pour Dieu est \u00ab une partie de l'amour infini dont Dieu s'aime lui-m\u00eame \u00bb. L'amour que nous \u00e9prouvons pour Dieu, c'est l'amour que Dieu \u00e9prouve pour soi en tant qu'il s'explique par notre propre essence, donc l'amour qu'il \u00e9prouve pour notre essence elle-m\u00eame19. La _b\u00e9atitude_ ne d\u00e9signe pas seulement la possession d'une joie active telle qu'elle est en Dieu, mais celle d'un amour actif tel qu'il est en Dieu20. En tout ceci, le mot partie doit toujours s'interpr\u00e9ter de mani\u00e8re explicative ou expressive : n'est pas une partie ce qui compose, mais ce qui exprime et explique. Notre essence est une partie de Dieu, l'id\u00e9e de notre essence est une partie de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, mais pour autant que l'essence de Dieu s'explique par la n\u00f4tre. Et c'est dans le troisi\u00e8me genre que le syst\u00e8me de l'expression trouve sa forme finale. La forme finale de l'expression, c'est l'identit\u00e9 de l'affirmation sp\u00e9culative et de l'affirmation pratique, l'identit\u00e9 de l'\u00catre et de la Joie, de la Substance et de la Joie, de Dieu et de la Joie. La joie manifeste le d\u00e9veloppement de la substance elle-m\u00eame, son explication dans les modes et la conscience de cette explication. L'id\u00e9e de Dieu n'est plus simplement exprim\u00e9e par les notions communes en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, c'est elle qui s'exprime et s'explique dans toutes les essences suivant la loi de production qui leur est propre. Elle s'exprime dans chaque essence en particulier, mais chaque essence comprend toutes les autres essences dans sa loi de production. La joie que nous \u00e9prouvons est la joie que Dieu lui-m\u00eame \u00e9prouve en tant qu'il a l'id\u00e9e de notre essence ; la joie que Dieu \u00e9prouve est celle que nous \u00e9prouvons nous-m\u00eames en tant que nous avons des id\u00e9es telles qu'elles sont en Dieu.\n\nD\u00e8s notre existence dans la dur\u00e9e, donc \u00ab durant \u00bb notre existence elle-m\u00eame, nous pouvons acc\u00e9der au troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance. Mais nous n'y r\u00e9ussissons que dans un ordre strict, qui repr\u00e9sente la meilleure mani\u00e8re dont notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 puisse \u00eatre rempli : 1o) Id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates qui nous sont donn\u00e9es, et affections passives qui s'ensuivent, les unes augmentant notre puissance d'agir, les autres la diminuant. 2o) Formation des notions communes \u00e0 l'issue d'un effort de s\u00e9lection portant sur les affections passives elles-m\u00eames ; les joies actives du second genre suivent des notions communes, un amour actif suit de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu telle qu'elle se rapporte aux notions communes. 3o) Formation des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates du troisi\u00e8me genre, joies actives et amour actif qui suivent de ces id\u00e9es (b\u00e9atitude). Mais, tant que nous existons dans la dur\u00e9e, il est vain d'esp\u00e9rer n'avoir que des joies actives du troisi\u00e8me genre ou, seulement, des affections actives en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral. Nous aurons toujours des passions, et des tristesses avec nos joies passives. Notre connaissance passera toujours par les notions communes. Tout ce \u00e0 quoi nous pouvons nous efforcer, c'est \u00e0 avoir proportionnellement plus de passions joyeuses que de tristesses, plus de joies actives du second genre que de passions, et le plus grand nombre possible de joies du troisi\u00e8me genre. Tout est question de proportion dans les sentiments qui remplissent notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 : il s'agit de faire en sorte que les id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates et les passions n'occupent que _la plus petite partie de nous-m\u00eames_21.\n\nLa dur\u00e9e se rapporte \u00e0 l'existence des modes. On se rappelle que l'existence d'un mode est constitu\u00e9e par des parties extensives qui, sous un certain rapport, sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9es \u00e0 appartenir \u00e0 l'essence de ce mode. C'est pourquoi la dur\u00e9e se mesure par le temps : un corps existe aussi longtemps qu'il poss\u00e8de des parties extensives sous le rapport qui le caract\u00e9rise. D\u00e8s que les rencontres en disposent autrement, le corps lui-m\u00eame cesse d'exister, ses parties formant d'autres corps sous de nouveaux rapports. Il est donc \u00e9vident que nous ne pouvons pas supprimer toute passion durant notre existence : les parties extensives, en effet, sont d\u00e9termin\u00e9es et affect\u00e9es du dehors \u00e0 l'infini. Aux parties du corps, correspondent des _facult\u00e9s_ de l'\u00e2me, facult\u00e9s d'\u00e9prouver des affections passives. Aussi l'imagination correspond-elle \u00e0 l'empreinte actuelle d'un corps sur le n\u00f4tre, la m\u00e9moire \u00e0 la succession des empreintes dans le temps. M\u00e9moire et imagination sont de v\u00e9ritables parties de l'\u00e2me. L'\u00e2me a des parties extensives, qui ne lui appartiennent que dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle est l'id\u00e9e d'un corps, lui-m\u00eame compos\u00e9 de parties extensives22. L'\u00e2me \u00ab dure \u00bb, dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle exprime l'existence actuelle d'un corps qui dure. Et les facult\u00e9s de l'\u00e2me renvoient elles-m\u00eames \u00e0 une puissance, puissance de p\u00e2tir, puissance d'imaginer les choses d'apr\u00e8s les affections qu'elles produisent dans notre corps, donc puissance de concevoir les choses dans la dur\u00e9e et en relation avec le temps23.\n\nLes parties extensives appartiennent \u00e0 l'essence sous un certain rapport et pendant un certain temps ; mais elles ne constituent pas cette essence. L'essence elle-m\u00eame a une tout autre nature. L'essence en elle-m\u00eame est un degr\u00e9 de puissance ou d'intensit\u00e9, une partie intensive. Rien ne nous para\u00eet plus inexact qu'une interpr\u00e9tation math\u00e9matique des essences particuli\u00e8res chez Spinoza. Il est vrai qu'une essence s'exprime dans un rapport, mais elle ne se confond pas avec ce rapport. Une essence particuli\u00e8re est une r\u00e9alit\u00e9 physique ; c'est pourquoi les affections sont des affections de l'essence, et l'essence elle-m\u00eame une essence de corps. Cette r\u00e9alit\u00e9 physique est une r\u00e9alit\u00e9 intensive, une existence intensive. On con\u00e7oit, d\u00e8s lors, que l'essence ne dure pas. La dur\u00e9e se dit en fonction des parties extensives et se mesure au temps pendant lequel ces parties appartiennent \u00e0 l'essence. Mais l'essence en elle-m\u00eame a une r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou une existence \u00e9ternelle ; elle n'a pas de dur\u00e9e, ni de temps qui marque l'ach\u00e8vement de cette dur\u00e9e (aucune essence ne peut en d\u00e9truire une autre). Spinoza dit exactement que l'essence est _con\u00e7ue_ \u00ab avec une certaine n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 \u00e9ternelle24 \u00bb. Mais cette formule, \u00e0 son tour, n'autorise aucune interpr\u00e9tation intellectualiste ou id\u00e9aliste. Spinoza veut dire seulement qu'une essence particuli\u00e8re n'est pas \u00e9ternelle par elle-m\u00eame. Seule la substance divine est \u00e9ternelle en vertu de soi-m\u00eame ; mais une essence n'est \u00e9ternelle qu'en vertu d'une cause (Dieu), d'o\u00f9 d\u00e9rive son existence ou sa r\u00e9alit\u00e9 d'essence. Elle est donc n\u00e9cessairement con\u00e7ue par cette cause ; elle est donc con\u00e7ue avec la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 \u00e9ternelle qui d\u00e9rive de cette cause. On ne s'\u00e9tonnera pas que Spinoza, d\u00e8s lors, parle de \u00ab l'id\u00e9e qui exprime l'essence de tel ou tel corps humain sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 \u00bb. Il ne veut pas dire que l'essence du corps n'existe qu'en id\u00e9e. Le tort de l'interpr\u00e9tation id\u00e9aliste est de retourner contre le parall\u00e9lisme un argument qui en fait partie int\u00e9grante, ou de comprendre comme une preuve de l'id\u00e9al un argument de la pure causalit\u00e9. Si une id\u00e9e en Dieu exprime l'essence de tel ou tel corps, c'est parce que Dieu est cause des essences ; il s'ensuit que l'essence est n\u00e9cessairement con\u00e7ue par cette cause25.\n\nLe corps existe et dure pour autant qu'il poss\u00e8de actuellement des parties extensives. Mais il a une essence, qui est comme une partie intensive \u00e9ternelle (degr\u00e9 de puissance). L'\u00e2me elle-m\u00eame a des parties extensives, en tant qu'elle exprime l'existence du corps dans la dur\u00e9e. Mais elle a aussi une partie intensive \u00e9ternelle, qui est comme l'id\u00e9e de l'essence du corps. L'id\u00e9e qui exprime l'essence du corps constitue la partie intensive ou l'essence de l'\u00e2me, n\u00e9cessairement \u00e9ternelle. Sous cet aspect, l'\u00e2me poss\u00e8de une facult\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire une puissance qui s'explique par sa propre essence : puissance active de comprendre, et de comprendre les choses par le troisi\u00e8me genre sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9. En tant qu'elle exprime l'existence actuelle du corps dans la dur\u00e9e, l'\u00e2me a la puissance de concevoir les autres corps dans la dur\u00e9e ; en tant qu'elle exprime l'essence du corps, l'\u00e2me a la puissance de concevoir les autres corps sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e926.\n\nLe Spinozisme affirme donc une distinction de nature entre la dur\u00e9e et l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9. Si Spinoza, dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , \u00e9vite d'employer le concept d' _immortalit\u00e9_ , c'est que celui-ci lui para\u00eet impliquer les plus f\u00e2cheuses confusions. Trois arguments se retrouvent, \u00e0 des titres divers, dans une tradition de l'immortalit\u00e9 qui va de Platon \u00e0 Descartes. En premier lieu, la th\u00e9orie de l'immortalit\u00e9 repose sur un certain postulat de la simplicit\u00e9 de l'\u00e2me : seul le corps est con\u00e7u comme divisible ; l'\u00e2me est immortelle parce qu'indivisible, ses facult\u00e9s n'\u00e9tant pas des parties. En second lieu, l'immortalit\u00e9 de cette \u00e2me absolument simple est con\u00e7ue dans la dur\u00e9e : l'\u00e2me existait d\u00e9j\u00e0 quand le corps n'avait pas commenc\u00e9 d'exister, elle dure lorsque le corps a cess\u00e9 de durer. C'est pourquoi la th\u00e9orie de l'immortalit\u00e9 entra\u00eene souvent l'hypoth\u00e8se d'une m\u00e9moire purement intellectuelle, par laquelle l'\u00e2me s\u00e9par\u00e9e du corps peut \u00eatre consciente de sa propre dur\u00e9e. Enfin, l'immortalit\u00e9 ainsi d\u00e9finie ne peut \u00eatre l'objet d'une exp\u00e9rience directe tant que dure le corps. Sous quelle forme survit-elle au corps, quelles sont les modalit\u00e9s de la survie, quelles sont les facult\u00e9s de l'\u00e2me une fois d\u00e9sincarn\u00e9e ? Seule une _r\u00e9v\u00e9lation_ pourrait nous le dire maintenant.\n\nCes trois th\u00e8ses rencontrent chez Spinoza un adversaire d\u00e9clar\u00e9. La th\u00e9orie de l'immortalit\u00e9 ne se s\u00e9pare pas d'une confusion de la dur\u00e9e et de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9. D'abord, le postulat d'une simplicit\u00e9 absolue de l'\u00e2me ne se s\u00e9pare pas lui-m\u00eame de l'id\u00e9e confuse d'une union de l'\u00e2me et du corps. Rapportant l'\u00e2me au corps, on oppose la simplicit\u00e9 de l'\u00e2me prise en un tout et la divisibilit\u00e9 du corps pris lui-m\u00eame en un tout. On comprend que le corps a des parties extensives en tant qu'il existe, mais on ne comprend pas que l'\u00e2me poss\u00e8de aussi de telles parties pour autant qu'elle est l'id\u00e9e du corps existant. On comprend (plus ou moins bien) que l'\u00e2me a une partie intensive absolument simple et \u00e9ternelle qui constitue son essence, mais on ne comprend pas qu'elle exprime ainsi l'essence du corps, non moins simple et \u00e9ternelle. En second lieu, l'hypoth\u00e8se de l'immortalit\u00e9 nous invite \u00e0 penser en termes de succession, et nous rend incapables de concevoir l'\u00e2me comme un compos\u00e9 de coexistences. Nous ne comprenons pas que, tant que le corps existe, la dur\u00e9e et l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 \u00ab coexistent \u00bb elles-m\u00eames dans l'\u00e2me comme deux \u00e9l\u00e9ments qui diff\u00e9rent en nature. L'\u00e2me dure en tant que lui appartiennent des parties extensives qui ne constituent pas son essence. L'\u00e2me est \u00e9ternelle en tant que lui appartient une partie intensive qui d\u00e9finit son essence. Nous ne devons pas penser que l'\u00e2me dure au-del\u00e0 du corps : elle dure autant que le corps dure lui-m\u00eame, elle est \u00e9ternelle en tant qu'elle exprime l'essence du corps. Tant que l'\u00e2me est l'id\u00e9e du corps existant, coexistent en elle des parties extensives qui lui appartiennent dans la dur\u00e9e, et une partie intensive qui la constitue dans l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9. Enfin, nous n'avons besoin de nulle r\u00e9v\u00e9lation pour savoir sous quels modes et comment l'\u00e2me survit. L'\u00e2me reste \u00e9ternellement ce qu'elle est d\u00e9j\u00e0 dans son essence, durant l'existence du corps : partie intensive, degr\u00e9 de puissance ou puissance de comprendre, id\u00e9e qui exprime l'essence du corps sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9. Aussi l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 de l'\u00e2me est-elle objet d'une exp\u00e9rience directe. Pour sentir et exp\u00e9rimenter que nous sommes \u00e9ternels, il suffit d'entrer dans le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance, c'est-\u00e0-dire de former l'id\u00e9e de nous-m\u00eames telle qu'elle est en Dieu. Cette id\u00e9e est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment celle qui exprime l'essence du corps ; dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous la formons, dans la mesure o\u00f9 nous l'avons, nous _exp\u00e9rimentons_ que nous sommes \u00e9ternels27.\n\nQue se passe-t-il quand nous mourons ? La mort est une soustraction, un retranchement. Nous perdons toutes les parties extensives qui nous appartenaient sous un certain rapport ; notre \u00e2me perd toutes les facult\u00e9s qu'elle ne poss\u00e9dait qu'en tant qu'elle exprimait l'existence d'un corps lui-m\u00eame dou\u00e9 de parties extensives28. Mais ces parties et ces facult\u00e9s avaient beau appartenir \u00e0 notre essence, elles ne _constituaient_ rien de cette essence : notre essence en tant que telle ne perd rien en perfection quand nous perdons en extension les parties qui composaient notre existence. De toutes mani\u00e8res, la partie de nous-m\u00eames qui demeure, quelle qu'en soit la grandeur (c'est-\u00e0-dire le degr\u00e9 de puissance ou la quantit\u00e9 intensive), est plus parfaite que toutes les parties extensives qui p\u00e9rissent, et conserve toute sa perfection quand disparaissent ces parties extensives29. Bien plus, quand notre corps a cess\u00e9 d'exister, quand l'\u00e2me a perdu toutes ses parties qui se rapportent \u00e0 l'existence du corps, nous ne sommes plus en \u00e9tat d'\u00e9prouver des affections passives30. Notre essence cesse d'\u00eatre maintenue dans un \u00e9tat d'enveloppement, nous ne pouvons plus \u00eatre s\u00e9par\u00e9s de notre puissance : seule demeure en effet notre puissance de comprendre ou d'agir31. Les id\u00e9es que nous avons sont n\u00e9cessairement des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates du troisi\u00e8me genre, telles qu'elles sont en Dieu. Notre essence exprime ad\u00e9quatement l'essence de Dieu, les affections de notre essence expriment ad\u00e9quatement cette essence. _Nous sommes devenus totalement expressifs_ , plus rien ne subsiste en nous qui soit \u00ab envelopp\u00e9 \u00bb ou simplement \u00ab indiqu\u00e9 \u00bb. Tant que nous existions, nous ne pouvions avoir qu'un certain nombre d'affections actives du troisi\u00e8me genre, elles-m\u00eames en relation avec des affections actives du second genre, elles-m\u00eames en relation avec des affections passives. Nous ne pouvions esp\u00e9rer qu'une b\u00e9atitude partielle. Mais tout se passe comme si la mort nous mettait dans une situation telle que nous ne pouvions plus \u00eatre affect\u00e9s que par des affections du troisi\u00e8me genre, qui s'expliquent elles-m\u00eames par notre essence.\n\nIl est vrai que ce point soul\u00e8ve encore beaucoup de probl\u00e8mes. 1o) En quel sens, apr\u00e8s la mort, sommes-nous encore affect\u00e9s ? Notre \u00e2me a perdu tout ce qui lui appartient en tant qu'elle est l'id\u00e9e d'un corps existant. Mais demeure l'id\u00e9e de l'essence de notre corps existant. Mais demeure l'id\u00e9e de l'essence de notre corps telle qu'elle est en Dieu. Nous avons nous-m\u00eames l'id\u00e9e de cette id\u00e9e telle qu'elle est en Dieu. Notre \u00e2me est donc affect\u00e9e par l'id\u00e9e de soi, par l'id\u00e9e de Dieu, par les id\u00e9es des autres choses sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9. Comme toutes les essences conviennent avec chacune, comme elles ont pour cause Dieu qui les comprend toutes dans la production de chacune, les affections qui d\u00e9coulent des id\u00e9es du troisi\u00e8me genre sont n\u00e9cessairement des affections actives et intenses, qui s'expliquent par l'essence de celui qui les \u00e9prouve, en m\u00eame temps qu'elles expriment l'essence de Dieu. 2o) Mais si, apr\u00e8s la mort, nous sommes encore affect\u00e9s, n'est-ce pas que notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, notre rapport caract\u00e9ristique, subsistent eux-m\u00eames avec notre essence ? En effet, notre rapport peut \u00eatre dit d\u00e9truit ou d\u00e9compos\u00e9, mais seulement en ce sens qu'il ne subsume plus de parties extensives. Les parties extensives qui nous appartenaient sont maintenant d\u00e9termin\u00e9es \u00e0 entrer sous d'autres rapports incomposables avec le n\u00f4tre. Mais le rapport qui nous caract\u00e9rise n'en a pas moins une v\u00e9rit\u00e9 \u00e9ternelle en tant que notre essence s'exprime en lui. C'est le rapport dans sa v\u00e9rit\u00e9 \u00e9ternelle qui demeure avec l'essence. (C'est pourquoi les notions communes restent comprises dans les id\u00e9es des essences.) De m\u00eame, notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 peut \u00eatre dit d\u00e9truit, mais dans la mesure o\u00f9 il ne peut plus \u00eatre effectu\u00e9 par des affections passives32. Il n'en a pas moins une puissance \u00e9ternelle, qui est identique \u00e0 notre puissance d'agir ou de comprendre. C'est le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, dans sa puissance \u00e9ternelle, qui demeure avec l'essence.\n\nMais comment concevoir que, de toutes fa\u00e7ons, nous jouissions apr\u00e8s la mort d'affections actives du troisi\u00e8me genre, comme si nous retrouvions n\u00e9cessairement ce qui nous est \u00e9ternellement inn\u00e9 ? Leibniz adresse plusieurs critiques \u00e0 la conception spinoziste de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 : il lui reproche son g\u00e9om\u00e9trisme, les id\u00e9es d'essences \u00e9tant analogues \u00e0 des formes ou figures math\u00e9matiques ; il lui reproche d'avoir con\u00e7u une \u00e9ternit\u00e9 sans m\u00e9moire et sans imagination, tout au plus l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 d'un cercle ou d'un triangle. Mais une troisi\u00e8me critique de Leibniz nous semble plus importante, parce qu'elle pose le vrai probl\u00e8me final du Spinozisme : si Spinoza avait raison, il n'y aurait pas lieu de se perfectionner pour laisser apr\u00e8s soi une essence \u00e9ternelle d'autant plus parfaite (comme si cette essence ou id\u00e9e platonique \u00ab n'\u00e9tait d\u00e9j\u00e0 dans la nature, soit que je t\u00e2che de lui ressembler ou non, et comme s'il me servirait apr\u00e8s ma mort, si je ne suis plus rien, d'avoir ressembl\u00e9 \u00e0 une telle id\u00e9e \u00bb)33. En effet, la question est : de quoi nous sert l'existence si, de toutes mani\u00e8res, nous rejoignons notre essence apr\u00e8s la mort, dans de telles conditions que nous \u00e9prouvons intens\u00e9ment toutes les affections actives qui lui correspondent ? Nous ne perdons rien en perdant l'existence : nous ne perdons que des parties extensives. Mais de quoi sert notre effort durant l'existence si notre essence est de toutes fa\u00e7ons ce qu'elle est, degr\u00e9 de puissance indiff\u00e9rent aux parties extensives qui ne lui furent rapport\u00e9es que du dehors et temporairement ?\n\nEn fait, selon Spinoza, notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 ne sera pas rempli (apr\u00e8s la mort) par des affections actives du troisi\u00e8me genre si nous n'avons pas r\u00e9ussi durant l'existence elle-m\u00eame \u00e0 \u00e9prouver proportionnellement un maximum d'affections actives du second genre et, d\u00e9j\u00e0, du troisi\u00e8me. C'est en ce sens que Spinoza peut estimer qu'il conserve enti\u00e8rement le contenu positif de la notion de salut. L'existence m\u00eame est encore con\u00e7ue comme une sorte d'\u00e9preuve. Non pas une \u00e9preuve morale, il est vrai, mais une \u00e9preuve physique ou chimique, comme celle des artisans qui v\u00e9rifient la qualit\u00e9 d'une mati\u00e8re, d'un m\u00e9tal ou d'un vase.\n\nDans l'existence, nous sommes compos\u00e9s d'une partie intensive \u00e9ternelle, qui constitue notre essence, et de parties extensives qui nous appartiennent dans le temps sous un certain rapport. Ce qui compte est l'importance respective de ces deux sortes d'\u00e9l\u00e9ments. Supposons que nous r\u00e9ussissions, d\u00e8s notre existence, \u00e0 \u00e9prouver des affections actives : nos parties extensives elles-m\u00eames sont affect\u00e9es par des affections qui s'expliquent par notre seule essence ; les passions subsistantes sont proportionnellement moindres que les affections actives. C'est-\u00e0-dire : notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve proportionnellement rempli par un plus grand nombre d'affections actives que d'affections passives. Or les affections actives s'expliquent par notre essence ; les affections passives s'expliquent par le jeu infini de d\u00e9terminations extrins\u00e8ques des parties extensives. On en conclut que, des deux \u00e9l\u00e9ments qui nous composent, la partie intensive de nous-m\u00eames a pris relativement beaucoup plus d'importance que les parties extensives. \u00c0 la limite, quand nous mourons, ce qui p\u00e9rit n'est \u00ab d'aucune importance eu \u00e9gard \u00e0 ce qui persiste34 \u00bb. D'autant plus nous connaissons de choses par le deuxi\u00e8me et troisi\u00e8me genres, d'autant plus grande est relativement la partie de nous-m\u00eames \u00e9ternelle35. Il va de soi que cette partie \u00e9ternelle, prise en elle-m\u00eame ind\u00e9pendamment des parties extensives qui s'y ajoutent pour composer notre existence, est un absolu. Mais supposons que, durant notre existence, nous restions remplis et d\u00e9termin\u00e9s par des affections passives. Des deux \u00e9l\u00e9ments qui nous composent, les parties extensives auront relativement plus d'importance que la partie intensive \u00e9ternelle. Nous perdons d'autant plus en mourant ; c'est pourquoi seul craint la mort celui qui a quelque chose \u00e0 en craindre, celui qui perd relativement davantage en mourant36. Notre essence n'en reste pas moins l'absolu qu'elle est en elle-m\u00eame ; l'id\u00e9e de notre essence n'en reste pas moins ce qu'elle est absolument en Dieu. Mais le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 qui lui correspond \u00e9ternellement reste vide : ayant perdu nos parties extensives, nous avons perdu toutes nos affections qui s'expliquaient par elles. Or nous n'avons pas d'autres affections. Quand nous mourons, notre essence demeure, mais comme un abstrait ; notre essence reste inaffect\u00e9e.\n\nAu contraire, quand nous avons su faire de la partie intensive l'\u00e9l\u00e9ment le plus important de nous-m\u00eames. En mourant, nous perdons peu de choses : nous perdons les passions qui subsistaient en nous, puisque celles-ci s'expliquaient par les parties extensives ; dans une certaine mesure, nous perdons aussi les notions communes et les affections actives du second genre, qui n'ont de valeur autonome, en effet, qu'en tant qu'elles s'appliquent \u00e0 l'existence ; enfin, les affections actives du troisi\u00e8me genre ne peuvent plus s'imposer aux parties extensives puisque celles-ci ne nous appartiennent plus. Mais notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 subsiste \u00e9ternellement, accompagnant notre essence et l'id\u00e9e de notre essence ; or ce pouvoir est n\u00e9cessairement et absolument rempli par les affections du troisi\u00e8me genre. Durant notre existence, nous avons fait de notre partie intensive la part relativement la plus importante de nous-m\u00eames ; apr\u00e8s notre mort, les affections actives qui s'expliquent par cette partie remplissent absolument notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 ; ce qui reste de nous-m\u00eames est absolument effectu\u00e9. Notre essence telle qu'elle est en Dieu, et l'id\u00e9e de notre essence telle qu'elle est con\u00e7ue par Dieu, se trouvent enti\u00e8rement affect\u00e9es.\n\nIl n'y a jamais de sanctions morales d'un Dieu justicier, ni ch\u00e2timents ni r\u00e9compenses, mais des cons\u00e9quences naturelles de notre existence. Il est vrai que, durant notre existence, notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 se trouve toujours et n\u00e9cessairement rempli : mais soit par des affections passives, soit par des affections actives. Or si notre pouvoir, tant que nous existons, est enti\u00e8rement rempli par des affections passives, il restera vide, et notre essence abstraite, une fois que nous aurons cess\u00e9 d'exister. Il sera absolument effectu\u00e9, par des affections du troisi\u00e8me genre, si nous l'avons proportionnellement rempli par un maximum d'affections actives. D'o\u00f9 l'importance de cette \u00ab \u00e9preuve \u00bb de l'existence : existant, nous devons s\u00e9lectionner les passions joyeuses, car seules elles nous introduisent aux notions communes et aux joies actives qui en d\u00e9coulent ; et nous devons nous servir des notions communes comme d'un principe qui nous introduit d\u00e9j\u00e0 aux id\u00e9es et aux joies du troisi\u00e8me genre. Alors, apr\u00e8s la mort, notre essence aura toutes les affections dont elle est capable ; et toutes ces affections seront du troisi\u00e8me genre. Telle est la voie difficile du salut. La plupart des hommes, la plupart du temps, restent fix\u00e9s aux passions tristes, qui les s\u00e9parent de leur essence et la r\u00e9duisent \u00e0 l'\u00e9tat d'abstraction. La voie du salut est la voie m\u00eame de l'expression : devenir expressif, c'est-\u00e0-dire devenir actif \u2013 exprimer l'essence de Dieu, \u00eatre soi-m\u00eame une id\u00e9e par laquelle l'essence de Dieu s'explique, avoir des affections qui s'expliquent par notre propre essence et qui expriment l'essence de Dieu.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  En _\u00c9_ , V, 36, sc., Spinoza oppose la d\u00e9monstration _g\u00e9n\u00e9rale_ du second genre \u00e0 la conclusion _singuli\u00e8re_ du troisi\u00e8me genre.\n\n2.  _\u00c9_ , V, 37, sc. Seuls des modes existants peuvent se d\u00e9truire, aucune essence ne peut en d\u00e9truire une autre.\n\n3.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 25-27.\n\n4.  _\u00c9_ , V, 22, dem., et 36, prop.\n\n5.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 36, sc. (tout le contexte prouve qu'il s'agit pour chacun de sa propre essence, de l'essence de son propre corps : cf. V, 30, prop. et dem.).\n\n6.  _\u00c9_ , V, 29, prop.\n\n7.  _\u00c9_ , V, 31, prop : \u00ab Le troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance d\u00e9pend de l'esprit comme de sa cause formelle, en tant que l'esprit lui-m\u00eame est \u00e9ternel. \u00bb\n\n8.  _\u00c9_ , V, 27, dem. Celui qui conna\u00eet par le troisi\u00e8me genre \u00ab est affect\u00e9 de la plus grande joie ( _summa laetitia_ ) \u00bb.\n\n9.  _\u00c9_ , V, 32, cor.\n\n10.  C'est pourquoi les notions communes en tant que telles ne constituent l'essence d'aucune chose singuli\u00e8re : cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 37, prop. Et en V, 41, dem., Spinoza rappelle que le second genre ne nous donne aucune id\u00e9e de l'essence \u00e9ternelle de l'esprit.\n\n11.  _\u00c9_ , V, 29, dem. Il y a donc ici deux esp\u00e8ces d'\u00e9ternit\u00e9, l'une d\u00e9finie par la _pr\u00e9sence_ de la notion commune, l'autre par l' _existence_ de l'essence singuli\u00e8re.\n\n12.  Sur les affections de l'essence en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, et sur l'adventice et l'inn\u00e9, cf. _\u00c9_ , III, explication de la d\u00e9finition du d\u00e9sir.\n\n13.  D'apr\u00e8s _\u00c9_ , II, 38 et 39, dem., les notions communes sont bien en Dieu. Mais seulement en tant qu'elles sont comprises dans les id\u00e9es de choses singuli\u00e8res (id\u00e9es de nous-m\u00eames et des autres choses) qui sont elles-m\u00eames en Dieu. Il n'en est pas ainsi pour nous : les notions communes sont premi\u00e8res dans l'ordre de notre connaissance. C'est pourquoi elles sont en nous source d'affections sp\u00e9ciales (les joies du second genre). Dieu au contraire n'\u00e9prouve d'affections que du troisi\u00e8me genre.\n\n14.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 14-20.\n\n15.  _\u00c9_ , V, 31, sc. : \u00ab Bien que nous soyons maintenant certains que l'esprit est \u00e9ternel en tant qu'il con\u00e7oit les choses sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9, cependant, pour expliquer plus facilement et faire mieux comprendre ce que nous voulons montrer, nous le consid\u00e9rons comme s'il commen\u00e7ait maintenant d'\u00eatre, et de comprendre les choses sous l'esp\u00e8ce de l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9... \u00bb\n\n16.  _\u00c9_ , V, 33, sc.\n\n17.  _\u00c9_ , V, 33, sc.\n\n18.  Amour envers Dieu, du second genre : _\u00c9_ , V, 14-20. Amour de Dieu, du troisi\u00e8me genre : _\u00c9_ , V, 32-37.\n\n19.  _\u00c9_ , V, 36, prop. et cor.\n\n20.  _\u00c9_ , V, 36, sc.\n\n21.  Cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 20, sc. ; 38, dem.\n\n22.  Sur les parties de l'\u00e2me, cf. _\u00c9_ , II, 15. Sur l'assimilation des facult\u00e9s \u00e0 des parties, cf. _\u00c9_ , V, 40, cor.\n\n23.  _\u00c9_ , V, 23, sc., et 29, dem. (cette facult\u00e9 de p\u00e2tir, d'imaginer ou de concevoir dans la dur\u00e9e est bien une _puissance_ , parce qu'elle \u00ab enveloppe \u00bb l'essence ou la puissance d'agir).\n\n24.  _\u00c9_ , V, 22, dem.\n\n25.  _\u00c9_ , V, 22, dem. Cette d\u00e9monstration se r\u00e9clame pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment de l'axiome du parall\u00e9lisme suivant lequel la connaissance de l'effet d\u00e9pend de la connaissance de la cause et l'enveloppe. La formule de Spinoza _species aeternitatis_ d\u00e9signe \u00e0 la fois l' _esp\u00e8ce_ d'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 qui d\u00e9coule d'une cause, et la _conception_ intellectuelle qui en est ins\u00e9parable.\n\n26.  _\u00c9_ , V, 29, prop. et dem.\n\n27.  _\u00c9_ , V, 23, sc. Cette exp\u00e9rience appartient n\u00e9cessairement au troisi\u00e8me genre ; car le second genre ne poss\u00e8de pas l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de l'essence de notre corps, et ne nous fait pas encore savoir que notre esprit est \u00e9ternel (cf. V, 41, dem.).\n\n28.  _\u00c9_ , V, 21, prop. : \u00ab L'esprit ne peut rien imaginer et ne peut se souvenir des choses pass\u00e9es si ce n'est pendant la dur\u00e9e du corps. \u00bb\n\n29.  _\u00c9_ , V, 40, cor. : \u00ab La partie de l'esprit qui persiste, de quelque grandeur qu'elle soit, est plus parfaite que l'autre. \u00bb\n\n30.  _\u00c9_ , V, 34, prop. : \u00ab L'esprit n'est soumis que pendant la dur\u00e9e du corps aux sentiments qui se rapportent \u00e0 des passions. \u00bb\n\n31.  _\u00c9_ , V, 40, cor. : \u00ab La partie \u00e9ternelle de l'esprit est l'entendement, par lequel seul nous sommes dits agir. Quant \u00e0 cette partie que nous avons montr\u00e9 qui p\u00e9rit, c'est l'imagination elle-m\u00eame, par laquelle seule nous sommes dits p\u00e2tir. \u00bb\n\n32.  En _\u00c9_ , IV, 39, dem. et sc., Spinoza dit que la mort d\u00e9truit le corps, donc \u00ab nous rend tout \u00e0 fait inaptes \u00e0 pouvoir \u00eatre affect\u00e9 \u00bb. Mais, comme le contexte l'indique, il s'agit des affections passives produites par d'autres corps existants.\n\n33.  LEIBNIZ, _Lettre au Landgrave_ , 14 ao\u00fbt 1683. Cf. Foucher de Careil, _R\u00e9futation in\u00e9dite de Spinoza par Leibniz_ (Paris 1854). En faisant comme si l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 de l'\u00e2me spinoziste \u00e9tait semblable \u00e0 celle d'une v\u00e9rit\u00e9 math\u00e9matique, Leibniz n\u00e9glige toutes les diff\u00e9rences entre le troisi\u00e8me genre et le second.\n\n34.  _\u00c9_ , V, 38 sc. Notre effort durant l'existence est ainsi d\u00e9fini, _\u00c9_ , V, 39, sc. : former notre corps de telle mani\u00e8re qu'il se rapporte \u00e0 un esprit au plus haut point conscient de soi-m\u00eame, de Dieu et des choses. Alors, ce qui concerne la m\u00e9moire et l'imagination sera \u00ab \u00e0 peine de quelque importance eu \u00e9gard \u00e0 l'entendement \u00bb.\n\n35.  _\u00c9_ , V, 38, dem. : \u00ab D'autant plus de choses comprend l'esprit par le deuxi\u00e8me et le troisi\u00e8me genres de connaissance, d'autant plus grande en est la partie qui reste indemne. \u00bb\n\n36.  _\u00c9_ , V, 38, prop. et sc.\n\n# CONCLUSION\n\n# TH\u00c9ORIE DE L'EXPRESSION\n\n# CHEZ LEIBNIZ ET SPINOZA\n\n# _L'expressionnisme en philosophie_\n\nLa force d'une philosophie se mesure aux concepts qu'elle cr\u00e9e, ou dont elle renouvelle le sens, et qui imposent un nouveau d\u00e9coupage aux choses et aux actions. Il arrive que ces concepts soient appel\u00e9s par le temps, charg\u00e9s d'un sens collectif conforme aux exigences d'une \u00e9poque, et soient d\u00e9couverts, cr\u00e9\u00e9s ou recr\u00e9\u00e9s par plusieurs auteurs \u00e0 la fois. Il en est ainsi pour Spinoza et Leibniz, et le concept d'expression. Ce concept prend sur soi la force d'une r\u00e9action anticart\u00e9sienne men\u00e9e par ces deux auteurs, de deux points de vue tr\u00e8s diff\u00e9rents. Il implique une red\u00e9couverte de la Nature et de sa puissance, une re-cr\u00e9ation de la logique et de l'ontologie : un nouveau \u00ab mat\u00e9rialisme \u00bb et un nouveau \u00ab formalisme \u00bb. Le concept d'expression s'applique \u00e0 l'\u00catre d\u00e9termin\u00e9 comme Dieu, pour autant que Dieu s'exprime dans le monde. Il s'applique aux id\u00e9es d\u00e9termin\u00e9es comme vraies, pour autant que les id\u00e9es vraies expriment Dieu et le monde. Il s'applique enfin aux individus d\u00e9termin\u00e9s comme essences singuli\u00e8res, pour autant que les essences singuli\u00e8res s'expriment dans les id\u00e9es. Si bien que les trois d\u00e9terminations fondamentales : _\u00eatre, conna\u00eetre, agir ou produire_ , sont mesur\u00e9es et syst\u00e9matis\u00e9es sous ce concept. \u00catre, conna\u00eetre, agir sont les esp\u00e8ces de l'expression. C'est l'\u00e2ge de la \u00ab raison suffisante \u00bb : les trois branches de la raison suffisante, _ratio essendi, ratio cognoscendi, ratio fiendi ou agendi_ , trouvent dans l'expression leur racine commune.\n\nLe concept d'expression, pourtant, tel qu'il est red\u00e9couvert par Spinoza et par Leibniz, n'est pas nouveau : il a d\u00e9j\u00e0 une longue histoire philosophique. Mais une histoire un peu cach\u00e9e, un peu maudite. Nous avons essay\u00e9 de montrer en effet comment le th\u00e8me de l'expression se glissait dans les deux grandes traditions th\u00e9ologiques de l'\u00e9manation et de la cr\u00e9ation. Il n'intervient pas comme un troisi\u00e8me concept rivalisant du dehors avec ceux-l\u00e0. Il intervient plut\u00f4t \u00e0 un moment de leur d\u00e9veloppement, et risque toujours de les d\u00e9tourner, de les confisquer \u00e0 son profit. Bref c'est un concept proprement philosophique, au contenu immanent, qui s'immisce dans les concepts transcendants d'une th\u00e9ologie \u00e9manative ou cr\u00e9ationniste. Il apporte avec lui le \u00ab danger \u00bb proprement philosophique : le panth\u00e9isme ou l'immanence \u2013 immanence de l'expression dans ce qui s'exprime, et de l'exprim\u00e9 dans l'expression. Il pr\u00e9tend p\u00e9n\u00e9trer dans le plus profond, dans les \u00ab arcanes \u00bb, suivant un mot que Leibniz aimait. Il redonne \u00e0 la nature une \u00e9paisseur qui lui est propre, et en m\u00eame temps rend l'homme capable de p\u00e9n\u00e9trer dans cette \u00e9paisseur. Il rend l'homme ad\u00e9quat \u00e0 Dieu, et d\u00e9tenteur d'une nouvelle logique : automate spirituel, \u00e9gal \u00e0 la combinatoire du monde. N\u00e9 dans les traditions de l'\u00e9manation et de la cr\u00e9ation, il s'en fait deux ennemies, parce qu'il conteste aussi bien la transcendance d'un Un sup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 l'\u00eatre que la transcendance d'un \u00catre sup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 la cr\u00e9ation. Tout concept poss\u00e8de en soi virtuellement un appareil m\u00e9taphorique. L'appareil m\u00e9taphorique de l'expression, c'est le miroir et le germe1. L'expression comme _ratio essendi_ , se r\u00e9fl\u00e9chit dans le miroir comme _ratio cognoscendi_ , et se reproduit dans le germe comme _ratio fiendi._ Mais voil\u00e0 que le miroir semble absorber, et l'\u00eatre qui se r\u00e9fl\u00e9chit en lui, et l'\u00eatre qui regarde l'image. Le germe, ou le rameau, semble absorber, et l'arbre dont il provient, et l'arbre qui en provient. Et quelle est cette \u00e9trange existence, telle qu'elle est \u00ab prise \u00bb dans le miroir, telle qu'elle est impliqu\u00e9e, envelopp\u00e9e dans le germe \u2013 bref _l'exprim\u00e9_ , entit\u00e9 dont on peut dire \u00e0 peine qu'elle existe ? Nous avons vu que le concept d'expression avait comme deux sources : l'une ontologique, qui concerne _l'expression de Dieu_ , qui na\u00eet \u00e0 l'abri des traditions de l'\u00e9manation et de la cr\u00e9ation, mais qui les conteste profond\u00e9ment ; l'autre, logique, qui concerne _l'exprim\u00e9 des propositions_ , qui na\u00eet \u00e0 l'abri de la logique aristot\u00e9licienne, mais la conteste et la bouleverse. Toutes deux se rejoignent dans le probl\u00e8me des Noms divins, du Logos ou du Verbe.\n\nSi Leibniz et Spinoza au XVIIe si\u00e8cle, l'un \u00e0 partir d'une tradition chr\u00e9tienne, l'autre \u00e0 partir d'une tradition juive, retrouvent le concept d'expression et lui donnent une nouvelle lumi\u00e8re, c'est \u00e9videmment dans un contexte qui est celui de leur temps, en fonction de probl\u00e8mes qui sont ceux de leur syst\u00e8me respectif. Essayons d'abord de d\u00e9gager ce qu'il y a de commun dans les deux syst\u00e8mes, et pour quelles raisons ils r\u00e9inventent le concept d'expression.\n\nCe qu'ils reprochent \u00e0 Descartes, concr\u00e8tement, c'est d'avoir fait une philosophie trop \u00ab rapide \u00bb ou trop \u00ab facile \u00bb. Dans tous les domaines, Descartes va si vite qu'il laisse \u00e9chapper la raison suffisante, l'essence ou vraie nature : partout, il en reste au relatif. _D'abord \u00e0 propos de Dieu_ : la preuve ontologique de Descartes repose sur l'infiniment parfait, et se h\u00e2te de conclure ; mais l'infiniment parfait est un \u00ab propre \u00bb, tout \u00e0 fait insuffisant pour montrer quelle est la \u00ab nature \u00bb de Dieu et comment cette nature est possible. De m\u00eame les preuves a posteriori de Descartes reposent sur la consid\u00e9ration des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 donn\u00e9es, et ne s'\u00e9l\u00e8vent pas jusqu'\u00e0 un principe dynamique dont celles-ci d\u00e9pendent. _Ensuite \u00e0 propos des id\u00e9es_ : Descartes d\u00e9couvre les crit\u00e8res du clair et du distinct ; mais le \u00ab clair-et-distinct \u00bb est encore un propre, une d\u00e9termination extrins\u00e8que de l'id\u00e9e qui ne nous renseigne pas sur la nature et la possibilit\u00e9 de la chose en id\u00e9e, ni de la pens\u00e9e comme telle. Descartes en reste au contenu repr\u00e9sentatif de l'id\u00e9e et \u00e0 la forme de la conscience psychologique qui la pense : il rate ainsi le v\u00e9ritable contenu immanent de l'id\u00e9e, comme la vraie forme logique, et l'unit\u00e9 des deux (l'automate spirituel). Il nous dit que le vrai est pr\u00e9sent dans l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte, mais qu'est-ce qui est pr\u00e9sent dans l'id\u00e9e vraie ? \u00c0 quel point d\u00e9j\u00e0 ce second courant critique rejoint le premier, on le voit ais\u00e9ment : car, si l'on en reste au clair-et-distinct, on ne peut mesurer les id\u00e9es entre elles et les comparer aux choses que par la consid\u00e9ration des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9. Ne disposant que d'un caract\u00e8re extrins\u00e8que de l'id\u00e9e, on n'atteint dans l'\u00catre que des caract\u00e8res eux-m\u00eames extrins\u00e8ques. Bien plus, la distinction comme norme de l'id\u00e9e pr\u00e9juge de l'\u00e9tat des distinctions entre choses repr\u00e9sent\u00e9es dans l'id\u00e9e : c'est en rapport avec le crit\u00e8re du clair et du distinct que Descartes, dans tout le tr\u00e9sor des distinctions scolastiques, ne retient que la distinction r\u00e9elle, selon lui n\u00e9cessairement num\u00e9rique, la distinction de raison, selon lui n\u00e9cessairement abstraite, la distinction modale, selon lui n\u00e9cessairement accidentelle. _Enfin \u00e0 propos des individus et de leurs actions_ : Descartes interpr\u00e8te l'individu humain comme le compos\u00e9 r\u00e9el d'une \u00e2me et d'un corps, c'est-\u00e0-dire de deux termes h\u00e9t\u00e9rog\u00e8nes cens\u00e9s agir r\u00e9ellement l'un sur l'autre. N'est-il pas in\u00e9vitable, alors, que tant de choses soient \u00ab incompr\u00e9hensibles \u00bb selon Descartes ? Non seulement ce compos\u00e9 lui-m\u00eame, mais le processus de sa causalit\u00e9, et aussi l'infini, et aussi la libert\u00e9 ? C'est dans un seul et m\u00eame mouvement qu'on r\u00e9duit l'\u00eatre \u00e0 la platitude de l'infiniment parfait, les choses \u00e0 la platitude des quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9, les id\u00e9es \u00e0 la platitude de la causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle \u2013 et qu'on red\u00e9couvre toute l'\u00e9paisseur du monde, mais, d\u00e8s lors, sous une forme incompr\u00e9hensible.\n\nOr quelles que soient les diff\u00e9rences entre Leibniz et Spinoza, et notamment leurs diff\u00e9rences dans l'interpr\u00e9tation de l'expression, c'est un fait qu'ils se servent tous deux de ce concept pour d\u00e9passer, \u00e0 tous les niveaux pr\u00e9c\u00e9dents, ce qu'ils estiment \u00eatre l'insuffisance ou la facilit\u00e9 du cart\u00e9sianisme, pour restaurer l'exigence d'une raison suffisante op\u00e9rant dans l'absolu. Non pas qu'ils reviennent en de\u00e7\u00e0 de Descartes. Il y a pour eux des acquis du cart\u00e9sianisme qui ne peuvent \u00eatre remis en question : ne serait-ce, pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment, que les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s de l'infiniment parfait, de la quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9, du clair et du distinct, du m\u00e9canisme, etc. Spinoza et Leibniz sont des post-cart\u00e9siens, au sens o\u00f9 Fichte, Schelling, Hegel sont des post-kantiens. Il s'agit pour eux d'atteindre au fondement dont d\u00e9coulent toutes ces propri\u00e9t\u00e9s pr\u00e9c\u00e9demment \u00e9num\u00e9r\u00e9es, de red\u00e9couvrir un absolu qui soit \u00e0 la mesure du \u00ab relativisme \u00bb cart\u00e9sien. Comment proc\u00e8dent-ils, et pourquoi le concept d'expression est-il le meilleur pour cette t\u00e2che ?\n\nL'infiniment parfait comme propre doit \u00eatre d\u00e9pass\u00e9 vers l'absolument infini comme nature. Et les dix premi\u00e8res propositions de l' _\u00c9thique_ montrent que Dieu existe n\u00e9cessairement, mais parce que l'absolument infini est possible ou non contradictoire : telle est la d\u00e9marche spinoziste o\u00f9, parmi toutes les d\u00e9finitions du d\u00e9but de l' _\u00c9thique_ , qui sont nominales, il est d\u00e9montr\u00e9 que la d\u00e9finition 6 est r\u00e9elle. Or cette r\u00e9alit\u00e9 m\u00eame est constitu\u00e9e par la coexistence de toutes les formes infinies, qui introduisent leur distinction dans l'absolu sans y introduire le nombre. Ces formes constitutives de la nature de Dieu, et qui n'ont l'infiniment parfait que comme propri\u00e9t\u00e9, sont l'expression de l'absolu. Dieu est repr\u00e9sent\u00e9 comme infiniment parfait, mais il est constitu\u00e9 par ces formes plus profondes, il _s'exprime_ dans ces formes, dans ces attributs. La d\u00e9marche de Leibniz est formellement semblable : m\u00eame d\u00e9passement de l'infini vers l'absolu. Non pas certes que l'\u00catre absolu de Leibniz soit le m\u00eame que celui de Spinoza. Mais l\u00e0 encore, il s'agit de d\u00e9montrer la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 d'une d\u00e9finition, et d'atteindre \u00e0 une nature de Dieu par-del\u00e0 la propri\u00e9t\u00e9. L\u00e0 encore cette nature est constitu\u00e9e par des formes simples et distinctes, dans lesquelles Dieu s'exprime et qui expriment elles-m\u00eames des qualit\u00e9s positives infinies2. De m\u00eame, chez Spinoza comme chez Leibniz, nous l'avons vu, c'est la d\u00e9couverte de quantit\u00e9s intensives ou de quantit\u00e9s de puissance, comme plus profondes que les quantit\u00e9s de r\u00e9alit\u00e9, qui transforment les proc\u00e9d\u00e9s a posteriori, en y introduisant l'expressivit\u00e9.\n\nPassons au second point, qui concerne la connaissance et l'id\u00e9e. Ce qui est commun \u00e0 Leibniz et \u00e0 Spinoza, c'est la critique du clair-et-distinct cart\u00e9sien, comme convenant \u00e0 la r\u00e9cognition et aux d\u00e9finitions nominales plut\u00f4t qu'\u00e0 la vraie connaissance par d\u00e9finitions r\u00e9elles. Or la vraie connaissance est d\u00e9couverte comme une _esp\u00e8ce_ de l'expression : c'est dire \u00e0 la fois que le contenu repr\u00e9sentatif de l'id\u00e9e est d\u00e9pass\u00e9 vers un contenu immanent, proprement expressif, et que la forme de la conscience psychologique est d\u00e9pass\u00e9e vers un formalisme logique, \u00ab explicatif \u00bb. Et l'automate spirituel pr\u00e9sente l'identit\u00e9 de cette nouvelle forme et de ce nouveau contenu. Nous sommes nous-m\u00eames des id\u00e9es, en vertu de notre pouvoir expressif ; \u00ab et on pourrait appeler notre essence ou id\u00e9e, ce qui comprend tout ce que nous exprimons, et comme elle exprime notre union avec Dieu m\u00eame, elle n'a point de limites et rien ne la passe. \u00bb3\n\nQuant au troisi\u00e8me point, nous devons repenser l'individu d\u00e9fini comme le compos\u00e9 d'une \u00e2me et d'un corps. C'est que l'hypoth\u00e8se d'une causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle est peut-\u00eatre le moyen le plus simple d'interpr\u00e9ter les ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes de ce compos\u00e9, les actions et les passions, mais n'est pas pour cela le moyen le plus convaincant ni le plus intelligible. On n\u00e9glige en effet un monde riche et profond : celui des _correspondances non causales._ Bien plus, il se peut que la causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle s'\u00e9tablisse et veille seulement dans certaines r\u00e9gions de ce monde des correspondances non causales, et le suppose en v\u00e9rit\u00e9. La causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle serait seulement un cas particulier d'un principe plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ral. On a \u00e0 la fois l'impression que l'\u00e2me et le corps ont une quasi-identit\u00e9 qui rend la causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle inutile entre eux, et une h\u00e9t\u00e9rog\u00e9n\u00e9it\u00e9, une h\u00e9t\u00e9ronomie qui la rend impossible. L'identit\u00e9 ou quasi-identit\u00e9 est celle d'un \u00ab invariant \u00bb ; l'h\u00e9t\u00e9ronomie est celle de deux s\u00e9ries variables, l'une corporelle, l'autre spirituelle. Or la causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle intervient bien dans chacune des s\u00e9ries pour son compte ; mais le rapport des deux s\u00e9ries, et leur rapport \u00e0 l'invariant, d\u00e9pend d'une correspondance non causale. Si nous demandons maintenant quel est le concept capable de rendre compte d'une telle correspondance, il appara\u00eet que c'est celui d'expression. Car s'il est vrai que le concept d'expression s'applique ad\u00e9quatement \u00e0 la causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle, au sens o\u00f9 l'effet exprime la cause, et o\u00f9 la connaissance de l'effet exprime une connaissance de la cause, ce concept n'en d\u00e9borde pas moins la causalit\u00e9 puisqu'il fait correspondre et r\u00e9sonner des s\u00e9ries tout \u00e0 fait \u00e9trang\u00e8res l'une \u00e0 l'autre. Si bien que la causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle est une esp\u00e8ce de l'expression, mais seulement une esp\u00e8ce subsum\u00e9e sous un genre plus profond. Ce genre traduit imm\u00e9diatement la possibilit\u00e9 pour des s\u00e9ries distinctes h\u00e9t\u00e9rog\u00e8nes (les expressions) d'exprimer un m\u00eame invariant (l'exprim\u00e9), en \u00e9tablissant dans chaque s\u00e9rie variable un m\u00eame encha\u00eenement de causes et d'effets. L'expression s'installe au c\u0153ur de l'individu, dans son corps et dans son \u00e2me, dans ses passions et ses actions, dans ses causes et ses effets. Et par _monade_ Leibniz, mais aussi par _mode_ Spinoza n'entendent rien d'autre que l'individu comme centre expressif.\n\nSi le concept d'expression a bien cette triple importance, du point de vue de l'\u00eatre universel, du conna\u00eetre sp\u00e9cifique, de l'agir individuel, on ne peut \u00e0 cet \u00e9gard exag\u00e9rer l'importance de la communaut\u00e9 Spinoza-Leibniz. M\u00eame s'ils divergent en chaque point, dans leur usage et leur interpr\u00e9tation du concept. Et d\u00e9j\u00e0 les diff\u00e9rences formelles, les diff\u00e9rences de ton pr\u00e9figurent les diff\u00e9rences de contenu. Nous disions qu'on ne trouve pas chez Spinoza une d\u00e9finition ni une d\u00e9monstration explicites de l'expression (bien que cette d\u00e9finition, cette d\u00e9monstration soient constamment impliqu\u00e9es dans l'\u0153uvre). Chez Leibniz, au contraire, on trouve des textes qui traitent explicitement de la compr\u00e9hension et de l'extension de la cat\u00e9gorie d'expression. Mais, bizarrement, c'est Leibniz qui donne \u00e0 cette cat\u00e9gorie une extension telle qu'elle finit par tout recouvrir, y compris le monde des signes, des similitudes, des symboles et des harmonies4 \u2013 tandis que Spinoza m\u00e8ne la plus s\u00e9v\u00e8re \u00e9puration, et oppose strictement les expressions aux signes ou aux analogies.\n\nUn des textes les plus nets de Leibniz est _Quid est idea_5. Apr\u00e8s avoir d\u00e9fini l'expression par une correspondance d' _habitus_ entre deux choses, Leibniz distingue deux grands types d'expressions naturelles : celles qui impliquent une certaine similitude (un dessin par exemple), celles qui enveloppent une certaine loi ou causalit\u00e9 (une projection). Mais il appara\u00eet que, de toutes mani\u00e8res, un des termes du rapport d'expression est toujours sup\u00e9rieur \u00e0 l'autre : soit qu'il jouisse de l'identit\u00e9 reproduite par le second, soit qu'il enveloppe la loi que l'autre d\u00e9veloppe. Et dans tous les cas il \u00ab concentre \u00bb dans son unit\u00e9 ce que l'autre \u00ab disperse dans la multitude \u00bb. L'expression selon Leibniz fonde dans tous les domaines un tel rapport de l'Un et du Multiple : ce qui s'exprime est \u00ab dou\u00e9 d'une v\u00e9ritable unit\u00e9 \u00bb par rapport \u00e0 ses expressions ; ou ce qui revient au m\u00eame, l'expression est une, par rapport \u00e0 l'exprim\u00e9 multiple et divisible6. Mais ainsi une certaine zone obscure ou confuse est toujours introduite dans l'expression : le terme sup\u00e9rieur, en raison de son unit\u00e9, exprime _plus distinctement_ ce que l'autre exprime _moins distinctement_ dans sa multitude. C'est m\u00eame en ce sens qu'on r\u00e9partit les causes et les effets, les actions et les passions : lorsqu'on dit qu'un corps nageant est cause d'une \u00ab infinit\u00e9 de mouvements de parties de l'eau \u00bb, et non l'inverse, c'est parce que le corps a une unit\u00e9 qui permet d'expliquer plus distinctement ce qui arrive7. Bien plus, comme le second terme est exprim\u00e9 dans le premier, celui-ci taille en quelque sorte son expression distincte dans une r\u00e9gion obscure qui l'entoure de toutes parts et dans laquelle il plonge : ainsi chaque monade trace son expression partielle distincte sur fond d'une expression totale confuse ; elle exprime confus\u00e9ment la totalit\u00e9 du monde, mais n'en exprime clairement qu'une partie, pr\u00e9lev\u00e9e ou d\u00e9termin\u00e9e par le rapport lui-m\u00eame expressif qu'elle entretient avec son corps. Le monde exprim\u00e9 par chaque monade est un continuum pourvu de singularit\u00e9s, et c'est autour de ces singularit\u00e9s que les monades se forment elles-m\u00eames en tant que centres expressifs. Il en est de m\u00eame pour les id\u00e9es : \u00ab Notre \u00e2me ne fait r\u00e9flexion que sur les ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes plus singuliers qui se distinguent des autres, ne pensant distinctement \u00e0 aucun lorsqu'elle pense \u00e9galement \u00e0 tous8. \u00bb C'est pourquoi notre pens\u00e9e n'atteint pas \u00e0 l'absolument ad\u00e9quat, aux formes absolument simples qui sont en Dieu, mais en restent \u00e0 des formes et \u00e0 des termes relativement simples (c'est-\u00e0-dire simples relativement \u00e0 la multitude qu'ils enveloppent). Et cela est encore vrai de Dieu, \u00ab des diff\u00e9rentes vues de Dieu \u00bb, dans les r\u00e9gions de son entendement qui concernent la cr\u00e9ation possible : les diff\u00e9rents mondes cr\u00e9ables forment ce fond obscur \u00e0 partir duquel Dieu cr\u00e9e le meilleur, en cr\u00e9ant les monades ou expressions qui l'expriment pour le mieux. M\u00eame en Dieu, ou du moins dans certaines r\u00e9gions de son entendement, l'Un se combine avec un \u00ab z\u00e9ro \u00bb qui rend la cr\u00e9ation possible. Nous devons donc tenir compte de deux facteurs fondamentaux dans la conception leibnizienne de l'expression : _l'Analogie_ , qui exprime surtout les diff\u00e9rents types d'unit\u00e9, en rapport avec les multiplicit\u00e9s qu'ils enveloppent ; _l'Harmonie_ , qui exprime surtout la mani\u00e8re dont une multiplicit\u00e9 correspond dans chaque cas \u00e0 son unit\u00e9 de r\u00e9f\u00e9rence9.\n\nTout ceci forme une philosophie \u00ab symbolique \u00bb de l'expression, o\u00f9 l'expression n'est jamais s\u00e9par\u00e9e des signes de ses variations, pas plus que des zones obscures o\u00f9 elle plonge. Le distinct et le confus varient dans chaque expression (l'entre-expression signifie notamment que, ce qu'une monade exprime confus\u00e9ment, une autre l'exprime distinctement). _Une telle philosophie symbolique est n\u00e9cessairement une philosophie des expressions \u00e9quivoques._ Et, plut\u00f4t que d'opposer Leibniz \u00e0 Spinoza en rappelant l'importance des th\u00e8mes leibniziens du possible et de la finalit\u00e9, il nous semble n\u00e9cessaire de d\u00e9gager ce point concret qui concerne la mani\u00e8re dont Leibniz interpr\u00e8te et vit le ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne de l'expression, parce que tous les autres th\u00e8mes et les autres concepts en d\u00e9coulent. Tout se passe comme si Leibniz, \u00e0 la fois pour sauver la richesse du concept d'expression et pour conjurer le \u00ab danger \u00bb panth\u00e9iste attenant, trouvait une nouvelle formule d'apr\u00e8s laquelle la cr\u00e9ation et l'\u00e9manation \u00e9taient les deux esp\u00e8ces r\u00e9elles de l'expression, ou correspondaient \u00e0 deux dimensions de l'expression : la _cr\u00e9ation_ , dans la constitution originaire des unit\u00e9s expressives analogues (\u00ab combinaisons de l'unit\u00e9 avec le z\u00e9ro \u00bb) ; l _'\u00e9manation_ , dans la s\u00e9rie d\u00e9riv\u00e9e qui d\u00e9veloppe les multiplicit\u00e9s exprim\u00e9es dans chaque type d'unit\u00e9 (les enveloppements et d\u00e9veloppements, les \u00ab transproductions \u00bb, les \u00ab m\u00e9tasch\u00e9matismes \u00bb)10.\n\nOr Spinoza donne de l'expression une interpr\u00e9tation vivante tout \u00e0 fait diff\u00e9rente. Car l'essentiel, pour Spinoza, c'est de s\u00e9parer le domaine des signes, toujours \u00e9quivoques, et celui des expressions dont la r\u00e8gle absolue doit \u00eatre l'univocit\u00e9. Nous avons vu en ce sens comment les trois types de signes (signes indicatifs de la perception naturelle, signes imp\u00e9ratifs de la loi morale et de la r\u00e9v\u00e9lation religieuse) \u00e9taient radicalement rejet\u00e9s dans l'inad\u00e9quat ; et ce qui tombe avec eux, c'est tout le langage de l'analogie aussi bien celui qui pr\u00eate \u00e0 Dieu un entendement et une volont\u00e9 que celui qui pr\u00eate aux choses une fin. Et du m\u00eame coup l'id\u00e9e absolument ad\u00e9quate peut \u00eatre atteinte et form\u00e9e par nous, dans la mesure o\u00f9 elle re\u00e7oit ses conditions du strict r\u00e9gime de l'univocit\u00e9 : l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, c'est l'id\u00e9e expressive, c'est-\u00e0-dire l'id\u00e9e distincte en tant qu'elle a conjur\u00e9 ce fond obscur et confus dont elle ne se s\u00e9parait pas chez Leibniz. (Nous avons essay\u00e9 de montrer comment Spinoza op\u00e9rait concr\u00e8tement cette s\u00e9lection, dans le proc\u00e9d\u00e9 de formation des notions communes o\u00f9 l'id\u00e9e cesse d'\u00eatre un signe pour devenir une expression univoque.) Quels que soient les termes mis en jeu dans le rapport d'expression, on ne dira pas que l'un exprime distinctement ce que l'autre exprime confus\u00e9ment. Surtout ce n'est pas ainsi qu'on r\u00e9partira l'actif et le passif, l'action et la passion, la cause et l'effet ; car, contrairement au principe traditionnel, les actions vont de pair avec les actions, les passions avec les passions. Si l'harmonie pr\u00e9\u00e9tablie de Leibniz et le parall\u00e9lisme de Spinoza ont en commun de rompre avec l'hypoth\u00e8se d'une causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle entre l'\u00e2me et le corps, leur diff\u00e9rence fondamentale n'en est pas moins celle-ci : la r\u00e9partition des actions et des passions reste chez Leibniz ce qu'elle \u00e9tait dans l'hypoth\u00e8se traditionnelle (le corps p\u00e2tissant quand l'\u00e2me agit, et inversement) \u2013 tandis que Spinoza bouleverse toute la r\u00e9partition pratique, en affirmant la parit\u00e9 des passions de l'\u00e2me avec celles du corps, des actions du corps avec celles de l'\u00e2me. C'est que, chez Spinoza, le rapport d'expression ne s'\u00e9tablit qu'entre \u00e9gaux. C'est l\u00e0 le vrai sens du parall\u00e9lisme : il n'y a jamais \u00e9minence d'une s\u00e9rie. Certes la cause dans sa s\u00e9rie reste plus parfaite que l'effet, la connaissance de la cause dans sa s\u00e9rie reste plus parfaite que celle de l'effet ; mais, loin que la perfection implique une \u00ab analogie \u00bb, une \u00ab symbolisation \u00bb, d'apr\u00e8s laquelle le plus parfait existerait _sur_ un autre mode qualitatif que le moins parfait, elle implique seulement un processus quantitatif immanent d'apr\u00e8s lequel le moins parfait existe _dans_ le plus parfait, c'est-\u00e0-dire _dans_ cette forme et _sous_ cette m\u00eame forme univoque qui constitue l'essence du plus parfait. (C'est en ce sens aussi, nous l'avons vu, qu'on doit opposer la th\u00e9orie de l'individuation qualitative chez Leibniz et la th\u00e9orie de l'individuation quantitative chez Spinoza, sans pouvoir en conclure certes que le mode ait moins d'autonomie que la monade.)\n\nChez Spinoza comme chez Leibniz, le rapport d'expression concerne essentiellement l'Un et le Multiple. Mais dans l' _\u00c9thique_ , on chercherait en vain un signe par lequel le Multiple, en tant qu'imparfait, implique une certaine confusion par rapport \u00e0 la distinction de l'Un qui s'exprime en lui. Le plus ou moins de perfection, selon Spinoza, n'implique jamais un changement de forme. Ainsi la multiplicit\u00e9 des attributs est strictement \u00e9gale \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 de la substance : par cette stricte \u00e9galit\u00e9, nous devons entendre que les attributs sont _formellement_ ce que la substance est _ontologiquement._ Au nom de cette \u00e9galit\u00e9, les formes d'attributs n'introduisent aucune distinction num\u00e9rique entre substances ; au contraire, leur propre distinction formelle est \u00e9gale \u00e0 toute la diff\u00e9rence ontologique de la substance unique. Et si nous consid\u00e9rons la multitude des modes dans chaque attribut, ces modes enveloppent l'attribut, mais sans que cet enveloppement signifie que l'attribut prenne une autre forme que celle sous laquelle il constitue l'essence de la substance : les modes enveloppent et expriment l'attribut _sous cette forme m\u00eame_ o\u00f9 il enveloppe et exprime l'essence divine. C'est pourquoi le spinozisme s'accompagne d'une extraordinaire th\u00e9orie des distinctions qui, m\u00eame lorsqu'elle emprunte la terminologie cart\u00e9sienne, parle un tout autre langage : ainsi la distinction r\u00e9elle y est en v\u00e9rit\u00e9 une distinction formelle non num\u00e9rique (cf. les attributs) ; la distinction modale y est une distinction num\u00e9rique intensive ou extensive (cf. les modes) ; la distinction de raison y est une distinction formelle-objective (cf. les id\u00e9es). Dans sa propre th\u00e9orie, Leibniz multiplie les types de distinction, mais pour assurer toutes les ressources de la symbolisation, de l'harmonie et de l'analogie. Chez Spinoza, au contraire, le seul langage est celui de l'univocit\u00e9 : d'abord _univocit\u00e9 des attributs_ (en tant que les attributs, sous la m\u00eame forme, sont ce qui constitue l'essence de la substance et ce qui contient les modes et leurs essences) ; ensuite _univocit\u00e9 de la cause_ (en tant que Dieu est cause de toutes choses au m\u00eame sens que cause de soi) ; ensuite _univocit\u00e9 de l'id\u00e9e_ (en tant que la notion commune est la m\u00eame dans la partie et dans le tout). Univocit\u00e9 de l'\u00eatre, univocit\u00e9 du produire, univocit\u00e9 du conna\u00eetre ; forme commune, cause commune, notion commune \u2013 telles sont les trois figures de l'Univoque qui se r\u00e9unissent absolument dans l'id\u00e9e du troisi\u00e8me genre. Loin que l'expression chez Spinoza se r\u00e9concilie avec la cr\u00e9ation et l'\u00e9manation, elle les expulse au contraire, elle les rejette du c\u00f4t\u00e9 des signes inad\u00e9quats ou du langage \u00e9quivoque. Spinoza accepte le \u00ab danger \u00bb proprement philosophique impliqu\u00e9 dans la notion d'expression : l'immanence, le panth\u00e9isme. Bien plus, il parie pour ce danger-l\u00e0. Chez Spinoza _toute la th\u00e9orie de l'expression est au service de l'univocit\u00e9_ ; et tout son sens est d'arracher l'\u00catre univoque \u00e0 son \u00e9tat d'indiff\u00e9rence ou de neutralit\u00e9, pour en faire l'objet d'une affirmation pure, effectivement r\u00e9alis\u00e9e dans le panth\u00e9isme ou l'immanence expressive. Voil\u00e0, nous semble-t-il, la v\u00e9ritable opposition de Spinoza et de Leibniz : _la th\u00e9orie des expressions univoques de l'un s'oppose \u00e0 la th\u00e9orie des expressions \u00e9quivoques de l'autre._ Toutes les autres oppositions (la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 et la finalit\u00e9, le n\u00e9cessaire et le possible) en d\u00e9coulent, et sont abstraites par rapport \u00e0 celle-ci. Car il y a bien une origine concr\u00e8te des diff\u00e9rences philosophiques, une certaine mani\u00e8re d' _\u00e9valuer_ un ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne : ici celui de l'expression.\n\nMais quelle que soit l'importance de l'opposition, nous devons revenir \u00e0 ce qu'il y a de commun entre Leibniz et Spinoza, dans cet usage de la notion d'expression qui manifeste toute la force de leur r\u00e9action anticart\u00e9sienne. Cette notion d'expression est essentiellement triadique : on doit distinguer ce qui s'exprime, l'expression m\u00eame et l'exprim\u00e9. Or le paradoxe est que, \u00e0 la fois, l'\u00ab exprim\u00e9 \u00bb _n'existe pas_ hors de l'expression, et pourtant ne lui ressemble pas, mais est _essentiellement_ rapport\u00e9 \u00e0 ce qui s'exprime, comme distinct de l'expression m\u00eame. Si bien que l'expression est le support d'un double mouvement : ou bien on enveloppe, on implique, on enroule l'exprim\u00e9 dans l'expression, pour ne retenir que le couple \u00ab exprimant-expression \u00bb ; ou bien on d\u00e9veloppe, on explique, on d\u00e9roule l'expression de fa\u00e7on \u00e0 restituer l'exprim\u00e9 (\u00ab exprimant-exprim\u00e9 \u00bb). Ainsi chez Leibniz, il y a bien d'abord une expression divine : Dieu s'exprime dans des formes absolues ou des notions absolument simples, comme dans un divin Alphabet ; ces formes expriment des qualit\u00e9s illimit\u00e9es qui se rapportent \u00e0 Dieu comme son essence. Puis Dieu se r\u00e9-exprime, au niveau de la cr\u00e9ation possible : il s'exprime alors dans des notions individuelles ou relativement simples, monades, qui correspondent \u00e0 chacune des \u00ab vues \u00bb de Dieu ; et ces expressions \u00e0 leur tour expriment le monde entier, c'est-\u00e0-dire la totalit\u00e9 du monde choisi, qui se rapporte \u00e0 Dieu comme la manifestation de sa \u00ab gloire \u00bb et de sa volont\u00e9. On voit bien chez Leibniz que le monde n'existe pas hors des monades qui l'expriment, et que pourtant Dieu fait exister le monde plut\u00f4t que les monades11. Ces deux propositions ne sont nullement contradictoires, mais t\u00e9moignent du double mouvement par lequel le monde exprim\u00e9 s'enveloppe dans les monades qui l'expriment, et par lequel inversement les monades se d\u00e9veloppent et restituent cette continuit\u00e9 d'un fond pourvu de singularit\u00e9s autour desquelles elles se sont constitu\u00e9es. Sous toutes les r\u00e9serves pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes, on en dirait autant de Spinoza. Dans la triade de la substance, Dieu s'exprime dans les attributs, les attributs expriment des qualit\u00e9s illimit\u00e9es qui constituent son essence. Dans la triade du mode, Dieu se r\u00e9-exprime, ou les attributs s'expriment \u00e0 leur tour : ils s'expriment dans des modes, les modes expriment des modifications comme modifications de la substance, constitutives d'un m\u00eame monde \u00e0 travers tous les attributs. C'est en fonction de ce caract\u00e8re toujours triadique que le concept d'expression ne se laisse rapporter ni \u00e0 la causalit\u00e9 dans l'\u00eatre, ni \u00e0 la repr\u00e9sentation dans l'id\u00e9e, mais les d\u00e9borde toutes deux, et en fait deux de ses cas particuliers. Car, \u00e0 la dyade de la cause et de l'effet, ou \u00e0 celle de l'id\u00e9e et de son objet, se joint toujours un troisi\u00e8me terme qui les transforme. Il est certain que l'effet exprime sa cause ; mais plus profond\u00e9ment la cause et l'effet forment une s\u00e9rie qui doit exprimer quelque chose, et quelque chose d'identique (ou de semblable) \u00e0 ce qu'exprime une autre s\u00e9rie. Ainsi la causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle se trouve localis\u00e9e dans des s\u00e9ries expressives qui b\u00e9n\u00e9ficient entre elles de correspondances non causales. De m\u00eame l'id\u00e9e repr\u00e9sente un objet, et d'une certaine mani\u00e8re l'exprime ; mais plus profond\u00e9ment l'id\u00e9e et son objet expriment quelque chose qui leur est commun, et pourtant propre \u00e0 chacun : la puissance, ou l'absolu sous deux puissances, qui sont celles de penser ou de conna\u00eetre, d'\u00eatre ou d'agir. Ainsi la repr\u00e9sentation se trouve localis\u00e9e dans un certain rapport extrins\u00e8que de l'id\u00e9e et de l'objet, chacun b\u00e9n\u00e9ficiant pour son compte d'une expressivit\u00e9 par-del\u00e0 la repr\u00e9sentation. Bref, partout l'exprim\u00e9 intervient comme un tiers qui transforme les dualismes. Par-del\u00e0 la causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle, par-del\u00e0 la repr\u00e9sentation id\u00e9elle, on d\u00e9couvre l'exprim\u00e9 comme le tiers qui rend les distinctions infiniment plus r\u00e9elles, l'identit\u00e9 infiniment mieux pens\u00e9e. L'exprim\u00e9, c'est le sens : plus profond que le rapport de causalit\u00e9, plus profond que le rapport de repr\u00e9sentation. Il y a un m\u00e9canisme des corps suivant la r\u00e9alit\u00e9, il y a un automatisme des pens\u00e9es suivant l'id\u00e9alit\u00e9 ; mais nous apprenons que la m\u00e9canique corporelle et l'automate spirituel sont le plus _expressifs_ lorsqu'ils re\u00e7oivent leur \u00ab sens \u00bb et leur \u00ab correspondance \u00bb, comme cette raison n\u00e9cessaire qui manquait partout dans le cart\u00e9sianisme.\n\nNous ne pouvons dire ce qui est le plus important : les diff\u00e9rences de Leibniz et de Spinoza dans leur \u00e9valuation de l'expression ; ou leur commun appel \u00e0 ce concept pour fonder une philosophie post-cart\u00e9sienne.\n\n* * *\n\n1.  Sur ces deux th\u00e8mes, du miroir et du germe (ou du rameau), en rapport essentiel avec la notion d'expression, cf. par exemple le proc\u00e8s d'Eckhart. En effet, ces th\u00e8mes font partie des principaux chefs d'accusation : cf. _\u00c9dition critique des pi\u00e8ces relatives au proc\u00e8s d'Eckhart_ , par G. TH\u00c9RY, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litt\u00e9raire du Moyen \u00c2ge (Vrin \u00e9d., 1926-1927).\n\n2.  Sur \u00ab les formes simples absolument prises \u00bb, \u00ab attributs m\u00eames de Dieu \u00bb, \u00ab causes premi\u00e8res et raison derni\u00e8re des choses \u00bb, cf. _Lettre \u00e0 \u00c9lisabeth_ , 1678, et _M\u00e9ditations sur la connaissance_ , 1684. Dans la note de 1676, _Quod ens perfectissimum existit_ , la perfection se d\u00e9finit par une qualit\u00e9 positive absolue _seu quae quicquid exprimit, sine ullis limitibus exprimit_ (Gerhardt VII, pp. 261-262). Leibniz fait allusion, dans les _Nouveaux Essais_ , aux \u00ab qualit\u00e9s originales ou connaissables distinctement \u00bb qui peuvent \u00eatre port\u00e9es \u00e0 l'infini.\n\n3.  LEIBNIZ, _Discours de m\u00e9taphysique_ , \u00a7 16.\n\n4.  Cf. _Lettre de Leibniz \u00e0 Arnauld_ (Janet I, p. 594) : \u00ab L'expression est commune \u00e0 toutes les formes, et c'est un genre dont la perception naturelle, le sentiment animal et la connaissance intellectuelle sont des esp\u00e8ces. \u00bb\n\n5.  \u00c9d. Gerhardt, VII, pp. 263-264.\n\n6.  LEIBNIZ, _Lettre \u00e0 Arnauld_ (Janet I, p. 594) : \u00ab Il suffit que ce qui est divisible et mat\u00e9riel, et se trouve divis\u00e9 en plusieurs \u00eatres, soit exprim\u00e9 ou repr\u00e9sent\u00e9 dans un seul \u00eatre indivisible, ou dans la substance qui est dou\u00e9e d'une v\u00e9ritable unit\u00e9. \u00bb Et _Nouveaux Essais_ III, 6, \u00a7 24 : L'\u00e2me et la machine \u00ab s'accordent parfaitement, et, quoiqu'elles n'aient point d'influence imm\u00e9diate l'une sur l'autre, elles s'expriment mutuellement, l'une ayant concentr\u00e9 dans une parfaite unit\u00e9 tout ce que l'autre a dispers\u00e9 dans la multitude \u00bb.\n\n7.  _Projet d'une lettre \u00e0 Arnauld_ (Janet I, pp. 552-553).\n\n8.  _Lettre \u00e0 Arnauld_ (Janet I, p. 596).\n\n9.  Cf. Grua \u00e9d., p. 126 : \u00ab Comme tous les esprits sont des unit\u00e9s, on peut dire que Dieu est l'unit\u00e9 primitive, exprim\u00e9e par toutes les autres suivant leur port\u00e9e... C'est de quoi r\u00e9sulte l'op\u00e9ration en la cr\u00e9ature, laquelle est vari\u00e9e selon les diff\u00e9rentes combinaisons de l'unit\u00e9 avec le z\u00e9ro, ou bien du positif avec le privatif. \u00bb Ce sont ces diff\u00e9rents types d'unit\u00e9 qui _symbolisent_ les uns avec les autres : par exemple les notions relativement simples de notre entendement, avec les absolument simples de l'entendement divin (cf. \u00e9d. Couturat, _Elementa Calculi_ , et _Introductio ad Encyclopaediam Arcanam_ ). Un type d'unit\u00e9 est toujours cause finale par rapport \u00e0 la multiplicit\u00e9 qu'il subsume. Et Leibniz emploie particuli\u00e8rement le mot \u00ab harmonie \u00bb pour d\u00e9signer cette r\u00e9f\u00e9rence du multiple \u00e0 l'un ( _Elementa verae pietatis_ , Grua, p. 7).\n\n10.  Il arrive que Leibniz emploie le mot \u00ab \u00e9manation \u00bb pour d\u00e9signer la cr\u00e9ation des unit\u00e9s et leurs combinaisons : cf. par exemple _Discours de m\u00e9taphysique_ , \u00a7 14.\n\n11.  Th\u00e8me constant dans les _Lettres \u00e0 Arnauld_ : Dieu n'a pas cr\u00e9\u00e9 Adam p\u00e9cheur, mais le monde o\u00f9 Adam a p\u00e9ch\u00e9.\n\n# APPENDICE\n\n# \u00c9TUDE FORMELLE DU PLAN DE L' _\u00c9THIQUE_\n\n# ET DU R\u00d4LE DES SCOLIES DANS LA R\u00c9ALISATION\n\n# DE CE PLAN :\n\n# LES DEUX _\u00c9THIQUES_ | TH\u00c8ME | CONS\u00c9QUENCE | CONCEPT EXPRESSIF CORRESPONDANT\n\n---|---|---|---\n\nLIVRE I\n\n|  |  |\n\nL'Affirmation sp\u00e9culative.\n\n1-8 | Il n'y a pas plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut, la distinction num\u00e9rique n'est pas r\u00e9elle. | Ces 8 propositions ne sont pas hypoth\u00e9tiques, mais cat\u00e9goriques ; il est donc faux que l' _\u00c9thique_ \u00ab commence \u00bb par l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. | Premi\u00e8re triade de la substance : attribut, essence, substance.\n\n9-14 | La distinction r\u00e9elle n'est pas num\u00e9rique, il n'y a qu'une substance pour tous les attributs. | L\u00e0 seulement est atteinte l'id\u00e9e de Dieu comme celle d'une substance absolument infinie ; et il est d\u00e9montr\u00e9 que la d\u00e9finition 6 est r\u00e9elle. | Seconde triade de la substance : parfait, infini, absolu.\n\n15-36 | La puissance ou la production : les proc\u00e9d\u00e9s de la production et la nature des produits (modes). | L'immanence signifie \u00e0 la fois l'univocit\u00e9 des attributs et l'univocit\u00e9 de la cause (Dieu est cause de toutes choses au m\u00eame sens que cause de soi). | Troisi\u00e8me triade de la substance : l'essence comme puissance, ce dont elle est l'essence, le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 (par des modes).\n\nLIVRE II\n\n|  |  |\n\nL'Id\u00e9e expressive.\n\n1-7 | Parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique de l'id\u00e9e et de son objet, parall\u00e9lisme ontologique de l'\u00e2me et du corps. | De la substance aux modes, transfert de l'expressivit\u00e9 : r\u00f4le de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu dans ce transfert. | Triade modale : attribut, mode, modification.\n\n8-13 | Les conditions des id\u00e9es : les id\u00e9es que Dieu a en fonction de sa nature, les id\u00e9es que nous avons en fonction de notre nature et de notre corps. | Les aspects de Dieu par rapport aux id\u00e9es : Dieu en tant qu'infini, en tant qu'affect\u00e9 de beaucoup d'id\u00e9es, en tant qu'il a seulement telle id\u00e9e. | L'ad\u00e9quat et l'inad\u00e9quat.\n\nExpos\u00e9 de la physique | Le mod\u00e8le du corps. | Les parties extensives, les rapports de mouvement et de repos, la composition et la d\u00e9composition de ces rapports. | Premi\u00e8re triade individuelle du mode : l'essence, le rapport caract\u00e9ristique les parties extensives.\n\n14-36 | Les conditions dans lesquelles nous avons des id\u00e9es font que celles-ci sont n\u00e9cessairement inad\u00e9quates : id\u00e9e de soi-m\u00eame, id\u00e9e de son corps, id\u00e9e des autres corps. | L'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate est \u00ab indicative \u00bb, \u00ab enveloppante \u00bb, par opposition \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, qui est expressive et explicative : le hasard, les rencontres et le premier genre de connaissance. | Caract\u00e8re inexpressif de l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate.\n\n37-49 | Comment les id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates sont-elles possibles ? Ce qui est commun \u00e0 tous les corps, ou \u00e0 plusieurs corps. | Les notions communes, par opposition aux id\u00e9es abstraites. Comment les notions communes m\u00e8nent \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu : le second genre de connaissance et la raison. | Caract\u00e8re expressif de l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, du point de vue de sa forme et de sa mati\u00e8re.\n\nLIVRE III\n\n|  |  |\n\nLa joie pratique.\n\n1-10 | Ce qui suit des id\u00e9es : les affections ou sentiments. Le \u00ab conatus \u00bb, en tant que d\u00e9termin\u00e9 par ces affections. | Distinction de deux sortes d'affections : les actives et les passives ; les actions qui suivent des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates et les passions qui suivent des id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates. | Seconde triade individuelle du mode : l'essence, le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, les affections qui remplissent ce pouvoir.\n\n11-57 | La distinction de deux sortes d'affections, actives et passives, ne doit pas faire n\u00e9gliger la distinction de deux sortes d'affections passives, les unes joyeuses et les autres tristes. | Les deux lignes, de joie et de tristesse : leurs d\u00e9veloppements, leurs variations et leurs recoupements. | Augmenter et diminuer la puissance d'agir.\n\n58-59 | Possibilit\u00e9 d'une joie active, distincte de la joie passive : poss\u00e9der la puissance d'agir. | Critique de la tristesse. | Le concept complet de joie.\n\nLIVRE IV\n\n|  |  |\n\nLe bon et le mauvais.\n\n1-18 | Les rapports de force entre affections : les facteurs de leurs puissances respectives. | Le bon et le mauvais, par opposition au Bien et au Mal. | Les d\u00e9terminations du \u00ab conatus \u00bb.\n\n19-45 | Premier aspect de la raison : s\u00e9lectionner les affections passives, \u00e9liminer les tristesses, organiser les rencontres, composer les rapports, augmenter la puissance d'agir, \u00e9prouver le maximum de joies. | Utilit\u00e9 et n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 relatives de la soci\u00e9t\u00e9, comme rendant possible, pr\u00e9parant et accompagnant ce premier effort de la raison. | Critique d\u00e9velopp\u00e9e de la tristesse.\n\n46-73 | Le bon et le mauvais d'apr\u00e8s ce crit\u00e8re de la raison. | Suite de la critique de la tristesse. | L'homme libre et l'esclave, le fort et le faible, le raisonnable et l'insens\u00e9.\n\nLIVRE V\n\n|  |  |\n\nJoie pratique et affirmation sp\u00e9culative.\n\n1-13 | Comment nous arrivons en fait \u00e0 former des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates (notions communes). Comment les affections passives joyeuses nous y am\u00e8nent. Et comment, par l\u00e0, nous diminuons les tristesses, et formons une id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de toutes les affections passives. | Nous arrivons donc au second genre de connaissance, \u00e0 la faveur de certaines occasions fournies par le premier genre. | Second aspect de la raison : former les notions communes, et les affections actives de joie qui s'ensuivent. Devenir actif.\n\n14-20 | L'id\u00e9e de Dieu, \u00e0 l'extr\u00e9mit\u00e9 du second genre de connaissance. | Des notions communes \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. | Le Dieu impassible tel qu'il est compris dans le second genre.\n\n21-42 | Cette id\u00e9e de Dieu, \u00e0 son tour, nous fait sortir du second genre, et acc\u00e9der \u00e0 un troisi\u00e8me genre de connaissance : le Dieu r\u00e9ciproque du troisi\u00e8me genre, l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate de soi-m\u00eame, du corps et des autres corps. | Il y a autant de parties de l'\u00e2me que de types d'affections. Non seulement des affections passives de tristesse et de joie, mais aussi des affections actives de joie du second genre ; et encore des affections actives de joie du troisi\u00e8me genre. D'o\u00f9 l'on conclut \u00e0 ce qui est mortel et \u00e0 ce qui est \u00e9ternel dans l'\u00e2me : le c\u00f4t\u00e9 qui meurt et le c\u00f4t\u00e9 qui subsiste, les parties extensives et l'essence intensive. | L' _\u00c9thique_ proc\u00e9dait jusqu'ici par notions communes ; uniquement par notions communes. Mais elle change, et parle maintenant au nom du troisi\u00e8me genre. Unit\u00e9, dans ce troisi\u00e8me genre, de la joie pratique et de l'affirmation sp\u00e9culative : devenir expressif, la b\u00e9atitude, la r\u00e9ciprocit\u00e9, l'univocit\u00e9.\n\nIl faudrait une longue \u00e9tude des proc\u00e9d\u00e9s formels de l' _\u00c9thique_ et du r\u00f4le de chaque \u00e9l\u00e9ment (d\u00e9finitions, axiomes, postulats, etc.). Nous voudrions seulement consid\u00e9rer la fonction particuli\u00e8re et complexe des scolies.\n\nLe premier grand scolie de l' _\u00c9thique_ est celui de I, 8 (scolie 2). Il se propose de donner une _autre_ d\u00e9monstration de la proposition 5, d'apr\u00e8s laquelle il ne peut pas y avoir plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut. Comme nous l'avons vu dans notre premier chapitre, il proc\u00e8de ainsi : 1o) la distinction num\u00e9rique implique une causalit\u00e9 externe ; 2o) or il est impossible d'appliquer une cause ext\u00e9rieure \u00e0 une substance, parce que toute substance est en soi et est con\u00e7ue par soi ; 3o) deux ou plusieurs substances ne peuvent donc pas se distinguer num\u00e9riquement, sous un m\u00eame attribut.\n\nLa proposition 5 proc\u00e9dait autrement, et plus bri\u00e8vement : deux substances de m\u00eame attribut devraient se distinguer par les modes, ce qui est absurde. Mais apr\u00e8s 5, la proposition 6 d\u00e9montrait que la causalit\u00e9 externe ne peut _donc_ pas convenir \u00e0 la substance. Et 7, qu'une substance est _donc_ cause de soi. Et 8 concluait qu'une substance est _donc_ n\u00e9cessairement infinie.\n\nLe groupe des propositions 5-8, et le scolie 8, proc\u00e8dent \u00e0 l'inverse l'un de l'autre. Les propositions partent de la nature de la substance, et concluent \u00e0 son infinit\u00e9, c'est-\u00e0-dire \u00e0 l'impossibilit\u00e9 de lui appliquer des distinctions num\u00e9riques. Le scolie part de la nature de la distinction num\u00e9rique, et conclut \u00e0 l'impossibilit\u00e9 de l'appliquer \u00e0 la substance.\n\nOr on peut croire que le scolie, pour prouver que la substance r\u00e9pugne \u00e0 la causalit\u00e9 externe, aurait avantage \u00e0 invoquer les propositions 6 et 7. En fait c'est impossible. Car 6 et 7 supposent 5 ; le scolie ne serait donc pas une autre d\u00e9monstration. Il invoque pourtant, et longuement, la proposition 7. Mais en un sens tout nouveau : il en retient un contenu purement axiomatique, et la d\u00e9tache enti\u00e8rement de son contexte d\u00e9monstratif. \u00ab Si les hommes portaient leur attention sur la substance, ils ne douteraient nullement de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9 de la proposition 7, bien plus cette proposition serait pour tous un axiome et serait compt\u00e9e parmi les notions communes... \u00bb Alors le scolie peut op\u00e9rer lui-m\u00eame une d\u00e9monstration tout \u00e0 fait ind\u00e9pendante du groupe d\u00e9monstratif 5-8.\n\nNous pouvons d\u00e9gager trois caract\u00e8res d'un tel scolie : 1o) Il propose une seconde d\u00e9monstration, et cette d\u00e9monstration est _positive et intrins\u00e8que,_ par rapport \u00e0 la premi\u00e8re qui op\u00e9rait n\u00e9gativement, extrins\u00e8quement. (En effet, la proposition 5 se contentait d'invoquer l'ant\u00e9riorit\u00e9 de la substance pour conclure \u00e0 l'impossibilit\u00e9 d'assimiler la distinction modale \u00e0 une distinction substantielle. Le scolie de 8 conclut bien \u00e0 l'impossibilit\u00e9 d'assimiler la distinction num\u00e9rique \u00e0 la distinction substantielle, mais \u00e0 partir des caract\u00e8res intrins\u00e8ques et positifs du nombre et de la substance). 2o) Le scolie est _ostensif_ puisque, ind\u00e9pendant des d\u00e9monstrations pr\u00e9c\u00e9dentes, il doit se substituer \u00e0 elles, et retient seulement certaines propositions de mani\u00e8re axiomatique, en les d\u00e9tachant de leur encha\u00eenement d\u00e9monstratif. (Bien s\u00fbr, il arrive qu'un scolie invoque des d\u00e9monstrations, mais non pas celles du groupe qu'il est charg\u00e9 de \u00ab doubler \u00bb.) 3o) D'o\u00f9 vient alors l'\u00e9vidence qui permet de traiter les propositions reprises comme des axiomes, ind\u00e9pendamment de leur premier contexte et de leur d\u00e9monstration ? Cette \u00e9vidence nouvelle leur vient d'arguments _pol\u00e9miques_ , o\u00f9 Spinoza attaque, souvent avec violence, ceux qui ont l'esprit trop confus pour comprendre, ou m\u00eame qui ont int\u00e9r\u00eat \u00e0 entretenir la confusion. (D\u00e8s le scolie de 8 sont vivement d\u00e9nonc\u00e9s ceux qui ne comprennent pas la proposition 7 en elle-m\u00eame, et qui sont pr\u00eats \u00e0 croire aussi bien que les arbres parlent ou que les hommes naissent des pierres).\n\nBref, les scolies sont en g\u00e9n\u00e9ral positifs, ostensifs et agressifs. En vertu de leur ind\u00e9pendance \u00e0 l'\u00e9gard des propositions qu'ils doublent, on dirait que l' _\u00c9thique_ a \u00e9t\u00e9 simultan\u00e9ment \u00e9crite deux fois, sur deux tons, sur un double registre. En effet, il y a une mani\u00e8re, discontinue, dont les scolies sautent des uns aux autres, se font \u00e9cho, se retrouvent dans la pr\u00e9face de tel livre de l' _\u00c9thique_ ou dans la conclusion de tel autre, formant une ligne bris\u00e9e qui traverse toute l'\u0153uvre en profondeur, mais qui n'affleure qu'en tel ou tel point (les points de brisure). Par exemple, le scolie de I, 8 constitue une telle ligne avec celui de I, 15, puis celui de I, 17, puis celui de I, 33, puis celui de II, 3, enfin celui de II, 10 : il s'agit des diff\u00e9rents modes de d\u00e9figuration que l'homme fait subir \u00e0 Dieu. De m\u00eame le scolie de II, 13, qui \u00e9rige le mod\u00e8le du corps, saute dans le scolie de III, 2, pour aboutir dans la pr\u00e9face du livre V. De m\u00eame une ligne bris\u00e9e de scolies forme une sorte d'hymne \u00e0 la joie, toujours interrompu, et o\u00f9 se trouvent violemment d\u00e9nonc\u00e9s ceux qui vivent de tristesse, ceux qui ont int\u00e9r\u00eat \u00e0 nos tristesses, ceux qui ont besoin de la tristesse humaine pour assurer leur pouvoir : IV, 45, sc. 2 ; IV, 50, sc. ; IV, 63 sc. ; V, 10, sc. De m\u00eame encore, le couple homme libre-esclave de IV, 66, sc., se retrouve dans le couple fort-faible de IV, 73, sc., puis sage-ignorant de V, 42, sc. sur lequel se termine l' _\u00c9thique_. Ou enfin V, 4, sc. ; V, 20 sc., qui forment la cha\u00eene royale nous conduisant au troisi\u00e8me genre.\n\nD\u00e8s lors les grands \u00ab tournants \u00bb de l' _\u00c9thique_ sont forc\u00e9ment pr\u00e9sent\u00e9s dans les scolies. Car la continuit\u00e9 des propositions et d\u00e9monstrations ne peut recevoir des points remarquables, des impulsions diverses, des changements de directions, que par l'\u00e9mergence de quelque chose qui s'exprime dans les scolies, pierre-scolie, remous-scolie, provoquant cette brisure en \u00e9mergeant. Exemples de tels tournants : II, 13, sc. (l'appel au mod\u00e8le du corps) ; III, 57, sc. (l'appel au mod\u00e8le des joies actives) ; IV, 18, sc. (l'appel au mod\u00e8le de la raison) ; V, 20, sc. et 36, sc. (l'appel au troisi\u00e8me genre).\n\nIl y a donc comme deux _\u00c9thiques_ coexistantes, l'une constitu\u00e9e par la ligne ou le flot continus des propositions, d\u00e9monstrations et corollaires, l'autre, discontinue, constitu\u00e9e par la ligne bris\u00e9e ou la cha\u00eene volcanique des scolies. L'une, avec une rigueur implacable, repr\u00e9sente une sorte de terrorisme de la t\u00eate, et progresse d'une proposition \u00e0 l'autre sans se soucier des cons\u00e9quences pratiques, \u00e9labore ses _r\u00e8gles_ sans se soucier d'identifier les _cas_. L'autre recueille les indignations et les joies du c\u0153ur, manifeste la joie pratique et la lutte pratique contre la tristesse, et s'exprime en disant \u00ab c'est le cas \u00bb. En ce sens l' _\u00c9thique_ est un livre double. Il peut \u00eatre int\u00e9ressant de lire la seconde _\u00c9thique_ sous la premi\u00e8re, en sautant d'un scolie \u00e0 l'autre.\n\nRevenons aux trois caract\u00e8res du scolie : positif, ostensif, agressif. Il est \u00e9vident que ces caract\u00e8res empi\u00e8tent les uns sur les autres, \u00e0 l'int\u00e9rieur d'un m\u00eame scolie. Nous pouvons toutefois les consid\u00e9rer s\u00e9par\u00e9ment.\n\nQue le scolie proc\u00e8de positivement, cela peut vouloir dire, nous l'avons vu, qu'il s'appuie sur des caract\u00e8res intrins\u00e8ques, alors que la d\u00e9monstration correspondante reposait seulement sur des propri\u00e9t\u00e9s extrins\u00e8ques. Un exemple particuli\u00e8rement net est donn\u00e9 en III, 7, \u00e0 propos du \u00ab flottement de l'\u00e2me \u00bb : celui-ci, dans la d\u00e9monstration de la proposition, est d\u00e9fini par le jeu des causes ext\u00e9rieures qui le provoquent, mais dans le scolie, par la diversit\u00e9 des rapports internes qui nous composent. Cela peut vouloir dire aussi que le scolie proc\u00e8de a priori, tandis que la d\u00e9monstration est a posteriori : ainsi en II, 1, o\u00f9 la d\u00e9monstration passe par les modes, mais le scolie repose sur la possibilit\u00e9 de penser directement une qualit\u00e9 comme infinie. De m\u00eame en I, 11, le scolie propose une d\u00e9monstration a priori fond\u00e9e \u00ab sur le m\u00eame principe \u00bb que le proc\u00e9d\u00e9 a posteriori de la d\u00e9monstration. Ou bien encore le scolie si important du parall\u00e9lisme, en II, 7 : alors que la d\u00e9monstration va de l'effet \u00e0 la cause pour conclure que l'ordre de la connaissance est le m\u00eame que celui des choses, alors que l'ensemble de la d\u00e9monstration et du corollaire s'\u00e9l\u00e8ve de cette identit\u00e9 d'ordre dans les modes \u00e0 une \u00e9galit\u00e9 de puissances en Dieu, le scolie au contraire part de l'unit\u00e9 ontologique de la substance pour conclure \u00e0 l'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des puissances et \u00e0 l'identit\u00e9 d'ordre. (Entre les deux proc\u00e9d\u00e9s, nous l'avons vu, il y a un d\u00e9calage, qui ne peut \u00eatre combl\u00e9 que dans la mesure o\u00f9 Spinoza, dans le scolie lui-m\u00eame, invoque l'id\u00e9e de Dieu d'une mani\u00e8re ostensive : ce qui nous renvoie d\u00e9j\u00e0 au second caract\u00e8re des scolies.)\n\nMais, pour en finir avec le premier caract\u00e8re, nous devons dire que la positivit\u00e9 des scolies se manifeste encore d'une autre fa\u00e7on particuli\u00e8rement complexe : il se peut que le scolie op\u00e8re dans l'\u00e9l\u00e9ment d'une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle, tandis que la proposition et la d\u00e9monstration tiraient les cons\u00e9quences de d\u00e9finitions nominales : c'est ainsi que, dans le livre I, les propositions 9 et 10 \u00e9tablissent la possibilit\u00e9 simplement logique d'un m\u00eame \u00eatre ayant une infinit\u00e9 d'attributs dont chacun est con\u00e7u par soi, mais se contentent d'invoquer les d\u00e9finitions 3 et 4, qui sont les d\u00e9finitions nominales de la substance et de l'attribut. Le scolie, au contraire, invoque la d\u00e9finition 6, dont nous avons vu qu'elle \u00e9tait la seule r\u00e9elle de toutes celles qui ouvrent le livre I. Bien plus, comme une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle est une d\u00e9finition dont on doit pouvoir _d\u00e9montrer_ qu'elle est r\u00e9elle, c'est-\u00e0-dire qu'elle fonde la possibilit\u00e9 \u00ab r\u00e9elle \u00bb de son objet (possibilit\u00e9 transcendantale par opposition \u00e0 la possibilit\u00e9 seulement logique), le scolie de 10 se charge effectivement de cette t\u00e2che, et d\u00e9montre que la d\u00e9finition 6 est bien r\u00e9elle : en effet la distinction des attributs, en vertu de ses caract\u00e8res positifs, ne peut pas \u00eatre num\u00e9rique. L\u00e0 encore il faut un usage ostensif de la proposition 9, s\u00e9par\u00e9e de son contexte.\n\nLe caract\u00e8re positif des scolies a donc trois aspects : intrins\u00e8que, a priori ou r\u00e9el. Consid\u00e9rons le second caract\u00e8re, ostensif. Lui aussi a plusieurs aspects, dont nous avons vu le principal. Cet aspect principal est axiomatique : il consiste, pour le scolie, \u00e0 invoquer le th\u00e8me d'une proposition pr\u00e9c\u00e9dente en l'extrayant de la cha\u00eene continue des propositions et d\u00e9monstrations, en lui donnant une force nouvelle directement pol\u00e9mique : ainsi dans les scolies de I, 8 (usage de la proposition 7) ; de I, 10 (usage de la proposition 9) ; de II, 3 (invocation de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu) ; de II, 7 (invocation des H\u00e9breux)... Le deuxi\u00e8me aspect, il est vrai, semble en retrait sur celui-ci ; car il arrive que les scolies se contentent de pr\u00e9senter un simple exemple de la proposition correspondante : ainsi en II, 8 (l'exemple des lignes dans le cercle) ; en IV, 40 (l'exemple si curieux de l'action de frapper) ; en IV, 63 (l'exemple du valide et du malade)... Mais il semble que la plupart des exemples chez Spinoza se d\u00e9passent dans deux directions, vers deux fonctions plus hautes et essentielles : l'une paradigmatique, l'autre casuistique. Ainsi en II, 13, sc., puis en III, 2, sc., se trouve dress\u00e9 le _mod\u00e8le_ du corps : non pas que le corps serve de mod\u00e8le \u00e0 la pens\u00e9e, et rompe le parall\u00e9lisme ou l'autonomie respective de la pens\u00e9e et de l'\u00e9tendue, mais il intervient comme un exemple d\u00e9veloppant une fonction paradigmatique, pour montrer \u00ab parall\u00e8lement \u00bb combien il y a de choses dans la pens\u00e9e m\u00eame qui d\u00e9passe la conscience. De m\u00eame le mod\u00e8le de la nature humaine, annonc\u00e9 en IV, 18, sc., d\u00e9velopp\u00e9 en V, 10, sc., et 20, sc. Enfin le mod\u00e8le du troisi\u00e8me genre, annonc\u00e9 en II, 40, sc., puis dans les derni\u00e8res lignes de V, 20 sc., et formul\u00e9 en V, 36, sc.\n\nD'autre part la fonction casuistique du pseudo-exemple appara\u00eet dans tous les scolies qui s'expriment, par rapport \u00e0 la d\u00e9monstration pr\u00e9c\u00e9dente, sous la forme d'un \u00ab c'est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment le cas \u00bb. L\u00e0 encore il ne s'agit pas d'un simple exemple, mais d'une stricte assignation des conditions sous lesquelles l'objet de la d\u00e9monstration correspondante se trouve effectivement r\u00e9alis\u00e9 : le scolie d\u00e9termine le cas subsum\u00e9 par la r\u00e8gle contenue dans la d\u00e9monstration correspondante, non pas comme un cas parmi d'autres, mais comme le cas qui remplit cette r\u00e8gle et satisfait \u00e0 toutes les conditions. Il arrive que les conditions soient restrictives, et qu'un scolie, parfois tr\u00e8s loin de la proposition correspondante, rappelle que cette proposition et la d\u00e9monstration devaient s'entendre en un sens restreint : II, 45, sc. ; IV, 33, sc. ; etc. Mais plus profond\u00e9ment il y a dans cet aspect des scolies quelque chose qui vient recouper le proc\u00e9d\u00e9 positif, puisque, au moins pour les erreurs et les passions, il est impossible d'obtenir une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle ind\u00e9pendamment des conditions qui effectuent l'objet pr\u00e9alablement indiqu\u00e9 dans la proposition et la d\u00e9monstration, impossible aussi de d\u00e9gager ce qu'il y a de positif dans l'erreur ou la passion si ces conditions ne sont pas d\u00e9termin\u00e9es dans le scolie. C'est pourquoi les scolies de ce type proc\u00e8dent sous la forme d'un \u00ab fiat \u00bb : voil\u00e0 comment la chose se produit... Ainsi le scolie de II, 35 explique comment l'erreur, d\u00e9finie comme une privation dans la proposition, se produit effectivement, et n'en a pas moins d\u00e9j\u00e0 une certaine positivit\u00e9 dans ces conditions o\u00f9 elle se produit. Ainsi encore, II, 44, ayant \u00e9nonc\u00e9 et d\u00e9montr\u00e9 que seule l'imagination consid\u00e8re les choses comme contingentes, le scolie se propose \u00e0 son tour de d\u00e9montrer \u00ab dans quelle condition cela a lieu \u00bb ( _qua ratione fiat_ ). Le livre III g\u00e9n\u00e9ralise ce proc\u00e9d\u00e9 : quand les propositions et les d\u00e9monstrations tracent dans leur progression continue le mouvement par lequel les affections s'encha\u00eenent et d\u00e9rivent les unes des autres, les scolies introduisent un arr\u00eat, comme une photo tout d'un coup prise, un figeage, une immobilit\u00e9 provisoire, un instantan\u00e9, qui montre que telle affection ou telle facult\u00e9 bien connues r\u00e9pondent effectivement, et dans telles conditions, \u00e0 ce dont parlait la proposition. Il en \u00e9tait d\u00e9j\u00e0 ainsi dans le livre II, avec la m\u00e9moire (II, 18, sc.), avec les notions communes (II, 40, sc. 1). Mais dans le livre III, se multiplient les formules des scolies du type : \u00ab Nous connaissons par l\u00e0 comment il peut arriver... \u00bb, \u00ab Nous voyons qu'il peut arriver \u00bb, \u00ab Cela a lieu parce que... \u00bb Et en m\u00eame temps les affections ou facult\u00e9s trouvent leur nom : non seulement M\u00e9moire, Notions communes dans le livre II, mais dans le livre III tous les noms d'affections, qui seront recueillies dans les d\u00e9finitions finales, comme dans un \u00e9cho de tous les scolies, Joie, Tristesse, Amour, Haine, etc. Comme si le mouvement des propositions, d\u00e9monstrations et corollaires poussait contin\u00fbment le flot des affections, mais que celui-ci ne formait ses vagues et ses cr\u00eates que dans les scolies. Comme si les propositions, d\u00e9monstrations et corollaires parlaient le plus haut langage, impersonnel et peu soucieux d'identifier ce dont il parle, puisque ce qu'il dit est de toutes fa\u00e7ons fond\u00e9 dans une v\u00e9rit\u00e9 sup\u00e9rieure \u2013 tandis que les scolies baptisent, donnent un nom, identifient, d\u00e9signent et d\u00e9noncent, sondant en profondeur ce que l'\u00ab autre \u00bb langage \u00e9talait et faisait avancer.\n\nLe second caract\u00e8re du scolie, ostensif, a donc \u00e0 son tour trois aspects principaux : axiomatique, paradigmatique et casuistique. Or ils mettent d\u00e9j\u00e0 constamment en jeu le dernier caract\u00e8re des scolies, pol\u00e9mique ou agressif. Ce caract\u00e8re ultime a lui aussi des aspects divers : tant\u00f4t il s'agit d'analyser la _confusion sp\u00e9culative_ ou la stupidit\u00e9 intellectuelle de ceux qui d\u00e9figurent Dieu, qui le traitent comme un \u00ab roi \u00bb, qui lui pr\u00eatent entendement et volont\u00e9, finalit\u00e9 et projet, figure et fonction, etc. (surtout les scolies du livre I). Tant\u00f4t il s'agit de d\u00e9terminer les conditions dans lesquelles se produisent l' _erreur sensible_ et les passions qui en d\u00e9coulent (surtout les scolies des livres II et III). Tant\u00f4t il s'agit de d\u00e9noncer le _mal pratique,_ c'est-\u00e0-dire les passions tristes, la contagion de ces passions, l'int\u00e9r\u00eat de ceux qui en profitent \u2013 cette d\u00e9nonciation se faisant surtout dans le livre IV, mais en rapport avec le projet le plus g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de l' _\u00c9thique_ tel qu'il est rappel\u00e9 dans les pr\u00e9faces ou conclusions de certaines parties. La pol\u00e9mique a donc pour son compte trois aspects, sp\u00e9culatif, sensible et pratique. Comment s'\u00e9tonner que tous ces aspects, et tous les caract\u00e8res dont ils d\u00e9pendent, se confirment et empi\u00e8tent les uns sur les autres ? Les grands scolies les r\u00e9unissent tous. Le scolie a toujours une intention positive ; mais il ne peut la remplir qu'\u00e0 l'aide d'un proc\u00e9d\u00e9 ostensif ; et il ne peut fonder celui-ci qu'en impliquant une pol\u00e9mique. Le proc\u00e9d\u00e9 ostensif, \u00e0 son tour, se trouve partag\u00e9 entre l'argumentation pol\u00e9mique qui lui donne sa pleine valeur, et le principe positif qu'il sert. On se demandera comment concilier la d\u00e9marche positive du scolie avec son argument pol\u00e9mique, critique et n\u00e9gateur. C'est que, inversement, la puissance pol\u00e9mique si vive de Spinoza se d\u00e9veloppe en silence, loin des discussions, au service d'une affirmation sup\u00e9rieure et d'une \u00ab ostensivit\u00e9 \u00bb sup\u00e9rieure. Selon Spinoza, la n\u00e9gation ne sert que pour nier le n\u00e9gatif, pour nier ce qui nie et ce qui obscurcit. La pol\u00e9mique, la n\u00e9gation, la d\u00e9nonciation ne sont l\u00e0 que pour nier ce qui nie, ce qui trompe et ce qui cache : ce qui profite de l'erreur, ce qui vit de la tristesse, ce qui pense dans le n\u00e9gatif. C'est pourquoi les scolies les plus pol\u00e9miques r\u00e9unissent, dans un style et sur un ton particuliers, les deux go\u00fbts supr\u00eames de l'affirmation sp\u00e9culative (celle de la substance) et de la joie pratique (celle des modes) : le double langage, pour une double lecture de l' _\u00c9thique_. \u00c0 la fois la pol\u00e9mique est le plus important dans les plus grands scolies, mais sa puissance se d\u00e9veloppe d'autant plus qu'elle est au service de l'affirmation sp\u00e9culative et de la joie pratique, et les fait se rejoindre dans l'\u00e9l\u00e9ment de l'univocit\u00e9.\n\n# INDEX\n\n# DES NOMS PROPRES\n\nAlqui\u00e9, , , , , , .\n\nAppuhn, .\n\nAristote, , , -143, .\n\nArnou, .\n\nBo\u00e8ce, .\n\nBonaventure, .\n\nBrochard, .\n\nBruno, , .\n\nBusolt, .\n\nCrescas, .\n\nDarbon, .\n\nDelbos, .\n\nDescartes, -24, , , -62, -75, , , -152, , , -302.\n\nDuns Scot, -58, , .\n\nEckhart, , .\n\n\u00c9lie, .\n\nErdmann, .\n\nFichte, , .\n\nFoucher de Careil, , .\n\nFranc\u00e8s, .\n\nFriedmann, , .\n\nGandillac, , , , , .\n\nGeoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, .\n\nGilson, , , , , , .\n\nGu\u00e9roult, , , , , .\n\nHeereboord, , .\n\nHobbes, , , .\n\nHuan, .\n\nKant, , .\n\nKaufmann, .\n\nKoyr\u00e9, , , .\n\nLachi\u00e8ze-Rey, , , .\n\nLaporte, .\n\nLasbax, .\n\nLeibniz, , -63, -68, , -97, , -139, , , , -209, -212, , , -311.\n\nL\u00e9on, , .\n\nLossky, .\n\nLucr\u00e8ce, .\n\nMerleau-Ponty, .\n\nNicolas de Cues, , , .\n\nNietzsche, .\n\nPlaton, -154.\n\nPlotin, -158, -161.\n\nPolin, .\n\nR\u00e9gis, .\n\nR\u00e9vah, .\n\nRivaud, , .\n\nRobinson, , .\n\nRousseau, .\n\nSchelling, , , .\n\nStrauss, .\n\nSuarez, , , .\n\nVajda, .\n\n# TABLE DES MATI\u00c8RES\n\nINTRODUCTION : R\u00d4LE ET IMPORTANCE DE L'EXPRESSION... -18\n\n> Importance du mot \u00ab exprimer \u00bb chez Spinoza. Son triple emploi : exprimer une essence, exprimer l'essence, exprimer l'existence. \u2013 Caract\u00e8re expressif de l'attribut, du mode et de l'id\u00e9e. \u2013 Exprimer : expliquer ou d\u00e9velopper ; impliquer ou envelopper ; compliquer, contenir ou comprendre. \u2013 Leibniz et Spinoza comptent sur l'id\u00e9e d'expression pour d\u00e9passer les difficult\u00e9s du cart\u00e9sianisme. \u2013 Pourquoi les commentateurs n'ont gu\u00e8re retenu l'id\u00e9e d'expression chez Spinoza. \u2013 Pourquoi l'id\u00e9e d'expression chez Spinoza n'est ni objet de d\u00e9finition, ni objet de d\u00e9monstration. Expression et d\u00e9monstration.\n\nPREMI\u00c8RE PARTIE : LES TRIADES DE LA SUBSTANCE\n\n_CHAPITRE I : Distinction num\u00e9rique et distinction r\u00e9elle_... -32\n\n> L'expression comme triade. Premi\u00e8re triade de l'expression : substance, attribut, essence.\n> \n> Le probl\u00e8me des distinctions chez Descartes. \u2013 Selon Descartes, il y a des substances de m\u00eame attribut : distinctions num\u00e9riques qui sont r\u00e9elles. \u2013 Et il y a des substances d'attribut diff\u00e9rent : distinctions r\u00e9elles qui sont num\u00e9riques. \u2013 Th\u00e9orie de Spinoza : il n'y a pas plusieurs substances de m\u00eame attribut, la distinction num\u00e9rique n'est jamais r\u00e9elle. \u2013 Cons\u00e9quence : la distinction r\u00e9elle n'est jamais num\u00e9rique, il n'y a pas plusieurs substances correspondant aux attributs diff\u00e9rents. \u2013 Les huit premi\u00e8res propositions de l' _\u00c9thique_ n'ont pas un sens simplement hypoth\u00e9tique. Gen\u00e8se ou constitution de la substance.\n> \n> Opposition de Spinoza avec Descartes, du point de vue de la th\u00e9orie des distinctions. Signification de la distinction r\u00e9elle chez Spinoza.\n\n _CHAPITRE II : L'attribut comme expression_... -43\n\n> Le statut de l'attribut et son caract\u00e8re expressif. Les textes du _Court Trait\u00e9._\n> \n> Probl\u00e8me des noms divins. \u2013 Attribut, attribution et qualit\u00e9. \u2013 Les attributs sont des formes communes \u00e0 Dieu et aux \u00ab cr\u00e9atures \u00bb. \u2013 Comment cette th\u00e8se ne supprime nullement la distinction d'essence entre Dieu et les choses. \u2013 Spinoza, partisan de l'univocit\u00e9 : contre l'\u00e9quivocit\u00e9, contre l'\u00e9minence, contre l'analogie. \u2013 Univocit\u00e9 des attributs et noms divins.\n> \n> Opposition des attributs et des propres. \u2013 Les trois esp\u00e8ces de propres. \u2013 Les propres ne sont pas expressifs.\n\n _CHAPITRE III : Attributs et noms divins_... -58\n\n> Th\u00e9ologie n\u00e9gative et m\u00e9thode d'analogie. \u2013 L'une et l'autre impliquent une confusion des attributs avec les propres. Confusion de la nature de Dieu avec de simples propri\u00e9t\u00e9s, confusion de l'expression avec la \u00ab r\u00e9v\u00e9lation \u00bb. \u2013 Pourquoi ces confusions sont constantes dans la th\u00e9ologie. \u2013 Oppositions du signe et de l'expression. \u2013 Noms expressifs et mots imp\u00e9ratifs. \u2013 Les attributs comme affirmations pures. \u2013 Distinction r\u00e9elle et affirmation.\n> \n> Comment des \u00ab expressions \u00bb diverses d\u00e9signent une seule et m\u00eame chose. La logique du sens. \u2013 Th\u00e9ologie positive et univocit\u00e9. \u2013 Distinction formelle selon Duns Scot et distinction r\u00e9elle selon Spinoza. \u2013 De l'univocit\u00e9 \u00e0 l'immanence.\n\n _CHAPITRE IV : L'absolu_... -71\n\n> L'\u00e9galit\u00e9 des attributs. \u2013 L'infiniment parfait et l'absolument infini.\n> \n> L'infiniment parfait comme \u00ab nerf \u00bb des preuves cart\u00e9siennes de l'existence de Dieu. \u2013 Sens des objections dirig\u00e9es contre la preuve ontologique de Descartes. \u2013 Leibniz et Spinoza : insuffisance de l'infiniment parfait. \u2013 Spinoza : l'absolument infini comme raison de l'infiniment parfait. \u2013 La preuve ontologique chez Spinoza ; plan du d\u00e9but de l' _\u00c9thique_. \u2013 Diff\u00e9rences du _Court Trait\u00e9_ et de l' _\u00c9thique. \u2013_ Leibniz et Spinoza du point de vue de la preuve ontologique. \u2013 La d\u00e9finition 6 est une d\u00e9finition r\u00e9elle.\n> \n> Seconde triade de l'expression : le parfait, l'infini, l'absolu.\n\n _CHAPTRE V : La puissance_... -84\n\n> Descartes, accus\u00e9 de rapidit\u00e9 ou de facilit\u00e9. \u2013 Les formulations de la preuve a posteriori chez Descartes : la notion de \u00ab facile \u00bb. \u2013 La quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ou de perfection, comme nerf de la preuve a posteriori de Descartes. \u2013 Insuffisance de la quantit\u00e9 de r\u00e9alit\u00e9 : la puissance comme raison.\n> \n> La preuve a posteriori dans le _Court Trait\u00e9. \u2013_ Formation d'un argument des puissances. \u2013 Les deux puissances : de penser et de conna\u00eetre, d'exister et d'agir. \u2013 La preuve a posteriori dans l' _\u00c9thique_ : la puissance d'exister, consid\u00e9r\u00e9e directement.\n> \n> Les attributs : conditions sous lesquelles on attribue \u00e0 quelque chose une puissance. \u2013 Cas de la substance absolument infinie, cas des \u00eatres finis. \u2013 Puissance et essence. \u2013 Les choses sont des modes, c'est-\u00e0-dire ont une puissance.\n> \n> Puissance et pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9. \u2013 Troisi\u00e8me triade de l'expression : l'essence comme puissance, ce dont elle est l'essence, le pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9.\n\nDEUXI\u00c8ME PARTIE : LE PARALL\u00c9LISME ET L'IMMANENCE\n\n_CHAPITRE VI : L'expression dans le parall\u00e9lisme_... -98\n\n> La production comme re-expression. \u2013 Dieu produit comme il se comprend, Dieu produit comme il existe. \u2013 Univocit\u00e9 de la cause : Dieu, cause de toutes choses au m\u00eame sens que cause de soi. \u2013 Contre l'analogie. \u2013 Logique du sens et re-expression.\n> \n> Ordre de production. \u2013 Exclusion d'une causalit\u00e9 r\u00e9elle entre modes d'attribut diff\u00e9rent. \u2013 Le parall\u00e9lisme : identit\u00e9 d'ordre, identit\u00e9 de connexion, identit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre. \u2013 L'identit\u00e9 de connexion et le principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9. \u2013 L'identit\u00e9 d'\u00eatre : mode et modification. \u2013 Nouvelle triade de l'expression. : attribut, mode et modification.\n\n _CHAPITRE VII : Les deux puissances et l'id\u00e9e de Dieu_... -113\n\n> Complexit\u00e9 de la d\u00e9monstration du parall\u00e9lisme : l'id\u00e9e et son objet. \u2013 Parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique et parall\u00e9lisme ontologique.\n> \n> \u00c0 toute id\u00e9e correspond quelque chose : influence d'Aristote. \u2013 \u00c0 toute chose correspond une id\u00e9e. \u2013 Pourquoi Dieu se comprend n\u00e9cessairement. \u2013 \u00ab N\u00e9cessit\u00e9 \u00bb de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. \u2013 La puissance de penser est n\u00e9cessairement \u00e9gale \u00e0 la puissance d'exister et d'agir.\n> \n> Les deux puissances et leur \u00e9galit\u00e9. \u2013 Distinction de la puissance et de l'attribut. \u2013 Les attributs et la puissance d'exister. \u2013 L'attribut pens\u00e9e et la puissance de penser. \u2013 Source des \u00ab privil\u00e8ges \u00bb de l'attribut pens\u00e9e.\n> \n> \u00ab Possibilit\u00e9 \u00bb de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. \u2013 Pourquoi l'entendement infini est un produit. \u2013 Les trois privil\u00e8ges de l'attribut pens\u00e9e.\n> \n> Pourquoi il \u00e9tait n\u00e9cessaire de passer par le parall\u00e9lisme \u00e9pist\u00e9mologique. \u2013 Seule l'id\u00e9e de Dieu permet de conclure de l'unit\u00e9 de la substance \u00e0 l'unit\u00e9 d'une modification. Transfert de l'expression.\n\n _CHAPITRE VIII : Expression et id\u00e9e_... -129\n\n> Premier aspect de la m\u00e9thode, formel ou reflexif : l'id\u00e9e de l'id\u00e9e, l'id\u00e9e qui s'explique par notre puissance de comprendre. \u2013 Forme et r\u00e9flexion.\n> \n> Passage au deuxi\u00e8me aspect. \u2013 Deuxi\u00e8me aspect de la m\u00e9thode, mat\u00e9riel ou g\u00e9n\u00e9tique : le contenu de l'id\u00e9e vraie, l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate, l'id\u00e9e qui exprime sa propre cause. \u2013 Id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate et d\u00e9finition g\u00e9n\u00e9tique. \u2013 R\u00f4le de la fiction. \u2013 Comment la gen\u00e8se nous conduit \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. \u2013 Passage au troisi\u00e8me aspect : arriver le plus vite possible \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu. \u2013 Troisi\u00e8me aspect de la m\u00e9thode : unit\u00e9 de la forme et du contenu, l'automate spirituel, la concat\u00e9nation. \u2013 Expression et repr\u00e9sentation.\n> \n> D\u00e9finition mat\u00e9rielle et d\u00e9finition formelle de la v\u00e9rit\u00e9. \u2013 L'expression, l'id\u00e9e ad\u00e9quate et l'id\u00e9e r\u00e9flexive. \u2013 Caract\u00e8re ad\u00e9quat de l'id\u00e9e de Dieu.\n\n _CHAPITRE IX : L'inad\u00e9quat_... -139\n\n> Comment nous \u00ab avons \u00bb des id\u00e9es. \u2013 Les conditions sous lesquelles nous avons des id\u00e9es ne semblent pas permettre que ces id\u00e9es soient ad\u00e9quates. \u2013 En quel sens \u00ab envelopper \u00bb s'oppose \u00e0 \u00ab exprimer \u00bb. \u2013 L'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate est inexpressive. \u2013 Probl\u00e8me de Spinoza : comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 avoir des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates ? \u2013 Quelque chose de positif dans l'id\u00e9e inad\u00e9quate.\n> \n> L'insuffisance du clair et du distinct. \u2013 Le clair et le distinct servent seulement \u00e0 la recognition. \u2013 Ils manquent d'une raison suffisante. \u2013 Descartes en reste au contenu repr\u00e9sentatif, il n'atteint pas le contenu expressif de l'id\u00e9e. Il en reste \u00e0 la forme de la conscience psychologique, il n'atteint pas la forme logique. \u2013 Le clair et le distinct laissent \u00e9chapper l'essence et la cause. \u2013 Leibniz et Spinoza, du point de vue de la critique de l'id\u00e9e claire et distincte.\n\n _CHAPITRE X : Spinoza contre Descartes_... -152\n\n> En quel sens la m\u00e9thode de Descartes est analytique. \u2013 Insuffisance de cette m\u00e9thode, selon Spinoza. \u2013 M\u00e9thode synth\u00e9tique. \u2013 Aristote et Spinoza : conna\u00eetre par la cause. \u2013 Comment la cause elle-m\u00eame est connue.\n> \n> Dieu comme cause de soi, selon Descartes : \u00e9quivocit\u00e9, \u00e9minence, analogie. \u2013 Dieu comme cause de soi, selon Spinoza : univocit\u00e9. \u2013 Univocit\u00e9 et immanence. \u2013 Les axiomes cart\u00e9siens et leur transformation chez Spinoza.\n\n _CHAPITRE XI : L'immanence et les \u00e9l\u00e9ments historiques de l'expression_... -169\n\n> Probl\u00e8me de la participation dans le n\u00e9o-platonisme. \u2013 Don et \u00e9manation. \u2013 Double diff\u00e9rence entre la cause \u00e9manative et la cause immanente, Comment, dans le n\u00e9o-platonisme, une cause immanente se joint \u00e0 la cause \u00e9manative : l'\u00eatre ou l'intelligence. \u2013 _Complicare-explicare. \u2013_ Immanence et principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9. \u2013 L'id\u00e9e d'expression dans l'\u00e9manation. \u2013 L'id\u00e9e d'expression dans la cr\u00e9ation : expression et similitude. \u2013 Comment, dans la th\u00e9orie de la cr\u00e9ation, une cause immanente se joint \u00e0 la cause exemplaire.\n> \n> L'expression, selon Spinoza, cesse d'\u00eatre subordonn\u00e9e aux hypoth\u00e8ses de la cr\u00e9ation et de l'\u00e9manation. \u2013 Opposition de l'expression et du signe. \u2013 Immanence : distinction et univocit\u00e9 des attributs. \u2013 Th\u00e9orie spinoziste de la hi\u00e9rarchie. \u2013 L'expression et les diff\u00e9rents sens du principe d'\u00e9galit\u00e9.\n\nTROISI\u00c8ME PARTIE : TH\u00c9ORIE DU MODE FINI\n\n_CHAPITRE XII : L'essence de mode : passage de l'infini au fini_... -182\n\n> Sens du mot \u00ab partie \u00bb. \u2013 Qualit\u00e9, quantit\u00e9, intensive, quantit\u00e9 extensive. \u2013 Les deux infinis modaux, dans la _Lettre \u00e0 Meyer._\n> \n> L'essence de mode comme r\u00e9alit\u00e9 physique : degr\u00e9 de puissance ou quantit\u00e9 intensive. \u2013 Statut du mode non-existant. \u2013 Essence et existence. \u2013 Essence et existence de l'essence. \u2013 Probl\u00e8me de la distinction des essences de modes. \u2013 Th\u00e9orie de la distinction ou de la diff\u00e9renciation quantitative. \u2013 La production des essences : essence de mode et complication.\n> \n> L'expression quantitative.\n\n _CHAPITRE XIII : L'existence du mode_... -196\n\n> En quoi consiste l'existence du mode : existence et parties extensives. \u2013 La quantit\u00e9 extensive, seconde forme de la quantit\u00e9. \u2013 Difference de la quantit\u00e9 et du nombre. \u2013 Les corps simples. \u2013 Il n'y a pas lieu de chercher des essences correspondant aux corps les plus simples.\n> \n> Premi\u00e8re triade de l'expression dans le mode fini : essence, rapport caract\u00e9ristique, parties extensives. \u2013 Lois de composition et de d\u00e9composition des rapports.\n> \n> Sens de la distinction de l'essence et de l'existence du mode. \u2013 Probl\u00e8me de la distinction des modes existants. \u2013 Comment le mode existant se distingue de l'attribut de mani\u00e8re extrins\u00e8que. \u2013 Mode existant et explication.\n\n _CHAPITRE XIV : Qu'est-ce que peut un corps ?_... -213\n\n> Seconde triade de l'expression dans le mode fini : essence, pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9, affections qui remplissent ce pouvoir. \u2013 Affections de la substance et affections du mode. \u2013 Affections actives et affections passives. \u2013 Les affects ou sentiments. \u2013 Nous semblons condamn\u00e9s aux id\u00e9es inad\u00e9quates et aux sentiments passifs. \u2013 Les variations existentielles du mode fini. \u2013 Force active et force passive chez Leibniz, puissance d'agir et puissance de p\u00e2tir chez Spinoza. \u2013 En quoi la puissance d'agir est seule positive et r\u00e9elle. \u2013 Inspiration physique : notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 est toujours rempli. \u2013 Inspiration \u00e9thique : nous sommes s\u00e9par\u00e9s de ce que nous pouvons.\n> \n> Critique du spinozisme par Leibniz, caract\u00e8re ambigu de cette critique. \u2013 Ce qui est commun \u00e0 Leibniz et \u00e0 Spinoza : le projet d'un nouveau naturalisme, contre Descartes. \u2013 Les trois niveaux chez Leibniz et chez Spinoza. \u2013 La v\u00e9ritable opposition de Leibniz et de Spinoza : le _conatus. \u2013_ L'affection comme d\u00e9termination du _conatus_. \u2013 En quel sens la passion nous s\u00e9pare de ce que nous pouvons. \u2013 La nature expressive : naturalisme finalis\u00e9, ou naturalisme sans finalit\u00e9 ?\n\n _CHAPITRE XV : Les trois ordres et le probl\u00e8me du mal_... -233\n\n>  _Facies totius universi_. \u2013 En quel sens deux rapports peuvent ne pas se composer. \u2013 Les trois ordres, correspondant \u00e0 la triade du mode : l'ordre des essences, l'ordre des rapports, l'ordre des rencontres. \u2013 Importance du th\u00e8me de la rencontre fortuite chez Spinoza.\n> \n> Rencontre entre corps dont les rapports se composent. \u2013 Augmenter ou aider la puissance d'agir. \u2013 Comment la distinction des passions joyeuses et des passions tristes vient se joindre \u00e0 celle des affections actives et des affections passives. \u2013 Rencontre entre corps dont les rapports ne se composent pas. \u2013 Passion triste et \u00e9tat de nature. \u2013 Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 \u00e9prouver des passions joyeuses ?\n> \n> Pas de bien ni de mal, mais du bon et du mauvais. Le mal comme mauvaise rencontre ou d\u00e9composition d'un rapport. \u2013 M\u00e9taphore de l'empoisonnement. \u2013 Le mal n'est rien dans l'ordre des rapports ; le premier contresens de Blyenbergh. \u2013 Le mal n'est rien dans l'ordre des essences : deuxi\u00e8me contresens de Blyenbergh. \u2013 Le mal et l'ordre des rencontres ; l'exemple de l'aveugle et le troisi\u00e8me contresens de Blyenbergh.\n> \n> Sens de la th\u00e8se : le mal n'est rien. \u2013 Substitution de la diff\u00e9rence \u00e9thique \u00e0 l'opposition morale.\n\n _CHAPITRE XVI : Vision \u00e9thique du monde_... -251\n\n> Principe du rapport inverse de l'action et de la passion dans l'\u00e2me et dans le corps. \u2013 Opposition de Spinoza \u00e0 ce principe : la signification pratique du parall\u00e9lisme.\n> \n> Le droit naturel : pouvoir et droit. \u2013 Les quatre oppositions du droit naturel avec la loi naturelle antique. \u2013 \u00c9tat de nature et hasard des rencontres. \u2013 La raison sous son premier aspect : effort pour organiser les rencontres. \u2013 La diff\u00e9rence \u00e9thique : l'homme raisonnable, libre ou fort. \u2013 Adam. \u2013 \u00c9tat de nature et raison. \u2013 N\u00e9cessit\u00e9 d'une instance qui favorise l'effort de la raison. \u2013 La cit\u00e9 : diff\u00e9rences et ressemblances entre l'\u00e9tat civil et l'\u00e9tat de raison.\n> \n> L'\u00e9thique pose les probl\u00e8mes en termes de pouvoir et de puissance. \u2013 Opposition de l'\u00e9thique et de la morale. \u2013 Aller jusqu'au bout de ce qu'on peut. \u2013 Signification pratique de la philosophie. \u2013 D\u00e9noncer la tristesse et ses causes. \u2013 Affirmation et joie.\n\n _CHAPITRE XVII : Les Notions communes_... -267\n\n> Premi\u00e8re question : Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 \u00e9prouver un maximum de passions joyeuses ? \u2013 Deuxi\u00e8me question : Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 \u00e9prouver des affections actives ? \u2013 Joie passive et joie active.\n> \n> Convenance des corps, composition des rapports et communaut\u00e9 de composition. \u2013 Points de vue plus ou moins g\u00e9n\u00e9raux. \u2013 Les notions communes : leurs vari\u00e9t\u00e9s, suivant leur g\u00e9n\u00e9ralit\u00e9. \u2013 Les notions communes sont des id\u00e9es g\u00e9n\u00e9rales, mais non des id\u00e9es abstraites. \u2013 Critique de l'id\u00e9e abstraite. \u2013 De Spinoza \u00e0 Geoffroy St Hilaire. \u2013 Les notions communes sont n\u00e9cessairement ad\u00e9quates. \u2013 R\u00e9ponse \u00e0 la question : Comment arriverons-nous \u00e0 former des id\u00e9es ad\u00e9quates ? \u2013 Notion commune et expression.\n> \n> L'ordre de formation des notions communes va des moins g\u00e9n\u00e9rales aux plus g\u00e9n\u00e9rales. \u2013 La joie passive nous induit \u00e0 former une notion commune. \u2013 La raison sous son deuxi\u00e8me aspect : formation des notions communes. \u2013 Sens pratique de la notion commune : nous donner des joies actives. \u2013 Comment, \u00e0 partir des notions communes les moins g\u00e9n\u00e9rales, nous formons les plus g\u00e9n\u00e9rales. \u2013 Comprendre les tristesses in\u00e9vitables.\n\n _CHAPITRE XVIII : Vers le troisi\u00e8me genre_... -281\n\n> Complexit\u00e9 du premier genre de connaissance : \u00e9tat de nature, \u00e9tat civil, \u00e9tat de religion. \u2013 Les signes et le premier genre.\n> \n> Le second genre et l'\u00e9tat de raison. \u2013 Application des notions communes aux modes existants. \u2013 Les notions communes comme d\u00e9couverte de l' _\u00c9thique_. Pressentiments dans le _Trait\u00e9 de la r\u00e9forme. \u2013_ Harmonies entre le premier genre de connaissance et le second. \u2013 Harmonies de la raison et de l'imagination.\n> \n> Les notions communes comme conditions de notre _connaissance. \u2013_ Des notions communes \u00e0 l'id\u00e9e de Dieu : en quel sens elle appartient au second genre, en quel sens elle nous fait passer au troisi\u00e8me. \u2013 Notions communes et formes communes. \u2013 Le troisi\u00e8me genre et l'ordre des essences.\n\n _CHAPITRE XIX : B\u00e9atitude_... -298\n\n> Les trois d\u00e9terminations du troisi\u00e8me genre. \u2013 Joies actives du troisi\u00e8me genre.\n> \n> Diff\u00e9rence entre la joie active du troisi\u00e8me genre et celle du second. \u2013 L'id\u00e9e de nous-m\u00eames. \u2013 Affections adventices et affection inn\u00e9es. \u2013 L'inn\u00e9 du second genre et l'inn\u00e9 du troisi\u00e8me. \u2013 Le Dieu du second genre et le Dieu du troisi\u00e8me. \u2013 Le troisi\u00e8me genre et l'expression.\n> \n> Comment nous acc\u00e9dons au troisi\u00e8me genre, durant notre existence. \u2013 Limites de cet acc\u00e8s. \u2013 Contre l'interpr\u00e9tation math\u00e9matique et id\u00e9aliste des essences. \u2013 Diff\u00e9rence de nature entre la dur\u00e9e et l'\u00e9ternit\u00e9 : critique du concept d'immortalit\u00e9. \u2013 La mort. \u2013 Les affections du troisi\u00e8me genre ne remplissent enti\u00e8rement notre pouvoir d'\u00eatre affect\u00e9 qu'apr\u00e8s la mort. \u2013 En quel sens l'existence est une \u00e9preuve : l'id\u00e9e de salut chez Spinoza. \u2013 Partie intensive et parties extensives : leur importance respective du point de vue de l'expression. Devenir expressif.\n\nCONCLUSION : TH\u00c9ORIE DE L'EXPRESSION CHEZ LEIBNIZ ET CHEZ SPINOZA _(l'expressionnisme en philosophie)_... -311\n\n> Exprimer : \u00eatre, conna\u00eetre, agir ou produire. \u2013 Sens historique de ce concept. \u2013 Sens que lui donnent Leibniz et Spinoza : le triple aspect de la r\u00e9action contre Descartes. \u2013 La diff\u00e9rence Leibniz-Spinoza : les expressions \u00e9quivoques et l'analogie, les expressions univoques et l'univocit\u00e9. \u2013 Les trois figures de l'Univoque selon Spinoza. \u2013 Le paradoxe de l'expression : l'exprim\u00e9.\n\nAPPENDICE : \u00c9tude formelle du plan de l' _\u00c9thique_ et du r\u00f4le des scolies dans la r\u00e9alisation de ce plan... -322\nDU M\u00caME AUTEUR\n\nPR\u00c9SENTATION DE SACHER-MASOCH, _1967_ (\u00ab Reprise \u00bb, no 15)\n\nSPINOZA ET LE PROBL\u00c8ME DE L'EXPRESSION, _1968_\n\nLOGIQUE DU SENS, _1969_\n\nL'ANTI-\u0152DIPE (avec F\u00e9lix Guattari), _1972_\n\nKAFKA \\- Pour une litt\u00e9rature mineure (avec F\u00e9lix Guattari), _1975_\n\nRHIZOME (avec F\u00e9lix Guattari), _1976_ (repris dans _Mille plateaux_ )\n\nSUPERPOSITIONS (avec Carmelo Bene), _1979_\n\nMILLE PLATEAUX (avec F\u00e9lix Guattari), _1980_\n\nSPINOZA \\- PHILOSOPHIE PRATIQUE, _1981_ (\u00ab Reprise \u00bb, no 4)\n\nCIN\u00c9MA 1 - L'IMAGE-MOUVEMENT, _1983_\n\nCIN\u00c9MA 2 - L'IMAGE-TEMPS, _1985_\n\nFOUCAULT, _1986_ (\u00ab Reprise \u00bb, no 7)\n\nP\u00c9RICL\u00c8S ET VERDI. La philosophie de Fran\u00e7ois Ch\u00e2telet, _1988_\n\nLE PLI. Leibniz et le baroque, _1988_\n\nPOURPARLERS, _1990_ (\u00ab Reprise \u00bb, no 6)\n\nQU'EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE ? (avec F\u00e9lix Guattari), _1991_ (\u00ab Reprise \u00bb, no 13)\n\nL'\u00c9PUIS\u00c9 ( _in_ Samuel Beckett, _Quad_ ), _1992_\n\nCRITIQUE ET CLINIQUE, _1993_\n\nL'\u00ceLE D\u00c9SERTE. Textes et entretiens 1953-1974 (\u00e9dition pr\u00e9par\u00e9e par David Lapoujade), _2002_\n\nDEUX R\u00c9GIMES DE FOUS. Textes et entretiens 1975-1995 (\u00e9dition pr\u00e9par\u00e9e par David Lapoujade), _2003_\n\n_Aux P.U.F._\n\nEMPIRISME ET SUBJECTIVIT\u00c9, _1953_\n\nNIETZSCHE ET LA PHILOSOPHIE, _1962_\n\nLA PHILOSOPHIE DE KANT, _1963_\n\nPROUST ET LES SIGNES, _1964_ \\- \u00e9d. augment\u00e9e, _1970_\n\nNIETZSCHE, _1965_\n\nLE BERGSONISME, _1966_\n\nDIFF\u00c9RENCE ET R\u00c9P\u00c9TITION, _1969_\n\n_Aux \u00c9ditions Flammarion_\n\nDIALOGUES (en collaboration avec Claire Parnet), _1977_\n\n_Aux \u00c9ditions du Seuil_\n\nFRANCIS BACON : LOGIQUE DE LA SENSATION, _(1981), 2002_\nCette \u00e9dition \u00e9lectronique du livre _Spinoza et le probl\u00e8me de l'expression_ de Gilles Deleuze a \u00e9t\u00e9 r\u00e9alis\u00e9e le 17 d\u00e9cembre 2013 par les \u00c9ditions de Minuit \u00e0 partir de l'\u00e9dition papier du m\u00eame ouvrage dans la collection \u00ab Arguments \u00bb\n\n(ISBN 9782707300072, n\u00b0 d'\u00e9dition 4856, n\u00b0 d'imprimeur 100095, d\u00e9p\u00f4t l\u00e9gal mars 2010).\n\nLe format ePub a \u00e9t\u00e9 pr\u00e9par\u00e9 par ePagine.  \nwww.epagine.fr\n\nISBN 9782707330222\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nA woman is forced to question her own identity in this riveting and emotionally charged thriller by the blockbuster bestselling author of The Good Girl, Mary Kubica\n\nJessie Sloane is on the path to rebuilding her life after years of caring for her ailing mother. She rents a new apartment and applies for college. But when the college informs her that her social security number has raised a red flag, Jessie discovers a shocking detail that causes her to doubt everything she's ever known.\n\nFinding herself suddenly at the center of a bizarre mystery, Jessie tumbles down a rabbit hole, which is only exacerbated by grief and a relentless lack of sleep. As days pass and the insomnia worsens, it plays with Jessie's mind. Her judgment is blurred, her thoughts are hampered by fatigue. Jessie begins to see things until she can no longer tell the difference between what's real and what she's only imagined.\n\nMeanwhile, twenty years earlier and two hundred and fifty miles away, another woman's split-second decision may hold the key to Jessie's secret past. Has Jessie's whole life been a lie or have her delusions gotten the best of her?\nPraise for Mary Kubica\n\n\" _When the Lights Go Out_ will keep you questioning everything\u2014and everyone\u2014until the riveting conclusion. A twisty, captivating, edge-of-your-seat read.\" \u2014MEGAN MIRANDA\n\n\"A page-turning whodunit and a moving account of grief.\" \u2014RUTH WARE\n\n\"Mary Kubica is a must-read.\" \u2014LISA SCOTTOLINE\n\n\"Mary Kubica has a knack for crafting engrossing psychological thrillers.\" \u2014 _I_ N _STYLE_\n\n\"Kubica [is] a writer of vise-like control.\" \u2014 _CHICAGO TRIBUNE_\n\n\"Kubica leads the pack when it comes to her genre.\" \u2014 _KIRKUS REVIEWS_\n\n\"[ _Pretty Baby_ ] raises the ante on the genre and announces the welcome second coming of a talent well worth watching.\" \u2014 _LA TIMES_\n\n\"Hypnotic.\" \u2014 _PEOPLE_\n\n\"The twists you expect aren't the ones that arrive.\" \u2014NPR\n\n\"Suspense done well.\" \u2014 _NEW YORK MAGAZINE_\n\n\"Intricately wrought suspense.\" \u2014 _VULTURE_\n\n\"[Kubica] practically has you holding your breath for all 300 pages.\" \u2014 _BUSTLE.COM_\n\n\"Will encourage comparisons to _Gone Girl_.\" \u2014 _PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW_\n\n\"A twisty roller coaster ride.\" \u2014LISA GARDNER\n\n\"Lots of twists and turns.... Comparisons to _Gone Girl_ and _The Silent Wife_ are deserved.\" \u2014 _HUFFINGTON POST_\n\n\"An utterly mesmerizing tale.... Haunting, psychologically deft and full of hairpin turns.\" \u2014MEGAN ABBOTT\n\n\"Brilliant, intense, and utterly addictive. Be prepared to run a gauntlet of emotions!\" \u2014B. A. PARIS\nALSO BY MARY KUBICA\n\nThe Good Girl\n\nPretty Baby\n\nDon't You Cry\n\nEvery Last Lie\nWHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT\n\nMary Kubica\n\nAbout the Author\n\n**Mary Kubica** is the _New York Times_ bestselling author of several novels, including the blockbuster _The Good Girl_ , which has sold over a million copies. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in history and American literature from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She lives outside of Chicago with her husband and two children. Follow Mary on Twitter, @marykubica.\n\nwww.MaryKubica.com\nFor\n\nDick & Eloise\n\nRudy & Myrtle\n\"The mind is its own place,\n\nand in itself can make\n\na heaven of hell,\n\na hell of heaven.\"\n\n\u2014John Milton, _Paradise Lost_\nContents\n\nPrologue\n\nChapter 1: Jessie\n\nChapter 2: Eden\n\nChapter 3: Jessie\n\nChapter 4: Eden\n\nChapter 5: Jessie\n\nChapter 6: Eden\n\nChapter 7: Jessie\n\nChapter 8: Eden\n\nChapter 9: Jessie\n\nChapter 10: Eden\n\nChapter 11: Jessie\n\nChapter 12: Eden\n\nChapter 13: Jessie\n\nChapter 14: Eden\n\nChapter 15: Jessie\n\nChapter 16: Eden\n\nChapter 17: Jessie\n\nChapter 18: Eden\n\nChapter 19: Jessie\n\nChapter 20: Eden\n\nChapter 21: Jessie\n\nChapter 22: Eden\n\nChapter 23: Jessie\n\nChapter 24: Eden\n\nChapter 25: Jessie\n\nChapter 26: Eden\n\nChapter 27: Jessie\n\nChapter 28: Eden\n\nChapter 29: Jessie\n\nChapter 30: Eden\n\nChapter 31: Jessie\n\nChapter 32: Eden\n\nChapter 33: Jessie\n\nChapter 34: Eden\n\nChapter 35: Eden\n\nChapter 36: Jessie\n\nChapter 37: Eden\n\nChapter 38: Jessie\n\nChapter 39: Eden\n\nAcknowledgments\nprologue\n\nThe city surrounds me. A panorama. With arms outstretched, I can't help but spin, taking it all in. Enjoying the view, knowing fully well this may be the last thing my eyes ever see.\n\nI stare at the four metal steps before me, aware of how frail and broken-down they look. They're orange with rust, paint flaking, some of the slats loose so that when I press my foot to the first step, it buckles beneath me and I fall.\n\nStill, I have no choice but to climb.\n\nI pull myself back up, set my hands on the rails and scale the steps. The sweat bleeds from my palms so that the metal beneath them is slippery, slick. I can't hold tight. I slip from the second step, try again. I call out, voice cracking, a voice that doesn't sound like mine.\n\nAs I reach the roof's ledge, my knees give. It takes everything I have not to topple over the edge of the building and onto the street below. Seventeen floors.\n\nI'm so high I could touch the clouds, I think. The sense of vertigo is overpowering. The ground whooshes up and at me, the skyscrapers, the trees starting to sway until I no longer know what's moving: them or me. Little yellow matchbooks soar up and down the city streets. Cabs.\n\nIf I was standing at street level, the ledge would feel plenty wide. But up here it's not. Up here it's a thread and on it, I'm trying to balance my two wobbly feet.\n\nI'm scared. But I've come this far. I can't go back.\n\nThere's a moment of calm that comes and goes so quickly I almost don't notice it. For one split second the world is still. I'm at peace. The sun moves higher and higher into the sky, yellow-orange glaring at me through the buildings, making me peaceful and warm. My hands rise beside me as a bird goes soaring by. As if my hands are wings, I think in that moment what it would be like to fly.\n\nAnd then it comes rushing back to me.\n\nI'm hopelessly alone. Everything hurts. I can no longer think straight; I can no longer see straight; I can no longer speak. I don't know who I am anymore. If I am anyone.\n\nAnd I know in that moment for certain: I am no one.\n\nI think what it would feel like to fall. The weightlessness of the plunge, of gravity taking over, of relinquishing control. Giving up, surrendering to the universe.\n\nThere's a flicker of movement beneath me. A flash of brown, and I know that if I wait any longer, it will be too late. The decision will no longer be mine. I cry out one more time.\n\nAnd then I go.\njessie\n\nI don't have to see myself to know what I look like.\n\nMy eyes are fat and bloated, so bloodshot the sclera is bereft of white. The skin around them is red and raw from rubbing. They've been like this for days. Ever since Mom's body began shutting down, her hands and feet cold, blood no longer circulating there. Since she began to drift in and out of consciousness, refusing to eat. Since she became delirious, speaking of things that aren't real.\n\nOver the last few days, her breathing has changed too, becoming noisier and unstable, developing what the doctor called Cheyne-Stokes respiration where, for many seconds at a time, she didn't breathe. Short, shallow breaths followed by no breaths at all. When she didn't breathe, I didn't breathe. Her nails are blue now, the skin of her arms and legs blotchy and gray. \"It's a sign of imminent death _,_ \" __ the doctor said only yesterday as he set a firm hand on my shoulder and asked if there was someone they could call, someone who could come sit with me until she passed.\n\n\"It won't be long now,\" he'd said.\n\nI had shaken my head, refusing to cry. It wasn't like me to cry. I've sat in the same armchair for nearly a week now, in the same rumpled clothes, leaving only to collect coffee from the hospital cafeteria. \"There's no one,\" I said to the doctor. \"It's only Mom and me.\"\n\nOnly Mom and me as it's always been. If I have a father somewhere out there in the world, I don't know a thing about him. Mom didn't want me to know anything about him.\n\nAnd now this evening, Mom's doctor stands before me again, taking in my bloated eyes, staring at me in concern. This time offering up a pill. He tells me to take it, to go lie down in the empty bed beside Mom's and sleep.\n\n\"When's the last time you've slept, Jessie?\" he asks, standing there in his starch white smock, tacking on, \"I mean, really _slept_ ,\" before I can lie. Before I can claim that I slept last night. Because I did, for a whole thirty minutes, at best.\n\nHe tells me the longest anyone has gone without sleep. He tells me that people can die without sleep. He says to me, \"Sleep deprivation is a serious matter. You need to sleep,\" though he's not my doctor but Mom's. I don't know why he cares.\n\nBut for whatever reason, he goes on to list for me the consequences of not sleeping. Emotional instability. Crying and laughing for no sound reason at all. Behaving erratically. Losing concept of time. Seeing things. Hallucinating. Losing the ability to speak.\n\nAnd then there are the physical effects of insomnia: heart attack, hypothermia, stroke.\n\n\"Sleeping pills don't work for me,\" I tell him, but he shakes his head, tells me that it's not a sleeping pill. Rather a tranquilizer of some sort, used for anxiety and seizures. \"It has a sedative effect,\" he says. \"Calming. It will help you sleep without all the ugly side effects of a sleeping pill.\"\n\nBut I don't need to sleep. What I need instead is to stay awake, to be with Mom until she makes the decision to leave.\n\nI push myself from my chair, strut past the doctor standing in the doorway. \"Jessie,\" he says, a hand falling gently to my arm to try and stop me before I can go. His smile is fake.\n\n\"I don't need a pill,\" I tell him briskly, plucking my arm away. My eyes catch sight of the nurse standing in the hallway beside the nurses' station, her eyes conveying only one thing: pity. \"What I need is coffee,\" I say, not meeting her eye as I slog down the hallway, feet heavy with fatigue.\n\n* * *\n\nThere's a guy I see in the cafeteria every now and then, a little bit like me. A weak frame lost inside crumpled-up clothes; tired, red eyes but doped up on caffeine. Like me, he's twitchy. On edge. He has a square face; dark, shaggy hair; and thick eyebrows that are sometimes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses so that the rest of us can't see he's been crying. He sits in the cafeteria with his feet perched on a plastic chair, a red sweatshirt hood pulled over his head, sipping his coffee.\n\nI've never talked to him before. I'm not the kind of girl that cute guys talk to.\n\nBut tonight, for whatever reason, after I get my cup of coffee, I drop down into the chair beside him, knowing that under any other circumstance, I wouldn't have the nerve to do it. To talk to him. But tonight I do, mostly, I think, to delay going back to Mom's room, to give the doctor his chance to examine her and leave.\n\n\"Want to talk about it?\" I ask, and at first his look is surprised. Incredulous, even. His gaze rises up from his own coffee cup and he stares at me, his eyes as blue as a blue morpho butterfly's wings.\n\n\"The coffee,\" he says after some time, pushing his cup away. \"It tastes like shit,\" he tells me, as though that's the thing that's bothering him. The only thing. Though I see well enough inside the cup to know that he drank it down to the dregs, so it couldn't have been that bad.\n\n\"What's wrong with it?\" I ask, sipping from my cup. It's hot and so I peel back the plastic lid and blow on it. Steam rises to greet me as I try again and take another sip. This time, I don't burn my mouth.\n\nThere's nothing wrong with the hospital's coffee. It's just the way I like it. Nothing fancy. Just plain old coffee. But still, I dump four packets of Equal in and swirl it around because I don't have a stir stick or spoon.\n\n\"It's weak and there are grounds in it,\" he tells me, giving his abandoned cup the stink eye. \"I don't know,\" he says, shrugging. \"Guess I just like my coffee stronger than this.\"\n\nAnd yet, he reaches again for the cup before remembering there's nothing left in it.\n\nThere's an anger in his demeanor. A sadness. It doesn't have anything to do with the coffee. He just needs something to take his anger out on. I see it in his blue eyes, how he wishes he was somewhere else, anywhere else but here.\n\nI too want to be anywhere else but here.\n\n\"My mother's dying,\" I tell him, looking away because I can't stand to stare into his eyes when I say the words aloud. Instead I gaze toward a window where outside the world has gone black. \"She's going to die.\"\n\nSilence follows. Not an awkward silence, but just silence. He doesn't say he's sorry because he knows, like me, that sorry doesn't mean a thing. Instead, after a minute or two, he says that his brother's been in a motorcycle accident. That a car cut him off and he went flying off the bike, headfirst, into a utility pole.\n\n\"There's no saying if he'll make it,\" he says, talking in euphemisms because it's easier that way than just saying there's a chance he'll die. Kick the bucket. Croak. \"Odds are good we'll have to pull the plug sometime soon. The brain damage.\" He shakes his head, picks at the skin around his fingernails. \"It's not looking good,\" he tells me, and I say, \"That sucks,\" because it does.\n\nI rub at my eyes and he changes topics. \"You look tired,\" he tells me, and I admit that I can't sleep. That I haven't been sleeping. Not for more than thirty minutes at a time, and even that's being generous. \"But it's fine,\" I say, because my lack of sleep is the least of my concerns.\n\nHe knows what I'm thinking.\n\n\"There's nothing more you can do for your mom,\" he says. \"Now you've got to take care of you. You've got to be ready for what comes next. You ever try melatonin?\" he asks, but I shake my head and tell him the same thing I told Mom's doctor.\n\n\"Sleeping pills don't work for me.\"\n\n\"It's not a sleeping pill,\" he says as he reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out a handful of pills. He slips two tablets into the palm of my hand. \"It'll help,\" he says to me, but any idiot can see that his own eyes are bloodshot and tired. It's obvious this melatonin didn't help him worth shit. But I don't want to be rude. I slip the tablets into the pocket of my own jeans and say thanks.\n\nHe stands from the table, chair skidding out from beneath him, and says he'll be right back. I think that it's an excuse and that he's going to take the opportunity to split. \"Sure thing,\" I say, looking the other way as he leaves. Trying not to feel sorry for myself as I'm hit with that sudden sense of being alone. Trying not to think about my future, knowing that when Mom finally dies, I'll be alone forever.\n\nHe's gone now and I watch other people in the cafeteria. New grandparents. A group of people sitting at a round table, laughing. Talking about old times, sharing memories. Some sort of hospital technician in blue scrubs eating alone. I reach for my now-empty cup of coffee, thinking that I too should split. Knowing that the doctor is no doubt done with Mom by now, and so I should get back to her.\n\nBut then the guy comes back. In his hands are two fresh cups of coffee. He returns to his chair and states the obvious. \"Caffeine is the last thing either of us needs,\" he tells me, saying that it's decaf, and it occurs to me then that this has nothing to do with the coffee, but rather the company.\n\nHe digs into his pocket and pulls out four rumpled packets of Equal, dropping them to the table beside my cup. I manage a thanks, flat and mumbled to hide my surprise. He was watching me. He was paying attention. No one ever pays attention to me, aside from Mom.\n\nBeside me he hoists his feet back onto the empty seat across from him, crosses them at the ankles. Drapes the red hood over his head.\n\nI wonder what he'd be doing right now if he wasn't here. If his brother hadn't been in that motorcycle accident. If he wasn't close to dying.\n\nI think that if he had a girlfriend, she'd be here, holding his hand, keeping him company. Wouldn't she?\n\nI tell him things. Things I've never told anyone else. I don't know why. Things about Mom. He doesn't look at me as I talk, but at some imaginary spot on the wall. But I know he's listening.\n\nHe tells me things too, about his brother, and for the first time in a while, I think how nice it is to have someone to talk to, or to just share a table with as the conversation in time drifts to quiet and we sit together, drinking our coffees in silence.\n\n* * *\n\nLater, after I return to Mom's room, I think about him. The guy from the cafeteria. After the hospital's hallway lights are dimmed and all is quiet\u2014well, mostly quiet save for the ping of the EKG in Mom's room and the rattle of saliva in the back of her throat since she can no longer swallow\u2014I think about him sitting beside his dying brother, also unable to sleep.\n\nIn the hospital, Mom sleeps beside me in a drug-induced daze, thanks to the steady drip, drip, drip of lorazepam and morphine into her veins, a solution that keeps her both pain-free and fast asleep at the same time.\n\nSometime after nine o'clock, the nurse stops by to turn Mom one last time before signing off for the night. She checks her skin for bedsores, running a hand up and down Mom's legs. I've got the TV in the room turned on, anything to drown out that mechanical, metallic sound of Mom's EKG, one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It's one of those newsmagazine shows\u2014 _Dateline_ , _60 Minutes_ , I don't know which\u2014the one thing that was on when I flipped on the TV. I didn't bother channel surfing; I don't care what I watch. It could be home shopping or cartoons, for all I care. It's just the noise I need to help me forget that Mom is dying. Though, of course, it isn't as easy as that. There isn't a thing in the world that can make me forget. But for a few minutes at least, the news anchors make me feel less alone.\n\n\"What are you watching?\" the nurse asks, examining Mom's skin, and I say, \"I don't even know.\"\n\nBut then we both listen together as the anchors tell the story of some guy who'd assumed the identity of a dead man. He lived for years posing as him, until he got caught.\n\nLeave it to me to watch a show about dead people as a means of forgetting that Mom is dying.\n\nMy eyes veer away from the TV and to Mom. I mute the show. Maybe the repetitive ping of the EKG isn't so bad after all. What it says to me is that Mom is still alive. For now.\n\nUlcers have already formed on her heels and so she lies with feet floating on air, a pillow beneath her calves so they can't touch the bed. \"Feeling tired?\" the nurse asks, standing in the space between Mom and me. I am, of course, feeling tired. My head hurts, one of those dull headaches that creeps up the nape of the neck. There's a stinging pain behind my eyes too, the kind that makes everything blur. I dig my palms into my sockets to make it go away, but it doesn't quit. My muscles ache, my legs restless. There's the constant urge to move them, to not sit still. It gnaws at me until it's all I can think about: moving my legs. I uncross them, stretch them out before me, recross my legs. For a whole thirty seconds it works. The restlessness stops.\n\nAnd then it begins again. That prickly urge to move my legs.\n\nIf I let it, it'll go on all night until, like last night, when I finally stood and paced the room. All night long. Because it was easier than sitting still.\n\nI think then about what the guy in the cafeteria said. About taking care of myself, about getting ready for what comes next. I think about what comes next, about Mom's and my house, vacant but for me. I wonder if I'll ever sleep again.\n\n\"Doc left some clonazepam for you,\" the nurse says now, as if she knows what I'm thinking. \"In case you changed your mind.\" She says that it could be our little secret, hers and mine. She tells me Mom is in good hands. That I need to take care of myself now, again just like the guy in the cafeteria said.\n\nI relent. If only to make my legs relax. She steps from the room to retrieve the pills. When she returns, I climb onto the empty bed beside Mom and swallow a single clonazepam with a glass of water and sink beneath the covers of the hospital bed. The nurse stays in the room, watching me. She doesn't leave.\n\n\"I'm sure you have better things to do than keep me company,\" I tell her, but she says she doesn't.\n\n\"I lost my daughter a long time ago,\" she says, \"and my husband's gone. There's no one at home waiting for me. None other than the cat. If it's all right with you, I'd rather just stay. We can keep each other company, if you don't mind,\" she says, and I tell her I don't mind.\n\nThere's an unearthly quality to her, ghostlike, as if maybe she's one of Mom's friends from her dying delusions, come to visit me. Mom had begun to talk to them the last time she was awake, people in the room who weren't in the room, but who were already dead. It was as if Mom's mind had already crossed over to the other side.\n\nThe nurse's smile is kind. Not a pity smile, but authentic. \"The waiting is the hardest part,\" she tells me, and I don't know what she means by it\u2014waiting for the pill to kick in or waiting for Mom to die.\n\nI read something once about something called terminal lucidity. I didn't know if it's real or not, a fact\u2014scientifically proven\u2014or just some superstition a quack thought up. But I'm hoping it's real. Terminal lucidity: a final moment of lucidity before a person dies. A final surge of brainpower and awareness. Where they stir from a coma and speak one last time. Or when an Alzheimer's patient who's so far gone he doesn't know his own wife anymore wakes up suddenly and remembers. People who have been catatonic for decades get up and for a few moments, they're normal. All is good.\n\nExcept that it's not.\n\nIt doesn't last long, that period of lucidity. Five minutes, maybe more, maybe less. No one knows for sure. It doesn't happen for everyone.\n\nBut deep inside I'm hoping for five more lucid moments with Mom.\n\nFor her to sit up, for her to speak.\n\n\"I'm not tired yet,\" __ I confess to the nurse after a few minutes, sure this is a waste of time. I can't sleep. I won't sleep. The restlessness of my legs is persistent, until I have no choice but to dig the melatonin out of my pocket when the nurse turns her back and swallow those too.\n\nThe hospital bed is pitted, the blankets abrasive. I'm cold. Beside me, Mom's breathing is dry and uneven, her mouth gaping open like a robin hatchling. Scabs have formed around her lips. She jerks and twitches in her sleep. \"What's happening?\" I ask the nurse, and she tells me Mom is dreaming.\n\n\"Bad dreams?\" I ask, worried that nightmares might torment her sleep.\n\n\"I can't say for sure,\" the nurse says. She repositions Mom on her right side, tucking a rolled-up blanket beneath her hip, checking the color of her hands and feet. \"No one even knows for sure why we dream,\" the nurse tells me, adding an extra blanket to my bed in case I catch a draft in my sleep. \"Did you know that?\" she asks, but I shake my head and tell her no. \"Some people think that dreams serve no purpose,\" she adds, winking. \"But I think they do. They're the mind's way of coping, of thinking through a problem. Things we saw, felt, heard. What we're worried about. What we want to achieve. You want to know what I think?\" she asks, and without waiting for me to answer, she says, \"I think your mom is getting ready to go in that dream of hers. Packing her bags and saying goodbye. Finding her purse and her keys.\"\n\nI can't remember the last time I'd dreamed.\n\n\"It can take up to an hour to kick in _,_ \" __ the nurse says, and this time I know she means the medicine.\n\nThe nurse catches me staring at Mom. \"You can talk to her, you know?\" she asks. \"She can hear you,\" she says, but it's awkward then. Talking to Mom while the nurse is in the room. And anyway, I'm not convinced that Mom can really hear me, so I say to the nurse, \"I know,\" but to Mom, I say nothing. I'll say all the things I need to say if we're ever alone. The nurses play Mom's records some of the time because, as they've told me, hearing is the last thing to go. The last of the senses to leave. And because they think it might put her at ease, as if the soulful voice of Gladys Knight & the Pips can penetrate the state of unconsciousness where she's at, and become part of her dreams. The familiar sound of her music, those records I used to hate when I was a kid but now know I'll spend the rest of my life listening to on repeat.\n\n\"This must be hard on you,\" the nurse says, watching me as I stare mournfully at Mom, taking in the shape of her face, her eyes, for what might be the last time. Then she confesses, \"I know what it's like to lose someone you love.\" I don't ask the nurse who, but she tells me anyway, admitting to the little girl she lost nearly two decades ago. Her daughter, only three years old when she died. \"We were on vacation,\" she says. \"My husband and me with our little girl.\" He's her ex-husband now because, as she tells me, their marriage died that day too, same day as their little girl. She tells me how there was nothing Madison loved more than playing in the sand, searching for seashells along the seashore. They'd taken her to the beach that summer. \"My last good memories are of the three of us at the beach. I still see her sometimes when I close my eyes. Even after all these years. Bent at the waist in her purple swimsuit, digging fat fingers into the sand for seashells. Funny thing is that I have a hard time remembering her face, but clear as day I see the ruffles of that purple tulle skirt moving in the air.\"\n\nI don't know what to say. I know I should say something, something empathetic. I should commiserate. But instead I ask, \"How did she die?\" because I can't help myself. I want to know, and there's a part of me convinced she wants me to ask.\n\n\"A hit-and-run,\" she admits while dropping into an empty armchair in the corner of the room. Same one that I've spent the last few days in. She tells me how the girl wandered into the street when she and her husband weren't paying attention. It was a four-lane road with a speed limit of just twenty-five as it twisted through the small seaside town. The driver rounded a bend at nearly twice that speed, not seeing the little girl before he hit her, before he fled.\n\n\"He,\" she says then. \"He.\" And this time, she laughs, a jaded laugh. \"I'll never know one way or the other if the driver was male or female, but to me it's always been _he_ because for the life of me I can't see a woman running her car into a child and then fleeing. It goes against our every instinct, to nurture, to protect,\" she says.\n\n\"It's so easy to blame someone else. My husband, the driver of the car. Even Madison herself. But the truth is that it was my fault. I was the one not paying attention. I was the one who let my little girl waddle off into the middle of the street.\"\n\nAnd then she shakes her head with the weariness of someone who's replayed the same scene in her life for many years, trying to pinpoint the moment when it all went wrong. When Madison's hand slipped from hers, when she fell from view.\n\nI don't mean for them to, but still, my eyes fill with tears as I picture her little girl in her purple swimsuit, lying in the middle of the road. One minute gathering seashells in the palm of a hand, and the next minute dead. It seems so tragic, so catastrophic, that my own tragedy somehow pales in comparison to hers. Suddenly cancer doesn't seem so bad.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I say. \"I'm so sorry,\" but she shoos me off and says no, that she's the one who should be sorry. \"I didn't mean to make you sad,\" she says, seeing my watery eyes. \"Just wanted you to know that I can empathize. That I can relate. It's never easy losing someone you love,\" she says again, and then stands quickly from the armchair, gets back to tending to Mom. She tries to change the subject. \"Feeling tired yet?\" she asks again, and this time I tell her I don't know. My body feels heavy. That's as much as I knew. But heavy and tired are two different things.\n\nShe suggests then, \"Why don't I tell you a story while we wait? I tell stories to all my patients to help them sleep.\"\n\nMom used to tell me stories. We'd lie together under the covers of my twin-size bed and she'd tell me about her childhood. Her upbringing. Her own mom and dad. But she told it like a fairy tale, like a _once upon a time_ kind of story, and it wasn't Mom's story at all, but rather the story of a girl who grew up to marry a prince and become queen.\n\nBut then the prince left her. Except she always left that part out. I never knew if he did or if he didn't, or if he was never there to begin with.\n\n\"I'm not your patient,\" I remind the nurse but she says, \"Close enough,\" while dimming the overhead lights so that I can sleep. She sits down on the edge of my bed, pulling the blanket clear up to my neck with warm, competent hands so that for one second I envy Mom her care.\n\nThe nurse's voice is low, her tone flat so she doesn't wake Mom from her deathbed. Her story begins somewhere just outside of Moab, though it doesn't go far.\n\nAlmost at once, my eyelids grow heavy; my body becomes numb. My mind fills with fog. I become weightless, sinking into the pitted hospital bed so that I become one with it, the bed and me. The nurse's voice floats away, her words themselves defying gravity and levitating in the air, out of reach but somehow still there, filling my unconscious mind. I close my eyes.\n\nIt's there, under the heavy weight of two thermal blankets and at the sound of the woman's hypnotic voice, that I fall asleep. The last thing I remember is hearing about the snarling paths and the sandstone walls of someplace known as the Great Wall.\n\nWhen I wake up in the morning, Mom is dead.\n\nI slept right through it.\neden\n\nMay 16, _1996  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nAaron showed me the house today. I'm in love with it already\u2014a cornflower blue cottage perched on a forty-five-foot cliff that overlooks the bay. Pine floors and whitewashed walls. A screened-in porch. A long wooden staircase that leads down to the dock at the water's edge where the Realtor promised majestic sunsets and fleets of sailboats floating by. _Quaint_ , _charming_ and _serene_. Those are the words the Realtor used. Aaron, as always, didn't say much of anything, just stood on the balding lawn with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, staring out at the bay, thinking. He's recently taken a job as a line cook at one of the restaurants in town, a chophouse in Ephraim. The cottage will more than cut his commute time in half. It's also a steal compared to our current mortgage, and set on two acres of waterfront land that spans the heavily wooded backcountry to the rocky shores of Green Bay.\n\nAnd there's a garden. A ten-by-twenty-or thirty-foot space overrun with brambles and weeds. It's in need of work, but already Aaron has promised raised beds. There is a greenhouse, a sorry sight if I've ever seen one, set in a sunnier patch of the yard where the grass still grows. Small, shedlike, with aged glass windows and some sort of clear, corrugated roof meant to attract the sun. The door hangs cockeyed, one of its hinges broken. Aaron took a look and said that he can fix it, which comes as no surprise to me. There isn't a thing in this world that Aaron can't fix. Cobwebs cling to the corners of the room like lace. Already I'm imagining rows and rows of peat pots of soil and seed soaking up the sun, waiting to be transported into the garden.\n\nNearby, a swing hangs from the mighty branch of a burr oak tree. It was the tree that cinched it for me. Or maybe not the tree itself, but the promise of the tree, the notion of children one day causing ruckus and mayhem on the tree's swing, three feet of lumber fastened to the branch with a sturdy rope. I envision them climbing deep into the divots of the tree's trunk and laughing. I can hear them already, Aaron's and my unborn children. Laughing and screaming in delight.\n\nAaron asked if I loved it as much as him, and I didn't know if he meant whether I loved the cottage as much as I love _him_ , or if I loved the cottage as much as he loves the cottage, but either way I told him I did.\n\nAaron left the Realtor with our bid. It's a buyer's market, he said, trying to finagle the asking price down a good 10 percent. Me, I would have paid asking price, too afraid to lose the cottage otherwise. Tomorrow we'll know if it's ours.\n\nTonight I won't sleep. How is it possible to love something so much, to want something so badly, when only hours ago I didn't know it existed?\n\nJuly 1, 1996 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nThe boxes are plentiful. There is no end to the number of cardboard boxes the movers carry through the front door, delivering them to their marked rooms\u2014living room, bedroom, master bath\u2014stomping across our home in dusty work boots. Sixteen hundred square feet of space needing to be filled as Aaron and I divvied up our gender-appropriate tasks, he directing the movers with couches and beds while I unpacked and washed the dishes by hand and placed them in the cabinets. I watched the many laps they took, each man's head beginning to glimmer with sweat. Aaron's too, though he hardly carried a thing, and yet the authority in his voice, the obvious clout as grown men trailed him through our home, heeding his every word, was enough to catch my eye. I watched him round the home time and again, wondering how I was so lucky to have him all to my own.\n\nIt wasn't like me to be lucky in love. Not until I met Aaron. The men who came before him were deadbeats and drifters, bottom-feeders. But not Aaron. We dated for a year before he proposed. Tomorrow we celebrate two years. Soon there will be kids, a whole gaggle of little ones spinning circles at our feet. As soon as we're settled, Aaron always said, and now, as my eyes assess the new home, the sprawling landscape, the sixteen hundred square feet of space, three bedrooms\u2014two vacant and left to fill\u2014I realize the time has come and like clockwork, something inside me starts to tick.\n\nWhen the movers' backs were turned, Aaron kissed me in the kitchen, pinning me against the cabinets, hands gripping my hips. It was unasked for and yet very much wanted as he kissed with his eyes closed, whispering that all of our dreams were finally coming true. Aaron isn't one to be sentimental or romantic, and yet it was true: the cottage, his job, leaving the city. We'd both wanted to get away from Green Bay since the day we were married, his hometown and my hometown, so that two sets of parents couldn't show up at our door on any given day, unsolicited, waging a secret battle as to which in-law could occupy the most of our time. We hadn't gone far, sixty-seven miles to be precise, but enough that visits would be preempted with a simple phone call.\n\nTonight we made love on the living room floor to the glow of candlelight. The electricity had yet to be turned on and so, other than the dance of candlelight on the whitewashed walls, the house was dark.\n\nAaron was the first to suggest it, discontinuing my birth control pill, as if he knew what I was thinking, as if he could read my mind. It was as we lay together on the wide wooden floorboards staring out the open windows at the stars, Aaron's prowling hand moving across my thigh, contemplating a second go. That's when he said it. I told him _yes!_ that I am ready for a family. That _we_ are ready. Aaron is twenty-nine. I am twenty-eight. His paycheck isn't extravagant, and yet it's enough. We aren't spendthrifts; we've been saving for years.\n\nAnd even though I knew it wasn't possible yet, the pill in my system nipped any possibility of pregnancy in the bud, I still imagined a creature no bigger than a speck starting to take form as Aaron again let himself inside me.\n\nJuly 9, 1996 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nOur days begin with coffee on the dock, bare feet dangling over the edge, downward toward the bay. The water is cold, and our feet don't reach anyway. But as promised, there are sailboats. Aaron and I spend hours watching them pass by, as well as sandpipers and other shorebirds that come to call, their long legs wading through the shallow water for a meal. We stare at the birds and the sailboats, watching the sun rise higher into the sky, warming our skin, burning off the early-morning fog. Heaven on earth, Aaron says.\n\nAs we sit on the dock, Aaron tells me about his nights at the chophouse that steals him from me for ten hours at a time. About the heat of the kitchen, and the persistent noise. The rumble of voices calling out orders in sync. The sputter of boneless rib eye on the grill, the dicing and hashing of vegetables.\n\nHis voice is placid. He doesn't complain because Aaron, ever easygoing Aaron, isn't one to complain. Rather he tells me about it, describing it for me so that I can see in my mind's eye what he's doing when he's away from me for half the day. He wears a white chef jacket and black chef pants and a cap, something along the lines of a beanie that is also white. Aaron's been assigned the role of _saucier_ , or sauce chef, one that's new to him, but no doubt comes with ease. Because this is the way it is with Aaron. No matter what he tries his hand at, things always come with ease.\n\nOur property is fringed by trees so that as we sit on the deck's edge, Aaron and me, it feels as if we're all alone, partitioned from society by the lake and the trees. If we have neighbors, we've never seen them. Never laid eyes on them. Never spied another home through the canopy of trees. Never are we disturbed by the sound of voices, but only the colloquy of birds as they perch in the trees and yammer back and forth about whatever it is birds talk about. On occasion the helmsmen will wave a hearty hello from behind the steering wheel of their sailboats, but more often than not they're too far away to see Aaron and me at the dock's edge, feet dangling southward, holding hands, sitting in silence, listening to the breeze through the trees.\n\nWe're marooned on an island, stranded and shipwrecked, but we don't mind. It's just the way it should be.\n\nAaron's work shift begins at two in the afternoon and ends when the last customer leaves and the kitchen is clean, most nights stumbling into bed around midnight or after, smelling of sweat and grease.\n\nBut the days are ours to do with as we please.\n\nLast week, Aaron repaired the greenhouse door and we stripped it of cobwebs and bugs. We spent days cultivating the garden and Aaron made good on his promise of raised beds, three feet by five feet by ten inches deep, made of white cedar that will one day house cucumbers and zucchini. But not this year. It's far too late in the season to grow produce this year and so for now, we buy it from any number of tatty roadside farm stands. We live two miles from town and even though the population around here expands sevenfold in the summer months thanks to a healthy tourist population, outside town it's still mainly rural, long stretches of open country roads that intersect with nothing but sky.\n\nInstead of planting produce this year, Aaron and I sowed perennial seeds to enjoy next year: baby's breath and lavender and hollyhocks because all the fences and cottages around here, it seems, are flanked with hollyhocks. We placed them in peat pots of gardening soil in the greenhouse and set them in the sunniest spot we could find. In a month or so, we'll transplant them to the garden. They won't bloom for some time, not until next spring. But still, I stand hopeful in the greenhouse, staring at the peat pots, imagining what might be happening beneath the soil's surface, whether the seeds' roots are taking hold, pushing down into the soil to anchor the seedling to this world, or if the seed has merely shriveled up and died in there, a dead embryo in its mother's womb.\n\nAs I clear out the last of my birth control pills and run a hand across what I imagine to be my uterus, I wonder what is happening inside there too.\njessie\n\nI had Mom cremated at her request. I carry her around now in a rhubarb-glazed clay urn with a cork in the top, one she bought for herself when the cancer spread. It's cylindrical and inconspicuous, the cork stuck on with an ample amount of Gorilla Glue so I don't lose Mom by chance.\n\nMom had two wishes when she died, ones she let slip in the last brief moments of consciousness before she drifted off to sleep, a sleep from which she would never wake up. One, that she be cremated and lobbed from the back end of the Washington Island Ferry and into Death's Door. And two, that I find myself and figure out who I am. The second hinged on the esoteric and didn't make obvious sense. I blamed the drugs for it, that and the imminence of death.\n\nI'm nowhere near accomplishing either, though I filled out a college application online. But I have no plans of parting with Mom's remains anytime soon. She's the only thing of value I have left.\n\nI haven't slept in four days, not since some doctor took pity on me and offered me a pill. Three if you count the one where I nearly nodded off at the laundromat waiting for clothes to dry, anesthetized by the sound of sweaters tumbling around a dryer. The effects are obnoxious. I'm tired. I'm grumpy. I can focus on nothing and my reaction time is slow. I've lost the ability to think.\n\nYesterday, a package arrived from UPS and the driver asked me to sign for it. He stood before me, shoving a pen and a slip of paper up under my nose and I could only stare, unable to put two and two together. He said it again. _Can you sign for it?_ He forced the pen into my hand. He pointed at the signature line. For a third time, he asked me to sign.\n\nAnd even then I scribbled with the cap still on the pen. The man had to snatch it from my hand and uncap it.\n\nI'm pretty sure I've begun to see things too. Things that might not be real, that might not be there. A millipede dashing across the tabletop, an ant on the kitchen floor. Sudden movements, immediate and quick, but the minute I turn, they're gone.\n\nI keep track of the sleepless nights in the notched lines beneath my eyes, like the annual rings of a tree. One wrinkle for each night that I don't sleep. I stare at myself in the mirror each day, counting them all. This morning there were four. The surface effects of insomnia are even worse than what's going on on the inside. My eyes are red and swollen. My eyelids droop. Overnight, wrinkles appear by the masses, while I lie in bed counting sheep. I could go to the clinic and request something else to help me sleep. Some more of the clonazepam. But with the pills in my system, I slept right on through Mom's death. I don't want to think about what else I'd miss.\n\nAt McDonald's, I'm asked if I want ketchup with my fries, but I can only stare at the worker dumbly because what I heard was _It's messed up when boats capsize_ , and I nod lamely because it is disastrous and sad, and yet so out of left field I can't respond with words.\n\nIt's only when he drops a stack of ketchup packets on my tray that my brain makes the translation, too late it seems because I hate ketchup. I dump them on the table when I go, the mother lode for someone who likes it. On the way out the door I trip, because coordination is also affected by a lack of sleep.\n\nTwo hours ago I dragged my heavy body from bed after another sleepless night, and now I stand in the center of Mom's and my house, deciding which of our belongings to take and which to leave. I can't stand to stay here much longer, a decision I've come to quickly over the last four days. I've spoken to a Realtor already, figured out next steps. First I'm to pack up what I want to keep, and then everything else will be sold in an estate sale before some junk removal service tosses the rest of our stuff in the trash.\n\nThen some other family will move in to the only home I've ever known.\n\nI'm eyeing the sofa, wondering if I should take it or leave it, __ when the phone rings. \"Hello?\" I ask.\n\nA voice on the other end informs me that she's calling from the financial aid office at the college. \"There's a problem with your application,\" she says to me.\n\n\"What problem?\" I ask the woman on the phone, afraid I'm about to be cited for tax evasion. It's a likely possibility; I'd left blank every question on the FAFSA form that asked about adjusted gross income and tax returns. I might have lied on the application too. There was a question that asked if both of my parents were deceased. I said yes to that, though I don't know if it's true.\n\nIs my father dead?\n\nOn the other end of the line, the woman asks me to verify my social security number for her and I do. \"That's what I have,\" she says, and I ask, \"Then what's the problem? Has my application been denied?\" My heart sinks. How can that be? It's only a community college. It's not like I registered for Yale or Harvard.\n\n\"I'm sure it's just a weird mix-up with vital statistics,\" she says.\n\n\"What mix-up?\" I ask, feeling relieved for a mix-up as opposed to a denied application. A mix-up can be fixed.\n\n\"It's the strangest thing,\" she says. \"There was a death certificate on file for a Jessica Sloane, from seventeen years ago. With your birth date and your social security number. By the looks of this, Ms. Sloane,\" she says, and I amend _Jessie_ , because Ms. Sloane is Mom. \"By the looks of this, Jessie,\" she says, and the words that follow punch me so hard in the gut they make it almost impossible to breathe. \"By the looks of this, you're already dead.\"\n\nAnd then she laughs as if somehow or other this is funny.\n\n* * *\n\nToday I'm looking for a new place to live. Staying in our old home is no longer a viable option because of the residual ghosts of Mom that remain in every corner of the home. The smell of her Crabtree & Evelyn hand cream that fills the bathroom. The feel of the velvet-lined compartments in the mahogany dresser. The chemo caps. The cartons of Ensure on the refrigerator shelf.\n\nI perch in the back seat of a Kia Soul, trying hard not to think too much about the call from the financial aid office. This is easier said than done. Just thinking about it makes my stomach hurt. A mix-up, the woman claimed, but still, it's hard to grapple with the words _you_ and _dead_ in the same sentence. Though I try to, I can't push them from my mind. The way she and I left things, I'm to provide a copy of my social security card to the college before they'll take another look at my application for a loan, which is a problem because I don't have the first clue where the card is. But it's more than that too. Because the woman also told me about some death index my name was found on. A _death index_. My name on a database maintained by the Social Security Administration of millions of people who have died, nullifying their social security numbers so that no one else can use them, so that I can't use my own social security number. Because, according to the Social Security Administration, I'm dead.\n\n_You might want to look into that_ , __ she'd suggested before ending our call, and I couldn't help but feel shaken up by it even now, hours later. My name on a death database. Though it's a mistake, of course.\n\nBut still I pray this isn't some sort of foresight. A prophecy of what's to come.\n\nI gaze out the window as some woman sits behind the wheel of the Kia, steering us through the streets of Chicago. Her name is Lily and she calls herself an _apartment finder_. The first I'd heard of Lily was days ago, when I'd come home from a cleaning job\u2014hating the feeling of coming home to Mom's and my empty house alone, wishing she was there but knowing she would never be again, making a flip decision to sell the home and leave. I came home, leaving my bike on the sidewalk, and there, hanging on the handle of our front door, was an ad for Lily's efficient and cost-free services. An apartment finder. I'd never heard of such a thing, and yet she was just the thing I needed. The door hanger was in-your-face marketing, the kind I couldn't recycle with the rest of the junk mail. And so I called Lily and we made an appointment to meet.\n\nLily's parallel parking skills are second to none, though it seems easy enough for someone like me who's never driven a car before. Growing up in an old brick bungalow in Albany Park, there was never a need to drive a car. We didn't have one. The Brown Line or the bus took us everywhere we needed to go. Either that or our own two feet. I also have my Schwinn, Old Faithful, which is surprisingly resilient in even the worst weather, except for, of course, three feet of snow.\n\nI was fifteen when Mom was diagnosed with cancer, which meant that for the time being, my life was on hold, anything that wasn't essential set aside. I went to school. I worked. I helped with the mortgage and saved as much as I could. And I held Mom's hair for her when she puked.\n\nShe found the lump herself, slim fingers palpating her own breast because she knew sooner or later this would happen. She didn't tell me about the lump until after she'd been diagnosed with cancer, one mammogram and a biopsy later. She didn't want to worry me. They removed the breast first, followed by months of chemotherapy. But it wasn't long before the cancer returned, in the chest and in the bones this time. The lungs. Back for vengeance.\n\n_Jessie, I'm dying. I'm going to die_ , she had said to me then. We were sitting on the front porch, hand in hand, the day she learned the cancer was back. At that point, her five-year survival rate took a nosedive. She only lived for two more, and none of them great.\n\nThe cancer, it's hereditary. Some aberrant gene that runs through our family line, red pegs lined up in my battleship already. Like Mom and her mom before her, it's only a matter of time before I too will sink.\n\nI claimed the back seat of the Kia after Lily dropped her purse into the passenger's chair. She drives with one hand on the horn at all times, so she can scare pedestrians out of the way, those she hollers at from behind safety glass to _shake a leg_ and _scoot your boot_. I have no credit history and no bank account, which I've confessed to Lily, and instead carry a pocketful of cash. Her eyes grew wide when I showed her my money, thirty hundred-dollar bills folded in half and stuck inside a wristlet.\n\n\"This might be a problem,\" Lily said, shrugging her shoulders not at the cash but rather the shortage of credit, the absence of a bank account, \"but we'll see.\"\n\nShe suggested I offer a landlord more up front to offset the fact that I'm one of those people who keeps all my money in a fireproof safe box beneath my bed. The checks I earn cleaning houses get cashed at Walmart for a three-dollar service fee, and then deposited into my trusty box. I considered signing on with a temp agency once, but thought better of it. There are perks to my job I won't find anywhere else. Because I'm cleaning houses, I don't have to pay taxes to Uncle Sam. I'm an independent contractor. At least that's the way I've always rationalized it in my head, though, for all I know, IRS agents are hot on my heels, planning to nab me for tax evasion.\n\nAnd still, I load my cleaning supplies into a basket on the back end of Old Faithful __ each day and pedal off to work, earning as much as two hundred dollars some days by cleaning someone else's home. I do it in peace with my headphones on. I don't have to make small talk. No one supervises me. It's the best job in the world.\n\n\"Either that,\" said Lily as she easily navigated the streets of Chicago, pulling in to an alley behind a high-rise on Sheridan and putting the car in Park, \"or you'll need to find someone to cosign on the loan,\" which isn't an option for me. I have no one to cosign on the loan.\n\nThe apartment search is nearly an abject failure.\n\nLily shows me apartment after apartment. A third-floor unit in a high-rise in Edgewater. A mid-rise on Ashland, newly rehabbed, in my price range though at the high end of it. Unit after unit of boxlike rooms enclosed by four thin gypsum walls, foggy windows that inhibit the light from coming in. The window screens are torn, one stuffed full with an air-conditioning unit, which is supposed to make me happy because, as Lily points out, renters usually have to buy them themselves, those repulsive window units that bar any natural light from entering the room.\n\nThe kitchens are tight. The stoves are old and electric. Freckles of mold grow in the showers' grout. The closets smell like urine. Lightbulbs have burned out.\n\nBut it isn't the mold or the windows that bother me. It's the noise and the neighbors\u2014strange people just on the other side of drywall, their domestic life partitioned from mine by a paltry combination of plaster and paper. The sense of claustrophobia that settles under my skin as I pretend to listen to Lily as she goes on and on about the two hundred and eighty square feet in the unit. The laundry facilities. The high-speed internet. But all I hear is the noise of someone's hair dryer. Women laughing. Men upstairs screaming at a ball game on TV. A phone conversation streaming through the walls. The ding of a microwave, the smell of someone's lunch.\n\nFour days without sleep. My body is tired, my mind like soup. I lean against the wall, feeling the force of gravity as it threatens to tug my heavy body to the ground.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Lily asks over the noise of the hair dryer, and I can't help myself.\n\n\"I hate it,\" I say, for the eighth or ninth time in a row, one for as many apartments as we've seen. Insomnia does that too. It keeps us honest because we don't have the energy to manufacture a lie.\n\n\"How come?\" she asks, and I tell her about the hair dryer next door. How it's loud.\n\nLily keeps composed, though inside her patience with me must be wearing thin. \"Then we keep looking,\" she says as I follow her out the door. I'd love to believe that she wants me to be happy, that she wants me to find the perfect place to live. But ultimately it comes down to one thing: my signature on a dotted line. What a lease agreement means for Lily is that an afternoon with me isn't a complete waste of time.\n\n\"I have one more to show you,\" she says, promising something different from the last umpteen apartments we've seen. We return to the Kia and I buckle up in the back seat, behind the purse that's already riding shotgun. We drive. Minutes later the car pulls to a sluggish stop before a greystone on Cornelia, gliding easily into a parking spot. The street is residential, lacking completely in communal living structures. No apartments. No condominiums. No high-rises with elevators that overlook crappy convenient marts. No strangers milling around on street corners.\n\nThe house is easily a hundred years old, beautiful and yet overwhelming for its grandeur. It's three stories tall and steep, with wide steps that lead to a front porch. A bank of windows lines each floor. There's a flat-as-a-pancake roof. Beneath the first floor there's a garden apartment, peeking up from beneath concrete.\n\n\"This is a three flat?\" I ask as we step from the car, envisioning stacks of independent units filling the home, all united by a common front door. I expect Lily to say yes.\n\nBut instead she laughs at me, saying, \"No, this is a private residential home. It's not for sale, not that you could afford it if it was. Easily a million and a half,\" she says. \"Dollars, that is,\" and I pause beneath a tree to ask what we're doing here. The day is warm, one of those September days that holds autumn at bay. What we want is to climb into sweaters and jeans, sip cocoa, wrap ourselves in blankets and watch the falling leaves. But instead we drip with sweat. The nights grow cold, but the days are hot, thirty-degree variants from morning to night. It won't last long. According to the weatherman, a change is coming, and it's coming soon. But for now, I stand in shorts and a T-shirt, a sweatshirt wrapped around my waist. When the sun goes down, the temperature will too.\n\n\"This way,\" Lily says with a slight nod of the head. I hurry along after her, but before we round the side of the greystone, something catches my eye. A woman walking down the sidewalk in our direction. She's a good thirty feet away, but moving closer to us. I don't see her face at first because of the force of the wind pushing her dark hair forward and into her eyes. But it doesn't matter. It's the posture that does it for me. That and the tiny feet as they shuffle along. It's the unassuming way she holds herself upright, curved at the shoulders just so. It's her shape, the height and width of it. The shade and texture of a periwinkle coat, a parka, midthigh length with a drawstring waist and a hood, though it's much too warm for a coat with a hood.\n\nThe coat is the same one as Mom had.\n\nI feel my heart start to beat. My mouth opens and a single word forms there on my lips. _Mom_. Because that's exactly who it is. It's her; it's Mom. She's here, alive, in the flesh, coming to see me. My arm lifts involuntarily and I start to wave, but with the hair in her eyes, she can't see me standing there on the sidewalk six feet away, waving.\n\nMom doesn't look at me as she passes by. She doesn't see me. She thinks I'm someone else. I call to her, my voice catching as the word comes out, so that it doesn't come out. Instead it gets trapped somewhere in my throat. Tears pool in my eyes and I think that I'm going to lose her, that she's going to keep walking by. And so my hand reaches out and latches on to her arm. A knee-jerk reaction. To stop her from walking past. To prevent her from leaving.\n\nMy hand grabs a hold of her forearm, clamping down. But just as it does, the woman frees her face of the hair and casts a glance at me. And I see then what I failed to see before, that this woman is barely thirty years old, much too young to be my mother. And that her face is covered in an enormity of makeup, unlike Mom, who wore her face bare.\n\nHer coat is not periwinkle at all but darker, more like eggplant or wine. And it has no hood. As she nears, I see more clearly. It isn't a coat after all, but a dress.\n\nShe looks nothing like Mom.\n\nFor a second I feel like I can't breathe, the wind knocked out of me. The woman tugs her arm free. She gives me a dirty look, scooting past me as I slip from the sidewalk, my feet falling on grass.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I whisper as she skirts eye contact, avoids my stare. She moves to the far edge of the sidewalk where she'll be two feet away, where I can't reach her. \"I thought you were someone else,\" I breathe as my eyes turn to find Lily with her arms folded, trying to pretend that this didn't just happen.\n\n_Of course it's not Mom_ , I tell myself as I watch the woman in the eggplant dress move on\u2014faster now, no longer shuffling along but now walking at a clipped pace to get away from me.\n\nOf course it's not Mom, because Mom is dead.\n\n\"You coming?\" Lily asks, and I say yes.\n\nI follow Lily as we sneak along a brick paver patio and into the backyard. My heart still beats hard. My nerves are rattled. The backyard opens up to reveal a patio and a yard, and behind that, a red brick garage with a jade green door. \"This is why we're here,\" says Lily, gesturing to the garage, and I stop where I am and ask, \"You want me to live in a garage?\"\n\n\"It's a carriage house,\" she says, explaining how there's living space up above, as is apparently evidenced by a window or two on the second and third floors. \"These are quite the find. Some people love them. The minute they come on the market, they're usually gone. This listing just came in this morning,\" she says, telling me how carriage houses used to be just that in the olden days, a place to park a horse and buggy and for the carriage driver to live. Servants' quarters. They're tucked away on an alley, camouflaged behind a far less humble house, living in the shadows of something bigger and better than them.\n\nWhich seems to me to be just the thing I need. To be camouflaged, to live hermit-like in seclusion, in the shadows of something grand.\n\n\"Can we see?\" I ask, meaning the inside, and Lily lets us in through a tall, tapered front door and immediately up a flight of rickety stairs.\n\nIt's larger than anything we've yet seen, nearly five hundred square feet of living space that is dilapidated and old, everything painted a hideous brown. The wooden floors have taken a beating. The boards are squeaky and uneven, with square-cut nails that lift right up out of the floorboards to a toe-stubbing height. The kitchen lines a living room wall, if it can even be called a kitchen. An old stove, an old refrigerator and a small bank of cabinets lined in a row beside where a TV should go. The lighting fixtures are archaic, giving off a scant amount of light. The place is minimally furnished; just a couple pieces of furniture that look to be about as decrepit as the home.\n\nThe bathroom appears to have had minor renovations. The fixtures, the paint are new, but the floor tile looks to be older than me. \"You won't hear a neighbor's hair dryer from here,\" Lily says. The so-called bedroom is up a second flight of precarious stairs, a loftlike space with an arched ceiling that follows the low roofline.\n\nOn the top floor I can't stand upright. I have to hunch.\n\n\"This is hardly suitable living space,\" says Lily, bent at the neck so she doesn't hit her head. Her wedge sandals struggle down the wooden steps, her hand clinging to the banister lest she fall. She doesn't think I will like it, but I do.\n\nCarriage homes like these, Lily says, don't follow the same rules as prescribed in the city's landlord-tenant ordinance. I wouldn't be protected in the same way. They're overlooked when it comes to regular safety inspections. There's only one door, which generally goes against fire codes that require two. Because garbage bins are relegated to the alley that abuts this home, it can be loud. The smell, especially in the summer months, can be sickening, she says.\n\n\"Rats are bent on eating from garbage bins, which means...\" she begins, but I hold up a hand and stop her there. She doesn't need to tell me. I know exactly what she means.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Lily asks.\n\nI listen for the sound of women's laughter. For rowdy men screaming at a TV. There are none.\n\n\"How do I apply?\" I ask.\n\nLily takes care of the paperwork. The landlord is a woman by the name of Ms. Geissler, a widow who lives alone in the greystone. We never meet, though Lily provides her with my completed application, a list of references\u2014ladies whose homes I clean\u2014and a letter of recommendation from a former high school guidance counselor. I kiss three grand goodbye, enough to cover first and last months' rent, plus two more for good measure. As they say, money speaks.\n\nAt Lily's suggestion, I wait in the car while she goes inside to meet with the landlord. I hold my breath, knowing it's liable the landlord will soon discover the same slipup as the college's financial aid office. That my social security number belongs to a dead girl. And she'll deny my application.\n\nBut, to my great relief, she doesn't. It takes less than fifteen minutes for Lily to emerge through the front door of the greystone, a key ring in hand. The keys to the carriage home. I breathe a sigh of relief. As it turns out, Lily let on about my mom and for that reason, Ms. Geissler approved the application without vetting me first. Out of sympathy and pity. Because she felt sorry for me, which is fine by me, so long as I have a place to live. A place that doesn't remind me of Mom.\n\nAs we pull away, I stare out the window and toward the imposing home. It's masked in shadows now, the sun slipping down on the opposite side of the street, burying the greystone in shade. The house is dignified but solemn. Sad. The house itself is sad.\n\nFrom the third story, I watch the window shade slowly peel back, though what's on the other side I can't see because it's shadowy and dim. But I imagine a woman, a widow, standing on the other side, watching until our car disappears from view.\neden\n\nJuly 26, _1996  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nIt just so happens that we do have neighbors.\n\nThey came this afternoon after Aaron had gone off to work, a pregnant Miranda and her two boys, five-year-old Jack and two-year-old Paul. They came trudging down our gravel drive, Miranda pulling both boys in a red Radio Flyer wagon so that by the time they arrived she was sweaty and spent. She'd come to deliver a welcoming gift.\n\nIt was the sound of wheels on gravel that caught my attention as I stood on a ladder, painting the living room walls a pale gray, the windows and doors open to expel chemical scents from the air. This is how I now spend my days when Aaron is away. Unpacking boxes of belongings. Cleaning the insides of closets and cabinets. Painting the home.\n\nI saw them through the window first, heard the tired woman growl at the boys to _stop crying_ and to _behave_ , her cheeks flushed red from the heat and the pregnancy and, I guessed, the desire to impress. Her blond hair blew around her face and into her eyes as she walked. Her body was cemented with a short maternity dress, fastened to her with sweat. On her feet were Birkenstocks. In her eyes, exhaustion and discontent. From the moment I first spied her out the open window I knew one thing: motherhood did not suit her well.\n\nI set down my painting supplies and met them on the porch. Dropping the wagon's handle, Miranda introduced herself first and then the kids, neither of whom said hello, for they were far too busy clawing their way out of the wagon, elbowing one another for room on the porch step. I didn't mind. They had blond hair like their mother, and if it weren't for the apparent age difference could have easily been twins. They fought one another, vying for the right to their mother's free hand. The bigger of the two won out in the end and as he slipped his hand inside Miranda's, the little guy fell to the ground in a puddle of tears. \"Get up,\" __ Miranda commanded, her sharp voice jabbing through the placid air, apologizing to me for their manners as she tried hard to raise Paul from the ground. But Paul was a deadweight and wouldn't stand, and as she tugged on his underarms he cried out in pain that she'd hurt him. Tears came pouring from his eyes _._\n\n\"Damn it, Paul,\" she said, pulling again roughly on those underarms. \"Get up.\"\n\nWhat she saw were naughty children making a fuss, embarrassing her, making her feel humiliated and ashamed. But not me. I saw something else entirely. I dropped down beside little Paul and held out a hand to him. \"There's a tree swing in the backyard. Let's go have a ride on it, and let Mommy rest awhile?\" __ I said. His pale green eyes rose to mine, snot gathering along his nostrils, running downward toward his lips. He wiped at his nose with the back of a dirty hand and nodded his sweet little head.\n\nMiranda had walked far to bring us a blueberry loaf, more than a block in the heat. The pits of her dress were damp with sweat, the cotton pulled taut across the baby bump. When she spoke, her voice was breathless, exhausted, burned-out from the energy it took to raise two boys on her own, and she confessed to me that this time\u2014while running a hand over that baby\u2014she was hoping for a girl.\n\nShe sat on a patio chair, kicking off her Birkenstocks and resting her swollen ankles on another seat as I poured us each a glass of lemonade, conscious of the dried paint on the backs of my hands.\n\nMiranda's husband, she told me, is employed by the Department of Public Works. She stays at home with Jack and Paul, though what she always wanted to be\u2014what she used to be in her life before kids\u2014was a medical malpractice attorney. She asked how long Aaron and I have been married and when I told her, her eyebrows rose up in curiosity and she asked about kids.\n\nDo we have them?\n\nDo we plan to have them?\n\nIt seemed an intimate conversation to have with someone I hardly knew, and yet there was a great thrill at saying the words aloud, as if cementing them to reality. I felt my cheeks redden as I thought of that morning before dawn when Aaron rose, dreamlike, above me, lifting my nightgown up over my head. Outside it was dark, just after four o'clock in the morning, and our eyes were still drowsy, heavy with sleep, our minds not yet preoccupied by the thoughts that arrive with daylight. We moved together there on the bed, sinking into the aging mattress. And then later, while grinning at each other over mugs of coffee on the dock, watching as the fleets of sailboats went floating by on the bay, I had to wonder if it happened at all, or if it was only a dream.\n\nWhen Miranda asked, I told her that we're trying. Trying to have a child, trying to start a family. An odd choice of words for creating a baby, if you ask me. _Trying_ is how one learns to ride a bike. To knit, to sew. To write poetry.\n\nAnd yet it was exactly what we were doing as Aaron and I made love with reckless abandon, and then followed it up a week or two later with a home pregnancy test. The tests were all negative thus far, that lone pink line on the display screen notifying me again and again that I wasn't yet pregnant. I tried not to let it get the best of me, and yet it was hard to do. It wasn't as though Aaron and I minded the time spent _trying_ ; in fact, we enjoyed it quite a bit, but with every passing month I yearned exponentially more for a baby. For a baby to have, a baby to hold.\n\nI never mentioned to Aaron that I was taking the pregnancy tests.\n\nI took them while he was at work, watching out the cottage window as his car slipped from view and then, when he was out of sight, rushing to the bathroom, where I closed and locked the door in case he mistakenly left something behind and had to return for it.\n\nAnd then, when the single pink line appeared on the display screen as it always did, I wrapped the negative pregnancy test sticks up in tissue and discarded them discreetly in the garbage bins.\n\nMiranda beamed when I told her that we're trying. \"How exciting!\" __ she told me, her smile mirroring the one on my own face.\n\nAnd then, helping herself to a slice of her own blueberry loaf and running a hand over her bump for a second time, she said that her baby and my baby could one day go to school together.\n\nThat they could one day be friends.\n\nAnd it was a thought that filled me with consummate joy. I grinned.\n\nI'd been a lone wolf for much of my life. An introvert. The kind of woman who never felt comfortable in her own skin. Aaron changed that for me.\n\nThe idea thrilled me to bits and, in turn, I instinctively stroked my own empty womb and thought how much I wanted my baby to have a friend.\njessie\n\nTonight makes five days since I've been asleep. It's my first night in my new place. I spend it not sleeping, but rather imagining myself dead. I think of what it must be like for Mom, being dead. Is there blackness all around her, a pit of nothingness, the blackest of the black holes? Or has time simply stopped for her, and there's no such thing anymore as the living and the dead? Sometimes I wonder if she's not dead at all but rather alive in the clay urn of hers, screaming to get out. I wonder if there's enough oxygen in the urn. Can Mom breathe? But then I remember it doesn't matter anyway.\n\nMom is dead.\n\nI wonder if it hurts when you die. If it hurt when Mom died. And I think, in frightening detail, what it feels like when you can't breathe. I find myself holding my breath until my lungs begin to hurt, to burn. It's a prickling pain that stretches from my throat to my torso. It's reflexive, automatic when my mouth gapes open, and I suck in all the oxygen I can to soothe the burn.\n\nIt hurts, I decide. It hurts to die.\n\nThere's a clock on the wall, one that came with the house. _Tick, tock, tick, tock,_ it goes all night long, keeping track of the minutes I don't sleep. Keeping count for me. It's loud, a conga drum pounding in my ear, and though I try and remove the batteries, the _tick, tock_ doesn't go away. It stays.\n\nI feel out of place in this strange place. The house smells different than what I'm used to, an earthy smell like pine. It's older than Mom's and my old home, where I lived my entire life. One of the windows doesn't close tight so that when the wind whips its way around the house as it does tonight, air sneaks in. I can't feel it but I hear it, the hiss of the wind forcing its way in through a gap.\n\nI lie there in bed, trying hard to catch my breath, to not think about dying, to will myself to do the impossible and sleep. Beside me, on the floor, are four boxes, the only ones I brought from the old home. Some clothes, a few picture frames, and a box of random paperwork Mom kept, just an old white bankers box, kept closed with a string and button. It seemed important enough for Mom to keep, and so I kept it. A thought comes to me now: _Could my social security card be in that box, tucked away with Mom's financial paperwork?_\n\nI climb out of bed and turn on a light, dropping to the floor beside the box. I loosen the string and lift the lid, meeting reams of paper head-on. If there's any sort of method to the madness, I don't see it.\n\nI search through the paperwork for my social security card, to be sure the numbers I dashed off on the FAFSA form weren't incorrect. That I didn't write the wrong ones down by mistake. Because never in my life have I been asked to give my social security number, and so it's conceivable, I think, that I have the numbers mixed-up. I look for the card itself, grabbing stacks of paper by the handful and flipping through them one sheet at a time, hoping the card falls out. But instead I find the deed to our home, an old checkbook ledger. Gas and electric bills. Years' worth of tax returns that gives me pause, because if I know one thing, it's that Uncle Sam isn't about to pay out tax refunds without a social security number.\n\nI set everything else aside except for the tax returns. My eyes go straight to the exemptions, the spot where someone would list their dependents and their dependents' social security numbers, meaning me and my social security number. Except that when I come to it, I find the line blank. Mom didn't list me as a dependent and, though I double-check the year of the form to be sure I was alive at the time, I see that I was. That I was eleven years old at the time the form was completed.\n\nAnd though I don't know much about income taxes, I do know it would have saved Mom a buck or two if she had thought to use me as a tax deduction. A baby gift from Uncle Sam.\n\nI wonder why Mom, who was frugal to a fault, didn't claim me as a dependent that year.\n\nIt was a mistake, I think. An oversight only. I dig through to find another 1040 in the tower of paperwork\u2014this one older, when I was four years old\u2014and search there for my name and social security number, finding it nowhere. Another year that Mom didn't claim me.\n\nI sift through them all, six tax return forms that I can find\u2014my movements becoming faster, more frantic as I dig\u2014and discover that never once did Mom claim me as a dependent. Not one single time.\n\nI turn off the light and get back into bed. I lie there, wondering why Mom didn't claim me as a dependent. What did she know about the IRS that I don't know? Probably a lot, I reason. I don't pay taxes. I've never once been sent a check from them. My only knowledge comes from hearsay, from eavesdropping on clients like Mr. and Mrs. Ricci, discussing whether they could claim Mrs. Ricci's shopping binges as exemptions, all those fancy clothes she toted home in the trunks of cabs.\n\nMom must've had a good reason for what she did.\n\nI listen to the clock, _tick, tock_. I don't bother closing my eyes except to blink, because I know that I won't sleep. I pull the blanket up clear to my neck because it's cold in the room. Though the thermostat downstairs is set to sixty-eight degrees, I have yet to hear the heat kick on.\n\nFall is here and winter is coming soon.\n\nI'm rubbing my hands together for friction, to try and create heat. To make myself warm. I rub them together and then press them to my cheeks. Rub and then press, rub and then press. And that's when I hear a noise.\n\nIt's sudden, the kind of noise that makes me sit up straighter in bed, that makes me hold my breath to listen.\n\nThe only way to describe it is a ping. A ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing. It's a piercing noise when it comes, like some sort of mechanical bleep or chime, the second or two between each ping a welcome reprieve. I rub at my ears, certain at first that the noise originates there, in my own eardrums. That it's merely tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, something only I can hear.\n\nBut then I realize it's not coming from my ears.\n\nIt's coming from somewhere on the other side of the room.\n\nI stare though the blackness but see nothing. It's too dark to see much of anything, aside from my own hand when it's pressed all the way up to my face. And so I push the blanket from me and rise, following the noise. I move blindly, feet guiding me, my steps small because I don't know what's in front of me. Where the bedroom ends and the stairs begin. I have to be careful so that I don't fall.\n\nI skirt around the edge of the bed, where I find myself on the other side of the room, hunched at the shoulders because the squat ceiling doesn't allow me to stand upright. From there, the noise rises up from the floor to greet me.\n\nI drop to my knees, running my hands over a metal grate by accident. There I discover a floor register, one of those metal contraptions that attaches to the end of an air duct and leads somewhere under the floor, to some other room in the home. That's where the ping is coming from, from some other room in the home. In my imagination, I see a mallet being tapped against the slats of another register in another room, because that's what it sounds like to me. Like metal on metal, rhythmic and fixed.\n\nI lie on the floor, pressing an ear to the grate so I can hear it more clearly. The ping. Which makes me think only of sonar emitting pulses underwater and then waiting for them to return, to see if there's anything out there, anything like whales or submarines. Except the only thing here is me.\n\nI'm overcome with the strangest thought then. An irrational thought but one that somehow makes sense.\n\nSomeone is trying to speak to me. To communicate with me.\n\nI press my lips again to the cold metal grate and call out, \"Hello?\"\n\nAt first there's no reply. The ping disappears, and as I sit there, waiting foolishly for someone to respond to me through the floor register, I realize this is ridiculous. Of course there's no one at the other end of the floor register speaking to me.\n\nBecause if there was, that would mean they're in the carriage home with me.\n\nA chill rises up my spine, one vertebra at a time.\n\n_Is there someone in the carriage home with me?_\n\nI rise to my feet and scurry across the room\u2014quicker this time, forgetting altogether about falling down stairs. I reach out to flip on the bedroom light. A yellow glare spreads over the room, obliterating the darkness. I stand at the top of the steps, staring down over the rest of the carriage home, listening for sounds, watching for movement. But there are none.\n\n\"Is anyone there?\" I call over the stairwell, my voice timid and afraid. My heart beats hard; my hands begin to sweat. For three or four minutes, no one appears and in time, logic begins to watch over me. I shake my head, feeling stupid.\n\nOf course no one is here.\n\nIt's the newness of the home that's to blame. That's what has me on edge. Because for the first time in my entire life, I'm alone and somewhere new. I feel lost without Mom, not knowing who I am or where I belong. If I belong anywhere.\n\nI turn off the bedroom light, and the room is once again plunged into darkness. It's darker now than it was before because my eyes have adjusted to the light. I creep across the room and back toward the bed, reminding myself that this house is old. Old homes come with all sorts of strange but innocuous noises. Rats living in the insulation, the settling of the home, water moving through the pipes. That's all that it is.\n\nAs I reach for the bed, I almost have myself convinced.\n\nUntil seconds later when the voices come. Female voices by the pitch of it, higher than that of a man. I suck in a gulp of air and hold it in, not believing my own ears.\n\nSomeone is there.\n\nThe voices are hard to hear, as if they're a million miles away, the sound dampened by distance and the network of aluminum tubes that make up the ductwork. At first it's only sounds, the cadence of women speaking, but no words that I can make out.\n\nUntil I do.\n\n\"It won't be long now,\" I hear, and at first I'm scared. My knees buckle. My throat constricts. My hands go to my throat without meaning to, pressing hard against my vocal cords. My tongue turns to sandpaper and though I'm cold, sweat breeds on my skin.\n\nI see women in some sort of insulated room, by the sound of it. Patients in a psych ward, the walls covered with plastic and foam; a door, padded on the inside, but reinforced with steel. No knob on the door. No way to leave. That's where I imagine the women are.\n\nI stagger back to the floor register, setting myself down over it. I press my ear to the grate, willing the voices to return again, but at the same time hoping they won't. Because I pray that no one is here.\n\nI call into the floor register, my voice mousy at first, scared, \"What? What won't be long now?\" Though my words are a whisper only, and if they were standing in the very same room as me, two feet away, they wouldn't hear.\n\nI cup my hands around my lips, pressing them flush to the floor register this time, so close I taste the bitter metal in my mouth. I call out, voice louder and more emphatic than it was before, \"Can you hear me? Is anyone there?\"\n\nThe only words I hear are low and plaintive. \"She's dead to the world.\" But to my question there is no reply. Whoever is there can't hear me.\n\nThe voices are hollow at first before they go silent. They disappear completely as I sit there, pressing my ear to the floor register in vain. But the only sound that I hear now is the _tick, tock_ of the wall clock.\n\nMy pulse is going at a breakneck speed. It pounds hard through my temple, my wrist. Wind rattles the carriage home, hissing its way in through the window's gap.\n\nA noise returns from the floor just then and I think that they are back. The women, the voices. The ping. I press my ear to the metal grate and listen.\n\nBut this time the only thing that comes is a rush of lukewarm air blasting into me.\n\nThe heat. The heat has finally kicked on.\n\nI think of the maze of tubes that work their way through the home and into this room from the furnace. The pipes and fittings and ducts. The ductwork, which, for a home this old, whimpers at every bend like the high pitch of female voices speaking, a whimper that my tired mind only doctored into words. There were never any women there.\n\nIt was the furnace's burners igniting, starting to produce heat. The furnace spurting air into the home. It comes out with a whine this time, and I press my hands to the grate to thaw them out.\n\nI'm aware suddenly of just how much my entire body aches.\n\nThe insomnia has taken my sleep from me, and now it's taking my mind. Turning the gray matter to sludge. How long can I go on, I wonder, without sleep?\n\nI return to bed and lie down on the mattress, staring out the open window at the sky. It's turned black now, though before I can sleep, dawn will be here. Not in the blink of an eye because that's not the way it is with insomnia.\n\nTime is as slow as the three-toed sloth when you can't sleep.\neden\n\nAugust 2, _1996  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nThe days have grown longer now that the task of getting settled into the cottage is through. The walls are painted; the unpacking is done. The garden has become a waiting game, staring at the soil, waiting for something to appear. Always waiting.\n\nEvery day, once Aaron has gone off to work, the next ten hours last a lifetime to me. Ten hours with nothing to do but wait until Aaron comes home to keep me company. Afternoons alone are lonely; dinners alone are lonely. I can't fall asleep until Aaron, completely tuckered out from another work shift, drops into bed beside me, nor can I bring myself to admit to him that I am lonely and bored.\n\nBefore leaving Green Bay I worked reception for a local pediatrician. It wasn't anything glamorous or ambitious, answering phones, greeting customers, coding medical records, tallying up bills, but it was _something_. But now Aaron has suggested that I not work, that I stay home, that soon enough we'll have a baby to raise and then I'll have something to do.\n\nOn occasion Miranda and her boys stop by for a visit, their afternoons long and lonely as well. We sit in the backyard, watching Jack and Paul wreak havoc on the tree swing, and as we do, I listen to Miranda depreciate parenthood, complain about her husband and her kids, knock the tedium of her everyday routine: the frozen waffles, the syrup in the hair, the messy bath times and all the books that she and her children are meant to read but never do because it's far too easy to just let them watch TV. Her husband\u2014Joe\u2014wants her to limit TV time to an hour a day, and Miranda laughed at this, saying Joe didn't have the first clue what it was like to be pregnant, what it was like to raise rough-and-tumble boys like Jack and Paul. She'd take any quiet time she could get, even if it meant they sat perched in front of the TV for five hours at a time, so close they were liable to go deaf and blind. She didn't care. Anything so long as they were quiet.\n\nThese were the words Miranda used and I stared at her openmouthed; I could hardly believe my ears. I agreed with Joe, treading carefully, delicately, saying how I'd read that too much TV can lead to obesity in children, to aggressiveness among other things, and she made light of this, saying I didn't know the first thing about being a mother.\n\n\"Just wait until you're a mother,\" she said. \"Then you'll see,\" __ while hoisting her bare feet onto my patio chair and drinking her lemonade.\n\nAnd then when adorable little Paul ran over and made every attempt to scamper onto her lap, hot and sweating, Miranda shirked away, saying, \"Come on, buddy, it's too hot for laps today,\" while pushing him off as if he was some sort of bug who'd landed on her legs.\n\nIn that moment, what I wanted to do\u2014what I ought to have done\u2014was pull him up onto my own lap. Let him rest his tiny head on my shoulder for a while. He was tired too, in addition to hot and sweating, his eyes begging for a cool bath and his afternoon nap, though Miranda was too busy whining about the drudgery of motherhood and wasn't yet ready to leave.\n\nSuddenly I wanted to feel the weight of him on my own two legs; I craved the heat of his skin on mine. I wanted to press those blond curls away from his eyes.\n\nI've started noticing kids with more frequency lately. Little kids, big kids. Babies. Kids at the park. Kids at the market. Kids walking down the streets of town, holding hands with their fathers and mothers. It seems everyone in the world suddenly had kids, everyone but Aaron and me.\n\nHad they been there all along and I failed to notice?\n\nOr did they arrive just then and there the moment Aaron and I decided to conceive?\n\nI didn't welcome Paul onto my lap as I wanted to do, but watched instead as he pouted and walked away, forced off Miranda's lap with her own two hands. His eyes were downcast, his bottom lip thrust out. He cried, not big crocodile tears but rather quiet and ashamed tears, the tears of someone who'd been told one too many times not to cry.\n\nAnd, as he disappeared to a corner of the yard to be sad, Miranda released a massive sigh of relief, grateful Paul was gone and she could once again breathe.\n\nAugust 14, 1996 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nIt's starting to become apparent that sex alone doesn't lead to a baby.\n\nWhen I woke this morning with blood dotting the inside of my underwear, my belly seized by a cramp, I knew another month had come and gone without a child. After the second month of trying, that blood in my underwear came as a startling blow, and there in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet seat, staring at the candy-apple red flecks on the lining of my favorite lace underwear, I began to sob. I kept it quiet and stifled, so that Aaron, in the kitchen brewing our morning coffee, couldn't hear. I didn't want him to know that I was upset. For whatever reason, I'd convinced myself over the last few days that every single twitch and prick I felt were the earliest signs of pregnancy. The tenderness in my chest, the desire to lay waste to almost everything I could find in the pantry, especially that which was high calorie, high fat.\n\nThese weren't signs of pregnancy after all, but rather signs of my period. The same ones I'd felt every single month for the last fifteen years of my life, since the middle of seventh grade when I started my period in science class, red blood seeping through a pair of white jean shorts. And now my biological clock had only convinced me I was pregnant. I'd been sure I was nauseated, morning sickness _already_ , when what it was was a change in hormones, my uterus clearing the decks, paving the way, getting ready to welcome a life that wouldn't be.\n\nI feel empty now, robbed of something that was mine, but why?\n\nHow can I grieve for something I never had?\n\nAfter Aaron left for work, I scrubbed my underwear clean with detergent and bleach and headed into town. I couldn't bring myself to tell him about the blood. Of course we don't much talk about babies and pregnancy or use words like _ovulation_ or _conceive_. Ostensibly, we just have sex, though inwardly what I'm thinking about, what we're _both_ thinking about, as we lie together in the moments afterward, my head draped across his chest, his warm hands massaging me, moving yo-yo-like up and down my back, is the end product, our handiwork, our creation, Aaron and me coming together, the best of him and the best of me fusing to create a baby.\n\nI know he wants this as much as I do.\n\nOnly one time did Aaron whisper to me as we lay there in the darkness of the bedroom, still trying hard to catch our breaths after we were through, that he wondered what she would look like and when I asked, \"Who?\" he said, \"Our baby girl. Our baby girl.\" I beamed there from ear to ear and when I told him I didn't know, he said, \"I bet she'll look like you.\"\n\nAnd then he kissed me slowly and deeply, the kind of kiss I felt all the way to my every extremity, and though he didn't say it, I knew that in Aaron's eyes if our baby girl looked like me, that she'd be the most beautiful girl in the world.\n\nIn all my life no one has ever made me feel as special as Aaron makes me feel.\n\nI've watched him garden, watched the way he carefully carries the peat pots from greenhouse to garden, his every move screaming of paternal instinct; the way he digs the perfect holes, assessing their dimensions twice for accuracy; the way he lays the tiny biodegradable contraptions inside as if setting an infant in a crib, scattering soil over the top as gently as drawing a blanket to a sleeping child's chin. He waters and watches and waits, and as he does, I watch him, this solid figure who, by his stature alone should be anything but gentle and soft-spoken, and yet he is. He wears his chestnut hair short these days, easier to hide behind the chef's cap so there can be no false claims of hair in food, at least not from him, his hands and forearms marked with a selection of scratches and burns. For as long as I remember, he's had them, those scratches and burns: badges of honor, war wounds dating back to his culinary school years.\n\nThere are times I find that I can't take my eyes off those scars.\n\nEach time he steps carefully through the garden, tending the seeds, careful not to step on our seedlings, it strikes me what a good father Aaron will one day be, so patient, so protective, so loving, the way he is with me.\n\nAnd so, to say the words aloud now, to tell him I've started my period, would be to confess to Aaron that though we _tried_ again this month, _tried_ to conceive a baby, we failed.\n\nAfter I wiped my eyes, I joined him on the dock for coffee and together we watched the boats pass by and shortly before two o'clock, as always, he left for work and again I was alone.\njessie\n\nEverything changes with the break of day.\n\nAs the sun rises, gliding over the horizon, the world turns bright. The oppressive burden of night disappears. For the first time in eight long hours, I can breathe.\n\nIn daylight, I find myself standing above the floor register on the bedroom floor, feet straddling it. I stare down at the black rectangle between my legs. There's nothing ominous about it; it's just an ordinary metal grate, cold now, the furnace no longer producing heat. I rub at my arms in an effort to warm them up.\n\nI shower and dress and head out into the day. Outside it's a cold start, no more than forty degrees that will rise up to sixty-five by midday. The sky is blue for now, though there's rain in the forecast. The grass is wet with dew. My fingers are cold as I lock the door.\n\nFrom where I stand, I catch a glimpse of my landlord through the window of her own kitchen. It's the back of her, just a pouf of hair and the ribs of a blue sweater before they meet with the wooden slats of a chair. It is a distorted image at best, muddled by the reflection of the outside world on glass. She doesn't see me.\n\nI could knock on the door, make an introduction, but that really isn't my thing.\n\nI round the side of the carriage home, gathering Old Faithful from the alleyway where I left her, leaned up against the side of the home. Ivy grows up the brick of the garage, the leaves starting to turn red. The alley is abandoned. There is nothing more than garage doors and Dumpsters here. City of Chicago garbage bins. No people. No rats. No feral cats. No signs of life anywhere. I settle Mom and her urn into the basket on back, nothing more than a metal milk crate that I keep secure with bungee cords. We set off down the street.\n\nIt's no secret that Chicago is the alley capital of the country, with over a thousand miles of shadowy backstreets. The kind of darkened corridors where people like to hide their trash and vermin, and nobodies like me.\n\nMorning traffic, as always, is a mess. Millions of people move this way and that like cattle in a cattle drive. My first stop is the same as always: coffee. I take it to go with a sugar twist from the bakery, where the donuts are fresh and the coffee is hot and cheap. I don't have six bucks a day to spend on coffee, and the owner knows me, sort of. She always says hello and calls me Jenny, and I don't have the heart to tell her that, after all these years, she's got it wrong. I set my coffee in the cup holder, pedaling away, making my way toward the Loop. I take my time, moving in wide circles around cars and trucks illegally parked in the bike lines, careful to avoid the city's sewage grates. I stay away from potholes.\n\nHaving no luck finding my social security card in the box of Mom's paperwork, I started the day with an idea in mind: getting a new one. That and figuring out how to get my name removed from this inauspicious death index it's on. I head toward the Social Security Office and there, wait in line for a mind-numbing hour, only to learn that in order to get a new social security card, I need to prove who I am. Something more legitimate than just my word. I need to provide some sort of official identifying documentation like a driver's license or a birth certificate that says I'm Jessica Sloane, neither of which I have.\n\nOn the advice of an employee at the Social Security Office, I head next to the Cook County Clerk's Office in the Richard J. Daley Center\u2014the Bureau of Vital Records\u2014in the hopes of tracking my birth certificate down.\n\nWhen I arrive at the Daley Center, the plaza is teeming with people. I tie Old Faithful up to the bike rack outside, watching as men and women in business suits take wide strides across the plaza. I rush past the Picasso and into the imposing lobby, where I wait in line to pass through security, looking on as others empty their pockets with the speed of a snail. I make it through the X-ray machine and the contents of my bag are searched. When I'm deemed harmless, the guard sends me on my way to the clerk's office, which is in the lower level of the building.\n\nA surge of people wait before the elevator doors and so I take the stairs alone, heading down where I take my place in a long line, sighing in solidarity with those who also wait, avoiding eye contact, losing patience.\n\nWhen it's my turn, an employee beckons, \"Next,\" with a hand held up in the air so that I see her there, hunched over a computer screen, shoulders sagging. I go to her, telling her what I need.\n\nSuddenly it dawns on me all the information I'm liable to find when the woman locates my birth certificate. Not only the documentation I need to prove I'm Jessica Sloane, but the place where I was born. The exact time I slipped from Mom's womb. The name of the obstetrician who stood below, waiting to catch me as I fell.\n\nMy father's name.\n\nIn just a few short minutes, I'll know once and for all who he is. Not only will I have proof of my own identity, but of my father's as well.\n\nI would never have done something as flagrant as seek out my birth certificate from vital records if Mom were still alive. That would have broken her heart, my having access to all these things she never wanted me to have. Searching our home seemed innocent enough, but tracking down my birth certificate feels like a really egregious act were she still here.\n\nBut Mom told me to _find myself_ , and that's what I'm trying to do. To get into college, to make something of myself. To do something that would make Mom proud, all of which I can't do without a social security card.\n\n\"I need to get a copy of my birth certificate,\" I say to the employee. My heart quickens as she slides a request form across the counter. She tells me to fill it out. I reach for a pen, completing as much of the form as I can. It isn't much. I can't answer the question that pertains to place of birth or anything having to do with my dad\u2014what his name is, where he was born.\n\nIt's only as I pause in my writing that the worker takes pity on me. Her eyes soften ever so slightly and she says, \"You don't have to fill it all in,\" while staring uncomfortably at the urn in the crook of my arm, seeing the way the pen in my hand hovers above the words _father's name_. \"Just as much as you know,\" she adds, telling me she can try and look it up with what little I know. I slide the form back to her, half-complete, and she says she'll just need the payment and to see a photo ID.\n\n_A photo ID._\n\nIt's easy to explain why I don't have a photo ID. Because by this point in most people's lives, they have a driver's license, which is something I also don't have. Because the cancer came the year I turned fifteen, the year I was meant to enroll in my high school's after-school drivers' education program. Because after we learned that Mom had an invasive tumor in her left breast, knowing how to drive a car\u2014in a city where we didn't need or own a car\u2014didn't take top priority. Because my afternoons were tied up with Mom from then on, riding the bus with her to bajillions of doctor appointments or working to help pay for our home and her care. Because once I knew there was a good chance Mom would die, I wanted to spend every minute I could with her.\n\nAnd yet I'm loath to tell the worker the bind I'm in because I know how it will sound. And so instead of coming clean, I root around in the pockets of my jeans, extracting the lining. I dive a hand deep into the depths of my bag searching for something I know isn't there. I pluck thirty dollars out of my wallet\u2014the cost of the birth certificate is only fifteen\u2014and try handing it to the woman. \"Keep the change, please,\" I say, bemoaning in a low voice how my license was in my bag just this morning. How it must have fallen from my wallet on the way in. How it was there, but now it's gone.\n\nI press the urn to my chest, hoping the woman's mercy will prevail and she'll pocket the extra fifteen bucks and get me what I need. She stares at the money for a minute and then asks whether I have any other form of ID. An insurance card or voter registration, but I shake my head and tell her no. I don't have either of these things. Mom had health insurance. A rock-bottom plan that helped pay for cancer treatment, though I'm still in the hole more than I care to think about. But Mom never added me to her insurance plan because she said it wasn't something I needed. I was young and healthy and the rare trip to the clinic could be paid for with cash. Those required school vaccines I got at the Department of Public Health because they were cheap.\n\n\"Got any mail with your name on it?\" the woman wants to know, but I shrug my shoulders and tell her no. She gives me a look. Disbelief, I think. I'm as much of a skeptic as the next guy; I know how this sounds.\n\n\"Please, ma'am,\" I beg. I'm tired and I don't know what else to do. My eyes feel heavy, threatening to close. There's the greatest desire to lie down on the floor and sleep. Except that it's only a tease, my body playing tricks on me. Even if I lie outstretched on the linoleum tiles, I still wouldn't sleep.\n\n\"I really need that birth certificate, ma'am,\" I say, shuffling in place, and it must be something about the way my voice cracks or the tears that well in my eyes that makes her lean forward and snatch the money from the countertop. She gathers the bills into her hand, counting them one at a time. Her eyes take a quick poll of the room to see if anyone else is watching, listening, before she whispers, \"How about this. How about I see if I can find anything first. Then we'll figure out what to do about the ID.\"\n\nI say okay.\n\nShe takes the form and begins typing information onto the rows of keys.\n\nMy heart pounds inside my chest. My hands sweat. In just a few short minutes, I'll know who my father is. I start thinking about his name. Whether he's still alive. And if he is, if he thinks about me the way I think about him.\n\nBy now, there are at least twenty people in line behind me. The room isn't large by any means. It's stodgy and drab, and everyone is looking at everyone else like they're a common criminal. Ladies clutch their purses to their sides. A kid in line screams that he has to pee. As he yells, I glance over my shoulder to see this poor kid, maybe four years old, hand pressed to his groin, eyes wide and ready to burst, his mother reading him the riot act for nature's call.\n\n\"There were no records found,\" the woman says to me then. Not at all the words I expected to hear. My face falls flat; my mouth parts. For a second I'm confused, unable to produce coherent thoughts or words.\n\nI fight to find my voice, asking, \"Are you sure you spelled it correctly?\" imagining her hunting and pecking for the letters, clipping the corner edge of some surplus letter by mistake, misspelling my name.\n\nBut her face remains motionless. She doesn't attempt another search, as I'd hoped she'd do. She doesn't glance down at the computer or check her work.\n\n\"I'm sure,\" she says, raising a hand into the air to beckon for the next customer.\n\n\"But wait,\" I say, stopping her. Not willing to give up just yet.\n\n\"There were no records found, miss,\" she tells me again, and I ask, feeling incredulous, \"What does that mean then, _no records found_?\" because what I'm suddenly realizing is that, instead of being _dead_ , the crux of the matter is that there is no birth record on file for me.\n\nI can't be dead because I haven't yet been born.\n\nThe Bureau of Vital Records doesn't even know I exist.\n\n\"Of course you must have found something,\" I argue, not waiting for a reply. My voice elevates. \"How can there be no birth certificate for me when clearly I'm alive?\"\n\nAnd then I pinch a fold of skin on my arm, watching as it swells and turns red before shriveling back down to size. I do it so that she and I can both see I'm alive.\n\n\"Ma'am,\" she says, and there's a shift in posture, her empathy quickly giving way to aggravation. I've become a pest. \"You left half this form blank,\" she says.\n\nI argue that she told me I could. That she was the one who said I didn't have to fill it all out. She ignores me, continues to speak. \"Who's to say you were even born in Illinois? Were you born in Illinois?\" she asks, challenging me, calling my bluff, and I realize that I don't know. I don't know where I was born. All my life, I only assumed. Because Mom never told me otherwise and I never thought to ask.\n\n\"No records found means that I couldn't locate a birth certificate based on the information you gave me. You want to find your birth certificate, you need to fill in the rest of these blanks,\" she tells me, slipping the request form back to me as I stare down helplessly at all the missing information, _name of father_ , _place of birth_ , wondering if what I filled in was even correct to begin with.\n\nWas Mom always a Sloane like me? That I'd also assumed. But if she was married when I was born, then maybe she had a different last name, one she ditched at some point over the last twenty years for some reason I don't know?\n\n\"And next time,\" the employee tacks on as I back dismally away, losing hope, running blindly into another woman in line, \"be sure and bring your ID.\"\n\nI make my way out the door, climbing back up to the first floor two steps at a time. The building's stairwell is industrial and dark, a flash of gray that comes at me quickly. It spirals upward in circles for thirty floors or more. When I arrive on the first floor, slipping through the stairwell door, crowds flood the lobby of the Daley Center. I'm grateful for this, for the anonymity of it all. I camouflage myself among the wayward teens who've been summoned here for court, those with purple-dyed hair and heads hidden beneath sweatshirt hoods. I make my way back outside, nowhere closer to finding my father or proving my identity.\n\nAs far as the world is concerned, I'm still dead.\neden\n\nSeptember 14, _1996  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nThe town was mobbed with people today as it always is on Saturdays, vacationers trying hard to take advantage of the last few warm days before fall arrives. It's September now, days shy of the equinox, and as September eventually bleeds into October, the seas of people will finally leave. They come for the hundreds of miles of shorelines, the extensive gift shops, the food. But by December, this far north into Wisconsin, the temperatures will hurtle to twenty or thirty degrees, mounds of snow will obstruct the streets, and the skies will be endlessly gray. And then no one will want to be here, least of all me. Aaron and I will spend the Midwest winter as we always do, imagining the warm places in the world we hope to one day go, places where cold and snow don't exist. St. Lucia, Fiji, Belize.\n\nPlaces we will never go.\n\nI spent the day while Aaron was at work wandering the town's streets, simulating a tourist. I visited gift shops; I bought a T-shirt and ice cream, a book on sailing. I rode the Washington Island Ferry through Death's Door, spending the late-afternoon hours exploring the crystal clear waters and the polished white stones of Schoolhouse Beach, trying to skip rocks out over the lake, and like getting pregnant, failing at that too.\n\nBack in town I watched families wander from store to store, mothers with buggies, fathers with toddlers perched on their backs. I stared at them as afternoon blended into evening, seated on a bench at Beach View Park, watching as families laid out blankets, staking their claim to a patch of land for the night's sunset display.\n\nThe children were everywhere, and I started to wonder why something in so much abundance could ever be hard to achieve.\n\nOctober 8, 1996 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nEach time Miranda and her boys stop by, she has a new suggestion for me, some tip on how to hasten conception. No subject is too personal or too taboo to discuss, from the style of Aaron's underwear to various positions that supposedly aid in fertilization as she lounges on my back patio or living room sofa, weather depending, and cites for me the reasons she believes Aaron and I are not yet pregnant\u2014though never once did I ask.\n\nAs she talks, Jack and Paul loiter before us, performing for me a song they learned, a magic trick, how they can make their eyes go crossed. They stand before me as Miranda spells out the effects of tight underpants on the male genitalia, saying over and over again, \"Look at me, Miss Eden. Look what I can do,\" __ while folding their tongues in half, or trying to make them stretch clear to the ends of their noses, and, as Miranda talks louder to counter their escalating tones, it hits me how attention-starved they are, how they would give anything for her to watch them for a minute, to praise their talents. Every day, there is dirt wedged beneath their nails and some sort of food on their cheeks and chins. Their outfits are cobbled together with clothing that doesn't match and hardly fits.\n\nI clap my hands for Jack and Paul, but Miranda tells them to go away. To go play.\n\nEvery day.\n\nAs her baby bump swells more and more, I'm pestered by Miranda to _hurry up_ , to get knocked up, so that her baby and my baby can still go to school together as I've promised her they would.\n\nIf I wait much longer they'll be in different grades.\n\nThat's what Miranda has told me.\n\n\"September is the cutoff, don't you know?\"\n\nAccording to Miranda's timeline, I have until September of next year to have a baby. Twelve months, which leaves only three to get pregnant.\n\n\"It's not that we're not trying,\" I've tried to explain, and she counters with a flip of the hand and a slapdash \"I know, I know,\" and then it's back to the underwear we go. To help with Aaron's and my fertility issues, she suggested a pillow beneath my hips to help steer sperm in the right direction. \"It's all about gravity,\" she says.\n\nAt every visit I watch the size of her own baby bump swell, her maternity shirts no longer able to cover its overwhelming girth. I tell myself that her suggestions are only old wives' tales, not rooted in truth, but how am I to know if that's true?\n\nBut today when she lounged on my sofa, peering at me with that same expression on her face\u2014mouth parted, eyebrows raised\u2014and asked if I was keeping track of my ovulation, I realized how stupid it was of me, how naive.\n\nThis was Aaron's and my first foray into babymaking. I was sure it was something that just _happened_ , that there was no need to time or plan. In the moment, I told her yes, of course I was keeping track of my dates, because I couldn't bring myself to say otherwise, to admit to her that it never occurred to me to figure out when I was and when I wasn't ovulating. Aaron and I both come from large families, and the number of grandchildren our parents have been blessed with is in no way in short supply. It seemed a given that after ample time, after many months of waking up in the morning to Aaron's soft fingers tracing my bare skin, thumbs hooking through the lacy edges of my underpants, gliding them proficiently over my thighs, sooner or later we'd succeed. We'd make a baby as we intended to do.\n\nBut for the first time I've come to realize that this is going to take more than time.\n\nAfter Miranda left I drove to the library and sought out a guidebook on pregnancy and there, in the stacks of books, plotted out my approximate menstrual cycle. I figured out the first date of my last period. I counted backward; I did the math. It wouldn't be perfect, that I knew\u2014my periods had never been perfect\u2014but it would be close. And close to perfect was better than nothing for me.\n\nAnd now, knowing that in just two days' time I will be ovulating fills me with an abundant amount of hope. Aaron and I were doing it wrong all along, missing out on the best times to get pregnant, likely omitting my most fertile days, those negligible hours when conception can occur. On the way home I stopped at the market and picked up a pocket-size calendar and, at home, with a red pen, circled my most fertile days for the next three months, through the end of the year.\n\nThis time we'll get it right.\njessie\n\nI push my way through the turnstile doors and step outside, making my way across the plaza. Beside the Eternal Flame, I pause, overcome with the sudden urge to scale the fence and lie down beside the puny little fire in the fetal position. To fall to my side on the cold concrete, beside the memorial for fallen soldiers. To pull my knees up to my chest in the middle of all those pigeons who huddle around it, trying to keep warm. The land around the flame is thick with birds, the concrete white from their waste. That's where I want to lie. Because I'm so tired I can no longer stand upright.\n\nPeople breeze past me. No one bothers to look. A passing shoulder slams into mine. The man never apologizes and I wonder, _Can he see me? Am I here?_\n\nI head to the bike rack, finding Old Faithful ensnared beneath the pedals and handlebars of a dozen or more poorly placed bikes. I have to tug with all my might to get her out and still I can't do it. The frustration over my identity boils inside me until I feel myself begin to lose it. All this red tape preventing me from getting what I need, from proving who I am. I'm starting to question it myself. _Am I still me?_\n\nThe debilitating effects of insomnia return to me then, suddenly and without warning. General aches and pains plague every muscle in my body because I can't sleep. Because I haven't been sleeping. My feet hurt. My legs threaten to give. I shift my weight from one leg to the next, needing to sit. It's all I can think about for the next few seconds.\n\nSitting down.\n\nPins and needles stab my legs. I wrench on the bike, yanking as hard as I can, but still she doesn't budge. \"Need a hand?\" I hear, and though clearly I need a hand, there's a part of me feeling so suddenly indignant that I turn with every intent of telling the person that _I've_ _got it_. Words clipped. Expression flat.\n\nBut when I turn, I see a pair of blue eyes staring back at me. Royal blue eyes like the big round gum balls that drop down the chute of a gum-ball machine. And my words get lost inside my throat somewhere as I rub at my bleary eyes to be sure I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing. Because I know these eyes. Because I've seen these eyes before.\n\n\"It's you,\" I say, the surprise in my voice clear-cut.\n\n\"It's me,\" he says. And then he reaches over and hoists Old Faithful inches above the other bikes, those that have held her prisoner all this time. It's effortless to him, like nothing.\n\nHe looks different than the last time I saw him. Because the last time I saw him he was folded over the cafeteria table, drinking coffee in a sweatshirt and jeans. Now he's dressed to the nines in black slacks, a dress shirt and tie, and I know what it means. It means that his brother has died. His brother, who was hurt in a motorcycle accident after a car cut him off and he went flying off the bike, soaring headfirst through the air and into a utility pole without a helmet to protect his head.\n\nHe held vigil beside his brother's hospital bed while I held vigil beside Mom's. And now, six days later, his eyes still look tired and sad. When he smiles, it's strained and unconvincing. He's gotten a haircut. The dark, messy hair has been given a trim and though it's not prim or tidy\u2014not by a long shot\u2014it looks clean. Combed back. Much different than the hair I saw those days and nights in the hospital cafeteria, his head stuffed under the hood of a red sweatshirt. We only spoke the one night, him fussing about the coffee, telling me how he'd rather be anywhere but there. But still, there's the innate sense that I know him. That we shared something intimate. Something much more personal than coffee. That we're bound by a similar sense of loss, united by grief. Both collateral damage in his brother's and my mother's demise.\n\nHe sets Old Faithful down on the ground and passes the handlebar to me. I take her in my hand, seeing the way his nails are bitten to the quick, the skin torn along the edges. A row of rubber bands rests on his wrist, the last one tucked halfway beneath the cuff of the dress shirt. A single word is written on the back of the hand with blue ink. I can't read what it is.\n\nHe runs his hands through his hair and only then do I think what I must look like.\n\nIt can't be good.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I ask, as if I have any more right being here than him.\n\nHe speaks in incomplete sentences, and still I get the gist. \"The wake,\" he says. \"St. Peter's. I needed some air.\"\n\nHe points in the direction of some church just a couple of blocks from here, one that's too far to see from where we stand. Though still I look, seeing that the sun has slipped from the sky and is hidden now behind a cloud. While I was inside the building, the clouds rolled into the city, one by one. They changed the morning's blue sky to one that is plush and white, filling the sky like cotton balls, making the day ambiguous and gray.\n\nI don't ask when or how his brother died and he doesn't ask about Mom. He doesn't need to because he knows. He can see it in my eyes that she has died. Neither of us offer our condolences.\n\nHe rams his hands into the pockets of his slacks. \"You never told me your name,\" he says. If I was the kind of girl that felt comfortable in situations like these, I'd say something snarky like _Well, you never asked._\n\nBut I don't because it's not that type of conversation, and I'm not that girl.\n\n\"Jessie,\" I say, sticking my hand out by means of introduction. His handshake is firm, his hand warm as he presses it to mine.\n\n\"Liam,\" he says, eyes straying, and I take it as my cue to leave. Because there isn't anything more to say. The one and only conversation we had in the hospital, words were sparse, but unlike in the hospital we're no longer killing time, just waiting for people to die. That night, before the conversation drifted to quiet and we sat in silence for over an hour, sipping our coffees, we talked about private things, nonpublic things, things we weren't apt to tell the rest of the world. He told me about his brother beating him up when they were kids. About how he would lock him out of the house in the rain and shove his head in the toilet, giving him a swirly when their folks weren't home. _Such a bastard_ , __ he said, though I got the sense that that was then and this was now. That over the years, things changed. But he didn't say when or how.\n\nI told him about Mom's hair and fingernails, both of which she lost thanks to chemotherapy. Her eyelashes too. I told him about the clumps of hair that fell out, and how I watched on in horror as Mom held fistfuls of it in her hands. How there were whole clods of it on her pillowcase when she awoke in the morning, masses of it filling the shower drain. I said that Mom never cried, that only I cried. It grew back, after the cancer was in remission for the first time, soft fuzz that grew a little thicker than it was before chemotherapy. A little more brown. It never reached her shoulders before the cancer returned.\n\n\"You should get back to the wake,\" I tell him now as we stand there in the middle of Daley Plaza. But he only shrugs his shoulders and tells me that the wake is through. That everyone split.\n\n\"The funeral's tomorrow,\" he says as I wrap my fingers around Old Faithful's handlebars. I don't know what to say to that. There isn't anything to say to that.\n\nTurns out, I don't need to say anything. \"You never said what you're doing here,\" he says then, but as I'm about to explain I realize that there's no easy answer for it, because the reason I'm standing outside Daley Center is far more convoluted than his. And so instead of answering, I sigh and say, \"Long story,\" thinking that he'll just say okay and walk away because chances are good he didn't want to know in the first place. He was probably only being polite because I asked what he was doing here, and so he thought he should too, that he should reciprocate out of courtesy.\n\nBut as he shifts in place and tells me, \"I have time,\" I realize that he wants me to stay.\n\nThere's a sadness in his eyes, the likeness to mine uncanny.\n\nWe walk. Out of the plaza, down Washington and toward Clark Street, me towing Old Faithful by the handlebar. We walk in the street because it's illegal to ride a bike on the sidewalk in the city. I don't know what time it is, but what I can say is that the haste of rush hour is past, the clog of morning traffic like hair in a shower drain. Impossible to get through. It's gone, as if some plumber stopped by and dropped a gallon of Drano on the street, ameliorating the clog. People move slowly now. They take their time. Without the blockage we easily slip through, weaving in and out of pedestrians and cars.\n\n\"I stopped by vital records,\" I say. \"I needed to get my birth certificate. Except that didn't go as planned,\" I explain as we turn a right on Clark, which is a one-way street around here. All the cars come directly at us. They miss us by a hair's breadth at times because there are no bike lanes. Not that it matters because half of the time when there are, cars and trucks illegally park and I have to veer around them and into traffic. The number of bike-related deaths in the city is staggering; I just hope that one day one of them isn't me.\n\nLiam asks why getting my birth certificate didn't go as planned. He's a good ten inches taller than me, broad in the shoulders but narrow around the hips. At just over five feet, I've always been on the short side. My whole life, for as long as I can remember, I've been short. Kids in school used to make fun of me. They'd call me names like shrimp, peanut. Squirt.\n\nHe towers over me, his body slim but in the tailored clothes, he doesn't look too thin. I remember him in the hospital\u2014oversize sweatshirt and jeans, getting swallowed up by fabric. Then he looked thin.\n\nI start at the beginning and tell Liam the whole story. Otherwise it won't make sense. And even then it doesn't make much sense because I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it myself. I tell him about applying to college, the phone call from the financial aid office. The woman's cheery voice on the other end of the line, laughing, telling me I'm dead. I tell him about the wasted time spent trying to find my social security card, the worthless trip to the Social Security Office. The one that led me here, to the Daley Center in search of my birth certificate, though that too was a waste.\n\n\"I don't have a birth certificate,\" I close with. \"At least not one in the state of Illinois. And without a birth certificate or a social security number, there's no way to prove who I am or that I even exist. But what freaks me out even more,\" I admit, \"is this implication that\u2014\"\n\nBut before I can get the words out, birds swarm around me, moving in from all directions. Pigeons with beady eyes and little bobbing heads, pecking at something on the street. They fight over it, their squawks loud and angry. I try to sidestep them, but their movements are arbitrary, aimless; there's no predicting where they'll go. I step on the tail feathers of one by chance and it scurries, wings slapping together to get away from me.\n\nAs I go to take another step, I see what the skirmish is all about. It's another pigeon, dead, lying on the street where my foot should go. The other birds move in on it, pecking at it, trying to eat it, and just like that, there's nowhere for me to put my foot. It throws off my stride, makes me lose balance. The dead pigeon lies on its back, spread-eagle-like. Its wings are fanned on either side of its body, white belly exposed, its neck turned too far in one direction, broken I think. I see only one beady eye, the other somehow missing. Its beak is tucked into the crook of a neck, and on the street beside it are flecks of blood.\n\nI nearly step on the carcass as my body lurches forward, stumbling, and I'm sure I'll fall. My heartbeat kicks up a notch or two, hands sweaty, and like that I'm at the mercy of the bird and the street.\n\nI let go of Old Faithful's handlebars by accident. I watch as she topples onto the street, certain I'm about to go with her. People turn to see what the racket is, the clang of the bike on the street, the sound of my scream. My hands reach for something to latch on to, coming up empty until Liam grabs me by the wrist, steadying me.\n\n\"Jessie?\" he asks, and I have to fight for a minute to catch my breath. I'm breathing hard, seeing only pigeons nipping the bloody flesh of a dead bird. And I'm thinking about that bird, wondering what happened to kill the bird. How did it die? If it was killed by a car or a bike, or a run-in with a building window maybe. Maybe it flew headfirst into the Thompson Center before sliding down, down, down to the ground.\n\n\"Jessie?\" Liam asks again because I still haven't replied. His eyes watch me, uneasy, as he makes sure I'm steady on my feet before leaning down to reclaim Old Faithful from the street.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" he asks, and, \"What happened?\" and I shake my head and say, \"The damn bird. Those pigeons.\"\n\n\"What bird?\" he asks. \"What pigeons?\"\n\nI turn to point them out to him. But when I look back on to the street behind me, there's no bird. No pigeons. The only thing there is a squandered hot dog that lies on the asphalt. Half-eaten, gravel stuck to what remains of it. Chunky green relish spilling from the bun, red ketchup splattered here and there like blood.\n\nThere's no dead bird.\n\nThere was never a dead bird.\n\nThe world loses balance all of a sudden, the street beneath my feet unpredictable and insecure. I think of sinkholes, when the earth suddenly decides to give, roadways collapsing like Play-Doh, sucking people in and swallowing them whole.\n\nI shake my head. \"Just tripped over my own feet,\" I say, but I can see in Liam's eyes: he doesn't believe me.\n\nWe move on.\n\nLiam waits for me to finish whatever it is I was saying before I saw the bird, but now my train of thought is gone. I can think only of the bird, the pigeons, the flecks of blood. And so he reminds me. And then I remember.\n\nWhat freaks me out the most, I tell him, is the implication that I'm already dead.\n\nHe asks about the death database. What it is and what it's called, and so I tell him what the woman from the financial aid office told me.\n\n\"The Death Master File,\" I say, which in and of itself sounds like something the grim reaper must carry along with him, a listing of all the souls he's sent to collect. Liam looks it up on his smartphone, and soon finds out that access to the file is restricted. That not just anybody can look at it. He tells me what I already know. That it's a listing of millions of people who have died, them and their social security numbers. It's used as a means to prevent fraud and identity theft. To stop living people from opening credit cards and getting mortgages in the name of someone who's already dead.\n\n\"So somehow I got placed on this list, and now my social security number is good for nothing until I clean up this mess. Because on paper, I'm dead. And I can't find my social security card or figure out how to get a new card because I don't have the other documentation I need to do it.\"\n\n\"Listen to this,\" Liam says as a disclaimer pops up on his phone and he reads, quoting verbatim, \"'In rare instances it is possible for the records of a person who is not deceased to be included erroneously in the DMF.'\"\n\nI ask him how that can happen. \"A clerical error,\" he says, meaning with the stroke of one wrong computer key someone who's alive and well is suddenly dead. Or not dead but undocumented, which is almost as good as being dead, I'm quickly learning.\n\nThe only reason my own death went unnoticed for all this time, I think, is because I haven't once been asked to give my social security number. But sooner or later it was bound to happen. When I sought out a driver's license, made an attempt to open a credit card. An attempt that would have been denied.\n\nAs we scoot onto the pedestrian side of the Clark Street Bridge and cross over the Chicago River, I think of people in the same situation as me, unable to access their own bank accounts and going broke. Those who don't have the money for food or shelter, though they _do_ have the money; it's just that it's tied up in some bank account they can't access because the bank is certain they're dead.\n\n\"People get locked out of their own lives, interrogated by police for suspected identity theft when the person whose identity they've supposedly stolen is themselves,\" Liam says as he drops his phone into the back pocket of his pants, and I utter under my breath, \"What a mess.\"\n\nI stare down below, beneath the metal grates of the bridge, where a tour is underway, tourists exploring the polluted grayish-green waters of the Chicago River. The tour guide steers passengers' attention to the bridge\u2014built in 1929, a bascule bridge, she says\u2014and all eyes move to Liam and me, taking photos, pointing upward some twenty feet or more to the bridge on which we stand.\n\n\"You really are Jessie, aren't you?\" His words are dry, meant to be funny, though they're not. His tone is deadpan, his face expressionless.\n\nAnd though I know it's in jest, it's a question that nags at me.\n\nI am Jessie, aren't I? Am I Jessica Sloane?\n\nWe continue to walk. Down Clark and left on Superior, my feet following Liam's lead. We're quiet. We don't speak much. He asks if I've been sleeping. He says that I look tired and I pause, looking at my own reflection in the glass facade of a building. I see what he sees. The sunken eyes surrounded by puffy red skin, the tip of my nose red.\n\nI make light of the insomnia. I say that sleep is a waste of time. That there are so many more productive things I could be doing instead of sleeping.\n\n\"It's not good for you, Jessie,\" he tells me. \"You need to sleep. The melatonin,\" he says, same as he did in the hospital when he slipped those pills into the palm of my hand. \"Give it a try.\" _I did give it a try_ , I think. I tried the melatonin\u2014that and the clonazepam\u2014and slept right on through Mom's death. Never again.\n\nI tell him that I will but I won't.\n\nAnd then he stops beside a mid-rise, saying, \"This is me. This is where I live.\"\n\nThis building beside us is five or six stories tall, flanked with floor-to-ceiling windows. A sign out front offers spacious open-plan lofts for sale. A doorman patrols the revolving front door and there's something very moneyed about it that makes me feel out of place and ill at ease. The Liam before me is suddenly at odds with the Liam I remember from the hospital, the one who was bedraggled, a bit dog-eared like me.\n\nA look of confusion must pass on my face. \"My brother and I lived here together,\" he explains. His voice is deep and there's no rise or fall to his intonation as he speaks, telling me, \"He was a software engineer.\"\n\nI fill in the missing pieces. His brother made the money. He paid for the condo. And now he's gone.\n\n\"You'll be okay?\" I ask, and his reply is detached.\n\n\"What's that they say?\" he asks, plucking at the row of rubber bands on his wrist so that I see now what it says on his hand in the blue ink. _Adam._ His brother's name, I think. \"About death and taxes?\"\n\nThat nothing is certain but death and taxes. That's what they say. But he's not looking for an answer. What he's saying is that he may or may not be okay, but there's no way to know right now. Same as me.\n\nWe say our goodbyes. I watch as he slips through the doors of the apartment building, disappearing behind a wall of glass.\neden\n\nNovember 14, _1996  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nIt's November now.\n\nThe gray skies have descended, everything perpetually overcast and sad. The boats have been pulled from the bay, leaving it barren and empty, like my womb. The seasonal shops are closed. The tourists took their cue to leave.\n\nTwo weeks ago, on the first of November, Miranda had that baby of hers, a seven pound, three ounce beautiful baby boy who she and Joe named Carter. I visited in the hospital the day after he was born, her only visitor aside from Joe. I saw it in her eyes as soon as I entered the postpartum room, Miranda swaddling baby Carter with a look of arrant dissatisfaction on her face. Her lips were pursed, her eyebrows creased, crow's-feet forming around the eyes.\n\nAs I walked in\u2014swapping places with Joe, who went to the cafeteria for coffee\u2014her disillusioned eyes rose to mine and she confessed aloud so that baby Carter could hear, not bothering to lower her voice or to press her hands to his ears to muffle the rotten words, \"All I wanted was a baby girl. Is it too much to ask for one little girl? But instead it's another goddamn boy.\"\n\nHer words knocked the wind out of my lungs. They made it hard to breathe. They were so ugly and vile, and I saw a look in Miranda's eyes as she spoke of him, eyes dropping to his. A look that made my heart hurt. Only a day old and already she abhorred her baby boy.\n\nI asked if I could hold him and she said yes, handing him off with too much inclination, too much ease, as if grateful to be rid of him. I took baby Carter to a chair in the corner of the room and peered at his inappreciable wisps of blond hair and his heavy, tired eyes, thinking to myself, _What difference does it make if he's a boy or girl, only that he's happy and healthy?_\n\nAnd I felt angry for the first time at Miranda. Not just annoyed but truly angry. Angry that she had three beautiful baby boys and I had none. Angry that she didn't love her babies or value her babies, that she couldn't understand another woman\u2014one like me\u2014would give life and limb for a child.\n\nOh, what I wouldn't give for a child.\n\nI had a thought then.\n\nWould Miranda care if I rose to my feet and carried baby Carter from the room?\n\nWould she even notice?\n\nThe hospital experience, for Miranda, was a welcomed furlough from motherhood. From what I'd been told, Carter spent his time in the nursery, being cared for by nurses round the clock except when he needed to eat, and only then did nurses carry him, crying and discontent, to his mother, and she welcomed him grudgingly, embittered to her chest. And then as soon as he was full, his eyes drifting lazily to sleep, she asked the nurses to take him away so that she could sleep.\n\nSpread out on her hospital bed in an indiscreet polka-dot gown, I watched Miranda sleep. Or pretend to sleep at least, so that she didn't have to tend to her child. She was exhausted, yes, from many hours of labor and delivery, from the every-other-hour feedings, and yet I wondered if her eyes were merely closed so that she could remain insensible to her baby boy, who lay limply in my arms, head misshapen, skin wrinkly and pink as a newborn's should be. Miranda's hair was brushed away from her face, pulled taut into a ponytail that lay flat against the bed. Her arms and hands were stretched out by her sides. She breathed with her mouth open, nostrils flaring with each inhalation and exhalation of air.\n\nI whispered her name. There was no reply.\n\nIt was almost as if she was asking me, begging me, daring me to take her child.\n\nAnd so I did.\n\nI stood from the inflexible armchair, slowly, gradually, piecemeal-like so that the chair wouldn't make a sound. So that the floor wouldn't cheep. So that my own two feet wouldn't betray me. I flexed one muscle and then the next until I was standing upright, holding my breath.\n\nI crossed the room, creeping by degrees so my shoes wouldn't squeak on the floors. Miranda's eyes were closed, enjoying the peace and serenity of having someone else care for her child.\n\nIt didn't occur to her for one instant that someone might try and take her baby.\n\nI slipped into the hallway without a peep. Two left turns and there Carter and I were, standing before the nursery, staring through glass at a half dozen sleeping babies. They lay bundled like burritos in their pink and blue blankets, with knitted hats atop their near-bald heads. They were sleeping, every last one of them, completely tuckered out. The newborns slept in rolling bassinets all arranged on display so that grandmas and grandpas could see. If it wasn't for the slip of paper in each bassinet with the baby's name and date of birth in blue ink, there was no telling them apart aside from the obvious distinction of pink and blue.\n\nHow easy it would be for two to be swapped, or for one to up and disappear.\n\nOne nurse stood guard of them all, a shepherd in the pasture keeping watch over her sheep. What I wouldn't give to be that nurse, to be tasked with caring for the infinite number of newborn babies that rotated in and out of the nursery each day.\n\nI wondered if she ever had a weakness for any one of these babies. A fondness. Was there ever one colicky child who caught her eye, the runt of a litter of multiples she wanted to bring home as her own?\n\nFrom down the hallway a door opened and I saw the main hospital on the other side, areas other than the labor and delivery ward. A common hallway. The hospital's information booth. The doorway was twenty steps away at best, and there was nothing but two unlocked doors to prevent Carter and me from leaving. There was no alarm, at least none that I could see. There was no system to buzz people in and out. It was an open door, an invitation.\n\nHow easily Carter and I could just leave.\n\nI looked around; the nursery nurse had her back in my direction, attention now focused on one little baby who was trying to wake up. Behind me, there was only a single woman at the nurses' station, a middle-aged lady on the phone. Other than that, the ward was quiet and still, all patient doors pulled closed, mothers on the other side in the throes of labor or fast asleep.\n\nI peered to the doorway again, those swinging double doors just twenty steps away from where I stood. I didn't think about the rest, about what I would tell Aaron or what Miranda might do when she awoke and realized Carter was gone. My heart beat quickly as desire and instinct told me to do it and to do it quickly, to move with purpose, to not draw attention to myself. In my arms, I held the very thing Aaron and I had been trying for for months. A baby.\n\nMiranda didn't want him anyway. I was doing her a favor, I reasoned.\n\nHow easily this baby could be mine.\n\nI thought of only one thing in that moment as I stood frozen, staring through glass at the plentiful sleeping babies.\n\nHow easy it would be to just go.\n\nI didn't do it, of course, but it would be remiss to say the idea never crossed my mind.\njessie\n\nI pedal toward Roscoe Village. As I do, I stare over my shoulder, back into the Loop at the peaks of skyscrapers that rise into the sky like distant mountain summits. I watch as the urban streets become residential.\n\nOnce in Roscoe Village, I duck into a burger joint on Addison. My stomach is empty by now, the morning's sugar high having given way to a glucose crash, one which makes me irritable and edgy. I've had nothing to eat but a donut all day\u2014a donut and coffee\u2014though since Mom's death, my hip bones protrude from my waistline and the bones of my rib cage are startlingly transparent.\n\nI'm not _not_ eating on purpose. I've just had no desire to eat.\n\nI order a hamburger and take it to the counter to eat. There, I stare out the window at the world as it passes by without me. A bus goes by, the 152 heading east. A plastic bag floats through the air, surfing the airstream. Middle school kids amble by in private school uniforms\u2014starchy plaid split-neck jumpers; burgundy sweater-vests; pressed pants\u2014with backpacks so heavy they nearly tip over from the weight of them. An older woman stands beside the bus stop. The 152 gathers her up and goes, disappearing in a puff of smoke.\n\nI eat part of my burger, wrapping the rest up for the trash. As I'm about to go, a voice stops me. I turn to see a woman standing beside me in jeans and a cardigan, a pair of white gym shoes on her feet. Her graying hair is wound back into a bun.\n\n\"Jessie? Jessie Sloane? Is that you?\"\n\nBut before I can say one way or another if it's me, she decides for me. \"It _is_ you,\" she declares as she tells me that she remembers me when I was yea high, her hand pegged at about thirty-seven inches in the air. And then she embraces me, this strange woman wrapping her thickset arms around my neck and declaring again, \"It is you.\"\n\nExcept that I don't know who she is. Not until she tells me.\n\nAnd even then, I still don't know.\n\n\"It's me,\" she says. \"Mrs. Zulpo. Eleanor Zulpo. Your mother used to clean my home when you were a girl. In Lincoln Park,\" she tells me, tacking on details as if it might help me remember. \"Tree-lined street, beautiful box beam ceilings, rooms flooded with natural light,\" she says, though she and her husband don't live there anymore, not since the housing market crash when she had to give up her home. When they had to downsize. That's what she tells me.\n\nI draw a blank. I don't remember.\n\nLike me, Mom used to clean homes. Mostly upscale places that we could never afford. She taught me everything I know. My first foray into the family business came when I was about twelve years old and would get down on my hands and knees beside her and scrub floors.\n\nBut before that, when I was too young to clean, Mom would lug me along on assignments and there I'd spend my days playing pretend in strangers' homes. Cooking imaginary meals in their palatial kitchens, tucking my imaginary children into their mammoth beds before Mom scooched me out of the way so she could wash the sheets.\n\n\"You don't remember me,\" Eleanor Zulpo decides, realizing that it must have been sixteen or seventeen years ago or so, when I was three or four. \"Of course you don't remember,\" she says, loosening her hold on my neck, telling me that I look just the same as I did back then. \"It's those dimples,\" she says, pointing at them. \"Those adorable dimples. I'd know these dimples anywhere.\n\n\"I read about your mother in the paper,\" she says then, sitting beside me on her own stool, unwrapping a hot dog. The sight of it alone, that hot dog, lying out on a foil wrapper, slathered in ketchup and relish\u2014that and the smell\u2014reminds me of the dead bird. The pigeon. And instead of a hot dog, I suddenly see blood, guts, gore, and I gag, vomit inching its way up my esophagus. I reach for my drink and force it back down, gargling, trying to get the taste of vomit from my mouth.\n\nMrs. Zulpo\u2014 _Eleanor_ , she says to call her\u2014doesn't notice. She keeps going. \"I saw her obituary,\" she's saying. \"It was a great write-up, a lovely tribute for a lovely woman,\" she says. I tell her that it was.\n\nI submitted the death notice to the newspaper. I covered the cost of the obituary. I found an old photo of Mom to use, one that was a good six years old at least, taken back before she got sick.\n\nWe'd lived our entire lives in private, but for whatever reason I felt the whole world should know that she was dead.\n\n\"There have been other cleaning women since your mother. But never anyone as good as she was, as conscientious, as thorough. She was one of a kind, Jessie,\" she says, and I tell her I know. Eleanor tells me stories. Things I didn't know, or maybe I did. Memories that have been lost to time, erased clear from my brain's hard drive. About the time I helped myself to her Wedgwood china when Mom was cleaning. How I snatched it right from her hutch and set the dining room table to have a tea party with. \"Wedgwood china,\" she tells me, grinning. \"A single cup and saucer go for about a hundred dollars each. They had been my own mother's, given to me when she died. Heirlooms. Your poor mother,\" she laughs. \"She nearly had a heart attack when she found you. I told her it was fine, that it wasn't like anything had gotten hurt. And besides, it was nice to see the dishes being put to use for a change.\"\n\nAnd then she tells me that, at her suggestion, the three of us sat down at the dining room table and drank lemonade from the Wedgwood china.\n\nIt fills me with a sudden sense of nostalgia. A yearning for the past.\n\n\"What else do you remember?\" I ask, needing more. Needing someone to fill in the gaps for me, all those details I can no longer remember.\n\nEleanor tells me how her children were grown by the time I arrived, and so it was nice to have a child in the house again. She didn't work outside of the home. When Mom and I came, she was grateful for the company. She used to look forward to the days we'd come. Usually she'd play with me while Mom cleaned, hide-and-go-seek in her home, or build forts from the newly washed sheets.\n\n\"You were a funny girl, Jessie,\" she tells me. \"Silly and strong willed, a great sense of humor to boot,\" she says. \"A bit ornery too. But those dimples,\" she adds as she takes a bite of the hot dog, speaking through a full mouth, \"with those dimples you could get away with murder, Jessie.\" She laughs.\n\nShe says that anything Mom wanted done, she had to ask me twice. That the lunch Mom brought along for me, I refused to eat. That I was a far cry from shy, and would spend half of my days in her home creating a show to perform for her and Mom before we'd leave.\n\n\"You used to march around, insisting like the dickens that your name wasn't Jessie. Because you didn't like it back then, I think,\" she says then, saying I was adamant about it, insistent that my name wasn't Jessie. That my name was something else, but she doesn't remember what. \"You would pout your face and stomp your foot and insist that people stop calling you Jessie. _Stop calling me that_ , you'd cry, face turning red. Your mother would go along with it for a while, trying to ignore your antics. Because she knew you were doing it for attention and, if she didn't give in to you, sooner or later you'd quit. Though rarely did you quit,\" she smiles, telling me I was a headstrong little girl.\n\n\"You knew what you wanted,\" she says.\n\nEventually Mom would have enough of it, Eleanor tells me, and she'd get down to eye level and say, _That's enough, Jessie. We talked about this, remember?_\n\nBut I have no memory of this at all.\n\nWhy would I go around masquerading as something other than Jessie? I don't have time to come up with an answer because soon Eleanor is telling me how I used to carry an animal everywhere I went\u2014a stuffed dog or a bear or a rabbit\u2014but I couldn't care less about that because what I'm wondering is why in the world I would be so unrelenting about that name. About the name Jessie. Why I would insist it wasn't mine.\n\n\"And then there was your mother's name,\" Eleanor says before I have a chance to think it through, and I ask, \"What about it?\"\n\nHer eyebrows crease. She removes a pair of glasses and sets them on the countertop, rubbing at her eyes. \"It's just that most little girls call their mother _Mom_ or _Mommy_.\"\n\nShe leaves it at that and so I ask, \"And I didn't?\" thinking suddenly that Eleanor is mistaken. That she's wrong. Time has altered these memories of hers, or she's mistaken Mom and me for some other cleaning lady and child. Another child with dimples like mine. Because in all my life, she's only ever been one thing to me\u2014Mom\u2014or so I think.\n\nEleanor shakes her head and at the same time I see my hands before me, gripping the edges of the countertop, also shaking.\n\n\"You didn't,\" she says. \"You called her by her given name _._ \"\n\nEleanor tells me that Mom would put up with it to a certain extent but then every now and again she'd get down and whisper in my ear, _We've talked about this, Jessie. Remember?_ Same as she said about my own name. _You're to call me Mom._\n\n\"For a short while, you'd remember. You'd remember to call your mother _Mom._ But before too long, you'd forget and go back to calling her by her Christian name. Eden.\"\n\nI don't remember doing that.\neden\n\nJanuary 16, 1998   \nChicago\n\nI drove the speed limit the entire way, not wanting to draw attention to myself. It snowed much of the time and the roads were slick, though being a Midwesterner, I'm quite accustomed to driving on slick roads. This wasn't my first time with snow. And yet it was my first getaway, my first flight. My first vanishing act of what I hoped wouldn't be many, because I prayed that the world would let me disappear, that he would let me go.\n\nI found myself staring in the rearview mirror nearly the entire time, all along Highway 42 and to the interstate, knuckles turning white from their grip on the steering wheel, though I knew there was no logical way he knew where I was, or that he watched me leave. But still.\n\nHe might just be there.\n\nWhen I arrived, the first thing I did was find an apartment that I could afford, which wasn't easy considering I have so little in the way of money, nearly nothing at all, quite literally ten dollars more than was the rent payment, which means that for the immediate future, we'll be eating bread and cheese. I purchased a paper at a newsstand and, on a snow-covered park bench, scanned the for-rent ads, settling on a studio apartment in Hyde Park. The building is all wrapped up in a creamy yellow brick facade that's gone to rack and ruin; it looks abandoned, uncared for and unloved, like me. The ad trumpeted a French Renaissance charm but if it's there, I can't see it.\n\nOn the way into the building, I watched a drug deal transpire on the street. It happened right there, right before my eyes, two shadowy figures lurking beside the building, where the tall structure obstructs the sun's rays, making the men harder to see. They were men, of course, because I find it hard to believe that two women would stand on the street corner trading money for drugs, a wad of folded-up cash for the clear plastic bag of pills that passed from one hand to the next. I never saw their faces or their eyes, for their heads were cloaked in the hoods of sweatshirts like headscarves. And yet the men were tall, lanky, flat. Undeniably men.\n\nWe passed by quickly, my eyes tethered to the broken concrete of the street, feet kicking up pebbles as I went, certain I could feel their eyes on me. I inserted my key and ducked into the foyer of the apartment complex, grateful to be separated by a wall of glass.\n\nWe can't stay here forever. It isn't safe, I don't think.\n\nAnd now, inside the apartment, I bolt the door behind me and stare out the peephole for a minute or two, to be certain no one followed me in. Not the drug dealer or his buyer, and not anyone else. I move to the window next, parting the dusty, broken mini-blinds with my fingertips, peering out, my fingers turning gray with dust. I survey the street below to be sure we haven't been followed, that no one knows we are here.\n\nThe last tenant had been recently evicted, her belongings never reclaimed. Because of this, I've been endowed with a foul-smelling sofa, a banged-up table, a mattress with worrisome stains. That and a carton of eggs that expired last week. I don't think we'll eat them.\n\nI open the newspaper and again turn to the classified ads. But this time, instead of searching the apartment listing, I go to the wanted ads, searching for a job as a house cleaner because really, that's the extent of my qualifications, and after the stunt I pulled at the hospital, references are out of the question. _Must be courteous, conscientious, previous experience preferred_ , I read. _Must speak English. Have good communication skills, a great work ethic._ The wages are noted; I tally the number of hours I will need to work to pay another month's worth of rent in this shoddy complex. Sixty hours\u2014that's what I'd need to work. Though we also need to eat.\n\nThis is no longer just about me.\n\nI try to relax but she's kicking and upset now, thrashing about, and I find that I can't relax. I tell her it's okay, that she doesn't need to worry, that she's safe here with me, though even I don't know if that's true because I have yet to decipher if we're safe here, if I'm safe. I stroke her, running my hand along the flushed skin, and for a moment\u2014only a moment\u2014she stops fighting. She gives in.\n\nI try on a name for size.\n\n\"Jessie,\" I say, taking her stillness as consent.\n\nI'll call her Jessie.\n\nI'm not a bad person, I remind myself, though in that moment as I sit\u2014watching a roach as it scurries across the worn carpeting, reaching a wall, shimmying along the baseboards to where the rest of its family no doubt lies waiting\u2014reflecting on the last twenty-four hours of my life, the last twenty-four days and weeks, I'm not entirely certain that's true. All sorts of emotions get churned up inside me, everything from sadness to regret and shame, and I think of him standing unsuspectingly at the cottage, knocking on the door in vain.\n\n\"You're not a bad person,\" I incant, believing that if I think on it long enough, if I say it enough times, a thousand times over, it might somehow turn true.\n\nI didn't set out to do the things I did. There was never any willful intent, any malice, only a pining for something I didn't have, something I so desperately needed. You wouldn't condemn a famished child for stealing a loaf of bread, now would you? A homeowner for shooting an armed intruder to protect his family?\n\nI'm not a bad person, I decide, far more resolute this time.\n\nI only did what I had to do.\njessie\n\nWhen I finally make my way back to Cornelia Avenue, it's evening. The colors of the sky have begun to change. Shadows fall across the street. The sun is thinking about going down.\n\nI walk along Cornelia beside Old Faithful, staring at the million-dollar homes that fringe the street. They're mostly newly gutted homes with small tracts of grass. For each home lies a single tree on the road verge, fully grown. Its leaves form a canopy over the street where it joins with the tree on the other side. Conjoined twins.\n\nThe temperatures have fallen. It's no more than fifty-some degrees outside, a cold that creeps under my clothing, chilling me to the bone. The heat in the carriage home is stingy at best, when it runs. Though I toyed with the thermostat this morning, setting the temperature to seventy-two degrees, the furnace never kicked on before I left. When I arrive, it will be cold inside.\n\nAs I make my way along the street, the dread of nighttime creeps in. The fear of eight long hours of darkness with nothing to do and only morbid thoughts to keep me company.\n\nThe front door of the greystone is open as I approach, though Ms. Geissler is nowhere to be seen. I stop on the sidewalk, wondering if I should let her know or if I should keep going. What I want to do is keep going, but my conscience says otherwise.\n\nThere's a garden on the front lawn of the greystone, one I didn't notice before, but now I do. It's not huge because city living doesn't allow for things to be huge. But it's magical. A blanket of yellows and oranges and reds that warms the earth. Tiny white butterflies hover above the blooms, levitating midair.\n\nI blink once and they're gone because most likely they were never really there.\n\nI make my way down the walkway, climbing the steps toward the front door. The home is large; three stories tall with a garden apartment to boot, one that peeks at me from beneath street level, hidden behind a black metal fence.\n\nAs I knock on the door, it pushes open more than it was before. My eyes take in the foyer, a carpeted runner, an unlit chandelier that dangles from the ceiling. \"Hello?\" I call out into the empty space, but if my landlord is here, she doesn't hear me.\n\nMy fingers press the doorbell and I hear the chime of it from inside, but still, there's no reply. \"Hello?\" I call again, laying a hand flat against the door and pressing it the rest of the way open. My feet cross the threshold as I step into the home.\n\nI reach for a light switch and toggle it up and down, but nothing happens. The chandelier above me remains dark. It's not black in the home because the sun has yet to go all the way down. There's still some light outside, but it's fading fast. Soon it will be gone.\n\n\"Ms. Geissler?\" I call out, explaining who I am and why I'm here. \"It's Jessie,\" I say. \"Jessie Sloane. Your new tenant. I just moved in to the carriage home,\" I call out, and at first I think the worst, that she's here somewhere, but that she's hurt. That she's had a nasty fall. That she can't answer me because she's lying on the ground just waiting to be found. That she's dead.\n\nI don't think the obvious. That Ms. Geissler's in the shower and can't hear me. That she forgot to close the door on the way out rather than the way in. That she's not here.\n\n\"Ms. Geissler?\" I call again, with an urgency to my voice this time. \"Hello? Are you here?\"\n\nAnd it's only then that I hear the sound of a piano playing from upstairs. Classical music, I think. The kind you've heard before because it's famous. Mozart. Beethoven. I don't know which. The piano is quieted down from the distance, diluted, but still I hear it, the music staccato-like, sharp and disconnected.\n\nAnd I breathe a sigh of relief because she's here. Because she's fine.\n\nI could go home now.\n\nI _should_ go home now.\n\nI should pull the door fully closed behind me and leave.\n\nBut instead I find myself hesitating at the base of the stairs. My hand grips the baluster as I stare up the flight of stairs, into the dark, cavernous second floor of the home. Because now the classical music has turned into some sort of ballad, and I find that it's haunting and beautiful.\n\nThat it's calling me, summoning me up the stairs.\n\nBegging me to come and listen, to come and see.\n\nAnd instead of leaving, my feet carry me up the stairs before I can think this through. I hold my breath as I go, listening only to the sound of the piano. Climbing upward, one step at a time.\n\nThe house is large, each room sprawling and grand, though they're hard to see for the scarcity of light, which becomes even more dim with each minute that passes by. Upstairs, my legs carry me to the bedroom from which the music comes. The only room that, as far as I can see, boasts light. The door is pulled to and so there's only a sliver of it. Only a sliver of light peeking from beneath the door slab.\n\nI go to it.\n\nStanding before the closed door, I listen to the sound of the piano play. My hand drops to the door's handle and it's unintentional when I turn the knob. I can't help myself; it just happens. I press a hand flat against the door and push it open, so slowly so that it doesn't squeak. I see her there on the piano's bench, her back to me. Her fingers move nimbly over the piano keys, foot pressing against the pedal with obvious expertise. I find myself entranced by her song, by the rhythmic motion of her hands and feet.\n\nAnd then she stops playing.\n\nAnd it strikes me suddenly, an awareness.\n\nShe knows that I am here.\n\nI shouldn't be here.\n\nAll at once I feel like a trespasser. Like I've gone too far. This is not my home and I have no business being here.\n\nShe doesn't turn. \"Something I can help you with?\" she asks and I gasp first before I laugh. A nervous laugh. An exhausted laugh. One I can't make stop though I try. And only then does she turn and look at me as I press my hands to my mouth to smother the laugh.\n\nMs. Geissler looks to me to be about sixty years old. Her hair is short, a dyed blond that's feathered around the edges. She wears glasses, dark, plastic frames that sit on the bridge of her nose. There's a frailty about her, her body gaunt, cloaked in a cotton dress. She rises to her feet and only then do I see that she's petite. There are lines on her face, laugh lines, frown lines, crow's-feet. And yet they look more regal than old. She's a beautiful woman.\n\n\"Jessie, isn't it?\" she asks, and though it takes a minute to find my voice, I say that it is. She says that it's nice to meet me. She steps toward me, slipping her hand into mine. My hand shakes as it did this afternoon, a quiver that won't quit.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I stammer. \"I didn't mean to interrupt,\" I say. Though I've done far worse than interrupt. \"I rang the doorbell. I knocked. The front door was open,\" I explain, voice as doddery as my hands, just barely managing to scrape the memories together and remember why I'm here. \"You left your front door open,\" I say again, for lack of anything better to say.\n\n\"Oh,\" she says, chastising the door latch. How it's old. How it doesn't work properly. How she needs to get it fixed, as she needs to get many things in this old home fixed.\n\n\"How is everything with the carriage home?\" she asks instead, and I tell her fine. I say how much I like it. I compliment the hardwood floors because I can think of nothing else to say. I say that they are pretty. I thank her for letting me stay there. She says it's no bother.\n\nIt's awkward and uncomfortable, all the conversation forced. I think then that I should leave. I've overstayed my welcome because I was never welcome in the first place.\n\nBut just as I'm about to say my goodbyes and go, a noise comes from somewhere upstairs. From the third floor of the home. What it sounds like to me is the thud of a textbook falling. Something heavy and dense. I glance upward, finding a hatch there, a pulldown ladder that when folded up and stowed away becomes one with the ceiling, as it is now.\n\n\"What's that?\" I ask, but Ms. Geissler's face goes suddenly blank, and she shakes her head, asking, \"What's what?\"\n\n\"The noise,\" I say. \"Is someone there?\" as I point up toward the ceiling.\n\n\"I didn't hear anything,\" she replies.\n\nI hold my breath and listen in vain for more noises coming from up above. But they don't come. The house is silent, and I know then: I made it up.\n\nMy eyes burn. I rub at them, making them more red than they were before, still aware of my shaking hands.\n\n\"I must be mistaken,\" I say, holding my hands out before me so that I can see the way they tremble. They're cold. But that's not the reason for the trembling. It's something far worse than that, I think. Something neurological. I have my brain to thank for this. Because after all these nights without sleep, my brain functions are out of whack.\n\nI try and convince myself that the shaky hands aren't degenerative. That they aren't getting worse. And yet there's no denying the fact.\n\nMy hands are shaking far more than they were this afternoon.\n\nIt's as if she can read my mind.\n\n\"You've been having trouble sleeping,\" she says, more of a statement than a question. She's not asking me because she knows. Behind the glasses, her eyes are a soft gray, staring at me in pity. I wonder how it is she knows I haven't been sleeping. Does it have something to do with the dark circles under my eyes, the bags, the red pools of blood that flood my sclera?\n\n\"I saw your light on late last night,\" she says by means of explanation, and I think of myself last night. Hearing the strange pinging sound through the floor register, the voices, and turning the light on to investigate. It was nothing, of course, though still I spent the rest of the night lying in bed unable to sleep, forever indebted to the sun when it finally decided to rise and I headed off in search of caffeine, my magical potion, which becomes far less potent with each passing day that I don't sleep.\n\nWhat makes not sleeping even worse than the crippling fatigue is the boredom that infiltrates those nighttime hours. The misery. The morbid thoughts that keep me company all night long. Last night I found myself thinking about ashes and bone fragments. That's what remains after a body has been incinerated. When Mom came back to me from the crematorium, I expected something soft, like the ashes left behind in Mom's and my fireplace. On cold nights, she and I used to toss in a few logs, sit on the floor beneath the same blanket, trying to stay warm. When the fire burned out, the ashes that remained were soft. Delicate. I didn't know that Mom's ashes would be coarse like sand, like cat litter, and not soft like ashes. Or that there would be bone fragments.\n\nAfter Mom's 130 pounds were reduced to just 4, I didn't have the wherewithal to bring the urn to the crematorium with me so that they could place her inside. And so instead she came to me in a little baggie in a sturdy box. I was tasked with making the transfer to the rhubarb urn, this straight, canister-like contraption that's anything but the round body, narrow neck of your classic urn. You wouldn't even know it was an urn except for Mom's name impressed in the clay along with the years of her birth and death. Her stint on earth. Forty-nine years.\n\nI made the transfer at the kitchen table, the day after I brought her remains home from the crematorium. The same table where we used to eat. I used a funnel. Same funnel we used to use when transferring sugar cookie icing to the piping bags. When I was done, a fine mist of Mom covered the tabletop. I wiped her away with the palm of a hand. Then Mom was stuck to me, and it wasn't like I could just wash her off with soap and water. Because it was Mom. I couldn't just wash Mom down the kitchen sink.\n\nThese are the things you don't think about when someone has died. You don't want to think about them.\n\nAnd yet these are the thoughts that keep me up all night. A fine mist of Mom on the palm of my hand.\n\n\"I couldn't sleep,\" I say, leaving it at that, pretending it was a one-time thing, not letting on to the fact that I haven't slept in all these nights.\n\n\"Try a glass of warm milk,\" she offers. \"It always helps me sleep like a baby,\" she says, and I tell her I will. But I won't. I've tried that already and besides, I hate the taste of warm milk.\n\nBut then it comes again. The noise, one I'm certain I didn't imagine this time. Another dull thud.\n\nAnd it's unintentional when my shaky hand lifts up to tug down the ladder and see for myself what's inside.\n\n\"You don't want to do that,\" Ms. Geissler snaps, her words brusque.\n\nI freeze in place, insisting, \"There's something there,\" and only then does she reconsider.\n\n\"I didn't want to scare you,\" she explains, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I didn't imagine the noise. It was there.\n\n\"It's squirrels,\" she tells me. \"They've taken over the place,\" she laments. \"I haven't stepped foot up there for a while.\" She says that she's been working with a pest control service to have them removed, but she's quite sure the service is more adept at bringing squirrels into her home then getting them out. The space is uninhabitable for now, until the problem gets sorted out. She can't bring herself to go up there, not until the squirrels are gone and her contractor repairs the damage.\n\n\"The squirrels,\" she complains, \"have chewed holes in the walls. They've gnawed their way through electrical wires. They've ruined a perfectly good lamp. I've switched services, mind you. But getting rid of squirrels is no easy task. I need a roofer to come and replace the tiles and block the squirrels' way in, but the roofer won't come until all the squirrels are out. The darn things have it in for me,\" she says, sighing exasperatedly, and it doesn't once occur to me not to believe her.\n\nI say to her, \"Sounds like a mess.\"\n\nOut the window, I see that the sun has finished setting. Darkness has arrived, anchoring itself to the earth for the night. Ending another day.\n\n\"It's getting late,\" I say, excusing myself, saying my goodbyes, and leaving.\n\nI make my way around the periphery of the house, cutting across the patio and onto the lawn. There I pause midstride, hands on hips, and look skyward to see that the stars are lost somewhere behind the clouds. That there isn't a star in sight. The moon is there, but only a sliver of it. A crescent moon that doesn't do anything to light up the night. The fall air is cool; goose bumps appear on my arms. I rub at them, hoping the friction will make them go away. For now it does, though I'm dreading another night in the freezing cold carriage home.\n\nThe home is enveloped in blackness as I arrive. I have to fight to get the key into its hole. Twice I drop it, scrabbling around on the stoop to hunt it down.\n\nThe sound of a siren in the distance startles me. As I glance backward, over my shoulder to see the red and blue emergency lights whirling through the sky, I find Ms. Geissler standing in the back doorway of her home. She's illuminated by kitchen lights, easier to see than me, who stands in total darkness.\n\nAnd yet her eyes are unmistakably on mine as if she's been watching me the entire time.\n\nI find the keyhole and open the door. I hurry inside.\n\nAs I climb the lopsided steps, I feel the weight of fatigue bearing down on me. Fatigue from physical exertion and fatigue from lack of sleep. I lie down on the mattress, staring at my shaky hands before my eyes. There's an anemic quality to them. Blanched and mealy, the skin at their edges disappearing somehow, evanescing, like a loose thread being tugged from the hem of a shirt, the whole thing unraveling, coming apart at the seams. That's me. Coming apart at the seams. Little by little, I'm disappearing.\n\nI look again at my hands, and this time they are fine. Intact.\n\nBut still shaking.\n\nI close my eyes and even though sleep is there within reach and I stretch my hand out to grab it, it's unattainable. Elusive and shifty. It moves away, mocking me. Laughing in my face.\n\nFor as tired as I am, I still cannot sleep.\neden\n\nDecember 21, _1996  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nFor months now, Aaron and I have become slaves to the red circles on my pocket-size calendar, our intimacies slated out in advance. During my most fertile days we make love two, sometimes three times a day, though there's something inorganic about it now, something mechanical and forced. Our entire world, it seems, has become about making a baby, and I struggle to remember what our lives were like before we made the decision to start a family.\n\nTwo nights ago I stayed up until he was home from work, in bed, reading my book. Twice I rose from bed to look outside, searching through the bare trees for signs of headlights in the distance\u2014a shock of blinding yellow against the blackness of night\u2014rambling down the long, winding drive. But there were none. The night was pitch-black, no moon anywhere, not a star to be seen. It seemed to take forever for him to be home.\n\nThe bedroom lamp was dimmed, a candle burning on the dresser for ambience, though when he finally did arrive, Aaron took one look at that candle and blew it out, thinking I'd gotten tired and plumb forgot about the burning candle. The small room filled with the noxious smell of smoke as he pulled his chef getup from his body, dropping it to the floor. He climbed into bed beside me, saying how he was so tired, how his feet hurt. His words were slurred with simple lethargy and fatigue. He didn't bother to turn off the light. I smelled the chophouse on him, the garlic, the Worcestershire sauce, the flesh of chops and steaks.\n\nAnd yet there it was, another red-circled date on the calendar.\n\nBeneath the blankets I wore a satin robe and beneath the robe nothing, though in it I didn't feel nearly as sexy as I'd thought I would, as I'd _hoped_ I would, a feeling that was only exacerbated when I untied the ribbon from around my waist, revealing myself to him, and in Aaron's eyes spied a moment of hesitation, an excuse ready to form on his lips.\n\n\"Remember?\" I asked, childlike hope in my eyes. \"I'm ovulating,\" I reminded him, and before he could speak, before he could tell me why it wasn't a good night, I lowered myself beneath the sheets and easily changed his mind.\n\nI don't think he minded that I did. In fact, I think he was quite pleased.\n\nWhen we were through, Aaron pulled away and moved to his side of the bed, leaving me and my elevated hips alone in the hopes that this time, gravity might work its magic.\n\nFor three days in a row now it's gone like this, though tonight Aaron did object and it was much harder to make him acquiesce, and even when he did there was little satisfaction in it, little pleasure, but rather the knowledge that he was doing this for me. Because I wanted him to. Because I was making him do it. There was resentment in it, disgruntlement in his every move. When we were done I offered a pitiful _thank you_ , which felt entirely wrong, as we each drifted to our own side of the bed, an ocean of space spread between us.\n\nIt's become apparent that these days we do it because we have to, not because either of us wants to have sex. We skip any sort of foreplay and get straight to the grunt work, finding sex as pleasurable as brushing teeth or washing dishes. Our movements have become as repetitive and predictable as cleaning laundry.\n\nJust like any other of our daily chores, we've begun to grudgingly make love for three days out of the month, finding the other twenty-seven to be a blissful reprieve.\n\nJanuary 9, 1997  \nEgg Harbor\n\nIt took nearly thirty minutes to get to the obstetrician appointment, and all along the way, all I could hear was the grinding of snow beneath the tires' tread. Outside it was cold, a frosty thirty-two degrees, and the plump clouds looked like they might burst apart at the seams at any moment, burying us with three more inches of snow. Aaron was torn, worried we wouldn't be home in time for his shift, but feeling the need to go too. To be at the appointment. He vacillated about it for a good five or ten minutes, standing in the open doorway, letting the cold air into our home.\n\nIn the end, he decided to go so that as we drove south on Highway 42, both of us quiet, I felt a great guilt about it, knowing that if he was late to work, it would be my fault.\n\nThe obstetrician was in Sturgeon Bay, a seventeen-mile drive. He was the closest I could find and also came with a recommendation, one from Miranda, the only woman in town I knew well enough to ask. Miranda, who drove her three boys to my home last week in her Dodge Caravan\u2014windshield caked with ice crystals still, so that it was near impossible to see through the rimy glass\u2014because it was far too cold to walk.\n\nMiranda, who sat sprawled on my sofa, feet raised to the coffee table, while I rocked her crying two-month-old baby, Carter, to sleep.\n\nMiranda, who was so overwhelmed with motherhood that she couldn't stand to be alone with her own three kids.\n\nMiranda, who revealed to me that she was pregnant again, that it was a mistake this time, that they hadn't been trying. \"Because who in their right mind tries for more when they already have three kids?\" she asked, staring at me sadly as if I should take pity on her for this obvious misfortune, but what I felt instead was infuriated and sick, anger and bile rising quickly inside me.\n\nMiranda confessed to me that though she and Joe had waited the recommended six weeks after Carter was born to fool around, sure enough, Joe managed to knock her up on the first try, and already the morning sickness had set in so that her boys were forced to watch even more TV than ever before because Miranda didn't have the stamina to entertain them all day, let alone feed them. \"The nerve of that bastard,\" __ she said of Joe and his evident virility, __ and then she asked what in the world was taking Aaron and me so long to conceive.\n\n\"You don't think,\" she asked, eyes wide, \"that you're infertile, do you? That that handsome husband of yours is shooting blanks?\"\n\nAs I sat beside him in the car, driving to the obstetrician appointment, listening to the pulverization of snow beneath the wheels, staring at the clouds, I couldn't help but wonder if that was the case. Was Aaron shooting blanks? Was Aaron _infertile_?\n\nAaron, who could do anything, who could fix anything, could not create a child?\n\nAaron, to whom everything came so easily, had difficulty making a baby?\n\nThe thought alone made me angry and annoyed. Angry at Aaron because why, for all the things he was so capable of doing, was he incapable of doing _this_?\n\nWhy couldn't he fix this? Why couldn't he make this right?\n\nAssigning fault seemed to be the name of the game these days, pointing fingers, attaching blame. Whose fault was it that we didn't yet have a baby?\n\nMarch 11, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nWhat I've come to learn after being referred to a fertility specialist is that even though I get my period each month with moderate regularity, my body isn't ovulating correctly, isn't always ovulating. _Anovulation_ , it's called, a word I've never heard of before but now think about at every waking hour and when I should be asleep. If I'm being honest, this comes as little surprise to me. My body is simply going through the motions, the preparations of the endometrium\u2014the lining of my uterus readying itself to welcome a fertilized egg\u2014and then sloughing off when no egg moves in. It's not that the egg wasn't fertilized by Aaron's sperm. It's that it simply wasn't there to begin with.\n\nToday I began my third cycle of Clomid. After months of this, I have no sense of humility left, no modesty. I've paraded my private parts for every doctor, nurse and technician in the fertility clinic to see, while all Aaron ever had to do was drop off a sperm sample and endure a simple blood draw. It hardly seems fair. The first month I didn't ovulate. Last month we upped the dosage and, though Dr. Landry spied two follicles when he performed his ultrasound\u2014forcing the transvaginal ultrasound probe between my legs so that I should rightfully have felt violated and ashamed, but no longer did, sending Aaron and me home with strict orders to have sex\u2014we didn't get pregnant.\n\nThe pills make me weepy all the time, for no apparent reason at all, though having seen the inventory of potential side effects, I consider it a blessing that the only one I'm doomed to endure is the predisposition for crying. I cry at the market; I cry in the car. I cry at home while mopping floors and folding laundry and standing in the doorway to one of the spare bedrooms, wondering if it will ever hold a child, steeling myself for another cycle of Clomid that will likely end again with my monthly flow.\n\nTo counter Aaron's low sperm motility, as it's called, he's switched to wearing loose-fitting underpants (I don't tell Miranda this), and is tasked with finding ways to reduce stress in his life, stress which neither of us knew he had. He now sleeps until after ten o'clock every morning so that we no longer share our day's coffee on the dock, which is fine anyway seeing as the eternal winter has trapped us indoors and there are no sailboats to be seen on the bay, none until spring. He takes herbal supplements and when the temperatures aren't too abysmal will go for a walk or a run, so that our days together are mere hours at best. This too is fine, seeing as we don't have much to talk about anymore, nothing that doesn't involve the many things the world is reluctant to let us have: strong, capable sperm; regular ovulation; a positive pregnancy test; a baby.\n\nIt isn't that Aaron doesn't have enough sperm\u2014he does\u2014it's that what he has doesn't swim properly and isn't able to travel the four inches or so to where my egg may or may not be waiting.\n\nIn short, we're both to blame, though there isn't a moment that I don't wonder which of us is to blame more and even though I think it's me, I _know_ it's me, there is a part of me aggrieved that I'm the only one forced to record my body temperature, to take ovulation tests, to cry in public for no sound reason at all, to travel to the fertility clinic again and again, to be probed so that some doctor or technician can gaze inside me and at my ovaries, while all Aaron has to do is take an herbal supplement from time to time and exercise on occasion.\n\nIt doesn't seem fair. It doesn't seem right.\n\nI've come to resent Aaron for this, as I've come to resent him for many things.\n\nMarch 13, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nI field questions nearly every day about when Aaron and I are going to have a baby, often from my stepmother or Aaron's mother, calling on the phone when he's at work, asking not-so-subtly for grandchildren.\n\nWhen can they expect them? When will there be good news to share?\n\nIt's not that grandchildren are in short supply because they aren't. Instead it's that Aaron and I have been married for over two years, and society doesn't take well to that: two nearly thirty-years-olds, married for over two years without kids, as if there's something unthinkable about it, something taboo.\n\nIs there something wrong with that?\n\nIt feels as if there is.\n\nA married woman of my age without a child is quite the anomaly these days.\n\nI can't bring myself to say aloud that we're trying, _trying and failing_ to make a baby because I don't want pity and I don't want advice. And so instead I tell Aaron's mother and my stepmother _soon_ , wishing that my own mother were still alive because hers is the only advice I want and need.\n\nI spend my days waiting. Waiting for Aaron to wake up, waiting for Aaron to leave, waiting for Aaron to get home so I can again close my eyes and sleep. Waiting for a new cycle of Clomid to begin, to ovulate, to make love to Aaron like robots would do, hasty and unfeeling, and then waiting for the negative pregnancy test results, the loyal, trusty blood.\n\nIt's the only thing I can depend on anymore. That sooner or later, my period will come.\n\nMarch 14, 1997  \nEgg Harbor\n\nSpring looms on the horizon.\n\nIt's weeks away still, but every now and then a day blooms before me, fifty or sixty degrees and full of sun, so that it's easier to get through than the endlessly gray winter days.\n\nThese rare springlike days I leave the cottage when Aaron is away and head into town. I've discovered a dance studio there, completely by chance\u2014I didn't seek it out\u2014a small single-story cottage on Church Street that tiny ballerinas move in and out of all day.\n\nThe first day I spotted the studio, I saw an empty park bench nearby, which was warm and welcoming, set directly in a shaft of sunlight so that even though it was no more than fifty-two degrees outside, I felt snug, my skin warm from the sun's generous beams.\n\nFor nearly an hour I watched the ballerinas, toddlers mainly in leotards with their hair pinned neatly back in buns. Their little voices were happy and high-pitched, like birds, as they clung to their mothers' hands, coming and going like clockwork, nearly every hour on the hour.\n\nThere was one group in particular that caught my eye. A group of sixteen\u2014eight mothers and their daughters\u2014who arrived en masse around noon, a whole bundle of giggly girls with women trailing behind, women who sipped lattes and gossiped while I sat alone on a park bench, feeling sorry for myself, isolated from society because I didn't fit in. Because I didn't have a child.\n\nThe women were beautiful, every last one of them, which for whatever reason made me feel dirty, self-conscious and ashamed. I smiled as they walked by, but not one looked at me and no one smiled in reply. They wore peasant tops and floaty skirts; cowboy boots; big, baggy sweaters; hobo bags; while me, on the other hand, I sat wrapped up in a sweatshirt of Aaron's that had faded and shrunk in the wash, feeling alone, bloated, desperate, wanting for a child.\n\nHow different I am from those mothers.\n\nI could never be one of them, one of those women who travel in a pack, whispering secrets about their husbands, their children's nighttime habits, which little ones still wet the bed. All because I didn't have a child. Because without a child, I had nothing to offer them.\n\nBecause I'm nothing, I easily reasoned then, if not a mother.\n\nThere's no other justification for my life.\n\nI watched them as they walked by, as they closed in on the dance studio. And then, after the women had passed and I assumed the parade was through, I noticed one little girl straggling behind, nearly stagnant on the sidewalk. Struggling to keep up. Too busy examining the buds on the trees. Smaller than the rest, which made me think of the piglet in Charlotte's Web. Wilbur, saved from slaughter by little Fern. I was captivated by her, holding my breath as she passed by, joining the others in the studio. Only when she was gone did I allow myself to breathe.\n\nAnd now twice, sometimes three times a week I find myself sitting there on that bench, watching the dancers come and go, wishing one of them, any single one of them\u2014but especially the littlest one, a head shorter than the rest, straw-colored hair and a collection of freckles, whose tiny feet always lag behind so that one day I worry she'll be forgotten\u2014was mine.\n\nI've become an addict really, and the only thing that eases the symptoms of withdrawal is seeing children, is being in the company of children. They are my fix, an antidote for the restlessness, the irritability, the tremor of my hands that is only exacerbated with each passing month that I don't get pregnant.\n\nThe little girl can't be more than three years old, pudgy arms, legs and cheeks still padded with baby fat that will one day wear away, no doubt, so that she'll look like any one of the ladies she tags along after, with their long limbs and their long hair and their coffee.\n\nI don't like the way I feel sitting there on that park bench, eyeing children who are not mine. But I have nothing better to do with my time, and I don't think I could stop if I tried.\n\nI suggested to Aaron that I look for a job, for some diversion from the long, lonely afternoons while he is away. Aaron isn't game. He'd rather I _not_ work, which makes no sense to me. The financial burden of fertility treatments is steep; we could use the additional income. We've begun to argue about things like the cost of ground beef, the cost of electricity.\n\nAaron and I are monitoring the Clomid cycles, which means for each failed attempt we are quite literally throwing away hundreds of dollars for the medication, blood work and ultrasounds to see whether my body is releasing eggs, and when. Insurance won't cover these costs because, of course, some high-and-mighty insurance company doesn't give a darn whether Aaron and I ever have a baby, and so the procedure is considered _elective_. We are electing to waste thousands of dollars to try and conceive a baby, while other parents, far less capable or worthy parents, are given one for free.\n\n\"You're under so much stress already,\" Aaron said when I suggested applying for a job, and \"Why not just focus on this?\" meaning making a baby, as if somehow I'd been unfocused, and as if that lack of focus was the reason we were still without a child. I'd been too cavalier about it, too casual, too devil-may-care. He didn't use those words, not a single one of them, and yet that's exactly what I heard when he came home from work after midnight that night and, though I lamented about being bored all day, about being alone, he suggested I not apply for a job, but rather focus on _this_ , with a sweeping gesture toward my vacuous womb.\n\nI screamed at him then. I slammed a door. I locked him out of the bedroom so he slept on the sofa for the night.\n\nNever before have I screamed at him. Never before have I raised my voice.\n\nHe didn't object to sleeping on the sofa. It was one in the morning. He was tired, he told me. \"Eden, that's enough,\" __ he said with a sigh while gathering his pillow from the head of our bed. \"I need to sleep.\"\n\nI sat there in the bedroom that night, in the dark, propped up against pillows and not lying down. My hands still shook even hours after my fit was through. A headache slunk up the base of my neck and consumed my skull so that every part of my head hurt. My eyes burned from crying and though I tried to blame the medication for this\u2014after all, mood swings and a propensity for crying were both common side effects of the Clomid\u2014I didn't know whether or not they were to blame this time.\n\nMaybe it was just me.\n\nI felt sorry come morning.\n\nBut I didn't apologize and neither did Aaron. Instead he left for work earlier than ever before and I returned to the dance studio, an addict in need of a fix.\n\nMarch 19, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nWhen Clomid alone failed to work, Dr. Landry suggested IUI. Intrauterine insemination. Placing Aaron's sluggish sperm directly into my uterus so that they don't have to paddle through those four inches of mucousy space all on their own, so that they will have an easier time finding and fertilizing my egg without getting lost, swimming in circles in my vaginal canal as they are apt to do. Each month, Aaron and I have quite literally thrown away money, frittered away follicles and eggs, doled out hundreds of dollars on medication and ultrasounds for nothing. My trips to see Dr. Landry have been a waste. It's time to try something new. Intrauterine insemination will add a couple hundred dollars to our monthly expenditure, but will also increase the likelihood of conception, especially in cases like ours where low sperm motility is to blame.\n\nThere it was again, that word: _blame._\n\nThere is also the added benefit that with IUI Aaron and I won't have to have sex, which is a blessing in and of itself. Aaron is capable of collecting his sample all on his own in the comfort of a private room at the clinic, complete with pornographic videos and magazines, where sexy, buxom women far more appealing to the eye than me will help us create a child. It mortified him to have to do this, and yet after months of invasive ultrasounds and repeated blood draws, after digesting medication that made me moody, that made me cry, after poking myself in the gut with shots of hormones for months on end, this seemed only fair. This seemed right. The nurse tendered my assistance, saying I could keep Aaron company if I'd like, but with a sideways glance, he went in without me and closed the door, and there was a spasm of jealousy, a shooting pain searing through my head as though someone had momentarily lodged an ice pick into my skull.\n\nI envisioned Aaron on the other side of that door, aroused by some strumpet on the television screen and not me.\n\nAnd then hours later, after the sperm had been collected and cleaned, it was my turn to be put to work, to lie on the exam table, completely undressed from the waist down with only a drape sheet to provide that false sense of privacy, while Dr. Landry placed first a catheter and then Aaron's sperm inside me.\n\nAnd then sent us home to wait.\n\nAaron, as always, went to work, leaving me alone and bored, and so I drove into town and sought out that small dance studio on Church Street and sat on the park bench, watching the little ballerinas come and go, searching for the smallest one with the straw-like hair and freckles, a head shorter than the rest, who always struggled to keep up with her mother and friends.\n\nI had to wait awhile, but eventually she came and my heart skipped a beat. My hands went numb. I held my breath.\n\nI saw her ambling first through the double blue doors of the studio, already lagging behind before she'd ever stepped foot outside, grappling with the weight of the door because there was no one around to hold it for her. Her tiny head barely surpassed the door's crash bar. The others were already a good five or ten paces ahead, moving down the concrete sidewalk in the direction of town, little girls gabbing merrily about an afternoon playdate while their mothers followed behind, paper cups of coffee in hand. Only once did a mother turn around to see where she was, calling out, \"Snap to it, Olivia, or you'll get left behind,\" __ and then she turned again, facing forward, never again checking on Olivia, who brought up the rear, the caboose on some sort of high-speed train that had somehow gotten off track.\n\nShe had a name now. _Olivia._\n\nBut Olivia's mother was fully immersed in a conversation with the ladies, listening to one of the other mothers complain about her husband's long hours and relentless travel schedule. He was in Tampa Bay this week on business, and that new admin assistant from the office had gone along too, the one her husband talked about at the dinner table, so that she couldn't help but be concerned.\n\n\"You don't think?\" asked one of the other ladies, and Olivia's mother piped in with \"Oh, you poor thing.\"\n\nAnd it was decided then. This woman's husband was having an affair.\n\nThrough all this, no one paid attention to Olivia, who had fallen even farther behind.\n\nI had no intent of rising from the park bench as she passed by. None at all. The thought didn't cross my mind until a single bobby pin fell from her hair, a silver sprung hairpin that dropped to the ground at such a frequency only I could hear. Little Olivia kept walking, leaving the hairpin behind. Her mother kept walking, now nearly twenty or thirty paces ahead. Only I paused to retrieve the hairpin, falling in line behind Olivia and the rest of her troupe, six steps behind and struck dumb.\n\nI couldn't speak.\n\nI could have called her by name; I could have tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the bobby pin. But I didn't. Instead I shadowed her by a mere three feet, eyes gaping at the lavender leotard and tutu, the sheer white tights, the hair done up in a bun, starting to lose its hold as strands of brown and yellow drifted through the springlike air. Beside our feet, the snow had melted, leaving puddles that returning birds paused to drink from. On the trees there were buds, tiny shamrock-green buds about to burst forth with leaves.\n\nI never once thought about taking her, about grabbing a hold of her with my hand pressed to her mouth so that she wouldn't scream. I didn't think of luring her away, bewitching her with the promise of a puppy or ice cream. I only wanted to watch for a while, to walk a breath behind and pretend for just this one moment in time that she was mine.\n\nAs I followed Olivia down the sidewalk, a conversation played out in my mind.\n\n_Slow down, baby girl_ , __ I thought to myself, whispering the words in my head. _Come hold Mama's hand_ , I urged, and in my imaginings I held out my hand as little Olivia slackened a bit, slowing down, turning to me so I could see the color of her eyes, the wealth of freckles she'd no doubt one day either outgrow or grow to hate. She slipped her hand inside mine and I squeezed tight, careful not to let go as we passed through an intersection while the traffic on either side paused to let us through. Olivia's hand was easy to hold. Her steps fell into sync with mine.\n\nIt was the raucous laughter of the other girls that broke my trance, bringing me back to the earth, back to my physical existence. To reality. They had all turned at once, calling Olivia a snail, a slowpoke, waiting for her to catch up so they could go get ice-cream cones, and even though I knew it was all in jest\u2014Olivia's piping laughter was proof of this, no?\u2014my heart ached for her for being called names, for being the poky little puppy, always lagging behind.\n\nAnd then my heart ached for me when she skipped off with her friends, leaving me behind, standing alone on the sidewalk with her bobby pin in my hand.\n\nI hoped that just once she would turn and see me and know that I was there.\n\nI kept Olivia's bobby pin as a token of luck.\n\nTen days later, my period arrived.\n\nAnd now another month has come and gone without a baby.\njessie\n\nMy nighttime thoughts can be grouped into four categories. They follow the same pattern, the same predictable rotation each night. Wash, rinse, dry, repeat.\n\nIt all begins with the morbid thoughts where I obsess over death and dying, of being dead, trapped inside an urn, unable to breathe. They settle in around twilight, when the sun sinks beneath the horizon, slipping away to play with kids on the other side of the world. It's then that I start to wonder how much time I have left on earth. I think about how and when I will die. Will it hurt when I die? Did it hurt when Mom died?\n\nThese morbid thoughts soon mutate into grieving, sinking ones where I miss Mom so much it hurts. By this point in the night, the world has turned black and I lie on my mattress in a black room, confined by blackness. A prisoner of the night. In all my life, it was always Mom and me, like Batman and Robin, Lucy and Ethel. Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. We were a team. Without her I don't know what to do. I spend half the night pleading for her back. Because I don't know who I am without her. Because, without her, I am nothing.\n\nI don't cry about it because my eyes are done crying. They've dried up. And so instead I think things like, if Mom isn't here, then I don't want to be here either. It's grim, and yet it's true.\n\nMy thoughts go on like this for what feels like hours because it probably is. Eventually they turn into a guilt trip, where I loathe myself for sleeping through Mom's death. For getting testy with her when she puked for the sixth time in a row, missing the toilet by a mile. For not speaking to her for weeks when she wouldn't come clean to me about my dad. For not holding her hand the time she chaperoned my fifth grade field trip to the planetarium, or bothering to thank her for the embroidery thread she got me in middle school\u2014a half dozen colors to make friendship bracelets with. I'd only huffed and stomped off to another room, thinking how stupid could she be. Didn't she know I didn't have any friends? These memories haunt me now.\n\nIn truth, Mom and I hardly fought. The only arguments she and I ever had were mostly over my father. Mom never wanted to talk about him\u2014she refused to talk about him\u2014and so I snuck around her back to try and learn more.\n\nI was six years old when I first realized I didn't have a father. Until then I was too oblivious to see that other kids did and I didn't. Mom and I lived alone. We kept to ourselves much of the time. I didn't go to preschool and I didn't have friends. I didn't know much of anything outside of my world with Mom, not until school began, and then my world grew exponentially larger, though still, in comparison to everyone else's, it was small.\n\nIt was my first day of kindergarten when I realized that all of the kids in the class, aside from me, had both a mom and a dad. I remember that day, organizing our belongings inside the bulky metal cubbyholes, while our moms hovered in the classroom, talking to the teacher, talking to other moms. Everyone except for my mom, because she stood there alone, talking to no one. This confused me. Why didn't Mom talk to the other women?\n\nBut what confused me even more was the huddle of men in the classroom. A whole busload of them. Not just moms, but moms _and_ men. Who were these men, and what were they doing here?\n\nI asked one little girl. I pointed at the giant of a man standing by her side. _Who is that?_ I asked, eyes wide, looking skyward. She said it was her dad, and though I'd heard that word before, it wasn't one that was readily in my vocabulary.\n\nI tallied up the men in the room, realizing that every single child had one but me.\n\nThe mention of my father didn't come up again until later in the school year, when some kid asked where he was. We'd had a music performance and, while everyone else had a mom and dad in tow\u2014grandma and grandpa too\u2014I only had Mom. And things like that, when you're six, are big news. How Jessie Sloane doesn't have a dad.\n\n_Where's your dad?_ the kid asked, all dressed up in a sweater-vest and pants.\n\n_I don't have one_ , __ I said, thinking that was the end of it. But he came back with some comment about how _everyone has a dad_ , and others started to laugh.\n\nI asked Mom about it that night at home. I had to know. _Where's my dad?_ I asked, standing in her bedroom doorway while she lay on the bed, bare feet crossed at the ankles, reading a book. Even at six years old, I could see that she was tired from a day spent cleaning someone else's home.\n\nI didn't wait for her reply. _Joey Malone said everyone has a dad_ , I told Mom as she uncrossed her ankles and set her bookmark between the pages of her book. _So where's mine?_ I asked, feeling aggrieved all of a sudden. As aggrieved as a little kid can be.\n\nMom was keeping something from me.\n\nMom had a secret that she wouldn't share with me.\n\nMom's face turned as red as hot coal. _Joey had no right to say that_ , __ she told me. _Not everyone has a dad. Not you._\n\nBut her answer came with no explanation.\n\nMaybe he was dead. Maybe they were divorced. Maybe they were never married in the first place. Or maybe I never really had a dad.\n\nStill, I started snooping around the house to be sure, in case there was something hiding there that I might find. Evidence. A clue.\n\nA few years later I became more tenacious about it, more annoying. I asked Mom again where my father was. What had happened to him. _Is he dead?_ I wanted to know. I said that word with the testiness of a preteen. The exasperation. _Dead._\n\nBut she wouldn't say. Time and again, she changed the subject; she pretended not to hear me ask. She had a brilliant way of mincing words, of making me forget what I had asked. Of clamming up and saying nothing.\n\nAnd yet, again and again, I asked. A hundred times after that. But never did she tell me.\n\nI became ruthless about it.\n\nWhen I was twelve I set a place at the dinner table for him. Whoever he might be. Just in case he decided to show. Mom swiped his silverware from the table post-haste. Flung it back in the drawer.\n\n_Let's not do this, Jessie_ , __ she said.\n\nI searched city streets for his face. Never sure what I was looking for, but always looking. I wondered if he had blondish hair and dimples like me. Or if he was a brunette, a redhead, maybe even some other ethnicity.\n\nMaybe we looked nothing alike.\n\nOr maybe we were the kind that could pass for twins.\n\nI learned that dimples are inherited. A dominant trait. Meaning only one parent would have to have them for me to have them. And seeing as Mom had none, I easily reasoned that they came from _him_. From _Dad_. That, barring some sort of genetic mutation, I'd inherited them from my father.\n\nWhat a dimple really is is a birth defect. A short facial muscle that pulls on your skin when you smile, causing indentations in the cheek. My father and I are, therefore, both defected.\n\nI made up names for him. Occupations. I sized up men with dimples at random, wondering if any of them were him.\n\nI imagined him with a different wife and kids. Me with half brothers and sisters, a family. In my delusion, every last one of them had dimples.\n\nBefore bed, I'd leave the porch light on, so that he could find our home if ever he came to visit. So that he'd know which one was ours. Which bungalow in a sea of bungalows belonged to me.\n\nWhen I was fourteen, I attempted a crop top for school. It wasn't my thing, bearing my belly button for all to see. But it was a camouflage T, soft and green, and I was fourteen. Feeling rebellious. Trying to fit in with the crowd but failing. Instead I stood out like a sore thumb, always light-years behind the latest fad.\n\nMom's mouth dropped. She shook her head. She said no to the crop top, told me to march upstairs and change. To _march_. I put up a fight, standing with my hands on my hips, pouting. Sputtering the nonsense of a fourteen-year-old girl.\n\nBut Mom would have none of it. It wasn't up for discussion, she told me, saying for a third time to _march_. Pointing at the stairs.\n\nMy words were brisk. _I bet that if my dad were here_ , _he'd let me_ , I said. She looked hurt, visibly wounded. I'd hurt her and I was glad I did.\n\n_Are you ever going to tell me about him?_ I asked. It was a fair question. I deserved to know, or so my fourteen-year-old self believed I did. I didn't once consider the reasons she kept him from me, or the ramifications of knowing who he was. But Mom did.\n\n_Qui vivra verra_ , Mom replied, holding her hands up in the air. Her favorite saying, one that rolled eloquently off her tongue. _Only time will tell_ is in essence what it means, but this time what it was was a way to be evasive. To avoid my question yet again.\n\nI stormed out of the room. Marched up the stairs and slammed a bedroom door. I put on a sweatshirt that covered every square inch of me.\n\nNot a year later, the cancer came.\n\nAnd then I started wishing I'd never asked about my dad.\n\nI dwell on those memories now, hating myself for what I put Mom through.\n\nBut every night around 3:00 a.m., when I've exhausted all the thoughts of death and grief and guilt for a single night, my imagination begins to take flight. My imagination or my memories, though some nights I have a hard time determining which is which. Tonight it's a memory, I think, one so far-flung that my brain has to cobble pieces of it together, adding to the gaps so that it makes sense. Filling in the blanks. I see that kindergarten classroom, a poster of the golden rule taped to the cinder block walls. A big bookcase, a rectangular rug with the alphabet depicted on it\u2014the alphabet plus simple pictures, an apple for _A_ , a bird for _B_ \u2014the American flag. A chalkboard with the teacher's name written on it in perfect penmanship. I see Mom standing there before the teacher, making an introduction, saying to the teacher that she is Eden and I am Jessie, and then the teacher squats just so and reaches out a hand to me and I shake it. Her smile is warm and sincere as she rises back up to Mom.\n\nMrs. Roberts stands with the clipboard in hand, making sure each child's paperwork is complete and that they've brought their supplies. Mom hovers self-consciously before her, hands behind her back, fingers laced. Mom and Mrs. Roberts talk and as they do, words reach my ears\u2014 _birth certificate_ , __ I think I hear\u2014and Mom stiffens at Mrs. Roberts's request.\n\n\"Pardon me?\" Mom asks, and Mrs. Roberts explains how there's a note from the school office that she's yet to provide a copy of my birth certificate with the other registration materials. A certified copy, with the raised seal.\n\nMom doesn't miss a beat. She says something about a house fire. \"We lost everything,\" she says, and Mrs. Roberts's face turns sad.\n\n\"How awful,\" Mrs. Roberts says consolingly as I, six-year-old me, asks unsuspectingly, \"What fire?\" Because there was never a fire. Not in our home. We didn't lose a thing.\n\nMom shushes me. Mrs. Roberts lays a hand on Mom's arm and says just as soon as she can get a replacement, that would be fine.\n\nBut then, like that, the memory disappears, and I have to wonder if it was a memory at all or only my imagination.\n\nTonight as I lie on the mattress in a misplaced belief that if I lie here long enough, eventually I will sleep, I think of a dead three-year-old Jessica Sloane, having to remind myself that it's a typographical error only, that she doesn't exist.\n\nThe room is quiet as I lie in bed wondering what she looked like. For three years old, I picture chubby wrists and knees, innocent eyes, an endless smile. I wonder if that's what she looked like. But then again I remember. There is no other Jessica Sloane. She _is_ me.\n\nA heavy silence flattens me in bed, filling every crevice in the room like a poisonous gas. I think that maybe it could kill me, that silence. Displacing all the oxygen in the room with a smothering quiet. The only thing I hear is the _tick, tock, tick, tock_ of the wall clock, keeping time.\n\nI rise to my knees and gaze out the window into the yard, seeing only the back of Ms. Geissler's home from here. It's tall and imposing, three floors of limestone and brick. Such a big home for one woman alone.\n\nThere's a balcony in the back of the home, a basic, rudimentary sort of thing. Wooden scaffolding that soars up three floors, a wooden slab to stand upon. It looks unsafe to me. Unsound. Not up to code.\n\nAs I kneel before the window, I rest my elbows on the sill. Foolishly believing that I blend into the blackness of the room, that no one can see me from here. The house is dark, except for a single light that's turned on. A yellow hue fills the margins of a window. The rest of it is blocked by a drawn window shade. I can't see into the room, just that frame of light around the window shade.\n\nMs. Geissler must have forgotten to turn the light off before she went to bed, I rationalize, because it's the middle of the night, and no one should be awake but me.\n\nBut as I stare, I see that the frame of light behind the window shade is moving, because the window shade inside it is also moving. It's a gentle back and forth motion, as if a person had been standing just seconds ago behind it, lifting the edges of the shade to peer out.\n\nI imagine her at the window, gazing out, seeing me lying on the mattress, pretending to sleep. I think of her own admission\u2014 _I saw your light on late last night_ \u2014and imagine that last night, like this, she stood at the window, staring at me. Me, who naively obliged, leaving the shades open wide, basic white roller shades that I didn't once think necessary to pull down.\n\nBut now suddenly I do.\n\nI watch the motion of the window shade as it slows and then stops.\n\nAnd then, like that, the light flicks off.\n\nThe yellow edges of the window disappear. The greystone is engulfed in total darkness. I'd think nothing of it, but then it occurs to me that the light was coming from the third floor of the home. The place with the squirrels. The place where Ms. Geissler doesn't go.\n\nShe was lying to me.\n\nWhy would she lie to me?\n\nI crawl back into bed. I throw the covers over my head.\n\nI make poor attempts to placate myself, to convince myself that the light is on a timer. That it's automated. That it goes on and off of its own free will. That a heat vent was spewing warm air directly at the window shade, making it move.\n\nBut it's not so easy to believe.\neden\n\nMay 14, 2001   \nChicago\n\nI watch as, beside me, Jessie sleeps. She's out for the count now\u2014finally, after a long, feverish night\u2014spread out on a blanket on the floor, arms splayed in opposite directions like the wings of a jetliner. Her pale face is placid and calm, unlike last night when it was a fiery red, the fever and the fury creeping up her neckline, inflaming her forehead and cheeks. She'd cried out all night in discomfort, wailing, unable to get a hold of her own breath. Her fever capped at 103 degrees and I was grateful for this, for the fact that it wasn't high enough to necessitate a visit to the emergency room. I don't know if I'd have had it in me to go to the hospital had we needed to. I find that the very notion of hospitals\u2014the antiseptic smells, the insipid hallways, the vigilant eyes\u2014still gets under my skin sometimes, like some form of PTSD, I think, because just thinking about being in one rattles my nerves, makes me dizzy, makes my chest hurt. I don't know that I could ever go back to one, not after what I've done. I'm certain they'd see clear through me, that\u2014even with all these miles spread between us\u2014they, the doctors, the nurses, the ladies at the reception desk, would know just exactly who I am, as if I have my own scarlet _A_ forever etched into my shirt as a reminder of my guilt.\n\nI stare at Jessie, sound asleep on the quilted blanket beside me. Her hair fans out around her face. Her arms, both of them, are thrust upward and over her head now like goalposts. There isn't a single line on her skin anywhere, and though I don't want to wake her, I stroke the back of a finger across her tranquil ivory cheek, grateful she still sleeps.\n\nIt takes my breath away sometimes, the way that she looks absolutely nothing like me, but is instead all blond hair and blue-eyed. And then there are those dimples\u2014those dimples!\u2014the most telling of all, so that I've tried sucking my cheeks in from time to time in the hopes of replicating them on my own skin. It doesn't work, of course, and instead of dimples I'm left with a fish face that makes Jessie laugh. There are times I find that I have to remind myself that I am a mother, that I am her mother, and I wonder if others see the hesitation in me, the doubt, or if it's only in my mind.\n\nYesterday as we were walking from the French bakery, the one with the luscious petits fours for which I had a sudden craving, the woman behind the counter wished me a happy Mother's Day, and there was something querying about it that I didn't like. It rubbed me the wrong way. What started as a polite greeting turned into a question instead, as if she doubted at that last moment\u2014words already out of her mouth, too late to pluck them back\u2014whether she should be wishing me a happy Mother's Day.\n\nWas I the child's mother? Was I a mother? After all, we looked nothing alike, and of course the lack of a wedding ring raised a red flag. Perhaps I was only the child's babysitter, her nanny, the au pair.\n\nAs I thanked the woman I saw her turn red with shame, believing she'd misspoken. But I grabbed for Jessie and said, \"Come along, my darling girl,\" as if that might validate it for both her and me. As if it might make my maternity more real.\n\nAll afternoon I found myself overthinking, wondering what exactly that woman saw that made her question whether I was Jessie's mother. Was it the manner in which I carried myself, the way I spoke, the lack of a physical resemblance? I thought about it all day and night, wanting to know, needing to know, so that whatever it was, I could next time disguise it better.\njessie\n\nThe day begins with a cleaning assignment, the first in two weeks. It's a good thing for more reasons than one. These days, cash is in short supply, and I need something to do with my time. Something better than to obsess over my social security number or lack thereof, Ms. Geissler staring out her window, watching me\u2014which, even by the light of day, still rattles me. So much so that before I leave, I eye the window shades in the carriage home, fully intent on pulling each and every one down so that no one can see inside while I'm gone.\n\nI slip out of the carriage home quietly, setting the door closed.\n\nI make my way down the alleyway in back, avoiding Ms. Geissler.\n\nAt 7:30 a.m., I arrive at the home on Paulina, a typical workers cottage. I have to ring the doorbell twice before Mrs. Pugh comes to the door and even then, when she draws it open, there's a deliberateness about it. It's not the breezy way she typically throws open the door and welcomes me in. Her voice is out of joint, uncharacteristic of her typical chirpiness. \"Jessie,\" she says at seeing me standing there. The word falls flat, her eyes dropping to the mop and bucket in my hands, the cleaning caddy stuffed up under my arm. It's far more than my two arms can carry, so that I feel clumsy though I haven't dropped anything. Not yet.\n\nAs the sun rises, it lands on the nape of my neck, making it warm, which is a relief from the near-hypothermic way I spent the night in the carriage home. Cold enough to freeze. My teeth chattered all night, body wrapped up in the one blanket I could find. Three pairs of socks on my feet.\n\nIt isn't so much a welcome. \"Jessie?\" is what Mrs. Pugh really means, a question more than anything, as if she's surprised to see me, as if she's asking why I'm here. She stands before me in a robe and slippers, shielded by the door. There's no workout attire as expected. No yoga mat and no gym shoes. She must not be feeling well, I guess, because at eight in the morning Mrs. Pugh has yoga, so that by seven thirty, she's always dressed, hair done up in a ponytail with strands that hang loose and frame her face. But not today.\n\n\"Am I early?\" I ask, looking at my watch, which tells me it's seven thirty. I'm not early because I'm right on time. I hear Mr. Pugh call from the distance, \"Who's there?\" he asks.\n\n\"It's Jessie,\" she says.\n\n\"Jessie?\" he asks, the tone of his voice equally confused. As if he doesn't know who I am, which of course he does. I've been cleaning their home for years. Every Tuesday.\n\n\"It's Wednesday,\" Mrs. Pugh tells me. \"You're not early, Jessie,\" she says. And I can't make out that expression on her face, but I can see that she's not happy. \"You're a day _late_. You were supposed to be here yesterday,\" she tells me, and it startles me, this sudden revelation that today is Wednesday. That it's not Tuesday after all, in which case my whole week's been mixed-up. I wonder what else I missed. I feel groundless all of a sudden, standing high on a ledge with nothing to hang on to.\n\nMy apology is effusive. \"I'm sorry,\" I sputter. \"I'm so, so sorry,\" as I try and make my way past Mrs. Pugh and into their home to clean it now, but she stands in my way and says not to bother. \"We had friends over last night, Jessie. Parents from the preschool. We needed the home cleaned,\" she says as she tugs tighter on the cord of the robe to keep whatever's inside concealed.\n\n\"I had to find someone else to clean it,\" she says as she stares at me, not into my eyes, but somewhere beneath. She raises a finger, points at my chest so that I look down but see nothing. She says, \"Jessie, your...\" but then her voice drifts off. She reconsiders. Puts her hand down and says instead, \"I tried calling you. You didn't answer.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" I say again. \"I could rake the leaves,\" I suggest, though the number of leaves on their lawn is negligible. It's too early in the season for many leaves to be falling. But I say it so that I'll have something, anything to do. \"Mow the lawn?\" I ask, hearing how desperate I sound, but she shakes her head and tells me, \"We have a service. They take care of the yard work.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" I say, feeling stupid. I back away, not bothering to turn and look where I'm going, missing the one concrete step that separates the front stoop from the walkway. One step, a ten-inch rise. I drop straight down, landing gracelessly somehow or other on the balls of my feet, whacking my teeth together in the process. I don't fall, but the mop slips from my hands, its clang echoing up and down the street.\n\nI turn to leave, tripping over the mop as I do, and only then does Mrs. Pugh take pity on me. \"Our company,\" she begins, \"last night. Six kids and twelve adults can make quite the mess.\"\n\nShe opens the door wider and invites me inside. My thanks is as over-the-top as my apology. It has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with time. Everything to do with keeping myself occupied.\n\nI wipe down the kitchen countertops and cabinets; I wash the floors. In the bathroom, I scrub like the devil, taking out all my anxiety on the subway tiles. It doesn't help.\n\nAs I move from the bathroom to Mr. and Mrs. Pugh's bedroom, I catch sight of a computer sitting on a writing desk and it gives me an idea. The desk is minimalist, as is the computer. A sleek silver laptop that prompts me for a password as I lift it open and press the return key, holding my breath to listen for the sound of footsteps sweeping down the hall. It doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. Taped there to the desk is the password, as well as the password for every one of Mr. and Mrs. Pugh's financial accounts. Their credit cards, their bank accounts. Their Vanguard funds. I type the code and easily get in. I could probably appropriate a few hundred thousand from them if I wanted to. But that's not what I'm here to do.\n\nMr. Pugh has gone off to work and so for now it's only Mrs. Pugh and me. Mrs. Pugh, who sat in the sunroom drinking her coffee and reading a book when I excused myself to clean. I pray she stays put, that she doesn't come wandering into her bedroom and catch me meddling with her things.\n\nI pull up a search engine and type my own name into it. Jessica Sloane. I'm not sure what I expect to find. Or rather what I expect to find is nothing. But instead I find an interior designer with my name, one that takes up the first two pages of results. Around page three I find a doctor named Jessica Sloane. Even farther down the page, a Pilates instructor. A Tumblr account for a fourth woman of the same name.\n\nBut me specifically, I'm nowhere there. Though it's not like I'd have a reason to be on the internet. I've done nothing noteworthy with my life; I don't have social media; I've never been on the news. For the last twenty years, Mom and I have lived as sequestered a life as we could. Like nuns, except that we didn't pray. We just kept to ourselves.\n\nI click on the tab for images. Hundreds of photographs load before my eyes. Hundreds of photographs of rooms the interior designer Jessica Sloane has designed. They're dramatic and fussy and not at all my style. There are photographs of her too. Her and Jessica Sloane, MD, all decked out in a white lab coat with a stethoscope slung around her neck, smiling. Trying hard to look empathetic and intelligent all at the same time. I click the news tab at the top of the page, finding articles about them too.\n\nI pause then, hands frozen above the keyboard, hearing a noise from down the hall. The house is long and narrow, each of the rooms small. I listen, hearing water streaming from the kitchen faucet, the coffee maker warming up to brew another pot. Mrs. Pugh is making herself more coffee.\n\nOnly when Mrs. Pugh's gentle footfalls drift away do I return to the screen.\n\nOn a whim, I insert my middle name, certain the search will come back empty. But instead it narrows the results down to a manageable thirty-two, which is not at all what I was expecting, and at first I think the computer is wrong.\n\nIt's the top hit on the page that catches my eye, a newspaper clipping dated seventeen years ago. The headline reads Hit-and-Run Driver Kills Girl, Age Three.\n\nIt takes my breath away. My eyes can't believe what they see. The words. The picture. The caption beneath the image that reads, in italics, Jessica Jane Sloane.\n\nThat's me.\n\nMy hands clutch the edge of the desktop, squeezing hard, white-knuckled from the grip.\n\nI go on to read an article that describes a child walking into traffic and being struck by a car. The car sped on, it says, leaving the girl for dead in the street. According to witness accounts, the car was going too fast, driving erratically. Assumptions were made that the driver was drunk, though no one got a good look at him or her, nor did anyone catch a glimpse of the license plate number. There were discrepancies as to the color of the car, which went to prove the unreliability of eyewitness accounts. They couldn't be trusted. The girl, Jessica Jane Sloane, was carted to the local hospital via ambulance, and there she died.\n\nI click back on the images tab and spy a photograph of little Jessica Sloane in a purple bathing suit. In it, she's happy. She's three years old.\n\nMy head spins. My fingers go numb. They lose feeling completely as I stare at the little girl's face and think, _Who is this girl and what's she got to do with me?_\neden\n\nMarch 29, _1997  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nThey say that vodka has no smell to it, and yet it was clear as day to me, the smell of it on Aaron's breath as he dropped into bed beside me tonight, the clock trumpeting 1:13 in the morning. Over the last few weeks, I'd noticed a gradual shift in his work schedule, each night him coming home later than ever before.\n\nAt first he said nothing, just stared blankly at me when I asked if he'd had something to drink. He didn't say yes, but he didn't say no either, and it seemed reasonable enough to assume he _had_ been drinking, though he need not say one way or the other because I could smell it on his breath.\n\nIt just so happened that Aaron and a couple of coworkers had stuck around for a nightcap after their shift was through. It had been a bad night, _shitty_ was the word Aaron used, Aaron who didn't ever used to complain. Damien was a no-show and Aaron was in the weeds all night, struggling to keep up on the line.\n\n\"It was just one for the road,\" he said. \"It's not like I'm drunk, Eden. It was one drink. One stupid drink,\" __ he said as he set the pillow over his head.\n\nI didn't need to remind him of the effects of alcohol on male fertility. He knew. He knew because Dr. Landry had told us all those many months before when we discussed ways to better improve Aaron's low sperm motility.\n\nI didn't need to tell him how I had been alone all day, for eleven hours this time. Nearly twelve. He knew this too. He knew that I didn't like to go to sleep until he was here, in bed beside me. He knew that most days the boredom and loneliness consumed me, and what else was there to do for those eleven or twelve hours besides think about how much I craved a baby?\n\nI rolled over onto my side of the bed, taking the blanket with me.\n\n\"So now you're mad?\" __ Aaron asked as he sat there, exposed. I didn't say yes or no but I didn't need to say one way or the other because Aaron could see my posture, could sense me tense up in fury and rage. He tried to reach out for me, but I pulled away. He sighed. \"I needed to unwind for a bit. To have a little fun,\" __ he said by means of explanation, but it only made things worse, imagining him with coworkers, drinking vodka and having fun.\n\n\"What's so wrong with that?\" he asked. \"Do you have any idea how stressful it is for me at work?\" but I had a different thought then, one that went back to money. Not only was Aaron coming home later each night, drinking after work with friends\u2014 _female friends?_ I wanted to ask, but couldn't do it quite yet, too afraid to know the truth, that Aaron was throwing back shots of vodka with the pretty cooks and waitresses while I sat, a prisoner in my own home\u2014he was blowing our money on booze. Money that could otherwise be saved for fertility treatments. For a baby.\n\n\"You don't need to be wasting our money like that,\" I said. \"We hardly have enough as it is.\"\n\nAnd then I did ask him who he was drinking with __ and he rattled off names. Casey. Riley. Pat. Names that were all conveniently unisex. Names that kept me up half the night wondering if they were male or female.\n\n\"Who's Casey?\" I asked, censoriously, and when he didn't reply I created her in my mind's eye: tall and svelte with long butterscotch hair and pecan eyes. Flirtatious and tactile, predisposed to standing too close and touching so that I envisioned her, this make-believe woman, with her nimble hand on Aaron's arm.\n\nPerfect teeth.\n\nA flawless complexion.\n\nAn effortless laugh.\n\nI've gained ten pounds now due to the many months of fertility treatments. I'm bloated all the time, in addition to moody and upset. The water retention has made my fingers grow fat. Most days my wedding ring barely fits with the water weight and stays hidden at home in a dresser drawer.\n\nAnd then Aaron asked, \"What happened to you, Eden? You used to be so much fun,\" __ while pulling the blanket from me. His final hurrah.\n\nI lay there in the dark, completely exposed.\n\nThere was a part of me that remembered that Eden, the fun Eden, but in the moment she seemed so far gone, she was hard to remember anymore.\n\nApril 14, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nToday I watched a mourning dove in the gutter of our home get pelted with hail. She was female, a mother-to-be, beautiful with delicate beige plumage, perched on three oval eggs in the aluminum gutter. She'd spent days with her man friend, methodically assembling the nest of twigs and grass blades\u2014while I watched on from the second-story window as they scurried back and forth from tree to trough, collecting materials and sticking them flimsily together\u2014not thinking once of the rainwater that would soon stream past her shanty or the pellets of frozen ice that would one day take her life.\n\nIt was golf ball\u2013size hail, a fusillade of machine-gun fire streaming down from the pale green sky. I've never felt so helpless, watching as she sat there, hunkered down over her eggs, protecting them until the bitter end. It went on for six and a half calamitous minutes, and when it was through she lay there, unmoving, folded lifeless over the eggs like a hooded cloak and I didn't know what to do. There was no blood. I would have expected there to be blood, and yet the internal damage was no doubt worse than that which I could see from the outside, evidence of the great lengths some mothers will go to protect their children. She could have flown away, sought shelter beneath the elm or cottonwood trees that crowded the yard, diminishing our view of the lake.\n\nBut she didn't. She stayed.\n\nThe storm passed. The clouds drifted away and the sun began to shine. A rainbow appeared in the sky. The hail melted. Rainwater evaporated. The only sign of the storm was the dead bird.\n\nAaron watched on as I schlepped the old wooden ladder to the back of the cottage and began to climb. He asked what I was doing as I shimmied up those steps in bare feet, the shaky ladder teetering on the lawn. At the top rung I saw her, splayed sideways, head lolling over the edge of the gutter. I pressed a single finger to her chest, feeling for a heartbeat and, at finding none, removed her body from the trench. Beneath her corpse, the eggs were still intact.\n\nShe died a martyr.\n\nI buried her beneath the trellis, which the snowdrift clematis had overtaken at this time of year, white flowers powdering the wood.\n\nThey say that mourning doves mate for life. As far as I could tell, her man friend never returned to grieve his loss or to check on the eggs.\n\nSometimes this is the way it is with men.\n\nApril 24, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nI can't trust myself to stay at home all day anymore.\n\nAll too often, I drive into town and park outside the dance studio, watching the little ballerinas come and go. It rains many days now, this time of year, and so they come toting umbrellas, skipping over puddles, walking faster than ever before, though always, _always_ , does little Olivia lag behind, and on the most inclement of days, when no one else wants to be outside, I am sure that she will be forgotten. It makes me sick to my stomach to do so, to watch the ballerinas in their leotards and tutus and tights, a Peeping Tom by my own right; it isn't perverse, there's nothing depraved about the thoughts that run through my mind, and yet I know in my heart of hearts that it's unhealthy, pining this way for someone else's child.\n\nAnd so, against Aaron's will, I found a job. Some useful way to spend my days other than keeping vigil of the ballet studio, watching the ballerinas come and go.\n\nWe rarely talk these days anymore, other than that time spent in limbo each month, while they wash Aaron's sperm before injecting it inside me. Then we talk. About what, I don't know. About nothing. When I ask him questions, I'm astounded by the brevity of his replies, one-or two-word responses that leave no room for dialogue. He doesn't make eye contact. He asks me nothing. We kill time in the lobby of the fertility clinic before my name is called and only then am I granted amnesty, a pardon, a reason not to have to sit in the lobby and speak to my husband.\n\nThe job is at the hospital. The position is in billing as a medical coder, one I have ample experience in after all those years working for a pediatrician in Green Bay. And so now, I spend eight hours a day reading through patient files to figure out what they're to be billed for; I enter data; I submit to insurance companies; I mail invoices to patients. It feels good to be doing something with my days, to be earning an income.\n\nAnd yet the position comes with its fair share of downsides too.\n\nYesterday as I sifted through patient files, I came across a little girl, a toddler killed in an auto-ped accident. In other words, she wandered into the street when her mother wasn't looking and was hit by a passing car on the roadway, a four-lane highway that cut right through town. The little girl (and though I, myself, never laid eyes on her, I conjured her up in my mind anyway, her tiny, broken frame still clad in a pair of denim overalls with blood-stained pigtails in her light brown hair) was transported to our hospital by ambulance, and there, received a multitude of treatments, from a CT scan to assess brain damage, to an operation to control internal bleeding and swelling in the brain. A decompressive craniectomy, as was noted in the extensive patient chart. There were blood transfusions. She was on narcotics for pain. An anesthesiologist was called to deliver a local anesthetic to put her to sleep for the surgery. The surgery itself lasted six hours, and each of these items came with an exorbitant price tag, one the family's shoddy insurance company was loath to pay. For six tortuous hours while the little girl's mother, I can only imagine, sat on a chair in the waiting room, biting her nails to the quick, a neurosurgeon, along with a team of doctors and nurses and scrub techs, removed part of the girl's brain to allow room for the swelling inside.\n\nStill, she died.\n\nBy the time the paperwork made it to me in coding and billing, it had been days since the angels carried her away. Her mother no longer stood within the hospitals' walls, sobbing for her child. Her body had been removed from the morgue, transported to the funeral home, buried in the ground.\n\nAnd yet for me, it's a fresh wound. One that will stay with me for a long time to come. As I typed the billing codes into the system, I cried for a little girl I've never met, tears snaking down my eyes and onto the computer keys, knowing that she will never truly be anything more than a name and a social security number to me, but still it makes me cry, grieving for someone I don't know, consumed with the unwanted knowledge that healthy little girls\u2014like the sick and the elderly\u2014die too.\n\nBut there are perquisites to the job too.\n\nI wear a name badge that gains me access to every nook and cranny in the whole entire hospital, including the birthing center, where I can watch newborn babies being tended to in the nursery, lying immobile in their rolling bassinets, bundled like burritos with knitted hats on their perfectly pink and misshapen heads. I didn't seek them out\u2014in fact, I swore to myself that I would abstain from visiting the newborn babies\u2014but I saw them anyway when a pair of grandparents-to-be stopped me in the hall and asked the way to labor and delivery. I had no choice but to lead them there, to steer them through the mazelike hospital halls, through the double doors and into the unit where the newborn babies caught my eye.\n\nAnd now I stand there for what feels like hours, staring through glass, coming to terms with my fait accompli. No workday passes without at least one visit to the nursery room and as I sit at my desk coding patient files, it's all I can think about, seeing those babies. Getting my fix. I've come to know the nurses now\u2014thanks to the frequency of my visits. They address me by name, sometimes holding up the newest infants so I can see their puffy, half-closed eyes, their still-bowed legs from being cramped inside a warm, cozy uterus, their cone-shaped heads from being suctioned through their mother's vaginal canal and into the world.\n\nWhen they ask, I tell them I'm training to be a nursery room nurse myself, that I'm in the process of earning my associates' degree in nursing and, that as soon as I do, I'm going to apply for a job here, in our hospital's nursery room. I tell them I come to watch and learn, to see how the experts do it. I flatter the nurses so they don't think it odd that I spend every free second away from billing and coding staring at babies who are not mine. They smile and say how fantastic that is and sometimes, if I'm really lucky, they sneak me inside so I can stroke the soft skin of a tiny babe.\n\nThough that, of course, isn't the real reason I come.\njessie\n\nIt's not yet ten in the morning when I leave the Pughs' home. The day stretches out before me like the Sahara, massive and deserted and dry. And now I'm even more agitated than I was before, all nervous energy with nothing to do. Nowhere to go. No one to talk to.\n\nI carry with me in my bag a printout of the newspaper article I found on the Pughs' laptop, grateful when Mrs. Pugh called down the hall that she was stepping out for a bit, and I was able to send it to the printer without her hearing me. Because if I knew one thing, it was that I needed to take the article with me.\n\nI hop on Old Faithful and ride. I turn aimlessly, unplanned at each intersection, my head lost in the clouds. I move in circles so that three times I pass by the very same delicatessen without meaning to. I speak to Mom. I ask her questions about my lack of a birth certificate, my missing social security card, the girl in the article. Who is she, and what does she have to do with me? Does she have anything to do with me? _Tell me, Mom_ , I scream in my head. _Tell me!_\n\nIt isn't until a woman standing on a street corner stares at me like I'm crazy that I realize I've been speaking out loud.\n\nIn time I find my way into the Loop. It isn't intentional. I don't go there on purpose. It's something far more subliminal than that, that makes my legs pedal hard, steering me to the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, where I park Old Faithful just steps from the bronze lions and walk.\n\nI don't go to the museum.\n\nRather I head to the south end of the building where, just off Michigan Avenue, I slip into this secret world of raised flower beds and a grove of hawthorn trees. I'd never have known what kind of tree they were, but Mom knew, Mom who found this spot by accident one day when I was young and we were exploring. It was fall and the trees were angular and uneven, a brassy shade of copper that peeked through the green of nearby trees as they do now.\n\n_Let's see what this place is_ , Mom had said that day, grabbing a hold of my hand and drawing me in. That first day, I didn't want to go. Rather I wanted to climb on the lions' backs and ride. But Mom had said no. The lions were to look at. They weren't for riding, though she let me pet them as we passed by.\n\nThe entrance to the garden is guarded by honey locust trees, which keep the rest of it hidden from the urban world on the other side. I slip in. I walk down a handful of steps that dip inches below street level. I move between the trees, lost in an enclave beneath an awning of leaves. Transported somewhere hundreds of miles from a city street.\n\nThere are people here. It's not as if I'm the only one who knows about this place. And yet those that are here are placid. Quiet. Drinking coffee and smoothies, reading books, staring into space. A woman picks at the edges of a muffin wrapper, offering scraps to a nearby bird.\n\nThis was one of Mom's favorite spots in the city. We'd come here and she'd spend hours sitting on the edge of the raised beds. She'd watch as I scaled them with my arms extended, imagining myself as a tightrope walker. They're large\u2014a good twenty feet by twenty feet or more\u2014so it was always quite the feat when I could get around without falling.\n\nMom let me do it for hours. She never got bored.\n\nThere was one place in the garden Mom liked more than the rest because it was secluded, set back from the street entrance, the water fountain and the pool. Even in the most secluded of places, she found the most covert place to hide.\n\nI make my way there now because I think that somehow I might feel closer to Mom if I sit there. That somehow we'll be able to commune.\n\nBut when I get there, that spot is already occupied. A man sits there, reading the newspaper. Truth be told, it makes me crabby, thinking what nerve he has to sit in Mom's favorite spot. And so I sit opposite him on another bed, twenty feet away or more, watching him, waiting for him to leave. I stare at him, thinking it'll make him uncomfortable and he'll go.\n\nBut he's not uncomfortable because he doesn't even see me staring. He's too preoccupied by the newspaper in his hands.\n\nI can't say one way or the other if he's tall or short because he's sitting. He's got his legs crossed, ankle to knee, and his clothes are all sorts of nondescript. Pants, shirt, shoes. Nothing noteworthy about them. They're clothes. The sleeves of his shirt are thrust to the elbows. There, on his left arm beneath the cuff of the shirt, is a scar. It peeks out from beneath the sleeve, a six-inch gash that's healed poorly. The skin around it is puckered and pink.\n\nHis face looks sad. That's the first thought I have. That the expression on his face\u2014that and his body language\u2014is one of sadness. The way his mouth pulls down at the corners, a slight tug there at the edges of his lips. The way his shoulders slouch. I should know because each time I look in the mirror, I see the very same thing. On his face is a patch of hair, a tight beard, trimmed and tidy. It gives off an aura of mystery and regality. His skin is tanned like the hide of a moose, stretched and dried in the sun before being smoked over a fire. Like he's spent too much time outside in the sun.\n\nHe isn't thumbing through the newspaper, but instead he's got his eyes peeled to some story on the top page, the paper folded so that he can hone in on it. Something bad has happened in the world, I think. Something bad always happens. I wonder what it is this time. Terrorist attack. Women and children being slaughtered by their own leaders. A shooting in an elementary school. Children murdered by their own moms and dads.\n\nI watch his eyes, the movement of them as he scans the story. Moving left to right. Dropping down to read the next line. But his eyes are lowered, gazing down on the newspaper and so I can't see much, none other than the lashes and the lids. He bites a lip. He bites hard so that the pain of the lip overrides whatever it is he's feeling on the inside. I do that too.\n\nHe reaches for a cup of coffee set on the marble edge of the raised bed. I read the corrugated sleeve on the cup. A coffee bar on Dearborn. I've never been there before, but I know the place. I've seen it before.\n\nAnd then he gets up to go, and I ready myself to make a move for his seat. He slips an orange baseball cap over the brown hair, though as he goes, he leaves his newspaper behind. Because he's sad. Because he's distracted.\n\nHe walks away and I notice a shoe is untied, the cuff of a pant leg stuck in the shoe's tongue. He leaves it there. For a second or two I watch him go.\n\nBut then, standing and making my way to the raised bed, I call to him, \"Sir,\" while grabbing the newspaper so that the wind doesn't have a chance to scatter it around the garden. \"Sir,\" I call again, \"your newspaper.\"\n\nBut he's walking away and before I can run to him, something leaps off the page at me. It grabs me by the throat so that I can't speak and I can't move. I'm frozen in place, a bronze statue like the lions who stand before the Art Institute, guarding its entrance.\n\nThere on the top of the newspaper is Mom's beautiful face. Her beautiful brown eyes and brown hair, both watered down by the black-and-white newsprint.\n\nHer obituary. The one I put in the paper because I needed the world to know she was dead. To solidify it. To make it real. Because only then, when it was written in print for all of the world to see, would I believe it.\n\nThis man. The sad man sitting in Mom's and my spot in the garden. He was reading her obituary.\n\nHe had the newspaper folded so that Mom's face was on top, and it was these words his eyes spanned as he bit his lip so that he wouldn't cry.\n\nMom's obituary is what made this man sad.\n\nI read over the words. Mom's death notice, which was brief because there wasn't a whole lot of information to provide. No memorial service. No one to send flowers to.\n\nThe final line reads \"Eden Sloane is survived by her daughter, Jessica.\"\n\nMy legs lose feeling. I go slack jawed. Because there's one word on the newsprint that the man has circled and it's my name. Jessica.\neden\n\nJuly 12, 2003   \nChicago\n\nThe park is named after some poet, I've come to learn. Though no one pays attention to things like that because, to most people, it's just a park where kids romp around on the playground and, on the other side of a chain-link fence, boys play basketball, the repeated _thump_ , _thump_ , _thump_ of the ball on concrete a steady refrain. They're older boys mostly, teenagers, and they spout from their mouths a flurry of curse words at regular intervals, and I feel grateful Jessie is still too young to know what any of it means, though she pauses from time to time to watch them. To just stand on the playground and stare.\n\nThere are baseball fields off in the distance, and on the other side of a bridge, a path that snakes along the river where she and I sometimes walk, but not today. Today she played on the playground, and for the first time ever, found a friend. Not the kind of friend we'd keep in touch with after today or invite over for a playdate. No, Jessie and I don't have those types of friends.\n\nRather she's the kind of friend who, for fifteen or twenty minutes at best, is a bosom body. A soul mate.\n\nI watched as Jessie and the little girl chased each other in dizzying circles, up the stairs and down the slide. Again and again and again. As far as I knew, they never exchanged names. Because that's the way it is with kids. Uncomplicated. Straightforward. Easy.\n\nThere was no one else on the playground but the two of them, and the only ones sitting on the periphery of it were the little girl's mother, pushing a newborn in an old-fashioned buggy, and me. It took some time, a few awkward glances my way, before she rose from her own park bench and came to mine, standing before me, offering a hello. I too said hello, staring down into the buggy at the infant sound asleep beneath a yellow blanket.\n\n\"How sweet,\" I said.\n\nThe baby, Piper, she told me, was twelve days old, born on the first of July. The woman moved guardedly, as if in pain, and I didn't ask before she told me, \"Piper was breech,\" telling me how her baby was fully intent on entering the world feetfirst. \"The doctors did everything they could to change that. But no such luck,\" she explained, sitting softly beside me on the park bench and describing in too much detail what a C-section is like. The incision. The surgical staples. The scar she'd no doubt have. She lifted the hem of her shirt then so that I could see it myself, and I blushed at the sight of her still-pregnant belly, at the bloated butterfly tattoo that sat just inches from the healing incision, at the canvas of fair skin. She was oversharing and I blamed the newness of childbirth for it, the fact that to her it was still fresh. The only thing these days that occupied her mind.\n\n\"With Amelia it was different,\" she admitted, and I made the easy assumption that Amelia was the older of the two, the little girl, maybe five years old, who Jessie made a train with at the top of the slide\u2014wrapping her skinny legs around the midsection of a girl she hardly knew\u2014and together they catapulted down to the wood chips below, landing on their rear ends, laughing. \"Twenty-some hours of labor, three hours of pushing,\" she said, going on far too long about the gush of water when her membranes ruptured, like the pop of a water balloon. Her, worried only that she might poop on the bed, as one of her girlfriends had done. The broken blood vessels left behind on her face from hours of pushing, thin, red veins that snaked this way and that across her skin. Some doctor she didn't know delivering her baby. Her breasts engorged, her unable to produce milk following childbirth. Having to relent to formula, which her mommy's groups abhorred.\n\nI felt uncomfortable, if I was being honest, about this sudden revelation of information from a woman I didn't know. But it dawned on me then that this is the type of thing women do, this is the type of thing mothers do: share their experiences, swap stories, foster camaraderie.\n\nShe looked at me expectantly, as if it was my turn to share. She was quiet, watching me, and when I didn't respond, she prompted, \"And your girl?\" and I knew then that I must tell her something, that I must offer up some version of the truth. I pictured those wide hospital halls, the glaring lights. \"She was a vaginal birth?\" she asked, that word alone\u2014 _vaginal_ \u2014making me turn redder than I was before. Because these were the kinds of conversations I didn't have. Intimate. Friendly.\n\nMost of my conversations ended at hello.\n\nI felt my head nod without my permission, and I knew I must say more, that a nod of the head alone wouldn't suffice.\n\nAnd so I told her about the hospital room. I told her about the huddle of people who gathered around me, the nurses clinging to either of my legs, encouraging me to push. Incanting it in my ear\u2014push, push\u2014as I gathered handfuls of bedding in my hands and bore down with all of my might. The epidural had worn off by then, or maybe it was never there to begin with. All I felt was pain, a pain so intense it was as if my insides were on fire, about to rupture. I was certain I would soon explode. A hand stroked the sweaty hair from my face, whispering words of encouragement into an ear as I screamed, this crude, ugly scream, but I didn't care how crude or ugly it was. The nurses wrenched on either of my legs, stretching me apart, making me wide. _Push_ , they said again and again, and I did, I pushed for dear life, watching as that flash of black spilled from inside of me and into the doctor's gentle hands.\n\nBut then I remembered.\n\nThat wasn't me.\njessie\n\nBefore I can tear my eyes from Mom's face on the newspaper's obituaries page, from my own circled name, the man has slipped from the garden and disappeared from sight. I attempt to run after him, barreling through the rows of hawthorn trees as quickly as my legs can carry me. But still, when I come rushing out onto Michigan Avenue, chest heaving, breathing hard, he's gone. The sidewalk is inundated with people, with kids, a middle school field trip to the Art Institute, and they're all lined up in two parallel rows before the museum's concrete steps. Clogging the sidewalk. I push past bubbly preteens who are incognizant of my desperation, who don't care. By the time I reach the other side, there's no sign of the man anywhere. The man with the sad eyes and the untied shoe.\n\nI stare up and down the street, completely aghast. A muscle in my eyelid twitches, a spasm. Something involuntary, something I can't make go away though I try. It's extremely annoying. The street is a wide six-lane divided street jam-packed with people and cars, a median strip in the center that's plugged with flowers and trees, making it even harder to see the other side. But still I walk, searching the streets for the man.\n\nI hurry down Michigan with a heavy, desperate tread. The wind is a wall by now, and I lean into it to walk. It's exhausting. All the while, my eyelid twitches. I turn left at Randolph, a temporary reprieve from the militant headwind, which now comes at me from the side so that I slope laterally, a perfect seventy-five-degree angle. At Clark, I turn right, not quite knowing where I'm going, but trying desperately to find the man. I climb northward, gazing into storefronts to see if he's there. I stare down alleyways, out of breath by the time I come to a six-story building on Superior Street, one that's flanked with floor-to-ceiling windows and looks oddly familiar to me.\n\nI spin in a circle, taking it in, the doorman in uniform, the sign outside that reads Spacious, Open-plan Lofts for Sale. Inquire Inside. __ I know where I am. I've been here before.\n\nJust like that, I'm standing at Liam's front door.\n\nI didn't know I was coming here. I didn't come here on purpose. But here I am, and now that I'm here, I make an attempt to scoot past the doorman and into the building. Because maybe Liam can help me think this through. The little girl in the car accident, the man in the garden. He'll make me see that there's nothing sordid going on. That it's only a coincidence.\n\nThe doorman stands on the curb, hailing a cab for a resident. \"Can I help you, miss?\" he asks, catching sight of me out of the corner of his eye, as he steers the resident into the back seat of the cab and closes the door for her.\n\nHe steps closer to me. \"I'm here to see Liam,\" I say.\n\nHis smile is mocking. Wary. \"Liam who?\" he asks, playing dumb, and I freeze, realizing only then that I don't have a last name. That to me he's just Liam. That until yesterday he wasn't even that, because before yesterday he didn't have a name. He was only the guy from the hospital, the one with the blue eyes.\n\nBut I also realize that the doorman knows fully well what Liam's last name is. He isn't curious. He's testing me, checking to see how well I know Liam before he lets me in.\n\n\"I don't know his last name,\" I admit, feeling uncomfortable as my feet shift in place. At first he's hesitant, not sure he wants to phone Liam or not. For all he knows, I'm someone Liam is avoiding, someone he doesn't want to see. And that's his job, to keep unwanted visitors at bay, unwanted visitors like me.\n\nHe sizes me up and down. He asks twice what my name is. Both times I say Jessie, though for the first time I start to doubt that it is. I feel disheveled, disoriented, and though I have no idea what I look like, I can see it in the doorman's eyes. It's not good. I run my hands through my hair; I rub at my twitching eyes.\n\n\"Is Liam expecting you?\" he asks, and I'm not quick enough on my feet to lie. I tell him no.\n\n\"Can you call him for me, please?\" I plead, the desperation in my voice palpable to both him and me.\n\nThe doorman reluctantly phones Liam for me, but Liam doesn't answer his call. \"He's not home,\" he tells me, setting the phone down. I feel the skeptic in me start to take hold. He's lying. He didn't call him. He only pretended he did, but he didn't. I think that maybe the number he dialed wasn't Liam at all, or maybe he didn't push enough digits for the call to go through. Or he hung up before Liam had a chance to answer.\n\nI'm about to get angry, but then I remember. The funeral. Liam's brother's funeral is today. He's at the funeral. He's not home.\n\nI excuse myself, walking from the building, feeling muddled. There's a convenient mart next door to the apartment building. I slip inside and buy a Coke, hoping the caffeine will make me feel less mixed-up. Or, at minimum, curtail the throbbing in my head from the day's lack of caffeine.\n\nBack outside, I drop down onto the curb to catch my breath. I need to think things through, but my mind can focus on only one thing. What if Jessica Sloane with my social security number did die when she was three? She wasn't erroneously classified as dead because she was really dead. Then I've been living with a mistaken social security number all this time, with a mistaken identity.\n\nIs it possible that the other Jessica Sloane and I have social security numbers so close they're off by only a single digit, or have two numbers that are interchanged? Maybe she died and someone unwittingly typed my social security number into the death database. The names matched, so they didn't think twice. An oversight only.\n\nDoubtful.\n\nAnd then my mind gravitates to the man in the garden. Who is he, and what was he doing there? What does he want with me?\n\n\"Jessie?\" I hear, and when I look up from the street, I see Liam making his way toward me. All dressed up in a black suit and tie. Looking undeniably sleek but also tired like me.\n\nI rise from the curb and bridge the gap, and, as we close in on one another, his face darkens. \"Your shirt,\" he says as he points to it, to my shirt, and tells me that I've got it on inside out. Which wouldn't be so obvious were it not for the label sitting smack-dab beneath my chin, a blaring thing. I pluck it from my skin for a better look.\n\nNot only do I have my shirt on inside out, but it's backward. And now that Liam has pointed it out for me, I feel the high neckline, the cotton taut in places it isn't meant to be taut. In that moment I have no memory of ever grabbing the shirt from the closet, slipping it from its hanger, of ever putting it on.\n\nIt's a blessing that I'm even dressed.\n\n\"Come inside,\" he says, his eyes hanging on a little longer than they ordinarily would. \"You can fix it there.\"\n\nBut I say, \"No,\" shooing him off, feeling suddenly asinine. \"It's just a stupid shirt anyway; it's not like anyone noticed.\" And then I sigh, feeling completely exasperated. Exasperated and exhausted. He hears it in my voice.\n\n\"Jessie,\" he says, his voice far more resolute this time. \"Come inside. Keep me company.\"\n\nWe step inside the building and wait for the elevator to come. \"Did you sleep last night?\" he asks. I don't say yes or no, but my silence gives it away. In my head, I tally the days up. I lose track at number four and have to start again, counting on my fingers this time, reaching seven.\n\nIt's been seven days since I've slept.\n\n\"I looked it up,\" Liam tells me as the elevator comes for us. Though it doesn't align with the lobby floor\u2014a fact that I realize all too late\u2014and so I trip on the way in, stumbling over that one-inch rise. Liam latches on to my arm, steadying me. He doesn't let go. Not until I draw my arm away, stepping closer to the wall so that I can use it for leverage if need be.\n\n\"Looked what up?\" I ask as the elevator sweeps us up to the sixth floor. I feel suddenly rocky on my feet. Nauseous.\n\n\"The longest a person has ever gone without sleep,\" Liam says.\n\nHe tells me how people die from lack of sleep. About lab rats who died from lack of sleep. \"How long?\" I ask.\n\n\"Eleven days,\" he says. \"Eleven, Jessie,\" he repeats to drive the point home, I think. \"You need to sleep.\"\n\n\"I will,\" I say, but chances are good that I won't.\n\nI ask how the funeral went because I don't want to talk about my lack of sleep or the fact that in four more days I'm liable to die because of it. The funeral, he says, went as well as to be expected for a funeral. His shoulders shrug and his expression is flat. He doesn't say more.\n\nThe elevator arrives at the sixth floor. He leads us to his apartment, walking a half step ahead of me. At the door, I stop a few feet back, waiting as he opens it. Inside, the space is big and roomy with ceilings that are extraordinarily high, track lighting, exposed brick. Sunlight pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. \"You coming?\" he asks.\n\nI walk past him and into the apartment as behind me he closes the door.\n\nHe offers me something to drink. I say no because I have my Coke, which I uncap and take a swig of. But as I raise the bottle up to my lips, there's that tremor to my hand again, the one I can't make stop.\n\nLiam tugs the tie from his neck and slips the suit jacket off. Throws it over the arm of a chair. Unbuttons his shirt. Rolls the cuffs of it to his elbows. Finds himself a water in the refrigerator and sinks into a low-slung chair. He never asks what I'm doing here.\n\nI give the article to Liam, my hand still shaking as I do. I sit on a chair opposite him. I don't bother fixing my shirt.\n\n\"What's this?\" he asks, but it's one of those questions that isn't really a question because already he's reading the story of Jessica Sloane, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver at the age of three. When he comes to the end of it he tells me what I already know. He says that this is strange.\n\nI assert, \"I mean, it's just a coincidence, right? A mistake?\"\n\nHis face is impassive. He doesn't say an emphatic _yes_ as I'd hoped he would; he doesn't put my mind at ease. This time, there are too many holes that don't line up.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he admits, saying, \"It's just that it's strange, Jessie. I mean, yesterday it was a coincidence. Yesterday it was a mistake. Yesterday someone screwed up. But now it's like it isn't so much an accident as it is someone intentionally trying to keep you off the radar. You have no birth certificate, you can't find your social security card and the social security number you think is yours matches up with that of a dead girl. One who might just have the same name as you.\"\n\nThe expression on his face says it all. Something sordid is going on here. Something bad.\n\n\"It's just hard to believe that she's not you,\" he says while motioning to the photograph in the article, but when I look at the child's face, I see nothing but a stranger looking back at me. I've never seen this girl before.\n\n\"But it's not me,\" I argue, voice trembling. \"She doesn't look a thing like me. Look at the shape of her eyes, her nose. It's all different,\" I allege, rising to my feet. \"It's all wrong.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean that,\" he says, his voice gentle. \"That's not what I meant, Jessie. I just mean,\" he says. \"I just mean that I think it's possible there's something going on here, some sort of identity theft.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, identity theft?\" I ask, except I know what he means. What he's suggesting is not that my identity has been stolen, but that I've stolen the identity of someone else\u2014unpremeditated on my part, but still identity theft.\n\n\"Jessie,\" he starts, but I shake my head and he stops.\n\nAt first there's nothing but silence. I drop back down into my chair. I think it through. \"You think my mother changed my name, gave me a phony identity and passed me off as a dead girl?\" I ask, the words themselves unthinkable. Not something that could possibly be real. For a second I feel like I might vomit. The Coke gathers in my stomach, burning the lining of it. There's hardly any food inside me, which, when coupled with everything else, doesn't sit well. The pain starts somewhere around my navel and creeps up my chest. An agonizing lump that plunks itself behind the breastbone.\n\n\"But no,\" I say decisively, rising to my feet again and beginning to pace. Why would Mom do that? Why in the world would Mom steal the identity of a girl who had died and give it to me? \"Why?\" I ask out loud, though the answer slowly dawns on me, that if Mom went around passing me off as a dead girl, then no one would know she had stolen another child's identity. Because that child was dead.\n\nI watch as Liam grabs for a laptop on the coffee table and types quick, harried words into it. He moves from his chair and comes to me and together we stare at the words on the screen. There's a whole word for it, he tells me. \"Ghosting. Thieves open bank accounts and credit cards using a dead person's social security number,\" he says. \"They pore over obituaries to see who's died, and then rack up thousands of dollars of debt in some stiff's name.\"\n\n\"But why?\" I ask dumbly, though I'm not that dumb. I just can't wrap my head around it. People do this kind of thing for financial gain, but Mom and I were never rich. We weren't living a life of riches. We lived paycheck to paycheck.\n\nBesides, Mom would never do anything to harm someone; she would never steal.\n\nThere has to be more to it than that.\n\nIf\u2014and that's a big _if_ \u2014she took the identity of a dead child and gave it to me, then it was for some other reason than financial gain. But what? I can't even begin to guess.\n\nI swallow the last of my Coke. It's like rubbing salt in an open wound. The pain in my chest gets worse so that I cough and, as I do, all I can think of is corroded pipes, the lining of my esophagus plugged up and rusty.\n\nI let an idea dwell for a short time, and then quickly expunge it from my mind.\n\n_Find yourself_ , Mom told me. One of two wishes she had for me before she died.\n\nMaybe she didn't mean for me to apply to college. Maybe it was far less esoteric than that. Maybe it was quite literal.\n\n_Find yourself_ , she said, because Jessie Sloane isn't you.\neden\n\nMay 28, _1997  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nAs spring ripens into summer, tourists reappear. The town comes to life with a certain vivacity that was missing during the dismal days of winter. Trees burgeon, flowers bloom.\n\nMiranda and her three boys appear like magic at my front door each day that I'm not working\u2014and often, I'd venture to guess, when I am\u2014toting blueberry loaves and apple pies.\n\nAs the boys play in the tree swing (that by now was meant to hold my own child, the two of us nestled snugly together, he or she on the seat of my lap, weightless and grinning as we lift off from the ground and take flight), Miranda and I sip lemonade. As always she sells short the joys of marriage and motherhood, while little Carter crawls on the lawn before us on all fours, eating dirt. She complains about everything from what a jerk her husband, Joe, can be\u2014coming home late from work, missing dinner, not helping with the boys' bedtime routine\u2014to the monotony of her days, to the amount of food three growing boys consume. She can never keep the cabinets fully stocked, she tells me, because the minute she buys it they eat it all, which leads into an onslaught on the difficulties of grocery shopping with three boys, and she describes it for me: the poking and the prodding of each other, the name-calling\u2014birdbrain, imbecile, idiot\u2014the running off headlong down the market's aisles, bumping into strangers, begging and crying for things that Miranda has already said no to, trying to sneak it past her and into the basket, screaming and calling her names when she snatches it out of their dirty hands and returns it to the store shelf.\n\n\"That must be so difficult,\" I say, trying my hardest to sound empathetic, but when Miranda replies with \"You have no idea, Eden. Can you even grasp how lucky you are, getting to grocery shop alone?\" it's all I can do not to scream.\n\nI would give life and limb to grocery shop with a child.\n\nMiranda doesn't bother asking how the fertility treatments are going, though just last night Aaron and I made the decision to give in vitro fertilization a try. Or rather, I should say, _I_ made the decision to give in vitro a try. The cost of it is extortionate, thousands of dollars for a single cycle, for Dr. Landry to go inside one time and pluck an egg or two from my ovaries to combine with Aaron's sperm, making an embryo, a _baby_ , in a culture dish. As one grows bacteria. It seems scientific, synthetic, and yet there isn't anything I wouldn't do for a child.\n\nI know this now.\n\nBut Aaron isn't so sure. As we stood in the kitchen last night, both of us speaking in acerbic tones, he calculated the costs we've paid over the year, all the pelvic ultrasounds and semen analyses, the Clomid cycles, the trigger shots, intrauterine insemination. The grand total tallied up to some ten thousand dollars already spent trying to create a child, an expenditure that will nearly double with one single cycle of IVF. Aaron and I don't have this kind of money. He reminds me of this relentlessly, as he reminds me how happy we used to be before we ever made the decision to start a family, and I have this vague recollection of a couple, a man and a woman\u2014as if in another life\u2014sitting on a dock, holding hands, watching sailboats float by on a bay.\n\n\"I think we should stop, Eden,\" he said, trying hard to reach out to me but I pulled away. \"I think we should be happy with what we have.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\" __ I asked, up in arms. What did we possibly have without a baby?\n\n\"Us,\" he said, looking sad. \"You and me. That's what we have.\"\n\nI wouldn't be deterred.\n\n\"We will do this,\" I told him of the in vitro fertilization. Hands on hips, my expression flat. An imperial fiat.\n\nI left the room so it couldn't be further discussed.\n\nI've taken out three credit cards in my own name, and charge each appointment with Dr. Landry to them in sequence. Never are we able to pay more than the minimum payment for each. The interest fees soar monthly as the cottage degenerates bit by bit. The furnace went out; we need to replace the plumbing throughout the entire home before the decades-old steel pipes wear out for good. The windows are drafty; they too need to be replaced before another winter comes or we'll spend an arm and a leg to heat the home, watching our money quite literally go out the window.\n\nBut each of these plays second fiddle to making a baby.\n\nAaron and I argue daily about money. The cost of groceries, the cost of clothes.\n\nWhat concessions can we make so that we can save more for a baby?\n\nDo we really need two cars, cable TV, a new pair of shoes?\n\n\"This is ridiculous,\" Aaron says as he holds up a shoe, the outsole flapping loose like a hangnail. \"I can't go to work like this.\" And yet I argue with him, claiming he's being extravagant by not making do with the shoe. \"Surely you can get another month out of those shoes,\" __ I say, suggesting he use some glue, though it isn't about the shoe, but rather what the hundred dollars for another pair of shoes will buy. An appointment with Dr. Landry, a hormone shot, a month's worth of Clomid.\n\nBut Aaron swears he needs the shoe, which inside makes me fume.\n\nHow selfish can he be? Where are his priorities?\n\nAt each unwelcome visit, when Miranda and her boys appear at my door without invitation, her belly continues to swell, another baby on the way, \"Hopefully a girl this time,\" __ she says, fingers laced together in the air.\n\nIf Aaron and I hurry up, she reminds me for the umpteenth time, joining me in the backyard for another glass of lemonade, her baby and my baby can one day go to school together. They can be friends.\n\nI smile.\n\nAnd though I don't say it aloud, I think to myself that I'd rather die than have my baby and Miranda's baby be friends.\n\nJune 13, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nThe hollyhocks are in bloom. Just the sight of them lined up defiantly against the weathered picket fence stabs me in the chest. They stand high above the rest of the flowers in the garden, six feet tall or more. Their bold bell-shaped flowers burn red against the greenery.\n\nIt's been a year then since Aaron and I planted the seedlings in the lawn against the fence where they'd be sheltered from the rain and the wind. And now here they are, exhibitionists in my flower bed, outshining the roses and lilies.\n\nReminding me of all the wasted time Aaron and I have spent trying to have a baby.\n\nWhen Aaron was at work, I took a pair of scissors to them, cutting hard through the thick stem. I seethed as I did it, crying, taking out a year's worth of rage on the flowers. I screamed like a maniac, grateful that, thanks to the deep rim of trees surrounding our yard, no one was around to see or hear my outburst. I grabbed handfuls of stems and tugged with all my might, wresting the roots from the ground where I stomped on them like a child. I tore the flowers from their stems, shredding them into a million pieces until my hands were yellow with pollen and I was out of breath from the outburst.\n\nWhen I was finished, I threw them away, beneath the garbage where all the negative pregnancy tests go.\n\nThe deer, I'll blame, when Aaron asks what happened to the flowers. I'll say that the deer have had their way with the hollyhocks, eating them to the quick.\n\nAnd he'll be more upset about this than he is our lack of a baby.\n\nAfter all our hard work.\n\n\"Such a shame,\" he'll say, before waging a war against the innocent deer.\njessie\n\nI take the Brown Line back to the carriage home, walking the last couple of blocks from the station at Paulina. I feel lost without my bike. I don't have my bike, Old Faithful, because I left it outside the Art Institute, tethered to some sort of loopy bike rack, when I walked to Liam's, chasing after the mystery man.\n\nIt's dark inside by the time I arrive, night falling quickly. I close the door behind me and jiggle the handle a couple of times to be sure it's closed tight. I'm in a trance, thinking about little else but the dead Jessica Sloane. The one who is three years old. The one who is me but not me all at the same time. Lines from the newspaper article run through my mind, committed to memory already.\n\n_A four-lane highway with a speed limit of just twenty-five._\n\n_The road twisted through the small seaside town._\n\n_The driver rounded a bend at nearly twice that speed._\n\nEvery time I close my eyes I see her face.\n\nI have only a vague recollection of riding the elevator downstairs; of pushing my way through the turnstile doors of Liam's apartment building; of walking to the Merchandise Mart to catch the train with him at my side. He'd offered to cover the cost of a cab for me but I said no.\n\nStill, he walked me there, to the Merchandise Mart, and paid to stand on the platform beside me, waiting until the Brown Line came. And now that I look, I see his jacket draped over me, keeping me warm. He must've put it there, but that I don't remember.\n\nI turn and walk up the carriage house's stairway, a rickety old thing with steps that are a bit concave, the edges worn away. The steps sink at their center. They squeak. The tread pitches downward from a century's worth of weight, and I cling to the railing so I don't fall.\n\nWhen I get to the top I have to fight for breath. The steepness of the steps isn't to blame, nor for once my overwhelming fatigue.\n\nWhat knocks the wind from my lungs is something else entirely.\n\nBecause as my feet hit the wooden floorboards and my eyes size up the open rooms, I see that the white window curtains I'd pulled shut before I left, so that no one could see inside while I was gone\u2014every single one of them is open wide.\n\nIt's instinctive, the way the blood coagulates inside me. It becomes thick and gooey so that I can't move.\n\nSomeone was here.\n\nMy gut feeling is to hide. There's a closet nearby, a catchall for coats and shoes. My eyes go to it. I could hide. I could bury myself in a dark nothingness and cower on the floor in fear. Because whoever opened the blinds might still be here. Inside the old home.\n\nI listen for strange noises. For calculated footfalls coming for me. For the sound of restrained breaths, slow, repressed and controlled unlike mine. I listen for the groan of floorboards, but the only sound I hear is that of my own heartbeat.\n\nI don't hide.\n\nI've never been a particularly courageous person. Mom always said to face my fears, to take matters into my own hands, to fight for what was mine. And so I make my way slowly through the home, searching for signs of life.\n\nMuch of the carriage house is easy to see from where I stand. But then there are those places I can't see. An upstairs closet, the bathroom, under the eaves of the pitched roof where shadows make it hard to see. All of that is up another set of stairs, on the third floor of the home.\n\nI ascend those steps on tiptoes, the arches of my feet beginning to burn. Convinced that if I walk on tiptoes, the intruder won't hear me, that he or she won't know that I am here.\n\nUpstairs, I see a figure hunkered down beneath the sloped ceiling and my breath leaves me. It's hidden to the side of the mattress, trying to hold still and yet moving in a gentle rhythm.\n\nWhat I see is a man on bent knee, crouched down, waiting to lunge at me as I reach the top of the staircase.\n\nI gasp aloud, attempting to brace for impact. But instead I lose balance, slipping backward on the top step and sliding downward the eight-or nine-inch rise to the step below. I catch myself there, gripping tightly to the stairwell banister before I plunge down an entire flight of stairs, head over heels over head. Breaking my neck.\n\nMy heart pounds hard.\n\nI cling to the banister and realize that no one has lunged at me.\n\nAnd this time, when I look again, there's no one there.\n\nIt's just the shadow of a tree streaming in through an open window. The leaves are hair, the branches arms and legs. The gentle rhythm, the movement of wind. No one is there.\n\nI turn to make my way to the bathroom. It's a small room, but as I come to it, I take note: the door isn't pressed flush against the wall as it should be. Behind the open door, there is enough space for a body to hide.\n\nI have to muster every ounce of courage I have to go on. It isn't easy. My feet don't want to move, but they do. It's slow, deliberate.\n\nWhen I reach the bathroom door, I don't step inside. I don't look behind the door.\n\nRather my movements are sudden and abrupt, an impulse. I kick the door as hard as I can, where it ricochets off the wall, the rubber stopper running headfirst into the baseboard, not bumping into a person first. Because there's nobody there to slow it down. There's nobody there at all.\n\nAs I make my way inside the bathroom, I find the shower curtain pulled tight, stretched from wall to wall. It billows slightly. Heat spews from a nearby vent, though that's not the reason for the movement. Instead what I envision is a figure standing on the other side of the curtain, the breath from his or her lungs making the curtain move.\n\nSomeone is there, hiding behind the shower curtain.\n\nI tread delicately. On tiptoes. Two steps, and then three.\n\nI reach out a hand, aware that the blood throughout my entire body has stopped flowing. That I'm holding my breath. That my heart has ceased beating.\n\nI feel the cotton of the shower curtain in my shaking hand, the plastic of its liner. I grab a fistful of it and pull hard, finding myself face-to-face with the white tiles of the shower wall.\n\nThere's no one there. It's only me.\n\nThe carriage home is empty. Whoever was here has gone for now.\n\nI do only one thing then, and that's check the fire safe box where I keep my money, to be sure someone hasn't swiped every last penny from me. Because why else would someone break into the carriage home except to steal from me? I keep the box in the closet these days, hidden in the corner beneath the hem of a long winter coat where, God willing, no one will ever find it. I open the closet door, drop to my knees and gather the box in my hands. The box is locked. When I slip the key inside, I find every dollar accounted for. Whoever was here didn't steal money from me.\n\nI try not to let my imagination get the best of me, but to force logic to prevail. I tell myself that I never closed the shades in the first place. That I only thought about doing it, but never did. I think long and hard, trying to remember the smooth, woven feel of the white roller shade in my hand as I drew it southward and let go, watching it hold.\n\nDid that happen, or did I only imagine it did?\n\nOr maybe whatever springlike mechanism that makes the shades open failed to keep them closed. The ratchet and pin that hold them in place didn't work. Simple human error or mechanical failure.\n\nOr maybe someone _was_ there, lifting the roller shades one by one so that when I returned, they could see me. I tell myself no. That the front door was locked. And that, as far as I know, only one person but me has a key. My landlord.\n\nI step from the closet and make my way to a nearby window where I stare out and toward Ms. Geissler's home. The room turns warm all of a sudden. Beneath my arms, I sweat.\n\nThere's no one there, no one that I can see.\n\nAnd yet, as it was last night, there's a light on in the third-story window of the greystone home. The window shades are lowered, but not pulled all the way down. They don't lie flush against the window sill. There's a gap. Albeit a small one, only a couple of inches at best.\n\nBut still, a gap.\n\nAnd as I stare at that gap for half the night, sometime around midnight I see a shadow pass by. Just a shadow, but nothing more.\neden\n\nJuly 2, _1997  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nBe still my beating heart, it worked! We're going to have a baby!\n\nOne single cycle of IVF and, as I sat on the toilet today after Aaron had gone off to work, the all-familiar pregnancy test cradled between my fingers, I spied not one single line this time, but two. Two! Two pink lines running parallel on the display screen.\n\nMy heart hammered quickly inside my chest. It was all I could do not to scream.\n\nAnd still I had my doubts\u2014after months of seeing only one line, it was easy to convince myself that I was imagining the second one there, that I had quite simply fashioned it in my mind. The one line was bright pink like bubble gum, the same dependable line that greeted me each month, bringing stinging tears to my eyes.\n\nBut the other, this new line, was a light pink, the lightest of light, the mere suggestion of pink, a whisper that something might be there.\n\nI pray that it's not a deception of my mind.\n\nI went to the market wearing mismatching shoes. I drove above the speed limit with the window open, though outside it poured down rain. I ran into the store without an umbrella, saturating my hair. If anyone noticed my shoes, they didn't point it out.\n\nI purchased three additional pregnancy tests of assorted brands in case one had a tendency toward being inaccurate. I took them home and urinated on them all, every last one of them, and in the end, there were six lines.\n\nThree additional pregnancy tests.\n\nSix pink lines.\n\nAaron and I are going to have a baby.\n\nJuly 5, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nFor days we've been living in a constant state of euphoria.\n\nI walk around the home, floating on air. I dream up baby names for boys and girls. I go to the hardware store and get samples of paint for the nursery room walls.\n\nAt home alone, I find myself dancing. Spinning in graceful circles around the living room floors. In all my life, I've never danced before. But I can't help myself. I can't stop my feet from swaying, my arms wrapped around myself, holding on to the life within. Dancing with my unborn child. I find an old record and set it on the turntable. I carefully place the needle on it, and move in tune to the music as Gladys Knight sings a song for me.\n\nThe day I discovered the positive pregnancy tests, I phoned Aaron at work to deliver the news. He was euphoric in a way I'd rarely seen him before. He left work at once and came home earlier than ever before, pulling his car in to the drive minutes before eight o'clock.\n\nHe brought me ice cream in bed; he fed it to me with a bent-out-of-shape spoon. He lay in bed beside me and rubbed my back. He massaged my feet. He stroked my hair. He told me how amazing I was, how gorgeous, and how already I had that beautiful pregnancy glow.\n\nHe stared at me then, just stared, and inside my heart began to cantor, a kaleidoscope of butterflies flitting inside me. I knew what would come next and it was then that my body began to want him, to need him like it hadn't for so long before. I soughed at his touch, my skin breaking out in gooseflesh as he ran a hand across my arm, lacing his fingers through mine. As he stared, he said again that if our baby girl looked anything like me, that she would be the prettiest thing around. And then he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and I knew that in that moment, I was the most beautiful girl in the world to him.\n\n_Our baby girl._\n\nHe held me tightly and kissed me like he hadn't in months, slowly and deeply at first, growing ravenous, a starved man who hadn't been fed in years, and it was then that I realized I too was empty and famished.\n\nMy breath quickened as he slid a steady hand up the skirt of my nightgown.\n\n\"You think it's okay?\" I gasped as Aaron withdrew my underpants and set them aside, though there was nothing more that I wanted in that moment than a fresh start for Aaron and me and our baby, to be able to erase all the animosity in a single moment, with a single deed.\n\n\"You think it's safe?\" I begged, and Aaron assured me that everything was okay, and, as we moved together there on the bed, I believed him. For the first time in a long time, I believed him.\n\nJuly 14, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nAn ultrasound with Dr. Landry confirmed the pregnancy, though there was no need for Dr. Landry's attestation because I, for one, already knew that it was true, that the manifold of pregnancy tests didn't lie. The battle with morning sickness had begun already, a misnomer if I'd ever heard one for it was morning, noon and night sickness. Not once did I complain, but rather welcomed the nausea and the fatigue as a gift.\n\nDr. Landry told Aaron and me that our tiny embryo is currently measuring one-half of a centimeter from crown to rump. As I lay on the examination table, feet in stirrups, for once not put off by the wand inside me, the complete invasion of privacy that I've come to accept as par for the course, Dr. Landry pointed out the gestational sac and the yolk sac, but I couldn't take my eyes off that pint-size nub that would one day be a baby.\n\nAaron held my hand the entire time. He stroked my hair. He kissed my lips when the image appeared, dark and grainy and impossible to see were it not for Dr. Landry's informative voice and thin finger telling us what was the gestational sac and what was the yolk sac, and where our baby was growing, and then, once I found it, the embryo\u2014a half centimeter long with paddle-like arms and legs and webbing between its toes and fingers, none of which I could see for myself though Dr. Landry told us were there\u2014the one thing in the world I loved more than anything else, I couldn't divert my eyes.\n\nThere was a heartbeat. We couldn't hear it yet, but we could _see_ it. It was there, the movements of it on the ultrasound screen. Our baby had a heart and a heartbeat, and blood that coursed through his or her tiny body. Its heart had chambers\u2014four of them Dr. Landry said!\u2014and beat like a racehorse, a heartbeat that easily trumped mine, though it too was going at a steady gallop.\n\nI'm six weeks along. And we have a due date now.\n\nBy May, Aaron and I will finally have a baby. We'll be parents!\n\nHow will I possibly be able to wait that long to hold my baby in my arms?\n\nJuly 16, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nI told my stepmother about the baby today. I didn't mean to; it just happened. We were on the phone when she asked\u2014as she had so many times in the past\u2014\"How much longer are we going to have to wait for you and Aaron to have a baby?\" __ and it wasn't so much that I told her, because I didn't, but it was the lack of a response that gave it away, the silence, because I was too busy beaming behind the handset, trying to no avail to manufacture a lie.\n\nIf Nora could have seen me, she would have noticed the way my skin turned pink; she, like Aaron, would have seen the way I glowed. She would have seen me run a delicate hand across the cotton of my blouse\u2014a link to the life inside\u2014and triumphantly smile.\n\nShe said nothing at first, nothing in response to my nothing.\n\n\"When were you thinking you'd tell us?\" she asked then with the slightest hint of malice\u2014Nora, of course, needs to be the first to know everything\u2014followed immediately by \"Does Aaron's mother already know?\" and there was jealousy and skepticism in her voice long before she offered her congratulations and said how happy she is for Aaron and me.\n\nI called Aaron's mother next before Nora had a chance to call for herself, boasting that she knew a whole thirty seconds before Aaron's mother did.\n\nIt was like a wildfire then, that instant burst of pregnancy news that caught quickly, spreading through the family from phone call to phone call like a raging inferno. By the end of the day, nearly everyone would know our news.\n\nMiranda arrived as Aaron's mother and I were saying goodbye, and catching a glimpse of my hand still situated on the cotton of my blouse, she said to me, \"It's about goddamn time, Eden.\"\n\nAnd then she hugged me, a quick, careless hug, sending her boys into the backyard to play alone so she could lie on my sofa and rest. Little Carter didn't want to go; he, himself, was still a baby, and so she picked him up and plopped him in Jack's arms and said again to _go_ and we stood there, watching them walk away, listening as Carter cried _._ She was massive again, still months away from giving birth to baby number four, and the evidence of it was everywhere: in her tired eyes, her unwashed hair, her inflated legs.\n\nPregnancy did not suit Miranda well.\n\nHer maternity shirts no longer fit correctly, leaving a fraction of her stomach exposed, ashy skin drawn tightly around her baby, a black, vertical line etched on her body from belly button down. Miranda herself didn't have a pregnancy glow, but rather was covered in blotchy brown spots all over her skin; the hormones were not working in her favor.\n\n\"Just wait until you're as fat as me,\" she said, seeing the way I watched her drop onto the sofa, a giraffe making an ungainly attempt to sit.\n\n\"Well I have news too,\" she said then, as if she couldn't stand me being happy, as if she couldn't take a back seat to my glad tidings for once. \"We're going to have a girl!\" she screeched, clapping her own hands, going on to say how\u2014though Joe didn't know it yet\u2014she'd had a peek at her medical file when the obstetrician was out of the room during her last appointment, and there, in the margins of the paperwork, saw the Venus symbol written with black ink.\n\n\"Finally,\" she said, frowning out the window at her three boys, fifty-pound Jack lugging twenty-pound Carter around, Carter who still cried. \"After everything I've been through,\" she said, and I wanted to be happy for her, I really did.\n\nBut I couldn't bring myself to be.\n\nShe didn't deserve another baby any more than a murderer deserves clemency.\n\nI was grateful when, an hour later, Paul wet himself and they had to leave.\n\nAaron had wanted to keep the news of our pregnancy a secret for a while longer, but I couldn't help myself. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, to let everyone in the whole entire universe know that I was going to be a mother. \"Why wait?\" __ I asked later that afternoon as he prepared for work. I frowned at him, feeling punctured that he would want to keep our baby a secret. We'd spent a year trying to achieve this, watched our lives and our marriage flounder to make a baby, drained our savings and accrued mass amounts of debt on our credit cards.\n\nAnd yet I couldn't be happier. I couldn't be more thrilled.\n\nThis was the one thing that I wanted more than anything. More than _anything_.\n\nI wanted everyone to know about it.\n\n\"Just in case,\" Aaron replied when I asked why we should keep our baby a secret, why we should wait to share the news.\n\n\"In case what?\" I asked, provoking him, but he wouldn't say the words out loud. He was being cautiously optimistic, I knew, but what I wanted was for him to be jubilant like me. He stood before me in the kitchen, slipping his feet into a pair of new shoes, waterproof, slip-proof black loafers that cost us an arm and a leg. But none of that mattered now, not trivial things like the cost of groceries, the cost of shoes.\n\nWe were going to have a baby.\n\nHe stood and came to me, wrapping his arms around the small of my back, and I breathed him in, the scent of his aftershave and soap because Aaron, of course, didn't wear cologne. His hands were rough from years of hard work, the scrubbing of dishes, the scalding sauces that bubbled over onto his hands, burning them. The many near misses with a utility knife. The gashes and lacerations, healed now but always there. Aaron's hands were rough and worn, but also the softest things in the world to me as they slipped under the hemline of my blouse and stroked my bare skin.\n\nHe wouldn't say the words out loud, but he didn't have to.\n\nI knew exactly what he was thinking.\n\n\"We saw our baby,\" I told him, whispering the words into his ear. \"We saw the heartbeat. Everything is fine.\"\njessie\n\nI'm out the door early, hurrying to the side of the carriage home to collect my bike, but when I arrive, I see that she's gone. That she's not there. That the spot where I left her last night is completely empty.\n\nThere's a moment of panic.\n\nSomeone has stolen Old Faithful from me.\n\nMy heart picks up speed, my face warming with frustration and anger and fear. I look up and down the alleyway as my heart sinks. For a minute, tears well in my eyes. I could cry.\n\nBut then I remember leaving Old Faithful tethered to the bike rack outside the Art Institute. No one has taken her from me. I left her there.\n\nI take the Brown Line out to Albany Park, getting off at Kimball. From there it's a walk to Mom's and my old home, a classic Chicago-style bungalow that's boxy and brick with a low-pitched roof on a street where every single home is a replica of the next. The desperation has gotten under my skin now, a do-or-die need to find my birth certificate, to find my social security card, to figure out who the hell I am. I need to make a final sweep of the home to see if there's anything there, anything I may have missed. Because the estate sale will kick off soon, and then it will be too late. Everything that was once mine will be gone.\n\nI've only been gone a couple of days. But as I make my way down the sidewalk, I feel homesick. I miss Mom more than ever. I miss my home. The sight of the for-sale sign plunged into the green grass makes my stomach churn, my Realtor's pretty face smeared across the corner of it. I'd picked her, this Realtor, because I saw her face and name on a similar sign somewhere down the street. There was a number to call and so I called it. And like that, the house is on the market and soon, any evidence of my time with Mom will be gone.\n\nThe house looks different than it did before. The only thing still here are the ghosts we've left behind. Aside from our house, the rest of the block looks annoyingly the same, as if no one noticed that I'd left or that Mom died, which most likely they didn't. The only person I see outside is our neighbor Mr. Henderson from next door. There he stands on his own front porch, thinning hair standing vertical, a cigar in hand. Smoke billowing around his head. Mr. Henderson wears corduroy pants, slippers, a fisherman cardigan. Though as far as I know, he doesn't fish. Instead he teaches English lit at a local college and is pretentious as all get-out. Mr. Henderson couldn't be bothered to help after Mom's cancer spread to the bones, leaving her far more susceptible to fracture. She fell one morning when I was at school, shattering a hip, lying there on her back, calling out an open window for help.\n\nHe heard her cries as he sat there in his own front room, sucking away on his cigar. No doubt he heard her cries, though later, as the ambulance carried her away and he stood watching from his porch steps\u2014merely a snoop and not a Samaritan\u2014he claimed he did not.\n\nI pay extra attention to the sidewalk as I walk along, taking care not to step on the cracks. Not that it matters because Mom wouldn't feel it anyway if my footfalls broke her back. _Step on a crack, break your mother's back._\n\nI cross the street, refusing to say hello to Mr. Henderson, refusing to meet his curious eye. I dig into my bag for the keys, climbing up the stairs and to the front door.\n\nThis neighborhood has been around for near forever. Most of the homes are circa 1920-something, during some sort of housing boom when thousands of bungalows sprung up overnight, fulfilling dreams of homeownership for that exploding middle class. Because the homes were practical and affordable. And because there were a ton of them. Up and down the street, all I see is nothing but trees and brick, trees and brick. Trees and brick as far as the eye can see. I have no doubt Mom chose Albany Park to live because it's relatively affordable, a good place to raise kids. Money was a luxury Mom and I didn't have. Not that I can say I grew up poor, because I didn't. But Mom was frugal and we weren't rich.\n\nWe planned a big dinner out for when the cancer was finally in remission for the second time around. Gibsons Steakhouse. Mom was going to buy a new dress to wear because she never spent money on herself. Any time there was a little extra to spare, she spent it on me.\n\nNeedless to say, Gibsons Steakhouse never happened.\n\nThe day Mom found out the cancer was back, she was sitting outside on the front stoop when I got home from school. She'd been to the doctor for back pain, the kind that no amount of ibuprofen could fix. Pain she hadn't told me about until that afternoon. She thought it was a herniated disc, back strain, sciatica. Effects of the job.\n\nAs it turned out, it was the breast cancer, back for vengeance. Metastasized to the bones, the lungs.\n\nShe told me to sit. She held my hand, caressed each finger one at a time while I committed to memory the length and shape of her fingers, the asymmetry of the knucklebones, the blue rivers of veins that swept across the thinning skin.\n\nShe said to me that day on the stoop, _Jessie, I'm dying. I'm going to die._\n\nI cried. But she said it was all right. She wasn't afraid to die. She was stoic. _When?_ I asked, like some stupid child. Like Mom had any way of knowing exactly when it would happen.\n\nWhat she said was _Sooner or later we all die, Jessie_. _It's only a matter of time. And this is mine_.\n\nI unlock the door and step inside. I'm inundated with the smell almost immediately. The smell of Mom. Her hand lotion, Crabtree & Evelyn's Summer Hill. It nearly knocks me from my feet. It's diffused through the rooms and if I didn't know any better, I'd think that Mom was still here with me. Heart still ticking, not yet dead. I hear that death rattle, the saliva pooling there in the back of her throat. The nurses' gentle footfalls, close enough to touch. As if they're still there, still walking in orbits around me. Lathering lotion on Mom's hands and feet, turning her every few hours to keep bedsores from forming on her skin.\n\nThe smell of the lotion is overpowering. It binds to the millions of tiny little hairs in my nose, bringing me to my knees every time I breathe. _Mom_.\n\nAnd I find that I'm looking for her, half-certain that when I turn she'll be standing there in the arched doorway of the kitchen, sagging body leaning against the doorway because she doesn't have the energy to hold it upright anymore, a soft cotton hat covering her bald head. Asking how I got along at school today in that way that she does, teeth gritted through the pain that managed to breeze in and past the narcotics sometimes.\n\n_How'd you get along at school today, Jessie?_\n\nBut it's not real, I remind myself.\n\nThe nurses are not here.\n\nMom is dead.\n\nAnd only then am I aware of the silence. Of the earsplitting silence that now worms its way through the cracks of our home.\n\nI don't know where to begin. I searched the entire home already, but I look anyway, starting in my bedroom, planning to work my way down in search of the social security card. I pluck desk and dresser drawers from their tracks. I dig beneath clothes I've intentionally left in the dresser drawers, those I no longer need. I lift rugs from the floor and check beneath. I canvass my closet. No luck.\n\nI make my way to Mom's bedroom, where I see that the liquidator has begun to tag items for sale. Mom's clothes now hang from a rolling rack beside her bed. I run my hands over a knit cardigan, her favorite. If I'd had my wits about me at the time, I would have had Mom cremated in the cardigan so she could spend all of eternity in it. But instead she wore a hospital gown, white and wrinkled with snowflakes, a single tie on the otherwise open back. The funeral home gathered her body from the hospital within hours after she died. But there was a mandatory waiting period before the cremation could begin. Twenty-four hours, in case I changed my mind.\n\nI spent those twenty-four hours parked outside the funeral home's doors, sitting on the curb because they didn't have a bench. And because I couldn't bring myself to go home without Mom.\n\nThe liquidator will take some 40 percent of all sales, which is fine by me. Anything so that I don't have to be involved in the process, so that I don't have to watch our possessions walk out the door in the arms of someone new.\n\nI pull open the closet door to reveal a large walk-in. It's empty now, all of Mom's clothes moved to the rack beside the bed. Only hooks and a mirror remain\u2014a silver-framed oval mirror that Mom and I used to make silly faces in front of when I was a girl. I'd stand on a chair so that I could see inside, and there we'd stare at our reflections side by side in the glass.\n\nThe mirror hangs on the closet wall, an oversight only, for it won't be long before the liquidator pulls that too from the wall and sticks a price tag on it, snatching memories right along with it, memories of my crossed eyeballs, Mom's fish face.\n\nI run a hand along the glass, remembering how sometimes we didn't make silly faces at all. How sometimes I'd just sit on the floor beside her feet and watch as Mom stared at herself, her dark hair and eyes so unlike the dishwater-blond hair that sat on my head, the tufts of eyebrow hair that stuck straight up, same as they do now. Unlike me, Mom didn't have dimples. My dimples are much more than simple holes in the cheeks, but more like deep comma-shaped gorges. I didn't get those from Mom. There isn't one feature on my face that came from her.\n\nEven as a kid, I saw the way Mom looked when she stared at her reflection in the mirror. She looked sad. I wondered what she saw. For some reason I don't think it was the same pretty face that I saw.\n\nI'm about to leave when I spot something out of the corner of my eye, something I've never noticed in Mom's closet before. Something that would have otherwise been hidden behind the hems of clothes, except that now there are no clothes to taint the view.\n\nI have to look twice to be sure that it's there, that I'm not only imagining it's there. What it is is black, metal, covered in louvers. A door. A boxy little door that hovers less than a foot above the hardwood floors.\n\nI drop to my hands and knees and pull on the door's knob, finding a crawl space on the other side. A _crawl space_. I never knew we had a crawl space before.\n\nThe space is dark and dingy, the ceiling low. The floor is dirt, covered only by a thick sheet of plastic. I can't believe I never found this place before. How many times did I dig my way through Mom's closet for clues as to who my father could be? But as it so happened, I never dug far enough. Instead I gave up when I got to the clothes, taking for granted that there was nothing on the other side but a wall.\n\nOnly one time did Mom bring my father up all on her own, without my begging. I was twelve years old. Mom had had a glass of wine before bed. She said to me that night, seconds before she fell asleep, head draped over the rock-hard sofa arm, _A long time ago, I did something I'm not proud of, Jessie. Something that shames me. And that's how I got you._\n\nThe next thing I heard was the sound of her half-drunk snore, but by morning I couldn't bring myself to ask what she'd meant by it.\n\nI reach inside the crawl space and drag something out. What it is, I don't know. Not until I get it into the closet's light do I see that it's a plastic storage bin, and the adrenaline kicks in at the prospect of what I might find inside. My social security card, for one, but more likely, something having to do with my father, which suddenly, in this moment, takes precedence. Something Mom kept tucked away so that I wouldn't find it.\n\nI tear the lid off, finding photo albums inside. I find myself feeling hopeful, wondering what I'll find in them. Photos of Mom, photos of my father, photos of Mom and her own mom and dad.\n\nBut of course not. Instead it's me. All me.\n\nI set the album aside to take back to the carriage home with me.\n\nI crawl toward the crawl space, feeling blindly inside for another box. I can't reach far enough in to grab it, and so I have to crawl in through the door. Inside, the space is only about thirty-six-inches tall. I'm not fully in before claustrophobia settles in. The dirty floors and wooden beams close in around me. The darkness is smothering. The only light comes from behind. I find another storage bin and drag it out backward, through the access panel and onto the closet floor, grateful for a little elbow room.\n\nI open the lid and have a look, hoping that this is the mother lode I've been in search of. The answer to all the questions I have. But it's not. It's nothing, just a bunch of inconsequential items in a plastic storage bin, which makes me realize this isn't a secret crawl space at all, but just a _crawl space_. For storage. For stuff Mom had no other place to put.\n\nShe didn't intentionally keep this a secret from me. I just never knew it was here.\n\nI sigh, feeling uncomfortable and glum. I rise to my feet, stretching my hands above my head, arching my back. But my movements are quick and careless. The blood flees my brain as I stand up, leaving me light-headed and dizzy. All of these nights without sleep are taking their toll on me. I reach for the wall to steady myself, crashing into the mirror as I do. I watch on helplessly as the mirror loses its hold on the wall and I can't catch it in time. I'm too slow to stop it from falling.\n\nIt slips from its nail and slams to the ground, scratching the wall as it does, leaving a four-foot scrape in the paint. The entire mirror shatters before my eyes. Broken glass spreads like spiderwebs, chunks falling to the hardwood floors. And all I can think about is bad luck. Seven entire years of bad luck that await me now.\n\nI curse out loud, wondering if there's any hope of salvaging the mirror. I start to gather the biggest chunks in my hand, careful that I don't step on the tiny shards of glass.\n\nMy eyes are so caught up in what's happening on the floor that at first I don't see the small compartment dug into the wall. A little recess carved there into the drywall, hidden behind where the mirror should go. A hole that's been fitted with a sturdy box.\n\nAnd I think for a moment that my eyes deceive me. That I'm only imagining the compartment is there. Because why in the world would there be a secret storage compartment on Mom's closet wall? I rub at my eyes, certain it will disappear as I do. But sure enough, it's still here.\n\nFor at least twenty seconds I stare at that box without moving.\n\nMom had a stash of personal stuff she kept hidden from me.\n\nI think of all the times Mom and I looked together in the mirror when I was a girl. All I ever saw was a mirror\u2014our own silly expressions looking back at us through the glass\u2014but for Mom it was a portal to her private world, a gateway to the things she didn't want me to see.\n\nIt feels an enormous invasion of privacy for me to snoop but I can't help myself. I reach my hand inside Mom's secret box. There's only one item there. It's a scrap of glossy white paper pressed into the corner of the box. My chest clenches. I hold my breath.\n\nThis could be something.\n\nOr, like the plastic storage bins hidden in the crawl space, this could be nothing.\n\nI have to use a fingernail to emancipate the scrap. When I do, I turn it over in my hands to see. It's a photograph that some part of my memory reminds me I've seen before.\n\nBut with the memory of the photograph comes the memory of Mom's face. Openmouthed and afraid. She knew I'd seen it. But what happened next has been wiped clean from my brain's hard drive. Either that or entombed beneath a gazillion other memories, harder than others to dig up.\n\nMom hid this photograph from me.\n\nIt's the kind of photograph that looks a little dated, a little old. Not crazy old, like archaic. But older than me. The colors are faded, the blues a little less blue, and the greens a little less green than they used to be. It's a picture of a lake. A long seashore of blue. Tan sand, darker where the water hits it. White ripples of waves. Evergreen trees line the edges of the lake. There is a pier suspended over the water, one that looks unsound, unsafe. Like at any moment it could sink into the lake and get carried away with the waves. If I squint my eyes up tight, there's a boat out there on the water. A sailboat, just a simple sloop with a single white mast. That's what I see.\n\nMom knew a whole lot about sailboats, which she relayed to me when we used to walk past DuSable Harbor on occasion, hand in hand. _See that one over there, Jessie?_ she'd ask, slipping her hand away long enough to point at it. I'd pretend to look. Pretend to look because I didn't really care, her words falling on deaf ears. _That's a cutter_ , __ or, _that's a catamaran_ , she'd tell me. She had a book on them, a heavy coffee-table book called _Sailing_. Though as far as I knew, Mom had never once stepped foot on a sailboat in her entire life. At least not since I've been alive. I forget sometimes that Mom had a life that preceded mine.\n\nBut the lake and the sailboat are only an afterthought to the image I see, because there's also a man in the photograph, one with brown hair and a large stature. He's tall and husky with thick wrists exposed by a flannel shirt that's rolled up to the elbows. There's a watch on a right wrist, a hat in his hand. He stands with his back to the camera, blurred at the edges because he wasn't standing still when the shutter button was pressed. He's not centered on the photo paper, as if he was moving away when the picture was snapped.\n\nThe photograph wasn't meant to be of him.\n\nThe central object is the sailboat. The picture is of the boat. And the man only got in the way. By today's terms, a photobomb.\n\nThe man stands with his hands on his hips, left knee bent a bit. His head is pitched to the right. He has blue jeans on\u2014saggy ones, not formfitting. The ends are fraying, turning white. One of his gym shoes is untied. Strands of hair move in the wind.\n\nI wish that he would turn and look at me, so that I could see his eyes, the shape of his nose. Whether we look anything alike.\n\nIs this man my father?\n\nWhy did Mom hide this photo from me?\n\nWhy did she not want me to know anything about this lake or this boat or this man?\n\nI think of all those times I sat cross-legged on the closet floor beside her feet, watching as she stared sullenly at her own reflection in the mirror. What I thought was that she didn't like what she saw. A modest, unpretentious face, a bit earthy with dark hair and dark eyes.\n\nAnd then, years later when the cancer settled in, that same face became cadaverous. She lost more weight than she had to spare, face thinning, cheekbones hollowed out\u2014an image she despised. That's what I thought she was looking at when she stared in the mirror.\n\nBut now I think that maybe she wasn't looking at herself as much as she was looking through the glass, reflecting on the life she left behind, the one she kept hidden from me behind that mirror.\neden\n\nJuly 21, _1997  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nWhat Aaron told the emergency room physician was that there was blood, \"Some blood,\" he said, \"spotting,\" which to me equated to a teaspoon or two, enough to dirty a single pad, but the amount of blood I saw was measured in liters and gallons.\n\nIt came gushing out of me, a deluge of blood pouring down from the sky, rivers and streams overflowing their banks, dousing the earth, sweeping homes from their foundations. Everywhere I looked there was blood.\n\nThe day was hot and I wore shorts, and the blood, it saturated my underpants first before snaking down the inside of my bare leg, a thin, red zigzag emblazoned against my fair white skin.\n\n\"I have my period,\" I told Aaron as we were there in the backyard\u2014he staring openmouthed at me, on his knees, installing chicken wire around the flower bed so the deer couldn't poach from us again, making off with our beautiful hollyhock blooms.\n\nIn retrospect there were warning signs, maybe: the suggestion of a cramp, some lower back pain, tokens of pregnancy as well as menstruation and miscarriage. The fact that the nausea had abated during the last twenty-four hours was, to me, a welcome blessing and not once a sign of catastrophe.\n\n\"You're pregnant,\" Aaron said lightly, rising to his feet and coming to me, but I couldn't process his words, couldn't make sense of what was happening. It was my period again, come to me like it does every month without fail. There was dirt on his forehead, and his hands were red, etched with the impression of chicken wire. \"You don't have your period, Eden,\" he said, dropping the wire cutters to the ground and taking my hands into his.\n\nHe wiped the blood from my leg with his own sweaty T-shirt.\n\nIn the car I sat on a kitchen towel.\n\nWe didn't speak on the way to the emergency room.\n\nHe told the attending physician that there was _some blood_ , that I was _spotting_.\n\nAn ultrasound was performed. This time, there was no heartbeat.\n\nThe baby's heartbeat had disappeared.\n\nBoth Aaron's and the doctor's eyes wandered to mine, though I wouldn't meet theirs, too busy staring at the black gestational sac on the monitor, at the stillness of the screen, the lack of movement. The absence of sound.\n\nAaron reached out a hand to mine but I couldn't feel it. I only saw that it was there.\n\nI was insensible. I was stone-cold.\n\n\"What now?\" Aaron asked the physician who'd been sent down from obstetrics to perform the ultrasound, a woman who would soon return to labor and delivery to deliver someone else's healthy newborn.\n\n\"We'll perform a dilation and curettage,\" she said, \"to eliminate any remaining tissue from the womb.\"\n\nTissue. As if only a few hours ago that tissue hadn't been a child.\n\nIn that moment, I couldn't speak. I couldn't even bring myself to cry.\n\nThey put me to sleep for the procedure.\n\nI prayed I'd never wake up again.\njessie\n\nI leave Albany Park, taking the train into the Loop, where I make my way to the Art Institute to collect my bike. From there, I pedal to the coffee bar on Dearborn, the one where the man at the garden had purchased his coffee, the name I'd read on the paper sleeve of his coffee cup. People are religious about their coffee and their routines, and so it seems logical enough to think that if he was here yesterday, he'll come again today. I need to find him. I need to ask him why he was in the garden\u2014 _Mom's and my_ special garden\u2014sitting there, reading her obituary. I need to hear why Mom's obituary made him sad. How does he know Mom?\n\nI bring the photograph of the man with me. I carry it in the front pocket of my bag.\n\nThe man who I think might be my father.\n\nAt random stoplights I slip my hand into the pocket of my bag and pull it out. I try to spot some nicety I haven't yet seen, some minor detail in the image I've managed to overlook, like the swollen clouds or the gangly-looking bird that perches on a rock at the water's edge.\n\nThe sleeves of the man's flannel shirt are shoved to his elbows in the picture. A raised red line bridges a lower arm. Scar tissue, I think, or maybe just an anomaly in the photograph, a streak of light or a reflection. I wonder what any of it means. If it means anything. If the clouds or the birds or the scar can provide details about the man or the land on which he stands.\n\nWhere was this picture taken?\n\nAnd more importantly, who is he?\n\nI search in vain for the smoking gun to tell me who he is. How I know him. What this man has to do with me. I wonder if the answer is there, staring me in the face, and I simply can't see it.\n\nAnd then the light turns green and I carefully shove the picture back into my bag and pedal on toward the coffee shop.\n\nWhen I arrive, I press in through the door, past people who are coming out. The coffee bar is eclectic, cluttered with mismatching tables and chairs. There are stacks of magazines and books.\n\nBetween the grinding and gurgling of the espresso machine, the roar of people talking, the coffee shop is loud. I order a coffee and carry it to the kiosk to douse it with sugar. A blue velvet sofa lines a wall, and I help myself to it, sinking into the wilted center, watching as caffeine-deprived customers come and go. The line grows long enough that the last person stands in the doorway because he doesn't clear the doorframe. Instead he props it open with his body, letting the fall air in. Napkins blow from a table and litter the floor.\n\nAs I sit there waiting for the man from the garden to magically appear, I pull the photograph from my pocket one more time, taking in the man's stature, the color of his hair. Imagining his eyes. In the image, they're looking out toward the sailboat, away from the camera lens, and so I can't see them. I can't see what they look like, but I can imagine.\n\nThey're blue like mine, and he has dimples too.\n\nI sip from my coffee, place the photograph back in my bag.\n\nMy mind drifts and I find myself thinking about the other Jessica Sloane. The one who is not me. And I know with a sudden translucence that I am not Jessica Sloane, but that I'm somebody else. That Jessica Sloane died when she was three and for whatever reason, Mom stole her social security number and gave it to me. This is no longer a hypothetical. I know.\n\nBut there are ways of finding out who you are, aside from a birth certificate, social security number or name. Because if I'm not Jessica Sloane, then I need to know who I really am. I think of forensic identification, stuff like fingerprints, DNA, handwriting analysis, dentistry. Ways to prove one's identity aside from birth certificates and social security numbers. Everyone in the whole wide world is supposedly unique, like the stripes of a zebra or the spots of a giraffe. Snowflakes. It's near mathematically and scientifically impossible that any two could be the same. Even the creases of our feet are distinct, which is one of the reasons babies' footprints are taken after birth. For identification purposes. Because no two footprints are alike. So hospitals know which baby is which if ever they get separated from their moms or dads. In case the ID bands slip from their ankles or wrists. I stare at my fingerprints, thinking the answer to who I am is sitting there, in all those miniscule lines that make me unique, a single snowflake, one in twenty trillion falling in a snowstorm, drifting aimlessly and alone.\n\nI don't know who I am, but I'm not Jessica Sloane.\n\nIt's hours later when I catch a smidge of orange pass by the storefront window, and I know right away: it's him. It's the orange baseball cap that he wore, slipping it over his hair before he left the garden. He's here, come and gone for coffee and somehow, in a daze, I all but missed him.\n\nI rise too quickly from the blue velvet sofa, spilling a lukewarm coffee, my third of the day, down the front of me, staining my shirt a translucent brown. I don't bother blotting it with napkins before I go scurrying for the door, knocking into a stanchion post along the way. I knock it over with a clang, leaving it on the floor as people stare. \"What's the hurry?\" I hear breathed through the air. \"What's her problem?\" followed by a giggle, a snort.\n\nI press my way out onto the city street, following the pinprick of orange in the distance, a beacon of light as it slaloms this way and that down the street. I run, pushing my way past people walking too slowly, trying desperately to bridge the gap from him to me.\n\nAs I narrow in on him, I reach out and tug on something, my hand bearing down hard. A little boy cries out, and, as they turn to me, I see. A little boy in a superhero costume. The Flash. He's perched on his father's shoulders, making him tall. The costume is red and yellow with a mask that covers his face. It's the type of mask that covers everything, leaving only slits for the mouth, nose and eyes. Like the costume, it's also red and yellow. Not orange, though my mind mutated them for me, mixing the red and yellow, turning them into orange.\n\nOnce again, my eyes have deceived me.\n\nHe isn't the man from the garden after all.\neden\n\nJune 17, 2005   \nChicago\n\nIt's been a couple of hours since it happened, and still I can't get my heart rhythm to slow. I feel off, a dull headache in the back of my neck that simply won't quit, my handwriting like chicken scratch from the shaking hands. Jessie is quiet now, tucked into bed with her lights turned off. I'd read her a story before bed, hoping it might help her forget. Hoping it might replace the photograph she saw with the fun of leading imaginary beasts on a wild rumpus around her bedroom. She was laughing by the time she went to bed, and I can only pray that she dreams tonight of Emile and Bernard, and not of Aaron.\n\nI, however, will dream only of Aaron.\n\nI think I covered my tracks quite well, but I won't ever know. There's no telling what goes on inside a little girl's mind, which details of our lives are committed to memory and which we forget.\n\nFor the first time tonight, past and present collided, and it made me realize one thing: that I have to be more wary of where I hide my things. Jessie is older now and more inquisitive. She's liable to have questions for me that I can't answer because I don't want to answer them. I have to be more careful if I'm going to keep my past from her.\n\nIt's not that I don't love her. It's that I do.\n\nWe'd just finished up dinner when it happened. I was in the kitchen, wiping down the countertops, and she'd disappeared down the hall to, presumably, go play. She was in her room, or so I thought at the time, quiet as a church mouse. That should have been my warning, because for as fiery and high-spirited as she is, Jessie is rarely quiet.\n\nI don't know how much time passed\u2014ten minutes, an hour while I was stupidly relishing in the quiet and didn't once think to check on her\u2014when she appeared there in the doorway to the kitchen with an item in her hand, asking of me, \"Who's this?\"\n\nHer eyes, when I turned to her, were doe-eyed, her hair falling into her forehead like it hadn't seen a brush in weeks. There were dust bunnies clinging to the fabric of her pants and I knew right away that she'd been somewhere she shouldn't have been, on her hands and knees, digging through things.\n\n\"Where'd you find this?\" I asked, taking it from her hand. I heard my voice crack as I said it, and though I couldn't see it, I was certain my face was masked in fear. My voice wasn't angry. It was scared.\n\nJessie had found it under my bed, of course, where she'd been snooping. The photograph had been stashed inside an envelope, inside a box, and under the bed, the kind of thing one didn't just happen to stumble upon. She went searching for it. Or rather she went searching for something and she found it, because up until a few minutes before, she didn't know this photograph existed, the photograph I'd snatched all those years ago in the yard of our cottage, a photograph of our glorious view\u2014the lake with a sailboat out at sea\u2014meant to be only of the lake and the sailboat, though Aaron stepped into the frame just as I took the picture. He'd apologized and later, after the pictures were developed, we'd laughed over it. Aaron thought he'd ruined my photograph, but what he'd done was the opposite of that. He'd made it perfect. He'd made it complete.\n\nUp until a few minutes ago, Jessie didn't know Aaron existed because those Who's my father? questions have only just begun to surface, and so far I've been able to quell them all with the suggestion of milk and cookies or ice cream.\n\n\"Who is it, Mommy?\" she asked again when I didn't respond.\n\n\"Just an old friend,\" I said, trying to settle my jittery voice as I opened a kitchen drawer\u2014the closest thing to me\u2014and slid it inside. I'd find a better hiding spot later after she'd gone to sleep. I could feel my cheeks inflame, my hands start to shake.\n\n\"Are you mad at me?\" Jessie asked then, eyes swelling with tears, mistaking what I was feeling for anger when what it was was sadness and regret and shame.\n\n\"No, baby,\" I said, dropping down to my knees and drawing her into me. \"Mommy could never be mad at you,\" I told her, and then I smiled as widely as I could and grabbed a hold of her hand. \"How about some ice cream before we get ready for bed?\" I proposed, and of course there was no hesitation, no wavering. Jessie screamed an easy yes! while jumping up and down, and so we carried bowls of chocolate ice cream onto the front porch to eat, watching as the sun made its final descent beneath the horizon. I helped her with a bath and we read about the wild rumpus. I tucked her into bed. She asked me to lie with her as she always does these days, and so I curled under the covers beside her, and she pressed her body into mine, a lean arm flung across my chest, pinning me down.\n\nThis was everything I ever wanted and more.\n\nI lay there until her breaths became flat and slow, and then I returned to my own room. There I sat on the bed, clutching the photograph of Aaron in my hand, still trying to catch my breath. This photograph had been hidden beneath the bed for years. I've known it was there, of course, but couldn't bear the idea of looking at it, not until it was forced quite literally into my hand. It was the only keepsake I kept of him, just the one single photograph\u2014not our wedding photographs, not my engagement ring\u2014because in it, he's looking away. He's not looking at me, and so I can't see that love and adoration in his eye.\n\nI can't see the anger.\n\nI stare at the photograph, wondering what Aaron must look like now. Is he graying slowly like me, or is his hair still a chestnut brown? Is he fuller around the middle, or maybe he's more slim? And then I start to wonder if he's eating okay, if he's sleeping okay, if some other woman now spends her nights beside him in bed. My mind gets stuck there, a skipping record. I can't unsee this image, imaginary as it may be, of a woman lying beside Aaron, peacefully asleep\u2014her head tucked into the crook of his arm, his hand on the small of her back\u2014where I used to be.\n\nI won't let myself dwell on the past.\n\nI move quickly, having to get rid of the evidence before Jessie wakes up and goes snooping again. I put the photograph where she'll never find it, and then, when it's done, I tiptoe back into Jessie's room and stand there at the edge of the bed, forcing the past to some locked chamber in my mind, the same spot where that woman's voice is buried, the high-pitched squeal as she chased me down on the street.\n\nGet your hands off my child.\n\nI slip back under the covers beside Jessie so that when she awakes in the morning, she'll never know I was gone. A simple sleight of hand.\njessie\n\nThat night, I climb into bed with my clothes still on. I don't bother changing them. I just want to get into bed, to be in bed. The bed used to be my safe place. But after all these nights not sleeping\u2014eight of them, eight days and nights without sleeping now\u2014the bed is my torture chamber too.\n\nI read once about a man who died because he couldn't sleep. Fatal familial insomnia, it was called. Within twelve months from the time symptoms appeared, he was dead.\n\nI think this is what's happening to me.\n\nIt started with a single bad night of sleep. For whatever reason, his mind wouldn't shut off. Wouldn't let him rest. One night turned into two, and before long he'd gone weeks without a decent night of sleep. _Relaxed wakefulness_ is what it was called, though it was anything but relaxed. He never made it past stage 1 of non-REM sleep, the stage between wakefulness and sleep. He never dreamed. It was a light sleep at best when he was lucky, lasting less than ten minutes at a time, the kind of sleep interrupted by a hypnic jerk, by an overwhelming sense of falling.\n\nI have it worse, I think. Because a light sleep, to me, would be a dream come true.\n\nHe walked the earth in a stupor, asleep but awake. Awake but asleep. He spent his days in a hallucination of sorts, not sure if he was alive or dead. He heard buzzing noises all the time. People calling out his name though no one was there. A voice whispering odd decrees on repeat. _Just do it already. Just jump._ A hand touching his arm and he'd whirl around, agitated and afraid, to find himself alone. The panic attacks were infinite. His brain was on overdrive all the time. There was no way to hit the switch and shut it down.\n\nAs a result, his brain's tasks were all out of whack. His muscles twitched. His heart raced. His blood pressure soared. Coordination was lost. He could no longer function properly. It went on like this until he died.\n\nThe most gruesome part? Though the body goes to pot, the mind does not. Thought processes remain relatively intact. They're clued in completely to their own demise.\n\nThe ill sweat profusely.\n\nThey stop eating, speaking.\n\nThey shrivel to nothing but a glassy-eyed stare, eyes shrunken to mere pinpricks, like mine. And then they die. Because, after those long, agonizing nights lying in bed, failing to truly sleep, fatal familial insomnia is nothing but a death sentence for them. The grim reaper coming to steal their life.\n\nI'm waiting for my time.\n\nI sit up in bed. I don't delude myself into lying down because I know I won't sleep. And so I sit, engulfed in blackness, legs pulled up to my chest. The blanket is kicked to the end of the bed because, though it's cold in the carriage home, I've begun to sweat. The sweat, it gathers under my arms and in my hairline. My palms are damp with it. The soles of my feet. The skin between my fingers and toes.\n\nMy heart beats rapidly.\n\nMy head spins.\n\nI stare into blackness, seeing things that I hope are not there. I go through the motions. The typical night, thinking the morbid thoughts, followed by the grieving ones where I miss Mom so much it hurts. It's a pain in my sternum this time, like heartburn or indigestion. Except that it's grief.\n\nAnd then when I'm done grieving, the self-loathing comes, where I despise myself for all of that which I _would've_ , _could've_ , _should've_ done differently. Said I love you while she could still hear me. Hugged her longer and with more frequency. Run a hand over the dark chocolate fuzz that had started to regrow on her scalp after her last round of chemo was through.\n\nI bullet point them all in my mind. All the things I should've done.\n\nThe silence and the blackness of the room become suddenly suffocating and I feel like I can't breathe. I'm drowning in silence. Being asphyxiated by it.\n\nI turn to my knees and peel the shade back, gazing outside. The world tonight is dark, a carbon gray. Not quite black, but close enough. Little by little, my eyes adapt to it, and though it's dark outside, I can see. Not perfectly, but I can see something. A halo of light from a streetlamp, a half a block away. Orion the hunter, brightening the sky. His shield is aimed at me as he hovers, light-years above the greystone, club hoisted above his head with a dog at his feet. For whatever reason, the light makes me feel less alone and less scared.\n\nAnd then, as the moonlight slips out from behind a cloud, it settles on the greystone. As my eyes adjust to it, the house begins to slowly take shape. My eyes rise up from ground level, grazing over the kitchen's sliding glass door, an enclosed porch, up the home's rear facade, and there they make out an amorphous shape standing in the open window of the third floor. The very same window, which, for the last two nights, radiated light.\n\nExcept that tonight it's dark. There is no light, but rather a pair of eyes.\n\nThe bile in my stomach begins to rise. I feel like I could be sick. I press a hand to my mouth to silence my own scream.\n\nThe moonlight reflects off the eyes, making them glint in the darkness of night. They're undeniable. They're _there_. I'm not just making them up.\n\nBut beyond the eyes I see little else. Just a formless, shadowy shape to let me know that someone is standing in the window, watching me.\n\nI let the shade go and it falls closed.\n\nI grab Mom and her urn from a bedside table and slip to the floor, thinking that I don't want to be here in this carriage home, that I want to leave. That I'd rather be anywhere else in the world but here. But also realizing that I have nowhere to go. I press Mom to me and hold her tight because with her in my arms, I feel less alone. I scoot to a wall and press my back to it, heart beating hard. I try to defuse my fears, to make myself feel better, by telling myself that it's only Ms. Geissler. That it's only Ms. Geissler watching me.\n\nAnd yet it doesn't make me feel better. Because Ms. Geissler is a stranger to me. We've hardly met. I don't know a single thing about her, other than she lied about the squirrels inside her home, but for what reason, I don't know.\n\nMy heart pounds. My hands are moist. They sweat and again I'm sure that I am dying. That the perspiration is a symptom of fatal familial insomnia, which has stolen my sleep from me and is now coming to take my life.\n\nI want to get out of here. I want to leave. And yet I paid nearly everything I have to be here. I can't get out of here, I can't leave. I have nowhere to go.\n\nI pull my knees into my chest. I drop my head to them and close my eyes. I pray to sleep, over and over I say it. _Please just let me sleep. Please just let me sleep. Please just let me sleep._ I beg for morning to come, for the sun to rise higher and higher in the sky, chasing the nighttime away.\n\nFor eight days now it's gone like this. Eight nights.\n\nHow many more days and nights can I go on without sleep?\n\nAnd then I hear something. Just a murmur, faint at first like the sound of a piano playing from some other room. A gentle melody. But, of course, that can't be because there's no piano in the next room, and no one here to play it but me. And I'm not playing a piano.\n\nMy ears stand at attention. My head tips. I listen, and though I want to stay, firmly anchored to the wall where I can see through the darkness to know what's coming for me, I lift my body from the floor, carrying Mom's ashes with me. It's unintentional when I press a single palm down on the ground to hoist myself up. The other clutches tightly to Mom, pressing her to my chest like a newborn baby. I stand to an almost-upright position, bent at the shoulders so I don't hit my head on the low ceiling. And still I do hit my head, crashing into a low-lying wooden beam, so hard that when I press my fingers to it I feel the undeniably sticky texture of blood.\n\nI tiptoe down the steps, one tread at a time, so slowly that it's almost as if I'm not moving at all. As I descend, voices surface. Not just one, but two or three or four. One lead and a host of background singers to accompany the piano. It makes me gasp for breath. My legs become weak, incapacitated; they start to give as I clutch the stair railing for support, squeezing so tightly the muscles of my hands cramp.\n\nI can't go on. I don't want to go on. But I do because I have to. Because there's nothing there, because there's some reasonable explanation for the sound. A car stereo playing outside the carriage home, maybe, the tune getting carried in through an open window.\n\nBut I won't know what it is unless I go see.\n\nI force myself to creep down the steps. I edge across the floorboards, willing myself forward, creeping, one step at a time. Following the sound, which comes from a wall and not the window at all because the window is closed tight.\n\nThe song isn't coming from the stereo of a car parked somewhere outside.\n\nIt's coming from inside the carriage home.\n\nI go after the sound, and it leads me to an old vintage pie safe pressed flush against a wall, a petite bookshelf with a couple of shelves and a door. It's one of the few pieces of furniture that came with the carriage home.\n\nI grab a hold of the knob and pull the door open swiftly, dropping to my knees. As I gaze inside, I find that it's empty, which makes no sense because the song is in there. It's coming from the pie safe. I feel blindly with my hands, moving them up and down the edges of the shelves, feeling for something, though what I don't know.\n\nAnd then a thought comes to me.\n\nWhat if the sound isn't coming from the pie safe? What if it's coming from somewhere behind?\n\nI don't think twice. I shove the pie safe out of the way. It isn't heavy, but it isn't light either. I press a shoulder into it. It takes some jostling as it skids across the floor.\n\nAnd there, on the wall behind where the pie safe was placed, I discover a cast-iron air return grille. One of those wall-mounted vents that leads into the duct system. It's an air return, one that sucks stale air from the room and cycles it back through the home's ductwork, leading, I have to assume, to the floor register upstairs where I heard the undeniable ping the other night. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing.\n\nExcept that nothing is getting sucked up in here. Instead it's getting forced out.\n\nAnd it's not air at all, but music. Gladys Knight & the Pips, \"Midnight Train to Georgia.\"\n\nHow can this be?\n\nI press my whole body against the grille to listen to the song. Mom's favorite. One she used to play over and over again until I got sick of it. Until I pouted and told her to turn it off because it was old people music. Those were the words I used. _Old people music._\n\nI'm stricken with the most impossible of thoughts, one that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.\n\nMom is there. Inside the home's ductwork.\n\nI set the urn down on the floor and, at first, try to jerk the whole thing off the wall with both of my hands. It won't budge. I grip the edges of the grille and pull, but I don't have a good grip on it and it slips easily from my grasp. I tumble backward, falling to the floor. The air return grille is wedged on too tight, held to the wall with four screws, one in each corner. I make an attempt to unscrew each with a bare hand, pinching and twisting the jagged screws until the skin splits, catching a sharp edge of it, one that's been whet over time. My finger starts to drip with blood.\n\nBut the screws don't move. Not even a little bit.\n\nI grit my teeth and pinch and twist harder, but still nothing. They don't budge the slightest bit.\n\nAnd so I wedge a fingernail into the slotted screw and turn. But all that happens is my nail breaks, getting ripped in two, leaving my nails in tatters. I curse out loud from the pain of it before hoisting myself from the floor and hurrying to the kitchen for a knife. I shuffle through a cutlery drawer\u2014tossing forks and spoons out of the way, spilling them one by one to the floor\u2014and find a butter knife.\n\nI run back to the air return. I fall again to my knees.\n\nI stick the knife into the screw head, turning counterclockwise as hard as I can. Bearing down on that knife with my whole body weight.\n\nThis time, it turns.\n\nI spin and I spin that knife, desperate, gasping, as if I might just find Mom inside the air return. Because for this moment that's exactly what I'm thinking. That that's where she is. Inside the air return. I don't know how or why, but she is. She's _there_. I'm just sure of it.\n\nI pluck one screw from the wall and move on to the next one. And the next one. And the next. All four screws tumble to the ground.\n\nThe grille loses its grip on the wall and falls. The sound is clamorous. I shove it out of the way and look inside. It's some sort of stainless steel box set there behind the air return grille, one that changes course about a foot of the way in. I can't see far enough inside to see where it goes and so I reach in a hand, grasping, sweating, but come up empty, thinking that behind that curve there are miles and miles of pipes and tubes which somehow or other lead to Mom. Mom is at the end of those tubes, listening to her music, speaking to me.\n\nI try going in headfirst and then feetfirst. But I don't fit and in time give up, because I don't know what else to do.\n\nI spend the rest of the night lying on the floor beside the air return in the fetal position, listening to Gladys Knight sing to me.\neden\n\nSeptember 26, 2010   \nChicago\n\nWe bought our first computer today, at Jessie's insistence. I'd been saving for some time for it, hoping to surprise her because, as Jessie says, we're the last two people in the world without a computer, which may or may not be true.\n\nWe had to take a cab to the store for it, so that we could tote the boxes home in the trunk of the cab, while the driver waited impatiently for us to load and unload, meter running the whole time, never once offering to help. And then, at home, after Jessie and I lugged the boxes to the office, we sat on the floor, methodically reading instructions and trying our best to decipher which cords went where. The directions might as well have been written in Japanese, the illustrations done up for a four-year-old.\n\nWhen all was said and done, I was shocked to find that, when we turned it on, the thing came to life, some sort of revolving image\u2014a screen saver, Jessie told me\u2014moving about on the screen.\n\nJessie went straight for the internet. \"Look yourself up,\" she encouraged me, and I asked what she meant by that, thinking she'd just use this computer to type up papers for school. I hadn't thought much of her fiddling around on the internet, but I saw quickly that it was the one thing on her mind, the reason she wanted this computer. To look stuff up on the internet.\n\n\"Go ahead,\" she said again with an enthusiastic nod of the head, dishwater hair falling into her eyes. \"Type in your name,\" she told me, \"and see what you find.\"\n\nBut I laughed only, telling her we wouldn't find anything, because certainly I'm not on the internet. That's the kind of thing reserved for celebrities and politicians. Not everyday, ordinary people like me. But Jessie was certain.\n\n\"The internet knows everything,\" she told me, emphasizing that word everything, and I filled instantly with dread, trying to assure myself that it was only the ramblings of an eager preteen, that certainly the internet couldn't know everything, like some sort of omniscient god.\n\nBut Jessie's hands breezed past mine, and with nimble fingers, she typed Eden Sloane onto the keyboard and pressed the return key.\n\nIt didn't happen right away.\n\nNo, there was a moment of naive disbelief while the computer did its thing. In that moment, I assured myself that we'd find nothing. Nothing at all. Of course the internet didn't know anything about me because why would it? What reason did I have to be on the internet?\n\nBut then an image popped onto the screen before us. And there was my name, highlighted any number of times. My stomach dropped at the sight of them, all these results the computer had gathered for Eden Sloane. Some of them, I saw\u2014as my eyes sailed past the results one at a time, trying to decipher which secrets of mine Jessie would soon find\u2014were not me. There was a split second of relief.\n\nIt's another Eden Sloane. It's not me.\n\nBut then one listing caught my eye, rattling me to the core. Because there, on the internet, for anyone to see, was my name and, beside it, the address of Jessie's and my home, our little bungalow on the northwest side of Chicago, where I thought no one could find us, where I stupidly believed there was no way to know where we were.\n\nI was wrong.\n\nBecause now I see that any and everyone is privy to that information, that anyone who's looking for me can find out just exactly where I am.\n\nIt was unconscious then, the way that I rose to my feet quickly and moved to the window, pulling the curtains closed post-haste. When Jessie gave me a look, I blamed the glare of sunlight on the computer screen\u2014a glare that wasn't ever there\u2014and she believed me.\n\nI haven't disappeared after all.\n\nAll this time, I've been out in the open, living right under everyone's noses.\n\nMy throat constricted and went dry. I choked on my own saliva. I coughed, a desperate, panicked cough, unable for a moment to breathe past the saliva that was lodged in my throat.\n\n\"You okay?\" Jessie asked, patting my back, and I nodded my head yes, though even I didn't know if that was true or not. Was I okay?\n\nWhen I could speak, I asked her to run down the hall and fetch me a glass of water.\n\nAs she did, I snatched the electrical cord from the socket, watching as the screen turned blissfully black. I started packing the computer back in its box the moment Jessie left and, that very same afternoon, planned to hail another cab and return it to the store.\n\nWhen Jessie returned with the glass of water and asked what I was doing\u2014as I sat there on my haunches, wrapping foam paper around the computer parts\u2014I told her that the computer was broken. That there was something wrong with it, which of course there was. There was something very wrong with it.\n\nI told her that it would have to go back. I avoided Jessie's eyes as, there in the doorway, her face quickly fell. \"Can we get a new one?\" she asked, and though I said yes, I didn't for one second mean it.\n\nBecause there would be something wrong with that computer too.\n\nAs Jessie and I stood on the drive, waiting for a cab to appear, I couldn't help but wonder, What other secrets of mine did the internet hold?\njessie\n\nThe music gets chased away with morning's first light, and now the house is silent and still. It startles me, the way the music suddenly stops, and now that it's gone, I have to wonder if it was ever really there. I sit up with a start, sticking to the wooden floor. I've been sweating. I say my own name aloud to be sure I can still speak, that fatal familial insomnia hasn't stolen my voice from me already. \"Jessica Sloane,\" I say, my words slurred.\n\nI find myself on my hands and knees searching for Mom's urn, knowing I left her here beside me last night. I comb through the planks of the hardwood floors, as if somehow or other she's slipped through the millimeter gap between boards.\n\nIt's a sinking feeling. A spreading, sinking feeling that comes to me at once.\n\nI've lost Mom.\n\nI don't know who I am anymore. I can't go on, I won't go on without her here. I hold my breath and refuse to breathe. And just when I think I'm about to die, I see her. Just two feet away, on the other side of me, right where I left her. My panic comes to a halt.\n\nMom is still here. She's not yet gone. I release my breath and, at the same time, somehow hear the labored sound of Mom breathing through the air return. Short, shallow breaths followed by no breaths at all.\n\nOnly in daylight do I give up my perch. I rise to my feet, arching my back from the stiff muscles that come with three or four hours of lying on the hardwood floors. I creep across the room slowly, deliberately, one step at a time, my legs half-asleep. And I'm jealous of them because at least some small part of me still knows how to sleep.\n\nIn the shower, I shampoo my hair. I reach for the conditioner and end up dumping another handful of shampoo on my scalp. I wash my body and then, because I can't remember if I did, I wash it again. Though later, when my skin starts to secrete a sour smell, I wonder if I washed at all.\n\nI head off for a cleaning assignment. As I scrub away on the homeowner's porcelain floors, I notice that my fingernails are still intact. Not a single nail is torn. There's no dried blood clinging to my fingertips because they haven't been bleeding. Even now I feel the sharp edges of the screw head burrowing into my fingertips, and I'm not sure if that happened or if I only imagined it did.\n\nI lock up before I leave. I load my paraphernalia onto the back end of Old Faithful. Mop, bucket, rubber gloves. The September day is sunny and warm. I ride in the street, on tapered one-way streets, which narrow with parked cars like the thickening of arteries with deposits of fat.\n\nI stop for coffee and a donut, taking them to go. \"Have a good one, Jenny,\" the owner of the bakery says to me as I leave, and I think maybe she doesn't have it wrong after all. Maybe she knows something I don't know. Maybe I really am a Jenny, since I'm no longer Jessica Sloane.\n\nI pedal past a police station. On the sidewalk before the brick building, I pause. I think about stepping inside, asking them to fingerprint me. Maybe they can look my prints up in their system and tell me who I am. But I'm not sure that's how it works. I'm sure they'd need a reason to fingerprint me, and I'm not sure I have one to give. Not a good one anyway. Not one that wouldn't raise red flags.\n\nBut then my mind drifts to the notion of DNA, one of those in-home kits that you mail away. Those that claim, with a simple swab of the cheek, to help you figure out your family tree, find distant relatives, discover unknown ethnicities. It's just what I need. To figure out who I am.\n\nI return to the coffee bar on Dearborn and sit there on the blue velvet sofa, waiting for the man from the garden. Hoping he'll come today. I see orange everywhere I look. On a shirt, a shoelace, a flyer taped to a store window, in a flower bed. But none are the man.\n\nI go to the garden, slipping back in between the honey locust trees and finding my way to Mom's favorite spot. It's empty, except for a bird, a little brown thing, a sparrow, pecking away in the dirt for food. I scare it away as I make my way to the edge of the raised bed, sitting on the marbled edge, my eyes circumspect but also tired. The twitch in my eye has yet to go away. If anything, it's gotten worse. It twitches incessantly, only stopping when I dig the heels of my hands into it and press hard.\n\nAfter an hour or two, I give up. I take the long way back to the carriage home because I'm in no hurry to return. I bike past the elementary school at the corner of Cornelia and Hoyne, a stately structure made almost entirely of red brick, four floors that are tall and thin and deep. Kids play outside, on a parking lot playground beside the school building. The flag is at half-staff; someone has died. The kids are rowdy, unruly, loud, like howler monkeys defending their territory. They scurry to the top of the jungle gym, laying claim to the swings and slides.\n\nI round the corner at Cornelia. A bell rings, calling the kids inside from play. They'll go home soon; it's midafternoon. Once they're gone, the world is suddenly silent. The trees stand tall and proud, the sun's light getting scattered at random through their leaves, dusting the sidewalk.\n\nAs I near in on the greystone, I watch as, across the street from it, a little boy schlepps a bucket, waddling down to the sidewalk with his mother on his heels. He flips the bucket upside down and a stack of chalk falls to the concrete. It makes a racket. A single blue piece nearly rolls into the street but he stops it in time, running awkwardly after it. His mother asks him what he's going to draw, waving her hand at me, calling out hello. He's going to draw a hippopotamus.\n\nMs. Geissler is also outside. She's bent at the waist, picking weeds from her flower bed, plucking and gathering them in her hands. She wears gaudy gardening gloves and, on her head, a wide-brimmed straw hat that keeps the sun from her skin.\n\nI see her and feel a rush of anger well inside me. A rush of anger and unease, among other things. I think of Ms. Geissler there in the third-story window watching me at night. The third story, which is overrun with squirrels. The third story, where she claims she hasn't been in months. I think of the eyes, of _her_ eyes, pressed to the window like the eyes of an owl, big enough and bright enough to catch prey on even the darkest of nights.\n\nBut it's more than that too, because I'm certain that someone has been in the carriage home when I wasn't there. Only two people should have a key to that home, and it's Ms. Geissler and me.\n\nThe carriage home is technically hers, but as far as I'm concerned, she shouldn't be allowed to come and go without reasonable notice. Without letting me know in advance, twenty-four hours in my opinion. It's one thing if the pipes had burst or sewage was overflowing from the toilet, but so far, that's not the case.\n\nI think of what Lily the apartment finder said about carriage homes not abiding by the same rules as prescribed in the city's landlord-tenant ordinance. Living here, I wouldn't be protected in the same way, she'd told me.\n\nDid she mean I'd have a complete lack of privacy? That Ms. Geissler could enter my home without permission? Open and close my window shades? Stare in through the glass at me?\n\nFor some reason, I don't think so.\n\nAt first I think I should keep going, that I should pedal right on by. But then I have second thoughts. I want to speak to her, because there's something nefarious going on here\u2014many nefarious things\u2014and I want to know what it is.\n\nI force down the kickstand of Old Faithful and stand, hands on my hips behind Ms. Geissler. As I do, words emerge. I don't think them through.\n\n\"Why have you been watching me?\" I ask.\n\nHer smile is warm. \"Jessie,\" she says kindly, as if she didn't hear my question or the tone of my voice at all. Instead she says that it's nice to see me today. \"How about this weather?\" she asks, hands elevated, praising the sun and the sky for this glorious day.\n\nAnd I'm thrown easily off track, thinking then only about the weather. Forgetting about the pair of eyes watching me at night. Forgetting the fear I felt at stepping inside the carriage home and finding the shades open wide.\n\nI snap to. \"Why have you been watching me?\" I ask, and her face clouds over in confusion. Her eyebrows crease.\n\n\"I don't know what you mean,\" she declares.\n\n\"I saw you,\" I assert, pointing a finger at the windows up above. The windows that are dark now, not a light on inside. They're obscure, shadows only. The only thing that I can see is the outside world getting cast back at me. A reflection. \"Standing up there,\" I say. \"Three nights in a row now,\" I say, though the truth is that I've lost count. It could be three. It could be four or more. \"You've been staring into the house, watching me. Spying on me. Why?\" I demand. \"Why are you watching me?\"\n\nThe smile slips from her face. Or rather gets replaced with one that's more pitying. Ruts form between her eyes, deep trenches in the skin. She pulls the hat from her head and a great big cluster of hair falls from her head, getting trapped in the straw brim. Like Mom's used to do before she bit the bullet and shaved it all off. I see her and me standing together in the shower basin. Starting with an electric shaver first, and then a cheap, plastic disposable razor. Rubbing gobs of aloe vera on it when we were through.\n\n\"Well, aren't you going to say something?\" I ask when Ms. Geissler doesn't say anything. I can't stand to see her looking at me piteously, saying nothing. \"You have no right,\" I say, my eyes lost on the clump of hair that has fallen out of her scalp. She grabs a hold of it, plucks it from the hat and releases it to the wind. \"No right,\" I tell her, \"to be spying on me.\"\n\n\"Jessie,\" Ms. Geissler says. Her voice bleeds of sympathy, empathy. Or darn good theatrics. I don't know which, but whatever it is, I don't like it one bit. \"Jessie, dear,\" she says again. \"You're still not sleeping, no?\" she asks. I feel my knees become liquid. They soften. I want to say no, that I haven't been sleeping. I want her to tell me to try warm milk. A spoonful of honey. To listen to music before I go to bed. Calming music. Lullabies. Not because I trust her; I don't. But because I want someone to tell me about the music and the voices that come to life in the ductwork at night. About Jessica Sloane.\n\nIn that moment I see her, Jessica Sloane, in her purple bathing suit, lying dead on the street. Pigeons circle around her, staring at her with their beady eyes.\n\nMs. Geissler stands before me, staring. \"Jessie, are you all right?\" she asks, and only then do I realize that she's been speaking to me. That she's been speaking to me and I didn't hear a word. \"You don't look all right,\" she decides, empathy in her eyes, but I won't let her divert me from my track. I look around, remembering where I am. Remembering what I was going to say.\n\n\"Slept like a baby,\" I lie.\n\nI look to the ground for the clump of hair that fell from Ms. Geissler's head, but it's not there. All there is is a cluster of leaves, a mixture of yellows and browns that shrivel on the lawn. As my eyes rise to Ms. Geissler, she replaces the hat on her head. And there I see it. A single wilted yellow leaf, folded like a moth in its cocoon, clinging to the straw of the hat.\n\nThere was never a clump of hair. I'd only imagined it was hair. It was just leaves. Leaves falling from a nearby tree, getting snagged on the hat as she hunched over the lawn, tending garden.\n\n\"I see you there in the window. Every single night. I know you see me. You were in my home,\" I snap, my tone turning vitriolic. \"That's trespassing, you know?\" I say. \"An invasion of privacy. I could call the police. I should call the police.\"\n\nShe's quiet at first. \"Jessie, honey,\" she says, the look on her face one of concern. Condolence. Shame. \"Oh, Jessie. Poor, poor, Jessie,\" she says instead, pitying me, ignoring my threat to call the police. She takes a step toward me, makes an attempt to stroke my arm with her gaudy gardening gloves. But I pull back. \"You must be mistaken, dear,\" she says. \"The third floor, I told you already,\" she says, making a sweeping gesture of the greystone behind her. \"I don't go up there anymore. I haven't been up there in months.\"\n\nIt's a lie. I know that's not true. I know because she was there.\n\n\"I saw the light on in the attic. I saw you standing there in the window looking out. Watching me.\"\n\n\"No,\" she says to me, shaking her head, looking concerned and confused. \"There are no lights up there in the attic. I'd had a lamp once, just an old floor lamp, nothing special, but the squirrels chewed their way right through the cord. Can you imagine?\" she says then, tsking her tongue and shaking her head. \"Pesky little things. It's a wonder they didn't electrocute themselves.\" And for the briefest of moments it sounds so genuine, so real, that I almost see the squirrels' overgrown teeth gnawing their way through the cord, cutting power to the floor lamp.\n\nBut not quite.\n\n\"I know what I saw,\" I insist.\n\nBut somewhere deep inside me, I also wonder if I do.\n\n\"You must be mistaken, Jessie,\" she says. \"Maybe it was a dream. You've lost your mother. Grief can be a terrible thing. The isolation, the desperation\u2014\" But I stop her before she can cite for me the stages of grief. Her eyes now are chock-full of condolence. Sorrow. They mock me. I know what she's doing. With her pitiful eyes and her compassion, she's trying to make me question my own sanity, to make me think I'm crazy. A by-product of the insomnia and the grief.\n\nBut I know what I saw. There was a light on in the third floor. There were eyes in the window, watching me.\n\n\"Then let me see,\" I insist. My words are assertive. I attempt to call her bluff. \"Let me go to the attic. Let me see for myself that there is no light there.\"\n\nHer lips curve upward. She grins. Not a happy smile, not a mocking smile, but an appeasing one. She's placating me. \"Oh, I don't think so. It's quite the mess, Jessie. I don't even think it's safe to go up there,\" she says. Not until she can get her contractor out to clean it up, which she says she really needs to do. It's been too long and the attic, for now, is just a waste of space. And then she says that she must go. Rain is on its way, she says, staring skyward. Until now I didn't notice the storm clouds rolling in. It was all blue sky and sun, but now it's not. Now there are clouds. \"The weeds are calling me,\" Ms. Geissler says, turning, stepping closer to the thistle and away from me.\n\nAnd then, in that moment, from up above, the clouds burst apart at the seams. Rainwater comes pouring down. Just like that, the sun-dappled sidewalks are gone, getting replaced with puddles. I take my eyes off Ms. Geissler, looking down, to see my feet submerged in a puddle of water. Across the street, the little boy's chalk hippopotamus gets washed away, rallying his tears. He begins to cry. But not before first throwing his chalk so that it breaks in two, screaming, \"It's ruined,\" and then stomping off and heading inside, hot on his mother's heels.\n\nI look back toward Ms. Geissler, but already she's gone.\n\nIn the distance, a screen door slams and there I am.\n\nHair matted down, wet clothes binding to me. All alone.\n\n* * *\n\nThe rain, only a cloudburst, is through. Over and done with. No sooner had I fled the lawn for the cover of indoors than it stopped. The sun forced its way through the clouds again like a baby chick breaking free from an eggshell. The world turned yellow, golden.\n\nDrop by drop the rain disappeared, going back up the way it came down. And then the sun set, turning the world to pink and then purple and then black, welcoming another sleepless night.\n\nI stare out the window and into the third story of Ms. Geissler's home. I stare until my eyes get tired from it, so tired that my retinas begin to burn, the lid continuing to twitch. And yet I can't bring myself to blink because in those milliseconds, I might miss something, a flicker of light, eyes in the window staring back at me. The house itself blurs, softening at the edges because I've been staring too long.\n\nBut still, I don't blink.\n\nThe shades on the third-story window are drawn. All three of them pulled taut. Like the world outside, the room is dark. For hours on end, there's no one there. Evidence that I'm mistaken. Evidence that I am wrong. That Ms. Geissler hasn't been standing in the window watching me at night, and that my imagination only made it up. It couldn't have been a dream because when you don't sleep you don't dream. And so instead it was my mind playing games with me.\n\nAll night long, the window remains empty and black. It's cold in the carriage home because I've turned the heat completely off in an effort to prevent noises from sneaking in through the ductwork. So far, it's working. There are no voices; there are no pings. No music. But as a result, the temperature in the carriage home hurtles to fifty degrees. My fingers and toes go numb.\n\nAs I lie there in bed listening to the _tick_ , _tock_ of the wall clock, it dawns on me. Mom is not my biological mom. It seems so transparent, so _glaring_ there in the witching hour. As if it's been staring me in the face all this time and I just failed to see. I look nothing like her, for starters, which doesn't necessarily matter because for all I know I'm a dead ringer of my dad. But still, it's cause for doubt.\n\nIf Mom is not my biological mother, then how did I come to be with her? How did I come to think of her as my mom?\n\nMaybe it was something innocuous, like she adopted me as a child. And in an effort to keep me from my birth mom\u2014who, for all she knew, would try and track me down in an attempt to regain custody\u2014she stole a dead child's identity and gave it to me so that I'd be impossible to find. Maybe my birth mother was abusive, neglectful. Or maybe she was thirteen years old, a victim of rape, not ready to be a mother. A teenager who'd gotten loaded at a party and went too far with some guy. Mom was saving me from a life of abuse and neglect at the hands of a reluctant mother.\n\nOr maybe it's not so innocuous after all.\n\nMaybe it's more toxic than that. Maybe I wasn't adopted, but rather taken. Kidnapped. It's a thought I go to only because it's the middle of the night, the time my imagination most often takes flight.\n\nDid Mom _kidnap_ me?\n\nI feel an overwhelming sense of guilt for thinking these things about Mom. That she took me. That I'm not hers. That she did something illicit, that she did something wrong. I think of myself, twelve years old, Mom, woozy on a glass of wine, confessing, _A long time ago, I did something I'm not proud of, Jessie. Something that shames me._\n\n_And that's how I got you._\n\nI know now what she means.\n\nEleanor Zulpo, the woman Mom used to work for when I was a girl, told me that as a child, I insisted my name was something other than Jessie. She remembered that I'd pout my face and stomp my foot and demand that Mom stop calling me Jessie.\n\nJessie isn't my real name. That much I already know. It's a name Mom forced on me, one I accepted with resistance, because even a three-or four-year-old knows their name and isn't quick to change it.\n\nBut not only did I call myself by a different name, but I called Mom _Eden_. Did I call her Eden because she wasn't my mom? Because she'd _kidnapped_ me? Because my mom was someone else, and if so, then who?\n\nIn the back of my mind I tell myself that if, _if_ , Mom kidnapped me\u2014that word itself lumbering through my brain, clumsy and awkward, finding it hard to travel from neuron to neuron because the very idea of it is so incompatible with _Mom_ , who was always so loving, so kind\u2014she had a good reason to do it. She wasn't just some run-of-the-mill child abductor.\n\nBut something doesn't add up, like a puzzle with interlocking pieces, the rounded tabs and the carved-out openings that are all supposed to connect. They don't.\n\nBecause there's the photograph of the man. The one I hold so tightly in my grip that the edges of it begin to disintegrate with sweat. I spend the night holding the photograph of the man with the lake and the trees, knowing he meant something to Mom, that she intentionally kept this photograph and this man from me.\n\nWho is he? I have to find him. I have to find him so that I can know who he is, if he's my father. Then I'll know how and when and why I came to be with Mom. Mom who is not my mom.\n\nI look hard for something, for some clue that I've failed to see. The cut of his hair, the color of the lake, the type of trees in the backdrop. The way he stands, the brand of his jeans\u2014the tag far too small to read, but still I try\u2014that sailboat in the distance. Is it really white like I believed it to be, or is it more of a pale yellow, or white with pale yellow stripes? None of which matter.\n\nAnd then I see it. It's a small thing, but significant enough to me. Because suddenly every detail is significant to me.\n\nThis man is left-handed. I know this, or convince myself I know it, because he's wearing his watch on his right wrist. It isn't one of those hard-and-fast rules, and yet it's common enough to be true. People tend to wear their watches on their nondominant wrists.\n\nI think that there are only a handful of lefties in the world, which narrows down my search exponentially, though still the field is huge. Instead of being one in seven billion, the odds that I'll find this man are now more like one in seven hundred million.\n\nAnd I know it then; I'll never find this man.\n\nHe could be anywhere. He could be anyone. Even if I found myself staring right at him, I'd never know it because I've never seen his face before.\n\nI set the photograph aside. I'm so cold that my skin turns mottled and gray. It's got a purplish tint to it and looks like it's covered in lace, a white overlay to the purple skin. I sit there on the floor, staring at my hands, my legs. All that exposed skin, which is as cold and as mottled as Mom's was before she died.\n\nAnd I come to one conclusion: like Mom, I'm also dying.\n\nAt first, everything around me is black. I can't bring myself to move. I'm too cold, too tired, too scared to move. I can't bring myself to throw the covers over my arms and legs. Night goes by with the speed of a sloth. Painfully slow.\n\nBut then it begins. Sunrise. Daylight. Morning comes. Out the window, I watch it happen.\n\nIt starts as a single pixel of light. The sun still tucked safely below the horizon, scattering its light into the atmosphere. A semidarkness. A soft glow of yellow and blue. The clouds thicken around it, getting drawn in, like nuts and bolts to a magnet. They flush at their edges, turning shades of pink and red. As if the clouds themselves are embarrassed.\n\nThe sun rises higher and higher into the sky.\n\nAnd just like that, day has arrived.\n\nThe air in the room starts to warm thanks to the sun's rays pouring in the open window. My mottled, purple skin disappears, getting replaced with a healthy pink. I'm not dying after all. I'm still very much alive, it seems. For now at least.\neden\n\nAugust 4, _1997  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nIt's been two weeks since they took my baby from me.\n\nToday, Aaron and I sat in Dr. Landry's office.\n\n\"The good news,\" Dr. Landry said, face firm, undeviating, with no hint of a smile, \"is that we now know you can get pregnant. Your body is capable of that. But maintaining the pregnancy is proving to be another matter.\"\n\nWe had only been there a couple of minutes. Aaron and I sat beside each other on matching tufted armchairs, Dr. Landry on a swivel chair behind his desk. In my hand I clenched a tissue, dabbing at my cheeks as Dr. Landry stared at me.\n\nI asked him, \"How long until we can try again?\" meaning all of us, another round of IVF at the cost of another ten thousand dollars, money that Aaron and I most certainly didn't have because we didn't have it the first time around. I now had three credit cards in my name and each were nearly maxed out. The minimum payment alone was more than I could pay. I'd never been in debt before; I'd never been behind on payments; I'd never been in the red. I'd never been bankrupt. It made me anxious, and yet I easily reasoned that it was money well spent.\n\nI'd sell my own organs\u2014a spare kidney or the lobe of a lung\u2014before giving up on a baby.\n\nHe was dressed down today, no lab coat as usual, and, as Aaron attempted to cling to my hand, I pulled away, folding my hands in my lap. The numbness, the narcosis, it stuck around me like a cold that wouldn't quit. When I wasn't in bed crying, then I was numb. I felt nothing. I had only two modes these days: sad and numb.\n\nDr. Landry replied with \"There's really no definitive answer to that; we can try again whenever you're ready,\" but his words were blighted by Aaron's incredulous sigh because Aaron, as he'd already told me, didn't want to try again. He wanted to be through.\n\nThe reason was simple.\n\nThe reason was me.\n\nFor the last two weeks, I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed. Morning, noon and night, I cried for my lost child, wondering how it was possible to grieve for something that was never truly mine.\n\n_Man plans, and God laughs._ Isn't that what they say?\n\nAaron didn't want me to make another appointment with Dr. Landry. He had other suggestions for whom I should call instead: a therapist, a support group. Maybe all I needed was some time away, he foolishly believed. A trip by myself to one of those places I've forever longed to go. St. Lucia, Fiji, Belize. As if lying by the seashore and drinking a cocktail might help me forget the fact that I'd just lost a child, might annihilate that desire to ever have a child, so that when I returned I'd feel fresh, revived, happy.\n\n\"I don't want a goddamn vacation!\" I screamed at him then, lying in bed, blankets over my head, coming up from under the covers only for air. \"I want a baby. Why don't you get that, Aaron? What's so difficult to understand?\"\n\nAnd it was only then in broad daylight, when I dared to poke my head out of my own dark cavern, that I could see Aaron's eyes were red and swollen, his heart visibly broken like mine. His shirt was wrinkled, the buttons lined up incorrectly, his hair standing on end. His facial hair had grown threefold, proof to me that he, like me, wasn't leaving the house, that he too couldn't bring himself to go to work.\n\nBut I didn't acknowledge this.\n\n\"I know what you're feeling,\" he said quietly, compassionately, his voice losing control as he wiped at his eyes with the back of a shirtsleeve.\n\n\"Trust me,\" he said. \"I get it.\"\n\nA better person would have realized that Aaron had lost something too. A better person would have consoled him, would have let him console and be consoled. But not me.\n\nThis was my loss, not his.\n\n\"Go away,\" I barked then, and I heard it in my own voice, heard it and hated it but said it nonetheless. \"You have no idea what I'm feeling. Don't stand there and pretend you know what it's like to lose a child.\"\n\nI returned to my cave, throwing the blankets back over my head where I could scarcely breathe.\n\n\"This baby. This pregnancy. This need to get pregnant,\" Aaron lamented as he stood in the doorway, urging me to eat, to get out of bed, to go for a walk, to get some fresh air. \"They've gotten the best of you, Eden. They've turned you into someone I don't recognize anymore. Someone I don't know.\"\n\nAnd then he reminded me of who I was before that day we decided to start a family.\n\nFun loving. Benevolent and genuine. Carefree.\n\n\"I'd give anything to go back to being Aaron and Eden. Just us. Just you and me,\" he said _,_ and for a bat of an eye I remembered us on our wedding day, riding in on horseback on Aaron's family farm in a regal ball gown, exchanging nuptials beneath the nighttime sky. A celebration worthy of a fairy tale. I had found my everything. I had married my prince.\n\nBut suddenly my everything wasn't good enough.\n\nI needed more.\n\n\"I want to try right away. As soon as we can,\" I told Dr. Landry today as we sat in his office, and it was then that Aaron stood up from his tufted armchair and left the room.\n\nSeptember 8, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nAaron didn't show up at the fertility clinic for today's appointment.\n\nFor weeks I've gone through the whole rigmarole, the process of developing follicles, of returning to Dr. Landry's office every few days to have my blood drawn and an ultrasound performed to see if there were any viable candidates for the procedure. I've been injected with a legion of hormones, each which leave blood blisters along my skin and a gamut of side effects, from headaches to hot flashes to moodiness and pain.\n\nAlready, Dr. Landry has forewarned me that, should implantation occur, Aaron and I will need to administer shots of progesterone into my backside to not only make a baby this time, but to help maintain the pregnancy. We'll do it daily, for ten weeks or more. \"It's not for the faint of heart,\" he assured me, but I told him I'm ready. \"I'll do anything, _anything_ ,\" I swore to Dr. Landry as he listed the side effects of the progesterone shots\u2014the weight gain, the facial hair, the unbearable pain\u2014to have a baby.\n\nAnd then, when a mature follicle was ready, spotted on Dr. Landry's ultrasound monitor where not so long ago sat the image of a baby with a heartbeat and webbed hands and feet, we scheduled an appointment for the egg retrieval, where Dr. Landry planned to insert a needle deep inside me to remove the eggs from my womb.\n\nToday was that day.\n\nExcept it wasn't.\n\nI sat for hours waiting for Aaron to come and deliver his sperm.\n\nThree hours and fourteen minutes to be precise, watching as other couples\u2014six, eight, ten of them\u2014came and went through the glass doors.\n\nI read each of the magazines in the waiting room two times.\n\nI made an attempt to phone Aaron, but he didn't answer my call.\n\nI told the receptionist, who stared at me with shame and regret, that Aaron was only running late, that he would be here soon.\n\nThat he was caught up in traffic.\n\nAnd then, after another hour of waiting, I asked to speak to a nurse and one was fetched for me, and, standing closer to her than appropriate so that she had to take a half step back to regain her personal space, I wondered whether they had any of Aaron's sperm remaining from the analysis or our first round of IVF. Certainly they had some remaining in storage, a few drops even, a single sperm, half-dead, clinging to the edges of a petri dish.\n\nBut she shook her head remorsefully, apologized and said no.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"There is no sperm.\"\n\nThe nurse took a step away, but before she could go I laid a hand on her arm and asked whether my eggs could be removed now, if they could simply be stored somewhere, held on to until Aaron came to make his deposit. It seemed completely possible, like layaway, but I was reminded then of the little life span an egg has after ovulation. \"There isn't time,\" she said, and it was then and only then that I inquired about donor sperm, an idea that settled in my mind slowly, one morsel at a time, while I spent hours in the fertility reception room, reading pregnancy magazine after pregnancy magazine, waiting for Aaron to come.\n\n_Donor sperm_.\n\nTwo words I thought I'd never have to use in my entire life.\n\nThe desperation in my voice was tangible to every single person in the room, but none more than me. \"Can we use donor sperm?\" I begged, latching on to her arm now, fingernails leaving crescent-shape indentations in her skin.\n\n\"Where is your husband, Eden?\" the nurse asked, stepping away, pretending altogether that I had never uttered those words, _donor sperm_. She was speaking down to me, that I knew. That I could clearly hear, as she riffled through a patient file in her hands, another patient's file, obviously distracted and needing to be somewhere other than in the reception area with me.\n\n\"Where's Aaron?\"\n\nIt was then that I told her how he must have gotten caught up at work, except that was a lie because it was Monday, the one day in which Aaron never worked.\n\nI inquired again about donor sperm\u2014certainly they had vials and vials of male sperm stored somewhere in this facility that I could use\u2014but the nurse assured me that they would need consent from me and Aaron\u2014from the both of us\u2014to use someone else's sperm.\n\nIn other words, Aaron would need to be present to give his consent, he would need to be here, and Aaron wasn't here.\n\nAaron wasn't running late and he wouldn't be there soon.\n\nHe had no intention of coming at all.\n\nHe just didn't tell me.\n\nNot until I came home from the fertility clinic to find him at the kitchen table, drinking a beer. A beer! Suffice to say I lost it completely, feeling enraged. I screamed at him then like I'd never done before, uttering words I could never take back. Coming at him with fists raised, thinking for a minute that I could hit him. That I _would_ hit him. I'd never done a thing like that before, and my fists stopped just shy of him as I turned on myself instead, pulling my own hair, screaming like a maniac. Aaron didn't flinch. I'd scarcely ever raised my voice to Aaron before, and it left me feeling rattled long after he left the room, walking out on me midsentence. It was the medication doing it, I convinced myself as I stood there in the empty kitchen in silence, strands of my own hair in my hands, watching as outside the sun went down\u2014an arc of pinks and blues setting over our share of the bay, heaven on earth as we once so foolishly believed\u2014the myriad fertility drugs affecting my judgment. They were the reason why I screamed and yelled, and yet I had every reason in the world to be angry.\n\nAaron never showed for the appointment.\n\nHe never came to deliver his sperm.\n\nMy eggs were ready and waiting, but where was he?\n\n\"Where were you?\" I demanded as I lifted his empty beer bottle from the kitchen table and hurled it against the wall, longing and hoping for the release of a thousand minuscule shards of glass when all it was was two. Two large chunks of amber glass falling to the floor with a dull thud, leaving me far from satisfied. I reached for a collection of mail then, set there on the table's edge, and hurled that every which way too, bills and late notices drifting to the ground like fallen leaves.\n\n\"I told you,\" he said after I'd followed him into the living room\u2014voice remarkably composed because he had likely sat there half the day rehearsing what he was going to say\u2014\"that I was through. We've been at this for a year,\" he said. \"Over a year. We're broke, Eden. Everything we've worked for is gone. We have no more money to invest in this,\" he said, holding out a bill for me, one that arrived in today's mail, a credit card statement with a seventeen-thousand-dollar debt. __ \"Look what this has done to us. To our marriage. To you.\n\n\"I can't keep doing this,\" he told me.\n\n\"I meant it, Eden. I'm through.\n\n\"It's time for you to choose.\"\n\nAnd then he reached for a packed bag that sat on the hallway floor.\n\nThe front door opened and then closed again, and I wondered if that was it then.\n\nIf that was the last time I'd ever lay eyes on Aaron.\njessie\n\nI sit on the sofa beside Liam, in his apartment. His laptop is on my thighs. I find my way to the website for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, thinking that if Mom stole me, for whatever reason, if I had a family before her, then maybe someone once reported me as missing. Maybe my real family is missing me.\n\nOn the website, I discover countless babies stolen from their cribs. Kids who got on the bus, but never made it home from school. Pregnant women last seen on the gritty footage of parking lot surveillance cameras. Infant twins missing after a parent was found dead. Babies lifted from hospital nurseries.\n\nOne by one, I become absorbed in the sad stories. The stories of the missing. Thumbnail image by thumbnail image, I open them all. I read about a toddler who was last seen playing on his own front porch in some small town in Georgia, where he lived with his father and stepmother in Jeffersonville, Georgia. He was last seen at approximately ten fifteen on a Tuesday morning, way back in 1995. His hair is sandy and his eyes are green. An age-progressed photo shows what he might look like today, if he's even still alive. He was taken by his mother in a custody battle. There's a picture of her too. In it, she looks a little agrarian, a little unsophisticated, a little mean. Her hair is sparse and thin, her skin weathered and blotchy.\n\nI think that it's possible that, like the little boy from Jeffersonville, Georgia, I am a child stolen from my front porch or from my crib, a child that climbed aboard the school bus one morning and never came home that afternoon.\n\n\"What did you find?\" Liam asks as I scroll through the website, finding a search form.\n\n\"Nothing yet,\" I tell him. But I hope I will soon.\n\nI fill in as much as I think I know and leave the rest blank. I am child. I am female. These are things I know. I make up the dates I may or may not have gone missing. I fill them in, this three-year gap that stretches clear from the day Jessica Sloane was born until the day she died. Three years. Three momentary years. Shorter than a presidential term, than the span between Olympic Games, between leap years.\n\nI watch as over one hundred cases load. One hundred little girls missing in a three-plus-year time span. One hundred little girls missing in a three-year time span that now, seventeen years later, still haven't been found. It makes me sad. I think of their parents, of their real moms and dads.\n\nOne by one I click on the images and they tell me everything I need: when and where the child went missing; the color of their eyes, their hair, how old they would be. There are age-progressed photos, though how accurate they are, I don't know. Ivy Marsh went missing at the age of two. She was last seen in Lawton, Oklahoma, a little girl with blue eyes, blond hair, dimples like me. Kristin Tate went missing on her third birthday, last seen in Wimberly, Texas. She too has dimples.\n\nI scroll down the page and click the arrow, move to the second page, and then the third. The fourth. \"What are you looking for?\" Liam asks, glancing over my shoulder to see what I see.\n\n\"I don't know,\" I say, but then I take it back, telling him that what I'm looking for is me. I take in the age-progressed photos of children who went missing nearly twenty years ago, wondering if any of them might look like me. Though I tell myself that an age-progressed image of an infant wouldn't have the same accuracy as that of an older kid because of how the face changes over the years. All babies have big, round eyes, chubby cheeks. Enormous foreheads. Toothless grins. There's nothing distinguishable about them. They all look the same to me. So who's to say what a baby's face would look like in twenty years?\n\nAnd it doesn't matter anyway because scanning the missing children, not one bears a resemblance to me.\n\nI push the laptop away. I reach into my bag and for the first time show the photograph to Liam. He asks who it is and I say, \"Just some guy,\" though I feel in my gut that there's more to it than that. Because of some primal instinct to be close to this man, to know who he is. I tell Liam where I found the photograph, hidden in the cubbyhole behind the closet mirror.\n\n\"You think he's your father?\" he asks, both a question and a statement. I shrug. He takes the photograph into his hands, holds it closely to his eyes, examining it before he slips the photograph back into my hands. My hands still shake, the tremor that for all these days won't go away. The room goes quiet, all except for the steady beat of rain against the window. It's a drizzle only, not a complete washout, though the day outside is ugly and gray. The morning's beautiful sunrise has been clouded over now; it's long gone. The melody of rain on glass is calming. I find myself soothed by it, tuning out everything else but that sound, wanting to sing along with it somehow, like a song's refrain.\n\nAnd then it happens again. My eyelids close. They do it against my will. My head slumps forward, my neck no longer able to hold it up. It lasts a second. Only a second.\n\nFor one blissful second, I am asleep.\n\nBut then a jolt of electricity tears through me and my head snaps to. I'm awake.\n\n\"Jessie,\" I hear. I see Liam's hand fall to my knee. I turn to face him, his blue eyes so well-meaning. I'm overcome with a sense of belonging that I've rarely known before, only ever with Mom.\n\nHe touches my hair and for a single moment, something inside me feels warm.\n\nHe urges me to lie on his sofa. He offers up a pillow and a blanket, but I say no thanks. That I'm all right. \"Jessie,\" he argues, but I say it again. I'm all right, though we both know that's not true.\n\nI excuse myself, pushing my body from the sofa as if I weigh three hundred pounds. In the bathroom I splash cold water on my face. I stare at my reflection in the mirror. My skin has a grayish-green tint to it. I look sick, like I'm dying. My eyes sink into their sockets, deep bags formed beneath each. I press a finger to them, watching as they sink and then swell. Sink and then swell. My lips are dry, chapped around the edges, blistered, my cheeks concave.\n\nI count the days on my fingertips. The days since I've been asleep.\n\nThe longest anyone has gone without a drop of sleep is eleven days.\n\nI stare at my own sunken reflection, not able to make sense of what I see, but knowing that by this time tomorrow, I will be dead.\neden\n\nSeptember 23, _1997  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nI tried not to let the desperation get the best of me, too afraid of what I might do if it did. I tried hard to keep busy, taking on extra shifts at the hospital, working overtime because being at home, alone, threw me easily off balance and I didn't like the feeling of being off balance, of being desperate, of feeling like I was losing control.\n\nMy home, Aaron's and my utopian cottage, quickly became a dystopia to me, a place where everything was undesirable and sad, and where I was in a constant state of dysphoria; I couldn't stand to be there and so I took to keeping myself out of the home all day, every day, doing everything imaginable to avoid the pine floors and whitewashed walls, the glorious tree swing that had once deceived me into believing this place was home.\n\nI spent ten hours a day reading through patient files, trying to decipher what they were to be billed for and entering it into the hospital's system. It was meaningless and mundane, and yet a wonderful way to waste time. I took odd jobs on occasion, answering ads for a temporary cleaning lady or a dog walker or a driver to take a sweet elderly woman for dialysis treatments, keeping her company for the four hours it took to eliminate waste from her blood three times each week. It kept me busy and more than anything, I needed to be busy.\n\nTime passed.\n\nLast week I came home to find a separation agreement in a manila envelope, set beside the front door. In it, Aaron left me the house and all of our assets, taking from me only the debt, as much as he could anyway, the credit cards that were in both of our names.\n\nEven in divorce he was protecting me.\n\nI signed the paperwork post-haste, knowing that the sooner I did, the sooner the divorce was complete, I could ask for donor sperm without Aaron's consent.\n\nIn the meantime, I did everything I could to keep busy, knowing it would take months, nearly six of them, until the divorce was finalized.\n\nCould I wait that long for a baby?\n\nOh, how I would try.\n\nBut as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.\n\nBecause the minute the well ran dry and I found myself with nothing better to do, I drove by the quaint dance studio on Church Street and sat on the park bench, watching the little ballerinas come and go, and it was different now because I hadn't been there in months, since springtime, but everything was still the same. The bigger girls scurried out of the studio first, followed by their mothers, who carried coffee and talked.\n\nAnd then, just when I'd begun to think that was it, the end of the procession, there came little Olivia with her short legs lagging behind, waylaid by things like heavy doors and sidewalk cracks, struggling to keep up. Her hair had been cut short, no longer in a bun but pinned to the sides of her head with barrettes. She was still easily distracted, that I'd come to learn, sidetracked by things like birds and bugs and today a leaf, bright red on the white concrete, the first indication of fall.\n\nShe paused to poke and prod at it as if it were alive, examining the redness of the leaf, the shape of its lobes, while the others gravitated away at their own pace so that the distance between them grew exponentially, and this time, Olivia's mother was too caught up in her conversation that she didn't see her daughter on her haunches, examining the leaf with the concentration and single-mindedness of a microbiologist. The woman's feet hit the street and she crossed the intersection, unaware of the fact that she and her child were now separated by a highway, the very same highway that once took a little girl's life when her mother was also not watching.\n\nSome women were not meant to be mothers.\n\nAnd some who were, some who would make the very best mothers, were refused the right.\n\nIt didn't seem fair.\n\nOh, what a good mother I would be, if only the universe would let me.\n\nSuddenly Olivia's eyes peered up from the fallen leaf and, at seeing that she was alone, she began to cry. It was a process that went by degrees, a feeling of excitement first at finding the leaf, followed by frustration that there was no one around to show the leaf to, before sadness crept in, a great heartache that the others had left without her, leading to panic. Sheer panic. Olivia gasped first, choking unexpectedly on her own saliva, and then she began to cry, quiet tears, choked-up tears, while her little knees shook beneath their shiny white tights.\n\nI'd be remiss to say that a series of thoughts didn't move swiftly through my mind.\n\n_How would I hide her?_\n\n_Where would we go?_\n\n_What would I call her?_ Because surely if she was a missing child, she couldn't parade around town as Olivia still. She'd have to be something else.\n\nI leaned forward from the bench to lift the leaf from the concrete and asked if she ever collected leaves and pressed them between the pages of a heavy book. The sound of my voice, the sight of her leaf in my hand, gave her pause. Her eyes rose from the earth and landed on my smile, and for a moment there was a cessation of tears as I extended the leaf toward her and she took it from me with a shaky hand.\n\nI rationalized in my mind that it would be Aaron's fault if I took the child\u2014not mine, no, not ever mine\u2014because that was the name of the game these days: blame.\n\nIf only he had shown up at the fertility clinic...\n\nIf only he hadn't walked out of my life...\n\nHe and I still would have a chance at our own child.\n\nI wouldn't have had to take one that wasn't mine.\n\n\"Why are you crying?\" I asked, though of course I knew the reason why. I remained seated, not wanting to scare her by standing tall and towering over her small frame. Outside, the temperatures were dropping again, fall drawing near. Soon the tourists would leave. On her arms there were goose bumps as loose strands of dishwater hair clung to the puddles of tears.\n\n\"Where's Mommy?\" she asked, eyes searching the street. But only I heard it in the distance: the sound of girls' laughter over the sound of the wind. Olivia didn't hear.\n\nThrough the trees I could barely make out the red sleeve of a cardigan, the pink of a tutu, a length of brown hair.\n\n\"You lost your mommy?\" I asked and, extending my own hand to hers, said, \"Would you like for me to help you find her? Would you like for me to help you find your mother?\n\n\"It's okay,\" I said when she hesitated. \"I won't hurt you.\"\n\nIt would be a lie to say she took my hand with ease, that she didn't stare at it for a minute, overthinking, some disquisition about not talking to strangers coursing through her mind.\n\nBut then she did take my hand, slipping it inside. It was a great shock to my system to feel this small, soft hand within mine, and it was all I could do not to squeeze tight with instinct, knowing that might make her scream. I didn't want Olivia to scream. I didn't want to scare her, but more so, I didn't want to draw attention to ourselves. For all intents and purposes, this was how it should be. I was hers and she was mine.\n\nAnd then I began to lead her in the opposite direction of where her mother had disappeared. The direction of my car.\n\nOlivia stopped, peering the other way over her shoulder\u2014even a young girl could remember which way her mother had last been walking\u2014but I said to her not to worry, that if we took the car we might find her mother more quickly than if we walked.\n\nI pointed to my car in the distance. \"It's right there,\" I said.\n\nShe thought about this a moment, standing frozen on the pavement, hemming and hawing, eyes moving back and forth from me to the car. A band of clouds had rolled in, blocking the earth from the sun, and as it did, the wind picked up its speed, chasing the warm day away. Outside, the temperature dropped by as many as five degrees and the day turned gray.\n\nFall was coming; fall was here.\n\n\"Well, that's okay,\" I said then, letting go of her hand. \"If you don't want to find your mother, we don't need to,\" and it was reverse psychology, of course, making her believe that if she didn't get in the car with me, I might just leave her behind.\n\nI didn't want to scare her, and yet there was no other way.\n\nI was only doing what I needed to do.\n\nI reasoned that we would only drive to the next town and then stop for ice cream. That I'd have her just long enough to teach her mother a lesson. Then I'd return her. Certainly I wasn't planning to _steal_ the child, because that's not the type of person that I am. A kidnapper and a thief. I only wanted to borrow her for a while, like a library book on loan. To satisfy my craving for the time.\n\nI had taken no more than two steps away when I heard Olivia's tiny feet scurrying quickly on the concrete, running after me. It worked.\n\nHer hand reached up, and she grabbed a hold of mine, squeezing tightly, careful not to let go. I smiled at her and she smiled back, the tears evaporating quickly from her cheeks.\n\n\"Your mother must be here somewhere,\" I said then, and we walked that way, hand in hand, for a good ten feet or more. We moved slowly\u2014at Olivia's pace, though I wanted to tug on her hand and run\u2014and still, it took twenty seconds or less to traverse those ten feet. But in those twenty seconds I convinced myself that in some minute, negligible way, we looked alike, Olivia and me, though in reality we didn't. We looked nothing alike.\n\nI wondered if, once she and I were sitting across from one another at a local diner, eating strawberry sundaes with whipped cream on top, I'd ever be able to return her to her mother.\n\nAnd then a new thought crossed my mind. I could drive farther south, south of Sturgeon Bay, south of Sheboygan, south of Milwaukee. We could live somewhere else, far away from here, where people might believe that we were mother and child.\n\nThey would have no reason not to believe.\n\nI'd rename her. I'd call her something other than Olivia.\n\nAnd in time, she'd come to think of it as her given name.\n\n\"I don't have a booster seat,\" I said as we approached the car, \"but that's okay for now. The seat belt will do just fine.\" And as we closed in on the car I extended a hand toward the handle, reaching out to open the back door for Olivia to climb through. \"It will only be a short drive after all,\" I promised her. \"I'm sure your mother is here somewhere.\"\n\nIn a single moment, I thought this through. I made a plan and it went like this. Once Olivia was in the car I would speed off the opposite way, far from town, away from her mother, not stopping until we'd passed Sturgeon Bay. There I would stop only to buy Olivia ice cream, something to soothe her, to make her not be scared, to quiet her certain tears. Ice cream and a stuffed bear or a toy from a gas station store, something she could clutch to her chest to make her feel safe. We'd drive all night, as far as we could go. Far away from here.\n\nAnd that's when I heard it.\n\nOlivia's name screamed urgently, emphatically through the cold air.\n\nIt was a high-pitched screech, whiny like a whistle. A distressed sound. What followed were the footsteps of a stampede, thousands of wildebeests running down the street. That's what it sounded like anyway, and as I peered up, hand still six inches away from the door, I saw Olivia's mother and her herd hurrying toward me, eight ladies with seven little ballerinas in tow, shouting commands.\n\n\"Olivia, come here right now.\n\n\"What do you think you're doing?\n\n\"Get your hands off my child!\"\n\nMy hands grew slick. My heart beat quickly, more quickly than it was already beating. Under my arms there was wetness. Sweat. My head suddenly hurt. My brain thought quickly to manufacture a lie, as one of the ladies pointed at me and said, \"I've seen you around here before,\" __ and I ransacked my mind for words, any words, but the words wouldn't come. My mind was holding them captive, detaining my words from me, though what it did do was measure the distance\u2014computing the distance from the ladies to me, the distance from me to the car\u2014doing the math, figuring it out, whether I could get Olivia inside the car before her mother and the other ladies reached us.\n\nI _could_ , I decided. But there needed to be no hesitation.\n\nI needed to go.\n\n_Go!_\n\nI needed to go _now_.\n\nBut my feet wouldn't work properly, and my hand, slick with sweat, let go of Olivia's hand and suddenly she was running in the wrong direction, running toward her mother and away from me and away from the car.\n\n\"Who in the hell do you think you are?\" Olivia's mother asked pointedly as she gathered Olivia into her arms and hoisted her to her chest. \"What did you think you were doing with my child?\"\n\nAnd though I was completely tongue-tied, it was Olivia who did the speaking for me, who struggled in her mother's arms to be set free and there, once her feet were firmly planted back on the concrete while twirling her red leaf in her hand, she said, \"You forgot me, Mommy.\"\n\nAnd with that she took six tiny steps away from her mother's reach and extended her leaf to me. A parting gift.\n\nI took it in my hand. \"She was helping me find Mommy,\" Olivia crooned, smiling a toothless grin, but still, I could muster no words.\n\nAnd then Olivia's mother changed tack, and her tone softened. The lines of her face disappeared and instead of reprimanding me or calling the police, as one of the ladies in the backdrop suggested she do, she thanked me. _She thanked me_. She thanked me for helping Olivia. Her cheeks turned red and her eyes filled with tears, and in that moment she believed were it not for me, she may have lost her child.\n\n\"You should keep a better eye on your daughter,\" I threatened, my voice and hands shaking like the leaves in the trees, clinging to their branches for dear life.\neden\n\nMay 11, 2016   \nChicago\n\nI sit on the front stoop, hands pressed between my knees to curb their shaking. I stare expectantly down the street, searching for that first glimmer of yellow to come bobbing along, the school bus, with Jessie on it. I check the time on my watch, knowing down to the minute what time the school bus arrives, but not having the tenacity to wait another three, because if I have to wait much longer I might get cold feet.\n\nI need to get this over and done with. I need for this to be through.\n\nI've combed and curled my hair. I lathered blush onto my cheeks for color, not so that I'll look nice, but so that I look alive, my current pallid tone far more synonymous with death and dying than with vigor. If I look healthy and robust, then maybe Jessie won't be as concerned. I wear a nice shirt. I plaster a smile to my face, one that sours the longer I wait.\n\nI practice the words I'll soon say, saying them aloud so that I can get control of my cadence and rhythm, so that my voice doesn't shake the way it often does when I'm scared. Truth be told, I am scared, yes. I'm absolutely terrified. Though I won't dare say that to Jessie; for Jessie's sake, I'll put on a brave face.\n\nThe braking of the school bus sounds to me like the screech of a barn owl. I watch as Jessie clambers down the massive steps on the heels of her classmates, eyes lost on the ground as they often are these days. Her backpack is heavy; she slumps forward to counter the weight of it and I force back tears, knowing that my days of watching Jessie emerge from the school bus are coming quickly to an end.\n\nI smile and she knows, the moment she arrives, that something is wrong.\n\n\"What's happened?\" she asks, staring at me with the deadpan expression of a teenage girl, one that hides a legion of feelings behind that single blank stare. Sadness, confusion, fear. Her eyes\u2014oh, how blue they are! Even to this day, they shake me to the core\u2014are poker-faced. But not for long.\n\nAs I take her in, I realize that though she's wise beyond her years, she's still a child. A child who will be an orphan soon. I pat at the step beside me and tell her to sit down, cursing myself for trying too hard to look nice. I forget in that moment everything that I'd planned to say\u2014all the wise old adages on life and death that I prepared to quote\u2014and say outright to her instead, \"Jessie, I'm dying,\" my voice flat and even, just barely above a whisper, trying desperately to stay calm for her sake. \"I'm going to die,\" I say as that inexpressive demeanor cracks before me and tears rush to Jessie's blue eyes, flooding them instantly, a flash flood of tears.\n\nI stare at her stoically, trying not to cry as Jessie breaks down before me. But it's hard to do. Jessie rushes into me, throwing her arms around my shoulders and neck. She pulls me in tightly as I purr into her ear, \"Now, now. Don't cry. Everything will be all right,\" enveloping her in my arms, patting her back, stroking her hair.\n\n\"I'm not scared,\" I tell her, lying through my teeth because these are the words she needs to hear. \"Sooner or later we all die, Jessie. It's only a matter of time. And this is mine.\"\n\nTo say I'm not heartsick would be a lie. To say I don't feel ashamed would be too.\n\nBecause after everything I did to make Jessie a part of my world, I'm leaving her alone to fend for herself, and for this, I feel guilty as sin.\njessie\n\nI'm lying in bed when I hear a noise from outside. It makes me jump suddenly, makes me spring inches from the mattress and into the air.\n\nWhat I expect to see when I look outside is a garbage can lid getting hurled to the ground, one of those galvanized steel ones clanging to the concrete. Because that's the sound I hear, the din of metal on concrete, and I imagine a colony of hulking rats climbing on shoulders to scale the garbage can, working together to carry off whatever's inside.\n\nBut instead when I peel the shade back and gaze out, I see nothing.\n\nThe moon, the stars are nowhere to be seen tonight. It's pitch-black outside.\n\nFor hours on end I find myself staring into the black nothingness that is Ms. Geissler's home. My body shakes from the cold, though as always I sweat. And I think that I have a fever, because that's the way it feels to me. Icy cold on the inside, but sweating through layers of clothes, my skin damp with sweat. My clothes stick to me as my teeth chatter. I'm not sure I have it in me to survive another night. I wonder what a panic attack feels like, a breakdown. I think that's what's happening to me.\n\nMy eyes adjust to the darkness, making out shapes. The blackened windows, the balcony suspended three stories in the air on stilts, the flat roofline, the porch, the sliding glass door.\n\nAs I stare, I watch a squirrel leap from the branches of an oak tree and onto the rooftop. It vanishes into the eaves of the rooftop, as voices speak to me through the floor register again. _Peripheral cooling_ , they say this time, and _mottling of the skin_ , their voices weak and watered down, far away from here. But I can't be bothered this time to run and throw myself down over the metal grate because I know they won't hear me if I do. Even if I scream at them through the vent, they won't reply because they never do. Because they're only in my mind.\n\nI hear the sound of footsteps too, quiet, restrained footsteps that slink up through the floor register and into the room with me. A giggle.\n\n_Shh_ , __ someone says, voice suppressed. _Let her sleep._\n\nI can't turn away from the window. Like bugs drawn to a light at night, I can't bring myself to look away. The window is the color of ebony, of charcoal. It's jet-black, the window shade motionless, completely inert.\n\nI take in the rectangular shape of the glass itself\u2014narrow and tall\u2014the stagnancy of the shade. There is no one there. Behind the window and the shade, the room is empty and dark.\n\nUntil it's not.\n\nBecause, at three in the morning, the light flicks on.\n\nThere's an immediacy to it, a sudden unexpectedness. So much so that I almost fall from the edge of the bed. It happens all at once. A lamp turns on and the shades go up at the same time. The room becomes flooded with light.\n\nFor the first time I have a clear view of the room inside. What I see is a bedroom of sorts. An attic room, one space divvied up by three windows. Like a triptych, a painting where three canvas panels come together to create one scene.\n\nIn the first, a bed's headboard is pressed up against a wall paneled with a dated oak that stretches from floor to ceiling. The bed is unmade, a marshmallow-white comforter pulled down a foot from the head of the bed, pillows lay flat. There is a lamp on beside the mattress that lobs the soft yellow light across the room.\n\nIn the second canvas is the foot of the bed and the bottom two vertical columns of a four-poster bed frame. There is a wooden door on the back wall that leads to a hall. Or a closet. It's closed, so I don't know where it goes. A random cord dangles from the ceiling, belonging to seemingly nothing. At some point in its life, it might have been a fan or a light.\n\nIn the third canvas is the man.\n\nWhich makes me clutch a hand to my mouth, to keep myself from screaming.\n\nHe's leaned up against the window, the very same window where someone has been standing behind the shade watching me. His back is turned to me, as he sits on a ledge, pressing his back to the glass. He's dressed in brown, all of it, everything I can see, blending into the walls. Camouflage, a disguise. His hair is brown, pruned close to his head. I can't see his face or his eyes.\n\nI stare at him for minutes, unmoving, he and I both frozen in place.\n\nAnd then he rises. And as he does, I see that he is tall. He stretches in place, hands above his head, back arched. His stride is long and decisive. He crosses the room in three easy steps\u2014what might take me eight or ten\u2014all with his back in my direction, as if he knows I'm watching him. As if he knows, and he's toying with me. Playing a game of peekaboo. Of blind man's bluff.\n\nHis hands hang limply by his sides. I set my own hands on the window glass, as if reaching for the man on the other side of it.\n\nI can feel it beneath my skin, something I can't quite put my finger on. Something about this man strikes a chord with me. His stature, his posture, the color of his hair. I've seen him before. Like Michelangelo's statue of David. You'd know it by David's carriage even if you never saw his face. He stands with his hand on his hips, left knee bent just a bit. His head is pitched to the right, looking at something off in the distance, something only he can see. Not me.\n\nAs my eyes fall to his right arm, I notice a watch on his wrist. A watch on his right wrist, which means to me that he, like the man in the photograph, is left-handed. I think of the man standing there in Mom's photograph in the saggy blue jeans. An afterthought to the lake and the boat and the trees. An addendum tucked neatly away in parenthesis. Almost forgotten, but not quite. I race to my bag and withdraw the photograph, holding it to the window so that I can see.\n\nThe stature is the same. Not just similar, but the same.\n\nHe's the man from Mom's photograph.\n\nAnd then he turns, wheeling toward the window, quickly, in an instant. My hand slips unintentionally from my mouth as a scream slips out. I hold my breath, taking in his trim beard and his sun-tanned skin, knowing I've seen him before. I don't blink and I don't breathe. Because I know this man. It isn't just a hunch. Because there on his forearm is the very same scar, harder to see from the distance, but undeniably there. A six-inch gash, one that stretches clear from his wrist to beneath the cuff of a shirt, the skin around it puckered and pink.\n\nAnd only then do I remember that the man in the photograph also had a scar.\n\nAs did the man at the garden. The one who sat reading Mom's obituary and looking sad.\n\nThe scar is the smoking gun. The one I was looking for. The one I couldn't see.\n\nThey're not two men who I've been searching for, but rather one man. And though it feels unimaginable, impossible, outrageous and far-fetched, I know it's true.\n\nThis man is my father.\n\nHe knows that I am here. He knows that I am here and he's come for me.\n\nBecause why else would he be there?\n\nNow that I see them, his eyes are like hazelnuts, small and dark. He stares at me. Like me, he doesn't blink.\n\nAnd then he steps from the window and reaches for the lamp. It turns off and then on again. A distress signal. An SOS. Morse code. Three short, three long, three short flashes of light. Save me.\n\nHe's speaking to me. Communicating.\n\nI rise from the bed, sitting on the edge of it. I force my feet into a pair of gym shoes. The shoes resist. My feet have been sweating. They're tacky and they don't slip easily on. The laces of my shoes remain untied, trailing me as I go down the treacherous steps. I race out the front door, leaving it open wide, and across the dew-covered lawn.\n\nAt first I don't think. I just go.\n\nBlades of grass reach out to tickle my legs as I cross the yard. The grass is long, in need of a trim, and my legs are bare, wearing only a pair of shorts. The air is nippy and brisk, but still, somehow, I sweat. It comes streaming down my hairline, gathering like swimming pools beneath my arms.\n\nAnd then, ten or twenty feet from the carriage home, I start to question myself. What am I doing?\n\nSuddenly I'm scared.\n\nThree times I stop to get my bearings, looking around, in front of me and behind. Listening. A tree reaches out for me, brushes my arm, its leaves like the gentle caress of a human hand. I jerk back, startled and afraid.\n\nIt's dark outside. So dark that I can't see what's three feet before my eyes. I don't know what's there, if anything's there. My heart pounds inside me. \"Is anyone there?\" I call out, but no one replies.\n\nAbove me, I'm keenly aware that the blaze of light from the third-floor bedroom has gone dark. The house is black, no light anywhere. I think about going back, about turning around and going home. Of crawling onto the bed, of hiding beneath the sheets where I'll be safely on base.\n\nBut then I come to a spot that's halfway to the greystone and halfway back. I'm stuck in the middle, and the thought of going back seems as ominous as moving forward, especially since I left the door open wide. By now, who knows who's let themselves inside.\n\nI hear scavengers in the distance. Raccoons, crows, rats. A creature scampers away from me on the lawn. Ringed tail. Masked face. Footprints like human hands. And I imagine a contorted human crawling by on all fours, releasing a guttural growl at me. Running away.\n\nI make my way along the brick paver patio and toward the front door. There I climb the steps to the front door. Nearly ten of them, each tread precariously thin. At the top I pause to catch my breath. I breathe in, holding the air in my lungs. Absorbing it. Letting it fill my cells and bob through my bloodstream like a buoy at sea.\n\nTwo sidelights flank the solid mahogany door. I see my bedraggled reflection in each as I stand with my hand on my heart, gasping for air. My hair stands every which way; my skin is a bloodless white, deathly pale. There are purple bags beneath my eyes.\n\nI knock on the door. It's a knock that's uncertain at first, but one that becomes more certain with each second that passes by. Once, twice, three times I knock. There's no reply.\n\nBefore I know it, I've knocked twenty-three times, each knock progressively louder, so that by number twenty-three, the knock is a pound. I raise my arm again but before I can bang once more, the porch light switches on. It startles me, the abruptness of it. Though after all this time, it's anything but abrupt.\n\nSuddenly I'm no longer trapped in a black hole but instead doused with a bright white light that makes me go momentarily blind. For a whole six seconds after the front door opens, I see nothing. Just blotches, spots, dots. \"Who's there?\" I ask, voice still breathless, knowing it can be one of two people standing in the doorframe: the man in the attic window or Ms. Geissler.\n\n\"It's three in the morning, Jessie,\" she says to me. Her words are tired and annoyed. It's Ms. Geissler, who, unlike me, had apparently been sleeping, spared from a night of insomnia, unlike me.\n\nMy eyes focus to see her wrapping a red cotton robe around herself, tying the belt into a bow and patting down her hair. \"What's the problem, dear?\" she asks, her eyebrows scrunched up. \"Is everything all right?\"\n\n\"He's here,\" I say quickly, taking two small steps toward Ms. Geissler, bridging the gap from her to me. She takes a step in retreat.\n\n\"Who's here?\" she asks. And I say, \"Him. A man. Upstairs.\"\n\nAnd it's the blankness of her expression that gets me upset, that makes me snap. That and my overwhelming fatigue, my persistent irritability thanks to a lack of sleep. \"You know who I mean. You know exactly who I mean,\" I say roughly because I know he's here, in her home. She has to know that he's here. She has to _know_ him, because why else would he be here? \"The man in the window upstairs. The one who's been watching me. He's here.\"\n\nShe presses a hand to her heart. Gasps, \"There's a man here? In my home?\"\n\nHer face goes white. She makes an offhand effort to peer over her shoulder and into the vacuous foyer as I take another step forward, one that gets my toes just inside her home. But only my toes. She resists, grasping the door hard and putting a foot behind it. She nearly shuts the door in my face. I lose balance, stumbling back onto the concrete stoop.\n\n\"I saw him in the window,\" I tell her, pointing at the staircase behind her. \"Upstairs. A man in the third-story window,\" I say, and at this she relaxes visibly and smiles. She shakes her head and tells me that there's no one in the third-story bedroom, her voice so sure that for a second I believe it. She says again that no one's been in that room for months. Not since the squirrel incident, and then I think she's going to rehash it for me, the whole story about the squirrels inhabiting the third floor. I know now that it isn't true because there were never squirrels in that room but rather a man, my father, who she's been hiding from me all these days.\n\n\"The attic ladder,\" she tells me this time instead, \"it's a pulldown thing,\" at which, like a mime, she grabs for an imaginary string over her left shoulder and pulls. \"Broken for a couple of months. Wouldn't you know it,\" she says, \"the exterminator managed to break the darn thing. I just haven't gotten around to getting it fixed.\"\n\n\"But I saw him,\" I insist, and she says quite simply, \"You must be mistaken. There's no one there. Because how would anyone get up there, Jessie, without a ladder?\"\n\nIt seems so sensible, the way that she says it. And for a fraction of a second, I doubt myself as she hoped I would do. But then his image returns to me\u2014him standing there in the window, looking out at me\u2014and I know that she's lying. That she's keeping him from me. Hiding him from the world just as Mom has always done.\n\n\"Let me in,\" I insist, pushing the door against the weight of her, and she says to me, \"Now, now, Jessie. You had a bad dream, that's all,\" but of course this can't be true.\n\n\"You were dreaming there was a man in the room,\" she says to me. She reaches out a hand to mine but I pull briskly away. \"Just a bad dream, that's all. It will all be clearer come morning.\"\n\n\"I know what I saw,\" I tell her, voice cracking. But her face is suddenly so pacific, so kind, and she asks if I'd like for her to walk me back to the carriage home so I don't have to go alone. It's dark out, she says. Hard to navigate the way. \"But not to worry,\" she tells me. \"I know this yard like the back of my hand,\" and she reaches for my arm to lead the way home. She winks at me and says, \"And besides, I have a flashlight.\" And there it is, in the pocket of her robe. She flicks it on as if this conversation is over, as if she's put my worries to rest and now I can go home, feeling assured that there's no man in this home. No man watching me.\n\nBut I yank my arm away. \"Why are you hiding him from me?\" I ask. My voice becomes elevated, high-pitched, defensive. \"Why don't you want me to see him? Why don't you want me to know that he's there?\"\n\nAnd then I let slip the one thought that's put down roots in the back of my mind, that's replaced all logical thought.\n\n\"Why are you keeping my father from me?\" I scream.\n\nHer face falls flat and she goes white, even whiter than she was before. She shakes her head, presses a hand to her mouth but says nothing. Nothing at first, before she carefully breathes out, treading lightly, \"You're quite sure you saw a man in there?\"\n\nMy heart nearly sings in relief. She believes me. _She believes me_.\n\nI nod vigorously.\n\n\"Perhaps you're right then. Perhaps someone is there,\" she says with concern as she draws back the door and lets me in. \"Why don't you go see,\" she suggests.\n\nI think of my father, so close within reach. I soar past Ms. Geissler on the staircase, taking the steps two at a time up to the second floor. There I stand beneath that little hatch that leads up to the third floor. I listen for footsteps at first, hearing nothing, but remembering that I've stood here before and heard something.\n\nHe was here that night. Standing above me. Was he trying to contact me, to get my attention? To let me know that he was here?\n\nI reach for the cord and give it a tug. The ladder unfurls before me, unfolding into makeshift steps. Two of the steps are split. Another is missing, just as Ms. Geissler said.\n\nShe warns me, \"The steps, Jessie. They're not safe,\" though I go anyway, clutching the hand railing, which is unstable at best. \"Bring the flashlight with you,\" she says, attempting to hand it to me. But I don't take it.\n\n\"There's a light,\" I tell her. \"I saw the light. I don't need a flashlight,\" but she tells me to take it anyway, as she gives it a shake. I take it only to appease her, tucking it under the crook of an arm.\n\nI begin to climb. I move slowly, walking though I want to run. The fourth step gives on me, splintering, and I shriek.\n\n\"Jessie!\" Ms. Geissler yells, asking if I'm okay.\n\n\"I'm fine, I'm fine,\" I say, gripping the railing harder and pulling myself up and over the broken step.\n\nMs. Geissler makes no attempt to follow, but stands instead at the bottom of the stairs. She crosses her arms against her chest, watching as I go. She tells me to be careful. She tells me to go slow.\n\nI reach the top step and hoist myself into the attic. The room is murky. Out the open windows, the sun is lost somewhere beneath the horizon. It's still nighttime, and yet there's a flush to the sky. Morning will be here soon.\n\nI barely make out a lamp, the same lamp that for the past few nights radiated light. One of those old Tiffany-style lamps, with the stained-glass shade. But when I go to turn it on, nothing happens. The lamp is dead, the lightbulb burned out. I turn the knob around and around but still nothing happens. All I hear is the idle click that mimics my heartbeat.\n\nI orbit the room, looking for him. I trip over things that I can't see. I hold my breath and listen, but I hear nothing. \"Hello?\" I ask, more begging than inquisitive.\n\n\"Come out so I can see you,\" I whisper to the man. My father. I tell him I know that he's here. That I want to see him, to meet him. That I've been waiting my whole life. I take small steps around the room, using my hands as a guide. My heartbeat pounds in my ear as I hold my breath, listening for breath, for footsteps, for him. A game of Marco Polo.\n\n\"Marco,\" I chant aloud to myself, but there's no reply.\n\nI reach for the flashlight Ms. Geissler gave me. I turn it on. It casts a meager glow around the room, not much but enough. The light bounces on the wall from the tremor of my hands.\n\nWhat I find is a wall of cardboard bankers boxes\u2014dozens of them\u2014with holes chewed out. Rodent droppings and old building supplies. Gallons of paint, boards of hardwood, boxes of screws and nails.\n\nA makeshift nest\u2014clumps of twigs and leaves\u2014is nestled into the corner of the attic, and on it, there's some hairless and fetal-looking thing that looks like it's just climbed out of its mother's womb. A mother squirrel stands over her baby, scowling at me.\n\nWhat I don't find is a four-poster bed. A white comforter. A cord dangling from the ceiling. A man. None of those things are here. It's just a ratty and dilapidated attic inhabited by squirrels, just as Ms. Geissler has said.\n\nI feel like I can't breathe. The pain in my chest is immense, in my arm, my jaw, my abdomen. The room is empty, though as sure as I live and breathe, I saw a man here.\n\nI stand looking out the window and toward the carriage home. I don't know how long I stand there, staring, thinking that maybe he will appear. That somehow we'll have swapped places. But he never appears.\n\nI make my way back down the steps, where Ms. Geissler stands waiting for me. On her face is a complacent look. An _I told you so_ look.\n\n\"Find what you were looking for?\" she asks, though I can't speak. A lump forms in my throat, but I will not cry. I cannot cry.\n\n\"I told you, Jessie,\" she gloats, and I know then that she did this only to humor me. \"There is no man there. Squirrels. Only squirrels.\" And then she thrusts the ladder back up so that the squirrels can't take over the rest of her home.\n\nShe shows me the door, but before closing it on me, she first asks, \"Did you ever think, Jessie, that you're only seeing what you want to see? You need help.\" She all but pushes me out of her house and slams the door behind me. I hear the sound of a lock clicking shut.\n\nThe porch light goes off, and once again I am submerged in darkness.\n\nI set myself down on the top porch step, feeling exhausted. My body aches from the lack of sleep, from ten nights of my mind depriving me of sleep. It's an insidious way to die, I think, from lack of sleep because there is nothing gory about it, no blood, no guts, and yet the effects are just as gruesome. I know because I'm living it.\n\nAs the sun begins to rise on the eleventh day, it's only a matter of time until I die.\n\nThis is what it feels like knowing you're about to die.\n\nThis is what Mom must have felt like knowing she would die.\n\nI sit on the stoop and talk to myself, blathering about what's happening to me, hoping to make sense of it, but striking out. I can't make sense of it. I count to ten to make sure I can still do it, losing track at number six. I cry, a proper cry, shoulders heaving, the first in a long time. My heart, my head, everything hurts. I fold over sideways on the porch step, rolling up into the fetal position, pulling my knees into my chest, wondering if this is where I'll die.\n\n* * *\n\nAll at once I look up and have no clue where I am.\n\nBy now the sun is just barely beginning to rise. It turns the world from black to gray. One by one people appear on the street before me. Joggers, early-morning commuters.\n\nAs a hint of daylight fills the sky, I suddenly catch a glimpse of something on the other side of the street. It's a man in jeans and a jacket, bustling down the street with his hands in the pockets of his pants. His chin is tucked into the coat to keep warm, and there's a hat on his head, an orange baseball cap, and for this reason I know that it's him.\n\nBut how did he get here? How did he slip out of Ms. Geissler's home without me seeing him?\n\nAnd that's when the answer comes to me. The balcony. The one that leads from street level up to the third floor.\n\nHe climbed down the balcony before I had a chance to go up the stairs, sneaking out as I cut across Ms. Geissler's lawn. That's when the light in the window went black. It went black because he'd already left. As I examined the attic with a flashlight, he was at ground level, looking in through the windows, watching me.\n\nI rise quickly, calling for him, waving my hands to get his attention. I fall down the porch steps, all six or eight or ten of them. \"Excuse me!\" I scream, but if he sees, if he hears, he doesn't look and he doesn't wave back. He doesn't slow down. He never stops moving. He's in a hurry. He has somewhere to be.\n\nI run as fast as my legs will carry me, which isn't fast.\n\nThe twitch in my eye has gone from one eye to two, so that they both spasm and I can't get them to stop. My hands shake. My arms ache, my legs ache, my back aches and, as I move across the street, not looking either way before I cross, a passing car nearly runs into me. The driver slams on their brakes to keep from hitting me.\n\nI stand there in the street, three inches before the hood of the car, staring at the panicked driver, myself unfazed. Because I don't have it in me to be scared. The driver shoots me a dirty look. When I don't move, she douses the window with windshield wiper fluid, splashing me as she hoped to do. She screams out the window at me, and only then do I go.\n\nBy the time I turn away from the car, the man has advanced a quarter of a block or more. He's harder to see than he was before, farther away. Every now and then I see the orange cap bobbing and weaving down the street, but then it gets blocked by a low-hanging tree limb and I can't see him.\n\nI panic; I've lost him.\n\nBut then again it returns, and I follow along.\n\nI listen for the sound of footsteps, and though I'm a half a block away, I hear them. They're tenacious and quick, and for this reason, I know that they're his. I follow, having only the drum of footsteps to guide me, the drum of footsteps, steady like a beating heart.\n\nBut then, as I round the corner and pick up the pace, I hear something else too. They're words, breathed into my ear. _Earth to Jessie_ , I hear, and I spin suddenly on my heels, glaring at a man who follows from behind. He's dressed in a suit and tie, an overcoat draped over him, smoking a cigarette. In the other hand, a coffee cup.\n\n\"What are you looking at?\" he grills, tossing the cigarette to the ground. He grinds it into the concrete with the toe of a shoe and immediately reaches into his breast pocket for another. I turn away, saying nothing.\n\nAnd then another noise comes. It's so soft, so subtle, hardly more than a whoosh of air against my ear, as I come to a red light and stop. _Psst_ , __ says the noise, like the buzzing of a mosquito in my ear. I'm at a street corner, my eyes peeled to the walk signal, waiting for my turn to cross, hoping it was soon before I lose track of the orange cap. The street is congested, early-morning rush hour dissecting me from it.\n\n_Psst. Hey you,_ I hear, _hey, Jessie_ , __ and I jump, my eyes turning away from the street to see who it is and who's calling me. The man with his cigarette is gone now, around the corner and out of sight, leaving a wake of smoke trailing behind. Behind me stands a corner coffee shop, the first floor of a three-story light-colored brick building. There are people milling around outside, just a small handful of them, though their bodies are turned away from me.\n\n_Jessie_ , __ I hear again, and I snap to attention. Who said that? Who's calling me?\n\nThere's a sudden chill in the air. I shiver. I pull my sweatshirt tighter around me, eyeing the people outside the coffee shop and taking them all in. But there's no one here that I know.\n\nI turn away but still can't shake the feeling that someone is following. That someone is watching me. It's a gut feeling and there, at the fringes of my awareness, I feel it. Eyes on me though they're outside my field of view, burning a hole in my back.\n\nOn the other side of the intersection I pause, looking backward one last time, because I just can't shake that sense of being watched. And then I hear it again.\n\n_Psst. Hey. Hey, Jessie_ , __ and I turn suddenly, a spinning toy top on its tip. I almost lose balance; I almost fall to the ground. The world spins on its axis and I don't know what to blame for it, the lack of sleep or grief.\n\nA man and woman walk behind me now, holding hands. Midthirties, pushing forty. They look slick and sophisticated, she taller than him in high heel boots, though they're both pinched and slim. \"Did you call me?\" I ask, but they exchange a look and tell me no. They part ways, slipping around me, one on either side. Once they pass, they rejoin hands, looking into each other's eyes before gazing over their shoulders at me. They laugh. I hear words giggled between them. _Lunatic_ and _crazy._ They're talking about me.\n\nAnd then there's a hand on my back. A warm hand that touches my bare skin from behind. It caresses me as every single hair on my arms and legs goes erect and I can't help myself. I scream. I jerk away, spinning around to find no one there. There's no one standing on the sidewalk behind me, though I hear it again. I feel it again. Lips pressed to my ear, whispering, _Earth to Jessie_.\n\nI shake my head, willing it away, telling myself that it's nothing. That it's only the wind. I look up, coming to, realizing that I've lost track of the man I am sure now is my father. He's gone. I listen for the sound of his footsteps, searching the horizon for the orange baseball cap. I start to panic\u2014eyes desperately lurching this way and that, hoping to see that pinprick of orange way off in the distance. I stagger down the street like a drunk. I can no longer hold my body upright because it's begun to collapse on me. I try running but I can't run, and so it's a shamble at best, feet dragging.\n\nA hand latches onto my arm, a voice asks if I'm all right. I peer down at the hand on my arm, seeing a spindly hand, a bony hand. Rivers of blue veins roll across it. There's dirt wedged beneath the fingernails, lining the edges of the nail bed, and that's how I know. I know this hand; I'd know this hand anywhere. This is Mom's hand.\n\nMy eyes shoot up, taking in the woman draped all in white. She looks nothing like Mom. And yet, she says, \"Jessie.\"\n\nI'm so taken aback that I don't have it in me to respond. She stands before me, a halo of sunlight bearing down on her. She wears a wispy white blouse that billows in the early-morning breeze, the top button undone so I catch a hint of the pale skin beneath. On her bottom half is a skirt, a long one, stretching clear to her feet so that I can't be certain they're there. She looks fragile, delicate and, as she draws her hands through her hair, strands come with it. Clumps of hair fall from her scalp just like that, getting trapped between her thin fingers. Through the thin, floaty blouse I catch sight of her breasts. The breasts flat, nipples gone. Serrated suture marks crisscrossing her chest, the way Mom's used to be.\n\n\"Mom,\" I say. As impossible as it sounds, this woman standing before me is Mom.\n\n\"Mom,\" I beg this time, trembling as I reach for her, wanting nothing more than to draw her close, to wrap my arms around her shoulders and pull her in tight. I'm crying now, tears falling freely from my eyes. \"Mom!\" I plead, but before me she pulls suddenly back, sharply back, her eyebrows pleated. Her mouth drops open and she asks, \"Do you need me to call someone for you? An ambulance, maybe?\" as she stands a good three feet away and retreats a step for every step that I draw near. I grab for her again, but she tugs her arms out of reach from mine, setting them behind her back.\n\n\"I'm not your mom,\" she states. And it's so assertive, so firm, it gives me pause.\n\nMy eyes calibrate the image I see, the woman with the red hair and green eyes dressed in all white. Except that her hair is intact and what I saw as suture marks are instead lace.\n\nIt's not Mom.\n\nI drop my hands to my sides, as she asks again if I need help, if there's someone she can call for me. I bark out _no_ , though all at once I realize that I have no idea where I am, that the streets and the buildings are unrecognizable to me. That I've never seen them in my whole life.\n\nWhere am I?\n\nHow did I get here?\n\nA siren wails off in the distance.\n\nA car door squeaks open and then slams closed.\n\nPeople push past me on the sidewalk, in a hurry to get here or there as the woman disappears into the crowds.\n\nI cup my hands around my mouth, screaming up and down the street for my father.\n\nAnd then, when I think all hope is lost, I see him. Out of the corner of my eye, somewhere in my peripheral vision, I catch a glimpse of orange as it slips behind the glass door of an apartment building on the other side of the street. I go to it, tugging on the door handle to follow him in, but find the door locked.\n\nI press my face to the glass, staring inside. The lobby of the building is near empty. It's dated and retro with 1970s linoleum tile, the kind that seeps with asbestos. Where are we? Does he live here? Does he know someone who lives here? The tile is partly covered with some sort of commercial carpeting, bland and gray, to disguise the ugly tile. A postal worker separates mail into a million bins and though I knock on the glass for him to let me in, he ignores me. Either he can't hear or he doesn't care. He just goes about sorting the mail as if I'm not here, as if he can't see me, as if I'm invisible.\n\nAnd I wonder then if I am invisible, if I am already dead.\n\nI tug again on the tempered glass door. The hollow metal frame rattles in place. I smash the heel of my hand against the glass to no avail.\n\nI begin to make my way around the building, in search of another way in. A freight entrance, maybe. But before I've gone twenty feet, a tenant comes tearing out of the building, eyes set on an incoming bus. I race back to the door, managing to slip in a hand in time to prevent it from latching. I sail inside. Behind me, the door closes tight.\n\nMy eyes look to the left just as a flash of orange disappears behind a door. A black-and-white sign beside it reads Stairs _,_ the steps themselves explicated by a zigzag line. He's going upstairs. I follow along, racing toward the stairwell and after him.\n\nI press hard on the steel door's push bar, making my way into the stairwell. I run, scaling the steps two at a time, clinging to the banister with a sweaty hand, pulling myself up the concrete stairs. The air is stuffy, suffocating, hard to breathe. There's a notable lack of oxygen in here. It's unventilated; there's no access to fresh air. I choke on nothing and it takes a moment to regain my composure, to stop myself from choking on the musty air.\n\nThere are sixteen floors in the building. Above me, I hear footsteps as they climb upward at a better clip than me. He's going too fast. I can't catch up. I call to him, but if he hears, he doesn't let up.\n\nSomewhere between the eighth and ninth floors, my feet slip on the edge of the step, on some sort of tactile paving, yellow, rubbery lumps that are meant to have the opposite effect, to prevent people from falling. But not me. Rather my body keeps going, the momentum of the run thrusting me forward at a blistering pace. But, thanks to the tactile paving, my feet slow down, two things which are mutually exclusive because I can't stop and go at the same time. And so instead I trip, feet skidding beneath me. My body jerks, my hand latching on to the banister to keep me upright. Pain radiates down my arm, into my hands, seeping into the muscles of my rib cage, my neck, my back. But I keep going. He is right there, within reach. I can't lose him this time.\n\nI scurry up yet another flight of stairs. I keep running, up the steps. Though before I know it, we've reached the top floor. The highest floor in the entire building, the sixteenth floor. The end of the line, I think at first, but not quite. Because he's still climbing. Because there's still one more flight of stairs, different from all the rest. More industrial, more heavy-duty. Not meant for everyday pedestrian use. It's more of an elaborate stepladder than stairs. But I scale it nonetheless, ten feet behind him. Beside it, a sign reads Roof Access _._\n\nThere's a hatch at the top, a single slab of aluminum with a hinged lid. He pushes through it and I follow, mounting the last few steps of the stepladder and breaking free onto the rooftop of the apartment building.\n\nAt the top, the hatch door closes all on its own behind me. The wind forces it shut, the sound of it slamming closed, startling me.\n\nI reach for the handle to tug it open again, finding it suddenly locked.\n\nI'm trapped on the building's rooftop.\n\nThe city surrounds me. A panorama. With arms outstretched, I can't help but spin, taking it all in. Enjoying the view, knowing fully well this may be the last thing my eyes ever see.\n\nThe buildings and skyscrapers rise up like dominos around me and I stand on my own domino, waiting for my turn to fall. The lake is bluer than I've ever seen, a luminous blue that makes the blue of the sky inferior. An underling. Sunlight reflects off the glass of the buildings so that the whole world is suddenly aglow.\n\nI circulate the building, looking for him, for my father. Now that we're here, he's somehow disappeared. He's hiding from me. I call to him, but he doesn't reply. \"Hello!\" I scream. \"I know you're up here!\"\n\nThe roof itself is filled with all sorts of miscellany. An industrial cooling system. Exhaust vents. Access panels to this and that. It makes it hard to see. I search among various parts of the cooling system, looking for him. They're big, boxy things that make noise from time to time, like the whirring of a fan inside. I hold my breath. I refuse to breathe. Breathing makes noise and I don't want to make noise. I only want to listen.\n\nA hand strokes me again, whispering into my ear, _Earth to Jessie._\n\nI pull back, drawing sharply away from the strange caress.\n\nTo the west end of the building, there's a fire escape, one that runs from ground level clear to the top, a thing so basic, so rudimentary, it terrifies me. It's little more than a metallic swimming pool ladder, four treads that lift you from the rooftop to the other side of the building.\n\nThat's where my father stands. On the fire escape. Now that the hatch is closed, the only way out of here, aside from a free fall, is the fire escape.\n\nI go there, legs shaking. I call to him, voice more subdued now that I see him. Now that I've found him. Now that he's in reach. He's climbed over the roof wall, a three-foot thing, and onto the fire escape.\n\nMy hand reaches out for the ladder's handrail and I grab a hold of it and pull myself up. My hands are dripping and slippery. I go up one tread. It gives on me and I fall back down to the ground. I start again. One step and then two, watching on in horror as my father begins his descent without me, jogging down the steps at a steady clip, unfazed by the great height.\n\n\"Stop, please,\" I beg, hearing the anguish in my voice. \"Please, don't go.\"\n\nAs I near the top, there's a moment of calm that comes and goes so quickly I almost don't notice it. For one split second the world is still. I'm at peace. The sun moves higher and higher into the sky, yellow-orange glaring at me through the buildings, making me peaceful and warm. My hands rise beside me as a bird goes soaring by. As if my hands are wings, I think in that moment what it would be like to fly.\n\nAnd then it comes rushing back to me.\n\nI'm hopelessly alone. Everything hurts. I can no longer think straight; I can no longer see straight; I can no longer speak. I don't know who I am anymore. If I am anyone.\n\nAnd I know in that moment for certain: I am no one.\n\nI think what it would feel like to fall. The weightlessness of the plunge, of gravity taking over, of relinquishing control. Giving up, surrendering to the universe.\n\nThere's a flicker of movement beneath me. A flash of brown, and I know that if I wait any longer, it will be too late. The decision will no longer be mine. I cry out one more time. And then I go, legs convulsing as I swing one leg over the edge of the building and onto the fire escape on the other side. I have to force myself to do it. It takes everything I have. All that's on the other side is a measly shelf, an overhang, that hovers seventeen floors above land.\n\nI make my way toward him, but he's moving far too fast for me. And I'm scared, looking down where, beneath me, the earth tilts and sways. I'm overcome with vertigo. I feel nauseous; I feel like I could be sick. The steps of the fire escape are perforated to prevent snow and ice from forming, which does nothing for me now. I can see straight through them to the street beneath my feet. People like ants walk up and down the street, minding their own business, paying no attention to me. Cabs like matchbooks soar past.\n\nThe steps beneath me are corroded and weak. A handful are missing. In some spots, the fire escape pulls away from the building's masonry, bolts no longer holding tight. I take the steps two at a time, though they clatter each time my feet hit, the entire fire escape bucking beneath me. I have to take long strides over the missing steps.\n\nI make it down only half a flight of steps before my knees give.\n\nAs they do, I lurch forward, staggering. I fall down the second half flight of stairs. The railing at the end is corroded, as much of the fire escape is. It's the red-orange of rust. As my body goes hurtling into it, the spindles give and I slip straight through, with nothing there to prevent my fall.\n\nAs I tumble off the side of the fire escape, my head swims.\n\nI take one final look at the great distance to the ground, the distance I'll soon fall.\n\nAll at once, I'm falling. My legs follow the rest of me, feet making a last-ditch effort to cling to something, trying in vain to tether themselves to the steel of the fire escape. I try to grab it with a hand, but it slips straight through time and again, as I soar along beside it, unable to grab hold.\n\nMy arms and legs kick. They do the doggy paddle as I soar downward. I flail and kick, my body splayed as air rushes from beneath me, wrapping my hair around my face. I can see nearly nothing. Not that there's much to see anyway, other than the blue of the sky as I fall. There's no air resistance. The air does nothing to slow me down. My hands make a meek attempt to protect my head, some sort of Pavlovian response, as I thrust my feet downward, knowing my only chance of survival hinges on landing feetfirst. It doesn't work. I can't get them down. Another fire escape landing soars past but I can't get to it in time.\n\nMy insides scuttle to my center from the speed, from the velocity of the fall. A fall that feels like forever. Like I am forever falling. My face molded in fear.\n\nI open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out.\neden\n\nOctober 3, _1997  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nIt's become an itch that I can't reach. A hunger that no amount of food can satiate. A drought that a thousand rainfalls can't fix.\n\nThat unquenchable need to be a mother.\n\nI think about it morning, noon and night.\n\nAt night I lie awake not sleeping, wondering how I will ever be a mother.\n\nI don't know that I have it in me to wait until Aaron's and my divorce is complete.\n\nThere is adoption, of course, but as a single mother going through divorce proceedings and carrying an exorbitant amount of debt, I hardly think I'm a suitable candidate for adoption.\n\nAnd so I must find another way.\n\nI go to work early and I leave late, spending those extra few minutes staring at the babies through the nursery room glass. On my lunch break I eat quickly so that I have time to wander down to the labor and delivery unit and salivate over the newborns while the nursery room nurses tend to their every need, the bottles and clean diapers and the endless rocks in the rocking chairs.\n\nI don't want to feel the way I do.\n\nI'm not a bad person, not by any means, and yet it's an addiction to me. A disease. I'm unable to abstain from thinking about babies, from wanting a baby, from craving a baby as one does gambling or cocaine.\n\nI've lost control of my own behavior. I don't know what I'm capable of, what I might do, and that in itself terrifies me. Once I was very rule abiding; I always did as I was told.\n\nBut now my neurotransmitters are in disrepair and quite simply, I'm not the person I used to be. That Eden is gone, replaced with someone I scarcely recognize anymore, someone I don't know.\n\nOctober 7, 1997 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nSomething happened today.\n\nI had eaten my lunch\u2014roast beef on rye from the hospital's cafeteria\u2014sitting all alone at one of the smaller round tables, nibbling quickly, quietly and staring out the window at the visitors and outpatients who came and went through the revolving front doors, realizing how utterly alone I felt as the other tables spilled over with groups of four, five, six, all involved in conversations that didn't have a thing to do with me. Oh, how I felt so alone. When I was through eating, I set my tray beside the trash can and then went to visit the babies in the nursery.\n\nA drug addict needing her fix.\n\nAs I stood there, peering through glass at the newborns sound asleep in their knitted blankets with their knitted hats, one little one in particular caught my eye, the name in the bassinet reading Jade Cutter _._ It was the name that caught my attention, not necessarily the baby herself, though she was perfect in every way, from the roundness of her head to the redness of her cheeks. But more so, it was the slip of pink paper in the bassinet that caught my eye, the one that listed her name, date and time of birth, pediatrician, and the names of her parents.\n\nJoseph and Miranda Cutter _._\n\nJoe and Miranda.\n\nThey'd had their baby girl. They'd had their baby girl and they didn't tell me.\n\nShe was swaddled in a pink cotton blanket, eyes closed, mouth parted as she breathed in her sleep. A single hand had forced its way from the blanket, but Jade seemed unmindful of this, unlike other infants\u2014I'd come to learn from my time spent observing them in the nursery\u2014whose limbs needed to be controlled so that they could sleep. There was dark hair, a mound of it, that sneaked out from the edges of the pink hat and, though they were shut tight, I had to imagine her eyes too were dark like Joe's, though these, of course, were things that often changed over time.\n\nAnd in that moment little Jade's eyes parted and she gazed at me, it seemed, and I was stricken with a sudden, purposeful, persistent need to hold her in my arms.\n\nI stepped into the nursery, greeting the ladies there by name. There were two of them, one older and one younger, both of whom I knew fairly well. How many months had I been stopping by, telling the tale of how I was working hard to earn my degree so I could be one of them, nursery room nurses who tended to newborn babies? How many times had they let me into the nursery, allowing me to watch as they changed diapers and swaddled with the expertise of someone who'd done it a million times? How many times had they let me stroke an infant's cheek in his or her sleep, never once needing to remind me to wash my hands because I always remembered?\n\nBut not this time.\n\n\"You'll need to stay in the hall, Eden,\" the older of the two nurses said, a woman by the name of Kathy, and I felt a stabbing sensation in the chest as she pointed to the floor, to an imaginary line that dissected the nursery from the hallway tiles.\n\nThat's the line where I was to remain behind.\n\n\"But, Kathy,\" I attempted to argue, but she held up her hands and told me that there had been complaints that they'd been too lax of late, and hospital officials were cracking down on security protocols, and I wondered now if the babies were fitted with tiny security devices on their wee wrists or ankles to keep someone from walking out the front door with them. Someone like me.\n\n\"But it's just me,\" I reassured her, holding up my badge, reminding her that _I work here._\n\nExcept that by that time, she'd turned her back to me and was attending to an infant who'd begun to fuss; she wouldn't let me in, and I could feel my hands begin to shake in withdrawal. There was a tightness in my chest and my head suddenly hurt. For a minute or two, I couldn't breathe. My heart was palpitating, strong, irregular beats that left me light-headed, though neither of the nurses seemed to notice; no one noticed but me.\n\nAnd then Joe was there coming to my rescue, as he appeared at the nursery to come lay claim to his baby girl.\n\n\"Joe!\" I said too loudly, thrilled to see him, knowing that he was my key to that baby. Joe would get Jade out of the nursery; Joe would let me hold and coddle baby Jade as I needed to do.\n\nHe said hello to me, and what a nice surprise to see me, and at this, I felt a smile spread widely across my lips. My heartbeat slowed; the tension in my head and neck began to ease.\n\n\"Miranda called you to tell you the news?\" he asked, but I said no, that I was working, that I had just come to visit the babies in the nursery when I saw baby Jade.\n\n\"Congratulations!\" I said, offering an awkward embrace. Joe was not a man I knew well, and what I did know came from Miranda's own complaints about him. How he was a jerk, a lousy father. But I couldn't let this deter me now.\n\n\"How is Miranda?\" I asked, and Joe replied as expected: Miranda was tired, Miranda wanted nothing but to sleep and already I imagined her, sore over her infant's need to eat.\n\nKathy glided the rolling bassinet out the nursery door to Joe's waiting hands, and when I made an attempt to follow, to accompany Joe to Miranda's room where I would sit on the corner armchair with Jade in my arms as I'd once done with Carter, he said to me, \"Another time, Eden? My parents are here,\" meaning that they already had company, that Joe's mother and father were here to see baby Jade.\n\nThat I wasn't welcome in the hospital room with Joe's mother and father because as everyone knows, three's a crowd.\n\n\"Just for a minute?\" I pleaded, staring at Joe, who looked worse for wear in that moment, tired and jaded. I could see it in his eyes: four children was too much.\n\nI could help him.\n\nI could take a single one off his hands.\n\nJust one child.\n\n\"Just to offer my congratulations to Miranda and then I'll go?\" I begged\u2014and even I could hear the desperation in my voice\u2014but Joe shook his head, and I felt like a child then, like a five-year-old child who'd just been told no.\n\nJoe said that he'd pass my message along to Miranda and then he turned to go without me. He walked quickly on purpose, faster than my legs could go, and I felt the dismissal a thousandfold then. I was being brushed off, given the cold shoulder as if I carried a stigma on my sleeve.\n\nThe stigma of infertility, the stigma of miscarriage, the stigma of a woman whose husband was in the process of divorcing her.\n\nI blinked and Joe was gone, disappeared down the hall and around the corner where I couldn't see him anymore, and immediately the headache returned, the palpitations, the sweat. The hospital walls began closing in on me as in a room nearby a lady, deep in the throes of labor, screamed, and instead of feeling sympathy for her, I felt a surge of jealousy and spite.\n\nOh, how I wanted to be the one screaming in the throes of labor pain! How I wanted to feel a baby inside me, wedging itself headfirst to get out. How I wanted to feel that baby press between my legs, to feel it crown as doctors and nurses gathered around telling me to push. _Push!_\n\nMy feet crept toward her room with instinct, setting my hand on the doorknob and turning it, opening it just a sliver so that I could see in. There was far too much happening inside the room for anyone to hear the door squeak. I stood in the doorway, inching a foot back so no one would see. A Peeping Tom. The door wasn't open and yet it was ajar, not quite closed tight, and through the crack I saw her laid out on her back, gasping from pain. I saw her gather handfuls of blanket in her hands and squeeze, pushing to get that baby out. I heard her scream, this throaty, guttural scream, crude and uninhibited as a nurse on either side told her to push. \"Push!\" Her husband stroked her sweaty hair, brushing it out of her eyes. Between her legs was a shock of black and there I stared, wondering just where exactly she ended and the baby began as she pushed again, holding her breath\u2014as I, in turn, held mine, parting my legs ever so and pushing too\u2014bearing down, and this time, as she pushed, a baby came spilling out of her insides, covered in mucous, and the room was filled with a sudden rapturous bliss.\n\nThe door slammed shut in my face.\n\nSomeone had seen me.\n\nI ran away, out of labor and delivery.\n\nI was due back at my desk in just a moment. Soon the other women in billing would wonder where I had gone, and why I wasn't yet back from lunch. They would tell our manager. I would be given a scolding.\n\nBut I couldn't go back to billing at that moment.\n\nI needed to get away.\n\nI got behind the wheel of my car and I drove and drove.\n\nI drove to the chophouse, needing to see Aaron, desperate suddenly to see him, for him to hold me in his arms, to stroke my hair and tell me everything would be all right. If I'm being honest, I was scared of the person I was, scared of the person I'd become. I was quite terrified, if Aaron didn't put a stop to it, of what I might do. My thoughts were scattered, sown like seeds in my mind, and there was no telling which ideas would bloom, the sensible ones like going home and putting myself to bed, or the misguided ones where I return to the hospital and force myself into Joe and Miranda's room, screaming like a lunatic, demanding that they give me their child.\n\nI left the car parked haphazardly across parallel lines on the street outside, nearly a block from the chophouse. Parking in town was never easy to come by. I stepped from the car, my ankle giving on me as it sunk deep into a crater on the street. I shook it off, kept moving, feeling the ligaments beneath my shoes begin to ache and swell.\n\nIt had begun to rain outside, the sky darkening. The restaurants, the gift shops, the galleries that lined the street radiated light. They beamed from the inside out, while outside people scattered like roaches in daylight, hiding under canopies and slipping inside stores, seeking shelter, huddled in throngs beneath ample-size golf umbrellas, clutching one another, laughing.\n\nBut not me.\n\nI made my way to the chophouse alone, fully intent on going inside. On speaking to Aaron. On begging him to help me, on pleading with him to take me back. I was desperate. What else could I do? The rain came pouring down, permeating my skin, so that I could feel it inside my bones. I hurried past people tucked warmly, drily beneath their umbrellas, no one offering to share. The rib of a passing umbrella poked me in the shoulder, but no apology came thereafter, as if it was my fault, as if it was my shoulder's fault for getting in the way of this man's umbrella.\n\nI closed in on the chophouse, smelling that scent that always followed Aaron home and into bed with us, that coiled around us while we slept. Grease, Worcestershire sauce, the flesh of meat.\n\nBut before stepping inside, I caught a fleck of Aaron through the restaurant window, seeing his face through the small partition that separates the kitchen from the dining room. A flyspeck only, but in that flyspeck, there was a lightness about him, a nimbleness, a radiance to his skin. Rain streaked down the window, but I peered past it, watching as a smile danced on the edges of Aaron's face. In the very same fleck some other man made a wisecrack, I could only assume, because then Aaron was laughing, _laughing!_ , the edges of his lips reaching upward to the sky like he hadn't done in years. Aaron was laughing and it was beautiful to see, an openmouthed laugh, nothing curbed or restrained about it, and I saw in Aaron's eyes a felicity that I hadn't seen in quite some time. Never did he press his hand to his mouth to hide the smile, but rather chuckled with all of his might.\n\nAaron was happy. Aaron had found his happy place.\n\nUnlike me, his heart had healed and he was no longer broken. He was whole.\n\nOh, how I wanted to be there beside him, laughing too.\n\nBut I couldn't bring myself to do it, to shatter what had already been fixed. I'd ruin him, that I knew, if I stepped foot into the chophouse, as I imagined the laughter drawing to a sudden close if I walked in, that lovely smile vaporizing from his face at the sight of me.\n\nAnd so instead, when a hostess poked her head outside and asked if I'd like to take a peek at the menu, I shook my head, scurrying the other way like all the other roaches, seeking shelter indoors from the rain.\n\nIt was an upscale restaurant where I went, fine dining with a bar attached, the kind where one might have a glass of wine while waiting for their table to be set. This hostess offered a table, but I strutted straight past her and to the bar\u2014sopping wet, leaving a trail of rainwater behind me as I walked. I climbed onto one of the tall stools and ordered a chardonnay to drink. A chardonnay! The glass came to me full to the rim, a generous pour at the hand of a bartender with cavernous dimples and sparkling blue eyes, a man who must have been six years younger than me, barely old enough to be serving alcohol at an upscale establishment. And yet here he was, and in the moment I felt suddenly old, much older than my twenty-nine years, but that didn't matter. That was the least of my concerns.\n\nWith the wine he also brought a dish towel, which I used to towel dry the ends of my hair.\n\nThe first sip of wine tasted like battery acid to me.\n\nIt choked me on the way down, burning the lining of my esophagus so that the bartender raised an eyebrow at me and asked if I was all right. I pressed a hand to my mouth, nodding, but I wasn't sure that I was all right. The wine settled in the pit of my stomach, and the feeling was a mix of repulsion and nausea, along with a warmth and prickling that I quite liked.\n\nAnd so I had another sip, wanting the warmth and prickling to have its way with me, to help me forget about Aaron and the miscarriage, all those wasted months trying unavailingly to create a baby.\n\nHow stupid I'd been in believing that with Dr. Landry's help we could outsmart nature. Aaron and I were infertile; that was the nature of the beast. That couldn't be changed.\n\nThe universe was laughing at me for my arrogance and my vanity.\n\nI took another sip of wine and this time, I didn't choke.\n\nI thought of my baby, of my unborn baby. Of my dead baby. I wondered what she would have looked like had she had a chance to grow full-term. Would she have looked like Aaron, with dark hair and light eyes, or would she have looked like me?\n\nWould she have been a she, or would she have been a he?\n\nI still think about her all the time.\n\nHad she been a girl, I would have named her Sadie.\n\nI raised my glass to my lips and swallowed a mouthful, wondering if she ever crossed Aaron's mind.\n\nWondering if I ever crossed Aaron's mind.\n\nBy the second glass, the wine was no longer battery acid to me. It quenched that _hunger_ , that _thirst_ , like nothing else in the world was able to do. It spilled through my veins, anesthetizing my arms and legs, dulling my senses. I hadn't had a drop to drink in quite some time and so it didn't take much for the room to start to blur at the edges, for the stool to feel insecure beneath my seat.\n\nWith every sip thereafter I became a more youthful version of myself, someone more energetic, someone more carefree.\n\nWith every sip I became blissfully forgetful, forgetting at once that I was a soon-to-be divorc\u00e9e, a woman who would never have a baby.\n\nIt was a quiet night, a Tuesday night, and so the bartender happily filled his free time speaking to me\u2014about what, I hardly remember anymore\u2014and, after that second glass of chardonnay was poured, I plucked a credit card from my purse, one that wouldn't be denied, and the bartender started a tab for me, telling me his name was Josh.\n\n\"You have a beautiful smile,\" he said to me, and I blushed, grinning, and he pointed at it and said, \"Yup, that's the one,\" while smiling his own beautiful smile. For whatever reason I dug a tube of lipstick from my purse, a light shade of pink, and applied it to my lips, leaving light pink prints around the rim of my wineglass that he filled each time with a bountiful pour.\n\nI unbuttoned the top button of my blouse, leaning farther over the bar, fully aware of just how pathetic it was, me, a lonely, depressed woman hitting on a bartender in a near-abandoned bar.\n\nI had become a clich\u00e9.\n\n\"What's your name?\" he asked, setting a bowl of nuts before me, a single finger brushing against my skin as he did, and I told him that it was Eden. He equated it to the garden of Eden, in other words, _paradise_ , and I smiled and said I'd never heard that before, though of course I had, from each and every one of the lowlifes who came before Aaron when they were trying to pick me up in bars far less classy than this.\n\n\"What are you doing here all by yourself, Eden?\" he asked while swirling a dishrag in circles before me.\n\nI shrugged my shoulders and said that I didn't know.\n\nWhat was I doing here?\n\nI reached for my glass and downed the last few drops. At once it was refilled, and I downed that too, scarcely able to recall what came next.\n\nOnly bits and pieces stayed with me until morning, a montage of what may have occurred. Sliding from the barstool with the third glass of wine. Laughing at myself as strange hands helped me to my feet, refreshing my glass. A face far too close to mine. The deep groove of dimples. Words whispered in my ear.\n\n\"Wait for me,\" he said.\n\nStanding on the street corner in the dark autumn night, I leaned against a streetlamp that didn't give off an ounce of light. Getting absorbed by blackness until even I wasn't sure if I was still there. It was raining still, a fine mist in the air, one which seemed to levitate and not fall.\n\nAnd then suddenly there were lips on my neck, hands kneading my skin, though who they belonged to, I couldn't see. It was far too dark to see, but it didn't matter to me. I knew only that my extremities were numb from the alcohol, and it was cathartic to me, strange hands wandering along the landscape of my skin, exploring the valleys and hills with a certain vehemence I'd never felt before. A body pressed against mine, pinning me to the streetlamp, whispering breathless words into the lobe of an ear.\n\n\"Where's your car? I'll drive.\"\n\nI heard the sound of an engine gunning, the stars coming at me at a dizzying speed before the world turned black again, and then the scratch of facial hair on my cheek, a hand groping at my chest with the impatience of a sixteen-year-old boy. A hasty man pawed at me, tearing at my blouse. What buttons remained clung to the fabric by strings, as he pushed me into the back seat of the car, moving with the deftness and agility of someone who knew what they were doing, of someone who had a history of strange women in the back seats of cars.\n\nI felt the force of my skirt getting thrust clear up to my rib cage. The scratch of a fingernail as he tore at my panties, pushing them aside. The sound of a moan, my own forced moan tolling through the airless space because, even with the continuous thrust of his hips into me, I felt nothing and I wanted more than anything to feel something, to feel _anything_ , because feeling something was far better than feeling nothing, and in that moment all I felt was nothing. Nothing that mattered anyway.\n\nInstead, hot breath on the lobe of my ear. Handfuls of hair being clenched between hands, tugged consciously or unconsciously, I didn't know. Reggae music on a car stereo.\n\nHe panted out a name in rhythm, \"Anna, Anna.\" Did he think that that was my name, Anna, or was there another woman in his life, a woman named Anna, and he was only pretending that I was her? I replied with \"Yes, yes!\" deciding that I would be his Anna if that's who he wanted me to be. A seat belt buckle drilled a hole into the small of my back, plastic plunging itself into me with every thrust of his hips, leaving its mark, though still I felt nothing, nothing at all, not until finally a spasm tore through him like a lightning strike and he collapsed against me, and then there was the weight of him, no longer supported by his own hands.\n\nThe weight of him. That I felt.\n\nAnd then weightlessness.\n\nA car door opened and closed and then there was silence.\n\nHe was gone.\n\nI woke up in the morning in the back seat of my car, parked at the far edge of a public playground parking lot, beneath the shadow of a tree, my skirt still thrust clear up to my rib cage, the rest of me exposed, hidden only by the dewdrops that had settled on the windows overnight.\njessie\n\nMy heart beats inside me like a cheetah. I'm screaming.\n\n\" _Psst_. Hey you, hey, Jessie.\"\n\nThere's a hand at my shoulder, rattling me. It's gentle, but insistent. I jerk away from the hand, arms flailing. I'm no longer falling.\n\nA mouth presses closely to my ear, speaks in a breathy voice. A stage whisper. \"Earth to Jessie,\" she says, and it's a numbing voice. A hypnotic voice. The perfect opiate.\n\nI imagine where I am. On the grass. Body in bits on the ground, bleeding and broken, hardly able to move. In the distance, the sound of an ambulance's wailing siren as my father walks away from the scene unscathed.\n\nThe voice says _it's okay, it's okay_ , three times or more while stroking my hair. I can't open my eyes. And yet I see her, a woman hunched over me on the lawn, while others crowd around her. She's gawking, her eyes fixated on the most gruesome parts of my battered body. A leg that bends backward, organs that protrude from the skin.\n\nI know the voice. I've heard it before. But I can't place it.\n\nI'm swimming beneath water. Sounds are muffled above my head. The dropping of a needle onto an old vintage vinyl record. Voices talking. A measured, high-pitched ping. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, ping. Voices in the background. Talking. Saying things like _morphine_ and _slipper socks_ and _ice chips_.\n\nWhen I go to open my eyes, they're sealed shut. Taped down. Impossible to open.\n\nMy hands rise and I'm surprised to find that I can still move them, my arms and hands. That they're not broken after all. Not shattered into a million pieces across the concrete.\n\nI press the heels of my hands against my eyes and rub hard, wiping the crusty discharge. Inside, my heart pounds hard. A song begins to play. Quietly. Background music. __ It's a song I know well because it's Mom's favorite song.\n\nWhen I finally get my eyelids to lift, all I see is yellow. A blinding yellow light.\n\nAnd that's when I know that I'm dead. That's the first clue.\n\nThe yellow light charges my eyes. It stuns and overpowers them, making them close again because I can't stand to keep them open; it hurts too much. I blink repeatedly, trying to adapt to the light. To orient myself, to find a reference point, to figure out where I am.\n\nThe second clue that I have that I'm dead is Mom. Because Mom is also dead. And yet, as I open my eyes, she's here, sitting five or six feet from me. She sits upright, on some sort of reclining armchair with castors on its feet, her gaunt legs propped on the chair's footrest. She's dressed in a roomy gown that slips carelessly from a shoulder, the hair on her head merely fuzz, as it was the last time I laid eyes on her alive. Which is why I know this is some sort of afterlife we're stuck in. Mom and me.\n\nThe room around me is blue. Blue walls. Blue sheets. A comforting, pastel shade of blue. I'm not on the lawn after all. I'm not outside, lying in the shadow of the building from which I fell. Rather I'm in a room, on a bed.\n\nA woman stands beside Mom, lathering lotion onto her arms and hands, massaging the purplish, blotchy skin. I know who she is because I've seen her before, at the hospital before Mom died. She was Mom's nurse, one of them anyway. A woman named Carrie who was more religious than any about applying lotion to Mom's hands and feet, about turning her so she didn't get bedsores. Even when I begged for them to leave her alone so Mom could sleep.\n\nShe looks over at me and says, \"Well, it's about time,\" and that's when I know that we're all dead. Mom, the nurse and me. They've just been waiting for me to arrive.\n\nI know how Mom and I died, but I wonder, how did she?\n\n\"That stuff knocked you out cold,\" says the woman who squats on her haunches beside me, a second nurse. Her hand rests on my shoulder, the very same hand that only moments ago rattled me, mouth purring into my ear, _Psst. Hey you, hey, Jessie. Earth to Jessie._\n\n\"What stuff?\" I ask, feeling dazed and confused. Behind me, from a record player, Gladys Knight sings to me. There's the greatest sense that I'm still falling, though I'm well aware that it didn't hurt when I hit the ground. That when I crash-landed into the concrete beside the apartment building, I felt nothing. I don't even remember it happening. I must've been dead by then, I decide. A heart attack, a broken neck.\n\nThe room whirls around me. I push myself up so I sit, perpendicular, no longer lying down on a bed. There's a puddle of blankets on the floor, a pillow beneath my head. The second woman rises from the ground beside me and pulls the strings of a window shade so that they rise. I've seen her before. She's the same woman who kept me company the night before Mom died, and now she too is dead like me. How can that be?\n\nHow can we all be dead?\n\nMore blinding yellow infiltrates the room, making it hard to see much of anything clearly. But Mom. I see Mom. My eyes go back to Mom. To Mom sitting there. Mom, in the flesh. No longer listless. No longer bed bound. She looks sleepy still, her eyes glazed over, and yet on her face, a smile. \"How about some ice chips, Miss Eden?\" Nurse Carrie asks, offering a single piece of ice from the end of a spoon.\n\n\"The clonazepam,\" I hear, and it takes a minute to realize the nurse is talking to me, that I asked a question and she's answering it for me. \"The stuff doc gave you to sleep. He'll be happy to hear it worked. You needed a good night's sleep. You were dreaming,\" she says. \"Calling out, kicking in your sleep. Must've been one hell of a dream.\"\n\nAnd as I finally start to get my bearings, I realize where I am. I'm in Mom's hospital room. Mom. Who sits six feet from me, upright, sucking on a cube of ice. Not six feet under, but six feet from me. No longer ashes, but now whole.\n\nThe clonazepam. The melatonin. That I remember. My own bloody, inflamed eyes. The doctor, concerned, offering something to help me sleep. Watching a newsmagazine show on the TV, a story about identity theft, while waiting for the pills to kick in, the nurse tucking me into bed, telling me about her daughter, dead in a car accident at the age of three. The purple swimsuit, her daughter collecting shells from the sea. That I remember.\n\nBy the time I woke up Mom was dead, except that she wasn't dead.\n\nIt was all a dream.\n\nMy eyes adapt. The light becomes less painful, less blinding.\n\nAnd that's when I see a man in the room too, and I know straightaway that it's the man from the dream. And I wonder if I'm still dreaming. If this is like the purgatory of dreams and I'm trapped somewhere between sleep and awake, having to atone for my sins before I can fully wake up. His back is to me as it's almost always been because he's there on a chair before Mom. He sits, though I see it in the body posture, the carriage, and I know that it's him. I'm not chasing him anymore because now he's here.\n\nPing, I hear then. Ping. And I turn to watch the movement of lines across Mom's EKG, the spikes and dips of her heartbeat.\n\n\"Dad,\" I breathe, my voice gravelly and hoarse. My heart throbs. Because after chasing him for all those days and nights, after spending my entire life trying to find him, he's here.\n\nHe's been here all along, waiting for me to wake up.\n\nExcept that as the man turns to me, I see that he's different. His face is not the face from my dreams. There's no facial hair anywhere, and his eyes are a grayish-green like sage. They're not brown. His hair is streaked with gray and there are lines across his face, forehead lines mostly, deeply set. His arms are blotched with pale pink scars.\n\nIt dawns on me then, slowly. Of course he's different from the man in my dream. Because in real life I never saw his face. I only caught a glimpse of the back of him when I was a girl, before Mom snatched the photograph from my hand. Before we read a book, before we ate ice cream. Now I remember. I never saw that photograph again until it returned to me in a dream.\n\nThere's a book on his lap.\n\nHe leans forward, gathering Mom's hands into his. Hers are limp. He strokes her cheek, and I see in his eyes the look that he has for her. A look of adoration, a look of love. It makes me feel embarrassed, watching them. This moment of intimacy. It's not for me to see.\n\nIn all my life, no one has ever looked at me that way. I doubt anyone ever will.\n\nHis smile is deferential, kind. \"No, Jessie,\" he says as he lets go of Mom's hands and turns back to me. \"I'm not your father,\" he tells me, and at first I'm speechless because if not my father, then who? My eyes well with tears\u2014wanting, _needing_ him to be my father\u2014as I sputter, \"There was a photograph Mom had of you. I remember seeing it a long time ago. She took it away, she hid it, but it stayed with me. It was a picture of my father. It was _you_. You have to be him,\" I say, and he leaves her side to come to me.\n\nHe sits down beside me on the bed, a gap spread between us. He pats my hand, tells me his name is Aaron. \"I knew your mother a long time ago,\" he explains. \"We were married. She was my wife,\" but then he pauses, his own eyes red, and gathers himself. He won't cry in front of me. \"I don't have any children, Jessie,\" he says, as if that should make it clear, but it only makes me more confused. More angry and more confused. Because how could he be Mom's husband but not my father? Didn't he want me?\n\nMy tone is more scathing, more exasperated than I mean for it to be. \"Then why are you here?\" I ask, and I see the anguish in his eyes, the grief. I pull my hand from his, seeing then that he doesn't have a wedding band. He's not married and I wonder if, after he and Mom were married, he ever was. He divorced Mom, he left her, I think, and there's a groundless anger that swells up inside me.\n\nThis man hurt Mom.\n\n\"I loved your mother very much,\" he says, as if he can read my mind. But then he rethinks and alters it a bit. \"I _love_ your mother very much,\" he says, before holding up the book from his lap. \"Eden,\" he tells me, \"your mother, she sent this to me,\" and I look at it, a brown leather book with a stitched edge, and in his other hand a note, written in Mom's handwriting on a piece of stationery. Stationery with her own name engraved along the edge. \"It's her journal,\" he explains, though in all my life, I never once knew Mom kept a journal.\n\nHe hands the note to me. I skim Mom's words. In them, she tells him she's dying. She says that she wants him to have this journal so that he can finally have closure, so he can finally understand.\n\nThe last line reads, _With love, Eden._\n\n\"Understand what?\" I ask. And there it is again, that exasperation.\n\nBut his tone is compassionate and warm, his eyes soft. He rubs at his forehead, confesses, \"There were some loose ends, Jessie,\" he says. \"Some unfinished business between your mother and me.\" He asks, \"What did Eden tell you about your father?\" and I shake my head and admit, \"Nothing. She never told me a thing about him.\"\n\nHe passes the book to me, the journal. He says that he thinks I should read it, that it would help me understand.\n\n\"Everything she did,\" he tells me, voice cracking, \"she did for you. You should know that.\"\n\nAnd then he rises to his feet to leave, but not before first confessing, \"I wanted to be a father, Jessie. I would have loved to be a father. I would have loved to be _your_ father. But sometimes life doesn't go as planned.\"\n\nI don't know what he means by that. But I grip the journal in my hand; I press it to my heart, knowing I'll soon understand.\n\nHe says that he'll give Mom and me a few minutes. And then he leaves the room.\n\nMy eyes turn to Mom's. They're unfocused and disoriented, the top lid puffed up. She sees me but doesn't see me all at the same time. I wave; she waves back. But not right away, as if there's a broadcast delay. Her lips are a length of string, pilled and thin. They're dry, chapped, some sort of gunk collecting around the edges, which no one bothers to wipe. Her skin is a washed-out shade of gray blotched with purple and blue. A lack of oxygen. Poor circulation flow.\n\nAnd yet she's there. Sitting upright. Waving.\n\n\"You're alive,\" I breathe as I go to her one last time.\n\n* * *\n\nThe nurse leads the way as we drift into the hall. I take one look over my shoulder as we go, saying to her quietly, in a whisper, \"It's a miracle.\" Because I don't want Mom to know how close she came to dying. \"She's better. She's all better. Just like that. Overnight, and she's better,\" I say, a smile as wide as the Grand Canyon on my face. And suddenly nothing else matters. All that matters is Mom. I clutch the nurse's hand, wanting to celebrate the moment, to savor it. Relief consumes me, seeing that Mom has her strength back, some of it anyway. That she can sit up, that she can swallow. I'm thinking of next steps already. We'll begin chemo again. Maybe there is some clinical trial that Mom can participate in, some new medicine we can give a try.\n\n\"Oh, Jessie,\" the nurse says as we watch a family pass by in the hallway, flowers and balloons tethered to their hands. Her face drops. It gets overpowered with empathy, and for a minute or two she's speechless. The only smile she has to offer is a comforting one. Not a happy one. Not a celebratory one like mine.\n\nIt's a sympathy smile.\n\n\"Jessie,\" she says as she ushers me to a nearby bench and we sit, just across the hall from Mom's room so we can still see inside. \"Your mother,\" she says, hesitating. \"She doesn't have much time left.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" I argue, thinking of Mom, sitting there in the room in a chair. Mom, more energetic than I've seen for weeks. Mom, making what looks to me like a speedy recovery. There's a spark to her eye, just a dot of light that wasn't there the last time I looked, days ago when she last opened her eyes. She'd been comatose for days like that; she couldn't swallow, she couldn't eat. The doctor said it wouldn't be long. And now here she is. Clearly he was wrong. Through the doorway I see Mom reach a hand out to nurse Carrie, rub at her throat. She can't speak. But she's asking for more ice chips, for a drink. \"Look at her. See for yourself. She looks _fine_.\"\n\n\"She looks better. But the cancer. The cancer is still there. This happens, Jessie. A death rally, we call it. She will relapse, honey, and likely soon. Maybe hours, maybe days. There's no way to know for sure, but her body is still deteriorating. The cancer isn't cured. It's metastasized to the lungs, the bones. It's getting worse.\"\n\nWhich I know. Of course I know. I've heard this all before, many times. But looking at Mom now, it can't be true. It's like she's had this surge of brain power and awareness. Like she's come back from the dead.\n\nAnd then I understand.\n\nTerminal lucidity. As imminent a sign of death as any. The final blessing I'd been hoping for. Five more lucid moments with Mom. That's all I asked for. And here they are.\n\n* * *\n\nThe nurse graciously turns off the machine as it flatlines. I wonder if she always does that, if her hand shoots there automatically the moment a patient dies so their beloved family members don't have to hear the damn thing scream. The ping from my dream has finally gone silent.\n\nMom's doctor presses the end of his stethoscope to her chest and we all look to him for guidance, for him to tell us she's dead, though we already know that she is. Her body lies peacefully on the bed, skin going white, blood draining from it. Already she's colder and more synthetic feeling than she was before. Her hands and toes unclench; her body goes lax. The doctor speaks. \"Time of death,\" he says, \"Two forty-two.\"\n\nAnd with it comes great relief.\n\nMom's battle with cancer is done.\n\nMom's death rally lasted a total of three hours and fourteen minutes. For some of it she sat up with me in the chair, while Aaron watched from the corner of the room. He thought he should leave, that Mom and I should have this time together, but I asked him to stay. I did most of the talking. Mom could talk once she warmed up to it, but talking didn't come with ease.\n\nI spent the time trying not to cry. But then, when I couldn't hold it in any longer, I sobbed, gulping down air and choking on it. Because there were things that needed to be said and I didn't have much time left. If I didn't say them, I'd regret it forever, for the rest of my life. \"I don't know who I am without you,\" I confessed. \"I'm no one without you.\" And though I didn't say it aloud, I thought to myself that I'm vapor without Mom around. I'm nothing. A nonentity. A rock, a clock, a can of baked beans.\n\nMom stroked my hand as she did the day she told me she was dying. Caressed my fingers one at a time, and forced a smile that was as sad as mine.\n\n\"You're _you_ ,\" she said. \"The one and only Jessie Sloane,\" as she stroked my arm with an anemic hand, the white flesh darkened here and there with bruise-like marks.\n\nI squeezed into the same chair beside her, as if I was still a little girl. I don't know how we fit, but somehow we did. We sat like that for a while. As we did, one of my earliest memories returned to me, one of the few that hadn't been lost to time. In it, I'm about five years old. It's the middle of the night when Mom comes to me in my room. I'm sound asleep when she kneels on the floor beside my bed, whispering into an ear, _Jessie, honey. Wake up._\n\nAnd I do.\n\nShe helps me get dressed. Not fully dressed, but instead we slip a sweater over my nightgown, a pair of leggings beneath its hem. Socks and shoes. I follow her out the front door and into the blackness of night, asking at least a gazillion times where we're going, though all she ever says is _You'll see._ We walk hand and hand down the street.\n\nThere's a rare giddiness about Mom in that moment. A frivolity. She isn't restrained as she often is, but instead is playful and bright. We only walk as far as the home next door, but for me it seems an incredible adventure, some sort of magical, midnight escapade. We have to walk to the far side of the Hendersons' home where the gate is, cutting through their lawn as we go. Mom stands on tiptoes\u2014her feet, I realize only then, are bare\u2014to unlatch the gate, pushing it slowly open so it doesn't squeak.\n\n_Where are we going?_ I ask, and she says, _You'll see._\n\nWe creep through the grass to a tree at the center of the backyard. A tall tree, sky-high, as high as my five-year-old eyes can see. Though it's too dark to see, I'm pretty sure the crown of the tree stretches clear into the clouds. There's a swing hanging there from one of the tree's branches, just a slab of wood with a thick rope that's looped through holes on each side. Mom tells me to hop on and at first I resist, thinking we can't possibly ride on the Hendersons' tree swing without asking. But Mom's face is radiant, her smile wide.\n\nShe sits down on the wood herself, pats the thighs of her pants. She tells me again to hop on, only this time she means on her lap. And I do.\n\nI scramble awkwardly on, Mom hitching an arm around my stomach to help hoist me up. I sit on her lap, leaning back and into her as she gets set to launch us from the ground. Mom holds onto the rope with a single hand, the other folded around my belly. She walks backward as far as her bare feet can reach and then all at once, she lifts her feet from the earth and, just like that, we fly.\n\n\"Do you remember,\" I asked, snuggled there beside her on the hospital chair, \"the time we broke into the Hendersons' backyard and snuck a ride on their tree swing?\"\n\nFor as long as I live, I'll never forget the smile that bloomed on her face right then. She closed her eyes, reveling in the moment. The memory of the two of us nestled together on that tree swing. \"It was the best night of my life,\" I said.\n\nShortly after the memory left, Mom got tired. The nurses and I helped her back to bed. Minutes later, Mom fell asleep. She drifted back into some sort of minimally conscious state and passed away two hours later with me there at her side.\n\n* * *\n\nIt's only after the funeral director comes to collect Mom's body that I finally rise from the chair. The room is remarkably quiet. No music playing, no familiar sound of the EKG.\n\nThe only sounds I hear now come from down the hall where other people lie dying.\n\nBefore he leaves, Aaron asks if I'll be all right and I tell him that I will. \"I may not be your father,\" he says, \"but it would mean the world to me if I could be your friend,\" and I tell him that I'd like that very much. He goes, and after he does, I see the nurse has already begun to strip the sheets from Mom's bed. Soon another patient will be here, another family surrounding them, watching as they die.\n\n\"Where are you going to go?\" she asks, and I shrug and say stupidly, \"Coffee,\" because nothing else comes to mind.\n\nBeyond that, I have no idea where to go, what to do with my life.\n\nBut there's a part of me that thinks I can figure this out in time.\n\nI try to reconstruct the dream. As I move down the bright, buzzing hospital halls, I try to piece it back together. But dreams have a way of fading fast, the mind a habit of deleting nonessential things. It's as if there's a fifty-piece puzzle before me and I'm missing all but five pieces. I've lost forty-five and only some of them connect. I remember only squirrels. Hot dogs. A hippopotamus. But I don't know what any of it means.\n\nIt's only as I cut through the hospital lobby, passing by the cafeteria, that I'm struck with the sudden sense that something is missing. Something that makes it harder to breathe. I come to a sudden stop and as I do, a body plows into me from behind, making my bag drop to the ground, contents spilling across the hospital floor. Mom's stuff\u2014her lotion, her ChapStick, her journal\u2014as well as mine. My driver's license, my credit card, dollar bills.\n\n\"My fault, my fault,\" I hear as I turn to see a man scramble to the ground to pick up my stuff. \"I didn't see you. I wasn't looking where I was going,\" he admits as he rises to his feet and holds out the bag for me, my things shoved indelicately back in.\n\nAs he does I catch a look at his face for the very first time, and only then do I remember. I gasp. It's him. \"Liam,\" I breathe, taking in that shaggy brown hair and the blue gum-ball eyes, knowing with certainty that he was there in my dream with me. There's the vaguest recollection of sitting on a sofa beside him, of his hand stroking my hair. It's a thought that makes me blush as I take a step closer to him. And though I don't know him, there's the greatest sense that I do. That we're already friends. \"Liam,\" I say again.\n\nBut his face only clouds over in confusion. He shakes his head, stares vacantly at me like I'm mistaken. He looks tired. Stubble has all but taken over his face, and his hair stands on end. His bloodshot eyes are even bloodier than they were before, rivers of red running through the white. He shakes his head. \"Jackson,\" he says. \"Jack.\" And I find that I'm thrown completely off, feeling out of sorts because he's not Liam. Of course he's not Liam. Because Liam was only a dream. This man is a different man completely, though our late-night confessions over coffee were real. That was real, I remind myself, finding it suddenly impossible to remember what's real and what's not.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I stammer. \"I thought,\" and I feel silly all of a sudden. \"I should go,\" I say, taking the bag abruptly from his hands, excusing myself, trying to sidestep him and leave. But he doesn't let me leave. Instead he steps in front of me, reaches out his hand and says, \"You never told me your name,\" and for a second there's the sense that he doesn't want me to leave. That he wants me to stay.\n\nHis handshake is warm and firm. He holds on a second longer than he needs to.\n\nI reply, \"Jessie,\" knowing for the first time in a long while that I am. I am Jessie Sloane.\n\n\"You're leaving, Jessie?\" he asks, and I say, \"No reason to stick around here any longer.\"\n\nI don't have to tell him that Mom is dead, because he already knows. He can see it in my eyes. \"Your brother?\" I ask, thinking of the motorcycle accident. His brother flying headfirst into a utility pole. \"Is he going to be all right?\" For a moment Jack\u2014Jackson\u2014is silent, but then he says, \"Bit the dust last night,\" and my heart breaks for the both of us.\n\nBut there's also a sense of relief because, though we lost the war, the battle is finally through.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" he asks, and I tell him I'm not sure. Anywhere. That I just have to get out of here, and he says he knows what I mean. His family waits upstairs in his brother's hospital room for the funeral home to arrive, to carry the body away. That's the last thing he needs to see. That's what he tells me. He shuffles from foot to foot, looking antsy and strung out, desperately in need of a good night's sleep.\n\nI ask him if he wants to go for coffee, and together we leave.\n\n* * *\n\nThat night, at home alone, I find the courage to open the journal. I caress its cover for a good fifteen minutes first, scared to death of what I might find inside. Maybe my father. Maybe not.\n\nI sit on the sofa in Mom's and my home in Albany Park. Because for now it's not yet on the market, though I know that soon it will be. I carefully pull the cover back. A flattened leaf slips from its inside and onto my lap\u2014red, with edges that fold up slightly at their edges\u2014as does a photograph, which falls facedown on my thighs. There's a name etched on the back. _Aaron_. I know what the picture is before I ever look. The photograph I found as a child. The one Mom hid away in this journal so that I couldn't find it again.\n\nMy heart breaks at the familiar sight of Mom's handwriting.\n\nMy eyes wade through the pages, tears blurring my vision. Making it hard to take in the words. But I do anyway, curled into a ball on the sofa, beneath a blanket Mom and I once shared, listening to her favorite records over and over again on repeat.\n\n_Aaron showed me the house today_ , it reads. _I'm in love with it already\u2014a cornflower blue cottage perched on a forty-five-foot cliff that overlooks the bay. Pine floors and whitewashed walls. A screened-in porch. A long wooden staircase that leads down to the dock at the water's edge where the Realtor promised majestic sunsets and fleets of sailboats floating by..._\neden\n\nNovember 10, _1997  \n_ Egg Harbor\n\nWhen I awoke this morning there was the most unpleasant sense in my stomach, as if I'd swallowed some sort of gastric acid in the middle of the night and there it sat, lost somewhere between my throat and my intestines, not sure which way to go. Up or down. There was an awful taste in my mouth, as if I'd drunk a vat of vinegar before bed, and when I hurried for a glass of water to wash it down, I wound up hurling the water and everything else inside my stomach into the kitchen sink and then stood, clutching the countertop, tasting vomit, trying hard to catch my breath. There was saliva on my chin and tears in my eyes.\n\nWhat did I eat last night?\n\nWhatever it was, it wasn't much. I haven't eaten much for weeks, having subjected myself to a life of seclusion since my brush with that bartender in the back seat of my car. I haven't left the house other than for the bare necessities, for fear of running into him on the street. My home is my prison. I've been too ashamed to go outside.\n\nAshamed for a whole slew of reasons, my promiscuity only being one of them.\n\nOvernight I had gone from being a respectable human being to a voyeur, a kidnapper, a misfit, a freak. The morning after my encounter with that bartender, I came home to find bruises on my neck from where he sucked my skin raw so that I couldn't leave the house until they healed, my skin returning to its usual shade of peach. Day and night I stared at those bruises, hating myself. What kind of person was I? What kind of person had I become?\n\nI remembered the feeling of little Olivia's hand in mine.\n\nHad that really happened, or was it only a dream?\n\nDid I nearly steal another woman's child?\n\nTwo women's children?\n\nThe bartender had taken off with my purse too, snatched it right from the front seat while I lay in the back in a daze, leaving the car door unlatched, the interior lights on so that by morning the battery was completely drained. I walked the three miles home with a swollen ankle, clutching the plackets of my shirt together since the buttons had snapped clear off at his hasty hand. I spent the morning after on the telephone with various credit card companies, reporting the cards stolen, despising myself for getting into this situation in the first place, for letting myself be a floozy and a victim. I avowed to pay off my debt and cut the new cards the credit card company would no doubt send me to shreds.\n\nI would never be a victim again.\n\nI'd never trust anyone again.\n\nI would never leave the house for fear I might try and pilfer someone else's child.\n\nAnd so I've become a recluse, plunged into a state of depression where I go unshowered for days at a time, oftentimes not getting out of bed from morning until night. I eat only when I need to, when the hunger pangs are more than I can bear. I've lost my job, no doubt, though no one told me as much, but one can't expect to stay employed when they haven't gone to work for thirty-odd days. I'm drowning in debt, I assume, though I haven't found the energy to drag myself to the mailbox to retrieve the bills, but I'm certain I must be because just last night when I flipped a light switch on, nothing happened. I jiggled the toggle up and down and when that failed, tried another light switch.\n\nIt appeared the electricity had been shut off for nonpayment.\n\nI went back to bed in the dark, planning to stay there for the rest of my life, which would be short as I swore off water and food too.\n\nBut then this morning the nausea wrenched me from bed, dragging me to the kitchen sink, where again and again I heaved, wondering what in the world was wrong with me.\n\nAnd it was a slow dawning then, daylight arriving at its own sweet time, one shaft of light at a time.\n\nFor thirty-odd days I had lain in bed since my encounter in the back seat of the car, and in those thirty-odd days, my period\u2014my ever-reliable period\u2014hadn't come.\n\nAnd now there was the nausea, the vomiting, and though every rational thought in my mind told me it wasn't true, it couldn't be true\u2014after all, I was infertile; there was no way I could get pregnant of my own accord, without Dr. Landry's menagerie of drugs and devices\u2014I knew instinctively that it was true.\n\nI was pregnant.\n\nTo say I was happy would be a lie.\n\nIt wasn't that I didn't savor the thought for a second or two, that I didn't relish the idea of carrying a child, of birthing a child, of being a mother. There was no greater desire in the whole entire world for me. It's all I wanted; it's the only thing that mattered in my life.\n\nBut deep inside I knew this child would never come to fruition. A fetus it was, but a baby it would never be. It would be as it was the last time with the heartbeat that was there and then not there, the gallons of blood. I would lose this baby as I had the last, and it would be my purgatory, my punishment, being forced to endure weeks, maybe a month, of pregnancy, knowing as always that it would end with blood.\n\nThat trusty, reliable blood.\n\nAnd so instead of being happy I stood there, back to the countertop, steeling myself for another miscarriage, to lose this baby like I had the last. Certainly the universe wouldn't let me keep this child. This, truly, was my penance, a gift that was given only to be taken away.\n\nJanuary 15, 1998 _  \n_Egg Harbor\n\nThe joke is on me it seems, for I've made it through the first trimester without a single drop of blood.\n\nThe baby has survived thirteen weeks in my wasteland of a womb.\n\nOnly by necessity have I left the house, taking a job at a local inn where I clean rooms once the guests leave. There's nothing glamorous about it. Just stripping beds of sheets and washing endless mountains of laundry, scrubbing someone else's excrement off a toilet seat. The perk of the job, however, is that I essentially speak to no one, working alone in an uninhabited guest room or the laundry room, dealing only with dust spores and mildew, as opposed to the human race.\n\nBut the work itself is backbreaking. And those first thirteen weeks of the pregnancy were anything but fun and fancy-free. The morning sickness, the lethargy nearly got the best of me until the empty hotels beds were hard to resist\u2014I envisioned myself sprawled out across them, wrapped up in one of the hotel's velour robes\u2014but, for as much as I wanted to, I didn't give in to the whim.\n\nOnly second to a baby, I needed this job more than anything.\n\nI haven't been to see Dr. Landry or another obstetrician, though there's a slight outgrowth to my midsection now, a bulge that makes my pants fit tightly so that I've taken to wearing sweatpants when I'm not stuffed into the uniform I wear for work, the polo shirt and the khaki pants, which I now leave unbuttoned so I don't flatten the baby.\n\nThe cottage is on the market again.\n\nI can no longer afford to pay for it. I haven't been able to for months so that I'm in debt to the bank and the foreclosure threats have begun to arrive. The sign went in today, stuck there\u2014forced into the nearly frozen ground\u2014by the very same Realtor who sold us the home.\n\nOh, what she must think, looking at me now. How I've changed.\n\nThe Realtor didn't look the least bit different to me, but I was changed, hardly the same woman I was when we first met, less than two years ago.\n\nAfter she left, I sat myself on the tree swing and swayed, moving back and forth through the nippy winter air. I did it until my fingers were numb and I could no longer feel the sturdy rope beneath my hands.\n\nThis was the closest my child would ever come to a ride on this swing.\n\nThe bay was empty now, not a boat anywhere, and snow flurries fell on the dock, collecting like powdered sugar. There were birds in the trees, winter birds, cardinals and chickadees, but everyone else was gone, sunning themselves on one of those tropical islands where I only dreamed I might one day go.\n\nThe greenhouse door was frozen shut.\n\nThe flowers in the flower bed were dead.\n\nI was still outside when I heard the doorbell ring, and thinking it was the Realtor\u2014that she had an offer _already!_ \u2014I left my post to see.\n\nBut it was not the Realtor.\n\nAaron stood before me, his chestnut hair getting peppered with soft powdery snow. His eyes had a forlorn look about them, sad. He wore a coat, his hands set in the pockets of it, and as I pulled the door to, he offered a simple smile.\n\n\"Aaron,\" I said.\n\n\"Eden.\"\n\nI couldn't bring myself to invite him inside, for the cottage was truly a mess, in a state of bedlam; I couldn't bring myself to show him what had become of our home. And so I stepped outside, onto the porch, my hair also getting peppered with snow. I pulled the door closed behind me. My feet were bare, covered only in socks, and against the concrete, they grew cold. Aaron, ever-obliging Aaron, ever-unselfish Aaron, ever-benevolent Aaron, shimmied at once out of his coat and wrapped it around my shoulders, saying to me, \"You'll catch your death out here,\" and beneath the weight of his hands\u2014which lingered there on my shoulders, gently liberating strands of hair that were trapped under the heavy coat, warm hands tucking them behind my ear, pausing there\u2014I softened like a stick of butter left on the table too long.\n\nWe said nothing.\n\nBut I could see in his eyes that I had been wrong. That Aaron wasn't healed as I'd believed him to be the day I saw him through the chophouse windows. That he was only taped back together that day, a skimpy job at best, for the tape had come undone, it had lost its stick, and Aaron was once again broken, standing before me now, mere fragments of himself.\n\nOh, what have I done?\n\nHe hunched to my height, bending his knees ever so. He cupped his hands around my face\u2014softly, delicately\u2014as if those hands cradled an heirloom crystal vase, and I could see in Aaron's eyes that what he held was, to him, something fragile, something magical, something irreplaceable and beyond compare.\n\nThat, to him, I was irreplaceable and beyond compare as I'd always been.\n\nThat, in all these months apart, that hadn't changed for him.\n\nHis lips felt warm as he pressed them to mine, and there was nothing rushed about it, nothing presumptuous or brusque. \"I want you back,\" he whispered into my ear.\n\n\"I need you back.\n\n\"I miss you, Eden.\n\n\"I am nothing,\" he said, \"without you.\"\n\nI am nothing.\n\nWas it just my imagination, or did the baby inside me kick?\n\nI stepped back from Aaron, tugging on the ends of my sweater to make sure that tiny bulge was concealed. Inside me the baby\u2014not Aaron's baby, but the baby of some man I would never know\u2014knew how to squint its eyes and to suck its thumb. Each day it grew bigger, arms and legs lengthening, organs and cells unfolding in my womb. It would come to be a person one day, a person perhaps with cavernous dimples and sparkling blue eyes, but never would I resent this child for the choices that I made.\n\n_Be careful what you wish for_ , __ the saying goes, but never would I harbor a grudge for all that I lost to have this baby. All that I will lose.\n\n_It might just come true._\n\nI would have done anything for a baby. This I know without a shred of doubt.\n\nThe lump in my throat was nearly impossible to speak past. Something inside my larynx had swollen to two times its size and my eyes burned with tears. As they began to fall, Aaron wiped them from my cheeks with the pad of a thumb and again pressed his lips to mine, saying that everything was okay, that everything would be fine. He held me close, stroking my hair, pressing my hands between his to keep them warm.\n\n\"Can I come home?\" he asked.\n\nAnd I thought what it would do to him if I told him about the baby.\n\nIt would take those broken pieces of Aaron that remained and sliver them completely. It would pulverize them so that all that was left of Aaron would be ashes and dust.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, feigning a smile, forcing the word past that knot. \"Yes.\"\n\nAaron's knees nearly collapsed from the relief of it. He kissed me again, this time with passion and zest, then reached his hand toward the doorknob to let us both inside.\n\nBut I stopped him.\n\n\"Not yet,\" I said. \"The house is a mess,\" I said. \"Complete bedlam. Let me clean it first,\" I told him, and though Aaron tried to shoo it off, to tell me it didn't matter, that we'd clean it together, I said no.\n\nThat I wanted it to be just right.\n\nThat I wanted it to be perfect for him.\n\nThat _I_ wanted to be perfect for him.\n\nAnd at this he relented, and an agreement was made.\n\nThe following morning he would return with all of his belongings, and we'd start over with a clean slate. We'd be Aaron and Eden again. Just us. Just Aaron and Eden.\n\nHe kissed me goodbye\u2014lips lingering on mine for what only I knew would be the last time\u2014and then he was gone, his car pulling out backward down the long, winding drive, disappearing through dark tree bark. The leaves of the trees were gone, as soon I would be.\n\nLife is full of regrets and this is only one of them.\n\nIt didn't take long to pack a bag.\n\nBy the time it was dark outside, I was heading south, south of Sturgeon Bay, south of Sheboygan, south of Milwaukee. Soon I would be living far away from here. My baby and me.\n\n_Dear Aaron,_\n\n_I had a dream last night. In it, I was being chased. I ran in slapdash circles all night long, sweating and panicked as people tend to do in dreams, and for the longest time I couldn't see the angry face of the man who was chasing me. It wasn't until later, when I finally awoke, delirious and frightened, that I realized it was you, which puzzled me a great deal because after all of the grief and the heartbreak I've put you through, you have never been anything but selfless toward me. Compassionate and kind._\n\n_You, of all people, would never hurt me._\n\n_I remembered the way it is with dreams sometimes, how they have a habit of being less literal and more metaphoric, and I thought that sometimes with dreams like this, it's not about who's chasing you, but what you're running from._\n\n_I've spent the last twenty years running from the past, Aaron, from all the horrible things I put you through. And now I'm dying of cancer. I'm going to die. But I can't stand the idea of leaving this world without explaining things to you first so that you'll understand. It's only right that you have the closure you deserve. Every single day for the past twenty years I thought about calling you, asking you to meet. But I knew I'd never be able to verbalize all that I was feeling, that I could never put it into intelligible words, nor could I bear the thought of looking you in the eye and admitting what I'd done. And so for now, my journal will have to suffice._\n\n_I have a child, Aaron, a daughter, named Jessie, who means everything to me\u2014and more. A mistake is what some might call it, but to me, she's perfection. Jessie has spent her entire life searching for her father. It should have been you._\n\n_With love,_\n\n_Eden_\n\n* * * * *\nacknowledgments\n\nFirst and foremost, thank you to my smart, savvy and thoughtful editor, Erika Imranyi, for always having faith in me and my books, and for helping take my rough drafts and transform them into something that shines. I'm so proud of the work we do together and know with confidence that my novels are far better after you've left your mark on them.\n\nThank you to my wonderful and always encouraging friend and literary agent, Rachael Dillon Fried, for having my back, for knowing just what to say when I'm in need of reassurance and for always seeing the positive in everything I do.\n\nThank you to everyone at Sanford Greenburger Associates, Harper Collins and Park Row Books, including my publicity team of Emer Flounders and Shara Alexander; Reka Rubin for sharing my novels with the world; Erin Craig and Sean Kapitain for another gorgeous cover design; the copy editors, proofreaders, sales and marketing teams, and all those who play a role in getting my story into the hands of readers. I couldn't do what I do without any of you. I'm forever grateful for your diligence, enthusiasm and support.\n\nTo my wonderful friends who do not (I promise!) provide the inspiration for my less savory characters, but always supply an abundance of encouragement throughout the process, thank you! To the booksellers, librarians, book bloggers and the media who read and recommend my novels to your customers, patrons and fans, you are amazing! And to my readers worldwide, you're the reason I keep writing.\n\nLastly, thank you to my parents, Lee and Ellen; my sisters, Michelle and Sara; the entire Kubica, Kyrychenko, Shemanek and Kahlenberg families; to my husband, Pete, and our children, Addison and Aidan; and to Holly, who kept me company while I wrote\u2014there will always be a spot for you by my side.\nISBN-13: 9781488023576\n\nWhen the Lights Go Out\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2018 by Mary Kyrychenko\n\nAll rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5H 4E3, Canada.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.\n\n\u00ae and \u2122 are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with \u00ae are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.\n\nwww.Harlequin.com\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n## The Icarus Syndrome\n\nA History of American Hubris\n\n## Peter Beinart\n\nTo Ezra and Naomi\n\n## Contents\n\nIntroduction\n\nPart I: The Hubris of Reason\n\nChapter 1 A Scientific Peace\n\nChapter 2 The Frightening Dwarf\n\nChapter 3 Twice-Born\n\nChapter 4 I Didn't Say It Was Good\n\nPart II: The Hubris of Toughness\n\nChapter 5 The Murder of Sheep\n\nChapter 6 The Problem with Men\n\nChapter 7 Saving Sarkhan\n\nChapter 8 Things Are in the Saddle\n\nChapter 9 Liberation\n\nChapter 10 The Scold\n\nChapter 11 Fighting with Rabbits\n\nChapter 12 If There Is a Bear?\n\nPart III: The Hubris of Dominance\n\nChapter 13 Nothing Is Consummated\n\nChapter 14 Fukuyama's Escalator\n\nChapter 15 Fathers and Sons\n\nChapter 16 Small Ball\n\nChapter 17 The Opportunity\n\nChapter 18 The Romantic Bully\n\nChapter 19 I'm Delighted to See Mr. Bourne\n\nConclusion The Beautiful Lie\n\nNotes\n\nSearchable Terms\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nAbout the Author\n\nCredits\n\nCopyright\n\nAbout the Publisher\n\n## INTRODUCTION\n\n\"If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject.\"\n\n\u2014WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER\n\nA story: the reason I wrote this book. I was sitting at a restaurant on New York's Upper East Side in early 2006, squeezed into a corner table next to an elderly, elfin man sipping a martini. He was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; I was petrified. I'd hero-worshipped the man since high school, when I developed a bout of Kennedy mania not uncommon among young liberals in Reagan-era Boston. I'd consumed his memoir of the Kennedy White House, and his cold war liberal manifesto, The Vital Center, and stacks of his op-eds. I didn't really understand why he was having lunch with me, and as far as I could tell, none of my halting efforts at flattery and political insight were validating his decision. He mostly wanted to gossip, but even there, I was out of my depth.\n\nThen his tone changed: \"Why did your generation support this war?\" I began to stammer, something along the lines of \"Well, of course, not everyone did; they weren't all as dumb as me.\" No laughter. \"But yes, perhaps there was something in our experience that, on average...\" Then he spilled his martini, and for the first time looked frail. Waiters swarmed; I was off the hook. We never spoke again. Less than a year later, he died.\n\nBut as one often does after flubbing a pregnant moment, I kept going over the scene in my mind, trying to formulate an answer worthy of the question and the questioner, something that convinced him I wasn't a fool. His assumption was right: Young people had supported the Iraq invasion at higher rates than their elders. According to an October 2002 Pew Research Center poll, Democrats under the age of thirty were almost as pro-war as Republicans over the age of sixty-five. A survey of bloggers, pundits, and op-ed writers revealed the same generational skew. And the reason, the culprit...suddenly it hit me: One of the culprits was him!\n\nIt was Schlesinger, after all, who had written in January 1991 that the Gulf War \"will most likely be bloody and protracted,\" that it \"will be the most unnecessary war in American history, and it may well cause the gravest damage to the vital interests of the republic.\" He may not have remembered that op-ed, but I did. I was a sophomore in college then, a dove, a worshipper of Arthur Schlesinger. On the eve of the first major war of my adult life, I was looking for guidance, and everywhere I looked, from my professors on up, the guidance was: Don't do it. Remember Vietnam. Tremble when you contemplate war. And so I trembled, and war came, and it was neither protracted nor bloody, at least for our side. In fact, the Kuwaitis greeted us as liberators, and it turned out that Saddam Hussein had been hiding a crash nuclear program, which might have reached fruition had he not been thrashed\u2014all of which made me tremble, in retrospect, about what might have happened had we not gone to war.\n\nThen came Bosnia. In 1993, with Bill Clinton trying halfheartedly to convince America's European allies to support air strikes against the Serb army that was raping and murdering Bosnia's Muslims, Schlesinger warned that \"the arguments used today for intervention in Bosnia have disquieting echoes of the arguments used 30 years ago for intervention in Vietnam.\" Vietnam! The word made me shiver. But two years later, Clinton did launch air strikes, and then he sent peacekeepers, and there was no quagmire. On the contrary, the rapes and murders stopped. The barbed wire from the concentration camps came down.\n\nFinally, in November 2001, early in the Afghan War, my hero put pen to paper yet again, this time insisting that the Bush administration's effort to depose the Taliban was proving futile. \"Perhaps,\" he wrote, \"they should have reflected on Vietnam.\" But by now I was sick of reflecting on it. It had never been my war, after all. It was a bogeyman, conjured by well-meaning but patronizing elders\u2014in the way a grandparent who had witnessed the Depression might warn against investing too heavily in stocks. By 2003, when America invaded Iraq, my generation had witnessed its own history, and it was not a history that made one tremble at the prospect of war. I was tired of hearing people cry wolf. Vietnam\u2014just hearing it invoked in a foreign policy debate made me roll my eyes.\n\nSo I had my answer to Schlesinger's question. And I imagined\u2014in that puffed-up way you imagine when you're on a pedestal speaking to yourself\u2014that he would have been unsettled. And then I had another thought, which unsettled me: My answer wouldn't have surprised him a bit. He had gone through the same process himself. As a college student in the late 1930s, he too had heard his elders invoke a traumatic war\u2014World War I\u2014as a reason not to fight again. At first he believed them, clinging to isolationism until Nazi troops reached French soil. But then he saw his elders proved wrong: For America, World War II was not a disaster; it was a triumph. And after the war, the triumphs continued. If 1989 through 2003 were our golden years, 1945 through 1965 were his. He too had been a child of the age of victory. And then Vietnam came, and he tasted tragedy, and politically he was never the same.\n\nNow history's wheel had turned again. Another generation\u2014mine\u2014had seen so much go right that we had difficulty imagining anything going wrong, and so many of us grew more and more emboldened until a war did go hideously wrong. Maybe there was an argument here about cycles\u2014Schlesinger loved cycles\u2014cycles of success leading to hubris leading to tragedy, leading, perhaps, to wisdom. Hubris. The word stuck in my brain.\n\nIt comes from the ancient Greeks, who defined it as insolence toward the gods. In Aeschylus's play Agamemnon, the great warrior, fresh from his triumph at Troy, strides upon a lush purple robe, even though he knows that purple symbolizes divine power. Angered, the gods withdraw their protection, and Agamemnon's vengeful wife hacks him to death in the bath. In another Aeschylus drama, The Persians, a young king, Xerxes, inherits a mighty empire from his father, Darius. From the start, Xerxes is tormented by feelings of inferiority, constantly reminded that Darius's empire \"was won at spearpoint \/ while he [Xerxes] not half the man \/ secretly played toy spears at home \/ and added nothing \/ to inherited prosperity.\" Determined to surpass his father's accomplishments, and emboldened by Persia's military might, he traverses the holy Bosporus, a body of water humans are not supposed to cross. Once again the gods retract their favor, and Persia's enemies massacre Xerxes' forces. Upon learning the news, Darius's spirit rises from the grave to bemoan \"my son in his ignorance \/ his reckless youth.... Mere man that he is \/ he thought, but not on good advice \/ he'd overrule all gods.\"\n\nIn Greek literature, people sometimes create their own hubris: Like Agamemnon, they win epic triumphs and thus decide they are more than human. And sometimes, like Xerxes, they inherit their hubris from the triumphs of generations past. Take the legend of Icarus. Father and son are trapped on the island of Crete. But Daedalus, a resourceful man, builds wings of feathers and wax. Don't fly too low, he cautions his son, a lighthearted youth named Icarus, or too high: \"Keep to a middle range if you can, and don't try to show off.\" At first, Icarus\u2014heeding his father's warning\u2014flies cautiously. But in his exhilaration, he gradually forgets Daedalus's words. As the Roman poet Ovid recounts the story, \"the youngster's initial fears have been mostly calmed. His confidence now has developed. He wonders what he can do with this splendid toy, what limits there are to his father's invention. He flaps his wings and rises higher\u2014but nothing bad happens. He figures he still has plenty of margin and rises higher still.\" Watching from earth, observers assume that this winged creature must be a god. \"It's exciting, wonderful fun, as he soars and wheels, but he doesn't notice the wax of his wings is melting and feathers are falling out.\" He has flown too near the sun. The wings crumble, revealing him to be mortal after all. And he plunges to his death, into the sea.\n\nThere's nothing intrinsically American about hubris. As Aeschylus and Ovid testify, it's a vice that long predates us. But since it's an affliction born from success, we've been especially prone. Over the last one hundred years, no world power has come close to matching our run of good fortune. When your cities are bombed and your lands are plundered and your government is toppled and your empire dissolves\u2014which is what happened, in varying degrees, to America's major competitors during the twentieth century\u2014you have lots of problems, but hubris is no longer one of them. We, on the other hand, who did much of the bombing and toppling and dissolving, have as a result sometimes been tempted to believe\u2014to paraphrase the campaign slogan of a certain Texas governor turned president\u2014that whatever Americans can dream, Americans can do. A rousing sentiment, but dangerous, the kind of thing that can get you into trouble with the gods.\n\nThis book is about American hubris, American tragedy, and the search for American wisdom. It's about three moments in the last century when a group of leaders and thinkers found themselves in possession of wings. In each case, the Icarus generations flapped gently at first, unsure how much weight the contraptions could bear. But the contraptions worked marvelously, and so people gradually forgot that they were mere human creations, finite and fragile. Politicians and intellectuals took ideas that had proved successful in certain, limited circumstances and expanded them into grand doctrines, applicable always and everywhere. They took military, economic, and ideological resources that had proved remarkably potent, and imagined that they made America omnipotent.\n\nIn critical ways, each generation was different. Woodrow Wilson and the pro-war progressives were more like Agamemnon; they mostly generated rather than inherited their hubris. Lyndon Johnson and the Camelot intellectuals of the 1960s, by contrast, and George W. Bush and the post\u2013cold war conservatives, were more like Xerxes and Icarus: eager to surpass the accomplishments of the Daedalus generations that came before. The ideas were different, too. Wilson succumbed to the hubris of reason: the belief that America was wise and powerful enough to turn the jungle of international affairs into a garden. Johnson and the Camelot intellectuals (including, for a time, Arthur Schlesinger) fell in love with toughness: the idea that through unyielding force America could halt communism's march anywhere in the world. George W. Bush and his conservative supporters (with an assist from liberal hawks like me) grew entranced by the idea of dominance: the belief that America could make itself master of every important region on earth.\n\nIn each case, politicians and intellectuals built on what came before, pushing ideas further and further, until, like a swelled balloon, they burst. The problem wasn't the ideas themselves; in limited form, they had often served the nation well. In fact, ironically enough, they had emerged partly as correctives to the hubris of a prior age, before inflating themselves. It is tempting, in the wake of foreign policy disaster, to damn an entire intellectual tradition for what it ultimately wrought. Thus, since Iraq, some liberals have projected back into history a unified conservative foreign policy lineage, always pregnant with the sins that the Bush administration would bring forth into the world. But I've grown distrustful of this way of thinking, which imagines that there are stained bloodlines and pure ones, and grown more partial to Reinhold Niebuhr's suggestion that in foreign policy, as in life, evil often grows from unchecked good. Harry Truman's efforts to contain communism in Europe were wise, even though they helped plow the ideological soil for Vietnam. Bush the father was right to fight the Gulf War, even though it helped breed the confidence that led his son to overthrow Saddam. Hubris is not the possession of any one party or intellectual tradition; it is any intellectual tradition taken too far. And foreign policy wisdom sometimes consists of understanding that the very conceptual seedlings you must plant now can, if allowed to grow wild, ravage the garden.\n\nBut how do you know when the former sapling, which once bore tasty fruit, is starting to strangle the other plants? In Greek literature, the gods don't tell you. Humans are simply expected to know. And to make matters even trickier, excessive ambition is not the only human pitfall; insufficient ambition can be deadly, too. Daedalus didn't just warn Icarus not to fly too high; he also warned him not to fly too low. In fact, Daedalus was, in his way, quite a risk-taker himself. He believed that he and his son could fly, which in itself might have been considered a transgression against the divine. The Greeks could have spun a legend that culminated with his death as well, thus implying that he should have remained earthbound and imprisoned. But they didn't, even though they had no evidence that humans could fly. They imagined it, and because of human ambition, now we can.\n\nSo where does ambition end and hubris begin? There's no formula for answering that. In fact, the belief that you've discovered a formula that works in all situations is itself a sign that you've crossed the line. To some degree, foreign policy is all about deciding in which direction you'd rather be wrong. Are you so intent on making sure America doesn't fly too high that you oppose not only invading Iraq, but saving Kuwait? Are you so determined to avoid flying too low that you support not merely World War II but Vietnam? Barely anyone will be right every time, because the gods don't speak to us. Or, as Warren Buffett has said about investing in a bull market, it's like Cinderella at the ball. She knows that if she stays too late her chariot will turn into a pumpkin and her gown will turn to rags. But she doesn't want to leave too early and miss meeting Prince Charming. The problem is that there are no clocks on the wall.\n\nNo clocks, but there are warning signs, the kind that someone with lots of experience at balls might notice. One warning sign is overconfidence: a political climate in which influential people assume that the war's outcome is preordained; that because of America's military prowess or economic resources or ideological appeal, we cannot possibly lose. When influential Americans talk that way, it's usually because America has not lost in a long time. We're all prisoners of analogy, and people tend to imagine that the future will be like the immediate past: that Vietnam will be like Korea or World War II; that Iraq will be like the Gulf War or the initial phase of Afghanistan. But that reliance on analogy often blinds us to the ways in which, rather than replicating the successes of the past, we are reaching beyond them, taking on more risk. We think we are running on a treadmill when we are actually ascending a ladder.\n\nIf overconfidence is one danger sign, unilateralism is another. France, Canada, and Britain, which had fought alongside the United States in World War II and Korea, refused to join us in Vietnam. France, Canada, and Germany, which had supported the United States in the Gulf War, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, opposed invading Iraq. The problem with failing to convince other countries\u2014and particularly the Western democracies that broadly share our values and interests\u2014to back us in war is not necessarily that we need their help to win. (These days, given the vast gap between our military capacity and theirs, they may be as much a burden as a help.) The problem is that their unwillingness to back us may be evidence that winning is impossible. What we need, in other words, is not our allies' tanks but their judgment. It's like a patient contemplating a high-risk medical procedure: You may not need several doctors to perform the operation, but you want several doctors to confirm that the operation can be successfully performed at all.\n\nThe sober judgment of allies is especially important for a nation intoxicated with success. (As the old saying goes, when three friends say you're drunk, lie down.) Americans sometimes dismiss our European allies as defeatist, so burdened by their tragic histories and so enfeebled by their military weakness that they instinctively choose retreat over confrontation. But it is precisely because they have been battered by history that they may be able to spot hubris when we, because of our more triumphant experience, cannot. Before Vietnam, and again before Iraq, French leaders urged the United States to learn from France's imperial misfortunes in Southeast Asia and the Arab world. But Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush scoffed at the idea that we had anything to learn. The French, after all, were history's losers. We were its winners. They were mere mortals; we were America.\n\nA third flashing light is excessive fear. Even when America's leaders fly nearest the sun, they generally insist that they are merely taking defensive measures against grave threats. Hubris rarely speaks its name. And to some extent, those leaders are right: Foreign threats usually have something to do with America's decision to launch a war. Woodrow Wilson would not have taken America into World War I just because he believed he could reorder world politics; German subs were sinking our ships. The United States would not have fought the Vietnam War had Ho Chi Minh not been a communist, no matter how confident we were of our military might. But the problem with explaining America's wars solely as a response to threats is that our threat perceptions vary wildly over time. Things we take in stride at one moment terrify us at another. In 1939, few American politicians believed that a Nazi takeover of Warsaw constituted a grave danger to the United States. By 1965, many believed we couldn't live with a North Vietnamese takeover of Saigon. In the 1980s, Americans lived peacefully, albeit anxiously, with thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads pointed our way. By 2003, many Washington commentators claimed that even Iraqi biological or chemical weapons put us in mortal peril. How threatened American policymakers feel is often a function of how much power they have. The more confident our leaders and thinkers become about the hammer of American force, the more likely they are to find nails.\n\nThat's the problem with explaining Iraq merely as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as the Bush administration did. Obviously, 9\/11 mattered: Without it, we would not have sent more than one hundred thousand U.S. troops into Iraq. But had 9\/11 occurred in 1979 or 1985 or 1993, moments when America was less confident that its military was unstoppable, its economic resources plentiful and its ideals universal, it is unlikely that we would have responded by launching two distant wars in short succession, something the United States had never done in its entire history. In fact, even in 2002, had the war in Afghanistan not initially gone well, thus further buoying the Bush administration's self-confidence, America probably would not have invaded Iraq. And had Bush officials doubted that they could successfully invade and remake Iraq, they probably would not have declared Saddam an urgent and intolerable threat. America's leaders tend not to tell us we are in grave danger unless they think they can do something about it.\n\nThis is not to say it's always a mistake for the United States to wage war in places it once considered irrelevant. Over the course of the last century, as America has risen to global power, we have naturally come to worry about regions of the world to which we previously gave little thought. But when we allow our fears to swell so dramatically that quelling them would require virtually unlimited quantities of money and blood, something has gone wrong. Once Lyndon Johnson declared a communist takeover in backward and remote Vietnam to be a grave threat to the United States, then a communist takeover in virtually any country constituted a grave threat. Once the Bush administration said America was in mortal danger because Saddam was supporting terrorism (not even terrorism against the United States, just terrorism) and seeking weapons of mass destruction, America was suddenly in mortal danger from Iran, North Korea, Syria, and perhaps Pakistan, too.\n\nA wise foreign policy starts with the recognition that since America's power is limited, we must limit our enemies. That's why Franklin Roosevelt hugged Stalin close until the Soviet Union had helped us defeat Nazi Germany, and why Richard Nixon opened relations with China, so the United States wasn't taking on Moscow and Beijing at the same time. By contrast, when America's leaders outline doctrines that require us to confront long lists of movements and regimes simultaneously, it's a sign that we've lost the capacity to prioritize. And that, in turn, is a sign that we think we are so powerful that we don't need to prioritize. And that, in turn, is a sign that we're flying too high.\n\nThese warning signs are a starting point. But in and of themselves, they are too crude. Because people are not particles, history is not physics. History does contain cycles\u2014attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes that rhyme\u2014but every moment is also unique and every event has multiple causes. Telling the story of the last century of American foreign policy as cycles of success leading to hubris leading to tragedy leading to wisdom, and then leading to more success, is like looking at a page covered with tiny, fuzzy dots and graphing the places they rise and fall. Reality is far messier than your smooth lines suggest. Others can map the evidence a different way.\n\nFor policymakers, the challenge is even tougher: to predict, on the basis of the dots you've already seen, where the next ones will fall. To do that well requires a trained eye. Just as a skilled radiologist can see patterns on an X-ray that may elude a medical student, the people who make foreign policy must draw meaning from a hazy landscape. In this effort, two kinds of knowledge can help. The first is a broad knowledge of history: not just American history, but the history of other great powers that in their day felt history's wind at their backs. This knowledge can provide a wider menu of analogies than the ones offered by America's recent past. Maybe Vietnam had more in common with the Spanish-American War than with Korea? Maybe our invasion of Iraq was more like Napoleon's invasion of Egypt than like the Gulf War? That American hawks relentlessly compare our adversaries to Hitler, and American doves relentlessly compare our wars to Vietnam, suggests that for much of our political class, the menu of available historical analogies is depressingly small.\n\nIf a broad sense of history can help policymakers navigate the fog, so can an intimate feel for one specific place. It is ironic that in recent years many American foreign policy commentators and practitioners, hoping to be the next George Kennan, have tried to formulate a universal foreign policy doctrine for the post\u2013cold war, or post-9\/11, age. In reality, Kennan, like William Graham Sumner, hated and feared universal doctrines. And after he saw containment swelling into one, starting in the late 1940s, he spent the next four decades screaming himself hoarse in opposition. What Kennan believed in, and what his writing on the Soviet Union exemplified, was the value of deep, local knowledge. By the time he wrote his famous \"Long Telegram\" from Moscow in February 1946, Kennan was on his third Russian posting and had also served in Riga and Tallinn, on Russia's northwest border. He spoke formal Russian better than Stalin (whose native language was Georgian), was writing a biography of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, and would later author a prizewinning account of American foreign policy during the Russian Revolution. It was his profound understanding not only of Russia's politics but of its history and culture that allowed Kennan to conceive of containment, a strategy he developed not for dealing with \"communism\"\u2014an abstraction he thought had little foreign policy meaning in and of itself\u2014but for dealing with one communist regime at one moment in time.\n\nIn post\u2013World War II America, where many saw the Soviet Union through the prism of America's last totalitarian foe, Nazi Germany, Kennan showed why the present was unlike the past; why Stalin, unlike Hitler, could be stopped by measures short of war. Like Daedalus, he crafted a set of conceptual wings appropriate to the specific problem at hand. And because he had built the wings, he could see when they were starting to melt.\n\nIt is no coincidence that a generation later, when the Johnson administration waded into its Indochinese bog, there were no high-level policymakers whose knowledge of Vietnam remotely rivaled Kennan's knowledge of Russia. On the contrary, America's best Asia specialists\u2014people like Kennan's friend John Paton Davies\u2014had been hounded from government by Joseph McCarthy, in part for daring to suggest that Asia's communist parties might not be clones of their Soviet counterparts. Similarly, there were no high-level policymakers in the Bush administration whose knowledge of Iraq approached the Kennan standard, either. Partly as a result, after 9\/11, Bush and his supporters implied that all Middle Eastern terrorist movements and terror-supporting regimes were basically the same. They lumped together Iraq, Iran, Syria, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Taliban into a single ideological construct called \"jihadist terrorism\" or \"Islamofascism\" and then outlined a set of responses\u2014preventive war and coercive regime change\u2014that they proudly equated with containment. The irony was that the Bush administration's one-size-fits-all approach to fighting terrorism was like containment: not Kennan's narrowly tailored strategy for containing Stalin's U.S.S.R., but Johnson's hubristic effort to contain communism everywhere in the world.\n\nHaving implied that national differences were irrelevant, the Bush administration then proceeded to appoint men too ignorant to spot them anyway. In May 2003, in the crucial first months after the overthrow of Saddam, Bush sent a man to run Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, who had never before been posted to the Arab world. To grasp the intellectual chasm between American foreign policy toward the U.S.S.R. in 1946 and American foreign policy toward Iraq in 2003, one need only try to envision Bremer writing a biography of an Iraqi writer, or, for that matter, being able to name one.\n\nIn important ways, America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq echo the Icarus tale. But they differ in one crucial respect: Icarus dies from his hubris; America does not. In this sense, we are more like Xerxes in The Persians, who survives the consequences of his arrogance and returns home in rags. Tormented by the chorus, which demands an accounting for all the great soldiers who now lie dead, Xerxes at first wallows in self-pity. He blames the gods; he declares himself cursed; he says he wishes he too had died. But then he puts on a new robe, and rather than suffering the chorus' abuse, he begins to direct its actions. \"We have been shattered by such a fate,\" he declares, but then tells the wailers to go home and prepare for the future.\n\nAs the play ends, there is at least the hint that although Xerxes has been transformed by tragedy, he has not in fact been shattered by it. He no longer feels sorry for himself. He can still lead his people. He turns their attention to the possibilities of a new day. Robert Kennedy, who like Arthur Schlesinger was transformed by Vietnam, and who late in life developed a fascination with the Greeks, once said that \"tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.\" If the last few years have acquainted a new American generation with tragedy and made us less inclined to believe that the course of history\u2014or the power of the gods\u2014is on America's side, we should see that as a cause not for despair, but for hope. For it is only when we abandon our false innocence and unearned pride that we can look around at the bits of feathers and wax that still surround us, and begin, carefully, to build wings.\n\n## PART I\n\n## THE HUBRIS OF REASON\n\n## CHAPTER ONE\n\n## A SCIENTIFIC PEACE\n\nWoodrow Wilson had very few friends, and that bothered him. People considered him \"cold and removed,\" he groused. He wished journalists would write about his lighter side\u2014his love of baseball, his gift for mimicry, his flair for limericks\u2014but instead they depicted him as a bloodless \"thinking machine.\" He longed for a nickname. Perhaps if he had kept his birth name, Thomas, he mused, people would call him \"Tommy\" and thus find him more approachable. Theodore Roosevelt was known as \"Teddy,\" and no one ever called him cold and removed.\n\nThe problem was that while Wilson loved the idea of friends, he wasn't very friendly up close. One reporter compared his handshake to \"a ten-cent mackerel in brown paper.\" A Baltimore ward leader said the president \"gives me the creeps. The time I met him, he said something to me, and I didn't know whether God or him was talking.\" Wilson knew his reputation as aloof was partly his own fault. \"I have a sense of power in dealing with men collectively which I do not feel always in dealing with them singly,\" he acknowledged, which may have had something to do with the fact that when he dealt with them singly, they often talked back.\n\nThere was one big exception, a genuine, honest-to-goodness presidential friend: Colonel Edward House. The two men took drives together, gossiped in their nightgowns, read poetry aloud to one another, shared secrets of their love lives. House, remarked Wilson, \"is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.\"\n\nFor Wilson, House had three endearing characteristics. First, he shared the president's background, having been raised in the genteel South. Second, he was a world-class sycophant. Third, he did the things that Wilson needed done but didn't like doing himself. The \"Colonel\" was not actually a military man at all; he was a fixer, highly skilled in the dark arts of patronage, conspiracy, and intimidation. \"He could walk on dry leaves,\" remarked Oklahoma Senator Thomas Gore, \"and make no more noise than a tiger.\" He always made you feel \"intimate,\" noted another observer, \"even when he was cutting your throat.\"\n\nWoodrow Wilson, a politician with little patience for the more corporeal elements of his craft, needed someone like that, and he rewarded House with both affection and power. For a long spell in the middle of Wilson's presidency, House wielded more influence over American foreign policy than the secretary of state and the secretary of war combined. He was a kind of ambassador without portfolio: Wilson's emissary to the actually existing human race.\n\nWalter Lippmann also seduced the powerful, but he did it through the front door. Disappointed by his own father, he acquired others, becoming the brilliant son that great men felt they deserved. At nineteen, as a Harvard junior, he took weekly tea with one world-renowned philosopher, William James, and gossiped over dinner with another, George Santayana. After graduating, he apprenticed for the famed muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens. His first book, written at age twenty-three, drew praise from Sigmund Freud. After his second, published the following year, Theodore Roosevelt declared him \"the most brilliant young man of his age in the United States.\" By 1916, at age twenty-seven, he was dining at the White House, and his editorials for a new progressive journal, the New Republic, were finding their way into Wilson's speeches. In the spring of 1917, while his contemporaries were being shipped across the Atlantic to the charnel house of World War I, he procured a draft exemption from Secretary of War Newton Baker, who was accumulating whiz kid assistants. Then, a few months later, as a damp Washington summer gave way to a frigid fall, Baker called Lippmann into his office. Colonel House wanted to meet him outside.\n\nThe fixer and the wunderkind began to walk, past Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House, and down Seventeenth Street toward the Potomac. In the distance spread the marshland that would become the National Mall, and beyond that the partially completed Lincoln Memorial, its white columns already standing, but empty of the seated figure who would reside within. As they walked, House described a project of the most fearsome secrecy. America had been at war for only six months, but already Wilson was designing a peace to redeem the slaughter. Three million Russians and five million Germans were either wounded or dead. In France, four thousand villages had simply ceased to exist. The European state system, long anchored by four vast overland empires, based in Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, and Istanbul, was imploding. Like most Americans, Wilson had hoped against hope that the United States could escape the widening gyre. He had resisted fierce pressure to join the fray, even after hundreds of U.S. civilians were drowned by German subs. On the night he finally asked Congress to declare war, he returned to the White House and wept. But now that America had joined the battle, Wilson was determined to build a new world on the ruins of the old, to ensure that barbarism never overthrew civilization again.\n\nWhen the slaughter stopped, the world would need a new map, which gave every nation the territory it deserved and not an inch more. And it would need laws, so that international affairs no longer followed the law of the jungle. For Wilson, it fell to America\u2014which he considered the sole disinterested combatant, the only nation that wanted nothing out of the war save that it not happen again\u2014to draw up the plans. And House was tapping the country's best minds for the task. He told Lippmann to join a group of experts working from a secret office in the New York Public Library. To disguise the project's import, they would call it simply \"the Inquiry.\" From the ashes of war they would construct what House called a \"scientific peace.\"\n\nA scientific peace. The concept came straight from the belly of the progressive movement. Progressivism, historians insist, was not one thing. It was a swarm of impulses and interests, often colliding with each other. But if progressivism was an ideological cacophony, one note cut through the din: faith in human reason. This faith predated World War I. Indeed, it grew from progressivism's success in remaking the United States. Surveying their country at the dawn of the twentieth century, many progressives had seen a society hurtling toward a second civil war. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, they believed, were dividing the nation against itself, making it a battlefield of hostile tribes\u2014business versus labor, urban versus rural, immigrant versus native-born\u2014each trying to smash each other into submission, each trampling democracy along the way. It was up to government to impose order, not through brute force\u2014then it would be just another selfish tribe\u2014but through the force of reason. Government would provide answers to society's conflicts: answers so disinterested, so rational, so self-evidently fair that the tribes would lay down their arms. It was no accident that many progressives saw a scientific peace as the answer to Europe's war. For close to two decades, they had been fashioning a scientific peace inside the United States.\n\nRational, disinterested policies required rational, disinterested policymakers: experts. And experts occupied a hallowed place in the progressive mind. Lippmann's boss at the New Republic, Herbert Croly, a homely, taciturn man\u2014alternately likened to a yogi and a crab\u2014suggested entrusting them with a fourth branch of government. The eccentric Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen proposed handing them control over the economy. And no one gave the concept grander expression than House himself. Five years earlier he had anonymously published a strange little novel, in which a young \"mastermind\" named Philip Dru, watching the United States sink into civil war, seizes power and declares himself \"Administrator of the Republic.\" He replaces Congress with a commission of five expert lawyers who decree all the high-minded reforms that selfish interests have long stymied. With order and reason thus enthroned in the United States, Dru sails off into the Pacific with his bride, determined to bring a scientific peace to the world beyond America's shores.\n\nPhilip Dru: Administrator was a lousy book, but a revealing one. Dru is not merely an expert. He is also an inspirational leader, able to rally the public to his cause. And as a great leader, he is largely an educator. While they revered experts, the progressives knew it took leaders to convince\u2014to educate\u2014the public to accept their conclusions. \"The nation,\" wrote Croly, \"like the individual, must go to school.\" And if the nation was a schoolhouse, the president was its schoolmaster. It was no coincidence that John Dewey, progressivism's most influential democratic theorist, was also a philosopher of education. To make democracy work, leaders had to educate Americans to embrace\u2014indeed, to demand\u2014the rational answers formulated on high.\n\nThis, then, was the essential progressive equation: Objective experts plus inspiring leaders plus educated citizens equal a society governed by reason, not force. And underlying it all was the most basic faith of all: in humanity itself. Against the late-nineteenth-century Social Darwinists who declared people fundamentally selfish, progressive thinkers like Dewey, Veblen, and the historian Charles Beard insisted that they were naturally generous and cooperative; it was the evil of anarchic capitalism that made them act like beasts. Against the theologians who saw humanity forever maimed by original sin, Walter Rauschenbusch and the champions of Social Gospel Christianity insisted that evil resided in the world, not in man.\n\nProgressivism's great discovery, declared the historian Christopher Lasch, was the \"lost innocence of the race.\" Progress was possible because deep inside, people were better\u2014much better\u2014than the world in which they lived. It was a stirring faith, nurtured by the progressive movement's success in bringing reason and order to the United States. And at a fevered moment at the height of World War I, after the planet itself had erupted in civil war, Woodrow Wilson decided to export it\u2014via the sword\u2014to the entire world. For a glittering constellation of American intellectuals, it was the crusade of a lifetime, a high-water mark of American optimism that would not be reached again until our own time. And it was shot through with hubris, hubris that America could make politics between nations resemble politics between Americans, hubris that the progressives could build a world governed by reason when, as it turned out, they weren't always that reasonable themselves. It was a hubris from which America would not fully recover until Wilson and House were dead, Lippmann was a weary, humbled man, and the world had endured more catastrophe than their innocent minds could even imagine in the brisk and intoxicating fall of 1917.\n\nBy the time House dispatched Lippmann to help draft a progressive charter for the postwar world, progressivism had already transformed public life in the United States. And it was because of their success rationalizing government at home that reformers dared imagine they could rationalize the entire globe. Until 1900, the tribes\u2014especially the mega-corporations, or \"trusts,\" which had amassed vast wealth since the Civil War\u2014had dominated the impotent, corrupt federal government. But as the new century dawned, impartial experts and heroic leaders began to seize command.\n\nThey didn't come much more heroic than Theodore Roosevelt. A war hero, a boxer, a ferocious reader with a photographic memory, and a big-game hunter who did his own taxidermy, America's twenty-sixth president was also the author of a four-volume history of the American West; biographies of Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Hart Benton, and Oliver Cromwell; the standard work on the Naval War of 1812; a book on child rearing; and several on the birds of New York state. As deputy sheriff of Medora, North Dakota, in the 1880s, he had captured three men who tried to steal his boat, and guarded them single-handedly for forty hours, keeping himself awake by reading Tolstoy.\n\nRoosevelt inaugurated the progressive age. In May 1902, 150,000 soot-covered men emerged from deep inside the earth in eastern Pennsylvania. They were anthracite coal miners, men at constant risk of suffocation, asphyxiation, or explosion, and they were on strike in pursuit of an eight-hour workday, a 20 percent wage hike, and recognition of their union. Past strikes had usually been resolved with buckshot, as the trusts and their government lackeys bloodied workers into submission. But Roosevelt didn't want a class war; he wanted a scientific peace, a settlement based on reason, not force. So he created what would become the quintessential progressive entity: an expert commission. Two engineers, a business specialist, a union leader, a judge, a priest, and the federal commissioner of labor heard testimony from 558 witnesses. They compiled statistics on the frequency of mine accidents, the quality of company-sponsored medical care, and the number of children working underground. In the end they gave the miners almost exactly half of what they asked for, along with a permanent commission to settle future disputes\u2014all without anyone getting shot.\n\nUsing the coal settlement as a model, Roosevelt then proposed a Bureau of Corporations to gather data on business practices, and a Bureau of Labor to do the same for working conditions. When conservative senators balked, he took his case to the people, telling cheering crowds that selfish corporations must submit to rational control. In 1906, he signed the Hepburn Act, which empowered another group of experts\u2014the Interstate Commerce Commission\u2014to hold hearings on railroad pricing, and in case of abuse, set rates itself. Meanwhile, Upton Sinclair's bestseller about the revolting conditions in Chicago packing houses, The Jungle, was sparking a furor over the safety of American meat. Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, then sent government investigators to confirm his findings. When they did, Roosevelt muscled through the Meat Inspection Act, which authorized Agriculture Department experts to ensure that America's chickens, hogs, and cows were not poisoning America's people, and to shut down slaughterhouses if they did.\n\nFrom coal to railroads to beef, this was the ethic of reason sprung to life. Experts and muckraking journalists gathered data about the irrationality and injustice tearing America apart. A charismatic leader used it to educate the people, building a mighty tide of public opinion that overwhelmed the selfish tribes. And thus empowered by an active and reasoned populace, the leader built a permanent machinery of investigation, creating a virtuous cycle of objective information, public education, and scientific peace.\n\nBut these achievements were a mere warm-up for what progressives would accomplish under their greatest White House champion, the man with few friends but epic dreams, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Even more than other progressives, Wilson feared a second civil war, mostly because he remembered the first one. His earliest memory was of standing outside his family's home in Augusta, Georgia, at age four and hearing people yell that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and there would be war. When war came, he watched Confederate soldiers moaning on gurneys inside his father's church, which had been turned into a makeshift hospital, and he peered at the Union soldiers milling in the courtyard outside, which had been turned into a makeshift jail. The war split the Wilson family asunder; its northern and southern branches never spoke again. \"A boy never gets over his boyhood,\" Wilson later declared, and his left him with a gnawing anxiety that order might break down once more.\n\nWilson never truly identified with either Blue or Gray. In his mind, they were both selfish tribes. Even as a boy, he tried to stand outside the conflict, to find an impartial, rational vantage point. When he played soldier, his imaginary armies flew neither the Stars and Stripes nor the Stars and Bars, but rather the Union Jack. As he grew older, Wilson came to idolize Lincoln, not because Lincoln had led the North to victory, but because, in Wilson's mind, he had stood above the parochial interests of both sides and thus restored unity to a divided nation. Lincoln \"was detached from every point of view and therefore superior,\" Wilson said of his political hero. \"You must have a man of this detachable sort.\"\n\nIn his own mind, Wilson was such a man. He considered himself detached from narrow regional interests because although born in the South, he had spent his adulthood in the North and so understood both worlds. And he considered himself detached from America's looming second civil war\u2014between rich and poor\u2014because he was neither a worker nor a capitalist; he was a scholar. He believed government could be \"reduced to science,\" a science in which he had particular expertise, since his own writings had helped establish public administration as an academic discipline in the United States. In 1910, when he ran for governor of New Jersey, his first foray into electoral politics, Wilson boasted that as the president of Princeton University he had run an institution dedicated to the production of unbiased expertise.\n\nThe job of impartial experts, in Wilson's view, was to write impartial rules. And in their grandest form those rules took the form of constitutions. Constitutions were precious to Wilson. The son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, he was reared in a religious tradition that placed special emphasis on the covenant between God and his people. For Wilson it was this basic compact, writes one biographer, that \"imposed a comprehensible pattern\u2014orderly, predictable, and permanent\u2014upon the transient character of human affairs.\" Wilson saw the Bible as the greatest constitution of all, \"the 'Magna Charta' of the human soul.\"\n\nIt was fitting, in Wilson's view, that the Civil War had ended in a rewritten American constitution, a new, fairer set of rules under which the entire country could peaceably live. And in his own life, Wilson drafted constitutions wherever he went. As a kid, he wrote one for his local baseball league. When he turned seventeen, he founded an imaginary yacht club and wrote a charter for it as well, complete with bylaws, regulations, and penalties for those who disobeyed. As an undergraduate at Davidson College, he transcribed the debating society's constitution by hand. At Princeton, where he transferred, he tinkered with the constitution of not one debating society, but two. From the University of Virginia, where he studied law, to Johns Hopkins, where he got his Ph.D., to Wesleyan, where he taught, it was more of the same. Like a legalistic Johnny Apple-seed, Wilson traveled from place to place replacing disorder with order, unfairness with fairness, anarchy with law. He even recommended to his wife that they draft a constitution for their marriage. Let's write down the basic principles, he suggested; \"then we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary.\" It was an early warning sign, a hint that perhaps the earnest young rationalizer did not understand that there were spheres where abstract principles didn't get you very far, where reason could never be king.\n\nIf Wilson's devotion to order and reason was classically progressive, so was his faith that leaders could educate people to want them. It was no coincidence that so many of his constitutions were written for debate societies. \"Statesmen,\" Wilson declared, \"must possess an orator's soul,\" and he certainly did: He was among the greatest orators in the history of American politics. If Wilson believed he was impartial, he believed just as strongly that his words could make ordinary people impartial, too. He possessed, his press secretary explained, \"an almost mystical faith that the people would follow him if he could speak to enough of them.\" He knew that people sometimes believed irrational, selfish things. He just didn't think they would continue to believe them after listening to him.\n\nNothing in Wilson's early years as president shook that faith. On the contrary, his already considerable self-confidence swelled as he compiled one of the most dazzling first terms in American history. A month after taking office, he put his oratorical gifts to use, becoming the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person. His topic was the tariff on imports, which had more than doubled since the Civil War. In Wilson's view, the tariff was irrational: Many of the sheltered industries were perfectly capable of competing with their foreign competitors. They enjoyed government protection not because it served the public interest, but because they had members of Congress in their pockets. Outraged by Wilson's proposal, the selfish tribes descended on Washington to preserve their irrational advantage. But Wilson met them head-on. In a dramatic appeal to the American people, he denounced the \"insidious\" lobbyists seeking \"to overcome the interest of the public for their private profit.\" Progressive senator Robert La Follette then shrewdly launched an investigation into whether the senators who opposed reform were benefiting personally from particular tariffs. Humiliated by what La Follette's investigation uncovered, several flipped their vote and the tariff bill passed. \"I did not much think we should live to see these things,\" exclaimed Wilson's ecstatic secretary of agriculture. Three years later tariff rates were entrusted to an expert commission, ostensibly shutting out the selfish tribes forever.\n\nFrom there, Wilson turned to the banks, which, according to a muckraking investigation by progressive House Democrats, used political rather than scientific criteria to make loans. The result was a Federal Reserve Board staffed with presidentially appointed expert economists to oversee America's regional banks. In the space of eight months, Wilson had passed the first tariff reduction in almost twenty years and the first banking reorganization in almost fifty.\n\nEleven months later, he passed the third jewel of his progressive agenda: a Federal Trade Commission empowered to investigate business fraud and abuse, ban unfair practices, and force the offenders to compensate their victims. And when Congress reconvened in December 1915, it passed seven smaller pieces of progressive legislation, including the creation of a Shipping Board to ensure safe working conditions for sailors, government loans to struggling farmers (the recommendation of a Wilson-appointed expert commission), a ban on child labor, workers' compensation for government employees, and an eight-hour day for railroad workers, which averted a potentially bloody nationwide strike.\n\nYears later, after the war had made progressive an epithet\u2014when Wilson was a pariah and reform lay flat on its back\u2014critics would look back at these initiatives and see not impartial reason, but selfish interest in disguise. Entrenched industries learned how to turn the bodies designed to oversee them to their own advantage, often by helping to write regulations with which their smaller competitors could not afford to comply. No matter how tightly the progressives tried to lock the door, the inequities of power usually found a way in.\n\nAnd the corruption did not only come from outside; the progressives themselves were not as disinterested as they liked to believe. Many of the experts appointed to the Tariff Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve turned out to have their own biases and interests. Even Wilson himself, though convinced that he, like Lincoln, was detached from irrational prejudices, actually held quite a few of them, including a virulent antipathy toward blacks, an instinct that women shouldn't vote, periodic suspicions about the loyalty of America's newer immigrants, and an unshakable faith in the number 13. In expecting the public to be motivated by logic alone, Wilson was holding it to a standard that he could not meet himself.\n\nThis hubris of reason would become clearer when Wilson exported his progressive assumptions overseas. But in his triumphant first term, it was easy to be bullish about human progress. America had not experienced a traumatic war in fifty years, or a serious economic downturn in twenty-five. The country had been booming for so long that the influential University of Pennsylvania economist Simon Patten declared that America had transitioned from a \"Pain Economy\" to a \"Pleasure Economy,\" in which scarcity would soon be a thing of the past. All this economic dynamism had produced class conflict, to be sure, but after more than a decade of progressive reform the government seemed to have that well in hand. Experts were steadily expanding their writ over the American economy, replacing selfishness with science and anarchy with order, and the American people\u2014judging by their enthusiasm for first Roosevelt and now Wilson\u2014were cheering them on. In the early years of a thrilling new century, America was fulfilling its destiny: It was becoming a republic of reason. \"It was a happy time, those last few years before the First World War,\" Lippmann would later reflect. \"The air was soft, and it was easy for a young man to believe in the inevitability of progress, in the perfectibility of man.\"\n\nIn 1910, the progressive-minded steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote a letter to the trustees of his newly formed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Their first project, he instructed, was to abolish war. Once that was accomplished, they should reconvene to \"consider what is the next most degrading evil or evils whose banishment...would most advance the progress, elevation and happiness of man.\" He envisioned the process continuing on like this, with the trustees periodically checking off problems and thus assisting \"man in his upward march to higher and higher stages of development unceasingly; for now we know that man was created, not with an instinct for his own degradation, but imbued with the desire and the power for improvement to which, perchance, there may be no limit short of perfection even here in this life upon earth.\" It was the kind of thing that, looked back upon from the other side of the abyss, could make you either laugh or cry.\n\nFor some Americans, the outbreak of World War I challenged this soaring optimism. Progressivism's success \"was beginning to shake me in my very firm belief in original sin,\" wrote a friend of Lippmann's. \"This war has restored it triumphantly.... How is Walter going to quench this fundamental and illogical passion in us all?\" It was the question: If humans were rational creatures and progress was history's natural course, why were the most advanced nations on earth sending their young men to cower in trenches and gag on poison gas? But most progressives parried it in classic American fashion: by drawing a bright line between the enlightened new world and the degenerate old. Europe was the past; America was the future. Europe was the disease; America was the cure. \"Evil and suffering did not of itself invalidate progressivism,\" notes the historian John Thompson; \"on the contrary, its existence had always been the spur\u2014so long as belief in the possibility of amelioration was retained.\" For Wilson, progressivism's success in fostering a scientific peace at home proved that amelioration was not just possible, but likely. \"Europe is still governed by the same reactionary forces which controlled this country,\" he explained, but that \"old order is dead...[and] the new order, which shall have its foundation on human liberty and human rights, shall prevail.\"\n\nBy \"old order,\" Wilson meant, above all, \"that unstable thing which we used to call the 'balance of power.'\" For centuries, it had been the core principle of European statecraft. Nations looked out for their self-interest, and only their self-interest. They allied, schemed, armed, even warred, all to ensure that no adversary\u2014or combination of adversaries\u2014grew powerful enough to threaten their very existence. The balance of power was disorderly, unfair, and unscientific, everything Wilson disdained. At best, each country's efforts at self-preservation and self-aggrandizement produced an equilibrium in which no nation, or group of nations, grew so powerful as to launch an attack, and none grew so weak as to invite one. The most anyone could hope for was a peace of drawn swords. The logic behind the balance of power mirrored the logic behind the unregulated free market. Given that nations, like people, were inherently selfish, a system based upon that selfishness was wiser than a system based upon the illusion that anyone gave a damn about anyone else.\n\nFor many European statesmen, who had learned from harsh experience to distrust their carnivorous neighbors, the balance of power was like gravity. You might not love it; but you defied it at your peril. \"We too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently,\" explained grizzled French premier Georges Clemenceau to Wilson. \"We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch.\"\n\nBut to progressives such as Wilson, who had witnessed less tragedy than their European counterparts, and more triumph, the balance of power looked both immoral and archaic, the global equivalent of America's selfish tribes. Once upon a time, argued Lippmann, American politics had also been like Europe's, with the North and South \"each trying to upset the balance of power in its own favor.\" But Lincoln had remedied that. The progressives also compared Europe's balance of power to the savage, anarchic capitalism of late-nineteenth-century America, which Social Darwinists had defended on the grounds that selfishness was the way of the world. Now, as the result of Roosevelt and Wilson's reforms, that too was being tamed.\n\nFinally, many progressives pointed to the Western Hemisphere as a third model that proved that the balance of power could be overcome, that politics between nations, like politics between individuals, could be governed by impartial reason, not brute force. America's policy toward its southern neighbors, Wilson declared, \"is known not to be [shaped by] a selfish purpose. It is known to have in it no thought of taking advantage of any government in this hemisphere or playing its political fortunes for our own benefit.\"\n\nWhen Wilson said the United States had no selfish motives in Latin America, he believed it. Just as he considered himself a neutral arbiter of race, class, and regional interests in the United States\u2014despite being a racist\u2014he cast himself in the same role when it came to America's relations with its neighbors to the south. He proposed that the countries of the Western Hemisphere agree to a Pan-American collective security treaty under which they would protect each other from external aggression and internal disorder. On its face, it looked as objective as the Tariff Commission. But in reality, it was the United States that had the power to intervene to prevent disorder in its weaker southern neighbors, not the other way around. And while Wilson genuinely believed that such interventions were unselfish, it was no coincidence that where the United States did intervene\u2014in Haiti, in the Dominican Republic, and in Mexico (twice)\u2014it had the non-altruistic effect of securing U.S. investments and preventing meddling by European powers.\n\nFor Wilson, it was an article of faith that he wanted for the Latins only what they wanted for themselves. Unlike more naked U.S. imperialists\u2014who would have been happy installing dictatorships in the countries to their south\u2014Wilson was enough of an idealist to believe that the people of Latin America could achieve what the United States had achieved: democratic capitalist governments where property was respected and change occurred only via the law. But his idealism was marred by parochialism: He didn't understand Latin America well enough to realize that given the historical experience and economic realities of many of its countries, even necessary change would be far more chaotic than in the United States. Wilson wanted America's neighbors to be democratic, but only if they elected people like him\u2014progressive capitalists\u2014not radicals who might foment disorder or interfere with American business. Ever the believer in political education, he famously declared that \"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!\"\n\nWhen they did not, he convinced himself that the leaders he disliked didn't represent their people as well as he did. For Wilson, it was nearly axiomatic that selfish, irrational nationalism was not real nationalism at all. And so he sent U.S. troops to depose an anti-American dictator in Mexico, confident that the Mexicans would welcome the arriving U.S. soldiers as liberators. Instead they rose up in fury against the gringo invaders, and America quickly withdrew. Wilson was bothered by the experience, but not too bothered. He still saw his Latin America policy as a success. After all, U.S. economic and political influence in the hemisphere expanded dramatically during his presidency, largely because World War I cut off South American banks and businesses from Europe. Wilson's Pan-American treaty was never ratified, but it remained his model for the world.\n\nDuring World War I, Wilson, who had never visited continental Europe before the war and spoke none of its languages, repeatedly recommended both U.S. domestic politics and U.S. relations with its Latin neighbors as templates for a world governed by reason, not force. His basic error was in not recognizing what was blindingly obvious to most African-Americans and Mexicans: that politics within the United States, and within the Western Hemisphere, was absolutely dependent on force. In the United States, it was the government's monopoly on military power that ultimately made possible the progressive agenda. No matter how rational Wilson's commissions, and how inspiring his rhetoric, they would not have mattered had Washington not been able to enforce its edicts via the sword. Similarly, in the Western Hemisphere, it was Washington's near monopoly on military power that undergirded Wilson's Pan-American visions. In the Americas, and in the United States, it was because Wilson had all the guns on his side that he could imagine that his authority did not really depend on them.\n\nAs Wilson saw it, the United States, given its lack of selfish motives, stood apart from Europe's balance-of-power clash in the same way government experts had stood apart from the clash between industry and labor in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal mines. America was not a player in Europe's game, but it could be an umpire, since its own domestic accomplishments suggested a better way. The United States, Wilson declared, must play \"a part of impartial mediation.\" The war's \"causes cannot touch us,\" he added, but its \"very existence affords us opportunities for friendship and disinterested service.\"\n\nBut as was so often the case, Wilson was not as disinterested as he liked to believe. The supposedly peaceful, rational politics of the new world and the brutal, benighted politics of the old were deeply intertwined. The Monroe Doctrine, which for close to a century had kept the Americas free from European power politics, had been enforced for most of that time not by the United States, whose navy was comparatively puny, but by Britain, the greatest naval power on earth. For its own reasons, London had decided to allow the United States a safe haven in the Western Hemisphere, but its ability to do so depended on a balance of power in Europe. For centuries, the central goal of British foreign policy had been to prevent any one nation from dominating the European continent, since that nation could then threaten the royal fleet that protected the British Isles. Without a European balance of power, Britain could not control the high seas. And without British control of the high seas, the United States could not be sole master of its hemispheric domain. Wilson saw the Americas as an Eden free of balance-of-power politics, but he could only indulge that conceit by ignoring Beelzebub guarding the gates outside.\n\nBritain entered World War I because it feared that if it did not, Germany might vanquish France and Russia and make itself overlord of all Europe. Since 1871, when Bismarck welded the German states into one, Germany had been casting an ever-longer shadow over the continent. In 1890, its population had been 11 million higher than France's; by 1913, the gap was 30 million. In 1890, it had produced about 2 million more tons of steel annually; by 1913, the gap was 13 million. In 1880, the British fleet had boasted more than seven times Germany's tonnage; by 1914, the ratio was less than two to one.\n\nThere were influential Americans who looked upon Germany's growing might the same way London did: with dread. Many of them were conservatives like Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a dour, haughty, and cerebral Boston Brahmin, the first person ever to receive a Harvard history Ph.D. Lodge believed in the balance of power for the same reason he opposed most progressive reforms at home: He thought that trying to eradicate selfishness was a fool's errand, and a dangerous one. \"We must deal with human nature as it is,\" he declared, \"and not as it ought to be.\" But in his view of Europe's war, Lodge was joined by Theodore Roosevelt, who broadly shared Wilson's domestic views but, crucially, did not see them as a template for American policy overseas. Unlike Wilson, who had little experience abroad, Roosevelt had long been fascinated by America's role in the world and had for years maintained a lively correspondence with friends and associates in Europe. As early as 1910 he had traveled through Europe after a post-presidential African safari, and returned home worried that the Huns were growing too strong.\n\nTemperamentally, Roosevelt also liked power politics. He liked\u2014he was blunt about it\u2014war. For Wilson, a domesticated world order, where decisions were made via education and law, not force, was heaven. For Roosevelt, who thought war made men virile and life exciting, a domesticated world order was hell. Roosevelt's bloodthirsty side was often ugly; in fact, it had produced a kind of hubris of its own in the Spanish-American War a decade and a half earlier. But his grasp of the fundamental difference between domestic and international politics made him more alive than Wilson to the role that force played\u2014and would always play\u2014in world affairs. And in Europe, at least, that understanding proved useful, since it helped him see the potential threat that Germany posed. \"Do you not believe that if Germany won this war, smashed the English Fleet and destroyed the British Empire, within a year or two she would insist upon taking the dominant position in South and Central America?\" he asked in 1915. Within months of the war's outbreak, Roosevelt and Lodge were demanding that America arm itself, if not to enter the war on Britain's side (something most Americans would not yet consider), then at least to ensure that if the Royal Navy did fall, America could defend its hemisphere if Germany went after that next.\n\nSpurning Roosevelt and Lodge's demands, Wilson initially resisted building up American arms. He saw the United States as an impartial mediator\u2014helping the Europeans evolve beyond power politics\u2014not another selfish tribe. Impartiality, however, was harder than it looked. When Wilson declared America neutral, he demanded that the combatants respect its right to trade with both sides under international law. But enforcing that law against the world's two greatest military powers was not like enforcing it against the trusts, especially when America's military was so feeble. The British and Germans thumbed their noses at Wilson's request. London imposed a blockade on German ports, and Berlin countered with a blockade of its own, aimed at cutting the British Isles off from crucial transatlantic supplies. There was, however, a crucial difference. Lacking His Majesty's mighty fleet, Berlin employed a newer technology: submarines. Britain enforced its blockade by boarding and searching U.S. ships. Submarines, by contrast, relied on stealth. If they surfaced to inspect passing ships they would be easy prey for an armed merchant vessel. Subs could only enforce a blockade one way: by sinking whatever tried to pass.\n\nIn May 1915, a German U-boat blew a hole in the British ocean liner R.M.S. Lusitania, drowning 1,198 people, including 128 American civilians, in the icy waters off the Irish coast. To Americans, who had seen the war as a remote affair, the shock was seismic. A decade later, many still remembered where they were when they heard the news. For Roosevelt and Lodge, it just underscored the German threat. They knew the American people weren't ready for war, but in their hearts, Lodge and TR were already there. For Wilson, however, the problem wasn't German power; it was international law. \"The rights of neutrals in time of war are based upon principle, not upon expediency,\" he wrote in a diplomatic note to Berlin, \"and the principles are immutable.\"\n\nIt was a fateful choice. By insisting that Americans had a sacred right to travel the high seas, Wilson was putting the United States on a path to war with Berlin. But he was justifying it on legal and moral grounds, not geopolitical ones. As Wilson described it, Germany was dangerous not because it threatened to dominate the European continent and imperil the Western Hemisphere, but because it was violating America's neutrality rights. This rationale preserved the fa\u00e7ade of objectivity that he cared about so much, the sense that America was acting from impartial principle, not selfish interest. But there was a cost: Wilson never used Germany's submarine warfare, as Lodge and Roosevelt urged him to, to tell Americans that they had a stake in a particular distribution of power on the European continent, that Germany was a danger not because it was violating international law but because it could threaten America. The United States was inching toward war, but with the illusion that it was still an umpire in the game of world politics, not a player on the field. It was an illusion that would prove extremely costly in the years to come.\n\nThe sinking of the Lusitania was like the starting of a stopwatch. Given Wilson's definition of neutrality rights, and Germany's need to blockade British ports, it was just a matter of time until U-boats drowned enough Americans to draw the United States into war. Well aware of this, Wilson flung himself into an effort to end the conflict before it engulfed his country. Colonel House shuttled between London, Paris, and Berlin trying to convince the belligerents to agree to a peace deal, any peace deal. Don't focus on \"local settlements [such as] territorial questions, indemnities, and the like,\" Wilson instructed House. But for Europeans, those \"local settlements\" were what the war was all about. Germany wanted enough money and land to ensure that in tandem with its lackey, Austria-Hungary, it could dominate Europe; Britain, France, and Russia (and later Italy) wanted to thwart Germany's plans and aggrandize themselves at Berlin's and Vienna's expense.\n\nIn May 1916, Wilson tried to cut the Gordian knot. He announced that if the combatants laid down their arms, America would join a League to Enforce Peace, a global version of the Pan-American pact he had been pushing in the Western Hemisphere. Together, the league's members would guarantee freedom of the seas and repel aggression by any country against another. This system of collective security, in which countries respected and enforced rules of civilized behavior, would replace the balance-of-power system, in which countries\u2014or alliances of countries\u2014looked out only for themselves. It would ensure that international disputes were resolved based upon reason, not force. The implication was that Europe's belligerents need not worry where they drew the armistice lines; the balance of power between adversaries would no longer matter.\n\nAmong American progressives, many of whom had been championing such a league for years, Wilson's speech was a triumph. Lippmann declared it \"one of the greatest utterances since the Monroe Doctrine.\" But Europe's leaders were less enchanted. It was as if America were demanding that they call a halt to the game and insisting that the score no longer mattered. For statesmen who genuinely believed that they were fighting for survival and who, in pursuit of that belief, had sent millions of young men to be maimed and killed, there was something infuriating about Wilson's insistence that their death struggle for security was a triviality and a superstition. Wilson's vision of a world without power politics, declared French author Anatole France, was like \"a town without a brothel.\" It was too innocent, too antiseptic, too inhuman. Wilson was casting off America's historic isolation and committing it to an active role in European affairs, but only conditionally: only if the old world became something radically different from what it was. The United States, Wilson declared, \"can in no circumstances consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and force. We believe that our own desire for a new international order under which reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men everywhere.\" But what if it wasn't? Lurking behind Wilson's words was an implicit threat, which would come back to haunt him: If the world did not live up to its standards, America would pick up its marbles and go home.\n\nSo Wilson's mediation efforts failed, and slowly but surely, the war reeled America in. In March 1916, when a U-boat sank the French passenger ferry Sussex, injuring several Americans, Wilson issued an ultimatum: Unless Germany ceased attacking civilian ships, the United States would break off diplomatic relations. After a fierce internal debate, the kaiser's government backed down, partly because it was running low on subs anyway. But Wilson had placed himself in a diplomatic straitjacket: The moment Berlin resumed its submarine blockade, his own words would push him to the brink of war.\n\nOn January 31, 1917, Germany's ambassador informed Washington that his government was doing just that. The Germans now believed they had enough subs to enforce the embargo, and, with Russia crumbling on their eastern front, they saw a chance to rapidly win the war. \"England will lie on the ground in six months,\" predicted German naval authorities, \"before a single American has set foot on the continent.\"\n\nThree days later, Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Berlin. He still hoped for a miracle, but on March 18, Germany sank three U.S. merchant ships, killing fifteen Americans. Wilson's entire cabinet was now demanding war. Adding to the fever, the British had intercepted a telegram, sent from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the government of Mexico, proposing a military alliance. If the United States declared war on Germany, and Mexico came to Germany's aid, Berlin would help it regain Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The telegram confirmed Roosevelt and Lodge's warning that if Germany won, its dark shadow would soon cross the Atlantic. When Wilson released Zimmermann's message to the Associated Press, it sparked a wave of public support for war.\n\nIf the Zimmermann Telegram demonstrated the dangers of a German victory, a very different event suggested the possibilities of a German defeat. On March 8, food riots broke out in Russia's imperial capital, Petrograd, and quickly grew into a general strike. When Czar Nicholas II tried to return to the city to reestablish control, soldiers refused to let his train pass. Seven days later, he abdicated. A dynasty that had ruled for three centuries had been toppled in a single week. And for the first time in its history, Russia was a republic, led by the moderate, pro-Western Alexander Kerensky.\n\nFor Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, Russia's liberal revolution was like a sign from God. Although aware that the carnage on the seas might force America into war, they yearned to enter it on behalf of something grander than the safety of America's merchant marine. If the United States had to descend into the valley of death, they wanted to believe it could lead Europe toward the light. Now, suddenly, the people of Russia, the most brutal, backward country on the continent, were breaking their chains, showing that the old world could indeed follow the path of the new. America could never join the war with its \"full heart and soul,\" Dewey had written, until \"the almost impossible happens...until the Allies are fighting on our terms for our democracy and civilization.\" Now the almost impossible had occurred: The most autocratic Allied power was embracing democracy. It is now \"as certain as anything human can be,\" wrote Lippmann, \"that the war which started as a clash of empires in the Balkans will dissolve into democratic revolution the world over.\"\n\nAmong pro-war progressives, the czar's overthrow was like the popping of a cork. In a great rush, the optimism that had been welling up during their years of domestic triumph bubbled over. Ambivalence, hesitation, even dread were replaced by giddy expectation. \"We have been, as it were, a laboratory set aside from the rest of the world in which to make, for its benefit, a great social experiment,\" Dewey declared. \"The war, the removal of the curtain of isolation, means that this period of experimentation is over. We are now called to declare to all the world the nature and fruits of this experiment.\" No longer was the war a mistake, or even a grim necessity; it was a crusade.\n\nOn the evening of April 2, 1917, as a light rain fell, mounted cavalry escorted Wilson's car from the White House to the Capitol. Soldiers saluted as he passed; thousands of well-wishers lined the route. Once he arrived, Wilson was taken to a congressional antechamber. Alone there for a moment, he began to shake uncontrollably, and had to stare hard into a mirror to regain his poise. At 8:32 P.M., the doors swung open and he walked into the House chamber, where he was greeted by a full two minutes of applause. With the exception of a tiny handful of war opponents, everyone in the audience wore or held an American flag.\n\n\"We are,\" Wilson declared, \"at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.\" This was the crusade in a nutshell: America would make politics between nations resemble politics between Americans. Wilson went on to salute the Russian people, who \"have been always in fact democratic at heart,\" for proving that America's democratic principles were becoming Europe's as well. And with the chief justice of the United States leading the crowd in raucous cheers, he ended by declaring that America \"shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest [to] our hearts\u2014for democracy...for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.\" As the crowd rose to its feet, members of Congress ripped the flags off their sleeves and lapels and waved them wildly. Five days later, America was at war.\n\nTo emphasize the conditional nature of America's commitment, Wilson declared that America would fight as an associate of Britain, Russia, France, and Italy, not an ally. Just as he believed Lincoln had done during the Civil War, he would fight and yet remain detached. Knowing (or at least suspecting) that London, Paris, Moscow, and Rome had made secret arrangements to feed on Germany's and Austria-Hungary's carcasses if they won the war, Wilson decided that America must establish a rational, disinterested process for designing the postwar world. To do that, in the fall of 1917, \"the Inquiry\" was born.\n\nLippmann was only one of the progressive luminaries whom House enlisted in the cause. Thorstein Veblen served as an informal adviser. So did the New Republic's Herbert Croly, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, and the famed historian of the vanishing frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner. Future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter requested a role, as did Judge Learned Hand. Dewey considered heading the Inquiry's Russia division. The effort began in secrecy, at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street, where only the head librarian and one aide knew the true purpose of the men working furiously in back. From there it moved to the American Geographical Society on Broadway and 155th, largely because of the society's vast storehouse of maps. Finally, a reporter for Philadelphia's Public Ledger broke the story, and the Inquiry was deluged with job applicants. Satellite offices were established at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Guards began patrolling the Inquiry's headquarters night and day.\n\nThe Inquiry was modeled on those great temples of progressive reform: the Tariff Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Federal Reserve. Just as they had established scientific principles for American industry and finance, the Inquiry would now establish them for entire nations\u2014determining which countries should exist and where. In their effort to draw new European borders, Lippmann and his colleagues produced four types of studies. Historians determined which ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups had the best ancestral claim to a given patch of land. Geographers and sociologists searched for the right way of classifying the current residents. Economists allocated natural resources and industrial infrastructure so nations would be economically viable. And a final group\u2014the smallest\u2014handled politics.\n\nMuch of the work in this fourth category concerned domestic arrangements like federalism. Relations between states, by contrast, received little attention. How to put the genie of German dominance back in its bottle and rebuild Europe's shattered balance of power were questions that had no scientific answers, and were thus largely ignored. The whole idea behind the Inquiry, after all, was to replace borders imposed by force with borders conceived through reason. As Wilson's secretary of state, Robert Lansing, explained, \"the fixing of frontier lines with a view to their military strength and in contemplation of war was directly contrary to...the policy of the United States.\"\n\nThe Inquiry produced more than two thousand reports, many filled with statistical tables and charts, often with no interpretation whatsoever\u2014the facts were meant to speak for themselves. But like Wilson himself, Lippmann and his colleagues were not as objective as they liked to believe. \"In some respects the Koords [sic] remind one of the North American Indians,\" read one report on the Middle East. \"Their temper is passionate, resentful, revengeful, intriguing, and treacherous.\" And it wasn't only racism that infected the Inquiry's efforts; power politics did as well. Just as the trusts had wormed their way into the tariff and trade commissions, the British now influenced the Inquiry\u2014plying the Americans with data that buttressed London's favored outcomes. So deeply enmeshed were they in the Inquiry's activities that British diplomats in Washington knew more about its work than did most members of Congress.\n\nThat, in and of itself, was not such a terrible thing. Had Wilson told Americans that Germany's power and ambition made it a potential threat to the United States, and that America was entering the war because Britain, France, and Russia could no longer contain that threat alone, no one would have expected the Inquiry to be impartial. Had he forthrightly acknowledged that America was committing itself to a world it could not perfect, had he defined America's war aims as something less grandiose than the eradication of power politics, perhaps the postwar peace would not have proved such a crushing disappointment. Had he not allowed the hubris of reason to swell so dramatically, perhaps it would not have so violently popped.\n\nIn October, Russia's liberal experiment collapsed as Kerensky's government fell to the Bolsheviks of Lenin. Determined to discredit the capitalist powers and withdraw Russia from the war, Lenin published the Allies' secret treaties dividing up the spoils of war. Suddenly, for all his grand rhetoric, Wilson looked like an accomplice to a land grab. In mid-December, House summoned Lippmann to his Fifty-seventh Street apartment and told him that the Inquiry must show the world that America was still fighting for high principle, and fast. For the rest of the month, Lippmann and his fellow experts worked around the clock, often not even going home to sleep. We need \"genius,\" Lippmann told his colleagues, \"sheer, startling genius, and nothing else will do.\" Finally, on January 2, 1918, Lippmann gave House the Inquiry's final report. Three days later the president and his best friend met to mold it into a series of public recommendations. \"We actually got down to work at half past ten,\" House noted in his diary, \"and finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it, at half past twelve.\"\n\nThe result, unveiled on January 8 before a joint session of Congress, was perhaps the most celebrated diplomatic initiative in American history: the Fourteen Points. It included free trade, freedom of the seas, disarmament, rights for colonial peoples, an end to secret treaties, and a League to Enforce Peace (increasingly called the League of Nations). When it came to borders, Wilson obscured some of the Inquiry's findings, employing vague language to avoid firm commitments, but the plan's eight territorial planks still veered toward national self-determination and the principle that borders should be determined by reason, not force. The boy who had once drafted constitutions for his baseball league and his imaginary yacht club had finally done it: He had drafted a constitution for the entire world.\n\nWilson knew that his wartime allies, especially the French, wanted a harsher peace. But he trusted in his capacity to teach. The experts had told him what was right, and now he would educate the people of Europe, rallying them against their own selfish regimes. That included the people of Germany. American planes dropped copies of the Fourteen Points behind enemy lines, and Lippmann joined a newly created Propaganda Commission, from which he planned \"a frank campaign of education addressed to the German and Austrian troops, explaining as simply and persuasively as possible the unselfish character of the war, the generosity of our aims, and the great hope of mankind which we are trying to realize.\"\n\nFinally, that August, after years of blood-soaked stalemate, the German military crumbled. With American troops now flooding into Europe, the Allies broke through enemy lines, destroying sixteen divisions in a matter of days. On the German home front, sailors mutinied; workers struck; starving women marched through Berlin holding their empty pots and pans. One of Germany's top generals, Erich Ludendorff, sank into depression; the other, Paul von Hindenburg, put on dark glasses and a fake mustache and sneaked across the border into Sweden. In November, the kaiser abdicated. A liberal government took power in Berlin and sued for peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points. The German people, it appeared, had heard Wilson's appeal. Now they too were demanding a scientific peace.\n\nThe stage was now set. No sitting U.S. president had ever left the Western Hemisphere. (According to some interpretations, doing so was actually illegal.) But overruling his top advisers, Wilson decided to oversee the peace negotiations himself, so no subordinate would steal the glory. On December 4, 1918, as gunships saluted, handkerchiefs waved, and pigeons were released into the sky, the passenger liner George Washington left the Hoboken, New Jersey, harbor, carrying the president and virtually everyone else of importance in the executive branch, a delegation 1,300 strong. It was flanked on its left and right by ten destroyers; a battleship sped ahead to smooth the waves. Nine days later, at just past 1:30 P.M. on December 13\u2014a time and date chosen because the president considered it lucky (his name contained thirteen letters)\u2014the armada, now sixty vessels strong, reached Brest, France, on the far side of the Atlantic. On the morning it arrived, the sun, which had been absent for days, suddenly cut through the gray sky.\n\nWhen Wilson disembarked, Europe's battered masses gave him a greeting that one journalist called \"inhuman\u2014or superhuman.\" At 3 A.M. that night, on the train carrying the American delegation to Paris, Wilson's doctor looked outside and saw men, women, and children lining the tracks as far as the eye could see. When the Americans reached the French capital, two million admirers jammed the streets, the largest crowd in French history. In Rome, the mayor likened Wilson's visit to the Second Coming. In Milan, banners compared him to Moses. Italian soldiers knelt before his picture; families placed his photograph on their windowsills, surrounded by sacred candles. \"For a brief interval,\" wrote H. G. Wells, \"Wilson stood alone for mankind.... He was transfigured in the eyes of men. He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.\"\n\nThe lonely preacher's son had wagered an epic gamble: that through force he could build a world governed by reason. And now, with Germany vanquished and Europe's masses screaming his name, he seemed on the brink of success. It was the progressive dream, unfolding on a global scale. \"It might turn out well,\" wrote House in his diary, \"and yet again it might be a tragedy.\"\n\n## CHAPTER TWO\n\n## THE FRIGHTENING DWARF\n\nRandolph Bourne made people uncomfortable. Partly, it was his body. At birth, a brutal doctor, making promiscuous use of forceps, elongated his head and disfigured his face. At age four he developed a double curvature of the spine, which left him a hunchback. As an adult, he wore a long black cape, like something out of Phantom of the Opera. John Dos Passos called him a \"tiny twisted bit of flesh.\" Theodore Dreiser called him \"that frightening dwarf.\"\n\nBourne's mind was frightening, too. He began reading grocery labels as a toddler and the Bible by kindergarten. By the time he reached college, he had become a withering polemicist, perhaps Lippmann's only generational equal. But if Lippmann used his pen to impress and ingratiate, Bourne used his to cut\u2014a harsher style engendered by a harsher life. A self-described \"homesick wanderer,\" he felt little affection for his aristocratic but downwardly mobile mother, barely knew his alcoholic, absentee father, couldn't stand his teachers and his hometown, and spent his twenties flitting from one mindless, dead-end job to another. Then, in 1909, he won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he met Charles Beard and John Dewey, the men who changed his life.\n\nBeard, the charismatic son of an Indiana gentleman farmer, was progressivism's greatest historian. Dewey, a shy mumbler from Burlington, Vermont, was its greatest philosopher. On the eve of World War I, they were high priests of the church of reason, and their effect on Bourne was almost spiritual. From Dewey, whom he likened to a prophet, Bourne learned that schools could unlock the human instinct for cooperation and thus breed citizens who transcended their selfish desires. From Beard he learned to see American history as an upward march from plutocracy to democracy and anarchy to organization. By the time war struck, Bourne was earnestly spreading the gospel of progress. It was young people like himself, he argued, in whom selfishness had not yet fully taken root, who could serve as \"the incarnation of reason.\" In 1914, Beard got his young disciple a job at the fledgling New Republic. Not yet thirty, the brilliant hunchback was becoming one of progressivism's sharpest voices. And in those heady, innocent days before the war, his future\u2014like his movement's\u2014appeared bright.\n\nAt first the carnage across the Atlantic changed little. Like his New Republic colleagues, and like Woodrow Wilson, Bourne wanted no part of Europe's war. But as 1916 turned to 1917, he began to feel the ground shift. Lippmann and Croly were now visiting Colonel House's New York City apartment every week, and their editorials were speculating with mounting fervor about how America's entrance into war might transform the country and the world. For his part, Bourne was moving hard the other way\u2014his antiwar militancy growing ever stronger as America crept toward war. Not coincidentally, fewer and fewer of his articles made it into print, and by April 1917, when America finally joined the fray, the New Republic was no longer publishing his political writing at all.\n\nBut Bourne's bitterest break came not with his employer, but with his mentors, Dewey and Beard, who became two of the war's loudest academic cheerleaders. Wilson's vision of a rationalized postwar world, wrote Beard, reflected the \"slowly maturing opinion of the masses of the people everywhere in the earth.\" It heralded \"a new epoch in the rise of government by the people and in the growth of a concert among the nations.\" Dewey rhapsodized about the war's potential impact at home. Wartime mobilization, he predicted, would shift power from private to public hands, from selfish tribes to unbiased experts\u2014exactly the shift for which progressives had been striving since the century turned. It would usher in \"a more integrated, less anarchic [political] system\" marked by the \"systematic utilization of the scientific expert.\" For decades, Dewey had seen education as the key to overcoming American selfishness and disorder. Now he had a new laboratory: war.\n\nFor Bourne, the analogy was not just wrong, it was monstrous. Schools were \"rational entities,\" safe laboratories for tinkering with human behavior. Nations at war were entirely different. Far from being a mechanism for reasoned planning, he argued, \"war is just that absolute situation...which speedily outstrips the power of intelligent and creative control.\" War \"determines its own end, victory, and government crushes out automatically all forces that deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path of organization to that end.\" For Bourne, Dewey was like a man who, having called a tiger a horse, thought he could restrict its diet to grass.\n\nWar progressivism, Bourne was coming to believe, rested upon a lie: Force, once unleashed, could not remain the servant of reason. If the Inquiry tested that proposition overseas, it found its domestic counterpart in something called the Committee on Public Information, which was tasked with building support for the war at home. Led by George Creel, a former urban reformer and muckraking journalist, it embodied progressivism's love affair with the fact. Among the men and women who stocked the committee\u2014many of whom had spent the prewar years exposing the abuses of the trusts\u2014it was a point of pride not to coerce Americans into supporting the war, nor even to play upon their emotions. \"A free people cannot be told what to think,\" declared Creel. \"They must be given the facts and permitted to do their own thinking.\"\n\nBourne's mentors nodded approvingly. Beard went to work for Creel's committee, editing some of its pamphlets on the causes and purposes of the war. Dewey applauded the committee's calm, deliberative spirit, which he considered appropriate for a country in which \"very large numbers of our citizens...have systematically taught themselves to discount all of the more violent appeals to passion.\"\n\nProgressives had long placed their faith in the rationality of the common woman and man. And Dewey had predicted that ordinary Americans would act rationally even\u2014and perhaps especially\u2014during war. But by 1917, that claim sat uncomfortably alongside the wave of anti-German frenzy spreading from Washington, D.C., across the American hinterland. After America entered the war, Congress passed espionage and sedition acts that outlawed \"disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language\" against the Constitution, the government, the military, and the flag. Cincinnati outlawed the sale of pretzels; Iowa's governor made publicly speaking German a crime. When a Wyoming man was overheard saying, \"Hoch der Kaiser\" (\"Up with the kaiser\"), a group of townspeople hanged him, cut him down while still alive, and made him kneel and kiss the American flag. In April 1918, a St. Louis mob abducted a young German-American, stripped him, dragged him through the streets, and then lynched him, while a crowd of five hundred cheered. At trial, the defense attorney called the murder patriotic, and it took a jury twenty-five minutes to acquit.\n\n\"The war,\" wrote Bourne's friend, Waldo Frank, \"which drove all the world, including Dewey mad, drove Bourne sane.\" In a series of scalding essays, Bourne put his mentors on intellectual trial. It wasn't just America's bloodthirsty yokels who proved that rationality was impossible in a time of war, Bourne argued; it was the war progressives themselves. Though Dewey and Beard saw themselves as apostles of reason, Bourne insisted that their motives for supporting the war were as primal as everyone else's. They were bored. Their domestic campaigns, having brought so much success, had lost the capacity to thrill. Having come of age at a time of swelling optimism, and possessing no primary experience of political tragedy, they were conditioned to see their people, their leaders, and themselves as capable of boundless achievement. And as a result, when Russia's liberal revolution offered a glimpse of a remade world, they could not resist the psychic pleasure of a crusade. \"Hesitations, ironies, consciences, considerations\u2014all were drowned in the elemental blare of doing something aggressive, colossal,\" wrote Bourne. \"There seems to have been a peculiar congeniality between the war and these men. It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.\"\n\nBetrayed by his prophets, Bourne cast about for a new creed. At times he veered toward isolationism. The horrors on the home front, he argued, showed that Dewey was wrong: American progressivism was not a successful experiment ready to be unveiled to the world. Americans should instead embark upon a \"stern and intensive cultivation of our garden...a turning within in order that we may have something to give without.\" At other moments, Bourne lurched toward pacifism. Wilson, he argued, had been right to seek to replace the balance of power with a world of reason and law. Where he had gone horribly wrong was in believing that this new world could be enthroned\u2014and maintained\u2014via the sword. There is no such thing as a \"democratic and antiseptic war,\" Bourne insisted. \"The pacifists opposed the war because they knew this was an illusion.\"\n\nHad Bourne lived longer, he might have reconciled these competing strains. But he did not live long enough to try. Cast out from the New Republic in 1917, he began writing for a small literary journal called Seven Arts. But it soon folded, largely because of the furor over his antiwar polemics. He briefly served as a contributing editor at another minor publication, Dial. But the journal's benefactor was also wooing John Dewey, the man Bourne was savaging in print. Dewey agreed to join the staff on one condition: that his nemesis be fired.\n\nUnder investigation by the Justice Department, increasingly unable to publish, and virtually homeless\u2014living in the apartments of friends\u2014Bourne died of influenza just weeks after the war's end. A legend soon grew that he had starved because no journal would print his work. That was a fable, but its appeal testified to Bourne's hold over the postwar imagination. In his final, fevered days, his assault on the hubris of reason offered a template for many of America's leading intellectuals and politicians in the two decades to come. Isolationists in the 1920s and '30s demanded that America never again bind its fate to the alien civilization across the Atlantic. Pacifists kept alive the dream of a rationalized world but insisted that achieving it required America not to fight wars, but to abolish them. And leading these two intellectual currents, oddly enough, were Charles Beard and John Dewey. In death, the prot\u00e9g\u00e9 became mentor, and the fathers carried on the work of the prodigal son. Had Bourne's ravaged body endured into the postwar age, the homesick wanderer might have found himself, finally, at home.\n\nIf the hubris of reason was cracking domestically, it would soon crack overseas as well. On January 18, 1919, five weeks after Wilson's triumphant arrival in Europe, the Paris Peace Conference began. The date was no accident. It had been on that same day in 1871 that Wilhelm I was coronated kaiser of a newly unified Germany. French premier Georges Clemenceau, who orchestrated the timing, remembered 1871. Back then, as a young man, he had helped barricade his neighborhood against the German siege of Paris. Now, in his seventies\u2014suffering from diabetes, insomnia, and eczema on his hands so severe that he was forced to wear gloves\u2014he had seen the Germans invade again. Germany, he told a journalist, was his \"life hatred.\" His one overriding goal before he died\u2014for which he was willing to beg, lie, cheat, steal, and kill\u2014was to ensure that France was never raped again. According to legend, he had asked to be buried upright, facing Germany, so he could keep vigil even from the grave.\n\nClemenceau wanted Wilson to see Germany as he saw it, to understand life in the lion's den. In January 1919, France was a ravaged nation. The war had taken one quarter of its men between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Double that number had been wounded; they were everywhere, pitiful, limbless creatures begging in the streets. On paper, France had won the war. But Clemenceau knew that it was less a victory than a stay of execution. France had lost a higher percentage of men than Germany, and since the fighting had occurred largely on its soil, it had suffered more damage to its infrastructure. By sparking the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the war had also removed France's most powerful ally\u2014and Germany's most powerful foe\u2014in Eastern Europe. Structurally, therefore, France finished the war even more vulnerable to its bigger, more productive neighbor than it had been at the start. Even the souvenir penknives that French shopkeepers sold to commemorate victory were made in German factories.\n\nClemenceau urged Wilson to see the destruction firsthand, the six thousand miles of French territory that the war had laid waste. \"There are hundreds of villages into which no one has yet been able to return,\" explained one French minister. \"Please understand: it is a desert, it is desolation, it is death.\" But Wilson resisted French invitations to tour the battlefields; he did not want to be swayed by emotion. He hadn't even wanted to hold the peace conference in Paris, preferring Geneva, where there would be fewer \"hysterical\" French. As always, Wilson saw himself and his nation as impartial, detached. Americans, he explained, were \"the only disinterested people at the Peace Conference.\" Asked by foreign correspondents what he would say to his fellow leaders once the conference began, he replied, \"[W]e come here asking nothing of ourselves and we are here to see you get nothing.\"\n\nClemenceau found Wilson's detachment maddening. He grumbled about the American president's \"cold reason\" and \"mathematical justice.\" Wilson, he moaned, \"believed you could do everything with formulas and his fourteen points. God himself was content with [only] ten commandments.\" For Clemenceau, there could be no objectivity between the lion and the lamb. In his mind, the purpose of the peace conference was not to repeal the balance of power\u2014a system he pointedly endorsed just before the negotiations began\u2014but to rectify it. France must be made stronger; Germany weaker. There must be a redistribution of force. \"I have come to the conclusion that force is right,\" he told a dinner guest. \"Why is this chicken here? Because it was not strong enough to resist those who wanted to kill it. And a very good thing too!\"\n\nFrance needed security; in that pursuit Clemenceau was unyielding. But he was flexible about how to attain it. The most obvious way was to ravage Germany as it had ravaged France: to strip it of as much land and money as possible. In addition to Alsace-Lorraine, whose return to France everyone took for granted, Clemenceau suggested annexing the Rhineland, a strategically vital, mineral-rich slice of land that hugged Germany's borders with Holland, Belgium, and France, or establishing a puppet state there. That way, if Germany struck again, at least France would have a territorial buffer to absorb the blow. He also proposed reparations so severe that they would not only help France rebuild but shift the economic balance of power with Berlin.\n\nBut France needed more than money and land. It needed allies, since without them it couldn't enforce a peace agreement anyway. Clemenceau was prepared to go softer on Germany in return for ironclad guarantees that America and Britain would come to France's aid if the Huns stirred again. But here his desires and Wilson's progressive vision clashed. Clemenceau wanted that most old-fashioned of things: an alliance against a potential foe. Wilson wanted a world without alliances, where nations no longer banded together in selfish blocs but instead championed the common interests of all humankind.\n\nFor five months, Wilson and Clemenceau bickered, with British prime minister David Lloyd George usually somewhere in between. Clemenceau embraced Wilson's call for a League of Nations but tried to turn it into an anti-German alliance. The League, he proposed, should exclude Germany and establish a standing army dominated by America, Britain, and France. When the Americans and British refused to create a League army, Clemenceau suggested a common military planning staff instead, so the League could organize quickly in response to German aggression. But Wilson rejected that, too. For Clemenceau, who assumed that Germany would resist whatever peace settlement the Allies imposed, the League was only useful as a tool of Allied enforcement. For Wilson, by contrast, the whole purpose of the peace settlement and the League was to establish principles so rational and fair that they would be accepted by all countries, Germany included. Wilson was no pacifist; he conceded that in theory the League might have to enforce its rulings at gunpoint. But he insisted that military action would be rare. As in his crusades for progressive reform at home, and for collective security in the Western Hemisphere, he claimed that it was education, not force, that would convince people to accept the scientific principles formulated on high. In the new world being born, he insisted, stopping aggression would depend \"primarily and chiefly upon one great force, and that is the moral force of the public opinion of the world.\"\n\nIn the end, the French and Americans struck a compromise: The Rhineland would stay in German hands but the Allies could occupy it for fifteen years. Washington and London also offered Paris security guarantees: They would come to its aid if the Germans attacked again. On paper Clemenceau had what he wanted. But the alliance was built on sand. Wilson downplayed it, saying it did not commit the United States to do anything it hadn't already pledged to do under the League. That made Clemenceau shiver. The League, in his mind, was utopian precisely because it bound its members to defend the borders of all nations\u2014whether those borders mattered to their security or not. In the real world, Clemenceau believed, that made America's pledges under the League virtually meaningless\u2014a point underscored by Wilson's insistence that upholding those pledges would rarely require force. Clemenceau wanted a French alliance with the United States to be everything the League was not: a binding, narrowly tailored commitment made for reasons of national security, not universal principle. He wanted Wilson to acknowledge that aggression against France mattered to America in a way that aggression against Latvia did not, to admit that America had entered the game of global politics not to protect the rights of all nations, but to protect the rights of those crucial few\u2014like France\u2014upon which America's own security relied.\n\nBut that is not how Wilson had sold the war back home. He had told Americans that the United States was an associate of Britain and France, not an ally\u2014that it was fighting not on their behalf, but on behalf of all humankind. The clear implication was that America's goal at the peace conference was not to buttress any one group of nations but to ensure that all nations, the victors as well as the vanquished, were treated rationally and fairly.\n\nIn Wilson's mind, his rapturous welcome across the continent proved that ordinary Europeans wanted this, too. They wanted to transcend their selfish, tribal desires; they just needed a great educator like himself to show them the way. \"National purposes have fallen more and more into the background,\" he declared, \"and the common purpose of enlightened mankind has taken their place.\" Mastodons like Clemenceau didn't understand that; they still hungered for alliances, reparations, and land. But Wilson told aides that Europe's leaders did not represent their people. \"If necessary,\" he insisted, \"I can reach the peoples of Europe over the heads of their rulers.\"\n\nBut the peoples of Europe let Wilson down. Time and again during the Paris negotiations, when Europe's leaders resisted his designs, Wilson threatened to take his case to their people, in a campaign of public education. And time and again, ordinary Europeans refused to be educated. When Wilson said he would appeal to the British to overturn their government's opposition to freedom of the seas, one of the Fourteen Points, Lloyd George urged him on, no doubt amused at the prospect of an American telling Britons to place their trust in his abstract principles rather than the Royal Navy. When Italian prime minister Vittorio Orlando walked out of the peace conference after his nation was denied the Adriatic city of Fiume, Wilson promised to explain the decision to the Italian people himself. Unmollified, the Italians, who had erected plaques to Wilson only weeks before, covered them over in disgust. If ordinary Americans weren't as rational in wartime as Wilson and his fellow war progressives had assumed, ordinary Europeans, it turned out, weren't, either.\n\nWilson was hoisted on his own petard. Against Roosevelt and Lodge's advice, he had denied that America was entering the war because its own security required preventing Germany from overthrowing the European balance of power. Instead he had told Americans that they were entering the war to abolish the European balance of power, to build a world in which reason governed force. The implication was that America's participation was conditional: If the old world refused to change, America could always retreat to its own hemisphere, since it could \"in no circumstances consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and force.\" Now, as the terms of the Paris Peace Conference trickled out, it became clear that the postwar world would indeed be governed by intrigue and force. The Treaty of Versailles was not as punitive as legend suggests. It was considerably less onerous, for instance, than the treaties that Germany had imposed upon Romania and Russia when they exited the war in May 1918. But it was far from a scientific peace. German territory was parceled out to France, Belgium, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, sometimes in flagrant violation of the principles of national self-determination laid out by the Inquiry and the Fourteen Points. Italy seized several choice parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire; Japan grabbed German islands in the Pacific and a slice of China; Britain and France snatched Berlin's colonies in Africa and the Middle East. The settlement reflected the distribution of postwar power, not objective standards of right and wrong. The peace treaty failed that classic progressive test: It was not seen as impartial by all sides.\n\nWilson did his best to sugarcoat the results. He had convinced the Europeans to join a League of Nations, he explained, and over time the League would smooth out the treaty's rougher edges. But many of Wilson's progressive allies refused to be placated. Outraged that his work for the Inquiry had been in vain, Lippmann warned the Europeans that \"if you make it a peace that can be maintained only by the bayonet we shall leave you to the consequences and find our own security in this hemisphere.\" Wilson had made America's entry into the war sound altruistic: The United States had joined the fray to lift up the benighted Europeans, not because its security was intertwined with theirs. Now the Europeans had refused to be lifted up. And so for many disillusioned progressives\u2014and many Americans more generally\u2014there was only one thing to do: return home.\n\nOn July 10, 1919, Wilson submitted the Versailles Treaty\u2014which included American membership in the League\u2014to the Senate. There he faced three rough blocs. First were the forty-seven Senate Democrats, who as loyal partisans nearly all backed U.S. entrance into the League. But by themselves they lacked the two-thirds votes necessary for ratification. Next were a group of Republicans called \"Irreconcilables,\" led by Idaho's Senator William Borah, who for various reasons were certain to vote no. They numbered only about fourteen, but their voice was amplified by disillusioned war progressives like Lippmann, who now opposed the League with the fury of lovers scorned.\n\nThe opposition of the Irreconcilables meant that to win Senate ratification the treaty required votes from the third bloc: a group of roughly thirty-five Republicans called \"Reservationists.\" The Reservationists were prepared to swallow America's entrance into the League, but only if certain \"reservations\" were added to the treaty, the most important of which was that only a vote of Congress\u2014not a vote of the League\u2014could take America to war. Their patron saint was Theodore Roosevelt, who six months earlier had dropped dead of a heart attack. Their leader was Roosevelt's soulmate, Henry Cabot Lodge, who saw his battle with Wilson as a tribute to his dead friend.\n\nAt first glance, Lodge stood in the ideological middle, with the militantly pro-League Wilson and the militantly anti-League Borah occupying the two poles. But in a deeper sense he stood apart from both. Wilson and Borah were, in the political scientist Hans Morgenthau's words, \"brothers under the skin.\" Wilson claimed that the League would rationalize international affairs and therefore must be embraced. Borah insisted it would not and thus must be spurned. Wilson said America should engage with the world in order to perfect it; Borah said the world could not be perfected and so should not be engaged. Only Lodge articulated a realistic internationalism: He acknowledged that the world could not be perfected\u2014that reason would never fully govern force\u2014but urged that America bind itself to it anyway.\n\nLodge did not believe in detachment. He was a fierce partisan of his city, Boston; his political party, the Republicans; and his intellectual tradition, which he traced to Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists. Like Wilson, he revered Lincoln\u2014but Lincoln the partisan and Lincoln the conqueror, not Lincoln the impartial reconciler. When World War I broke out, Lodge became a partisan of Britain and France. The United States, he insisted, \"should act, not as an umpire between our allies and our enemies, but as one of the allies.\" Now, with the war over, his goal mirrored Clemenceau's: to put Germany in a box from which \"it will be physically impossible for her to break out again.\"\n\nFor Lodge, the League\u2014as Wilson described it\u2014was a dangerous delusion. America, in his view, would never go to war for Latvia, and he did not like making promises that his nation could and should not keep. He was willing to support U.S. membership, but only once Congress made clear that the League was a mere debating society, which would change nothing fundamental about international affairs. Lodge was not sentimental; he did not believe that international politics would ever be much more than a jungle. He urged Wilson to eschew \"efforts to reach the millennium of universal and eternal peace,\" to stop trying to make \"mankind suddenly virtuous by a statute or a written constitution.\" Better to seek a balance of power against Germany, anchored by an alliance with France. Better to fly low and steadily than be seduced by the clouds above.\n\nIn theory, Wilson and Lodge should have been able to come to terms. Wilson desperately wanted the League; Lodge desperately wanted the treaty with France. Each man had the power to grant the other's wish. But to convince Lodge to support U.S. membership in the League, Wilson had to admit that the emperor had no clothes: that America would never go to war at the League's behest. Even more humiliatingly, he had to separate the French security treaty from the League itself, to show that the former, unlike the latter, constituted a binding commitment. He had to acknowledge, in other words, that his dream of a rationalized world would not come true anytime soon.\n\nThis Wilson would not do. Instructing his Democratic Senate allies not to compromise, he instead set out to speak to the people, to rally them against selfishness and call them to reason in one last, great educational campaign. His longtime doctor, Cary Grayson, begged him not to go. Wilson had a history of strokes, and that April in Paris, while running a high fever, one side of his face had gone numb and his eye had twitched uncontrollably. Since the president's return to the United States, Grayson noticed, his memory had deteriorated; he seemed confused by simple things. But Wilson brushed off the warning. \"I know I am at the end of my tether,\" he declared, \"but...in the presence of the great tragedy which now faces the world, no decent man can count his personal fortunes in the reckoning.\"\n\nOn September 3, 1919, he left Washington in a custom-designed train. From Ohio to Nebraska to California and back through the interior West, he delivered thirty-seven speeches in twenty-two days over nearly ten thousand miles. The crowds often swelled into the thousands, and, in every speech save one, Wilson addressed them without a microphone. Finally he began to buckle under the strain. On September 25, during a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he lost his bearings, and then, upon recalling America's fallen soldiers, burst into tears. That night he coughed so violently that he had to sleep upright to breathe and suffered a headache so painful he could barely see. His train raced back to Washington, but, on the car ride from Union Station to the White House, as his motorcade drove past deserted sidewalks, he began doffing his hat to imaginary crowds, fueling rumors that he had lost his mind. Within a week the left side of his body was paralyzed. He spent most of the rest of his presidency in seclusion, tended to by his wife, Edith. Neither his vice president nor any member of his cabinet would see him for the next year and a half, until he emerged to watch his successor sworn in.\n\nThe people had failed Wilson yet again. Even Democrats detected little shift in public opinion as the result of his trip; if anything, anti-League sentiment was building as more and more Americans came to see Wilson's European crusade as one big waste. Colonel House\u2014long Wilson's anchor to the messy, real world\u2014sent him two letters urging him to accept Lodge's changes. \"Your willingness to accept reservations rather than have the treaty killed,\" he implored, employing the flattery that had long greased their relationship, \"will be regarded as the act of a great man.\" But even before his stroke, Wilson had turned on his old friend, convinced that House had made concessions in Paris aimed at sabotaging his dream. Edith Wilson, who had long resented House for competing with her for the president's meager affections, refused the colonel's pleas for a meeting. So Wilson spent the disastrous fall of 1919 walled off from reality, barricaded in what one observer called \"the lonely citadel of his soul.\"\n\nWith Wilson a virtual cadaver, and the politically primitive Edith in firm control, the vultures circled. In November, the Irreconcilables and Reservationists joined forces to defeat the unamended treaty. Then, when Lodge's reservations were added, the treaty was voted down again, this time by a coalition of Irreconcilables and Senate Democrats, whom Wilson had instructed to oppose anything but a clean draft. The following March, when the treaty came up for one final vote, twenty-one Senate Democrats defied the president and backed the amended draft. But they still fell seven votes short of the two-thirds needed for ratification. In retaliation, Wilson refused to urge Senate Democrats to support the treaty with France, and so it died as well.\n\nThe tragedy was not, as Wilson's supporters claimed, that Lodge and the selfish Republicans had killed his dream of a rationalized world. That dream was always a fantasy, born of a fundamentally flawed analogy between politics in the United States\u2014where leaders possessed a near monopoly on force and thus could imagine that force had given way to reason\u2014and politics in the world at large, where no such monopoly existed and force stood naked as the arbiter of events. The real tragedy was that Wilson could not himself abandon his dream, even after Paris, and thus help bring Americans to the painful, crucial realization that they must commit themselves to a world they could not perfect. As a result, in the years after World War I, the hubris of reason gave way not to a sober and dogged realism, but to isolationism and pacifism\u2014new flights of fantasy that evaded the central truth that Wilson would not help his country learn: that America must bind itself to the world, even though the world would always let America down.\n\nFor John Dewey and Charles Beard, it had been a very bad war. Before America joined the fighting, Dewey had predicted that wartime Americans would be models of rationality. We will be \"lenient and amiable in our judgments,\" he prophesized, and \"discount all the more violent appeals to passion.\" But even on Dewey's own campus, violent passions stirred. Two months after America entered the fray, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler told a commencement audience that \"what had been tolerated before becomes intolerable now. What had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason.\" Four months later, Butler fired psychology professor James McKeen Cattell, the man who had recruited Dewey to Columbia, for writing a letter on university stationery claiming that draftees had the right to conscientiously object. Dewey protested, but most of his colleagues considered the firing entirely justified. Soon Dewey was being investigated by the Justice Department for \"pro-German\" leanings himself.\n\nBeard's experience was no better. In the spring of 1916, after publicly defending a man's right to shout \"To hell with the flag\" in a New York City public school, he was summoned by the Columbia trustees. For thirty minutes they questioned him about his allegedly subversive political and historical views before sending him away with a warning not to continue to \"inculcate disrespect for American institutions.\" Cattell's firing the following year was the final straw. On the afternoon of October 9, 1917, Beard finished his afternoon lecture, then told his students, \"This is my last lecture in Columbia University. I have handed in my resignation this afternoon to take effect at 9 A.M.\" Butler and the trustees, Beard later explained, were using \"the state of war to drive out, or humiliate, or terrorize every man who held progressive, liberal, or unconventional views in political matters.\" After a moment of stunned silence, Beard's students rose and applauded for twenty-five minutes straight, while their teacher wept.\n\nSoon Beard himself\u2014like Dewey\u2014was under investigation, in his case by the Senate Judiciary Committee for associating with groups deemed unfriendly to the war effort. The army banned some of his books from its training camps.\n\nPolitically, neither man was ever the same. The war, Dewey admitted, had fostered a \"cult of irrationality.\" The \"small voice of reason\" had been utterly silenced \"amid howling gales of passion.\" Equally disillusioned by the war's fruits overseas, he joined Lippmann and the Irreconcilables in urging the Senate to reject the Versailles Treaty. \"Were not those right who held that it was self-contradictory to try to further the permanent ideals of peace by recourse to war?\" he wrote in early 1919. It was a veiled apology to Randolph Bourne, the disciple he had betrayed, who had died just weeks before.\n\nIn what one friend called \"a state of tension that in most people would have been an illness,\" Dewey left for Asia, where he spent the next two years. He returned to the United States a devout pacifist, insisting, as Bourne had in his final days, that instead of using force to build a world of reason, America should use reason to build a world free of force. He would never support another war.\n\nFor his part, Beard carried on the other half of Bourne's revolt against the hubris of reason: isolationism. In 1922, he called for a foreign policy of \"continentalism,\" under which the United States would divest itself of all overseas territories and commitments, refuse all military and diplomatic efforts to protect U.S. investments abroad, and build a military solely devoted to protecting the homeland from foreign attack. Henceforth, Beard pledged, he would \"center my efforts on the promise of America rather than upon the fifty century-old quarrels of Europe.\" The United States, he declared, should \"set its own house in order under the stress of its own necessities and experiences.\"\n\nOn paper, Dewey's pacifism and Beard's isolationism were worlds apart. Dewey's vision remained every bit as hubristic as Wilson's; he was just no longer willing to kill to achieve it. Beard, by contrast, now rejected not merely Wilson's means, but his ends: He no longer wanted to rationalize the world. But despite this theoretical gulf, Dewey and Beard shared one core belief, which would define American foreign policy in the interwar years: that America should never again make any overseas commitment that would require enforcement via the sword.\n\nFor the French, who desperately needed America's drawn sword to keep the Germans at bay, it was a slow-motion tragedy. In August 1921, Wilson's successor, Warren Harding, signed a separate peace with Germany that freed the United States of all obligations to enforce the Treaty of Versailles. Since Britain had conditioned its own security alliance with France on America's, Paris was now on its own.\n\nA year later, Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo, normalizing relations with the Soviet Union. For France, the rapprochement was ominous. Paris, which had long pursued close ties with the nations to Germany's east so that in the event of war Berlin would have to fight on two fronts, was now banking on alliances with the newly created nations of Eastern Europe, some of which had been carved from German or Russian soil. Rapallo was the first step in Germany and Russia's efforts to take that land back. Even worse, the treaty contained a secret clause allowing Germany to train its forces on Soviet soil\u2014a direct violation of Versailles, which required the Germans to substantially disarm. Less than three years after the peace treaty, Berlin was already breaking free.\n\nBy 1923, the Germans were no longer paying their war reparations, either. Ever since 1921, when an Allied commission had set the reparations bill at 132 billion marks, Berlin had been screaming about the insane, intolerable burden under which it labored. But in reality the burden wasn't as insane and intolerable as it appeared. Given the way the reparations were structured, the bulk of the 132 billion would never have to be paid; the real figure, by some estimates, was only 25 billion marks (about $550 million). Before the Allies presented the bill, the Germans had actually proposed paying more than that themselves.\n\nThe real problem was not the amount of reparations Germany had to pay; it was the fact that most Germans did not believe they should pay any reparations at all, just as they did not believe they should forfeit territory, armaments, or their right to immediately join the League. The Versailles peace, which the Germans called a virtual crime against humanity, was in many ways milder than the one the Allies would impose in 1945, and which Germans swallowed with barely a whimper. The difference was that after World War I\u2014unlike after World War II\u2014the Germans did not feel defeated. They had never seen foreign troops marching through their razed cities. Since the Allies, in a terrible blunder, had made Germany's postwar civilian leaders sign the hated Versailles Treaty, rather than forcing the generals who had launched the war to take ownership of the peace, German militarists and hypernationalists found it all too easy to claim that the war had not been lost on the battlefield. It had been lost because liberals, socialists, and Jews stabbed Germany in the back.\n\nClemenceau was right. The Germans had not abandoned their dreams of European hegemony. And his nightmare was coming true: France was being left to face them alone. It was a vicious cycle. The more abandoned France felt, the more it lashed out against Berlin in a desperate bid to strangle Germany's growing postwar power in the crib. And the more France lashed out, the more it alienated public opinion in America, where isolationists and pacifists alike insisted that the selfish, irrational French were as bad as their German foes, if not worse.\n\nIn January 1923, after Germany, which was paying some of its reparations in coal, defaulted on its thirty-fourth shipment in thirty-six months, France and Belgium sent troops into the Ruhr Valley to seize German mines and steel plants as collateral. German inflation had already been running dangerously high as the new Weimar-based government printed currency to fill the gap between what it received in taxes and customs duties (which had fallen sharply) and what it spent (which remained high). The Ruhr occupation tipped that problem into a catastrophe. Furious that French troops were squatting on German soil, Weimar encouraged passive resistance: paying miners and factory workers not to work. To do that, Weimar printed even more money. By fall, it required thirty paper mills and 150 presses all operating twenty-four hours a day to generate all the marks that Germany's government was sending into circulation. To purchase the goods that one mark would have bought in 1914 now required one trillion. Its savings rendered virtually worthless by hyperinflation, the German middle class was now easy prey for a Nazi Party whose popularity was beginning to build.\n\nAmericans mostly responded by blaming France. The Ruhr invasion, declared William Borah, was \"utterly brutal and insane.\" Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the Nation, called it every bit as despicable as Germany's invasion of Belgium during World War I. Thousands assembled at New York's Madison Square Garden, where a litany of senators denounced French militarism. To register his disapproval, President Harding withdrew all remaining U.S. troops from the Rhineland, abandoning the final element of American enforcement of Versailles. Four years earlier, when they signed their names at Versailles, French leaders believed they had an American commitment to defend their borders and to help keep Germany from arming in the Rhineland. By 1923, they had neither.\n\nThe Ruhr occupation did not just offend American sensibilities; it hurt America's bottom line. World War I had turned the United States into the world's largest creditor, and U.S. investors were keen to sink their money into postwar Germany, whose reviving industries they believed would offer fat rates of return. But as long as the French occupied the Ruhr, Germany's economy could not revive. So in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge sent banker Charles Dawes to convince Berlin to start paying a reduced reparations bill, and to convince Paris to withdraw its troops. Dawes succeeded. The Germans began paying, France pulled back, and Americans made money. But for France, it was yet another defeat. By agreeing to the Dawes Plan, the French effectively conceded that it would be Washington\u2014not Paris\u2014that determined whether Germany was paying sufficient reparations. And since Dawes and Coolidge didn't much care whether Berlin paid its reparations to France, so long as it repaid its loans to America, Weimar could now default with virtual impunity. Just as significant was the way Dawes approached the two sides: as an impartial mediator. As Coolidge put it, \"We are independent, detached and can and do take a disinterested position in relation to international affairs.\" Wilson had at least made America an \"associate\" of the French cause. Coolidge went further: America was now strictly neutral between the nation it had fought alongside and the nation it had fought against, between France, which had no capacity to dominate Europe, and Germany, which still did.\n\nSoon the impartiality was enshrined in international law. In 1925, at the Swiss resort of Locarno, Germany, France, and Belgium pledged to respect each other's borders, with Britain and Italy serving as guarantors. It all seemed wonderfully hopeful: The wartime belligerents were finally starting to reconcile. Europeans began speaking of a \"spirit of Locarno\" breaking out across the continent; the British, German, and French negotiators all won the Nobel Prize. But there were darker forces at play. At Locarno, the final, slim prospect of a British alliance with France died. Instead of pledging to protect France against German attack, Britain was now pledging to protect Germany against French attack as well, which presumably meant that if the French again sent troops into the Ruhr to enforce Versailles, then London and Paris would be at war. At Locarno, the Germans also conspicuously refused to pledge to respect their borders with Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It was yet another sign that Berlin intended to break out of its Versailles straitjacket in the east, a move that would in turn imperil the two-front strategy on which French security relied.\n\nSlowly and artfully, using progressivism's language of impartiality as their pretext, the Germans were wriggling free. In 1926, they were admitted to the League and even given a seat on its council. Now any French bid to use the League to enforce Versailles was subject to Berlin's veto, and any League-sponsored effort at disarmament would have to apply equally to both Germany and France. Since France, given its visceral fear of its eastern neighbor, was unwilling to disarm, Germany no longer had to, either. In January 1927, the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission, which had been (halfheartedly) monitoring Berlin's compliance with its disarmament obligations, left German soil. In theory, under the Versailles Treaty, Germany still had only one hundred thousand troops and no tanks, heavy weaponry, or air force. Meanwhile, France began building a chain of military defenses across the length of its border with Germany: the Maginot Line.\n\nFor the pacifists and isolationists who shaped American foreign policy in the 1920s, it was France\u2014more than Germany\u2014that exemplified the selfish, irrational tendencies they disdained. The Germans, with their calls for international equality, mutual disarmament, and self-determination, spoke America's language. The French, by contrast, kept going on about fortifications, punishments, alliances, and the balance of power\u2014all grating to the American ear. France, wrote Dewey, \"affords a striking example of the fact that\" in international affairs, \"the old policies and the old type of politicians are still absolutely in control.\" When it came to security, the French were like a man desperate for food, and every time they lunged for it, Americans reprimanded them for their poor table manners.\n\nWhile France grimly prepared for another war, Americans in the 1920s fell madly in love with the idea of peace. From Ernest Hemingway to John Dos Passos to William Faulkner to H. L. Mencken, American novelists and critics savaged the idea that there was nobility in war. Harding and Coolidge's influential secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, began calling the State Department \"the Department of Peace.\" In 1922, publisher Edward Bok offered one hundred thousand dollars to anyone who could outline a scheme for world peace in less than five thousand words, and a staggering 250,000 Americans inquired about taking part. The Nation demanded \"a burning, an unconquerable, an undeviating hatred of war, any war for whatever reason.\" On Armistice Day 1932, Nicholas Murray Butler, the Columbia University president whose wartime jingoism had so traumatized Dewey and Beard, called on the nations of the world to destroy their weapons, but leave a few to put in museums so future generations could see how barbaric human beings had once been.\n\nInfluential Americans actually said such things in the 1920s, in full sincerity. What's more, they tried to turn their words into action. In 1920, Borah introduced legislation proposing a conference with Britain and Japan aimed at cutting each nation's naval expenditures in half. It passed the Senate, 74\u20130. The following fall, Secretary of State Hughes convened the Washington Naval Conference, which produced an agreement between America, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy on a ratio limiting their battleship fleets. Hughes, one British observer quipped, had destroyed more royal vessels than all the admirals in history. Scattered voices in the U.S. departments of Navy and War muttered that the ratios did not allow America to keep pace with Japan in the Pacific, but they were missing the larger point: Congress wouldn't have appropriated enough money to keep pace even without the treaty. Between 1922 and 1926, American naval spending dropped by one-third.\n\nBy 1927, the Coolidge administration was itching for another disarmament conference. But the French, who had been dragged unhappily into the first one, refused to play along. Instead, French foreign minister Aristide Briand\u2014a man renowned for his wit and great mop of disheveled gray hair\u2014proposed that the United States and France pledge never to go to war. It was a sly move. Since Versailles, Paris had been busily encircling Germany with alliances: with Belgium in 1920, Poland in 1921, Czechoslovakia in 1924, and Romania and Yugoslavia in 1926. However, in the rational, unselfish new world supposedly born from World War I, alliance was a dirty word. So the French didn't call their treaties \"alliances\" they called them pledges never to go to war (sometimes with secret addenda promising military aid in case either signatory went to war with anyone else). Now Paris was proposing such a pledge with the United States.\n\nHughes's replacement as secretary of state\u2014an elderly, profane, former corporate lawyer named Frank Kellogg\u2014was not fooled. He knew that if America and France pledged never to go to war, America would find it much harder not to go to war with whomever France was fighting against. With a U.S. nonaggression pact in its back pocket, France could infringe upon U.S. neutrality rights\u2014as the British had done during World War I\u2014secure in the knowledge that America could not retaliate. This would make the United States a de facto belligerent on France's side.\n\nThe American peace movement, however, was enthralled by Briand's idea, and so Kellogg needed a counterproposal. In that effort, he turned to the work of John Dewey. Upon his return from self-imposed exile in Asia, Dewey had thrown himself into a movement called the Outlawry of War. War, Dewey noted, was not currently illegal under international law. There were laws of war\u2014rules about treating prisoners, and the like\u2014but no laws against war. This, Dewey declared, made international politics barbaric and archaic. Once upon a time, he claimed, societies had not outlawed murder, either; they had just regulated it. Dueling was once a legal method of settling disputes within nations. But now humanity had progressed. Just as dueling had been outlawed between individuals, war should now be outlawed between nations.\n\nIt was a deeply progressive argument: History was marching upward from barbarism to civilization, and, in that effort, the triumph of reason and law within nations should serve as a template for the triumph of reason and law between nations. It was similar in spirit to what Dewey had believed in 1917, except that now Dewey insisted that this upward march must proceed not via war, but via its abolition. As always, the key was public opinion. Dewey, like Wilson during the Paris Peace Conference, insisted that ordinary people were more morally advanced than their leaders. Across the world, he insisted, a \"community of moral feeling\" against war already existed. By helping to outlaw war, America would nurture that moral feeling until it became a stigma so profound\u2014like the stigma against slavery or incest\u2014that war became almost unthinkable. Dewey's pacifism was the ethic of reason turned inside out, a kind of hubris of the impotent. America should insist on an utterly remade world, governed by reason, not force. But the means should be as pure as the end: To avoid sullying the dream of a rationalized world, America should shed no blood in its pursuit.\n\nIn 1921, Dewey had written to Borah, the flamboyant leader of the Senate Irreconcilables, urging him to draft legislation committing the United States to the abolition of war. Two years later, Borah did just that, and in 1927, when Kellogg needed an answer to Briand, Borah's legislation was still sitting there like an unlit match. When Kellogg struck the fuse and proposed a treaty banning war not just between the United States and France but between all nations, the peace movement erupted in even greater exhilaration. Carrie Chapman Catt's Committee on the Cause and Cure of War convened ten thousand town meetings to pass pro-Outlawry resolutions; side by side the resolutions stretched for two miles. Letters endorsing Kellogg's proposal flooded the State Department at the rate of six hundred per day.\n\nThe French were furious. Once again they had tried to drag Americans down into the harsh, real world only to see them float back up into the haze of dazzling abstraction. There was nothing left to do but smile grimly and play along. At the signing ceremony, where sixty-four nations pledged to forever abstain from war, Briand\u2014a glorious bullshitter when necessity required\u2014solemnly dedicated the treaty to the World War I dead. President Coolidge, with greater sincerity, declared that the Kellogg-Briand Treaty held \"greater hope for peaceful relations than was ever before given to the world.\" The Senate passed the treaty, 85\u20131. Dewey called it one of the most important events in the history of international affairs. Kellogg won the Nobel Prize.\n\nSome of the senators who voted for the treaty were isolationists. They didn't believe for a minute that the blood-soaked Europeans would refrain from war. But the treaty was a harmless sop to their pacifist constituents, a meaningless commitment that substituted for a real one. Pacifists, by contrast, supported the treaty in deadly earnest; they considered Kellogg-Briand the dawn of a virtual messianic age. Between them, the two factions embodied the same dual impulses that had animated Randolph Bourne in his final days: to avoid war by fleeing it and to avoid war by banning it. Wilson, for all his self-delusion, had actually risked something for his vision of a rationalized world. Beard and the isolationists abandoned that vision; Dewey and the pacifists thought they could achieve it by proclamations alone. What they all shared\u2014Wilson and those who rebelled against him in the giddy, unreal 1920s\u2014was a refusal to meet the world on its own terms, to accept that politics between nations would never resemble politics between Americans, yet must be embraced nonetheless. The real answer to the hubris of reason was still waiting to be born.\n\n## CHAPTER THREE\n\n## TWICE-BORN\n\nOn a fall day in 1932, John Dewey ascended a Manhattan podium to endorse a candidate for Congress: a theologian thirty years his junior named Reinhold Niebuhr, who was running on the Socialist ticket in New York state's 19th District. It was a decision he would regret. Unbeknownst to Dewey, Niebuhr had just completed a book that attacked him by name. Dewey, Niebuhr charged, placed too much faith in reason, forgetting that \"reason is always, to some degree, the servant of interest.\" And his pacifism was na\u00efve, since \"conflict is inevitable, and in this conflict power must be challenged by power.\" Niebuhr's book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, was a broadside against the faith to which Dewey had clung in both war and peace: that through education humanity could be fundamentally improved. For the aging philosopher, it would prove little consolation that the young cleric won only 4 percent of the vote.\n\nLike Randolph Bourne, Niebuhr had once been a fervent admirer of Dewey, and like Bourne, he had scores to settle from World War I. Niebuhr had been twenty-four years old when America plunged into the Great War, and his war progressivism had an almost desperate tinge. Niebuhr, after all, was German, the son of an immigrant from the province of Lippe-Detmold. When the war broke out, he was a student at Yale Divinity School, struggling to perfect his English. And when the United States entered the fray, he was a minister at a German-language church in northwest Detroit, having only recently convinced the board to allow English-language services every week. As war hysteria gripped the nation\u2014and publicly speaking German became in some places a crime and in others an invitation to mob attack\u2014Niebuhr refused to defend his besieged flock; to the contrary, he added to their torment. Eager for literary fame, he broke through with a cover story in the Atlantic implying that when it came to German-Americans, the public's \"suspicions of disloyalty\" were wholly justified. He demanded removal of the word German from his denomination's letterhead, and when a church newspaper gently criticized wartime censorship, Niebuhr chastised its editor, insisting that the paper express \"out-and-out loyalty.\"\n\nThe ambitious young preacher justified all this by declaring World War I a noble crusade: \"the inspiring spectacle of a nation making every sacrifice of blood and treasure for aims which do not include territorial ambitions or plans for imperial aggrandizement.\" He was gambling that Wilson and Dewey were right: that the war would midwife a nation and a world governed more by reason than force. When that hope died at Versailles, Niebuhr announced\u2014like Randolph Bourne and Walter Lippmann\u2014that he had been betrayed. He called Wilson a dupe. He denounced the wartime pastors so \"anxious to prove that they liked the smell of blood.\" He fretted that \"no one will ever know the tragedy in the millions of lives of German immigrants\" treated \"as potential criminals\" by their adopted nation. Niebuhr understood the tragedy all too well. He had seen it up close, not as a victim, but as a victimizer. Like Lippmann, he responded to the collapse of his war progressive dreams with rage when the more honest reaction would have been shame.\n\nFor a time after the war, Niebuhr called himself a pacifist. But his heart was never in it. Even when he supported outlawing war, he kept rebuking his fellow outlawers for their excessive idealism, for their failure to see that war was a product not of human ignorance, which could be eradicated, but of human sinfulness, which could not. World War I, he declared, \"made me a child of the age of disillusionment.\" And that disillusionment applied not merely to the belief that the world could be rationalized through war, but to the belief that it could be rationalized through peace as well.\n\nWhat exactly all this disillusionment meant for Niebuhr's foreign policy views was not yet clear, since in the 1920s foreign policy was not his major concern. But when it came to domestic affairs, he kept pointing out the limits of reason and the centrality of power, taking aim at core principles of the progressive creed. One of his favorite examples was Henry Ford, the auto titan who dominated Niebuhr's adopted city of Detroit. Ford made a great show of his Christian piety, thus suckering some progressive-minded ministers into believing that by citing the ethical teachings of the gospel they could convince him to treat his workers more fairly. Niebuhr called that a delusion. Ford didn't exploit his workers because he was ignorant of the Bible; he exploited them because it made him rich. The problem was not inadequate education; it was naked self-interest. And the answer, in Niebuhr's view, was to confront Ford with the organized self-interest of his workers, who should fashion themselves into a labor union and refuse to work at starvation wages. Unlike the progressives, Niebuhr didn't think the clash between Ford and his workers had an objective solution. He wasn't seeking a scientific peace. He was seeking a new industrial balance of power, in which the rich\u2014acting less from reason or love than from fear\u2014satisfied the selfish desires of the empowered poor. In 1929, Niebuhr made it official, joining the Socialist Party.\n\nThen the Depression hit. By 1933, America's gross national product was less than one-third its level in 1929. Food riots grew common; families foraged in garbage dumps for something to eat. In this bleak and savage new America, Niebuhr lurched further left. Once again he took aim at progressives, whom he accused of trying to persuade the rich to treat the poor more justly. The old progressive faith in education, and in the ultimate harmony of society, he argued, was na\u00efve. The class war had begun, and it was a contest not of reason, but of might. Dewey, Niebuhr claimed, would not stare this harsh reality in the face. He could not see that when oppression forces you to the barricades, the time for pedagogy is done.\n\nIn his attack on Dewey, Niebuhr reflected his times. The Depression politicized intellectuals and radicalized them, leaving many contemptuous of the claim that the struggle between business and labor could culminate in a scientific peace. In 1931, Lippmann's first boss, the famed muckraker Lincoln Steffens, published an autobiography mocking his earlier belief that by exposing society's crimes, journalists could educate those in power to remedy them. In his influential 1932 polemic, Farewell to Reform, John Chamberlain took stock of three decades of progressive good intentions and declared them a failure; revolution was the only option left. That same year, a host of prominent writers, including the novelist John Dos Passos, the philosopher Sidney Hook, and the literary critics Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson, announced that they were voting communist for president.\n\nLooking at the election results, one might have wondered whether any of this mattered. American politics did move left in the 1930s, but the result was not revolution, but the New Deal\u2014not a farewell to reform, but its spirited revival. At the very moment leftist intellectuals were burying progressivism, Franklin Roosevelt seemed to be dredging it up.\n\nBut the intellectual rebellion that Niebuhr led\u2014against Dewey's faith in the inevitability of progress, the efficacy of education, and the inherent goodness of man\u2014would by the early 1940s profoundly affect American foreign policy, as the United States climbed out of the Depression and found itself standing at the precipice of a second world war. As in 1917, a vision of America would become the template for a vision of the entire globe. And a generation less intoxicated by success than its predecessor, and more toughened by tragedy, would do what the pacifists and isolationists of the 1920s and 1930s could not: bury the hubris of reason and reconcile America to a fallen world.\n\nAll this, however, was still a long way off when Dewey endorsed Niebuhr on that fall day in 1932. America's president was Herbert Hoover, a man who neatly blended the pacifism and isolationism of the interwar years. Hoover believed in reason, not force, and understandably so: He had seen the former transform his life and the latter devastate the world. His biography would have made Horatio Alger blush. Orphaned at age nine, he was sent to live with his uncle in Oregon, who forced young Herbert to labor such long hours in the family real estate office that he was unable to attend high school. Undaunted, the young striver took classes at night, where he mastered bookkeeping, typing, and math and so impressed his teachers that he gained admission to Stanford University's inaugural class. There he trained as a mining engineer, and by age forty his genius at exploiting inaccessible deposits had made him a multimillionaire. (To this day, Hoover's entry in the Australian Prospectors & Miners Hall of Fame does not even mention that he became president.)\n\nIn early-twentieth-century America, engineering was a quintessentially progressive profession, and Hoover was, in one colleague's words, the \"engineering profession personified.\" Engineers saw themselves as scientifically trained experts standing above the selfish clash between business and labor. They occupied, in Hoover's words, a \"position of disinterested service,\" \"want[ing] nothing...from Congress [except] efficiency.\" And this, in Hoover's mind, made them just the kind of people America needed to run its government.\n\nWorld War I provided Hoover his chance. In London on business, he was asked by the U.S. Embassy to help find food, lodging, cash, and safe passage back to the United States for the thousands of Americans marooned in Europe. This he did with dazzling efficiency: Of the $1.5 million in loans he arranged for roughly 120,000 stranded Americans, all but $300 was paid back. When the job was done, the U.S. ambassador called Hoover \"a simple, modest, energetic man who began his career in California and will end it in heaven.\"\n\nAfter that, Hoover was charged with aiding the people of Belgium, who were suffering both from German occupation and a British blockade. This time he oversaw the shipment of more than $5 billion in food and supplies while spending less than half a percent on overhead. By war's end, close to four million Europeans had written letters or signed petitions thanking him for his work. The people of Finland invented a new verb: hoover, meaning \"to help.\" Now something of an international celebrity, he was tapped by Wilson to head the American Food Administration, where he ran a vast public relations campaign aimed at convincing Americans to ration food and other staples so there would be enough for the troops overseas. Soon, the word Hoover entered the American lexicon as well, as a verb meaning \"to conserve.\" \"I can Hooverize on dinners and on lights and fuel too,\" read a popular Valentine's Day card in 1918, \"but I'll never learn to Hooverize when it comes to loving you!\"\n\nHoover's wartime experience left him with foreign policy views that blended the pacifism of John Dewey and the isolationism of Charles Beard. Already predisposed to nonviolence by his Quaker upbringing, Hoover now contrasted his accomplishments as an international engineer and relief worker\u2014using science, commerce, and moral appeals to improve humanity's lot\u2014with the savagery and waste of Europe's war. But if Hoover, like Dewey, believed that America should try to build a world free of force, his wartime experience also inclined him toward Beard's pessimism that Europeans would ever shed their murderous ways. The result was a foreign policy ideology best described as \"pacifism if possible, isolationism if necessary.\" The U.S. government, in Hoover's view, should appeal to other nations to cut armaments and renounce aggression, just as he had appealed to Europeans to aid Belgium and to Americans to stop eating meat. And the United States should spread capitalism across the globe, just as he had in his mining days. But America should always retain the freedom to retreat across the oceans if its efforts were rebuffed. The United States, Hoover believed, was militarily and economically self-sufficient. For him, as for Harding, Coolidge, and even Wilson, America's international engagement was conditional: If the world lived up to our standards, great. If not, we could survive perfectly well on our own.\n\nThis was exactly the attitude that had been making French leaders twitch ever since Versailles. In 1929, soon after entering the White House, Hoover, along with British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, hatched plans for another naval disarmament conference, to extend to smaller ships the restrictions put in place in 1921. Thrilled, peace activists sent the State Department so many letters that clerks complained they could not process all the mail.\n\nIn London the following spring, the United States, Britain, and Japan agreed to limit their fleets of destroyers, cruisers, and submarines. But the French\u2014confirming their reputation as the troglodytes of Europe\u2014would not join in. Pressed to accept naval parity with Benito Mussolini's Italy, Paris responded with that most tedious and hoary of demands: a security alliance with America and Britain. When Hoover refused, the French walked out. France, Hoover commented, was \"rich, militaristic, and cocky; and nobody can get on with her until she has to be thrashed again.\"\n\nThe Germans could not have agreed more. Berlin's bid to free itself from the fetters of Versailles, which it had once pursued with stealth and good manners, was becoming more blatant. A big reason was the Depression, which further devastated a German middle class still reeling from the hyperinflation of 1923. In September 1930, with unemployment nearing 15 percent, the Nazis\u2014who had won roughly 800,000 votes two years earlier\u2014garnered more than 6 million, making them the Reichstag's second-largest party. Six months later, Berlin announced a customs union with Austria, the first step toward unifying the two German-speaking nations, which Versailles explicitly banned. The French were apoplectic and ultimately squashed the move, but Hoover, who saw the customs union as economically rational, not geopolitically threatening, gave his blessing. \"Evidently you don't approve of the Versailles Treaty,\" remarked Secretary of State Henry Stimson. \"Of course I don't,\" Hoover replied. \"I never did.\"\n\n\"In the realm of reason,\" observed Walter Lippmann, Hoover \"is an unusually bold man.\" But \"in the realm of unreason he is...easily bewildered.\" Unfortunately for the Great Engineer, unreason was on the march in the Depression years, and not just in Germany. In September 1931, a cadre of younger Japanese army officers swearing fealty to bushido, the ancient Japanese warrior code, engineered a massive invasion of the northern Chinese province of Manchuria. Hoover was stunned: He had thought American morality and commerce were taming the Japanese. Just a year earlier, Tokyo had signed the London Naval Treaty, and Japan's economy was deeply enmeshed with America's own. But the Japanese prime minister who signed that treaty was now dead, shot in the abdomen by a young hypernationalist. And during the Depression, America's own protectionist policies changed Tokyo's economic calculus. In an increasingly autarkic world, Japan could no longer depend on financial and commercial links across the oceans; it needed an economic bloc of its own. That required securing Manchuria, its primary source of iron and coal, and the recipient of 90 percent of its foreign investment. By year's end, Japanese troops had pushed several hundred miles into China. In Tokyo, yet another civilian prime minister lay dead, and the army and navy were firmly in control.\n\nIn response, Hoover turned to the methods that, in his own life, had served him so well. He issued a moral appeal, informing Tokyo that since it had violated the Kellogg-Briand Treaty banning war, America would not recognize the fruits of its aggression. But Japan's war-frenzied regime paid little heed. Hoover hoped the strain of conquest might spark Japan's economic collapse, but instead its economy improved. He backed a League of Nations investigation into the incursion, but when the world body issued its condemnation, Japan walked out. Finally, Secretary of State Stimson\u2014a blue-blooded Theodore Roosevelt prot\u00e9g\u00e9 who feared war less than his boss, and understood power politics more\u2014suggested threatening sanctions. But Hoover refused; his experience in Europe had bred in him a deep aversion to blockades. \"The United States,\" he declared, \"has never set out to preserve peace among other nations by force.\"\n\nIn the 1920s, America's refusal to help uphold the European or Asian balance of power had been more understandable. Given the lack of obvious foreign threats, and the American public's hostility to overseas obligations, it would have taken an unusual leader to see that Germany's potential strength and undaunted ambition necessitated an American commitment to France. Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge might have been such leaders, but by the mid-1920s both were dead.\n\nHarder to defend was Hoover's unwillingness to build up American strength in the early '30s, with the Japanese rampaging through China, and Germany growing increasingly aggressive in its territorial demands. Even after the Manchuria invasion, Hoover still did not commission a single new warship. To the contrary, he began planning the grandest disarmament initiative yet. For years peace groups had been agitating for a meeting to address not merely limitations on a few classes of ships among a few powers, but the disarmament of the entire globe. And in 1932 they got their wish, when representatives from fifty-nine nations arrived in Geneva for the World Disarmament Conference. U.S. officials quickly electrified the delegates by proposing that all \"offensive\" weapons be banned, and all other armaments be cut by at least a quarter. A peace convoy of more than two hundred cars, carrying a petition with 150,000 signatures in support of Hoover's efforts, drove from Los Angeles to Washington, where it was taken to the White House by police escort.\n\nPredictably, the French were hostile. Naval disarmament was bad enough, but slashing the size of their army\u2014when intelligence reports showed that Germany was rapidly rearming\u2014was downright terrifying. Yet again Paris demanded security guarantees from Washington and London, and yet again Paris was rebuffed. \"When would the American government learn,\" exclaimed French foreign minister Andr\u00e9 Tardieu, \"that it could not brutalize France into concessions which it was not prepared to make?\" In July, the disarmament conference temporarily adjourned. Four months later, Germany's parliamentary elections produced an upset: the Nazis had won a plurality of the vote.\n\nIf Hoover clung to the foreign policy principles of a dying age, his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, was widely thought to lack any firm principles at all. Even as a child, his cousins, Theodore's children, considered him a toady, eager to tell adults whatever they wanted to hear. At Harvard, classmates called him a \"false smiler\" and \"two-faced.\" When FDR ran for president, H. L. Mencken quipped that if he \"became convinced tomorrow that cannibalism would get him the votes he so sorely needs, he would begin fattening up a missionary in the White House backyard.\" The charges of spinelessness and opportunism would never entirely stop. \"Every great leader had his typical gesture,\" declared the writer and Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce years later. \"Hitler the upraised arm, Churchill the V sign. Roosevelt?\" She licked her index finger and raised it to the wind.\n\nBut FDR did have foreign policy principles, or at least foreign policy instincts, instincts that would eventually help him overcome the hubris of reason. Those instincts were just difficult to see early on because one of them was that a politician should conceal his views when they clashed with the public's, and for most of the 1930s, FDR's did. Had he been more forthright\u2014less two-faced and opportunistic\u2014it is unlikely he would have been elected, or reelected, president of the United States.\n\nFDR's foreign policy instincts were shaped by two mutually reinforcing passions: for Teddy Roosevelt and for the sea. As a boy, the young Franklin hero-worshipped his fifth cousin, whom he called the greatest man he had ever known. At fourteen, he bought a pair of TR's trademark pince-nez eyeglasses. At twenty-three, he married TR's favorite niece, Eleanor. He slavishly patterned his political career on his famous relative's: winning election to the New York state assembly, getting himself appointed assistant secretary of the navy (and trying to leave that job to raise a regiment to fight in Mexico, just as TR had done in Cuba during the Spanish-American War), and then becoming governor of New York.\n\nFDR mimicked his cousin ideologically as well. Although he was working in Wilson's Navy Department when World War I broke out, FDR's views more closely resembled those of TR and Lodge. Like them, he made little pretense of objectivity; he wanted Britain and France to win. And like them, and in defiance of his superiors in the administration, he urged as early as 1915 that the United States build up its military to deal with a potential German threat. FDR's wartime statements bristled with TR's belief that war between nations was inevitable, necessary, even fun, and that it would do America good to get into the fight. He mocked his boss at the Navy Department, a pacifist named Josephus Daniels, whose \"faith in human nature and civilization and similar idealistic nonsense was receiving such a rude shock\" from the war. And he derided the \"soft mush about everlasting peace which so many statesmen are handing out to a gullible public.\" When the war ended, Roosevelt supported American membership in the League of Nations but added that \"I don't care how many restrictions or qualifications are put on [it].\" The League, he explained, was \"merely a beautiful dream, a Utopia.\" In the harsh and exhilarating real world, the struggle for power would rage on.\n\nIf FDR's muscular foreign policy views echoed TR's, they also stemmed from his almost mystical connection to the sea. Growing up on an estate alongside the Hudson River, he built toy boats before he could read, sailed his first real one at age nine, and owned a vessel by age sixteen. At his prep school, Groton, he filled his room with prints of sailing ships and tried to run away and join the navy during the Spanish-American War. At Harvard he began collecting manuscripts about naval history and developed a lifelong fascination with geography. He also read the works of the famed Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, who argued that a strong navy, capable of protecting commercial shipping, securing colonies, and protecting home waters, was essential to a nation's power.\n\nFDR's love of the sea reinforced his cosmopolitanism: As a child, he spent so much time learning German and French from foreign-born governesses that when he entered Groton he spoke with a slight European accent. He traveled to Europe for the first time at age three, and then every summer from ages seven to fifteen. Unlike Wilson, whose image of the world derived largely from theories developed in the United States, FDR was used to seeing events through foreign eyes. And unlike Hoover, whose international mining and relief work inclined him to see foreign nations as consumers or charity cases, FDR, because of his naval obsession, could more easily see them as competitors. Expert sailor that he was, FDR knew that the Atlantic and Pacific were no longer America's moats\u2014that they grew smaller with every naval advance. Even before World War I, he urged Daniels and Wilson to build a fleet capable of patrolling one thousand miles off American shores. If \"an enemy of the United States obtains control of the seas,\" he warned, the Western Hemisphere would offer no refuge.\n\nFinally, it was the sea that introduced Roosevelt, just before his fortieth birthday, to tragedy and forced him to summon a previously untapped, inner strength. As a young man, he had indeed been\u2014as his detractors whispered\u2014pliable, smug, and light. For all his mimicry of his famous relative, the contrasts spoke louder than the similarities. While an undergraduate at Harvard, TR had begun writing his authoritative, five-hundred-page history of the Naval War of 1812. FDR, by contrast, wrote editorials for the Harvard Crimson urging louder cheering at football games. TR had actually waged war; FDR just pretended to. In July 1918, after much pestering, Daniels let him travel to wartime Europe to inspect the U.S. fleet. Although he later giddily recounted his voyage through (allegedly) sub-infested waters and described the artillery fire he heard on the battlefields of northern France, FDR never encountered any real hardship or danger. To the contrary, traveling with his old Harvard friend and golfing partner Livingston Davis, he stayed in the fanciest hotels, dined with foreign dignitaries, and drank himself sick. (After one particularly wild night of carousing in Scotland, he awoke to find himself sharing a bed with a fox.) Although already sporting a fever, he stayed out until 4:30 A.M. on his final night in Europe, and then promptly contracted double pneumonia on the voyage home. When the boat docked in New York City, he was carried by stretcher to his mother's house, where Eleanor, while unpacking his clothes, discovered his love letters to her former assistant, Lucy Mercer. Eleanor offered him a divorce, but when his mother threatened him with disinheritance, FDR declined. For Roosevelt's critics, the trip just illustrated his true nature: boastful, spoiled, irresponsible, dilettantish, and weak\u2014\"the featherduster,\" as college classmates called him behind his back.\n\nBut something changed in his thirty-ninth year. After a long and exhausting deep-sea fishing trip near the Roosevelt vacation compound off the New Brunswick coast, FDR fell into icy waters and soon began to shake uncontrollably. Within days, he was paralyzed from the waist down by polio. As his muscles atrophied, his shriveled legs began to bend backward behind his knees. To keep them straight, a doctor pressed them into heavy plaster casts, where they were forced upright by iron rods, in a procedure that one biographer compared to \"being stretched on a rack in a medieval torture chamber.\" Years later, FDR told a friend that in those days of agony, for the first time in his life he lost his faith in God, and then, somehow, found it again.\n\nOutwardly, FDR remained much the same. He rarely complained, and he retained his usual breezy demeanor. But those close to him noticed a profound change. Polio, noted Eleanor, was the \"turning point\" in her husband's life. It \"gave him strength and courage he had not had before.\" Roosevelt's close friend and future labor secretary Frances Perkins described \"a spiritual transformation\" and a new \"humility of spirit.\" FDR's uncle called him a \"twice-born man.\"\n\nThis can be taken too far. In important ways, the foreign policy realism that FDR smuggled into the White House antedated his disease. It had its roots in his adoration of TR, his reading of Mahan, his travels in Europe, and his image of the sea. But in some inchoate way, polio reinforced his view of the world as an irrational, unknowable, unyielding place. By 1932, FDR understood, in a way Wilson and Hoover never did, that politics, like life, did not permit tidy constructs or linear progress. His personal story\u2014brash optimism and easy success followed by sudden calamity and a struggle against the limits it imposed\u2014was a kind of metaphor for his entire generation. Like Niebuhr, he was also, in his way, a \"child of the age of disillusionment.\" As Roosevelt campaigned for president on crutches, rocking his stiff, steel-encased legs and hips forward in order to move a few excruciating feet, his old drinking buddy, Livingston Davis, shot himself. It was yet another sign of an end to childlike things.\n\nAt first, Charles Beard was enthusiastic about Roosevelt's presidency. Tacking as he so often did with the political wind, FDR had spent the 1920s downplaying his internationalist foreign policy views. At the 1932 Democratic National Convention, when the isolationist publisher and power broker William Randolph Hearst demanded that he renounce his support for the League, Roosevelt quickly complied, thus helping secure his party's nomination. In his first year in office, he torpedoed efforts to coordinate a global response to the Depression and his delegate to the London Disarmament Conference announced that America would make \"no commitment whatever to use its armed forces for the settlement of any dispute anywhere.\" FDR did triple the budget for new ship construction, the biggest increase since 1916, but even this he justified on isolationist grounds: as a way to fight unemployment and defend America's home waters. Impressed, Beard applauded Roosevelt's renunciation of \"any duty owed by the United States to benighted peoples.\" By the fall of 1933, Beard was dining at the White House and reporters were calling him \"one of the intellectual parents of the New Deal.\"\n\nHitler was now in power. Four days after being appointed chancellor, he ordered a massive rearmament effort. A few months later, he pulled Germany out of the London Disarmament Conference and the League. In early 1934, he made his rearmament efforts public, in bald defiance of Versailles. Seeing no response from Britain or France, he introduced conscription the following year. Then, on the morning of Sunday, March 7, 1936, German troops marched into the Rhineland. France asked if it could expect Britain's support if it met Hitler's move with force, support that Britain had twice pledged to provide, at Versailles and Locarno. But His Majesty's government refused, with its secretary of state for war telling Hitler's ambassador that the British public \"did not care 'two hoots' about the Germans reoccupying their own territory.\" For his part, FDR's secretary of state, Cordell Hull, declared that since the United States had signed neither Versailles nor Locarno, Hitler's actions were none of its concern. Only later would historians learn that Hitler, whose military buildup was still in its early stages, had instructed his generals to retreat at the first sign of foreign resistance.\n\nPrivately, FDR called Hitler a madman and mused about offering the Fuhrer a disarmament deal, and imposing a naval blockade if he refused. But publicly he said nothing of the sort. An astute student\u2014and often slavish follower\u2014of popular opinion, Roosevelt knew exactly how his fellow citizens felt about German aggression: Far from undermining American isolationism, Hitler's moves were bolstering it. During the 1920s, when the prospect of another European war seemed remote, pacifism had been as strong a public force as isolationism, although the line between the two sometimes blurred. But by the mid-1930s, with militarism rising in Germany, Italy, and Japan, Americans found it harder to imagine that through commerce, disarmament deals, and nonaggression pacts they could build a less violent, more rational world. And so pacifism, with its optimistic, outward-looking spirit, receded before isolationism: the sense that with storms brewing on the horizon, America should shut its windows and lock its doors. \"Let us turn our eyes inward,\" declared Pennsylvania governor George Earle in 1935. \"If the world is to become a wilderness of waste, hatred, and bitterness, let us all the more earnestly protect and preserve our own oasis of liberty.\"\n\nAmerican efforts to do that were shaped, to a striking degree, by the memory of World War I. From 1934 to 1936, North Dakota's Gerald Nye oversaw a vast Senate investigation, involving ninety-three hearings and more than two hundred witnesses, into whether bankers and arms dealers had lured America into the Great War. Bestselling books such as H. C. Englebrecht and F. C. Hanighen's Merchants of Death, Walter Millis's Road to War, and Beard's The Open Door at Home and The Idea of the National Interest hurled essentially the same charge. On April 6, 1935, the eighteenth anniversary of America's entry into the war, fifty thousand veterans marched for peace in Washington, laying wreaths at the graves of three congressmen who had voted no. A January 1937 poll revealed that 71 percent of Americans considered U.S. intervention in World War I a mistake.\n\nThe result of all this historical remorse was the Neutrality Acts, a series of laws that between 1935 and 1937 prohibited the sale of weapons or the lending of money to countries at war, and warned Americans that if they traveled on belligerents' ships, they did so at their own risk. This time reckless tourists would not be permitted to get themselves drowned, and weapons manufacturers and Wall Street speculators would not be allowed to sign contracts that gave them a financial incentive in the spilling of American blood.\n\nThe Neutrality Acts represented the final, tragic, unintended consequence of Wilson's justification for U.S. entry into World War I. Wilson had justified that entry by invoking America's sacred rights under international law. Now the historical revisionists were insisting that those rights hadn't really been sacred at all; they had masked the pecuniary interests of arms dealers and Wall Street fat cats\u2014fat cats who were none too popular with American capitalism on its knees. The war progressives had offered an idealistic rationale for war, not a geopolitical one, and so once Americans decided that this idealism was a fraud, no compelling argument for international engagement remained. In this sense, the isolationism of Charles Beard was war progressivism's bastard child.\n\nFranklin Roosevelt had World War I on the brain as well. \"From 1913 to 1921, I personally was fairly close to world events,\" he told the nation in a radio address, \"and in that period, while I learned much of what to do, I also learned much of what not to do.\" FDR didn't say so out loud, but unlike 71 percent of his fellow citizens, he still believed the war had been worth fighting. In his mind, Wilson's mistake was in how he justified it. Wilson had portrayed it as a war for high principle when it was actually a war to keep America safe.\n\nThrough the end of 1936, FDR kept his head down, signing the Neutrality Acts and promising to \"isolate America from war,\" thus helping ensure a reelection landslide. But in October 1937, when Tokyo resumed its attack on China, he began to do what Wilson had not: argue that the shifting balance of power on far-off continents endangered the United States. Condemning \"terror and international lawlessness,\" FDR warned that \"if those things come to pass in other parts of the world let no one imagine that America will escape, that it may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked.\" Roosevelt wasn't arguing that Japanese expansionism merely threatened principles like self-determination that Americans held dear. He was arguing that Japanese expansionism threatened the United States itself, that stopping it was a matter of necessity, not choice.\n\nFDR didn't say how the United States should stop Japan, except to speak vaguely about an international \"quarantine.\" Still, isolationists got the point. He was taking aim at their central argument: that America could live apart. Members of Congress threatened impeachment. \"Stop Foreign Meddling; America Wants Peace,\" screamed the Wall Street Journal. The quarantine speech, FDR later claimed, \"fell upon deaf ears, even hostile and resentful ears.\" The following January, after Japanese planes sank an American gunboat on the Yangtze River, the House of Representatives came within twenty-one votes of passing the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national referendum on taking the country to war except in cases of foreign attack. For the moment, FDR's bid to convince his fellow citizens that they had a stake in the global balance of power had failed. \"It's a terrible thing,\" he told an aide, \"to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and to find no one there.\"\n\nIn March 1938, Hitler swallowed Austria, with Washington offering only the mildest of protests. Then in September, in his most brazen move yet, he demanded the Sudetenland, the German-speaking chunk of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs asked the French, with whom they had a security treaty, if they could expect support in the event of war. The French in turn asked the British, and were told\u2014as Neville Chamberlain later famously put it\u2014that the Sudetenland crisis was \"a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.\" Not only would Britain not fight to defend Czechoslovakia's border with Germany, it would not even commit to defending France's border with Germany (despite having pledged to do so at Locarno), if in trying to defend its imperiled Eastern European ally, Paris incurred Hitler's wrath. On paper, the U.S.S.R. was also committed to France and Czechoslovakia's defense. But with Britain fleeing its commitments, Moscow would not act alone.\n\nThe French were actually relieved. By the late 1930s, Hoover had gotten his wish: French leaders were no longer militaristic and cocky. To the contrary, they were almost morbidly fatalistic, like a man who knows he will soon face the gallows and has spent so many hours shouting himself hoarse from his prison cell, with no response, that he can no longer muster the breath. The French knew their best chance at stopping Hitler had been to act early, before he converted Germany's massive industrial capacity into military might. By 1938, it was too late: France was producing forty-five warplanes per month; Germany was producing 450. When the U.S. ambassador in Paris asked French premier Edouard Daladier if France would go to war for Czechoslovakia, Daladier replied, \"With what?\"\n\nOn September 15, Chamberlain flew to Hitler's mountain castle in Berchtesgaden\u2014a remote location that the Fuhrer had chosen largely to humiliate the British leader\u2014and told him that London and Paris would back a plebiscite in those parts of Czechoslovakia where ethnic Germans constituted a majority. But Hitler soon upped the ante. The Czechs, he demanded, must evacuate the Sudetenland by October 1 and hand the territory\u2014and all its military installations\u2014over to the German army, which would then supervise the vote. Hitler also insisted that Prague surrender its Polish-and Hungarian-speaking provinces to those neighbors, just to ensure that the rump Czech state would be utterly defenseless. At first Chamberlain refused. But his generals, long starved of resources by governments committed to disarmament, said they lacked the planes to defend London. So on September 28, in a last-ditch bid for peace, Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler again, this time in Munich. For thirteen hours, the leaders of Britain, Germany, Italy, and France negotiated, while Czech representatives waited at a nearby hotel. In the end, Hitler got the Sudetenland, and Chamberlain got a pledge that Germany and Britain would remain forever at peace. The British leader returned home triumphant, carrying his trademark umbrella, and telling a cheering crowd that he had achieved \"peace with honor...peace for our time.\" Privately, FDR compared Britain's treatment of the Czechs to Judas Iscariot's betrayal of Jesus. But he didn't say so publicly. To the contrary, he sent Chamberlain a two-word cable: \"Good man.\"\n\nAs 1938 turned to 1939, FDR kept telling Americans that their fate and Europe's were intertwined. But as his actions in the Munich crisis showed, he held out little hope of translating those words into actions anytime soon. There was something ironic in the fact that this master communicator, whose radio addresses had rallied the nation during the depths of the Depression, did not believe his oratory could rouse isolationist America from its slumber. But this was part of the lesson he had drawn from World War I. Wilson's failure during the treaty fight had left Roosevelt dubious about the degree to which a leader, even an articulate one with the facts on his side, could sway the public on questions of war and peace. In this way, FDR's cautious response to the darkening international scene wasn't mere timidity; it reflected a retreat from the progressive belief that citizens were essentially pliable. In FDR's mind, political education could only do so much. Events would have to speak for themselves.\n\nOn September 1, 1939, international dignitaries gathered in Geneva, home to the League of Nations, to unveil a long-planned statue of Woodrow Wilson. On the same day, hundreds of miles to the northeast, German soldiers poured across the Polish border. At last, Britain and France decided to fight. At 2:50 A.M. Washington time, Roosevelt was awakened by a call from his ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, informing him that World War II had begun. The call, FDR told his cabinet later that week, provoked \"a strange feeling of familiarity, a feeling that I had been through it all before.\" The two decades since World War I suddenly seemed like a long intermission. Now he was \"picking up again an interrupted routine.\"\n\nAddressing the nation on September 3, FDR assured Americans that he had no intention of taking them to war. But neither did he ask them to be detached observers in the struggle between Nazism and its foes. \"I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought,\" he declared, in an oblique reference to Wilson's call for impartiality in the early days of World War I. \"There is a vast difference,\" he added in his State of the Union address the following January, \"between keeping out of war and pretending that war is none of our business.... For it becomes clearer and clearer that the future world will be a shabby and dangerous place to live in\u2014yes, even for Americans to live in\u2014if it is ruled by force in the hands of a few.\" With Europe at war, Congress finally amended the Neutrality Acts to allow Britain and France to buy U.S. arms, so long as they paid cash and carried them away in their own ships.\n\nAs 1939 turned to 1940, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's U.S.S.R.\u2014which had signed a nonaggression pact the previous summer\u2014carved up Eastern Europe. Then, in April, Germany conquered Denmark and Norway, and then Holland and Belgium in May. Keeping up his rhetorical campaign, FDR warned that if Hitler gained control of Europe, Americans would be a \"a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.\" But these were just words. \"If you cannot give France in the coming days a positive assurance that the United States will come into the struggle within a short space of time,\" wrote French premier Paul Reynaud on June 14, \"you will then see France go under like a drowning person after having thrown a last look towards the land of liberty from where she was expecting salvation.\" But with more than 80 percent of Americans still against entering the war, FDR let France drown. Only the sight of it, he reasoned cruelly but correctly, would shift the public mood. Eight days after Reynaud's plea, the Nazis accepted France's surrender on the same spot, in the forests of Compi\u00e8gne north of Paris, where Germany had surrendered twenty-two years before. Mercifully, Georges Clemenceau was not alive to see his nightmare come true.\n\nFrance's fall jolted American opinion like no presidential speech ever could, and FDR quickly capitalized. In August, with Winston Churchill now Britain's prime minister, and bracing his nation for a German assault, FDR sent the United Kingdom fifty destroyers in exchange for military bases in the Western Hemisphere. The following month, he convinced Congress to institute the draft, although mail to the White House ran ten to one against. And in December, with the British no longer able to pay for American arms, he pushed through \"lend-lease,\" which essentially provided them for free.\n\nAs he edged closer to war, FDR began laying the foundations that would undergird American foreign policy for the next quarter century. First, he convinced former Republican secretary of state Henry Stimson to become his secretary of war, and Frank Knox, who had been the GOP's vice presidential nominee in 1936, to serve as secretary of the navy. Stimson's former boss, Herbert Hoover, was now a rabid isolationist. But Stimson, who had quarreled with Hoover almost a decade earlier on Manchuria, now broke with him decisively and became the anchor for a revived Republican internationalism, which helped FDR push lend-lease and the draft through Congress. In choosing Stimson, FDR\u2014the country squire whose New Deal domestic policies had made him a hated figure in conservative East Coast financial circles\u2014was also reconciling with his class. American foreign policy would henceforth be led by a bipartisan, hard-nosed elite entirely comfortable with power politics. In America's hour of peril, the children of Theodore Roosevelt\u2014who espoused neither Woodrow Wilson's ethic of reason nor the pacifism of John Dewey nor the isolationism of Charles Beard\u2014were closing ranks. They would guide American foreign policy for a generation, until discredited by hubris of their own, in Vietnam.\n\nAt the same moment he embraced bipartisan internationalism, FDR also began dramatically expanding presidential power. The deal to provide Britain fifty destroyers violated the Neutrality Acts and would have met fierce resistance on Capitol Hill. But the White House, advised by a corporate lawyer named Dean Acheson, decided it had the legal authority to transfer them without congressional approval. Then, in May 1941, FDR declared an \"unlimited national emergency,\" which gave him the power to take any action he deemed necessary to protect the Western Hemisphere. In July, he used it to send four thousand Marines, without congressional approval, to Greenland and Iceland, to prevent them from falling into Nazi hands. It was an historic shift. Ever since Versailles, Congress had held foreign policy tightly in its grip, giving the president little scope for overseas adventures. Now executive power\u2014nurtured by America's bipartisan internationalist elite\u2014was starting to swell. It would swell unabated for a generation, until it too collapsed in the jungles of Vietnam.\n\nIn May 1941, FDR had a dream that Hitler's Luftwaffe was bombing New York. Privately, some historians believe, he had already decided to enter the war. By fall, U.S. warships were escorting British merchant vessels across the Atlantic, ranging hundreds of miles in pursuit of German subs, doing everything possible to provoke an incident. They soon got one. In September, a German U-boat fired torpedoes at the U.S.S. Greer near Iceland. In October the U.S.S. Kearny was hit, and later the U.S.S. Reuben James. Public opinion swung toward war, particularly since FDR claimed that the ships had been attacked without provocation, which was a lie. But still, Roosevelt waited. Calling for war now, he told Churchill, would trigger a bitter three-month congressional debate. And if events on the battlefield or at the subsequent peace conference turned sour, that initial disunity would return to haunt the nation.\n\nThe basis upon which America entered the war, FDR believed, would make all the difference once the shooting stopped. When subs attacked the Greer, he did not say\u2014as Wilson had\u2014that Germany had violated America's neutrality rights. Instead he warned that Hitler was seeking \"absolute control and domination of the seas.\" Roosevelt was groping for a way to convince the public that this time Germany threatened not just international law, but American security. Only then\u2014once Americans saw international engagement as survival, not social work\u2014would they sustain it even when the world let them down. \"Our policy is not based primarily on a desire to preserve democracy for the rest of the world,\" FDR added. \"It is based primarily on a desire to protect the United States and the Western Hemisphere from the effects of a Nazi victory.\" This, he believed, was what Wilson should have said in 1917.\n\nIt was easier in 1941, of course, because Hitler was a more terrifying figure than the kaiser, with more terrifying weapons and more grandiose plans. But FDR still needed an event to dramatize his words. It came, as it happened, not in the Atlantic but in the Pacific. When France fell to Germany in 1940, Japan conquered its colonies in northern Indochina, leading the United States to halt sales of scrap iron and steel in protest. The following summer, Japan took the rest of France's Asian empire, prompting FDR to take the much graver step of cutting off Tokyo's supply of oil. That set the clock ticking. With no fuel supply of its own, Japan faced a choice: ignominious withdrawal or a push farther south into the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. By the first week of December, Roosevelt knew that Tokyo was planning the latter course, which he feared would involve an attack on U.S. forces in the Philippines. His close aide Harry Hopkins suggested that America strike first and thus gain the element of surprise, but FDR refused, partly because he believed that only a Japanese attack would unify the country behind war.\n\nAt 7:55 A.M. Hawaii time on December 7, carrier-based Japanese aircraft began appearing in the Oahu sky. For two hours, 360 planes turned Pearl Harbor into an inferno, killing more than two thousand Americans and destroying most of America's Pacific fleet. The decision for war, FDR told Hopkins, was now out of his hands. Events, not mere words, had shown that America could not live apart. \"Franklin,\" commented Eleanor, \"was in a way more serene than he had appeared in a long time.\"\n\nOn May 22, 1940, Reinhold Niebuhr received a letter from the executive secretary of the American Socialist Party. The party had just held its annual convention, which reaffirmed its devotion to class struggle and its indifference to the struggle between nations currently bloodying much of the world. World War II, according to party doctrine, was a contest between capitalist powers in which Socialists should have no allegiance. This placed the party in direct conflict with groups like the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which insisted that the United States had a strategic and moral interest in fascism's defeat. Niebuhr, the secretary noted, was a prominent member of both organizations. \"I am interested,\" he wrote, \"in getting your reaction on this matter.\"\n\nTwo days later, Niebuhr resigned his party membership. \"The Socialists have a dogma that this war is a clash of rival imperialisms,\" he wrote in the Nation. \"Of course they are right. So is a clash between myself and a gangster.\" The party was so wedded to \"purely ideal perspectives\"\u2014it viewed events from such Olympian heights\u2014that it could see no important difference between the capitalism of Winston Churchill and the capitalism of Adolf Hitler. That, Niebuhr argued, was \"utopianism.\" For him, few epithets were worse.\n\nNiebuhr's break with the left had been several years in coming. By the mid-1930s, with the New Deal in full swing, his fury over economic oppression had begun to cool. He still believed that ultimately the proletariat would rule. But FDR's \"amiable opportunism,\" he admitted, was \"arresting the decay of capitalism as effectively as that can be done.\" His sympathy for Marxism also faded as he learned more about its Soviet incarnation. In 1939, when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia became allies, he began to stress their common totalitarian features. If the Socialists saw little difference between Churchill and Hitler, Niebuhr saw less and less difference between Hitler and Stalin.\n\nBut there was something odd about Niebuhr's ideological transformation. Despite moving from left to center, he kept sounding many of the same themes. In 1932, he had attacked progressives like Dewey as na\u00efve for thinking that through reason they could achieve justice without conflict. Now he accused the communists of na\u00efvet\u00e9 as well. They too, he argued, championed a supposedly scientific vision of inexorable progress. They too believed that if you overhauled society's institutions you could eradicate evil. Because they would not acknowledge that human nature was inherently sinful, they could not see that it wreaked havoc upon all efforts to rationalize society, including their own. Whereas Niebuhr had once applauded communism for its hard-boiled embrace of class conflict, he now lumped it with progressivism as yet another utopian creed.\n\nOnce again Niebuhr reflected his times. By the mid-1930s, many American intellectuals were shifting anxieties, worrying less about the injustice of Depression-era capitalism and more about the menace of fascist aggression. At first communism seemed a sturdy bulwark against this rising threat, and to underscore the point, in 1935 the American Communist Party ceased its revolutionary agitation and joined liberals in an antifascist Popular Front. But between 1936 and 1938, Stalin's show trials, which culminated in the murder of dozens of his political rivals, prompted some American intellectuals to reconsider their communist sympathies. And when Stalin and Hitler joined forces the following year, the trickle of anticommunist disillusionment became a flood. One after another, intellectuals who had embraced some species of communism during the Depression left the Marxist faith. The disillusioned communists\u2014a remarkable group that included the philosophers Sidney Hook and James Burnham; the journalists Max Lerner, Louis Fischer, Irving Kristol, and Max Eastman; the critics V. F. Calverton and Irving Howe; and Philip Rahv and William Phillips, editors of the new, fiercely anti-Stalinist journal Partisan Review\u2014did not all end up in the same place politically. But they shared a sensibility. Like Niebuhr, they had lost faith in grand schemes for remaking the world because they had lost faith in grand schemes for remaking human beings. The 1930s taught that evil did not stem merely from failures of education and expertise, or from one economic system. Its roots lay deeper, inside humanity itself. A whole generation of intellectuals carried this tragic insight with them as they journeyed back to the democratic fold. They approached American democracy not as virgin enthusiasts, like the progressives, but as weary travelers. Noting that they had gained wisdom through pain, the sociologist Daniel Bell called them \"twice-born,\" which, as it happens, was the same phrase FDR's uncle had applied to him.\n\nIt was these \"twice-born\" intellectuals who in the late 1930s provided intellectual ballast for Roosevelt's moves toward war. Unlike the war progressives, they held out little hope that through military action America could eradicate power politics. They conceded that Americans would die and kill for racist, colonial powers like Britain and France and for an immoral economic system at home. But they were comfortable fighting for lesser evils. In their minds, that was what politics was all about. \"The civilization we are called on to defend,\" wrote Niebuhr, \"is full of capitalistic and imperialistic injustice...[but] it is still a civilization.\"\n\nIn their argument for war, the ex-communists were joined by another child of the age of disillusionment: Walter Lippmann. Lippmann had walked his own tortured intellectual path since Versailles. Obsessed with the public irrationality that World War I had exposed, in the 1920s he had questioned whether ordinary people were competent to govern themselves at all, whether democracy could ever really work. But like the ex-Marxists, he became a partisan of liberal democracy in the late 1930s, not because he had regained his youthful optimism about what it could accomplish but because the alternatives were so horrifying.\n\nEarly in FDR's presidency, fearful of repeating the mistakes of 1917, Lippmann had urged America to steer clear of Europe's troubles. But as the Nazi menace grew, he came to terms with the war that as a young man he had championed and then spurned. He did so by replacing the idealistic arguments of his youth with realist ones. America had not entered World War I to rationalize the world, he now argued. It had fought to ensure \"the safety of the Atlantic highway\": to prevent Germany from smashing the British fleet that guaranteed American security and prosperity. This, he argued, \"is something for which America should [again] fight.\" He had, it turned out, discovered the same rationale for war as FDR, the man he once called an \"amiable boy scout\" who \"just doesn't happen to have a very good mind.\"\n\nBy the early 1940s, John Dewey and Charles Beard were old men. They could see war coming and had long ago resolved to resist it with everything they had so as never to repeat the sins of World War I. In 1940, when the City University of New York revoked a job offer to the British philosopher Bertrand Russell because he was a pacifist, Dewey felt he was reliving a nightmare. Beard, who had long since stopped receiving invitations to the White House, grew convinced that FDR's power grab was leading to dictatorship. He even alleged that Roosevelt had known the Japanese might bomb Pearl Harbor but did nothing because he needed a pretext for war. Both Dewey and Beard felt in their bones that this war would be worse than the last, that it might destroy American democracy once and for all. \"Day and night I wonder and tremble for the future of my country and mankind,\" Beard wrote to a friend. \"An epoch has come to an end,\" Dewey declared, \"but what is beginning is too much for me.\"\n\nIn their opposition to American entry into World War II, Dewey and Beard were fulfilling their silent oath to their martyred student, Randolph Bourne. But ironically, they now came under assault from a new group of younger intellectuals, for whom the Bourne legend held no appeal. To these sad-eyed realists, who in the 1930s had grown old beyond their years, Dewey and Beard were moral perfectionists, men who would allow the greatest of evils to triumph for fear of implicating themselves in the lesser evil of war. Dewey, Niebuhr charged, would not \"defend democracy because it is not pure enough.\" The historian Lewis Mumford, once a Beard disciple, now called him \"a passive\u2014no, active\u2014abetter of tyranny, sadism, and human defilement.\"\n\nIn 1941, the American Communist Party, now in bed with Nazism via the Hitler-Stalin pact, created a Randolph Bourne Award to honor an intellectual who opposed America's march to war. They chose the novelist Theodore Dreiser, a raving anti-Semite who considered FDR's foreign policy a Jewish plot. Pacifism and isolationism, which sought to keep America free from the barbarism of the old world, had become complicit in its greatest barbarism ever. The age of Randolph Bourne\u2014which had begun, oddly enough, when influenza took his life\u2014was now dead. In its wake, the real answer to the hubris of reason was being born.\n\n## CHAPTER FOUR\n\n## I DIDN'T SAY IT WAS GOOD\n\nOn Friday, September 15, 1944, Franklin Roosevelt went to the movies. The film was Wilson, a lavish, syrupy, star-studded account of the twenty-eighth's president's life that cost $5 million to produce, making it the most expensive film yet made. A decade earlier, when World War I revisionism ran rampant and Wilson was a figure of public scorn, such a project would have been unimaginable. But World War II rescued Wilson's reputation. In 1941, Otto Preminger directed In Time to Come, a Broadway play about the Paris Peace Conference, which painted Clemenceau and Lodge as villains and Wilson as a man too good for his time. Three years later, the magazine Look published a glossy pictorial biography of Wilson subtitled \"The Unforgettable Figure Who Has Returned to Haunt Us.\" At their 1944 convention, Democrats voted a resolution of tribute to the former president. And by the time Wilson hit the theaters, the nation was in the midst of a full-blown Wilson revival. At the Roxy in New York, twenty thousand people stood in line for a ticket; one million saw the film in its first five weeks alone. The movie, which noted Wilson's love of football, golf, and vaudeville, even made him seem friendly. But FDR was less charmed by the experience than stressed. While he was watching it, his blood pressure spiked to 240 over 130.\n\nFor Roosevelt, Wilson's failure was a near obsession. When writing speeches in the Cabinet Room of the White House, he often glanced up at Wilson's portrait, which he had installed above the mantelpiece. Versailles, wrote FDR's speechwriter Robert Sherwood, was \"always somewhere within the rim of his consciousness.\" But unlike the creators of Wilson, FDR did not exactly consider his old boss a role model; more like a cautionary tale. Wilson, he believed, had dug his own political grave by imagining that other countries and his own citizens were more malleable than they really were. In response, in the years before Pearl Harbor, FDR had labored mightily to convince Americans by word and deed that saving Europe and Asia from fascism was self-defense, not philanthropy. And now, with America in the fight, he had two big and rather un-Wilsonian ideas about the postwar world. First, it should be built on power, not reason, because only a coalition of the powerful could keep the peace. Second, this must be concealed\u2014as much as possible\u2014from the American people, who, if confronted with the ugly truths of international affairs, might scurry back to their shores, in which case the world would again go to hell. It was in his messy, often unsentimental, sometimes duplicitous efforts to square these dual imperatives that FDR, in his final years on earth, began formulating an answer to the hubris of reason. That answer\u2014which his successor, Harry Truman, amended and completed\u2014was far from perfect. In some ways, it was downright tragic. But it laid the foundation for a fundamentally better world.\n\nIf FDR had an historical inspiration for his postwar vision, it was not America's twenty-eighth president; it was the twenty-sixth. Theodore Roosevelt had also envisioned an international order built on power. As early as 1910, he had offered his own conception of a League of Nations. What distinguished it from Wilson's was that TR wanted \"to create the beginnings of international order out of the world of nations as those nations actually exist.\" In other words, power in the League should reflect power in the world: TR had little patience for an international body based upon the principle that strong and weak nations were equal in the eyes of international law, since for him law was only as good as the gun that enforced it. When the United States entered World War I, he saw the Allies as the core of this new body. He wanted a league of victors, built upon security treaties between America, Britain, and France. The victorious powers would be allowed their spheres of influence, no matter how unscientific and unfair, as long as they stuck together and thus kept the defeated Germans from again disturbing the peace.\n\nFDR's vision was strikingly similar. In August 1941, six months before America entered the war, he met Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland. They agreed to formulate an \"Atlantic Charter\" that outlined their hopes for the postwar world. But when the British prime minister proposed that this vision include an \"effective international organization,\" FDR balked, saying the League had been tried and had failed. Instead, he suggested, Britain and America should police the world themselves. \"The time had come,\" he declared, \"to be realistic.\"\n\nThe following May, Roosevelt broadened the idea, telling Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov (whose country was now at war with Hitler) that the postwar world should include \"Four Policemen\": the United States, Britain, the U.S.S.R., and China, the four nations that would emerge as most powerful once Germany and Japan were crushed. Each great power would walk a particular beat: Britain would control Western Europe; the Soviet Union would control Eastern Europe; the United States would guard the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific; and China (with America's help) would control the Asian mainland. Together, these Four Policemen would keep down Germany and Japan, so that they couldn't stir up trouble as they had after World War I. Such an arrangement, FDR told the \"cannonball\"-headed, \"slab\"-faced Soviet foreign minister, was far preferable to another League, which would include \"too many nations to satisfy.\" As the Saturday Evening Post's Forrest Davis reported the following April, \"Mr. Roosevelt primarily is concerned not with aspirations toward a better world such as he articulated in the Atlantic Charter, but with the cold, realistic techniques, or instruments, needed to make those aspirations work. This means that he is concentrating on power.... The problem of security rests with the powers who have the military force to uphold it.\"\n\nThis time there would be no Inquiry poring over maps in the New York Public Library, scientifically determining which nations should exist, and where. Unlike Wilson, FDR clearly envisioned spheres of influence, in which great-power \"policemen\" made the rules and small nations did as they were told. And unlike Wilson, who had imagined a peace settlement so impartial that it was embraced by victor and vanquished alike and thus required little enforcement, FDR wanted the victors to impose peace and sustain it by confronting Germany and Japan with overwhelming force. His greatest desire was that the wartime allies stick together to uphold the peace. (Unlike Wilson, FDR always called America an ally of Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R., never a mere \"associate.\") Ideally, in Roosevelt's view, the Germans and Japanese would see the justice of this new postwar order. But he wasn't relying on public opinion to keep the postwar peace; he was relying on a powerful alliance. All this would have brought a smile not only to the faces of Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, but to that other mustachioed devotee of power politics: Georges Clemenceau.\n\nSecretary of State Cordell Hull and his influential deputy, Sumner Welles\u2014both unreconstructed Wilsonians\u2014were appalled. \"During the spring of 1943,\" wrote Hull in his memoirs, \"I found there was a basic cleavage between him [FDR] and me on the very nature of the postwar organization.\" Hull and Welles tried and failed to convince FDR that opposing another League of Nations was wrong on the merits. But fortunately for them, Harry Hopkins, the president's most influential adviser, convinced him he was wrong on the domestic politics. Roosevelt had assumed that the American people did not want another League; he had told Churchill as much at Newfoundland. Since America entered the war, however, public sentiment had shifted, as the reaction to the movie Wilson illustrated. In 1941, only 38 percent of Americans had backed U.S. entrance into a new international organization; by 1944, 72 percent did. This was, in a sense, a testament to FDR's own strategy: By waiting until Pearl Harbor to enter the war, he had convinced most Americans that isolationism was impossible. But now, having decided to participate in the world, Americans were again determined to bend it toward their ideals. For FDR, that was a recipe for disillusionment, since he suspected that the world would not bend very quickly or very much. Hopkins, however, convinced him to conceal those thoughts from public view. Henceforth FDR would continue crafting a postwar settlement based on power politics, but he would give it a Wilsonian face, especially when addressing audiences at home. And he would try, in this way, to do what Wilson and the war progressives could not: reconcile America's missionary impulse with the realities of an imperfect world.\n\nIn keeping with this political strategy, FDR in the spring of 1943 agreed to encase his Four Policemen idea within a Wilsonian shell. In a meeting with British foreign secretary Anthony Eden in March, he suggested a three-tiered international body including an executive committee, comprised of the Four Policemen, which made all important decisions, an advisory council including six or eight other nations, which handled smaller, nonmilitary matters; and a general assembly with universal membership that met once a year so that small countries could, in Eden's words, \"blow off steam.\"\n\nIn November, Roosevelt presented his vision to Churchill and Stalin. To meet them, he flew to Tehran, a trip of more than seventeen thousand miles, undertaken in an age when aircraft cabins often lost pressurization, by a man suffering serious respiratory problems and in chronic pain. His fellow leaders embraced the Four Policemen concept, but they were amused by FDR's insistence that they make no public reference to it and his claim that the American people would never accept great-power spheres of influence. It was as if, having drawn them a picture of a wolf, he was demanding that they call it a sheep.\n\nThe contradiction went to the heart of Roosevelt's political dilemma. He desperately wanted good postwar relations with Stalin. Otherwise, he feared, the Germans would exploit divisions between the wartime victors, as they had after World War I. And he knew Moscow's price for such a partnership: a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, which could serve as a buffer in case Germany ever invaded again.\n\nOn the battlefield, that sphere was already being demarcated. By the time FDR went to Tehran, the U.S.S.R.\u2014having turned the tide against Hitler's forces at Stalingrad and Kursk, two of the bloodiest battles in the history of war\u2014was already emerging as the most powerful player in Eastern Europe. That was no accident. From the beginning, FDR had adamantly opposed spilling American blood in the lands between the Baltic and the Adriatic seas. When his adviser William Bullitt, and then Churchill, suggested that Washington and London alter their European invasion plans, choosing a route that took longer to defeat Hitler but put American and British troops on the ground in Eastern Europe to contain Soviet influence, FDR refused. Fighting in Eastern Europe, he knew, would require mobilizing far more American troops, which could disrupt the economy back home. The military warned that it would prove a logistical nightmare, since the region lacked good supply routes from the sea. And finally, Roosevelt feared that Americans would revolt against the additional loss of life. He had sold them not a war for the rights of small nations, but what he called \"The Survival War\"\u2014a war to defeat Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. He knew Americans didn't want Eastern Europe to fall under Stalin's thumb, but his gut told him that they were even more opposed to sacrificing their sons to prevent it. There was a gap, he believed, between the world that Americans wanted to create and the blood-price they were willing to pay to create it. And when that gap was exposed, he feared, a foul, isolationist wind might sweep across the American political landscape. His strategy, therefore, was to hide the discrepancy between ideals and reality as much as possible until America was firmly ensconced in a system of postwar security. Then, no matter how disillusioned Americans became, they would be unable to again retreat from the world.\n\nFor his strategy to work, FDR needed his fellow leaders to lie. That was a major reason he had traveled those forty excruciating hours on a primitive plane\u2014not merely to get Stalin and Churchill to agree to his scheme for postwar cooperation, but to enlist their aid in convincing his own people. In Tehran, FDR told Stalin he \"fully realized\" that Russia planned to reoccupy the Baltic countries, which it had ruled for roughly a century until they gained independence at Versailles. But since \"the question of referendum and self-determination\" would constitute a \"big issue\" in America, it would be helpful to him \"personally\" if Stalin gave Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia some say over their fate. On Poland, Stalin informed Roosevelt and Churchill that he intended to annex an eastern slice of the country while compensating the Poles with a slice of eastern Germany. FDR said that this was fine but that he \"could not publicly take part in any such arrangement,\" since he needed the votes of \"six to seven million Americans of Polish extraction\" in his upcoming reelection bid.\n\nUpon returning to the United States, Roosevelt delivered a Christmas Eve radio address about his trip. \"The rights of every nation, large or small, must be respected and guarded as jealously as the rights of every individual within our own republic,\" he announced. \"The doctrine that the strong shall dominate the weak is the doctrine of our enemies\u2014and we reject it.\" Just back from a whorehouse, he was insisting that America remained chaste. One day, he knew, reality would become too graphic to ignore.\n\nAs 1943 turned to 1944, the particulars of FDR's vision grew clearer. By March, the State Department had hammered out an outline of the new international organization to be born after the war. Its very name\u2014the \"United Nations Organization\" (later referred to as simply the \"United Nations\")\u2014hinted at its differences with the League. \"United Nations\" was the appellation that America, Britain, the Soviet Union, and their smaller partners had given their alliance against Germany, Italy, and Japan. It suggested a continuation of the wartime partnership, an organization comprising (or at least dominated by) the alliance that had won the war.\n\nIn crucial ways, the UN was also structured differently from the League. The League had also contained a council composed of big countries, but it could merely offer recommendations to the General Assembly, which made the final decision. What's more, every member of that General Assembly could exercise a veto, which created a significant equality of power between members. At the UN, by contrast, the General Assembly would make recommendations to the Security Council, not the other way around. In fact, the Security Council would not even need a General Assembly recommendation; it could simply act on its own authority. Moreover, only the Security Council's permanent members\u2014the Four Policemen (with France later added as a fifth)\u2014enjoyed veto power. The result, observed British historian Evan Luard, was \"a revolutionary transformation of the existing international system in favour of the great.\"\n\nWith a draft of the prospective United Nations in hand, Secretary of State Hull began corralling congressional support, taking particular pains to woo prominent Senate Republicans, which Wilson had failed to effectively do while negotiating the League. Key Republicans such as Arthur Vandenberg, the GOP's ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, were pleased by the Security Council veto and the absence of an international police force, both of which allayed their fears that the nascent UN would infringe upon American sovereignty. They were happier with the organization's structure, in fact, than some Wilsonians, who objected to the outsize power that the body afforded large nations. But politically, the UN's real vulnerability wasn't its structure but the territorial settlement it would implicitly ratify, since both Wilsonians and anticommunist conservatives strongly opposed granting the Soviets a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In May 1944, when Forrest Davis penned an article titled \"What Really Happened at Teheran,\" which claimed that, in his dealings with Stalin, FDR was \"willing to settle for the lowest common denominator...peace among the great powers,\" prominent senators began to suspect that the president was cutting secret deals on Eastern Europe. \"We all believe in Hull,\" wrote Vandenberg in his diary, \"but none of us is sure that Hull knows the whole story.\"\n\nThey were right; he didn't. That fall, Churchill traveled to Moscow without FDR, who authorized the U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Averell Harriman, to represent him. At 10 P.M. on October 9, at a meeting to which Harriman was not invited, Churchill took out half a piece of paper, wrote down percentages alongside the names of various countries, and handed it to Stalin, who made a check mark in blue pencil. It was a parody of sinister old-world power politics: The two leaders had just divided up southeastern Europe. Britain's sphere of influence would include 90 percent control in Greece, while Russia's would give it 90 percent in Romania and 75 percent in Bulgaria and Hungary. They would split Yugoslavia 50-50. Churchill told Stalin that this \"naughty document\" should be kept secret \"because the Americans might be shocked.\" That was true. Many Americans, including Vandenberg and probably also Hull, would indeed have been shocked. But FDR was not one of them. At Tehran, Roosevelt later confided, he had \"already told the Russians they could take over and control [Eastern Europe] completely as their sphere.\" The president, commented Harriman several weeks after the Moscow summit, \"consistently shows very little interest in Eastern European matters except as they affect sentiment in America.\"\n\nFDR spent 1944 in a race against time: hoping to win reelection to a fourth term before voters learned of his compromises on Eastern Europe. In November, he successfully crossed the finish line, after a campaign in which his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, rarely challenged his postwar efforts. But the 1944 campaign was just one leg of a longer contest, in which Roosevelt struggled to entrench America in the UN before the tragedy in Eastern Europe made Americans recoil. And within that competition lay another, more intimate one: against the limitations of FDR's own body. Since Tehran, Roosevelt's health had deteriorated. A medical examination in early 1944 revealed hypertension, an enlarged heart, and signs of cardiac failure. Over the course of the year, he lost twenty pounds, and a picture published in July, which captured his withered, dazed visage, briefly threatened his reelection bid. In September, when a former aide saw Roosevelt for the first time in eight months, he was appalled by \"the almost ravaged appearance of his face.\"\n\nNevertheless, a month later, FDR flew to Yalta to meet Churchill and Stalin for what would be the last time. The flight was again arduous, and the accommodations were worse. The leaders stayed in Livadia Palace, a fifty-room czarist castle perched on a cliff above the Black Sea. But the building, which like most things in Crimea had been ravaged by Hitler's armies, contained barely any working bathrooms and teemed with typhoid and lice. Churchill muttered that it must have taken the Russians ten years to find a site so ghastly, and endured the stay by fortifying himself regularly from a private supply of whiskey. FDR\u2014his face pallid, his lips blue, his hands trembling\u2014wrapped himself in a large cape to stay warm.\n\nStill, Roosevelt pressed his agenda: to secure Moscow's pledge to enter the war against Japan, to decide how to govern postwar Germany, to nail down the structure of the new United Nations, and to again fudge the question of Eastern Europe so anger over Soviet influence there didn't turn Americans against the UN. On the first issue, he succeeded: Stalin agreed to enter the Asian theater three months after the European war was won. (In return the U.S.S.R. expected to replace Tokyo as the dominant power in Manchuria and northern China.) The UN's organizational structure wasn't much of a problem, either. For six months Stalin had been demanding that the sixteen Soviet republics each have its own General Assembly vote, presumably to counter the pro-Western Latin American and British Empire blocs. At Yalta, he agreed that between them the republic would have two or three votes, and FDR said he would demand the same number for the United States if the Senate raised a fuss. But the issue, Roosevelt insisted, \"is not really of any great importance\" the UN was not going to make decisions by majority vote.\n\nThe tough nut was Poland. By the time of the Yalta Conference, Soviet troops were already occupying Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, and Posen, while their American and British counterparts remained one thousand miles away. FDR had already agreed to shift the Polish border west, and Churchill had traded away Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary on a single piece of paper. But the composition of Poland's postwar government was harder. The issue had special meaning for Churchill, since the destruction of Polish independence had been Britain's trigger for war. Roosevelt was less personally invested, but he knew that of all the Eastern European nations, Poland's fate was the most politically explosive back home. Weeks earlier, Moscow had installed a puppet regime based in Lublin. The United States and Britain, by contrast, still recognized the exiled prewar Polish leadership in London. At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill pushed Stalin to bring the London Poles into a broad-based government. In return they got words. In a Declaration on Liberated Europe, all three leaders called for \"broadly based\" governments and \"free elections\" in the lands liberated from Hitler. It was a lovely vision: a \"Crimean Charter\" that echoed the Atlantic one penned by FDR and Churchill in 1941. But with the Red Army squatting on Polish soil, Roosevelt knew he had no way of making the rhetoric real. All he could do was plead. \"I want this election in Poland to be the first one beyond question. It should be like Caesar's wife. I did not know her but they said she was pure,\" he told Stalin. \"They said that about her,\" replied the Soviet leader, his smallpox-scarred face widening into a grin, thus revealing his yellowish-brown teeth, \"but in fact she had her sins.\"\n\nOn March 1, Roosevelt went before Congress to report on what he had achieved. One aide said he looked \"ghastly, sort of dead and dug up.\" But his words stirred the chamber. At Yalta, he declared, he and his fellow leaders had put an end to \"the spheres of influence, the balances of power...that have been tried for centuries\u2014and have always failed.\"\n\nWithin weeks, events in Poland were mocking his words. Not only were the Soviets exercising a sphere of influence, but they were enforcing it with characteristic brutality: systematically silencing, deporting, or murdering Poles who wanted a government free from Moscow's grip. Furious, Churchill sent FDR a stream of missives proposing that they make a joint protest, thus exposing Stalin's violation of the principles to which he had signed his name. But Roosevelt did not want a public row. The creation of the United Nations, its ratification by the Senate, and the exorcism of the ghost of Versailles were within reach. He knew the realities in Eastern Europe would be nastier than the proclamations in the Atlantic and Crimean charters implied, but he believed that he had laid down a moral marker, a standard by which the world could judge. Over time, he hoped, things would improve, as long as America did not pull away from the world in disgust. \"Perfectionism,\" he declared in his 1945 State of the Union address, perhaps with an eye toward the realities Americans would soon discover, \"no less than isolationism or imperialism or power politics may obstruct the paths to international peace. Let us not forget that the retreat to isolationism a quarter of a century ago was started not by a direct attack against international cooperation but against the alleged imperfections of the peace.... We gave up the hope of gradually achieving a better peace because we had not the courage to fulfill our responsibilities in an admittedly imperfect world.\" For FDR, this was the core lesson of World War I, the true answer to the hubris of reason. America must dirty its hands. To preserve its freedom, it must practice power politics, even though power politics would threaten American freedom in other ways. And it must do so while recognizing that despite its efforts, the world would remain an ugly place, just not quite as ugly as if America tried to remain pure.\n\nThose close to the president knew the end was near. \"He is slipping away from us,\" said his scheduler, William Hassett, \"and no earthly power can keep him here.\" On April 12, as he sat for a portrait, FDR suddenly complained of a \"terrific headache,\" then slumped over unconscious in his chair. At 3:35 in the afternoon he was pronounced dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. By his side was Lucy Mercer, the mistress he had told Eleanor he would jettison more than twenty-six years earlier.\n\nTwelve days later, a U.S. platoon made contact with Russian troops in eastern Germany, near the city of Torgau, on the Elbe. The Americans followed the Russians back to the farmhouse where they were encamped and drank toasts to the Allied cause, its triumph over the Nazis now virtually assured. A few hours later, half a world away, 282 delegates entered the San Francisco Opera House for the opening ceremony of the United Nations. By late June they had approved a structure that closely resembled the one envisioned at Yalta. It would comprise a General Assembly, where all nations talked, and a Security Council, where the great powers\u2014vetoes in hand\u2014acted. The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights spoke about \"the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,\" but once again reality could not match the soaring words. Despite some vague language about trusteeship, Britain and France kept their colonial possessions. On Poland, delegates deferred seating Russia's puppet government. But the ultimate outcome was already clear: With Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, and a Soviet veto on the Security Council, Poland's awful fate was sealed.\n\nA month later, the Senate took up American membership in the UN. Especially among Democrats, Wilson's ghost was summoned again and again. It is rare for a man \"to be given a second chance in his lifetime to correct a great mistake,\" declared Connecticut's Brien McMahon. \"It is even more seldom that that chance comes to a nation.\" Senator Charles Andrews informed his colleagues that he had recently visited Wilson's grave for inspiration. Florida's other senator, Claude Pepper, said that specters hovered over the proceedings, watching through the \"veil which their immortal eyes can always penetrate.... One of them is Woodrow Wilson, and the other is Franklin D. Roosevelt.\"\n\nIn the end, the vote wasn't close. Pearl Harbor had killed American isolationism, and the realities in Eastern Europe\u2014which FDR had helped mask\u2014hadn't yet revived it. On Saturday, July 28, with only two die-hard isolationists voting no, the Senate overwhelmingly ratified the Charter of the United Nations. Upon hearing the news, one aging League supporter said he \"almost shouted and cried with joy.\" Another wrote, \"The faith of Woodrow Wilson has been vindicated. The record of the United States of 1920 has been expunged.\" But in the Senate chamber, the mood was oddly muted. Spectators packed the galleries, but the vote sparked no cheering or applause. In truth, Wilson's spirit had not been entirely revived; his faith had not been fully vindicated. The world had been saved, but not exactly transformed. As average Americans would gradually come to realize, Eastern Europe was slipping away. And there were other horrors. As U.S. troops occupied Germany, they discovered a vast machinery of death, whole cities devoted to race murder. In August, Americans\u2014who a few years earlier had been shocked by the Spanish bombing at Guernica, which killed roughly two hundred people\u2014watched their own nation drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing eighty thousand in a single night. Meanwhile, from Arkansas to Arizona, one hundred thousand American citizens whose only crime was their Japanese ancestry were slowly exiting the camps where they had been imprisoned for most of the war. In such a world, who could declare, even in victory, that humanity was marching toward a bright dawn? A few idealists attacked the UN as a betrayal of the Wilsonian dream, \"a mere camouflage,\" in the words of one church group \"for the...exercise of arbitrary power by the Big Three for the domination of other nations.\" But many Americans seemed to intuitively grasp the lesson that FDR believed the war progressives and their pacifist and isolationist successors had never learned: that the world was a tragic place, which America could neither escape nor fully redeem. What the Senate had ratified, wrote Time magazine, was \"a charter written for a world of power, tempered by a little reason.\" Or as FDR exclaimed about the Yalta deal, in words that could have summed up his entire foreign policy, \"I didn't say the result was good. I said it was the best I could do.\"\n\nFDR wasn't much of an intellectual; he relaxed by building model ships, not reading highbrow journals. But the sentiment he expressed\u2014that people must do their best in the world while not expecting too much of it\u2014captured the intellectual spirit of the age. Even before World War II, the Great War, the Depression, and Stalin's crimes had darkened the mood of many American writers and thinkers. And now, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the Iron Curtain joined the register of human horror. Looking back, the intellectuals of the 1940s tended to lump together the political faiths that had come before\u2014war progressivism in the 1910s, pacifism in the '20s, Marxism in the '30s\u2014and call them the age of optimism and reason. Their own challenge, as they saw it, was to practice politics in a world that had reduced all utopian visions to rubble. \"Frustration is increasingly the hallmark of this century\u2014the frustration of triumphant science and rampant technology, the frustration of the most generous hopes and of the most splendid dreams,\" wrote a precocious Niebuhr disciple named Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his 1949 book, The Vital Center. \"Nineteen hundred looked forward to the irresistible expansion of freedom, democracy and abundance; 1950 will look back to totalitarianism, to concentration camps, to mass starvation, to atomic war.\"\n\nFor many intellectuals, coming to terms with these frustrations meant acknowledging that their roots lay not in any economic or political system, but in human nature itself. \"Our modern civilization...was ushered in on a wave of boundless social optimism,\" wrote Niebuhr in a series of 1944 lectures that became the book Children of Light, Children of Darkness. \"Modern secularism is divided into many schools. But all the various schools agreed in rejecting the Christian doctrine of original sin.\" This was a little overstated, as Niebuhr's generalizations often were. But it was a feature of intellectual life in the 1940s to see the past in prelapsarian terms.\n\nNiebuhr's vision of man as a fallen creature was rooted in his Christian theology. But his views penetrated far beyond the community of faith. Lionel Trilling, a secular Jew and America's most influential literary critic, was drawn to writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and T. S. Eliot, whose work evoked a sense of tragedy about the human condition. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger attacked the progressives for their \"soft and shallow concept of human nature\" and their \"unwarranted optimism about man.\" There was a self-consciously jaded quality to many wartime intellectuals. They were like Rick, the hard-boiled nightclub owner in the 1942 film Casablanca, who seems utterly cynical about the world yet risks his life to resist the Nazis nonetheless. Niebuhr and Schlesinger loved calling their adversaries\u2014be they communists or old-style progressives\u2014idealistic and innocent. For their part, they prided themselves on seeing the world in all its awfulness without succumbing to despair.\n\nIn addition to assaulting the progressives for their overly sunny views of human nature, intellectuals in the 1940s attacked the claim, made by progressives and Marxists alike, that politics could be scientific. The wartime intellectuals were not hostile to science and technology per se. How could they be, since without radar and penicillin and the factories that churned out ships and planes faster than the Nazis, America might not have won the war? But they denied that the scientific method\u2014the gathering and testing of objective facts\u2014could underpin government, since people, unlike machines, did not always act in rational ways, and since politics, unlike engineering, was fundamentally a moral pursuit. Once again, John Dewey served as whipping boy. The University of Chicago philosopher Mortimer Adler, yet another student turned assailant, accused him of creating an educational philosophy based on the principle that \"science...would eventually supply all the guidance necessary for human conduct.\" That made a Deweyian education ultimately amoral, Adler alleged, since science \"cannot make a single judgment about good and bad, right and wrong.\"\n\nIf Adler accused Dewey of thinking America should brew its politics in a beaker, no one applied the critique more systematically to foreign policy than Hans Morgenthau, who took deadly aim at Colonel House's old idea of a scientific peace. A Bavarian-born Jew, Morgenthau spent his youth at the knee of scholars steeped in the tradition of Bismarckian realpolitik. He admired that conservative, Germanic tradition, with its reverence for the national interest and the balance of power, because he believed it respected limits, limits of both human reason and national power. He mourned its replacement by Nazism, and when Nazism chased him to America's shores, he used the realpolitik tradition of his youth to challenge the foreign policy culture of his adopted land, in hopes of better preparing it for its confrontations with the old world.\n\nFor too long, Morgenthau argued in his 1946 book, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Americans had succumbed to the \"misconception of international affairs as something essentially rational, where politics plays the role of a disease to be cured by means of reason.\" This, in Morgenthau's view, was a profound mistake; human behavior could not be rationalized, because human beings possessed an irrational and incurable lust for power. That was particularly true in international affairs. In the domestic arena, Morgenthau observed, liberal democracy camouflaged the harsh realities that underlay all politics, redirecting the struggle for power from the bullet to the ballot. As a result, people who took democracy for granted\u2014and no people did so more than Americans\u2014tended to believe that international politics could be tamed in the same way: by creating global parliaments that put international disputes to a vote or global courts that ruled aggression illegal. But the domestic camouflage of power, Morgenthau insisted, depends upon the fact that one sovereign possesses a monopoly of it. It is precisely because the state's power is so uncontested that it can sheath its sword, thus creating the illusion that its authority doesn't ultimately rest on force. In the international arena, by contrast, where there is no sovereign, the contest is naked. In a neighborhood with no policeman, no one can pretend that safety does not rely on the barrel of a gun. And thus, Morgenthau posited, it was in international affairs that the illusion that politics could be made rational and scientific\u2014made into something other than the self-interested search for power\u2014was most dangerous. Both the war progressives and their pacifist successors had relied heavily on analogies between domestic and international affairs. Those analogies, Morgenthau insisted, were dead wrong.\n\nMorgenthau urged Americans to abandon the progressive illusion that through scientific knowledge and charismatic leadership they could educate other nations to desire something besides power. And he urged them to abandon that illusion about themselves as well, recognizing what other nations already knew: that beneath America's moralistic rhetoric lay its own self-interest. Instead of trying to create a rational system to govern the world, he argued\u2014be it Wilson's collective security or Dewey's pacifism\u2014Americans should see themselves as guardians not of universal morality, but of their own national interest. For Morgenthau, a foreign policy based on national interest was not amoral; to the contrary, it was the most ethical response to an anarchic world. After all, in a town with no policeman, what better keeps the peace: the household that in the name of nonviolence disarms itself, and thus tempts others to attack; the household that equates its own interests with everyone else's, and thus seeks to deny others the right to self-defense; or the household that carefully delineates its domain and maintains sufficient strength to defend it? In foreign policy, Morgenthau argued, where precepts drawn from domestic affairs hold little sway, a concern for the national interest was most likely to establish a balance of power, an equilibrium that confronted potential aggressors with countervailing force. And a balance of power could effectively mitigate international conflict because rather than requiring nations to transcend their self-interest, it relied upon it. It appealed to something more solid than reason: fear.\n\nIn the 1940s, Morgenthau was not alone. He was part of a remarkable crop of foreign policy intellectuals determined to slay the hubris of reason once and for all. One of those intellectuals, ironically enough, was the former boy wonder of war progressivism, Walter Lippmann. Having already recast World War I as a war of self-defense, Lippmann, now America's most famous columnist, argued that after World War II America should not again try to create an institution like the League of Nations based upon \"a moral code which was beyond human capacity to observe and which the United States had been unable to honor.\" Instead, he argued, sounding a lot like FDR, that the United States should focus on maintaining cooperation among the big powers that had vanquished Germany and Japan. And if that required granting Moscow a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe so it would feel less threatened, so be it. After all, didn't America have its own sphere in Latin America? Here Lippmann picked up a theme that both Niebuhr and Morgenthau stressed: that America must acknowledge the self-interest in its own actions rather than demanding that other nations comply with moral norms it did not uphold itself.\n\nBy the end of World War II, Lippmann was no longer a wunderkind. Nearing sixty, he had enjoyed dazzling professional success. But he had also experienced not only national tragedy, but personal tragedy as well, having seen his marriage collapse in a blaze of public humiliation after an affair with the wife of one of his best friends. He was no longer the optimist and rationalist he had been when he met Colonel House for that autumn 1917 stroll. His views, he wrote in 1943, had evolved \"slowly over thirty years, and as a result of many false starts, mistaken judgments and serious disappointments. They represent what I now think I have learned, not at all what I always knew.\" It was a measure of the age that when it came to foreign policy, even a man as haughty as Walter Lippmann was in a chastened mood.\n\nIf Niebuhr was realism's theologian, Morgenthau its political scientist, and Lippmann its journalist, its greatest postwar practitioner was an introverted hypochondriac from Milwaukee named George Frost Kennan.\n\nKennan was too young to be a disillusioned progressive and too conservative to have ever been a communist, but he didn't need grand public embitterments to decide that the world was a grim place. Private embitterments more than did the job. He was born in a house built backward, so it received little natural light. His mother died when he was an infant, leaving him to be raised by a repressed, distant father and a stepmother who favored her own boy over him. At twelve they dispatched him to military school, where he was tormented by bigger boys and his class yearbook read, \"Pet peeve\u2014the universe.\" Fascinated with the American elite ever since reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, he somehow made it to Princeton, where he was even more miserable than he had been in high school. A poor, unsophisticated son of the Midwest with weak social skills and something of a persecution complex, he entered the Ivy League expecting to be looked down upon, and was not disappointed. In his first week, he asked a fellow student for the time and had smoke blown in his face. On a campus dominated by eating clubs, he had neither the money nor the cachet for sustained membership, and ate most of his meals alone. After graduating, he joined the foreign service, a profession he loved but tried to resign from eight times in response to imagined slights. In his time off he often checked himself into sanitariums to cure an array of real and perceived maladies. He enjoyed the company of nurses, he later admitted, because they conjured the mother he had never had.\n\nKennan once wrote that he felt like \"a guest of one's own time and not a member of its household.\" This alienation from the modern world was sometimes quaint: Kennan loathed cars and proposed that candidates for the foreign service be required to till the soil. And it was sometimes appalling: Kennan's love affair with the eighteenth century often left him unsympathetic to blacks, Jews, women, and immigrants who demanded liberation from ancient hierarchies. Kennan's affection for hierarchy, in fact, sometimes left him dubious about democracy itself and led him to muse about the benefits of a government run by unelected wise men like, well, himself.\n\nAs an observer of his own country, Kennan was often unfair and unreliable. But it wasn't his analysis of the United States that in the 1940s made him famous: It was his analysis of the U.S.S.R. Upon joining the foreign service, he was sent to study Russian at the Oriental Seminary in Berlin, a citadel of realism founded by Otto von Bismarck, and then to the Baltic capitals of Riga and Tallinn, where he was introduced to Russia by its czarist \u00e9migr\u00e9s, who bred in him an abiding love for its culture and a fierce hostility to its communist rulers. As the years passed, and his foreign policy views jelled, Kennan's realism and his anticommunism came together in a critique of what he called \"universalism,\" a pathology he believed that American progressives like Wilson and Soviet communists like Lenin shared. Both groups, Kennan argued, wanted to remake the world according to supposedly objective principles and promised that once they had, \"the ugly realities [of world politics]\u2014the power of aspirations, the national prejudices, the irrational hatreds and jealousies\u2014would be forced to recede\" and nations would live in harmony. The nature of those principles differed, of course. Wilson wanted a world of reason and law, a world that looked like America in the progressive age; Lenin wanted a global dictatorship of the proletariat, a world that looked like the U.S.S.R. But the fundamental problem with both visions, Kennan insisted, was that they imposed an abstract, universal vision on a messy, diverse world. For Kennan, like Morgenthau, foreign policy was not a science. Practitioners should not build logical models; they should tend to organic matter. They should be not mechanics, but gardeners, cultivating each plant or flower based on its own circumstances and needs. In foreign policy, as in marriage, Kennan argued, general principles of conduct are far less useful than an intimate understanding of the participants. Had he known that Wilson proposed drafting a constitution to govern his union, he would have laughed and laughed.\n\nWhen it came to Russia policy, Kennan saw two imperatives: to prevent Soviet universalism from threatening America and to prevent America from threatening itself by lapsing back into a Wilsonian universalism of its own. Kennan didn't begrudge FDR's willingness to grant the Soviets a sphere of influence, since preventing it was beyond America's power. But he considered Roosevelt na\u00efve for thinking that granting the U.S.S.R. such a sphere would make it an ally in policing the postwar world. Russian history, Kennan argued, inculcated a suspicion of outsiders, and Marxist-Leninism, with its ideological hostility to capitalism, confirmed the tendency. Given the Kremlin's revolutionary aspirations, he believed, FDR's efforts to enlist it as a partner in upholding the postwar status quo were doomed. Even worse, America's efforts at cooperation would likely be taken in Moscow as signs of weakness, thus increasing rather than reducing the chances of war.\n\nKennan did not consider Stalin another Hitler; he thought the Soviet leader was basically cautious. But if America, in its zeal to maintain the wartime alliance, left the door to expansion open, Stalin would walk through. Russia, wrote Kennan, is like a \"toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force.\" America needed to carefully choose which chunks of the globe were essential to its security, and in each one establish a balance of power sufficient to deter Soviet influence. Such balances would not require governments that resembled America's: that would be Wilsonian universalism, Kennan's other b\u00eate noire. They could be democratic or dictatorial, capitalist, socialist, or even communist. All America should ask of its allies was the will to resist Soviet domination. With this strategy, Kennan modified FDR's response to the hubris of reason. The final answer would not be called the Four Policemen; it would be called containment.\n\nBy 1946, Washington was finally ready to hear what Kennan had to say. During the war, given FDR's obsession with maintaining the anti-German alliance, Kennan and the other anti-Soviet hard-liners in the State Department's Eastern European division had been mostly ignored. But in his final days, even Roosevelt, by some accounts, was losing patience with Moscow. While he sympathized with Stalin's desire for friendly governments on Russia's border, he had grown increasingly annoyed by the Soviet leader's inability to orchestrate them with a light and subtle hand so as not to embarrass him at home. Roosevelt may have genuinely believed that the nations of Eastern Europe could elect governments that were both democratic and deferential to Moscow\u2014a wildly unrealistic hope in a country like Poland, which seethed with hatred toward its large and brutal neighbor. Or he may simply have wanted to delay any conflict with Stalin until Germany and Japan were defeated and America was ensconced in the UN. Either way, when Harry Truman succeeded him, relations between Washington and Moscow began to chill. Truman\u2014a failed businessman, a machine politician, the vice president largely because special interests had blocked more qualified contenders, and now the first president in a half century without a college degree\u2014was staggeringly unprepared for the challenges he would face. FDR hadn't even bothered to tell him that America was building an atomic bomb. On April 12, 1945, when Eleanor Roosevelt broke the news that the president was dead, Truman was silent for a long time; then asked, \"Is there anything I can do for you?\" To which she replied, \"Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.\"\n\nOne consequence of Truman's ignorance was that he viewed U.S.-Soviet relations from the perspective of an outsider. Roosevelt had felt grateful to the U.S.S.R., which had lost ninety times as many lives in the war as had the United States. He knew that by delaying America's invasion of France until 1944 he had purchased victory cheap, and that he had been able to do so because for almost three years Soviet ground troops had faced the Nazi meat grinder largely alone. At Tehran and Yalta, FDR had also given Stalin the winks and nods that undercut Allied declarations about democracy and self-determination. Truman hadn't been in those back rooms, nor even told what transpired there, and so he saw the Allied victory the way most of his countrymen did: as the story of America saving Europe, and especially Russia, which Truman assumed had only survived Hitler's onslaught because of American aid. It was Stalin, in his view, who should be grateful, and should express that gratitude by upholding his public pledges to safeguard democracy in the nations he controlled. Over the course of 1945, as it became clear that Stalin was doing no such thing, Truman began to get tough.\n\nConvinced that FDR's diplomacy had involved too much carrot and too little stick, Truman spent much of 1945 trying to muscle Moscow into cooperating on America's terms. He brought Soviet foreign minister Molotov into his office and gave him \"the straight one-two to the jaw.\" He halted wartime aid and made it clear there would be none in the future unless the Kremlin cleaned up its act. He threatened to publicly denounce Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe and he brandished America's new atomic bomb, thinking it would scare Stalin into complying with U.S. demands. But all these efforts failed: The bomb was too crude an instrument to be wielded for geopolitical effect, and while the Soviets didn't relish the cutoff of U.S. aid, having pliant governments on their border mattered more. As for Molotov, it wasn't easy to intimidate a man who slept with a hunk of brown bread and a pistol under his pillow. So Truman and his advisers began a more fundamental reassessment. Perhaps the problem wasn't that FDR's efforts at cooperation had involved too many carrots. Perhaps cooperation wasn't possible at all.\n\nThat's where Kennan came in. In February 1946, in his capacity as deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow, he was asked by the State and Treasury departments to explain Stalin's increasingly anti-American rhetoric and his refusal to join the newly created International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Kennan read the request and groaned. He had explained the Kremlin's behavior to his superiors in Washington many times before, and received no response; it was like \"talking to a stone.\" What's more, the \"sunless, vitaminless\" environment of Stalinist Moscow was affecting his health. Suffering from a fever, cold, and ulcers, he retired to his sickbed and dictated an eight-thousand-word telegram, the longest ever sent from the embassy in Moscow. He expected that this time too it would disappear into the bowels of the Washington bureaucracy with barely a trace.\n\nIn his missive, Kennan took aim at the key assumption underlying both Roosevelt's and Truman's policies: that the United States\u2014either through carrots or sticks\u2014could maintain its alliance with the Soviet Union now that the war was won. Moscow, argued Kennan, was not eschewing cooperation because American policy was too tough or too soft; American policy was irrelevant. Stalin was not Georges Clemenceau, a prickly character eager for a postwar partnership with the United States. Stalin wanted conflict with the capitalist world because he ruled by repression, and to justify that repression he needed an external threat. With Hitler vanquished, and America the most powerful capitalist country in the world, we were now it.\n\nKennan's answer was containment. If Roosevelt had transgressed the Wilsonian faith by accepting spheres of influence, Kennan now committed an even greater apostasy: He blessed the balance of power. Even FDR, Kennan argued, had been dewy-eyed. The Soviets would not help America police the world. Rather, they would pocket their Eastern European spoils and seek new ones, foraging in places such as Western Europe, Japan, and the Middle East, which America must not allow a hostile power to control. To prevent this, Kennan argued, the United States would have to seek regional balances of power, alliances that met the U.S.S.R. and its clients with countervailing force.\n\nThis time, Kennan's telegram did not reach Washington and disappear. To the contrary, it detonated with near-atomic force. Kennan's boss, Ambassador to Russia Averell Harriman, gave it to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who sent it to Truman, the entire cabinet, top military officers, key members of Congress, and influential columnists and publishers. The State Department distributed it to every U.S. Embassy in the world. Kennan had provided a rationale for the policy Washington was already groping toward. The central reality of the coming age, it was now clear, would be not great-power cooperation, as FDR had hoped, but great-power conflict. As Kennan's fellow Soviet expert Charles Bohlen noted, there would be not one postwar world, but two.\n\nAs containment became the prism through which Washington saw the world, other aspects of the postwar settlement fell into place. Originally, FDR had wanted Germany crushed. The more emasculated it was, he assumed, the less it could challenge the Four Policemen who patrolled the postwar world. In 1944, he endorsed Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau's plan to exile Germany to the nineteenth century, dismantling its industry and carving it into small agricultural states. When FDR talked about how to treat Hitler's vanquished nation, his favored image was castration, and it wasn't always clear that he was speaking entirely metaphorically.\n\nBy 1945, Roosevelt had ditched Morgenthau's plan, in part because of opposition from Secretary of State Hull, who feared inflaming the Germans. But what sealed the decision was containment. Preventing Soviet expansion, Kennan argued, required building up the capacity of key regions to resist. And unless Germany's economy revived (at least in that part of Germany under Western control), neither would Western Europe's as a whole, leaving it ripe for Soviet subversion. Ironically, then, it was the recognition that great-power cooperation was impossible\u2014that a balance of power was the best America could achieve\u2014that helped convince the United States to treat the defeated Germans more generously. The same principle underlay the Marshall Plan, America's initiative to alleviate the economic disorder and despair stalking postwar Western Europe. That noble effort would never have passed Congress had Americans not feared that Moscow would turn Europe's suffering to its advantage. Such ironies fit the intellectual ethos of the age: By lowering America's moral sights and substituting a more realistic vision (containment) for a more optimistic one (U.S.-Soviet cooperation), America was actually doing more good.\n\nThe contrast was clear. After World War I, the absence of foreign threats had contributed to America's withdrawal. After World War II, by contrast, the specter of Soviet power drew America further and further into European affairs. Soon the United States wasn't only paying to rebuild Western Europe economically; it was promising to defend it militarily. If in 1940, when France fell, Clemenceau's nightmare had come true, in 1949 Washington and Paris realized his dream, a binding security guarantee, the NATO pact.\n\nWhat held the postwar settlement together, then, was restraint on American universalism and fear of the universalism of the Soviet Union. FDR granted Moscow its sphere of influence; Truman contained it. Together they acknowledged the limits of America's capacity to remake the world yet convinced Americans to sacrifice so that Hitler and Stalin could not remake it, either. Roosevelt and Truman set their ideological ambitions lower than Wilson and paid a higher price to achieve them; they deployed greater power in pursuit of narrower goals. By eschewing a scientific peace, they forged one better able to endure in an imperfect world.\n\nAnd yet, while America's leaders often acted like realists, they didn't sound like realists. They outfitted their Lodgean peace with Wilsonian clothes. From Newfoundland to Yalta to San Francisco, FDR and Truman often spoke in universalistic, missionary terms. Partly it was politics. Kennan, Morgenthau, and Lippmann wanted to keep the citizenry out of foreign policy, since they believed that public participation would hamper the subtle and ruthless adjustments that an effective balance of power required. FDR and Truman, however, could not afford such an elitist view. They had to speak to Americans in their own language; they had to get legislation through Congress. They had to worry about the balance of power at home as well.\n\nBut there was more to it than that. The words were window dressing, but they were not only window dressing. They reflected a discomfort with brute, unreasoning power even as America accommodated itself to it. If FDR and Truman lacked Wilson's faith in a world governed by reason, neither were they fully reconciled to its opposite. Had they not at least partially believed their own words, they could not have spoken them so convincingly. In this sense, they were less like Kennan, Morgenthau, and Lippmann than like Niebuhr, who refused the realist label because while he acknowledged that self-interest powered human affairs, he did not want to sanctify it. He believed that while both nations and individuals were inherently sinful, they could still be redeemed through the mystery of God's grace. And it was this faith that ordinary individuals could somehow be redeemed that kept Niebuhr from the dark and sometimes ugly skepticism of democracy to which Kennan fell prey. \"Realities are always defeating ideals,\" he wrote, \"but ideals have a way of taking vengeance upon the facts which momentarily imprison them.\"\n\nThis is where Niebuhr and Roosevelt met. Perhaps it is no surprise that a man who for decades insisted, in the face of all reality, that he would cast off his own momentary imprisonment and walk again would insist on seemingly fanciful declarations about what was possible in the world. With the UN charter, as David Fromkin puts it, FDR created a sleeping beauty. Like the Declaration of Independence, its words rebuked their authors and offered the prospect, however distant, that justice and reason would one day rise from their slumber.\n\nIt was a treacherous balance. If the ideals grew too intoxicating they could blind Americans not only to the limits of what they could expect from the world, but of what they could expect from themselves. Missionaries unable to recognize their own sinfulness, Niebuhr noted again and again, were worse than merely na\u00efve; they were often monstrous. Yet if the ideals disappeared altogether, as the realists seemed to desire, the result might be utter cynicism, a world grown numb to evil.\n\nThere was no abstract formula for weighing these competing imperatives. Abstract formulas, in fact, had been part of the problem. Much of the time, FDR and Truman were simply feeling their way. But overall, their generation\u2014which was more aware than the war progressives and pacifists of the tragic nature of world affairs and more aware than the isolationists that America must struggle to improve it nonetheless\u2014found a balance that served their nation astonishingly well. For an extraordinary period during and immediately after World War II, they not only built a stable balance of power but swathed it in the garb of reason. They saved Asia from Japanese imperialism, and Western Europe from not one species of totalitarianism but two. They took a nation that wanted no commitments in the world, especially if they involved carrying a gun, and made it the leader of the mightiest wartime and peacetime alliances in human history. They did all this while strengthening America's economy and preserving its democracy, in the face of Beard's and Dewey's predictions that another world war would destroy both.\n\nAnd then, as the years passed, and Americans increasingly took the fruits of their labor for granted, a younger generation of thinkers and leaders began to suspect that they had set their sights too low.\n\n## PART II\n\n## THE HUBRIS OF TOUGHNESS\n\n## CHAPTER FIVE\n\n## THE MURDER OF SHEEP\n\nFor all his misanthropy, George Kennan had to admit that the world was treating him pretty well. Before his February 1946 \"Long Telegram\" from Moscow, he had been an obscure, miserable functionary; perhaps two hundred people in the entire government had known his name. Now he was the State Department's resident genius. In April he was recalled to Washington and made deputy commandant of the National War College, where he taught officers and diplomats about the U.S.S.R. A year later he became the State Department's first-ever director of Policy Planning, which put him in charge of foreign policy big-think and gave him direct access to Secretary of State George Marshall. Even his health began to improve.\n\nThe key figure in Kennan's ascent was Navy secretary James Forrestal. Like Kennan himself, Forrestal was an outsider in the patrician, East Coast, WASP-dominated foreign policy elite. Born to a working-class Catholic family, he had twice broken his nose boxing, which added an air of menace to his rugged good looks. Some people said he resembled the actor James Cagney, who was famous for playing gangsters. Like Kennan, Forrestal had made it\u2014against the odds\u2014to Princeton. But unlike Kennan, who was miserable there yet stayed true to himself, Forrestal used the Ivy League to don a new identity as an upper-class dandy. He shed his Catholicism, cut ties to his parents, made millions on Wall Street, and romped with the Jazz Age Long Island set like a character from a Fitzgerald novel. Yet he never seemed entirely at ease with his new self. His many business associates, his many drinking buddies, his many lovers, even his ill-fated wife, all admitted that beneath the high-achieving, high-living exterior lurked a man they didn't really know at all.\n\nPolitically, Forrestal was a realist of sorts. He certainly saw the world as a tough and irrational place. But for Kennan, Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Lippmann, the recognition that the world was tough and irrational represented a reaction against Wilson's messianic fervor, a kind of anti-ideology. Forrestal, by contrast, invested toughness with an ideological fervor of its own. He saw the Soviets as Nazis, ruthless fanatics determined to snuff life from the free world. And he believed that only brute, unyielding force could keep them at bay. In his use of Nazism as a template for understanding international affairs\u2014his belief that evil was a permanent, pervasive force in the world and that any concession to it would unleash the same horror as Chamberlain's had at Munich\u2014Forrestal was, in 1946, a man ahead of his time, a harbinger of a new hubris gradually taking root in a new age.\n\nForrestal was morbidly fascinated by the writings of Marx and Lenin, which he saw as the postwar equivalent of Mein Kampf: a Rosetta stone for understanding America's new totalitarian foe. In late 1945, he asked an economist on his staff named Edward Willett to do a study of \"dialectical materialism,\" a term Willett had never heard before. Willett, a man whose intellectual reach often exceeded his grasp, read two books on Marxism and then produced a paper titled \"Random Thoughts on Dialectical Materialism and Russian Objectives,\" which lived up to its name. Forrestal distributed the paper to some Russia experts for review, but the general response was that Willett didn't know what he was talking about, and that in any case, Soviet foreign policy was motivated more by national interest than by Marxist theory. Forrestal was crestfallen. He had commissioned the paper precisely because he believed the Kremlin was motivated by Marxist theory and thus was hell-bent on global revolution. \"I realize it is easy to ridicule the need for such a study,\" he wrote to one associate, \"but I think in the middle of that laughter we always should remember that we also laughed at Hitler.\"\n\nJust then, like an answered prayer, Kennan's Long Telegram landed on his desk. It was well reasoned, well informed, articulate\u2014everything Willett's paper was not. Kennan, like most other Russia experts, believed that Stalin's foreign policy was motivated more by Russia's historic insecurity and animosity toward the West than by the writings of Lenin and Marx. But in his effort to puncture the still-prevalent view that America could charm Moscow into postwar cooperation, Kennan had described the Kremlin in harsh, pungent terms. And he did acknowledge that communism exacerbated Russian suspicions of the outside world. This was good enough for Forrestal, who now had a new horse to ride.\n\nAfter summoning Kennan back to Washington to teach at the National War College, which he had helped create, Forrestal asked him to revise Willett's article, hoping to invest its argument with greater intellectual heft. Kennan demurred, admitting that he didn't share Willett's belief that Stalin, like Hitler, wanted a world war. But Forrestal countered with a new request: Kennan should write a paper of his own. This put Kennan in a bind. He wanted to keep Forrestal, his most powerful patron, happy, yet he didn't really share his views. He tried to square the circle by drafting an essay that claimed Moscow's actions were motivated by both nationalist and ideological impulses, without suggesting which was more important. That was good enough for Forrestal, who distributed Kennan's essay with a cover note stating that \"nothing about Russia can be understood without also understanding the implacable and unchanging direction of Lenin's religion-philosophy.\" For Kennan, who later admitted that he had written the essay to serve \"what I felt to be Mr. Forrestal's needs at the time,\" it was a small, strategic breach of intellectual honesty. And it worked. Three months later, with a push from Forrestal, he got his dream job: head of the State Department's Policy Planning staff.\n\nBut Kennan's breach came back to haunt him. In January 1947, he gave a talk on Russia at the Council on Foreign Relations, which the editor of the Council's journal, Foreign Affairs, asked him to turn into an article. Kennan didn't have time to write something new, so he submitted the essay he had penned for Forrestal. The State Department gave him permission to publish it as long as it did not bear his name. Under the article's title, the byline read simply \"By X.\"\n\nOn the surface, the X article brought Kennan another burst of good fortune. It was excerpted in Reader's Digest and Life, and quoted in Newsweek. After Forrestal tipped off New York Times columnist Arthur Krock about the author's identity, Kennan was named one of U.S. News & World Report's people of the week. Suddenly he was deluged with speaking requests. At Radcliffe, where his daughter attended college, friends began calling her \"Miss X.\"\n\nBut beneath all the adulation lay a problem, one that would shadow Kennan until he was an old man: the problem of what containment actually was. For Kennan, it was something modest, something significantly less than a global doctrine. First of all, it was a strategy against a country, the Soviet Union, not an ideology, communism. If communist movements were pawns of Moscow, Kennan conceded, then their ascent to power in strategically important countries should be vigorously opposed. (He even supported covert action to undermine Soviet control in Eastern Europe.) But unlike Forrestal, he suspected that some communist regimes might refuse orders from the Kremlin and perhaps even grow openly hostile, in which case they themselves might become vehicles for containing Soviet power. For Kennan, it was critical that while the Soviet Union pursued \"universalism\"\u2014a world remade in its ideological image\u2014the United States should not. That, in his view, had been Wilson's mistake. The United States might be partial to democracy, but it should condone ideological diversity. It should tolerate governments of any type as long as they were not agents of a threatening power.\n\nSecondly, for Kennan, containment was primarily a political strategy, not a military one. He had seen firsthand the way World War II shattered Soviet society, and he believed the Kremlin had little appetite or capacity for another world war. Unlike Forrestal and Willett, therefore, he put little stock in the Hitler analogy. The real danger, in his mind, was not that the Red Army would sweep across Western Europe. It was that the people of Western Europe, made desperate by the continent's postwar misery and chaos, would elect Kremlin-controlled communist parties and thus unlock the door to Soviet domination from the inside. That's why for Kennan, containment's crown jewel was the massive program of American economic assistance dubbed the Marshall Plan. NATO, by contrast, which committed the United States to Western Europe's military defense, struck him as unnecessary and probably counterproductive.\n\nFinally, Kennan did not believe that containment applied everywhere. Even the spread of Soviet influence did not bother him if the spread was to countries that lacked the industrial capacity, natural resources, or strategic location to tip the geopolitical balance in Moscow's favor. If the Kremlin wanted to waste its money and blood in irrelevant backwaters, he believed, that was no reason for America to follow suit. Kennan was not always precise or consistent in defining which chunks of the globe he considered strategically important and which he did not, but he was adamant that containment have geographic limits. The central point, in his mind, was that America must have a prior conception of its interests, which it defended against Soviet threats. To oppose Soviet power everywhere would flip that on its head: It would mean deciding that anywhere the U.S.S.R. probed suddenly became in the interest of the United States to defend, in which case Moscow, not America itself, would determine which areas of the globe mattered to America.\n\nBy the summer of 1947, Kennan had articulated these principles many times. What he had not done\u2014on purpose\u2014was clearly articulate them in his paper for Forrestal, the paper that, to his surprise, made containment a household world.\n\nIn his summer home, surrounded by pine trees on an island off the coast of Maine, Walter Lippmann read the X article and decided that containment was a dangerous idea and Kennan was a dangerous man. He proceeded to write fourteen straight columns attacking the concept, which he packaged into a short book. He took its title from a French phrase describing the standoff between Berlin and Paris before World War II: la guerre froide, the cold war.\n\nFor Lippmann, Mr. X's containment doctrine had two big and interrelated problems. First, it assumed that the Soviets were motivated by ideology, not nationalism. As a result, it interpreted the Kremlin's insistence on an Eastern European sphere of influence not as the fulfillment of an historic Russian desire for a buffer against attack from the West (a desire that Hitler's invasion had graphically underscored), but as the first step in a bid to take over the world. Second, because Mr. X had defined Soviet ambitions as global, he was insisting that America's response be global, too. Containing Moscow everywhere, Lippmann warned, would require the United States to commit itself to a motley array of \"satellites, puppets, clients, agents about whom we can know very little.\" It would require \"a drawing account of blank checks both in money and military power.\"\n\nThe irony was exquisite. To please Forrestal, Kennan had described Soviet policy as more ideological than he thought it really was, and containment as more global than he believed it needed to be. To make a polemical point, Lippmann had put the most extreme gloss on Kennan's purposefully ambiguous pronouncements. The result was a grand, public feud between two men who basically agreed. Kennan called it a \"misunderstanding almost tragic in its dimensions.\" He checked into Bethesda Naval Hospital complaining of ulcers and began composing a letter to Lippmann expressing his \"bewilderment and frustration\" that the columnist had \"held against me so many views with which I profoundly agreed.\" Kennan considered publishing the letter, but Secretary of State Marshall, who believed his planning chief had gotten too much publicity already, refused. And Kennan, for reasons that remain obscure but probably stemmed from his generally neurotic personality, never sent it, either. Two years later, finding himself on a train with Lippmann from New York to Washington, he launched into an impassioned explanation of why the columnist had gotten his views all wrong. But by then it was too late.\n\nIt was too late because between 1946 and 1950, containment swelled from the limited doctrine Kennan espoused into the hubristic one Lippmann condemned. And the vehicle for that expansion, as usual, was success.\n\nWhat expanded was not merely a foreign policy doctrine, containment, but a foreign policy mind-set, toughness, which had its roots in World War II. For virtually everyone in the Truman administration, Munich had been a totemic trauma, a searing, life-altering event. And to most policymakers its lessons were clear: The world contained evil people and evil regimes, which were impervious to reason. If their aggression was not met, early on, by force, the result might be death, destruction, and dishonor on an epic scale.\n\nBut despite this, America in the early postwar years did not go searching the world for Hitlers to destroy. In Western Europe and Japan, to be sure, Truman administration officials generally agreed that America must contain Soviet power; World War II had shown we had vital interests there. There were other chunks of the world, however, where the United States had never before projected much military power and whose political fate had never seemed tightly bound up with its own. The United States in the late 1940s did not have global military commitments, and most politicians, on both sides of the aisle, wanted to keep it that way. In 1948, with the Truman administration negotiating the treaty that created NATO, thus obligating America to defend Western Europe, Arthur Vandenberg and John Foster Dulles, two of the Republican Party's most influential spokesmen on foreign affairs, both demanded Secretary of State Marshall's assurance that America not go around making similar pledges in other corners of the globe.\n\nOne reason they feared such pledges was financial. With memories of the Depression still fresh, many politicians and policymakers considered the U.S. economy a fragile organism, vulnerable to sudden collapse. Containing communism across the entire globe would require vast sums for defense, which would likely lead to budget deficits and their ugly cousin, inflation, a prospect almost as frightening to government officials in the early Truman years as the Red Army.\n\nAs a result, to Forrestal's dismay, Truman put sharp restrictions on the amount he would spend containing the Soviets, restrictions that buttressed Kennan's insistence on containment's geographic limits. Since \"our nation's economy under existing conditions can afford only a limited amount for defense,\" announced Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in October 1949, \"we must look forward to diminishing appropriations for the armed services.\" That same month, Truman unveiled his budget, which slashed military spending by 15 percent. In the late 1940s, America's leaders did not know how much military spending the U.S. economy could bear, and they were not eager to find out.\n\nBut success turned Kennan's version of containment, with its keen appreciation of America's financial and geographic limits, into something more like Forrestal's. It began in the Near East, where Britain, which had long checked Russian ambitions, was now too bankrupt and exhausted to continue the job. In 1946, Iran's shah complained of bullying from Moscow, which had stationed troops on his nation's soil during the war and was refusing to remove them until it got a share of Persian oil. Truman demanded that the Red Army leave and dispatched $10 million in military aid, which Tehran used to fight a separatist uprising that the Kremlin had stoked in the country's north. Within a year, the Soviet troops were gone; the separatists had been crushed; and the United States, not the U.S.S.R., had won lucrative new rights to drill for Iranian crude. It was Munich in reverse: by standing tough\u2014and not abandoning Iran, as Chamberlain had abandoned Czechoslovakia\u2014America had nipped aggression in the bud. Iran had been a \"test case,\" declared the State Department, of a \"small state victim of large state aggression.\" And this time, America passed.\n\nIt was, it turned out, just a warm-up. A year later, in February 1947, a British embassy official drove to the State Department to inform U.S. officials that His Majesty's government, now liquidating its once-mighty empire in a kind of geopolitical fire sale, could no longer afford to defend Greece or Turkey, either. In Greece, a right-wing government was fighting for its life against communist rebels. In Turkey, the Soviets were demanding bases near the Dardanelles, from which they could project power into the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.\n\nThat night, Kennan and other top State Department officials met to consider whether America should come to Greece and Turkey's aid. It was a potentially historic shift. The eastern Mediterranean had been a traditional zone of British\u2014not American\u2014influence. (In their 1944 meeting in Moscow, where Churchill and Stalin agreed that the United Kingdom would enjoy 90 percent control in postwar Greece, no American had even been in the room.) Moreover, defending Athens and Istanbul would cost far more than defending Tehran. Congress was in no hurry to send hundreds of millions of dollars to nondemocratic regimes whose fate had never troubled it before, and even some in Truman's own cabinet were dubious.\n\nThe State Department officials agreed that America should send the money. But Kennan shuddered when he heard the way Truman intended to justify it. \"It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,\" read the speech Truman was planning to give before Congress. This was just what Lippmann had warned against: a pledge to contain communism everywhere it reared its head. The Truman Doctrine \"should not be a blank check to give economic and military aid to any area in the world where the communists show signs of being successful,\" Kennan pleaded in a memo to his superiors. The American people must be told that containment had limits. But Truman's political advisers said the universal rhetoric would help sway a skeptical Congress. Like the X article, it was a small, strategic breach of intellectual honesty, with consequences that turned out not to be small at all.\n\nOnce again containment worked. Congress appropriated the money, and by late 1949 the Greek communists (whom Stalin had never much cared for anyway) had laid down their arms and the Dardanelles was safe from Soviet threat. Truman's hard line boosted his approval ratings, as Democrats who had been pilloried as soft on communism in the disastrous midterm elections of 1946 regained their foreign policy edge. Things got even better in 1948, when the Soviets blocked land access to West Berlin and Truman responded with a massive airlift that forced them to back down. It was another step up the toughness ladder: Now the Americans weren't merely sending money to contain the U.S.S.R.; we were flying planes. And this brought yet more success. Abandoning Berlin to the Russians, warned one U.S. official, would have been \"the Munich of 1948.\" Instead the Soviets caved, and Truman's reputation for firmly resisting communist aggression helped power him to an upset reelection victory that fall.\n\nContainment was working beautifully; the Truman administration was flying high; and yet George Kennan\u2014who had built the conceptual wings\u2014was worried. \"If I thought for a moment that the precedent of Greece and Turkey obliged us to try to do the same thing in China,\" he declared, \"I would throw up my hands and say we had better have a whole new approach to the affairs of the world.\"\n\nAlmost everything Kennan knew about China he had learned from John Paton Davies, a man rather similar to himself. Although jollier than Kennan, Davies shared his talent for combining intimate knowledge of a foreign land with detached, almost clinical, judgments about its politics. Born to Baptist missionaries in the province of Sichuan, Davies had attended Yenching University alongside many of the people who would later populate China's political elite. After finishing his studies in the United States, he had returned to China as a Foreign Service officer, serving four diplomatic tours there over the course of twelve years. When Kennan became head of the Policy Planning staff, Davies was the first person he hired.\n\nAs Davies looked at China in 1948, he saw good news and bad news. The bad news was that there was no way on God's green earth that America could prevent Mao Zedong's Communist Party from taking power, since America's allies, the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek, whose corruption and incompetence Davies had witnessed up close, were in a state of terminal collapse. The good news was that Mao, who unlike the communist leaders in most of Eastern Europe had his own power base, was unlikely, in Davies' view, to remain Moscow's stooge for very long. If America played its cards right, in fact, Mao might even become America's ally in containing Soviet power. \"A united communist China,\" suggested Kennan, reflecting Davies, \"might threaten Russian security and Russian control of the communist movement.\"\n\nDavies and Kennan proposed that America limit aid to Chiang in hopes of establishing decent relations with Mao once he took power. Forrestal, who had ascended to the newly created position of secretary of defense, objected. But Truman overruled him, declaring, with typical pool-hall eloquence, that sending money to Chiang was like \"pouring sand in a rat hole.\" It was clear evidence that within the corridors of power, Kennan's modest version of containment remained alive and well. Forrestal notwithstanding, most Truman officials recognized that not every victory for communism was a victory for the U.S.S.R.; that containment applied in some parts of the world but not in others; and that given the limits of American money and power, sometimes the best thing the United States could do\u2014even in the face of communist victories\u2014was to leave well enough alone.\n\nBut that is not what they had told the public. From the X article to Truman's Greece and Turkey speech, the rhetoric of containment had soared higher than the reality, and Chiang's American supporters now demanded that the latter be brought in line. China, whose vast bounty of consumers and converts had long stirred the dreams of American business and the American church, occupied a special place in the national imagination. And as 1948 turned to 1949, a powerful China lobby, championed by Time magazine's founder, Henry Luce\u2014the son of a Presbyterian missionary who had harvested souls in the city of Dengzhou\u2014accused the administration of letting the communists win. Over administration objections, Congress appropriated billions in economic and military aid to Chiang.\n\nKennan urged his superiors to confront the \"confusion and bewilderment in the public mind regarding our China policy,\" to say publicly what they were saying behind closed doors: that Chiang was a lost cause and Mao did not pose a grave threat. But Truman, like FDR before him, was more comfortable acknowledging the limits of American power privately than in public. His administration did not challenge the China lobby until it was too late, and by October 1949, when Mao hoisted a red flag in Tiananmen Square, the American China debate had turned rancid. The timing of Chiang's defeat was terrible: It came soon after news that Moscow had tested an atomic bomb, and amid of a wave of high-profile espionage trials, which fueled suspicions that Truman had let Mao take power because deep within the U.S. government, traitors were helping the communists win.\n\nOn February 9, 1950, with these flammable ingredients already in place, an obscure Wisconsin senator named Joseph McCarthy lit the match. He had been looking for an issue that would make his name. Friends suggested the St. Lawrence Seaway; then a national pension plan; then it hit him: treason! In a speech to the Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, he brandished a piece of paper allegedly listing 205 communists who worked for the State Department. The intersection of China's fall and McCarthy's lies, which he would hurl without scruple or shame for the next four years, played a crucial role in the growth of the hubris of toughness. China, after all, should have been a shining example of the limits of the Munich analogy. It should have convinced Americans of what Kennan and Davies knew: that contrary to the X article and contrary to what Truman had said in his Greece and Turkey speech, there was no earthly way America could man every anticommunist barricade across the globe. Had America genuinely tried to keep Mao from power\u2014which would have required not merely epic sums of money, but U.S. casualties in numbers that would have made Okinawa look like afternoon tea\u2014those limits would have become brutally clear. A serious effort at actually applying global containment in China would likely have brought the whole doctrine crashing down. But precisely because Truman hadn't done that, McCarthy and his allies could insist that holding China would have been easy: It would have required just a bit more aid, a few military advisers, and perhaps a little airpower. Fueled by McCarthyism, the legend grew that America had \"lost\" China not because it lacked the power to keep it, but because it refused to try.\n\nIntellectually, the McCarthyite argument on China was preposterous. But its impact on American politics was immediate and profound. Within months of McCarthy's emergence and China's fall, Truman's job approval rating, which had been nearly 70 percent in January 1949, had been cut in half. Prominent Republicans were calling Secretary of State Dean Acheson a coward and his predecessor, George Marshall\u2014the five-star general who had masterminded America's victory in World War II\u2014a traitor. And the political claim that Truman officials were weak in their opposition to communism was often linked to a cultural claim, which had particular resonance in the toughness years: that they were weak as men. Acheson, sneered McCarthy, pranced around \"with a lace handkerchief, a silk glove, and with a Harvard accent.\" GOP senator Everett Dirksen vowed to expose the administration's \"lavender lads,\" and by 1953 more than four hundred State Department employees had been either fired or forced to resign for alleged homosexuality. Decades later, Lyndon Johnson, then a freshman senator from Texas, would remember that \"Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over in China.\" When it was his turn in power, he would make sure nothing like that ever happened to him.\n\nIt was in this toxic political climate, on June 25, 1950, that the White House learned that communist North Korea had invaded its southern twin. Truman administration officials, consistent with Kennan's view that containment did not apply on the Asian mainland, had repeatedly implied, both publicly and privately, that they would not defend Seoul. But when war came, all that went out the window. Truman was in Independence, Missouri, when he learned of the invasion, and he quickly rushed back to Washington. \"I had time to think aboard the plane,\" he later wrote. \"In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak.... Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier.\" Later he added, \"If...the threat to South Korea was met firmly and successfully, it would add to our successes in Iran, Berlin and Greece.\" Those were the choices: Munich or anti-Munich. Berlin and Greece had boosted Truman's approval ratings, while his failure to prevent Mao's takeover had sent them tumbling and fueled McCarthy's rise. The November midterm elections were only months away, and Republicans would surely cite another communist triumph as evidence that he was guilty of appeasement, if not treason. By 1950, Truman believed that acknowledging containment's limits was more than perilous. It was the fast lane to political death.\n\nWithin days, the United States was rushing troops to the battle. Inside the administration, the debate was no longer about whether America should fight; it was about what America was fighting for: the preservation of South Korea or the liberation of the communist North as well. When Kennan, who had been on leave at Princeton, returned to the State Department, Davies warned him that if U.S. forces tried to reunify the entire peninsula, China might enter the war. In response, Kennan proposed that Truman publicly pledge not to cross the 38th parallel, which divides the two Koreas. But in good toughness fashion, John Allison, director of the State Department's Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, accused him of espousing a \"timid, half-hearted policy\" of \"appeasement.\" As the summer dragged on, Kennan felt the momentum swinging toward reunification. \"The course upon which we are today moving,\" he wrote to Acheson in late August, \"is one, as I see it, so little promising and so fraught with danger that I could not honestly urge you to continue to take responsibility for it.\"\n\nBut Acheson did take responsibility for it. In mid-September, General Douglas MacArthur pulled off a daring amphibious landing at Inchon, two hundred miles behind enemy lines, and began racing toward the 38th parallel. Halting him there would have required a heroic act of political will, since dealing with the egomaniacal general was, in Kennan's words, like \"arranging the establishment of diplomatic relations with a hostile and suspicious foreign government.\" Besides, with the fall elections approaching, Truman needed a win, something that would silence the McCarthyite hordes. So far, every time he had taken another step up the toughness ladder, it had paid off.\n\nSo MacArthur crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea, and like Xerxes crossing the Bosporus, the gods took their revenge. In this case, the instruments of their vengeance were Chinese. In early October, with MacArthur's troops nearing the Yalu River, which separates North Korea from China, Stalin told Mao that if he threw five to seven divisions into the fight he could not only keep the Americans off his border, but deal them a crushing blow. After several sleepless nights, Mao decided\u2014as Davies and Kennan had feared\u2014to do just that. Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops were sneaking across the Yalu, carrying precooked meals so they wouldn't need to light fires visible to American planes. On October 26, U.S. forces took their first Chinese prisoner. Still, MacArthur pushed north, boasting that his men would be home by Christmas.\n\nIn late November, the Chinese launched an all-out attack, forcing U.S. troops into a panicked retreat. By spring, after months of ghastly fighting, American forces stabilized their positions roughly where the whole conflict began, at the 38th parallel, and State and Defense department officials began exploring negotiations to end the war. But MacArthur resisted, defying Truman's orders and demanding that America expand the conflict by blockading China's ports, bombing its military installations, and encouraging Chiang to launch an invasion from Taiwan. In April, after MacArthur's brazen insubordination became too much to bear, Truman fired him. But this just liberated the general to loudly accuse his former boss of being \"blind to history's clear lesson\" and practicing \"a form of appeasement on the lines of the Munich conference in 1938.\" For his part, McCarthy called Truman's refusal to pursue total victory a \"super-Munich,\" adding, \"The son of a bitch ought to be impeached.\" The young senator from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, saw his office flooded with pro-MacArthur mail.\n\nAs MacArthur's supporters saw it, Truman\u2014like Neville Chamberlain in 1938\u2014was showing dangerous weakness in the face of aggression. But the charge just showed how unreal their definition of weakness had become. In the late 1930s, many Americans had denied that their nation's safety required the survival of France. Before 1947, few had believed American security had much to do with what happened in Turkey and Greece. In 1949, most observers assumed that the United States would abandon South Korea to its fate. Yet by 1951, Truman's opponents were handing him umbrellas because he refused to launch a war inside China to liberate all of Korea from communism. America's mounting global strength, as it filled the gap left by Europe's evaporating empires, combined with the terror of weakness inherited from World War II, had turned every foe into Hitler and every compromise into Munich. Politicians who once considered it no shame to let America's enemies have Paris now cried treason because we were letting them have Pyongyang.\n\nMacArthur and his allies genuinely believed that the only reason containment kept expanding was that the communists kept confronting the United States with graver and graver threats. What they didn't grasp was that their definition of what constituted a threat had grown in parallel with America's growing confidence in its power. One big reason for that growing confidence was the U.S. economy. In the late 1940s, many Truman officials had seen it as fragile and thus unable to sustain too much defense spending. Their belief that the United States didn't need to stop communism everywhere in the world had been deeply bound up with their belief that America couldn't afford to. But by 1950, official views were beginning to change. In 1949, the new head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Leon Keyserling, began denying that deficits were as dangerous as most people assumed. Following the famed British economist John Maynard Keynes, he argued that the government spending that created deficits could also rev up the economy, thus producing higher economic growth\u2014and higher tax revenues\u2014and eventually bringing the budget back into balance. Keyserling cited World War II. After all, the massive military buildup\u2014and resulting deficits\u2014needed to fight the Nazis hadn't wrecked America's economy. To the contrary, they had ended the Depression. And in the years since, continued economic growth had helped balance the budget again. Recent experience, in other words, showed that the U.S. economy wasn't fragile at all. It could bear, and even benefit from, far more government spending than policymakers had previously imagined. The only real limits were in America's leaders' minds. As former undersecretary of state Robert Lovett told a committee tasked with putting America's containment strategy into written form, \"there was practically nothing that the country could not do if it wanted to do it.\" His words might have served as an epigraph to the mounting hubris of the age.\n\nIn April 1950, that committee\u2014led by Kennan's successor as head of Policy Planning, Paul Nitze\u2014produced a sixty-six-page top-secret document called National Security Council Report 68, which declared that America could, and must, dramatically boost defense spending. NSC 68 was partly a product of Keyserling's economic optimism, an optimism nurtured by America's burgeoning postwar boom. By 1955, Keyserling predicted, gross national product would grow to almost $300 billion, meaning that even at dramatically higher levels, military spending would not rise significantly as a percentage of GNP. Gradually, the Depression-induced caution of the 1940s was melting away. Truman officials were coming to see economic limits as a thing of the past.\n\nIn 1950, with NSC 68 claiming that the United States could afford to spend far more on defense, and Korea apparently proving that we needed to, a flurry of supplemental financing boosted military spending to more than $48 billion, an astounding increase over the roughly $13 billion in Truman's initial budget. Containment, which Kennan had conceived as primarily a political strategy, was now an unmistakably military one. And if NSC 68 eviscerated containment's financial restraints, it eviscerated its geographic ones as well. The report's authors admitted that not every communist victory represented a threat to the United States, but they insisted that America oppose communism's advance everywhere anyway because no matter how strategically insignificant a country might be, its loss would prove psychologically damaging. The perception of weakness, NSC 68 argued, would breed \"doubt and recrimination,\" both among America's allies and within the United States itself. And with McCarthy becoming a national plague, no one needed to spell out just how debilitating that domestic \"recrimination\" could be.\n\nNSC 68 highlighted a concept that would sit near the core of American foreign policy during the toughness years: \"credibility,\" the belief that showing weakness in unimportant places would unnerve our allies and embolden the communists in important ones\u2014which meant that unimportant places were important after all. America's challenge, therefore, was not merely to be strong, but to appear strong\u2014too look \"credible\"\u2014both to others and to ourselves. And in the funhouse mirror that was McCarthy-era Washington, where mighty America looked perpetually weak, creating the perception of strength required expanding containment to the far reaches of the earth.\n\nBeneath the policy differences lay a deeper, philosophical difference between Kennan's version of containment and NSC 68's version. Kennan, like Lippmann, Morgenthau, and Niebuhr, believed that Wilson and the progressives had been na\u00efve about human nature: There was darkness in the soul that made reason an insufficient guide to world affairs. \"The fact of the matter,\" Kennan told students at the National War College, \"is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.\" But for Kennan, that last clause was crucial: Every one of us was capable of evil, Americans included. That's why, although he believed America must sometimes use force to limit the evil done by its enemies, he also insisted that it limit itself, because it could do evil, too. For Kennan, containment was a partial doctrine because anticommunism was a partial truth\u2014valuable in moderation, but prone, if stretched too far, to resemble the very fanaticism it was pitted against. NSC 68, by contrast, threw around words like evil, irrational, and fanatical liberally, but applied them only to the other side. Americans were uniformly described as moral, decent, and rational\u2014so moral, decent, and rational, in fact, that they could take virtually unrestrained action to combat communism without ever imperiling their souls.\n\nBut by 1950, Kennan did believe that frenzied anticommunism was imperiling the American soul. There was madness in the air. Kennan's old patron, James Forrestal, whom Truman had recently replaced as secretary of defense, began claiming he had been fired because Soviet agents wanted to silence his warnings about Moscow's impending all-out attack. He also brooded endlessly over a Washington columnist's claim that he had shown cowardice when thieves came to steal his wife's jewelry. Within weeks of his dismissal, Forrestal was refusing to leave his house, talking in hushed tones for fear he was being bugged, keeping the blinds permanently drawn to guard against snipers. Friends convinced him to check into Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he was treated with sedatives, tranquilizers, and shots of insulin.\n\nAt first Forrestal's health seemed to improve. But a few weeks into his stay, he rose from his hospital bed in the middle of the night and began copying passages from Sophocles' poem \"The Chorus from Ajax.\" The poem tells the story of the legendary Greek warrior Ajax, a man so confident in his martial skill that he spurns the goddess Athena when she offers her assistance on the battlefield of Troy. In retaliation for this and other acts of mortal hubris, she afflicts him with madness. Believing himself under attack by his enemies, Ajax pulls out his sword and slaughters his foes, only to find that he has murdered a herd of sheep. Shamed, he turns the sword on himself.\n\nAfter finishing his transcription, Forrestal put the sheets of paper on the table beside his bed and walked across the corridor to an adjacent kitchen. There he opened a window and jumped. He landed facedown with a thud, thirteen floors below.\n\nThere was another man, even closer to Kennan, who by the early 1950s was checking for hidden microphones when he entered a room. And he, tragically, had reason to. In the summer of 1951, the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security launched an investigation of John Paton Davies, charging that he had sabotaged Chiang, assisted Mao, and tried to infiltrate communists into the U.S. government. Kennan testified on Davies' behalf and even threatened to resign in protest. But given his opposition to global containment, Kennan was now a marginal, even suspect figure himself, and his protests had little effect. In 1953, Davies was removed from his post as assistant to the U.S. high commissioner in Germany and sent to stamp passports in Peru. When even that demotion didn't satiate McCarthy, the State Department launched yet another investigation into Davies' character, the ninth in five years\u2014and then fired him outright. Rather than return to the United States, Davies remained in Peru. For the next decade, the American government's foremost China expert lived at the foot of the Andes, sustaining his family by building furniture.\n\nIn one of his last Davies-inspired memos, written in August 1950, just months before his friend was consumed by McCarthyite attack, Kennan focused on a little-noticed consequence of NSC 68: the decision to send military advisers to battle a communist-led revolt in the obscure French colony of Vietnam. \"In Indochina, we are getting ourselves into the position of guaranteeing the French in an undertaking which neither they nor we, nor both of us together, can win,\" Kennan warned Acheson. But in a cover note he acknowledged that \"like many of my thoughts, [these] will be too remote from general thinking in the Government to be of much practical use to you.\" He was right: his memo received no response at all.\n\n## CHAPTER SIX\n\n## THE PROBLEM WITH MEN\n\nIn an age of hysteria, Dwight Eisenhower was the political equivalent of Valium. He tacked to the soothing center; he spoke in apple-pie platitudes; he practiced his chip shot in the Oval Office. As a result, critics often accused him of passivity. Behold the Eisenhower doll, they quipped: Wind it up and it does nothing for eight years.\n\nBut an ice cube dropped into boiling water expends tremendous energy, even if the resulting liquid is merely lukewarm. In reality, Ike was not passive at all. Behind closed doors, he worked strategically, forcefully, even ruthlessly, to hold the price of containment down, in both dollars and American lives. And because he succeeded so well, the hubris of toughness, which had swelled massively between 1946 and 1950, deflated somewhat during his eight years in office. It was only once he exited the political scene that a new generation of leaders\u2014emboldened by America's postwar success and lacking his hard-won knowledge of the limits of economic abundance and military might\u2014flew the wings of containment into the sun.\n\nWhen Eisenhower sought the presidency in 1952, some liberals feared that, because he had spent his life in the military, he might prove a warmonger. They could not have been more wrong. As a general, Ike had been the anti-MacArthur, a man known for his aw-shucks modesty, meticulous planning, and extreme caution. His mother was a pacifist, a philosophy he didn't share but never mocked. And his experience sending young men to their deaths bred in him an intimate hostility to war. Discussing dovish civilians in a letter to his brother in 1943, he wrote that \"I doubt whether any of these people, with their academic or dogmatic hatred of war, detest it as much as I do.... [They] probably have not seen bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying human flesh.\" As the commander of Allied forces in March 1945, with Churchill pressuring him to race to Berlin before the Soviets got there, Ike refused; he would not take large casualties for a prize of little military value. Seven years later, he lashed out at those who criticized his decision, declaring that \"none of these brave men of 1952 have yet offered to go out and pick the ten thousand American mothers whose sons would have made the sacrifice to capture a worthless objective.\"\n\nIf Ike learned wartime prudence the hard way, Americans in the early 1950s were learning it as well, in Korea. When the war began, only 14 percent of the public expected it to last more than a year. But by the time Eisenhower was elected, it had dragged on for thirty months, with no end in sight. For the last eighteen of those, little territory changed hands. It was World War I\u2013style trench warfare: endless artillery barrages, impenetrable defensive lines, ghoulish conditions, dead boys piling up in the snow. To hold Pork Chop Hill, a place of no particular significance except that the military brass wanted it held, one army company lost 121 of 135 men. By the fall of 1952, a plurality of Americans considered the war a mistake. And with more than one hundred thousand Americans dead, wounded, or missing, the McCarthyite illusion that global containment was easy\u2014that it required little more than cleansing Foggy Bottom of a few latter-day Benedict Arnolds\u2014had become the least lamentable casualty of war.\n\nEisenhower's chief opponent for the Republican presidential nomination, Robert Taft, had proposed following MacArthur's advice and doubling down in Korea: taking the fight to Mao in an effort to quickly win the war. And once Ike got the nomination, some in his party pressured him to follow suit. But Eisenhower knew enough about war\u2014and about MacArthur\u2014to suspect that escalation was folly. And he had seen enough as a candidate to realize that the American people wanted peace more than they wanted victory. His running mate, a young, red-baiting California senator named Richard Nixon, and his chief foreign policy adviser, the starchy, self-righteous John Foster Dulles, excoriated the Democrats for appeasement and pledged to roll back communism in Korea and across the globe. But Ike, for the most part, promised not to win the war, but to end it. In October, as a new round of fighting sent U.S. casualties above one thousand per week, he called the war a \"tragedy.\" American troops, he suggested, should cede much of the combat to South Koreans. And just eleven days before the election, in a nationally televised speech at Detroit's Masonic Temple, he promised that, if elected, he would go to Korea and make peace. \"For all practical purposes,\" declared a political writer for the Associated Press, \"the contest ended that night.\"\n\nWhen Eisenhower arrived in Seoul in late November 1952, he found the South Korean president Syngman Rhee and America's top military commander, Mark Clark, itching for a major offensive aimed at unifying the peninsula once and for all. But Eisenhower politely ignored them, wrapping himself in a thick jacket, thermal boots, and a fur hat and trudging out to inspect the situation firsthand. After interrogating front-line officers, eating with troops, and scouting the terrain from the air, he concluded that his intuition had been right: Militarily, unification was a pipe dream. Instead, he passed word to the Soviets and Chinese that, if a truce wasn't reached soon, he might expand the war, and perhaps even use nuclear weapons. Having stoked his adversaries' fears of war, he then moved aggressively to make peace. He was aided in this effort by Stalin's death, since it was Stalin\u2014more than Mao\u2014who had been keen to prolong the fighting. (After all, it was Chinese boys, not Russian ones, who were getting killed.) By summer, South Korean, North Korean, American and Chinese diplomats had negotiated an armistice, which left the border between North and South Korea almost exactly where it had been when the war began. Most Americans breathed a sigh of relief and vowed never to do anything like that again. For a time, Korea's bitter memory proved Ike's ally in keeping hubris in check\u2014until its chastening influence was gradually buried under a new wave of success.\n\nEisenhower's behavior in Korea set the tone: no more endless expenditures of money and blood. The first constraint was almost as important as the second. Nothing in Ike's experience growing up in hardscrabble nineteenth-century Kansas predisposed him to believe that money was infinite or debt a good thing. His economic views were shaped in an earlier, harsher era, when scarcity was the norm and free spending was a ticket to ruin. Since leaving the military, he had also become golfing buddies with a slew of prominent businessmen, who reinforced his antipathy to big government. Succeeding Truman, declared a congressman who shared Ike's economic views, was like \"taking over a hussy who had spent all her husband's money and run up a lot of bills at the local department store.\"\n\nAided by the armistice in Korea, Eisenhower slashed military spending from 13 percent of GDP in 1954 to barely 9 percent when he left office. If America's generals had assumed that having one of their own in the White House would be good for business, they were bitterly disappointed. During Ike's presidency, two army chiefs of staff resigned and a third, Maxwell Taylor, retired to write a book attacking Eisenhower's policies on national defense.\n\nIf Eisenhower refused to pay for containment, he also refused to fight for it with American troops. There would be no more Koreas on his watch. This posed a problem, because, like the authors of NSC 68, he insisted that containment be global. He still wanted to contain communism everywhere; he just wanted to do so cheaply and bloodlessly (or, at least, cheaply and bloodlessly for the United States). And in that effort, two methods proved particularly useful. The first was covert action. The CIA\u2014headed by John Foster Dulles's brother Allen\u2014was busy during the Eisenhower years. It toppled leaders in Iran and Guatemala; attempted coups in Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, and the Congo; and discussed putting radioactive dust in Fidel Castro's shoes to make his hair fall out and rob him of the virile image that supposedly kept Latin leaders in power. Containing communism via assassinations and coups usually proved disastrous for the targeted nations, and for their long-term relations with the United States. But financially, if not morally, it was cheap. And few Americans got killed.\n\nEisenhower's second major method of containment didn't get Americans killed, either, although it did scare some of them half to death. That method was nuclear weapons. During his presidency, Ike wielded nukes to scare the Soviets and Chinese into settling the Korean War, to deter Moscow from invading West Berlin, and, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum, to stop the Chinese from taking Quemoy and Matsu, islands that weren't even vital to Taiwan's defense, let alone America's. If Moscow stirs up trouble, Ike informed congressional leaders in late 1954, the United States will \"blow the hell out of them.\"\n\nEisenhower's discussion of the bomb\u2014which he said America would employ \"just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else\"\u2014was chillingly nonchalant. And critics depicted him as a genial, vaguely senile, grandfatherly figure, mouthing banalities and cutting ribbons while subordinates prepared to blow the world to kingdom come. But as with many things Ike-related, appearances were deceiving. Eisenhower wasn't actually cavalier about nuclear weapons at all. To the contrary, he had seen enough of war to know that once unleashed, it could rarely be controlled. And as a result, he feared that if conventional fighting broke out between the superpowers or their proxies it might end in mushroom clouds. (One reason he favored covert action was its deniability, which allowed each side to pull back and save face before things got out of hand.) And so, in an audacious gambit, he loudly declared that, if conventional warfare broke out, he would initiate what he most feared: nuclear war. In so doing, he hoped not only to disabuse the Soviets of the belief that they could keep small wars small, but also to disabuse those in his own government. By insisting that any superpower conflict would descend the slippery slope to Armageddon, he hoped to prevent both sides from taking the first step.\n\nSo while Eisenhower's nuclear rhetoric was terrifying, his behavior was generally cautious. In 1954, with French troops besieged in the remote Vietnamese garrison of Dien Bien Phu, and Paris facing defeat at the hands of the communist Vietminh, Ike's air force and navy chiefs of staff, along with Vice President Nixon, urged American air strikes. But Ike, convinced that air strikes now would lead to ground troops or worse later, refused. On Quemoy and Matsu, although he threatened nuclear war, he resisted calls to initiate it, even after China shelled the islands. And in July 1958, although he sent troops to seize the Beirut airport in a show of support for Lebanon's beleaguered pro-Western regime, he overruled the joint chiefs, who wanted to occupy the entire country. By October, U.S. forces were gone.\n\nIke held down global containment's cost. Unfortunately, he never challenged the concept itself. He still hewed to the idea\u2014enshrined in NSC 68\u2014that if the United States permitted communism's advance anywhere, it would damage American credibility, thus emboldening communists everywhere. This idea, which eviscerated Kennan's effort to make distinctions between different regions of the globe and to see U.S. interests as something other than a function of communist threats, remained part of Eisenhower's conceptual arsenal. It was still lying there when he left office for his less skilled successors to pick up, like an unexploded grenade.\n\nIn this sense, for all his savvy, Ike paved the way for the hubris that followed. Because he reduced America's military resources without reducing the interests they were supposed to defend, he made it easy for younger men to attack him as passive. That was unfair: Eisenhower's strategy was not passive; it was downright daring. And for eight years at the height of the superpower standoff, it prevented war. \"We kept the peace,\" he told a journalist. \"People ask how it happened\u2014by God, it didn't just happen.\" It was a remarkable achievement, but by the time Eisenhower left office, it no longer felt so remarkable. The Korean trauma was fading: Between the fall of 1952 and the fall of 1956 the percentage of Americans who considered the war a mistake fell by 15 points. Precisely because of Ike's success\u2014because the communists made few significant gains and America avoided war\u2014average Americans, and especially the foreign policy elite, came to believe that Korea had worked. It had been hard but necessary, a win. The conflict was being absorbed into the toughness catechism, the latest in a valiant litany of anti-Munichs that ran from Iran to Berlin to Greece. And increasingly a new generation of American leaders and thinkers was eager for more. They thirsted for new challenges\u2014challenges that required danger, sacrifice, and strain. Eisenhower, who had seen enough danger and sacrifice to appreciate their absence, never grasped this yearning. He knew war too well to romanticize it, and he had nothing to prove. But he now belonged to a passing age.\n\nIn 1960, Ike's final year in office, a young intellectual named Daniel Bell published a book called The End of Ideology, in which he argued, among other things, that young intellectuals like himself were bored. They were bored because in America there were no more political crusades. In the Wilson years, intellectuals like Dewey and Beard had thrilled to progressivism's vision of a harmonious, rational world. In the 1930s, writers had flocked to communism's equally heady vision of inexorable scientific progress. But by the '40s, America's leading intellectuals\u2014men like Niebuhr and the literary critic Lionel Trilling\u2014had buried those grand visions and embraced tragic realism, not just in foreign policy but as a perspective on life.\n\nIt was a weary creed, befitting people who, as Bell noted, had seen horrors that made them old before their time. By the 1950s, few American intellectuals still believed\u2014as had Dewey and the social gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch\u2014that if government provided the right kind of education it could unlock the reason and love lodged in ordinary people's souls. Far from valorizing the common man, the intellectuals of the '50s breathed a sigh of relief that ordinary Americans didn't expect very much from politics. America's shopkeepers didn't harbor fascist dreams of national purity; they tried to keep taxes low. America's labor leaders didn't march for revolution; they tried to get their members a better dental plan. If the progressives had yearned to transcend humanity's petty, selfish concerns, the postwar realists embraced them. In cold war America, argued Bell, politics was about the \"unheroic, day-to-day routine of living.\" After \"living dangerously in the exciting land of either-or,\" declared Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Americans had entered \"the unromantic realm of more-or-less.\"\n\nFor older intellectuals like Niebuhr, who had seen the catastrophe that political crusades could bring, this realism represented an intellectual life raft. But for many of the younger thinkers who followed, it was more like a straitjacket. Since World War II generally marked the beginning of their political consciousness, not the end, they tended to take America's postwar success for granted. With the exception of Korea (and even that became a happier story in retrospect), they had seen no costly overseas traumas. At home they had experienced almost ceaseless boom. Yet instead of contentment, many experienced what the sociologist David Riesman called the \"malaise of the privileged.\" There was something enervating about being told that 1950s America, with its private comfort and lack of public drama, was the best humanity could do. And the species of American that all this comfort produced\u2014the conformist, sheeplike \"Organization Man\" that William Whyte portrayed in his widely read 1956 book\u2014filled younger critics with disgust. \"The young intellectual is unhappy because the 'middle way' is for the middle-aged, not for him,\" wrote Bell. \"[There is] an underlying restlessness, a feeling of being cheated out of adventure, and a search for passion.\"\n\nAmong those who felt this restlessness was Schlesinger, a short, slight, balding, bespectacled, and bow-tied historian two years Bell's senior. Schlesinger was particularly worried about the impact that this lack of adventure was having on America's men. In 1958, in an essay for Esquire titled \"The Crisis of American Masculinity,\" he warned that women were on the march, \"an expanding, aggressive force, seizing new domains like a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive, are hardly able to hold their own and gratefully accept assignments from their new rulers.\" The signs of emasculation were everywhere: in the media's fascination with sex-change operations, in the rage for homosexuality, even in the movies. Why was it, Schlesinger asked, that Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy\u2014each well into his fifties\u2014kept playing romantic leads \"opposite girls young enough to be their daughters?\" Because none of the younger male stars looked man enough to pull it off.\n\nThe problem, he argued, stemmed from conformity and ease. Men drove in identical cars; worked in identical, air-conditioned offices; slept in identical, manicured suburbs. Nothing in their lives was unconventional; nothing involved danger. Postwar America had become homogenized, and it had gone soft. It no longer produced heroes; it produced drones. And a man without heroic dreams was not fully a man.\n\nSatire, Schlesinger suggested, might be one antidote to this cultural malaise. Inspiring art was another. And a third tonic was politics. If a leader confronted the nation's affairs in a sharp and daring way, pushing Americans beyond their comfort zone, demanding they meet epic challenges without hesitation or fear, he could create a space in which men might become heroes. He could make public life \"virile\" again. Although Schlesinger didn't say so, he had a candidate in mind: the junior senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.\n\nIt was an apt choice, since for Jack Kennedy, virility was virtually a philosophy of life. Like Theodore Roosevelt, who was in crucial ways his cultural and ideological ancestor, Kennedy's identity had been forged, in boyhood, by a struggle against physical weakness. Born asthmatic and with a deformed back, he spent much of his youth wheezing, on crutches, and wearing a brace. His mother described him as \"elfin\" his grandfather offered him a dollar for every pound he gained. At two, he came so close to dying of scarlet fever that his father, Joseph Sr., promised God that he would donate half his money to charity if the boy lived. (God fulfilled his side of the bargain; Joseph Sr., it appears, did not.) At age fourteen, Jack suffered an attack of appendicitis so severe that a priest administered last rites. \"At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth,\" said his younger brother Robert, \"were days of intense physical pain.\"\n\nIt was not an easy family in which to be frail. Jack's father, who had clawed his way to great wealth only to find himself snubbed by Boston Brahmins who would not accept an Irish Catholic at any price, loathed weakness. And Jack's older brother, Joe Jr., a bigger, stronger boy with a brutal streak, punished it. At night, younger siblings lay awake listening to Joe smashing Jack's head against the wall; one particularly nasty confrontation landed Jack in the hospital with twenty-eight stitches. \"Jack always had something to prove, physically,\" remarked his prep school friend Lem Billings, \"to overcompensate and prove he was fit when he really wasn't.\"\n\nIt was hardly a surprise, therefore, that Jack Kennedy filled his adolescence with trials signifying manhood. Despite his size, he played football at Harvard. He racked up sexual conquests, first with prostitutes procured by his father and later with women he met on his own. (This particular show of physical vigor had the paradoxical effect of saddling him with yet another malady: the clap.) And he went to war. Rejected in 1941 by the army because of his bad back, he used his father's connections to find a spot in the navy, and then used them again to transfer from desk work into command of a PT boat in the South Pacific, one of the most glamorous jobs at sea. In July 1943, near the Solomon Islands, a Japanese destroyer sliced his boat in half. Two of his men were killed instantly; the other eleven were tossed into the ocean. With most of the surrounding territory controlled by the Japanese, Kennedy led his surviving men on a five-hour swim through crocodile-and shark-infested waters to a tiny deserted island. He towed one badly burned sailor by clenching a life-jacket strap in his mouth. Avoiding Japanese patrols, and despite repeatedly falling unconscious from exhaustion, he then led them on a second swim to a larger island two and a half miles away, where they survived on coconuts and water. There they were discovered by two Pacific islanders in a canoe, to whom Kennedy gave a coconut shell on which he scribbled a plea for help. The story of PT-109 would become legend. As president, Kennedy kept the coconut shell in a case on his desk.\n\nHad Kennedy's quest to prove his manhood been a merely personal drama, it would hardly have mattered. But by World War II, his journey had taken on a distinctly ideological cast, one that mirrored the nation's as a whole. Joseph Sr., after all, was an appeaser. Like many in his generation, his views of foreign policy had been shaped by World War I, a war whose draft he had unapologetically dodged. Military service, he insisted, was a \"sucker's game.\" Like Herbert Hoover, he considered war an inexcusable distraction from the real purpose of world affairs: making money.\n\nIn December 1937, FDR rewarded Joseph Sr. for the vast sums he had donated to his presidential campaigns by naming him ambassador to the Court of St. James (a position Kennedy wanted largely so he could lord it over his WASP tormenters back home). Arriving in London as Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy was reaching its crescendo, Joe Sr. took an instant liking to the former Birmingham industrialist, a man who, like himself, valued commerce and loathed war. And he developed a sharp aversion to Chamberlain's rival, Winston Churchill, who struck Kennedy as not only militaristic, but perpetually drunk. When Chamberlain returned from Munich in September 1938, having purchased peace with Hitler at Czechoslovakia's expense, Joe Sr. called him the greatest statesmen of the age. A year later, with Hitler demanding part of Poland, Kennedy urged that London cede it to the Nazis as well. He even met secretly with the German ambassador, telling him that Britain lacked the stomach for war and accusing his own boss, Franklin Roosevelt, of succumbing to pressure from Jews.\n\nBy 1939, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., was a very controversial man. His declaration that \"democracy in England is finished\" and that fascism might prove a better alternative had evoked fury in both the British and American press, as had his prediction that if Britain did fight the Nazis, it would lose. The New Statesmen called him a \"frightened rich man who thinks only in terms of money.\" When war broke out, Fleet Street pointedly noted that Kennedy had followed British women and children to the countryside, where fewer bombs fell, rather than stay in London with the nation's men.\n\nNone of this was lost on his college-age sons, Joe Jr. and Jack, who in the late 1930s split their time between London and Harvard. Joe Jr. eagerly embraced his father's isolationist line. In 1938, when Walter Lippmann criticized one of the ambassador's speeches, Joe Jr. accused the columnist of exhibiting \"the natural Jewish reaction.\" The following year he toured civil war Spain, penning letters back home that championed the Fascist cause. Joe Sr., who thought becoming an author could boost a young man's career, hired an editor to turn his son's letters into a book. And when Joe Jr. returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1940, he helped found Harvard's Committee Against Military Intervention in Europe.\n\nBy 1940, however, with Paris under Nazi control and American opinion swinging hard against appeasement, publishers showed little appetite for a book praising Fascist Spain. Instead it was Jack who made his literary mark. In the fall of 1939, he had decided to write his Harvard thesis on British policy toward Hitler. Submitted in April 1940, \"Appeasement at Munich\" did not condemn Chamberlain's actions. To the contrary, it argued that he had faced little choice, since in a democracy like Britain's, public opinion naturally tended toward pacifism. Far from contradicting his father's view, Jack's paper subtly echoed it, implying that in a dangerous world, totalitarianism was the form of government most likely to survive.\n\nWhen Joe Sr. suggested that his younger son now seek publication, Jack jumped at the chance to turn his thesis into a book. But he still didn't envision it as a brief against appeasement, telling his father that \"I should like to get something in the conclusion about the best policy for America as learn't [sic] from a study of Britain's experience but of course don't want to take sides too much.\"\n\nWhen Jack sent the manuscript to New York Times columnist and family friend Arthur Krock, however, that ambivalence quickly disappeared. Krock urged Kennedy to shift the blame from British democracy to Chamberlain himself. And he urged him to come down clearly in favor of U.S. intervention, to use Britain's example to warn Americans of the perils of lethargy in the face of the Nazi threat. Krock even suggested a title. Churchill had recently named a collection of his anti-appeasement speeches While England Slept. Kennedy should play off it, calling his book Why England Slept.\n\nSo it was that in July 1940, with his father and older brother still sympathetic to fascism, hostile to Jews, and inclined toward appeasement, John F. Kennedy published an interventionist manifesto, which lionized Churchill and demanded that America institute a draft. Hitting shelves only weeks after Paris fell, Jack's book became an instant bestseller (it didn't hurt that Joe Sr. bought copies in bulk) and identified its author with arguments about the inescapability of evil, the danger of aggression, and the necessity of force that would define his generation. By war's end, Joe Jr. was dead, having volunteered for a near-suicide mission over Germany that some believe he took in a desperate bid to clear his and his father's names. Joe Sr., having resigned his ambassadorship, was a political pariah, a symbol of policies that many Americans now associated with cowardice, if not treason. Jack, by contrast, was a famed interventionist and a war hero. It would be excellent training for a cold war climate in which toughness, both ideological and personal, became a national obsession. Schlesinger was right: Jack Kennedy had a gift for the politics of manliness. His mastery of it helped propel him to the White House. And his fidelity to it helped propel America into Vietnam.\n\nWhat distinguished men like Kennedy and Schlesinger from their elders wasn't merely their fixation with Munich; it was their tendency to refract that experience through the lens of America's postwar success. As a result, they not only believed that communist expansion must be stopped (which Ike believed, too), but that America's capacity to stop it was nearly infinite (which Ike did not). For Kennedy and his supporters, in fact, it was precisely Eisenhower's unwillingness to confront communism with the full force of American ingenuity and might\u2014even though he had acknowledged the danger\u2014that made his presidency so dispiriting. The answer was to strip away Ike's self-imposed limits, to ask more of Americans, to get them fully into the game.\n\nHad Sputnik not arrived, America's restless young intellectuals might have needed to invent it. On October 4, 1957, from out of the sky, came evidence that while Americans were sitting fat and happy on the couch, the other side was racing ahead. Sputnik was a beeping, two-foot-wide, 184-pound aluminum sphere, the first man-made satellite in space, and it was the Soviets who had launched it, not the United States. Two months earlier, in another shock, Moscow had launched the first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Suddenly America seemed to be falling behind in everything from missiles to science labs to math teachers.\n\nPredictably, Ike greeted the furor with a yawn. When a committee led by Ford Foundation chairman H. Rowan Gaither used Sputnik to demand another round of NSC-68-style increases in defense spending, Eisenhower largely rejected the proposed buildup, blandly noting that it did not matter whether America had as many missiles as Moscow; we had enough to deter attack. (He also knew from secret U-2 spy planes that the Soviets had nowhere near as many ICBMs as panicked Americans assumed.) But this time, rather than tamping down national alarm, Eisenhower's low-key response inflamed it, further convincing his critics that he was lethargic and weak, the embodiment of what Schlesinger called \"the politics of fatigue.\" One prominent journalist compared Eisenhower to Stanley Baldwin, the appeasement-minded British prime minister who had preceded Chamberlain. \"Thank you, Mr. Sputnik,\" declared a commentator on the Mutual Broadcasting System. \"You gave us a shock which hit many people as hard as Pearl Harbor.... You woke us up out of a long sleep. You made us realize a...nation, like a man, can grow soft and complacent.\" It was time for Jack Kennedy to make his move.\n\nIn his 1960 presidential bid, Kennedy made the post-Sputnik \"missile gap\" the symbol of an America that, like Britain in the 1930s, lay asleep as threats gathered. His opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, was McCarthy in a better suit, a master at painting Democrats as pink. Running with Ike in 1952, he had labeled Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson a \"PhD grad of Dean Acheson's cowardly college of communist containment.\" But Kennedy was not Stevenson. In fact, he and his advisers saw the high-minded, self-consciously cerebral Illinois governor in much the same way Nixon did: as effete and soft. In Congress, Kennedy had joined McCarthy and Nixon in blasting Truman for losing China. Columnist Joseph Alsop dubbed Kennedy \"Stevenson with balls,\" and Jack relished the line.\n\nKennedy beat Nixon at his own game. Picking up Schlesinger's theme, he linked Nixon to the soft, materialistic ethos that had supposedly enfeebled the nation. Referring to Nixon's famous \"kitchen debate\" with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in a model house at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, Kennedy accused his opponent of having told the Soviet leader \"that while we might be behind in space, we were certainly ahead in color television.\" The vice president \"may be very experienced in kitchen debates,\" Kennedy jibed; \"so are a great many other married men I know.\" But \"I would rather take my television black and white and have the largest rockets in the world.\"\n\nThe virtues of a hard and strenuous life, and their importance to America's cold war struggle, were a central Kennedy theme. In December 1960, he penned an article for Sports Illustrated titled \"The Soft American,\" in which he pointed to a recent study revealing that young Americans trailed Europeans in tests of flexibility and strength and warned that \"our increasing lack of physical fitness is a menace to our security.\" In an era of \"pre-cooked meals and prefab\" houses, Kennedy wrote that same year, Americans were losing \"that old fashioned Spartan devotion.... We stick to the orthodox, to the easy way and the organization man.\" Some wondered, he told an audience at Rice University, why America must beat the Soviets to the moon. \"Why climb the highest mountain?\" he responded, \"[W]hy does Rice play Texas?...because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and abilities.\"\n\nKennedy's mania for personal and ideological toughness represented, in a sense, Theodore Roosevelt's final, posthumous victory over Woodrow Wilson. In 1917, when Wilson launched his crusade to tame world affairs, Roosevelt's dissenting view\u2014that seeing the world as a jungle would improve national character\u2014had been a minority strain. But during World War II, cousin Franklin had embraced much of TR's vision, even as he spoke Wilsonian words. And now JFK, in his obsession with vigor, was echoing TR with uncanny precision. Roosevelt had ordered that all U.S. Marines be able to march fifty miles in under twenty hours; when Kennedy learned of this, he renewed the order and publicly extended it to the members of his cabinet. Roosevelt encouraged reporters to cover him hunting and hiking but refused to let them watch him play tennis, which he considered effete. For his part, Kennedy encouraged journalists to report that he played touch football (so long as they explained that in the Kennedy clan, touch football was quite savage), but he avoided being photographed playing golf, which was Ike's soft, grandfatherly game. On one occasion, Jack even screamed at a New York Herald Tribune reporter who had revealed that the reason he campaigned without an overcoat in New Hampshire and Wisconsin in winter was not that he possessed the kind of frontier grit that made him impervious to cold, but, rather, that he wore thermal underwear.\n\nVigor, that quintessentially Kennedy word, connoted not only toughness but youth. And when Kennedy spoke in generational terms, which was often, he emphasized that while he and his contemporaries were idealistic, they were not innocent. They were, he noted in his inaugural address, \"tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.\" Unlike Wilson and the progressives, they knew that in the world, as in the heart, evil never died.\n\nThe Kennedy men, like the intellectuals and statesmen of the 1940s, saw themselves as coming of age in a world where innocence was no longer possible. (Kennedy's national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, titled a 1963 foreign policy essay \"From Innocence to Engagement.\") In that way, toughness was central to the self-conceptions of both groups. But what they meant by it was different. In the '40s, moral toughness had meant recognizing that the world was inescapably tragic yet could not be escaped. It meant lowering one's expectations about what reason could accomplish without succumbing to despair. The ethos was defensive: The world must be engaged not so the children of light could transform it in their image, but to ensure that the children of darkness did not, either. For Kennedy, Bundy, and Schlesinger in the early '60s, by contrast, toughness connoted something more aggressive, something more like a crusade. It meant demanding more of oneself and one's nation, paying any price, bearing any burden, meeting any hardship, and thus achieving the impossible. As Schlesinger wrote about the early days of the Kennedy administration, \"We thought for a moment that the world was plastic and the future unlimited.\"\n\nFor the older men, World War II was the last in a sequence of brutal blows. For the younger generation, it was the beginning of the nation's astonishing rise. In the '40s, toughness meant living with limits; by the '60s it meant transcending them. Kennan, Morgenthau, Lippmann, and Niebuhr were realists. The Kennedy men, by contrast, were what the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills called \"crackpot realists\" and David Halberstam called \"ultra-realists.\" They started with the reasonable insight that evil could never be eradicated and that the currency of world affairs would always be power\u2014and forgot that there were limits to these truths as well.\n\nThe men of Camelot were fond of comparing the 1950s to the '30s, with the implication that they too had come to power after a period of innocence, inaction, and mounting danger. Kennedy was obsessed with Churchill: He bestowed honorary American citizenship on the former British prime minister, claimed to have read all his books, and asked to hang one of his paintings in the White House. But Churchill and FDR had roused their nations for defensive action in a moment of genuine and frightening weakness. America in the '50s, on the other hand, was the opposite of weak. Even with Eisenhower's cuts, the NSC 68 buildup had left the Soviets\u2014with their much smaller and less efficient economy\u2014far behind. What the Kennedy men called appeasement was simply the cautious use of awesome strength. And what they called toughness in the face of aggression was something close to aggression itself.\n\n\"In the long history of the world,\" Kennedy declared in his inaugural address, \"only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility\u2014I welcome it.\" But 1961, unlike 1938, was not freedom's hour of maximum danger. And claiming that it was smacked of generational envy. The Kennedy men, who had found the '50s boring and vaguely effeminate, wanted epic challenges. That's why they took fifty-mile hikes; it's why they wanted to go to the moon; it's why Rice played Texas. They thought such struggles would have a salutary effect on the national character, and the cold war, of course, was the greatest struggle of all. But Churchill and FDR had not waged war against Hitler because they feared their people were succumbing to a life of ease. It was ease that their Depression-wearied people desperately wanted, but came to accept that they could not have. That was what made the wartime generation's struggle both tragic and heroic. Kennedy's, by contrast, was a blend of tragedy and farce.\n\n## CHAPTER SEVEN\n\n## SAVING SARKHAN\n\nIn 1958, a novel about American foreign policy stunned the publishing world. It sat on bestseller lists for seventy-eight weeks and sold almost five million copies. Hollywood turned it into a movie starring Marlon Brando. Critics compared its impact to Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle. By one estimate, it inspired twenty-one bills in Congress.\n\nThe novel was The Ugly American. It is set in the fictional Southeast Asian nation of Sarkhan, which American diplomats are trying to save from falling into communist hands. Unfortunately, most of the Americans in Sarkhan are \"fat,\" \"ignorant\" organization men, more interested in gossiping at embassy cocktail parties than wading through remote swamps to battle an elusive and deadly foe. Sarkhan's only hope lies with the different breed of American embodied by Tex Wolchek, a \"tall and muscular\" army paratrooper intimately familiar with writings of Mao Zedong, and Colonel Edwin Hillandale, a charismatic, harmonica-playing expert on Southeast Asian languages and cultures who understands that the key to winning hearts and minds in Sarkhan is understanding that the natives are obsessed with astrology and palm-reading.\n\nJohn F. Kennedy loved it. In 1959, he sent the novel to all his colleagues in the Senate. As president, he encouraged its co-author, William Lederer, to send him memos on counterinsurgency. He tried to appoint Major General Edward Lansdale\u2014the man on whom Hillandale was based\u2014as his ambassador to South Vietnam. When the State Department resisted, he made him an adviser on Cuba instead.\n\nWhat appealed to Kennedy about The Ugly American was not just its theme\u2014the intersection of personal toughness and anticommunism\u2014but its setting: the third world. In 1951, as a thirty-four-year-old congressman, he had traveled with his brother Robert and sister Pat for seven weeks through India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. He came back moved by the poverty he saw, and by the depth of nationalist passion in countries long bridled by colonialism. \"If one thing was bored into me as a result of my experience in the Middle as well as the Far East,\" he declared upon his return, \"it is that Communism cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms. The central core of our Middle Eastern policy is (or should be) not the export of arms or the show of armed might but the export of ideas, of techniques, and the rebirth of our traditional sympathy for and understanding of the desires of men to be free.\" Kennedy returned to this anti-imperialist theme repeatedly in his congressional career. In 1957, he gave a speech so critical of France's colonial war in Algeria that it elicited an angry visit from the French ambassador. But Kennedy stood his ground, keeping the ambassador waiting and purposely serving him an awful lunch.\n\nThe trip, and what he learned from it, spoke well of Kennedy. Like Eisenhower in 1952 trudging through the Korean snow, he had gone to see for himself. And in so doing he had partially freed himself from the intellectual shackles of global containment. At ground level, he had sensed the absurdity of trying to force Asia's left-wing, anticolonial movements onto Nazism's Procrustean bed. He had learned what Kennan learned in Moscow and Davies learned in Chongqing: that up close, a grand abstraction like \"communism\" explains far less than it appears to in Washington, D.C.\n\nBut Kennedy was also a child of Munich and McCarthyism. In his formative years, he had seen appeasement fail, containment succeed, and men destroyed for acknowledging that it couldn't succeed everywhere. So he tried to keep his heresies in check, to reconcile what he had seen in Asia with what his constituents read about in Sarkhan. In this regard, The Ugly American proved inspiring. Hillandale, after all, is no armchair anticommunist; he speaks the local language and cares about the local people. But all this knowledge and empathy is also a means to an end: crushing the communists. For Kennedy, Hillandale squared the circle between reality and ideology, between the need to understand and the need to be tough. Unfortunately, Hillandale wasn't a real person and Sarkhan wasn't a real place. Vietnam was.\n\nIn the late 1950s, with scores of Asian and African nations on the cusp of independence, JFK wasn't alone in his fascination with the developing world. It was widely assumed, among the restless toughness intellectuals, that their generation's greatest test\u2014their World War II\u2014would come in what Kennedy called, with a touch of romance, \"the lands of the rising people.\" Politics may have grown boring in the West, argued Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology, but \"the trajectory of enthusiasm has curved East, where, in the new ecstasies for economic utopia, the 'future' is all that counts.\" In economics and political science departments across the United States, modernization theorists began studying how to export capitalism to the poor world so the masses of Africa, Asia, and Latin America would see that Marxism was not the true path to prosperity. \"The Communist bid to win Asia by demonstrating rapid industrialization is already launched,\" announced one such theorist, an ambitious MIT professor named Walt Rostow, in 1957. \"It behooves the Free World and especially the United States to decide promptly whether it is to observe or participate in this struggle on which so much of our destiny hinges.\" Observing, of course, was what Ike did. Participating, shaping, mastering\u2014that was the Kennedy way. When he became president, Kennedy made Rostow his deputy national security advisor.\n\nAs if to underscore Rostow's point, two weeks before Kennedy took office, Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech pledging Soviet support for \"wars of liberation\" across the third world. Kennedy opened his first National Security Council meeting by quoting the Soviet premier's words. The speech, he told a journalist, was \"Khrushchev's Mein Kampf. He tells us what he's going to do.\" It was as if the Soviet leader had sounded an opening bell.\n\nAmerica's diplomatic corps and its regular army, Kennedy feared, were too slow, timid, and dumb for this epic contest; he needed Hillandales. He established mandatory counterinsurgency classes at the army war colleges and the State Department. High-level diplomats were summoned to a special \"Interdepartmental Seminar\" taught by Lansdale, Rostow, and others, where they read Mao and Che Guevara. Kennedy himself wrote the introduction to a book on counterinsurgency. And even volunteers for the newly created Peace Corps, whose work digging wells and building schools across the third world initially struck Kennedy as a bit soft, were imbued with the Hillandale spirit. Recruits were sent to jungle boot camps, where they awoke at 5 A.M. for calisthenics and a day of obstacle courses and grueling runs. At one Peace Corps camp in Puerto Rico, young do-gooders were taught to rappel down the face of a dam, and thrown, hands and feet bound, into a river to learn how not to drown.\n\nKennedy approved, but his real favorites\u2014the men whom the Peace Corps civilians were trying to imitate\u2014were the Special Forces. Fluent in obscure languages, familiar with the work of both Mao and Rostow, able to descend deep into the jungle for weeks at a time with neither food nor maps, they terrorized the regular army in mock battles. Generals would awake in the morning to find their bedsheets scrawled with the words \"You are dead,\" and stickers notifying them that their jeeps had been blown up. Kennedy upped the Special Forces' budget fivefold and personally selected their equipment, which included sneakers with steel soles to protect against jungle booby traps. They were the only members of the U.S. military permitted to wear berets. In October 1961, Kennedy took the White House press corps on a field trip to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Special Forces troops staged ambushes and ate snake meat. Skydivers jumped from planes; frogmen swam from submarines. One soldier hoisted a rocket on his back, zoomed over a lake, and landed at the proud president's feet.\n\nFor Kennedy, the first round in this new cold war struggle came in Cuba, where on January 8, 1959, a thirty-two-year-old ex-pitcher named Fidel Castro\u2014having turned to revolution after failing to make the Pittsburgh Pirates\u2014had marched his guerrilla army into Havana, overthrowing the American-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Initially, Castro's anti-imperialist rhetoric elicited Kennedy's sympathy. But when the Cuban leader's leftist proclivities became clear, that sympathy quickly dissipated. The NSC 68 rules\u2014that America must stop any new scrap of territory from being painted red (especially one within spitting distance of Miami)\u2014had been transgressed. And Kennedy, who had spent the campaign promising that in the fight against third-world communism he would get America off the couch and into the game, could not sit idly by.\n\nThe CIA, as it happened, had a plan to set things right. Buoyed by its success overthrowing leftists in Iran and Guatemala, the Agency had won Ike's permission to organize something similar in Cuba. Soon after Kennedy's inauguration, CIA deputy director Richard Bissell informed him that the Agency was training anti-Castro exiles in Guatemala for an invasion of Cuba's southern coast. Bissell and his boss, CIA director Allen Dulles, claimed that Castro's support was soft, both among the Cuban public and within the Cuban military. (The Agency's own Cuba analysts disagreed, but were ignored.) If Kennedy moved quickly, Dulles and Bissell promised, he could spark an uprising that, at worst, would enmesh Castro in a civil war. If he did nothing, by contrast, Moscow would help Castro consolidate control and foment Marxist revolution across the Americas.\n\nThe proposal pitted Kennedy's anti-imperialist instincts against his anticommunist ones. He was eager to launch the Alliance for Progress, an aid program aimed at putting the United States on the side of nationalist aspiration in the Americas, and he feared that invading Cuba would sabotage that effort. But while he had misgivings about the operation, he believed in the CIA. Smart, unconventional, tough\u2014they were his kind of people. He particularly liked Bissell, a forceful, brainy alumnus of Groton and Yale who at a well-lubricated, late-night CIA dinner at Washington's Alibi Club had delighted the president by declaring himself a \"man-eating shark.\" Bissell might not be Hillandale, but he reminded Kennedy of another favorite fictional character, James Bond, whose daring, elegance, anticommunism, and cost-free sexual promiscuity offered the president an idealized image of himself. (At a Georgetown dinner in 1960, Kennedy had asked Bond's creator, the British spy novelist Ian Fleming, how to handle Castro. Fleming suggested spreading rumors that Castro was impotent, which faintly echoed reality, since Schlesinger dubbed the CIA's invasion plan \"Operation Castration.\")\n\nSchlesinger, to his credit, opposed the Cuba operation, as did some in the State Department; they feared the public relations fallout and didn't understand the rush. But Kennedy looked down on the bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom; they were organization men, cautious, unimaginative, and slow. \"They're not queer at State,\" he told a friend, \"but, well, they're sort of like Adlai [Stevenson]...[I]f I need material fast or an idea fast, CIA is the place I have to go.\" The difference between Eisenhower's foreign policy and Kennedy's, Rostow had explained, would be \"a shift from defensive reaction to initiative.\" Now Kennedy had to choose between an audacious scheme run by an elite band or a policy of paper-pushing and wait-and-see. It was no contest.\n\nThe irony was that it would have required greater bureaucratic initiative, and greater political courage (a very different thing than cold war machismo), to rein containment in, as Eisenhower had done at Dien Bien Phu. But Kennedy was in a more vulnerable position than Ike: He didn't have his predecessor's experience running large, treacherous bureaucracies, and he didn't have the word General in front of his name. Near the end of a briefing on the invasion plan, Bissell looked at him and said, \"Don't forget one thing.... If we take these men out of Guatemala, we will have to transfer them to the United States, and we can't have them wandering around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.\" The subtext was clear: Once Republicans learned that Kennedy had quashed a plan to overthrow Castro, a plan Eisenhower had put into motion, he would face a firestorm on his right. (And the CIA, angry that its operation had been scrapped, and led by the brother of Ike's secretary of state, would discreetly fan the flames.) Dropping the invasion, Kennedy aide Kenny O'Donnell later explained, would have made the president look like an \"appeaser of Castro.\"\n\nThat fear haunted Kennedy's advisers as well. At the State Department, Undersecretary Chester Bowles warned that the department's Latin America experts put the invasion's chance of success at only one in three, and he urged his boss, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to try to dissuade Kennedy. But Rusk had spent his entire life ensuring that he was never caught on the wrong side of the appeasement charge. So poor as a child that he sometimes attended school without shoes, and so patriotic that he enlisted in ROTC not at the beginning of college, but at the beginning of high school, he had\u2014rather miraculously\u2014become a Rhodes scholar. And as a result, he had been in the audience in 1933 when the fashionable aristocrats of the Oxford Union declared that if war came to Europe again they would not fight for King and Country. It was an act that Rusk never forgot nor forgave. As Truman's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, he had urged going north of the 38th parallel and helped organize the first American military aid to Vietnam. As a result, during the height of the red scare, he had come out of the Asia bureau unscathed, even as experts like John Paton Davies were destroyed. The reason was that Rusk wasn't really an Asia expert at all; he was a Munich expert.\n\nRusk's whole life, in other words, had taught him not to do what Bowles was urging. Privately, he did fear that the invasion was ill conceived. But he kept those worries to himself. And so did almost everyone else. \"Nobody in the White House wanted to be soft,\" one aide later recalled. \"Everybody wanted to show they were just as daring and bold as everybody else.\"\n\nSo Kennedy told the CIA to go ahead with the plan, so long as it kept America's fingerprints off it\u2014wishful thinking, given that news of the exile training program had already shown up in the New York Times. On the evening of Saturday, April 14, fifteen hundred Cuban exiles loaded onto five freighters at a secret U.S. base in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, bound for Cuba's southern coast. It would be, the historian Theodore Draper later wrote, \"one of those rare events in history\u2014a perfect failure.\" Castro, who knew an invasion was in the works, had arrested many of the people who might have supported one. And even if he hadn't, few Cubans were interested in joining an exile force composed of loyalists from the old regime. To make matters worse, the area the CIA had chosen for the exiles' landing, the Bay of Pigs, was a Castro stronghold, a place he often went to fish.\n\nA preparatory strike aimed at disabling Cuba's small air force failed, so Castro's pilots sunk the boats carrying most of the exiles' ammunition and communications equipment before they even reached the shore. Once they did, the Cuban army was there in force to greet them. Bissell had assured Kennedy that even in the worst case scenario, the exiles could disappear into the nearby Escambray Mountains and launch a guerrilla war from there. But he had neglected to mention that between the beaches and the hills lay eighty miles of swamp.\n\nFor a day and a half, the rebels radioed frantically to their CIA trainers for air support. And in turn, the CIA and the military beseeched the president. But Kennedy\u2014frightened of the international condemnation an all-out U.S. attack would bring\u2014refused. He had, he was beginning to realize, been set up. Dulles and Bissell had never really believed that the Cubans could defeat Castro alone. They had simply wanted to get him on the hook. Once the fighting began, they assumed, he would have no choice but to invade.\n\nThat is certainly what the exiles believed. \"Do not see any friendly air cover as you promised. Need jet support immediately,\" wired their commander at 1:45 P.M. on Tuesday, with his men facing imprisonment or death. And then, after his final plea was denied, this message: \"And you, sir, are a son of a bitch.\" Back in Washington, Kennedy was sitting alone in his bedroom, in tears.\n\nThe Bay of Pigs had a paradoxical impact on Kennedy. Privately, he grew more wary of military action. He now understood the reason for the habitual optimism of the Joint Chiefs and the CIA: If things went awry, they would simply push him to escalate. He fired Dulles and Bissell and began relying more heavily on longtime aides, especially his brother Bobby. But publicly, he kept these anxieties to himself. Precisely because, like Truman on China, he had halted U.S. intervention before it cost significant American lives, he had not forced the foreign policy elite to acknowledge the limits of American power. Hawks could still say, as they did in 1949, that with airpower, military advisers, and guts, America could contain communism everywhere at modest cost.\n\nHerein lay the tragedy of the toughness ethic: Even when presidents realized that global containment was impossible, they feared saying so publicly, and as a result, they perpetuated the political dynamic that held them captive. \"Defeats\" like Mao's takeover in China and the Bay of Pigs did not slow the climb up the ladder toward hubris, because politically they were processed not as battles America had lost but as battles America had chosen not to win. Since World War II, the only thing that had deflated the growing myth of American omnipotence and omniscience was agony, the agony of all those frostbitten American boys suffering and dying in Korea. But by 1961, that memory no longer stung.\n\nSo while Kennedy was privately chastened by the Cuban disaster, his political problem, as he perceived it, was not that he had been too much of a hawk, but too much of a dove. Within hours of the invasion's collapse, Bobby was demanding that the White House take steps to ensure that his brother did not look like a \"paper tiger.\" Two days later, JFK himself warned that \"our restraint is not inexhaustible,\" thus reassuring Americans that although he had quashed an all-out invasion, he might not be so sane the next time. Dulles and Bissell were replaced by men as hard-line as themselves. And the only other official to lose his job over the debacle was none other than Chester Bowles. At the White House, his warnings were seen not as evidence of good judgment but as confirmation of what everyone already suspected: that he was soft. Rusk, by contrast, soldiered on.\n\nIf Cuba was the first round, the second came in a country most Americans had never even heard of: the tiny, sleepy, landlocked nation of Laos. In early 1961, Vietnam was still an afterthought. (When he gave Kennedy a post-election foreign policy briefing, Eisenhower never even brought it up.) It was Laos, in Ike's words, that constituted the \"cork in the bottle\" in Southeast Asia. If it fell to communism, it might take the whole region down with it.\n\nBut for a country of such grave geopolitical import, the civil war in Laos had a distinctly Potemkin feel. The State Department wrote the speeches of the Laotian king. The Royal Lao Army, whose entire budget came from the Pentagon and CIA, showed little interest in fighting. Sometimes it canceled military maneuvers to pick flowers or swim. On one occasion, government and rebel troops skipped a planned battle and together participated in a local water festival. \"My people,\" the king explained apologetically, \"only know how to sing and make love.\" As a \"military ally,\" quipped Kennedy's ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, \"the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I.\"\n\nDespite these realities, or perhaps because of them, Rostow and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to flood Laos with U.S. troops. When Kennedy asked Joint Chiefs chairman Lyman Lemnitzer for a backup plan in case the troops failed to stamp out communism, Lemnitzer exclaimed, \"You start using atomic weapons!\"\n\nKennedy was not going to be sent down a rabbit hole again. Instead he asked his European allies for advice. British prime minister Harold Macmillan and French president Charles de Gaulle suggested that he try cutting a deal with the Soviets. Moscow, it turned out, didn't particularly relish a communist victory in Laos, either, since the rebels were mostly allied with Beijing. So, in May 1961, U.S. Ambassador at Large Averell Harriman and Soviet foreign affairs minister Andrei Gromyko began negotiations that culminated in an agreement guaranteeing Laos's cold war neutrality; it could have military alliances with neither east nor west. With that, Laos quickly fell out of the news, returning to what Galbraith called \"the obscurity that it richly deserves.\"\n\nOnce again Kennedy had acted wisely. And once again wisdom was politically perilous. Rostow was appalled by Kennedy's show of weakness. \"The cease-fire in Laos came as a cold war defeat for the U.S.,\" declared Henry Luce's Time magazine. Because Kennedy could not say publicly what Kennan had\u2014that a country like Laos did America little good as an ally and little harm as a foe\u2014his good judgment there actually made it harder to show the same good judgment elsewhere. He was still climbing up the hubris ladder. Khrushchev, he told an aide, \"must not misunderstand Laos and Cuba as an indication that the United States is in a yielding mood.\"\n\nUnfortunately, that is exactly what Khrushchev seemed to believe. In June, Kennedy went to meet the Soviet premier in Vienna. Confident that he could win over fellow politicians with his intelligence and charm, Kennedy hoped to convince his Russian counterpart to avoid aggressive moves, especially in the third world. But if Kennedy wielded power like a stiletto, Khrushchev wielded it like a club. So uneducated that he could barely sign his name, Khrushchev had a primitive understanding of American politics. (He assumed that since New York governor Nelson Rockefeller hailed from a family of famous capitalists, he must be the real power in Washington.) Already inclined to suspect that a young, inexperienced man like Kennedy was too weak to control the plutocrats who really ran American foreign policy, Khrushchev had felt his suspicions vindicated by the Bay of Pigs. By bullying the young leader, he hoped to win concessions, especially on Germany, which he cared about most.\n\nSo every time Kennedy said something gracious, Khrushchev said something brutal. Hour after hour, the Soviet leader lectured, hectored, and belittled, taking every Kennedy courtesy as an invitation for another verbal assault. Kennedy, who had expected a parlor discussion, found himself\u2014unprepared\u2014in a barroom brawl. And if the insults and bravado weren't enough, Khrushchev closed the summit with a threat: He would shut off the West's access to Berlin, the divided city located deep inside communist East Germany. If the United States resisted, there would be war.\n\nIn reality, Khrushchev's bluster stemmed more from weakness than strength. East Germany, the most economically advanced of the Soviet client states, supposedly a shining model of socialist development, was being slowly depopulated. In the summer of 1961 alone, more than twenty thousand East Berliners fled to the capitalist West, where per capita income was more than twice as high and consumers didn't have to wait two years to buy a refrigerator. If he did nothing, the Soviet leader feared, East Germany might collapse, thus creating the ultimate Russian nightmare: another unified, militarized Germany, this time backed by the United States. But the Munich paradigm predisposed America's leaders to see the Kremlin as strong, not weak, as zealously seeking new conquests rather than nervously trying to hold on to what it already had. And so for Kennedy, the obvious explanation for Khrushchev's belligerence was that after Cuba and Laos, the Soviet leader thought he was soft.\n\nAfter their final meeting, Kennedy slumped on a couch in a darkened hotel room, a hat pulled over his eyes. \"He savaged me,\" he told James Reston of the New York Times, who had scored an exclusive interview. \"He thinks because of the Bay of Pigs that I'm inexperienced...thinks I'm stupid. Maybe most important, he thinks that I had no guts.\" Reston thought the president was in shock. In London the next day, en route back to the United States, an emotional Kennedy told the hawkish columnist Joseph Alsop, \"I just want you to know, Joe, I don't care what happens. I won't give way. I won't give up, and I'll do whatever's necessary. I will never back down, never, never, never.\" Back in Washington, Rostow was composing a memo to the president. The spring and summer of 1961, he wrote, were analogous to 1942, when the Allies suffered setback after setback. But just as Churchill and Roosevelt had turned the tide, so would they. The place to start was Vietnam.\n\nKennedy had some experience with Vietnam. He had gone there in 1951, as part of his trek with Bobby and Pat across Asia. And he had found a country at war. France, which had lost its Southeast Asian colonies to Japan during World War II, had managed to regain them afterward, thus boosting its war-wounded pride. But French control was more apparent than real. Under Japanese occupation, Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh had developed into a powerful force, and for a brief period after Tokyo's defeat even governed the country. When Paris tried to reassert colonial rule, Ho's troops launched a guerrilla war. By the time Kennedy arrived, they controlled two-thirds of the countryside. With France buckling under the war's economic strain, the United States\u2014which saw the conflict less as an anticolonial struggle than as an anticommunist one\u2014was increasingly paying the bills.\n\nFrench colonialism left a poor impression on the young congressman. He found French officials obstinate and crudely racist, far inferior, from his Anglophile perspective, to their British counterparts in India, who had granted independence before the real ugliness began. In keeping with his generally anticolonial bent, Kennedy in 1953 introduced Senate legislation conditioning U.S. aid for the French effort on Paris's willingness to grant its Southeast Asian colonies independence. Unless Vietnam developed a sovereign, anticommunist \"native army\" free from French control, he insisted, Indochina was lost.\n\nThen, in 1954, one seemed to magically materialize. Rocked by their devastating loss to the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu, the French agreed to grant Vietnam independence. But to deny Ho the full fruits of victory, Vietnam was to be temporarily partitioned. North of the 17th parallel, where the Vietminh enjoyed overwhelming control, would be a communist state. But in the South, where the French enjoyed greater influence, a pro-Western government would be established. In 1956, internationally supervised elections would unite the country once again.\n\nFor the young John Kennedy, Vietnam's partition was an intellectual trap. He badly wanted to believe that America could fight Vietnamese communism without becoming colonialism's heir. And on paper, the newly independent nation of South Vietnam enabled him to believe exactly that. It had an army, a flag, and a devoutly Catholic, avowedly anticommunist leader named Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy liked what he saw and in 1956 helped found the American Friends of Vietnam. South Vietnam, he declared, summoning all his best cold war metaphors, \"represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.\"\n\nBut it was a mirage: There was no South Vietnam. The Vietminh, by far the most powerful force in the country, had only accepted temporary partition because they were promised elections to reunify the entire nation, elections they (and everyone else) assumed Ho would win. South Vietnam, by contrast, was led by men who had either sat out their country's anti-imperial struggle or opposed it. In Washington, their titles and crisply pressed uniforms appeared impressive. But back home they were just the same colonial flunkies serving a new foreign master. \"Like water turning into ice,\" David Halberstam would later write, \"the illusion crystallized and became a reality, not because that which existed in South Vietnam was real, but because it became real in powerful men's minds.\" And John F. Kennedy, who should have known better, was one of them.\n\nIn the fall of 1961, with the Kennedy administration hungry for a win after Cuba, Laos, and Vienna, Vietnam forced its way onto the White House agenda. Two years earlier, having abandoned hope that national elections would ever be held, and after watching Diem ruthlessly suppress Vietminh supporters in the South, Ho's government in Hanoi began aiding the Vietcong, a southern insurgency dedicated to reunifying the country by force. The southern countryside soon erupted in violence, and Diem responded by forcing peasants from their guerrilla-infested villages, which alienated them further. By September 1961, the Vietcong were launching ever more brazen attacks, even briefly seizing a provincial capital fifty-five miles from the southern capital, Saigon. Alarmed, the Joint Chiefs proposed dispatching a large contingent of U.S. troops. But Kennedy distrusted their advice. So he dispatched Rostow and his special military advisor, General Maxwell Taylor, to travel to South Vietnam to investigate.\n\nThe choice of fact-finders predetermined the facts they found. If Kennedy, Rusk, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy thought victory in Vietnam was important, Rostow went further: He believed it was virtually preordained by history itself. Rostow, the son of left-wing Jewish immigrants who in homage to their adopted land had named their three sons Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo, and Eugene Victor (for Socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs), was socially insecure; colleagues in Cambridge and Washington often thought he was trying just a little too hard to fit in. (This was easy for people who graduated from Groton to say about someone who graduated from New Haven's Hillhouse High.) But what Rostow lacked in social self-confidence he more than made up for in intellectual self-confidence. He had entered Yale at fifteen, had won a Rhodes scholarship four years later, and by twenty-nine had become the youngest person ever offered a full professorship at Harvard. In his masterwork, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, he set out to disprove Marx. The great philosopher was correct to see history as moving inexorably in one direction, Rostow conceded, but he had gotten the direction wrong. It was actually moving toward American-style capitalism. For older intellectuals like Niebuhr, accepting that capitalist America was the best humanity could do had been a sobering, even tragic realization, since it fell so far short of their earlier utopian dreams. But for Rostow, America was utopia. We had solved the big problems\u2014we had reached the end of ideology\u2014and our answers were universal. Since American society was \"now within sight of solutions to the range of issues which have dominated its political life since 1865,\" explained Rostow, domestic policy was \"becoming a bore.\" But helping third-world countries stuck far down on history's ladder was exciting as hell. Like Walter Lippmann and John Dewey in 1917, Rostow believed that he had cracked history's code, which made him serenely confident that\u2014with his guidance\u2014America could win in Vietnam.\n\nRostow's approach to foreign policy was the mirror image of Kennan's. Kennan had started with an intimate knowledge of a particular country at a particular time and then crafted a theory around it. Rostow, by contrast, started with a theory that was applicable always and everywhere and then grafted it onto a specific time and place. As a result, he was better at seeing forests than trees. Returning once from a trip to Latin America, he astonished colleagues by declaring that the key to understanding Hispanics was to realize that they were really Asians. \"Oh, for God's sake, Walt,\" someone replied, \"why are you talking about something you know nothing about?\"\n\nMaxwell Taylor also had too much invested in South Vietnam to see it for what it really was (or was not). Even by Kennedy administration standards, he cut an imposing figure. Movie-star handsome, he spoke French, Spanish, Chinese, German, and Japanese, and was given to quoting Thucydides in the original Greek. The New York Times called him a cross \"between Virgil and Clausewitz.\" During World War II, he had sneaked behind enemy lines to scout out locations for a potential American attack. Since the war, he had run the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and then, in a dazzling cultural shift, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.\n\nHe had come to Kennedy's attention after leaving the Eisenhower administration and then slamming its overdependence on nuclear weapons, in a book called The Uncertain Trumpet. Ike had threatened nuclear war because he believed that small wars, once unleashed, could not be effectively controlled. But Taylor believed they could: The Uncertain Trumpet was a primer on how to fight them, and win. \"We can trigger near total destruction,\" declared its book jacket. \"But can we defend Berlin-South Korea-Vietnam-Iran-Thailand-America?\" Now Taylor was Kennedy's Special Military Advisor, and his job as he saw it was to answer that question yes.\n\nIn their report, Rostow and Taylor conceded that South Vietnam was suffering a \"deep and pervasive crisis of confidence.\" But rather than linking that crisis to the artificiality of the state itself, they attributed it to the Vietcong's recent gains and to America's neutrality deal in Laos. The implication was clear: Kennedy's soft line in Laos had destabilized the region, and only a hard line next door could stanch the bleeding. Rostow and Taylor recommended sending eight thousand U.S. combat troops. Officially, their mission would be to help repair the devastation from a recent flood in the Mekong Delta. But in reality they would be there to buck up the South Vietnamese and scare the North into stopping the war.\n\nKennedy hesitated. He suspected that if he sent the troops and the North's aggression did not cease, he would soon face pressure to send more. \"It's like taking a drink,\" he told Schlesinger. \"The effect wears off, and you have to take another.\" But he was determined to hold South Vietnam. It had become, said Bundy, \"a sort of touchstone of our will.\" So as he had on Cuba, Kennedy split the difference, refusing to send combat troops but substantially boosting the number of U.S. advisers and the amount of aid. As a model, he cited Truman's aid to Greece, which had halted communism's advance with U.S. money but without U.S. soldiers. It was a bad analogy: Greece was a real country; South Vietnam was not. But it was one of a number of comforting analogies that the Kennedy administration had inherited from almost two decades of foreign policy success. And neither Rostow nor Taylor nor Kennedy himself knew enough about Vietnam to grasp how poorly it applied.\n\nBy 1962, Kennedy was growing more confident. On Berlin, Khrushchev had backed down, abandoning his threat to block Western access to the city, and instead building a wall halfway through it, to keep the East Germans in. And if Kennedy's Berlin victory helped erase the humiliation at Vienna, he soon won an even bigger victory, which helped erase the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs.\n\nThat aborted invasion hadn't spelled the end of U.S. efforts to topple Castro. Kennedy, who had himself attacked Nixon for \"losing\" Cuba to the communists, knew that if it stayed lost he could be vulnerable, too. So in late 1961 he put Edward Lansdale, of Ugly American fame, in charge of a secret effort to overthrow the Cuban leader. The effort was dubbed Operation Mongoose, since Lansdale, who owned two of the catlike carnivores, insisted that they excelled at killing dangerous snakes.\n\nOnce again Castro was a step ahead. He asked the Soviets for help deterring another U.S. attack, and Khrushchev, angry that America had installed nuclear missiles near his border in Turkey (and worried that Castro might shift his allegiance to Beijing), decided to return the favor by putting nukes near America's shores. At first, evidence of the missile deployments in Cuba was murky, and Kennedy downplayed the rumored buildup. But as the summer of 1962 turned to fall, his GOP opponents\u2014led by New York Senator Kenneth Keating\u2014seized on the rumors and denounced the White House as weak for standing idly by. Then, at 8:45 A.M. on Tuesday, October 16, McGeorge Bundy walked into the president's bedroom and handed the bathrobe-clad commander in chief photos proving that the buildup was real. \"Ken Keating,\" Kennedy muttered, \"will probably be the next President of the United States.\"\n\nAt first Kennedy was not sure why the Cuban missiles posed such a grave threat. (\"What difference does it make?\" he mused. \"They've got enough to blow us up now anyway.\") But when he met with his advisers, a consensus quickly formed that the missiles were intolerable. Whether or not they actually threatened America, Kennedy later explained, they \"would have appeared to, and appearances contribute to reality.\" Whether this hoary old chestnut, enshrined by NSC 68, was really true\u2014whether concessions in one part of the world really did embolden the communists elsewhere\u2014was far from obvious. (In fact, a mountain of political science literature would later cast doubt on the claim.) But to men who had seen Hitler exploit every British and French concession, it made intuitive sense. And besides, even if weakness didn't embolden the communists; it would certainly embolden the GOP. Allowing Castro not merely to survive but to obtain missiles able to incinerate much of America, Bobby declared, would get his brother impeached.\n\nSeveral advisers proposed a sneak attack while America still enjoyed the element of surprise. But Kennedy, rightly terrified that an attack might spark World War III, decided to start with an embargo instead. \"The 1930s taught us a clear lesson,\" he told the nation on Monday, October 22: \"aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.\" The embargo worked. Ships carrying Soviet arms were met before reaching Cuba by American vessels (including a 2,200-ton destroyer named for Joe Kennedy, Jr.), and rather than risk Armageddon, the Soviet ships turned around. But on the island, construction continued. For all Kennedy knew, the Soviets already had everything they needed to install and arm the missiles, even if another ship never got through.\n\nBy Sunday, October 28, the Kennedy administration was thinking seriously again about air strikes, to be launched before dawn on Tuesday morning. White House officials were handed envelopes marked \"To Be Opened in Emergency,\" which explained that in the event of nuclear war they would be ferried by helicopter to shelters in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. (Each official was allowed to save one secretary.) Privately, Kennedy put the chance of war at \"somewhere between one and three and even.\" Then, that morning, Khrushchev cut a deal, agreeing to dismantle the missiles in return for a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba and a secret pledge to withdraw the missiles in Turkey.\n\nOn the surface, the outcome confirmed the toughness paradigm. \"If we have learned anything from this experience,\" declared the minutes of an October 29 National Security Council meeting, \"it is that weakness, even only apparent weakness, invites Soviet transgression. At the same time, firmness in the last analysis will force the Soviets to back away from rash initiatives.\" As many of Kennedy's advisers saw it, the missile crisis was his equivalent of Truman's aid to Greece or the airlift in Berlin, his very own anti-Munich. And like Truman, he reaped the rewards. By the end of October, Kennedy's approval rating was eleven points higher than it had been in August, when Republicans were slamming him as weak. That fall, Democrats broke the historic pattern for a president's first midterm elections and gained seats in the Senate.\n\nBut Kennedy knew\u2014even more vividly than before\u2014that the toughness ethic that he publicly upheld was at odds with reality. In truth, it wasn't only Khrushchev who had blinked. By promising not to invade Cuba and to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey, Kennedy had made two key concessions of his own. He just hadn't forthrightly explained them to the American people. Soon after the crisis, Kennedy brought in Schlesinger, who served as the White House's court historian, and told him that commentators were drawing dangerous conclusions from the missile crisis. Khrushchev, the president insisted, had backed down partly because the United States had met him halfway and partly because he didn't consider the Cuban nukes crucial to Soviet survival. \"It was because of these factors that our policy worked,\" wrote Schlesinger in his notes, \"not just because we were tough.... He [Kennedy] worried that people would take the wrong lessons away from the crisis.\"\n\nHad he known the truth, which was that Castro furiously opposed Khrushchev's concession because he believed the nukes were crucial to his survival, Kennedy might have taken his private heresies even further. It was one thing to expect Moscow to back down in showdowns far from home. It was another to expect indigenous communist movements to do so when they were fighting on their own soil. A generation earlier, Kennan had insisted on exactly this distinction\u2014between Soviet interests and the interests of local communist movements\u2014but by the early 1960s he had been in intellectual exile for a decade. And so when Kennedy began venturing, tentatively, away from the logic of global containment, he found few influential guides and few well-lit conceptual paths. When it came to the cold war, his top advisers, for all their surface brilliance, were intellectually conventional and timid. And they knew very little about the third world. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in fact, was already thinking about how to apply the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis\u2014which were, of course, the same old lessons of Munich\u2014to another place where he believed communist aggression needed a firm American reply: Vietnam.\n\nConditions there were going from bad to worse. The new American aid, which Kennedy dispatched after the Rostow-Taylor mission, was supposed to come with strings. U.S. officials were unhappy with Diem, a short, squat man who liked to hear himself talk\u2014he could answer a single question with an hour-long reply\u2014and couldn't be bothered to listen. His government either neglected or abused South Vietnam's rural villagers, the overwhelming bulk of the population. He closed down newspapers and sent political opponents to \"reeducation centers.\" And his main criterion for choosing political advisers was blood. At one point the president's three brothers comprised half the South Vietnamese cabinet.\n\nBut when American officials tried to pressure Diem to make reforms, he either ignored them or flew into a rage, and Washington\u2014unable to credibly threaten to abandon Saigon\u2014backed down. Rather than grow more representative, Diem's regime grew more insular, with power increasingly confined to the president; his drug-addict brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu; and his poisonous wife, Madame Nhu, popularly nicknamed the Dragon Lady. Censorship increased, and the regime began requiring official permission for all public gatherings, including weddings and funerals.\n\nSoon this repression blew up in the government's face. On May 8, 1963, in violation of government orders, revelers in the city of Hue flew religious flags in a mass celebration of the Buddha's birth. Diem's troops responded by firing into the crowd, killing two adults and six children. In an overwhelmingly Buddhist country ruled by a small, repressive Catholic clique, that was like throwing a lit match on dry grass. Buddhist priests launched hunger strikes and mass protests. Then, on June 11, as cameras rolled, an elderly monk burned himself alive.\n\nMadame Nhu called the immolation a \"barbecue\" and offered gasoline and matches to anyone who wanted to follow suit. For his part, Diem sent troops to arrest monks by the thousands and ransack their pagodas. He had declared war on the most revered figures in Vietnamese society, and soon, in Halberstam's words, \"a form of madness seemed to take over in Saigon.\" University students walked out of their classes in protest, followed by high school students, and then elementary school students. Back in Washington, Kennedy's whiz-kid advisers strained to understand the crisis. They kept referring to the leader of the Buddhist rebellion as Mr. Bonze, not realizing that bonze was not his actual name; it was the Vietnamese word for \"monk.\"\n\nIn August, South Vietnamese generals asked U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., grandson of the man who had battled Woodrow Wilson over the League, whether Washington would oppose a coup. At first the Kennedy administration was noncommittal. But spooked by rumors that Diem was secretly negotiating a deal with Hanoi to reunify Vietnam and expel the Americans, the White House eventually encouraged the plotters. That even America's handpicked ally was prepared to liquidate South Vietnam should have been a sign that it was not the place to draw an anticommunist line in the sand. But instead, Diem's overtures helped convince U.S. officials that he needed to go.\n\nIn the early afternoon of November 1, renegade troops occupied military bases and communications centers across Saigon and demanded that Diem resign. Within hours they had virtually encircled the government palace. By morning, Diem and his brother had fled through a secret underground tunnel and taken refuge in a Catholic church in the district of Cholon. There they gave confession and took communion before making a deal with the coup leaders for safe passage out of the country. But the deal didn't hold. After being picked up by an armored personnel carrier, they were shot and hacked to death by rebel troops, their bodies deposited in an unmarked grave. Informed of the news during a White House meeting, Kennedy turned pale and fled silently from the room.\n\nBy 1963, John F. Kennedy had become a mildly seditious man. The missile crisis had shaken him, and his apparent victory over Khrushchev had made him less vulnerable to attack from his right. In May, he asked a few White House aides to begin drafting what they called \"the peace speech,\" and not to show it to anyone in Rusk's State Department or McNamara's Pentagon until the last minute.\n\nOn June 10, Kennedy took the podium on commencement day at American University, and gently challenged some of the key assumptions that had governed U.S. foreign policy since NSC 68. First, he described the U.S.S.R. less as bloodthirsty and aggressive than as haunted and afraid. \"No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War,\" he declared. \"A third of the nation's territory, including two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland.\" This was a far cry from equating the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany in 1938. Kennedy was finally describing Soviet leaders as Kennan had\u2014as leaders of a particular country, guided in large measure by their own historical experiences\u2014rather than as mere vessels for a demonic ideology. Yes, Kennedy acknowledged, Soviet communism sometimes appeared crazed and frightening, but Americans should take care \"not to fall into the same trap...not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side.\" Anticommunism, in other words, was only a partial truth; toughness could be taken too far. It may have been only a coincidence, but in the months before the speech, Kennedy had grown close to a new member of the National Security Council staff, thirty-five-year-old Michael Forrestal, whose father's own distorted and desperate anticommunism had taken his life fourteen years before.\n\nIn August, Kennedy and Khrushchev signed a treaty partially banning nuclear tests; it was the first arms control deal of the cold war. And while some Republicans denounced the treaty as appeasement, it easily passed the Senate. When Kennedy mentioned the agreement on a western tour in late September, in fact, he was surprised to find that it elicited loud applause, even in Billings, Montana, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Perhaps the country was changing; perhaps ordinary Americans were no longer stuck in 1950. Perhaps after a big win in 1964, Kennedy might voice even greater heresies.\n\nPerhaps America didn't need to be in Vietnam. \"If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected,\" Kennedy told Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. \"We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam,\" he insisted to his old friend Charlie Bartlett over drinks. \"Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the Communists and then get the American people to reelect me.\"\n\nWas this just talk? It was Kennedy's gift, and perhaps also his curse, to see better than his advisers that toughness had become a conceptual prison. But he was smarter than he was brave. Forced to choose between the risk of losing in Vietnam and the risk of really trying to win, his first choice, as it had been all along, was not to choose. In September, he once again suggested that they send Lansdale to Saigon; maybe he could square the circle. A few weeks later, as the president's motorcade approached the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, he was shot and killed. The nation grieved, and the hubris of toughness continued to swell.\n\n## CHAPTER EIGHT\n\n## THINGS ARE IN THE SADDLE\n\nJohn F. Kennedy, said French president Charles de Gaulle, was America's mask. Lyndon Johnson was its face. With Kennedy, power was rarely crude. He hid it with elegance, irony, wit. Throughout his political career, he had left the unsightly work to others. Joe Sr. handled the bribes; Bobby leveled the threats. Jack was seldom in the room.\n\nRaw politics\u2014horse-trading, patronage, intimidation\u2014bored and embarrassed him. His grandfathers had played that game on the ghetto streets of Irish Boston. He had been sent to Choate and Harvard to transcend it. And although he had seen more combat than advisers like Bundy, McNamara, and Rostow, he was squeamish about raw force as well. When he thought of those Cuban exiles lying dead on the beach, or of Diem's mutilated body, he became almost physically ill. The icon was Bond: force veiled by style. The bad guys were dispatched in dramatic fashion, but you never actually saw them die.\n\nWith Lyndon Johnson, by contrast, power was naked, corporeal, animal. \"You really felt as if a St. Bernard had licked your face for an hour, had pawed you all over,\" commented the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee. \"He never just shook hands with you. One hand was shaking your hand; the other hand was always someplace else, exploring you, examining you.\" As a twenty-three-year-old congressional assistant, Johnson began his lifelong habit of demanding that subordinates accompany him not only into the bathroom, but into the stall. By the time he reached the Senate, he was urinating openly in his office washbasin during meetings. In mixed company, sometimes he pulled down his pants to scratch his rear end. Fellow members of Congress described encountering him in bathrooms and watching with discomfort as he shook his penis in their direction while commenting on its size. In the words of Robert Caro, \"None of the body parts customarily referred to as private were private when the parts were Lyndon Johnson's.\"\n\nUnlike Kennedy, he had never had the luxury of being above the fray. Lacking money and family connections, he had early on developed an ability to make men serve his interests through sheer force of will. With those more powerful than himself, he employed brazen, epic flattery. With those less powerful, he relied on humiliation. Kennedy outcompeted the people around him; Johnson emasculated them. He would brutalize an aide, berate him in public, reduce him to a whimpering wreck, and then turn around and give him a car or some other lavish gift. As president, he threatened cabinet members that if they resigned he would sic the FBI and IRS on them. Kennedy did not enjoy seeing men abase themselves; it made him uncomfortable. For Johnson, by contrast, it was the beginning of a good working relationship. \"How loyal is that man?\" he asked a White House aide about a potential hire. \"Well, he seems quite loyal, Mr. President,\" the aide replied. To which Johnson erupted, \"I don't want loyalty. I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.\"\n\nThere was nothing subtle about the way Lyndon Johnson practiced the politics of toughness. He saw doves as little boys or, worse, as women. Informed that one official was growing squeamish about Vietnam, he shot back, \"Hell, he has to squat to piss.\" Munich, of course, was at the heart of it. \"Lyndon's ideas were set in concrete by World War II,\" wrote a former Senate colleague after he became president. \"Every big action he takes will be determined primarily on the basis [of] wether [sic] he thinks any other action will look like a Munich appeasement.\" In the summer of 1941, he had been a thirty-two-year-old congressmen, deputized by FDR, and by his mentor, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, to make sure that legislation instituting a military draft passed. In a country still unreconciled to war, resistance had been fierce. One congressional aide said that \"in forty years on the Hill he had never seen such fear of a bill.\" When the tally hit 203\u2013202 in favor, Rayburn halted the voting, in blatant violation of House rules. For his young prot\u00e9g\u00e9, the spectacle was not disturbing; it was inspiring. This was how real men wielded power, how evil was countered, and how democracy survived.\n\nIn the late 1940s, the lessons Johnson learned in the anti-Nazi struggle transferred seamlessly to the cold war. \"We have fought two world wars because of our failure to take a position in time,\" he declared in 1947, in endorsing Truman's aid to Turkey and Greece. \"We must apply to Dictator Stalin the same doctrine that we applied to the Kaiser and to Hitler.\" In anticommunism, Johnson's instincts and his interests aligned. As military budgets skyrocketed, defense became a big industry, especially in Texas. And Johnson, who secured a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee just in time to support the NSC 68 buildup, became the industry's champion, and its beneficiary.\n\nIf historical analogy and home-state pork weren't reason enough to back global containment, there was, of course, political fear. Like Kennedy, Johnson saw McCarthyism from both ends: as hunter and prey. In 1948, he shamelessly linked his Democratic Senate opponent, Coke Stevenson, to labor unions allegedly under communist control. But soon after winning, he watched his support for Truman become a frightening liability in a state going wild for MacArthur. Johnson never fully got over the McCarthy years. As president, he sometimes told younger aides that they didn't know what it was like, didn't realize the value Congress placed on Asia, didn't understand the hell that would break loose if a Democrat let the communists paint another Asian ally red. That fear lodged deep within him, where it merged with terrors of an even more visceral sort. \"Every night when I fell asleep,\" he told a biographer about his years as president, \"I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: 'Coward! Traitor! Weakling.' They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up...terribly shaken.\"\n\nTaking the helm of an anguished nation in late November 1963, Johnson decided that the best way to win its affection was to be more faithful to Kennedy's legacy than Kennedy would have been himself. He tried to retain Kennedy's foreign policy team, since they represented continuity. (Insecure around all those eggheads, he nonetheless tried to create a little camaraderie. A few weeks after the assassination, he invited several staffers to join him for a swim in the White House pool: naked, of course. But one egghead was so nervous that he dove in without taking off his glasses. And they spent much of the rest of the time trying to recover them.) The key Kennedy holdovers\u2014Bundy, McNamara, Rusk\u2014assured LBJ that continuity meant holding South Vietnam. It was the awful irony of the Kennedy-Johnson succession. In his final months, Kennedy had sensed that the path he was following in Vietnam was leading to disaster. (Whether he would have gotten off it is another question.) But Johnson insisted on following that path, at least initially, because it had been Jack's.\n\nFor most of 1964, Johnson tried to keep Vietnam out of the newspapers. He told the eggheads to manage the problem quietly so he could focus on winning the presidential election that fall\u2014the election that would make him a real president, not just a surrogate. But subtly, American policy was beginning to shift. Kennedy's decision to send advisers in 1961 had been meant to deter the North from supporting the Vietcong. His 1963 decision to ditch Diem had been meant to create a government in the South capable of rallying the country. By 1964, however, both efforts had failed. Diem's overthrow produced not a legitimate government, but virtually no government, as a dizzying array of factions jockeyed for control. In January, a group of young officers led by General Nguyen Khanh took control. But Saigon remained consumed by demonstrations, strikes, and rumors of additional coups. Khanh took up residence in a houseboat on the Saigon River in case he needed to make a fast getaway. Meanwhile, the South Vietnamese public was becoming increasingly anti-American and increasingly pro-reunification, and the flow of weapons and fighters heading south from Hanoi grew and grew.\n\nWatching with mounting frustration, the Johnson administration decided to make the North pay for its meddling. The real problem, of course, was the South, where the government and indeed the entire state enjoyed little popular allegiance. But the Munich and Korea analogies distorted Washington's view, inclining U.S. officials to see Vietnam as yet another case of cross-border aggression. And no one knew how to solve the South's internal problems anyway. So in a classic example of policymakers having a hammer and deciding that their problem was a nail, Johnson's advisers decided to take the fight to Hanoi.\n\nIt was this decision that led, in the summer of 1964, to something called OPLAN 34A: South Vietnamese commando raids against North Vietnam. On August 2, soon after one of those raids, the destroyer U.S.S. Maddox journeyed north of the border to conduct electronic espionage off the North Vietnamese coast, in a place called the Tonkin Gulf. Perhaps thinking that the Maddox had been part of the commando raids, North Vietnamese torpedo boats opened fire, and after a brief skirmish, were warded off. Johnson was furious. Moscow and Beijing think \"we're yellow and don't mean what we say,\" he told an aide. So he ordered the Maddox back into North Vietnamese waters, where on the night of August 4, sixty miles off the coast, it and another ship, the Turner Joy, radioed that they were under attack. In response, Johnson ordered air strikes against North Vietnamese ships and oil storage facilities. More important, he asked Congress for a resolution authorizing him to take \"all necessary measures to repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States.\"\n\nIt was a blank check for war. (Johnson compared the resolution to \"grandma's nightshirt...it covered everything.\") Yet Congress quickly complied. Presidential power had grown massively in the quarter century since Franklin Roosevelt repealed the Neutrality Acts. Truman had waged war in Korea without asking Congress first. In 1955, Ike had demanded\u2014and received\u2014authority for military action over Quemoy and Matsu. Kennedy had kept Congress in the dark about the Bay of Pigs. For many in the bipartisan foreign policy elite born under FDR, the lesson of the 1930s was that average Americans were too parochial to respond proactively to foreign threats. And the lesson of the McCarthyite 1950s was that Congress was filled with wild men who, if allowed too much oversight of the executive branch, would wreak havoc with their demagogic crusades. Occasionally lying to Congress and the public, in other words, was part of protecting the country. And who could argue with the results? As the \"imperial presidency\" grew, so did American prosperity and power. Sometimes, it seemed, the American people and their representatives in Congress didn't even want to know all the things being done to keep them safe. In 1958, according to a University of Michigan study, 71 percent of Americans trusted their leaders to do the right thing all or most of the time. As late as 1966, asked why Congress didn't more carefully scrutinize the activities of the CIA, Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall explained that there was \"information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a Member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have.\"\n\nLyndon Johnson, who had been manipulating other officeholders since he stole the student council elections at Southwest Texas State Teachers' College, lustily embraced this tradition of \"benign\" duplicity. (\"How do you know when Lyndon Johnson is telling the truth?\" went a joke of the time. \"When he strokes his chin, pulls his earlobe, he's telling the truth. When he begins to move his lips, you know he's lying.\") Administration officials never mentioned the South Vietnamese raids that had preceded the August 2 attack, thus leaving the impression that it was entirely unprovoked. And they never mentioned their suspicions that the August 4 attack had not actually occurred at all. The Senate debated the Tonkin Gulf Resolution for less than ten hours, during which the chamber was mostly empty; then passed it, 88\u20132. The House took forty minutes, and its vote was unanimous.\n\nFor Johnson, it was a masterstroke. He invoked the now-familiar litany, comparing his actions in the Tonkin Gulf to Truman's in Greece, Turkey, and Berlin, and to Kennedy's in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And as it had for them, toughness paid political dividends, with the crisis boosting his popularity thirty points almost overnight. His Republican presidential opponent, Barry Goldwater, a man who seemed altogether too comfortable contemplating nuclear war, was marginalized on the far right. And having kept both the communists and the Republicans at bay, and with a big lead in the polls, Johnson seemed to have the country in the palm of his hand. \"I never had it so good,\" he exclaimed at a rally in Detroit, where he was endorsed by both auto titan Henry Ford and the head of the United Auto Workers, Walter Reuther. It was the perfect end-of-ideology image: the inclusive, centrist leader flanked by the enlightened capitalist and the anti-revolutionary worker. \"The times were good now,\" wrote Halberstam about that fall of 1964, \"and there were better ones, golden ones, ahead.\"\n\nThe country was booming: Unemployment was 4.5 percent; inflation was almost nonexistent; there hadn't been a recession in nearly five years. Militarily, Johnson declared, the United States was stronger \"than at any other time in our peacetime history.\" African-Americans, having watched Johnson muscle through the Civil Rights Act, seemed grateful. (\"Those Negroes,\" LBJ declared, \"cling to my hands like I was Jesus Christ.\") A cover story in Time commented on the wholesome, deferential quality of America's youth, noting that \"the classic conflict between parents and children is letting up.\" The country appeared almost devoid of worry. Its capacity to achieve seemed limited only by its capacity to dream\u2014and in Lyndon Johnson it had a president who dreamed big. \"I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do,\" he boomed. \"Hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all.\"\n\nHis election victory was massive: 61 percent, the largest in American history. In the Senate, Democrats now claimed sixty-eight seats. In his inaugural address, Johnson called America a nation of \"miracles\" and announced that he would do FDR one better: He would end poverty for good. Aides thought he had his eye on Mount Rushmore, or higher. \"I understand you were born in a log cabin,\" commented West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard on a visit to the LBJ Ranch. \"No, Mr. Chancellor,\" Johnson replied. \"You have me confused with Abe Lincoln. I was born in a manger.\"\n\nJohnson was on top of the world, and to stay there all he had to do was defeat one \"raggedy-assed little fourth-rate country.\" In November, administration officials drew up bombing plans aimed\u2014depending on whom you asked\u2014at either reducing Hanoi's support for the Vietcong, halting it altogether, or buoying morale in the South. But Johnson hesitated. It was his war now, and although less attuned than Kennedy to the power of anti-imperial aspiration, he knew enough to know that Vietnam was a bad place to pick a fight. \"What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?\" he screamed at McGeorge Bundy. \"I don't think it's worth fighting for.\" Standing on the precipice, like Agamemnon before the purple robe, he paused, even trembled, searching for a way to avoid the fateful step. But a trembling man can still commit hubris. Johnson raged against the prison of his own assumptions\u2014assumptions both about America's enemies and about America's people\u2014but they imprisoned him nonetheless. \"If you start running from the Communists they just chase you right into the kitchen,\" he told Bundy, moments after declaring that Vietnam was not worth fighting for. And then, in a conversation the same day with his old Senate mentor, Richard Russell: \"They'd impeach a President who'd run out, wouldn't they?\"\n\nSeeking an alternative to both escalation and defeat, or perhaps just seeking to delay the reckoning, Johnson sent Bundy to South Vietnam to investigate. But Bundy was as much a prisoner of the toughness ethic as he. A legend at Yale, where he had arrived as the first student in school history with three perfect scores on his college entrance exams, Bundy in 1940 had broken with the prevailing isolationism on campus. Just weeks after Jack Kennedy published Why England Slept, he had issued his own interventionist manifesto in a book of student essays titled Zero Hour: Summons to the Free. When he returned to academia after the war as a preternaturally young government professor at Harvard, his Munich lecture became famous; students crowded into the lecture hall to hear his voice crack as he described the betrayal of little Czechoslovakia. \"It is certainly a peculiar statistical coincidence,\" remarked Bundy's brother William, who himself served as Johnson's assistant secretary of state for the Far East, \"that of the decision-making group [on Vietnam], Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, my brother, Walt Rostow, myself, all of those of us who were of age in 1940\u201341 were interventionists in the isolationist-interventionist debate.\" In making Bundy his envoy, Johnson was sending yet another American who knew too much about Central Europe in 1940 and too little about South Vietnam in 1965.\n\nDuring Bundy's trip, the Vietcong attacked a U.S. Army barracks in the town of Pleiku, killing eight and wounding 126. Within hours, Bundy sent word back to Washington: The bombing must begin immediately; America must stand firm. The next day, Johnson spoke from the East Room of the White House in his best Kennedyese: \"We love peace,\" he declared. \"We shall do all we can in order to preserve it for ourselves and all mankind. But we love liberty the more and we shall take up any challenge, we shall answer any threat. We shall pay any price to make certain that freedom shall not perish from this earth.\" Letting South Vietnam go communist was now the equivalent of letting freedom perish from the earth. And in this climate of rhetorical absurdity, in which America's leaders could not distinguish marginal threats from mortal ones, the air war against North Vietnam began.\n\nEleven years earlier, when the leaders of the navy and air force proposed air strikes to save the French at Dien Bien Phu, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway had warned them not to be na\u00efve: The air strikes would fail, and American ground troops would surely follow. Back then, Korea was still an open wound; Lyndon Johnson himself had counseled caution. By 1965, however, the only caution that Korea induced was tactical: If America went to war again in Asia, it must not draw China in. Memories of Korea had brightened over the intervening decade. Polls showed that almost two-thirds of Americans now considered the war worthwhile, close to twice the number in 1952. Korea was no longer considered a bloody stalemate; it was considered a win. In 1954, having fought one world war and one large regional war in less than a decade, the public was tired. But by 1965, success had made Americans malleable. They weren't crying out for war in Vietnam, but where their leaders pointed, they dutifully followed. It had worked so far.\n\nSo the bombing commenced and ground troops quickly followed. In late February, General William Westmoreland, head of the Military Assistance Command in Saigon, requested two battalions\u2014roughly 3,500 troops\u2014to protect the U.S. air base at Da Nang. To fight an air war, after all, you needed ground troops to guard the planes.\n\nBy March, it was clear the bombing wasn't working. (The CIA's own reports had predicted it would not work, but Johnson rarely read even the summaries.) In South Vietnam, which had just endured yet another coup, morale was as low as ever, and the North was gearing up for a major new offensive. Westmoreland now requested two entire army divisions, not merely to guard bases but to fight the enemy on the ground. Johnson agreed to send forty thousand, but limited their mission: They were only to fight in \"enclaves\" within fifty miles of a U.S. base. And they would stay only long enough for the South Vietnamese to build up their forces and for the bombing to take its toll. Johnson still believed he was standing on the precipice, that he could pull back whenever he wanted. But it was an illusion; he was already over the edge.\n\nThings were moving quickly now. By summer, the South Vietnamese army was visibly crumbling; desertion rates among draftees approached 50 percent. The North was no longer just sending supplies and advisers to the Vietcong; it was sending full regiments, who decimated the South Vietnamese in battle. Westmoreland asked for 150,000 troops and more intense bombing. Bundy, McNamara, and Rusk all concurred.\n\nBut one top official, Undersecretary of State George Ball, began to furiously resist. He was a bit older than Bundy, McNamara, and Rostow, and he wasn't awed by them. For all their supposed brilliance, they struck him as parochial. Unlike them, he knew the French experience in Vietnam well, having been the French government's attorney in the United States for much of the 1950s. While other administration officials invoked America's history in World War II, Greece, Berlin, Korea, and Cuba, the familiar histories of toughness and triumph, only Ball talked about France's history in Vietnam, a history of defeat. French president Charles de Gaulle, Ball noted, believed America would suffer the same agony in Vietnam as his country had. And that view was shared by most of America's European and Asian allies, as well as by the United Nations itself, which had endorsed the war in Korea but refused to endorse the war in Vietnam. Urged to heed the warnings of America's allies, Johnson replied, according to notes, \"that he did not pay the foreigners at the UN to advise him on foreign policy, but that he did pay [Dean] Rusk.\"\n\nAs spring turned to summer in 1965, four graying intellectuals echoed Ball's fears: Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hans Morgenthau, the very men who had done so much to define the toughness creed a generation before. In February, Lippmann called the administration's escalation \"supreme folly. While the war hawks would rejoice when it began, the people would weep before it ended.\" Johnson and Bundy responded by repeatedly inviting Lippmann to the White House, where they lathered him with flattery and tried to deceive him into thinking they shared his views. But Lippmann\u2014who had been schmoozing with presidents for half a century\u2014was neither dazzled nor intimidated, and kept pounding away in print. So the White House decided to play rough. Two teams of administration aides launched the \"Lippmann Project,\" an investigation of everything he had written since the 1920s, aimed at exposing him as a fool. Johnson began telling anyone who would listen that Lippmann, now in his late seventies, was cowardly or senile or both. The campaign took a toll: Some of Lippmann's longtime friends began to snub him; government officials stopped answering his calls. But the old man did not buckle. \"The root of [Johnson's] troubles has been his pride, a stubborn refusal to recognize the country's limitations or his own,\" wrote Lippmann in one particularly acid column. \"Such pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall.\"\n\n\"I am dreadfully worried about what our people are doing in Southeast Asia,\" George Kennan confided to a friend in March. He tried to speak to Bundy but got nowhere. Finally he agreed to testify before the Senate. \"I think that no episode, perhaps, in modern history has been more misleading than that of the Munich conference,\" he declared. \"It has given to many people the idea that never must one attempt to make any sort of political accommodation in any circumstances. This is, of course, a fatally unfortunate conclusion.\"\n\n\"The policy of restraining Asian communism by sheer military might is fantastic,\" added Reinhold Niebuhr in September. When Hubert Humphrey journeyed to New York to give the keynote address at a dinner in his honor, the seventy-three-year-old theologian was appalled to find the vice president \"claiming my anti-Nazi stance of the thirties [as justification] for the present war.\"\n\nIn May, Hans Morgenthau took the stage at the first National Teach-In against the war. Yes, he conceded, South Vietnam would likely go communist if U.S. forces withdrew. But to claim, as the Johnson administration did, that it would therefore become a client of Beijing was just plain ignorant, given the historic animosity between the two nations. (In fact, communist Vietnam would go to war with communist China four years after the United States withdrew.) In June, Morgenthau accepted a CBS News invitation to debate Bundy on the war. But the younger man out-maneuvered him, selectively quoting from Morgenthau's articles to make it appear as if the aging professor were contradicting himself. Lacking Bundy's debating skills, or his instinct for the jugular, Morgenthau left the exchange embittered, later admitting to a friend that he felt a \"general discouragement, sometimes bordering on despair.\"\n\nOutside government, the Daedaluses of the toughness ethic\u2014the men who had helped craft the conceptual wings that Johnson was now flying into the sun\u2014saw disaster ahead. And inside the government, George Ball saw it, too. On June 18, 1965, he sent Johnson a memo that began with a poem by Emerson:\n\nThe horseman serves the horse,\n\nThe neat-herd serves the neat,\n\nThe merchant serves the purse,\n\nThe eater serves his meat;\n\n'Tis the day of the chattel,\n\nWeb to weave, and corn to grind,\n\nThings are in the saddle,\n\nAnd ride mankind.\n\nThings\u2014or as the Greeks would have put it, gods\u2014were in the saddle, not men. Vietnam was not a place that the United States, for all its might, could control. America's leaders needed to lower their sights, appreciate their limits, husband their strength, maybe even save their souls. None of the men who mattered agreed, or even really understood. And Lyndon Johnson sent another hundred thousand troops to South Vietnam.\n\n## CHAPTER NINE\n\n## LIBERATION\n\nUnderstanding how the hubris of toughness fell\u2014and what replaced it\u2014requires a half step back in time.\n\nOn Wednesday, April 19, 1961, McGeorge Bundy slipped out of his office on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building and into a conference room across the hall, where the National Security Council staff sat waiting. Two days earlier, Cuban exiles had waded ashore at the Bay of Pigs. By Wednesday, those who remained alive were being hunted down by Castro's men in the Zapata swamp. The Kennedy administration's first major foreign policy initiative had proved a catastrophe. Yet Bundy's tone was self-assured, even cocky. The former Harvard dean compared the Cuban exiles, with their blind faith that Washington would come to their rescue, to assistant professors who na\u00efvely insisted they would gain tenure, until the fateful day arrived. Some of the men in the audience\u2014which included Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, and a few others\u2014chuckled. Others picked at a large bowl of fruit in the center of the table. But near the back of the ornate conference room, one junior staff member silently seethed. The gilded surroundings, the haughty repartee, the fruit juice dripping from powerful men's lips as they joked about weaker men's fate\u2014it reminded him of ancient Rome. \"I guess [Castro's ally] Che [Guevara] learned more from Guatemala than we did,\" quipped Bundy, referring to the 1954 coup on which the Cuba invasion was partly modeled. For Marcus Raskin, that was the final straw. \"It's interesting that Che learned from Guatemala,\" he interjected, \"but what have we learned?\" Bundy didn't respond; he just glared. Someone else scolded Raskin for indulging in recriminations. That afternoon, the twenty-six-year-old received a call from Bundy's assistant. His presence at National Security Council meetings would no longer be required.\n\nIn an administration of self-styled Hillandales, Raskin was that oddest of creatures: a man uninterested in appearing tough. The son of a Jewish immigrant plumber from Milwaukee, he had been, in his youth, a musical prodigy. He mastered the first-year piano instruction manual in a week; he was playing concertos by age twelve. But at his core, the disheveled young pianist was less a musician than a moralist. As a teenager, he walked with a classmate named Jerry Silberman through the hardscrabble neighborhood near his childhood home, burning with outrage at the squalor. Silberman later moved to Hollywood and changed his name to Gene Wilder. Raskin moved to Washington, where he began causing trouble.\n\nSeveral left-leaning Democratic congressmen had banded together to form something called the Liberal Project, and in 1959 they hired Raskin as the group's secretary. Several days into the job, he sent his bosses a memo. \"Americans are bored. They are apathetic about politics. They are afraid,\" he wrote. \"They have withdrawn from the awesome complexity and almost hopeless dread, which is the general social and political scene.\" On the surface, it was a familiar attack on the malaise of the late Eisenhower years, not much different from what Schlesinger and Bell were writing at the time. But beneath the surface lay the seeds of an ideological revolt. As Schlesinger saw it, Americans were bored because their government was not fighting the cold war with vigor and nerve. Once it did, public life would become exciting, and men could again become men. For Raskin, by contrast, the problem was not that America's leaders were waging the cold war lethargically; it was that they were waging the cold war at all. The militarization of America's foreign policy, he argued, was sucking the life out of America's people. Their creative, hopeful instincts were being suffocated by fear. It was a critique that, propelled by Vietnam, would move from the margins of American politics to the center during the 1960s, shattering the hubris of toughness and wrecking the careers of many of the smug young men who sat alongside Marcus Raskin that April day, eating fruit.\n\nBundy hired Raskin knowing that he was, by Kennedy standards, on the extreme left. But Bundy liked to be intellectually challenged. Silencing dissenting views was too easy; it was more satisfying to allow radicals a hearing, and then beat them in a fair fight. Bundy, a champion debater from his days at Groton, envisioned Raskin as a kind of sparring partner, someone who would keep him sharp and then politely retire once the decisions were made.\n\nBut Raskin did not play by the rules. Not content with mere intellectual banter, he crossed into open moralizing\u2014something the hard-nosed Camelot men could not abide. A few months after the Cuba meeting, Bundy asked an aide to draw up plans for a nuclear first strike if the Soviets invaded West Berlin. When Raskin found out, he said something indelicate: He called his colleagues war criminals. \"How,\" he asked, \"does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany?\" It was the ultimate taboo, turning the Munich analogy on its head and seeing America's leaders, not the communists, as Hitler's heirs. For hours Raskin and the aide screamed at each other, until both broke down in tears. Things were getting out of hand. \"I can't take Marc anywhere,\" Bundy muttered, \"without worrying that he won't pee on the floor.\"\n\nIn the spring of 1962, Raskin's former bosses in Congress published a book, The Liberal Papers, which thanked him by name. American foreign policy, declared its opening essay, was warped by \"fear about masculinity...distorted into a need to feel tough.\" Later chapters proposed that America cut its nuclear stockpiles, slash military aid to anticommunist dictatorships, and support China's admission into the UN\u2014in short, that America try to end the cold war. Republicans quickly pounced. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen suggested that the book be renamed \"Our American Munich.\" With the GOP vowing to make Raskin an issue in the fall midterm elections, he was reassigned to domestic affairs. By year's end he was gone.\n\nIn his rage at the cold war, however, and at the tough-guy politics that sustained it, Raskin was not alone. He represented the tip of a large and growing iceberg floating beneath the surface of American public life. In 1964, Stanley Kubrick produced Dr. Strangelove, which depicted America's generals as nuclear-obsessed madmen convinced that communists were trying to contaminate their bodily fluids. The New York Times' fifty-nine-year-old film reviewer condemned the movie as disrespectful, since it depicted \"virtually everybody\" in power as \"stupid or insane\u2014or what is worse, psychopathic.\" But a younger critic wrote in to object, praising the film for exposing how \"after some 20 years of living under the constant threat of the great bomb we are intellectually and emotionally spastic.\" In 1959, a naval officer turned historian named William Appleman Williams published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, which argued that it was America's insatiable search for overseas markets, not Soviet aggression, that had sparked the cold war. Williams was soon hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. But over the course of the 1960s, his academic disciples began hacking away at the idea that the Soviets represented evil and America embodied good. And in June 1962, fifty-nine students gathered at a United Auto Workers camp in Port Huron, Michigan, where they formed Students for a Democratic Society and issued a generational manifesto that would sell sixty thousand copies. Its message was similar to Raskin's: that the cold war was not a geopolitical necessity, forced upon America by a slave superpower bent on world domination. It was an elite strategy, used to keep Americans in a state of emotional terror and political lockdown so they would stand mute while their leaders pursued policies of violence and exploitation from Harlem and Mississippi to the far corners of the earth.\n\nIn the mainstream press, these cracks in the political ice went largely unnoticed. But they were signs of a deeper change. The cold war was beginning to thaw. By the late 1950s, Joseph McCarthy had drunk himself to death, and with anticommunist hysteria no longer at fever pitch, peace groups began emerging from the forced hibernation of the red scare years to demand a halt to the testing\u2014and ultimately the production\u2014of nuclear bombs. In Moscow, Stalin was dead, too, replaced by less fearsome men. In Beijing, Mao was growing increasingly anti-Soviet, giving lie to the specter of a unified communist menace. And, most important of all, in the United States, a generation with no memory of Munich was coming of age. They flooded America's universities: College enrollment nearly quadrupled between 1946 and 1970. Most of the students were apolitical, but a vocal few, like those who gathered at Port Huron, began contrasting the catechisms of the cold war with the new realities of their time. The younger generation, Lyndon Johnson later remarked in disgust, wouldn't \"know a Communist if they tripped over one.\" But that was precisely the point. For the twenty-six-year-old Raskin, and the even younger activists who trailed behind, Munich was not a template; it was a clich\u00e9. Soviet communism\u2014those tired old bureaucrats in Moscow mouthing slogans even they seemed to no longer believe\u2014did not strike them as particularly menacing. What was menacing was anticommunism. America's \"democratic institutions and habits have shriveled in almost direct proportion to the growth of her armaments,\" declared the Port Huron Statement. For a whole generation of younger activists, the cold war was not a struggle for democracy; it was the antithesis of democracy. It was not something to wage, but something to overcome.\n\nThe struggle against the cold war was, at its core, a struggle against the ethic of toughness that marked the Camelot age. It was a revolt, in the eyes of those who instigated it, against the violence and oppression that characterized American policies at home and abroad. And that revolt linked the anti\u2013cold warriors to another group of Americans struggling against violence and oppression: the activists of the burgeoning civil rights movement. How intimately the two movements were intertwined can be glimpsed in the unusual career of one Albert Bigelow. Bigelow had been a naval captain in the Pacific during World War II. But ten years after the war, his life changed forever when two horribly disfigured victims of Hiroshima who had come to the United States for plastic surgery stayed at his house. (Again the World War II analogy was being flipped on its head: For the anti\u2013cold warriors the good war wasn't quite so good.) Haunted by what his government had done, Bigelow decided that the next time America detonated a nuclear weapon, he would be there. So in March 1958 he and three other pacifists set sail in a thirty-foot sailboat, The Golden Rule, for the Marshall Islands, where the United States was set to test a hydrogen bomb. Arrested near Honolulu, Bigelow reluctantly concluded that placing himself in the path of nuclear explosions was impractical. But he still wanted to lay down his body for justice and peace. So in May 1961 he boarded a bus in Washington along with twelve other members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), determined to integrate interstate transport across the South.\n\nCORE's founder, James Farmer, had cut his teeth working for the pacifist Fellowship for Reconciliation, which was formed in 1915 to oppose World War I. Bayard Rustin, the Fellowship's other African-American staffer, went on to organize the 1963 March on Washington. And the other two major civil rights organizations\u2014the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)\u2014were founded on pacifist principles as well. So the movement to end the cold war helped to incubate the movement for civil rights\u2014and the pollination also went the other way. It was a summer spent working for SNCC in 1961 that helped convince the University of Michigan's Tom Hayden to cofound Students for a Democratic Society the following year.\n\n\"I am going,\" wrote Bigelow before setting sail for the Marshall Islands, \"because however mistaken, unrighteous, and unrepentant governments may seem, I still believe all men are really good at heart.\" Philosophically, this was the great divide, separating the practitioners of cold war toughness from the anti\u2013cold war activists who revolted against them. For Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the realist intellectuals of the 1940s, the beginning of wisdom was recognizing that people were not necessarily good at heart, that evil could never be eradicated from the world because it could never be eradicated from the soul. This premise had profound implications for foreign policy: It meant that conflict was endemic, that evil means might be required to ensure that greater evil did not prevail. That had been the lesson of Munich: that sometimes the horror of war was the only way to prevent greater horror. And it was this lesson that \"ultra-realists\" like Bundy, Rusk, and Lyndon Johnson not only learned but overlearned, and that helped lead America into Vietnam.\n\nBigelow didn't see the world that way, because he didn't see human beings that way. And neither did many others on the New Left. It is the \"theological gospel according to Reinhold Niebuhr,\" wrote Marcus Raskin, \"namely, that we live in an immoral world that offers the statesmen no option but to choose evil, albeit a lesser one,\" that has \"made sonsofbitches of us all.\" From the struggle to end the cold war to the struggle for civil rights, the activists of the early 1960s were generally more hopeful; they refused to believe that when you stripped humanity naked you found the snake of original sin. (Even Martin Luther King, Jr., who admired Niebuhr, found his view of human nature too bleak.) It was no accident that America's leading pacifist journal, which published white anti\u2013cold warriors along with civil rights leaders like King and Rustin, was called Liberation. The assumption was that while society was filled with violence, fear, and hate, people were not born that way. If you liberated them from oppressive institutions like segregation and militarism, their inner goodness could break free.\n\nIf this optimism about human nature underpinned the struggle for racial justice and world peace, it was even clearer in the third leg of the 1960s protest triad: the counterculture. The closest thing hippies had to a philosopher was a rather square classics professor named Norman O. Brown. Brown was a sunny Freudian, which Freud himself might have considered an oxymoron. In Freud's view, the human subconscious was a dark and dangerous place. People had an instinct for sex, which if not constrained by cultural taboo would destroy civilization. And they had an instinct for death, which could easily explode into violence. So repression was tragic because it denied people their deepest desires, but it was also necessary because those desires, if unleashed, could spawn barbarism and chaos. Brown disagreed. He denied that people had an instinct for death, and he denied they should repress their instinct for sex. In his view, people's truest selves were not frightening; they were glorious. Brown urged Americans to unlock their inner Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy, which \"breaks down the boundaries; releases the prisoners; abolishes repression.\" Liberate people from social constraint, he insisted, and they will become virtual geysers of love.\n\nBy the late 1960s, thousands of young hippies\u2014clad in tie-dye and tripping on LSD\u2014were attempting exactly that. Like the overall-wearing civil rights activists of SNCC and the coffeehouse peace activists of SDS, they believed they were championing love against hate, nonviolence against violence, liberation against repression. All three movements believed that the men who ran America, and kept the nation in a state of conformity and fear, were morally bankrupt and needed to be peaceably overthrown. All three believed that once they were, the love and compassion locked inside the American heart would break free. All three believed that ultimately the ethic of toughness was an ethic of death. And all three were radicalized and empowered when that ethic blew itself to bits in Vietnam.\n\nIn the summer of 1965, George Ball had warned Lyndon Johnson that once he began escalating in Vietnam, he would not be able to stop: The number of U.S. troops might eventually reach half a million. Robert McNamara called that prediction \"outrageous.\" But within eighteen months it had come true. The problem was simple: Every time America upped the ante, so did Hanoi. In July, when Johnson made the fateful decision to throw a hundred thousand U.S. troops into the war, there were two North Vietnamese regiments fighting in the South. By November, there were as many as nine. America escalated in the air as well. By 1967, the United States had dropped more bombs on Vietnam than it did in all of World War II. But Hanoi built tunnels, thirty thousand miles of them. And China and the Soviet Union, which had once supported a negotiated settlement, began vying to see who could aid Hanoi more. Between 1965 and 1968, by one estimate, the bombing cost America almost ten dollars for every one dollar of damage it did to North Vietnam.\n\nJohnson's actions didn't only spark a counter-escalation in Vietnam; they also sparked a counter-escalation at home. In the early 1960s, anti\u2013cold war activists had mostly focused on nuclear disarmament, not Southeast Asia. In five thousand words, the Port Huron Statement only mentioned Vietnam once. But with American planes and then American GIs pouring into Vietnam, the New Left's priorities began to shift. On Easter Sunday 1965, SDS held the first major rally against the war. In May, the University of Michigan held the first antiwar \"teach-in,\" and by summer this exercise in guerrilla education had spread to 120 campuses. In November, thirty thousand people protested in Washington; the following March, fifty thousand turned out in New York. Over the course of 1965, the membership of SDS quadrupled.\n\nWith large public majorities backing Johnson on the war, it was easy to dismiss the protesters as a lunatic fringe. But soon mainstream figures began rebelling as well. In March 1967, with roughly forty thousand Americans wounded or dead in Vietnam, Robert Kennedy called the war a \"horror\" and urged Johnson to halt the bombing. A month later Martin Luther King publicly denounced it, too, describing America as \"the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.\" And with the antiwar movement growing bigger and angrier, and key members of the political establishment defecting to its side, the Johnson administration began to feel like an institution under siege. In November, when Dean Rusk traveled to New York for a speech, five thousand people turned out to protest, and members of SDS threw bottles and bags of blood. When Bundy went to defend the war at Harvard, a campus that a few years earlier had held him in awe, demonstrators carried signs asking, \"When Will Bundy Pay for His War Crimes?\" His old academic colleagues increasingly shunned him; his brother William's office at MIT was firebombed. Stephen Bundy, a Harvard undergraduate, walked into the offices of the Harvard Crimson newspaper one day to find its editors throwing darts at a picture of his father mounted on the wall.\n\nMcNamara, whose own son was becoming a radical peace activist, began to break under the strain. In November 1965, a thirty-two-year-old Quaker man sat down at the river entrance to the Pentagon, a mere fifty yards from McNamara's office, poured kerosene over his body, and set himself and his eighteen-month-old daughter on fire. (The baby lived; her father did not.) It was not an easy image to forget. At a New Year's Eve party a few weeks later, McNamara began talking with a woman who opposed the war, and then suddenly began to sob. Over the next two years the scene repeated itself several times. The man with the slicked-back hair and the clipped, machine-gun voice, who once epitomized the ultratough Camelot style, now seemed hard-pressed, when talking about the war he had helped launch, to keep from bursting into tears.\n\nThe heady optimism of 1964, when America seemed invincible and Lyndon Johnson held it in the palm of his hand, was a distant memory now. In 1966, George Ball quietly resigned. When McNamara suggested that the war could not be won, Johnson accused him of disloyalty and froze him out. He turned on Bundy, too, convinced that he was secretly colluding against him with Bobby Kennedy. By the end of 1967, Bundy and McNamara were both gone.\n\nReplacing Bundy as national security advisor was Rostow, whom one aide described as \"Rasputin to a tsar under siege.\" Rostow was a jovial figure, far gentler than the caustic Bundy. But on the subject of Vietnam, his historical determinism made him the truest of true believers, \"a fanatic in sheep's clothing,\" in one detractor's words. He carefully edited intelligence reports before Johnson saw them, weeding out bad news and trumpeting signs of progress, however trivial. To more pessimistic colleagues, his insistence that America was winning in Vietnam seemed increasingly divorced from reality. After one dispiriting report on the war in 1967, he turned to the briefer in a slightly desperate tone and demanded, \"You do admit that it'll all be over in six months?\" \"Oh,\" the man replied with a smirk. \"I think we can hold out longer than that.\"\n\nBut Rostow possessed the quality that his boss prized most: absolute loyalty. As former aides and allies turned against him on the war, Johnson, an insecure, unlovable man in the best of times, crawled into a dark space inside himself. He was, he insisted, the victim of a conspiracy. Communists had infiltrated the \"highest counsels\" of government; antiwar senators were taking orders from the Kremlin. No longer able to travel without being besieged by demonstrators, he became a virtual prisoner inside the White House, which was itself ringed by protesters chanting, \"LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?\" and \"Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you now?\" Increasingly, Johnson found it difficult to sleep; his doctor worried that his health might give out. Robert Kennedy privately described the president as \"very unstable.\" At a private meeting in 1967, when reporters repeatedly badgered him about why America was in Vietnam, Johnson finally unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and screamed, \"This is why!\"\n\n\"The only difference between the Kennedy assassination and mine,\" Johnson moaned, \"is that I am alive and it has been more torturous.\" The awful irony was that he didn't care very much about Vietnam. His real love, he insisted, was the Great Society, his massive effort to alleviate poverty, not \"that bitch of a war.\" But he remained captive to the toughness ethic, convinced, as he later told a biographer, that if he let South Vietnam fall, people would say \"I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine.\" So in November 1967 he summoned the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, to Washington to tell Americans that victory was near. \"We are making real progress,\" the square-jawed general told the National Press Club. \"We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view.\"\n\nWestmoreland's timing was very bad. Even as he spoke, North Vietnamese and Vietcong units were quietly slipping into cities and towns across the South. A diversionary attack on a Marine base near the border with Laos drew U.S. forces out of urban areas. Many South Vietnamese troops had left their bases as well, having returned to their home villages to celebrate the lunar New Year, which the Vietnamese called Tet. And then, on January 30, 1968, all hell broke loose. At 2:45 A.M., nineteen Vietcong troops blew a hole in the wall surrounding the American embassy in Saigon. For six hours they crouched behind flowerpots in the embassy garden and traded fire with U.S. military police, until they were finally subdued. Over the next twenty-four hours, Hanoi attacked thirty-six of South Vietnam's forty-four provincial capitals, as well as the airport, the South Vietnamese military headquarters, and the presidential palace in Saigon. Communist forces seized control of the picturesque city of Hue, ancient seat of the Vietnamese empire. By the time U.S. Marines retook it a month later, it was \"a shattered, stinking hulk, its streets choked with rubble and rotting bodies.\"\n\nBack home, commentators reacted with shock. \"What the hell is going on?\" demanded CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite, who according to polls was the most trusted man in the nation. \"I thought we were winning the war!\" In purely military terms, Tet was actually an American victory. The Vietcong, who excelled at guerrilla warfare, were no match for U.S. forces in a conventional fight, and they sustained massive losses in the attack. But for ordinary Americans, who had repeatedly been told that victory was near, that was cold comfort. If the enemy could make it to the gates of the U.S. Embassy itself, the war was clearly far from over. In February, Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald conducted a mock interview with General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. \"We have the Sioux on the run,\" Custer insisted, \"the Redskins are hurting badly and it will only be a matter of time before they give in.\"\n\nWestmoreland proposed upping the ante yet again: mobilizing the reserves and calling up another two hundred thousand troops. But politically, something had snapped. To replace McNamara, Johnson had chosen establishment superlawyer Clark Clifford, a man with doubts about the war and an ego so large that not even Lyndon Johnson could subordinate it to his own. (Clifford-watchers often told the story of the company president who called to ask him how to handle a legal problem. Clifford told the man to say and do nothing, and charged him ten thousand dollars. When the man called back to complain about the bill and to ask why he had to remain mum, Clifford replied, \"Because I told you to,\" and billed him another five thousand dollars.) Since his days teaching elementary school in Texas, Johnson had always made sure to establish dominion over his aides, to make it brutally clear who was beholden to whom. But he was weak now; he needed Clifford more than Clifford needed him. The new defense secretary quashed Westmoreland's request for massive reinforcements. And he gathered a group of seasoned cold warriors\u2014men like Dean Acheson and Council on Foreign Relations president John McCloy\u2014to tell Johnson the ugly truth. There could be no more escalations. The question was no longer how to win; it was how to get out.\n\nIn important ways, America had become a different country. Underpinning the hubris of toughness had been several assumptions, all born from the nation's extraordinary post\u2013World War II success. The first assumption was that when America put its shoulder to the wheel, no military force on earth could long stand in its way. That faith had shattered at Tet. The second assumption was that the American people would bear whatever burdens and pay whatever price their leaders demanded to stop communism. By the late winter of 1968, that too looked dubious. Tet had sent public opinion reeling. Peace protests were drawing hundreds of thousands into the streets, and in March, for the first time, Gallup showed that a plurality of Americans opposed the war.\n\nThirdly, the hubris of toughness had presumed boundless resources. Kennedy and Johnson had basically embraced NSC 68's assumption that when it came to foreign policy, the government had a blank check. But by 1968, resources no longer looked so boundless. Johnson's spending on the war and the Great Society\u2014and his refusal to raise taxes to pay for them until it was too late\u2014had sparked inflation and a gaping budget deficit. With the U.S. economy suddenly weak, foreign investors began to convert their dollars into gold, shaking the world's faith in the greenback. Johnson arranged a Band-Aid fix and the momentary crisis passed, but as Acheson acknowledged, \"The gold crisis has dampened expansionist ideas.\" Just a few years earlier, men like Rusk, Bundy, and McNamara had taken it as a virtual given that America had the money, the firepower, and the will to stop communist expansion anywhere on earth. By the spring of 1968, that confidence seemed like the fantasy of a bygone age.\n\nOn March 26, Acheson, McCloy, and the other establishment gray-beards went to the White House. Unlike Kennan, Lippmann, Morgenthau, and Niebuhr, most of them had nodded approvingly as the Camelot generation stretched containment far beyond its original size and shape. They had found it flattering that younger men wished to replicate in the third world what they had achieved in Europe. And they hadn't known enough about the world's hotter, darker regions to see that the analogy was horribly flawed. But by 1968, these foreign policy elders were less afraid of Ho Chi Minh than of their own grandchildren, who, radicalized by the war, seemed to be turning against them and everything they had built. Losing in Vietnam, they had come to believe, would endanger the United States less than staying there. Johnson, who had spent his entire career looking over his right shoulder, making sure that men like these never saw him as weak, was aghast. \"The establishment bastards,\" he fumed, \"have bailed out.\"\n\nFive days later, Johnson did, too. Politically he had become radioactive. On March 12, an obscure antiwar senator named Eugene McCarthy had stunned the political world by coming within four thousand votes of beating him in the New Hampshire primary. Polls suggested that the outcome in Wisconsin, the next state to vote, would be even worse. Johnson, interestingly enough, had been thinking a lot about Woodrow Wilson, the last president destroyed by hubris in war. As LBJ later told a biographer, he was haunted by images of Wilson's final eighteen months, when the twenty-eighth president was \"stretched out upstairs in the White House, powerless to move, with the machinery of the American government in disarray around him.\" Johnson would not let that happen to him: He would end the war and leave office, thus saving his political reputation and perhaps his life itself. And so at 9 P.M. on March 31, he went on television to announce that America was prepared to curb the bombing and negotiate a peace agreement with Hanoi\u2014and that he would not seek reelection as president.\n\nIn a sense, LBJ's gambit worked. He returned to Texas, grew his hair long, ate like a pig, smoked like a chimney, terrorized the workers on his ranch, and lived for another five years. But he had only saved his body. Close observers suspected that his soul was already dead. \"My daddy committed political suicide for that war in Vietnam,\" said Johnson's daughter Luci. \"And since politics was his life, it was like committing actual suicide.\" The war, and the hatreds it spawned, haunted Johnson to the grave. He was dissuaded from attending the 1968 Democratic convention for fear that his presence might fuel violence. He wasn't even invited to the Democratic convention in 1972, and his portrait did not hang alongside past presidents and current candidates in the party's gallery of honor. When he died, Johnson's New York Times obituary declared that \"his vision of the Great Society [had] dissolved in the morass of war in Vietnam.\" The first southerner to occupy the White House since Wilson, he too had seen war turn rancid, and died with its taste on his lips.\n\nJohnson wasn't the only one thinking about World War I. In myriad ways, the New Left also reached back in time, to the days before American foreign policy was swallowed by the Munich analogy, to the peace crusaders of interwar years. Randolph Bourne, who had languished in obscurity since World War II, suddenly became hot. In 1964, Harper & Row published an anthology of his essays; in 1966, E. P. Dutton put out another. The New Left historian Christopher Lasch devoted an admiring chapter to him in a book that took swipes at Niebuhr. In 1967, a radical young linguist named Noam Chomsky quoted Bourne at length in an essay on intellectuals and war.\n\nIf Vietnam revived Bourne's reputation, it resuscitated his two mentors as well: John Dewey and Charles Beard. Marcus Raskin called Dewey's bid to outlaw war a model for post-Vietnam foreign policy. And while writing the Port Huron Statement, Tom Hayden was influenced by Dewey's 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems, in which the philosopher argued, contra Walter Lippmann, that with the right education, ordinary people could effectively govern themselves. For Hayden and his intellectual mentor, C. Wright Mills\u2014who wanted a \"participatory democracy\" and loathed the postwar belief that elites should keep the irrational masses far from the levers of power\u2014Dewey was an inspiration. They even set out to reclaim the word utopian, which in the toughness years had rarely been uttered without a sneer.\n\nWhile New Left sociologists and philosophers were resurrecting Dewey, New Left historians\u2014led by William Appleman Williams\u2014were resurrecting Beard, hailing his warnings about presidential power and the economic motives for war. \"The war in Indochina...has led many liberals and radicals to look again at the criticism offered by such men as Charles Beard,\" wrote a young, militant historian named Ronald Radosh. Even Herbert Hoover's foreign policy received a second, more positive look.\n\nInvoking Beard, Dewey, and Bourne was a way of summoning an earlier time, before American soldiers patrolled the global beat, before American children cowered under their desks during nuclear drills, before America's leaders lathered themselves with machismo to cover their fear. Not everyone in the anti-Vietnam movement was a Deweyian pacifist, of course. Most protesters didn't oppose all wars, just this one. Still, as the fighting ground on, killing sixteen thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese by the beginning of 1968, even many nonpacifists began to feel, as Raskin and SDS and the civil rights marchers had from the beginning, that Vietnam was a symptom of a larger disease: a penchant for violence that had become endemic to American foreign policy and American life.\n\nIf intellectuals and activists were creating post-toughness politics\u2014a politics aimed at liberating American from the Cold War\u2014in the late 1950s that political ethic moved from the streets into the Democratic Party. The first presidential candidate to give it voice was Eugene McCarthy, the man whose shocking success in the 1968 New Hampshire primary had chased Lyndon Johnson back to Texas. McCarthy was an unlikely trailblazer. A conventional cold warrior for most of his career, he had spent the late 1950s slamming Eisenhower as an appeaser. In 1964, he told Johnson that he would make a better running mate than Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey was apt to go soft on Vietnam. As late as 1965, with U.S. troops pouring into Indochina, McCarthy still held his tongue, hoping that LBJ might appoint him ambassador to the UN.\n\nBut by year's end, as it became clear that he wouldn't get a glamorous new job, McCarthy grew bitter and bored. An introvert who as a young man had toyed with becoming a Catholic monk, he didn't really like the Senate. He often skipped committee meetings to read theology or write poetry. And as time passed, his personal alienation morphed into a broader ideological discontent. For one thing, administration officials kept lying to him. One evening in February 1965, he went with a group of senators to the White House, where Johnson lavished praise on South Vietnamese leader Nguyen Khanh, insisting that he was popular and in control. The next day Khanh was ousted in a coup. The following year, in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, McCarthy asked Dean Rusk whether he believed MacArthur's old adage that America could not win a land war in Asia. Rusk replied with a blizzard of obfuscation, to which McCarthy responded, \"I don't think that quite answers my question.\" Rusk looked at him smugly and declared, \"I know it didn't, sir.\"\n\nBy 1967, McCarthy had become that most dangerous of Washington creatures: a politician with little to lose. He had just turned fifty; his job annoyed him, his marriage had turned sour, and he had the gnawing sense that life was passing him by. Young peace activists were scouring the Senate, looking for someone to run against Johnson in the primaries. McCarthy's children, two of them peace activists themselves, urged him to do it. An old monk told him to seize the day. He saw the chance to inject some excitement and purpose into his life, maybe even to become a hero.\n\nAs it turned out, he was not a very good hero. Although honest and intelligent, he was also lazy, arrogant, mean-spirited, reclusive, and opaque. Instead of prepping for an important debate, he passed the time singing Irish ballads. He made an influential New York Times columnist wait outside his office while he finished writing a poem about wolverines. One afternoon in Los Angeles, arriving early for an event, he simply walked to the podium and gave his prepared speech, even though the crowd had not yet arrived.\n\nAfter New Hampshire, he was joined in the race by Robert Kennedy, who immediately seized the hero's mantle. In this competition with Camelot, with the fairy-tale story of the shy, tortured younger sibling who rises to avenge his brother's death and save the nation in its moment of peril, McCarthy's deficiencies became downright painful. At his events, listeners nodded politely, or nodded off. At Kennedy's, girls screamed; fans ripped at his clothes; grown men cried. Emotionally McCarthy was a dud. But ideologically he was the truly momentous figure: the vehicle through which post-toughness politics entered the political mainstream.\n\nRobert Kennedy was too wedded to the past. Earlier in his career, he had taken the Kennedy cult of toughness to truly lunatic extremes. As a Senate investigator, he once challenged Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa to a push-up contest. On a trip down the Amazon in 1965, he jumped into a river filled with piranhas and dared his boatmates to join him. The following year, on safari in Africa, he dismounted from a jeep, walked to within fifteen feet of a rhinoceros, and stared at the beast until it trotted away.\n\nOn foreign policy, he had been a rigid, brutal, hawk. In the 1950s, he hadn't merely worked for Joseph McCarthy; he had made the drunken demagogue godfather to his first child. A maniac for Edwin Hillandale and James Bond, he had kept a green beret on his Senate desk and organized such fierce mock counterinsurgency battles at the Kennedy vacation compound that relatives warned he was scaring the kids. In his brother's administration he was known for advocating the hardest of hard-line stances, and then calling his colleagues wimps when they pointed out the risks.\n\nBy 1968, his views had evolved, and he called for deescalating in Vietnam. But he never confronted the underlying assumptions that made the war possible. Attacking global containment itself\u2014linking the horrors of the late 1960s to the hubris of the early 1960s\u2014would have meant defiling his brother's memory, the one thing that he would not, under any circumstances, do. And so his critique of the war was passionate yet incoherent. No longer a cold warrior, and yet not an anti\u2013cold warrior, his true foreign policy ideology, if it can be called that, was simply Kennedyism: the belief that through the alchemy of Camelot, America could be both hawkish and dovish, tough and humane, crusading and restrained, that it could bear any burden in its long twilight struggle against communism yet escape burdens like Vietnam.\n\nMcCarthy was more lucid and more radical. Vietnam, he declared, \"originated in the containment doctrines of the 1950s.\" It was the bitter fruit of NSC 68, of the belief that every time communist guerrillas advanced across some godforsaken jungle outpost it was 1938 all over again. For McCarthy, enough was enough. He called not merely for deescalating in Vietnam but for recognizing Cuba, ending weapons sales to the third world, and slowing the nuclear arms race. It was the same agenda that Raskin had been fired for supporting in 1962. And McCarthy's philosophical assumptions also mirrored those of the New Left. He accused America's leaders of being too quick to see evil lurking around every corner, too unwilling to believe that people would respond to love, not force. We must place our \"hope and trust in our fellow men,\" McCarthy told antiwar activists. \"We do not have...to be afraid.\"\n\nIt was no surprise that many of those activists joined his campaign, believing\u2014for the first time in their lives\u2014that a mainstream presidential candidate saw the world as they did. In the late 1960s, the hubris of toughness, which had been building like a wave for two decades, finally broke. In the '70s, post-toughness politics would take over first the Democratic Party and then the government itself.\n\n## CHAPTER TEN\n\n## THE SCOLD\n\n\"The tragedy of Vietnam is the tragedy of the catastrophic overextension and misapplication of valid principles.\" With those words, published in 1967, Arthur Schlesinger traced not only the rise of the hubris of toughness, but the arc of his own career. In the 1940s he had been the junior member of a group of realist thinkers\u2014led by his mentor Reinhold Niebuhr\u2014who told Americans that the struggle against evil was forever, that reason would never govern the world. In the early 1960s he had watched contemporaries like Bundy and Rostow stretch that toughness ethic past the breaking point, turning the struggle against evil into a global crusade. And by decade's end he had become a senior member of a new group of intellectuals, many of them too young to remember Munich, who rejected toughness politics and began imagining a post\u2013cold war world.\n\nEugene McCarthy lost the Democratic nomination in 1968, first to Robert Kennedy\u2014who had taken a decisive lead by the time he was gunned down\u2014and then to his old rival Hubert Humphrey, who was even less inclined to challenge cold war orthodoxy. But McCarthy's ideas won. After 1968, the antiwar movement began taking over the Democratic Party. That year, for the first time since the cold war began, northern Democrats in Congress voted en masse against a major weapons system: the Sentinel antiballistic missile. In 1970, peace activists in Washington State rewrote the state party platform to demand a moratorium on the production of nuclear weapons. In 1971, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield introduced legislation to cut the number of American troops in Europe in half.\n\nUnderlying these heresies was the belief\u2014once confined to a scruffy New Left fringe\u2014that, as Schlesinger put it, \"the military hang-up of our foreign policy is an exercise in futility.\" In Vietnam, America was using more firepower than any nation in history. (The United States would ultimately drop 14 million tons of explosives, more than five times as many as it dropped during World War II.) Yet it was losing to the Vietcong, a ragtag guerrilla force, backed by North Vietnam, a country that used one-fifth as much electricity as was generated annually by the Arlington, Virginia, branch of the Potomac Electric Power Company. \"Perhaps the principal lesson of the past decade,\" wrote Leslie Gelb and Paul Warnke, two rising stars in the post-Vietnam foreign policy establishment, \"is that military force is a singularly inept instrument of foreign policy.\"\n\nAmerican foreign policy, argued the post\u2013cold war thinkers of the early 1970s\u2014again echoing the New Left radicals of the early 1960s\u2014had been too governed by fear. The Soviet Union, they insisted, was not Nazi Germany. It was a tired, defensive gerontocracy, eager, above all, to be left alone. To be sure, communist movements might be gaining steam in certain pockets of the third world. But they were no more controlled by Moscow than they could be defeated by the United States. The key was to stop worrying about these obscure conflicts, to see them as local affairs that could not harm the United States unless the United States used them as an occasion to harm itself. What truly threatened America, in other words, was not the Soviet Union, but America's excessive fear of the Soviet Union, which led it to do self-destructive things. \"If we find ourselves in a hostile world,\" declared Warnke, \"it's going to mean our foreign policy has been idiotic.\"\n\nCold warriors often accused the new intellectuals of isolationism. But that was mostly wrong. The post-toughness Democrats were well aware that America could not escape the world. In fact, they popularized the term interdependence to describe the myriad new ways in which America was entangled in it. But it was precisely this entanglement, they argued, that required that America change the nature of its international involvement from conflict to cooperation. \"Perhaps the greatest challenge to American foreign policy makers in the next generation will be to find constructive ways in which to cooperate with other nations in 'managing interdependence,'\" wrote Anthony Lake, a talented post\u2013cold war thinker who, like Gelb, was born too late to remember Munich. The language was calmer and dryer than that of the New Left. It was the language of the seminar room, or even the boardroom, not the language of the soapbox and the street, but many of the same ideas were there: If you liberated people from their fear you could unlock their decency; if America's leaders got over their obsession with appearing tough, they could build a more cooperative, more humane world.\n\nAlthough their criticism of military force and their talk of global community sometimes made them sound like John Dewey, the post\u2013cold war thinkers were neither pacifists nor utopians. Dewey had opposed all U.S. military commitments, even after Hitler took power. The post\u2013cold war thinkers of the 1970s, by contrast, only suggested that America limit the scope of its military commitments and stop viewing communism as a unified menace\u2014which made sense, given that Beijing and Moscow threatened each other more than either threatened the United States. In the quarter century between Pearl Harbor and Pleiku, America's leaders had gradually forgotten that there were limits to American power, and as a result, that there must be limits to American fear. Now Vietnam had shown that America was not omnipotent, and so men like Lake, Warnke, and Gelb usefully pointed out that America did not need to be.\n\nWith their greater optimism about international cooperation, and about human nature itself, the post\u2013cold war intellectuals were temperamentally different from realists like Kennan and Morgenthau. But when it came to global containment, the views of the two groups tended to coincide. The reason was that the post\u2013cold war intellectuals were not rebelling against Kennan's and Morgenthau's ideas; they were rebelling against \"catastrophic overextension and misapplication\" of Kennan and Morgenthau's ideas. They were not rebelling against the realism of the 1940s; they were rebelling against ultra-realism of the 1960s. In suggesting that Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk's worldview was overly dark, men like Gelb, Warnke, and Lake were actually doing something similar to what Kennan and Morgenthau had done when they called John Dewey's worldview overly rosy: They were deflating an ideological tradition that had swelled too far. In insisting that the truths of realism, like the truths of progressivism, had limits, the post\u2013cold war thinkers were offering the beginnings of an answer to the hubris of toughness. All they needed was a leader who could make Americans listen.\n\nThat was the hard part, as Democrats learned in 1972, when they nominated George McGovern for president. Unlike Eugene McCarthy, McGovern was no latecomer to peace politics; it was in his blood. He hailed from South Dakota, two of whose three congressmen had opposed World War I. As a young man in the 1940s, he had joined the United World Federalists, which denounced the UN as too weak. In the presidential election of 1948, he had supported Henry Wallace over Harry Truman, and thus cast his lot with the last prominent Democrat to oppose the nascent cold war. McGovern never repudiated those early views. To the contrary, in his autobiography he insisted that \"the peace of the world would have been better served by the hopeful and compassionate views of Wallace than the get tough policy of the Truman administration.\" If Marcus Raskin and others in the antiwar movement yearned to revive the spirit of peace progressivism, they finally had their man.\n\nWhen McGovern called Wallace's worldview \"hopeful,\" he was referring to something specific: the hope that the United States and the Soviet Union, having cooperated to vanquish fascism, could make their continued cooperation the foundation of a peaceful world. McGovern never abandoned that hope. Throughout his career, he worked to demilitarize, and ultimately end, the cold war. At the height of McCarthyism, when many politicians were baying for war not merely with Pyongyang, but with Beijing as well, he opposed U.S. intervention in Korea. A decade later, in his first Senate speech, he proposed recognizing Castro's Cuba. By the time he ran for president in 1972, he was demanding that the Pentagon's budget be slashed by more than a third.\n\nEven George McGovern was no John Dewey or Herbert Hoover; he wasn't calling for an end to America's core military commitments in Western Europe and Japan. But he was the most radical critic of global containment ever nominated by a major party. \"The war against communism is over,\" he told the journalist Theodore White. \"Somehow we have to settle down and live with them.\"\n\nLike Warnke, who became his campaign's top foreign policy adviser, McGovern did not believe that America was fated to live in a hostile world. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, he urged Americans to stop being \"so absorbed with fear and danger from abroad\" on the campaign trail, he conjured \"a future that is not based on outdated stereotypes of military confrontation and power politics.\" It was a revealing critique. Ever since the 1940s, America's most influential foreign policy thinkers had insisted that power politics was not a choice but a fact. It was the inevitable expression of the lust for power that resided in the human heart. But McGovern, like the New Left, rejected that tragic view. McGovern's Christianity was not Niebuhr's. In fact, his hero was the progressive theologian whom Niebuhr had rebelled against: Walter Rauschenbusch, father of the Social Gospel. Christianity's task, wrote Rauschenbusch, is \"transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.\" For Niebuhr this was utopian nonsense. But Rauschenbusch's words so inspired McGovern that decades after reading them in college, he quoted them in his autobiography.\n\nParadoxically, it was this more hopeful view of human nature, and of foreign policy, that made George McGovern such an angry man. What Raskin introduced into the Kennedy White House, McGovern introduced into the 1972 presidential campaign: the language of moral fury. For Bundy, who considered himself a student of Niebuhr, who believed that evil was forever present in world affairs, and that \"grey is the color of truth,\" sermonizing about foreign policy was like \"pee[ing] on the floor.\" But McGovern, like Raskin, believed that foreign policy was not a choice between lesser evils but between evil and good. So he said what he believed, which was that Vietnam was more than a mistake. It was a crime.\n\n\"This chamber,\" McGovern told his Senate colleagues in September 1970, in perhaps the harshest attack on the toughness ethic ever by a national politician, \"reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land\u2014young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor, or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war, those young men will some day curse us.\"\n\nGeorge McGovern knew something about shedding blood. In early 1943 he had been a twenty-two-year-old college student with a pilot's license, a pregnant wife, and an absolute dread of flying a plane. Nonetheless, he piloted thirty-five bombing raids over Germany, sometimes amid enemy fire that forced him into terrifying emergency landings. On one mission his right tire blew out upon takeoff, meaning that his plane would likely crash when it tried to land. Rather than bailing out, McGovern and his crew completed their nine-hour bombing run, all the while knowing that they might die upon their return to base. On another flight, McGovern's plane was struck by more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel during withering German antiaircraft fire. One of his men was hit in the leg. The plane lost oxygen, and the heated suits that insulated the crew from the subzero weather gave out. Still, McGovern found a makeshift airstrip and successfully landed the plane.\n\nOne of McGovern's men, a streetwise, hard-drinking engineer from Bridgeport, Connecticut, was shattered by these harrowing ordeals. After the war he entered a mental asylum, and then stepped in front of a truck, in what may have been a suicide. McGovern's navigator, a somber Milwaukeean with dreams of entering the ministry, was flying with another pilot when he was forced to bail out over German soil just before his plane blew up. McGovern spent the remainder of the war sleeping next to the man's empty bunk, gazing at his clothes and photos of his family, praying that he would return. He never did. One of the deep ironies of the 1972 campaign, a campaign in which many Americans came to see McGovern as a pacifist, if not a coward, was that he was one of the greatest war heroes ever to run for president. He had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for Bravery four times. But in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination, he excised mentions of his war record. \"It seemed hypocritical,\" said one of his aides, to boast that \"'I killed more people than any of you guys.'\"\n\nGeorge McGovern would not play the politics of toughness. He attacked the idea that \"tough talk and big Pentagon budgets are somehow synonymous with national manhood\" and said he would, if necessary, go on his hands and knees to Hanoi to retrieve American prisoners of war. He refused to boast about his wartime heroism, perhaps because he feared dishonoring the dead. He was a very unusual cold war politician: one with no need, or desire, to prove himself a man.\n\nIt was all quite admirable. There was just one problem: He lost forty-nine states.\n\nPolitically, rejecting the hubris of toughness was treacherous: Americans didn't want to go on bended knee to Hanoi. But sustaining it was also treacherous, since Americans didn't want to keep sending their sons to fight Hanoi, either. In 1968 and 1972, as the Democratic Party was abandoning the politics of machismo, America elected and reelected a man who said \"combat is the essence of politics\" and boasted about eating sheep's testicles. No one worked harder than Richard Nixon to maintain America's image of ferocity, and his own. Yet Nixon's bravado couldn't conceal the fact that fewer and fewer of his citizens were willing to pay the price to contain communism around the world. And so his foreign policy often resembled a man who hangs a \"beware of dog\" sign on his house while trying to rouse an exhausted and indifferent mutt. Nixon repeatedly bluffed foreigners about what the United States might do and lied to Americans about the commitments he had made in their name. Those efforts were sometimes ingenious but they involved too much secrecy, dishonesty, and immorality for a public that no longer gave its presidents the benefit of the doubt. Ultimately Nixon's efforts to practice the politics of toughness in an era of diminished power failed. And in 1977, Jimmy Carter did what McGovern could not: smuggle post-toughness foreign policy into the White House.\n\nIt was hardly surprising that Richard Nixon considered fear a more powerful force than love. His own life proved it. At an early age he discovered that people didn't much like him. In college his brooding manner and harsh tone repelled girls. After law school he was rejected by the fancy Manhattan firms. But he overcame this personal rejection through brass-knuckle determination. In his first political campaign, he defeated an entrenched congressman by insinuating that he espoused the \"communist line.\" Once in Congress, Nixon exposed establishment golden boy Alger Hiss as a spy, thus making himself a hated figure among right-thinking liberals but helping win himself a spot as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate. Even that triumph, however, didn't end the social rejection. In eight years as president, Ike never once asked his grasping understudy to join him in the White House private quarters. \"What starts the process really are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid,\" Nixon once told a friend. \"But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, [and] personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.\"\n\nIf Nixon saw life as a pitiless struggle in which grit\u2014not charm\u2014usually won out, he reinforced that worldview with his choice of national security advisor. Growing up in the Bavarian town of Furth in the 1930s, young Heinz Kissinger watched his meek, kindly father destroyed by repeated experiences of degradation and defeat. He developed such a terror of non-Jews that even after he immigrated to the United States as a teenager and changed his name to Henry, he still instinctively crossed the street when gentile boys approached. He abandoned his own, deep religious faith after the Holocaust claimed thirteen of his relatives. And in its place he substituted a view of life that would have made Hobbes shiver. Explaining the Holocaust to an American acquaintance after the war, Kissinger wrote that \"the intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance.... Having once made up one's mind to survive, it was a necessity to follow through with a singleness of purpose inconceivable to you sheltered people in the States. Such singleness of purpose broached no stopping in front of accepted sets of values; it had to disregard ordinary standards of morality. One could only survive through lies, tricks and by somehow acquiring food to fill one's belly. The weak, the old had no chance.\"\n\nAs an adult, Kissinger spoke little about the harrowing anti-Semitism of his youth. (\"Any people who have been persecuted for two thousand years,\" he joked, \"must be doing something wrong.\") But its impact was palpable. \"Life is suffering. Birth involves death,\" he wrote in his undergraduate thesis, a 388-page behemoth titled \"The Meaning of History\"\u2014the longest in Harvard's history\u2014which spurred the university to limit the length of all future submissions. If McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk had in their youth witnessed the Western democracies' failure to resist Hitler, Kissinger had witnessed something even more chilling: the failure of Germany's own citizens\u2014his family's Christian neighbors\u2014to resist the destruction of their fragile democracy from within. As a result, even more than native-born Americans of his generation, he tended to see democracies as weak and ordinary citizens as irresponsible and apathetic. Only strong leaders, acting independently of their people's whims, could restrain the chaos and evil lurking in international affairs, and within the hearts of women and men.\n\nKissinger, his colleagues were astonished to learn, feared that he might become the victim of a vicious anti-Semitic backlash if he presided over defeat in Vietnam. (It didn't help that Nixon himself often baited him with anti-Semitic remarks.) Asked once about White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Kissinger replied that \"Haldeman was the kind of guy who would send you to the showers.\" It was hard to imagine a worldview more at odds with the one emerging inside the Democratic Party, which proposed that by ending the cold war, America's leaders could foster international harmony and unlock the decency buried inside the nation's soul.\n\nGiven their dread of weakness, it was no surprise that Nixon and Kissinger considered post-Vietnam America\u2014and especially the post-Vietnam foreign policy elite\u2014to be dangerously soft. And they saw their challenge as ensuring that the United States did not pay dearly for the infirmity of its ruling class. In part that meant giving America's enemies a reason not to exploit its vulnerability. Nixon opened diplomatic relations with China and he pursued d\u00e9tente with the Soviet Union. And by playing the two communist giants off against each other, and holding out the prospect of economic and diplomatic favors if they eschewed aggression, he tried to achieve the goals of containment without its price. Instead of containing America's foes, he gave them incentives to contain themselves.\n\nNixon's overtures to Moscow and Beijing helped slow the arms race and reduce the threat of nuclear war (at least to the United States; in the late 1960s, Moscow and Beijing came alarmingly close to war with each other). Thawing the cold war also promoted democratic change in the Soviet bloc, since the 1975 Helsinki Accords, a centerpiece of d\u00e9tente, helped spur dissident movements in Eastern Europe. That was the good news. The bad news, from Nixon and Kissinger's perspective, was that Moscow would not\u2014or could not\u2014contain communism's spread in Vietnam and other corners of the third world. For post-toughness liberals like Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, that wasn't a big problem. After all, they argued, America's rapprochement with China proved Kennan's old argument that not every communist regime was America's enemy or Moscow's friend. For McCarthy and McGovern, it hardly mattered what form of government third-world countries chose: They couldn't bloody the United States unless we used them as an excuse to bloody ourselves. If America reached out its hand in friendship, in fact, it could cooperate with left-wing regimes to build a more just and peaceful world.\n\nBut Nixon and Kissinger had little interest in a foreign policy of kumbaya. What McCarthy and McGovern saw as the hand of friendship looked, through Nixon and Kissinger's darker lenses, like the white flag of surrender. Individually, third-world communist regimes might not threaten the United States, they conceded. But the perception of weakness did. The more blood there was in the water, the more ferocious the sharks would grow. For Nixon and Kissinger, it was easy to imagine just how merciless America's enemies would become once they realized Uncle Sam could be pushed around. All Nixon and Kissinger had to do was envision how merciless they would be. \"We'll get them on the ground where we want them. And we'll stick our heels in, step on them hard, and twist,\" Nixon told aides one day in 1971, in explaining how to handle a wounded opponent. \"Get them on the floor and step on them, crush them, show them no mercy.\" No wonder he didn't want to be the one lying on the ground.\n\nIf McCarthy and McGovern took America's post-Vietnam weakness as a license to stop viewing foreign policy as a contest of military strength, for Nixon and Kissinger the lesson was the opposite. The weaker America grew, the more crucial the old NSC-68 idea of \"credibility\"\u2014the belief that America would stand up for its allies and against its adversaries\u2014became. Nixon called it \"the madman theory.\" The more irrational it became for America to use massive force, the more America's enemies needed to believe that its leaders were just crazy enough to do it.\n\nIn their efforts to appear insane, Nixon and Kissinger occasionally convinced each other. Without his calming presence, Kissinger told aides, \"that drunken lunatic\" would \"blow up the world.\" He later informed them that \"our peerless leader has flipped out.\" For his part, Nixon mused that Kissinger required psychiatric care. But the Dr. Strangelove act made less of an impact on its intended audience: America's third-world foes. Soon after taking office in 1969, Nixon tried to bolster his reputation for bloodcurdling toughness by secretly bombing North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, something Johnson had refused to do. But Hanoi was not intimidated and kept trying to topple the government of South Vietnam. The following year\u2014furious that Vice President Spiro Agnew had accused him of \"pussyfooting,\" and after considerable drinking and several screenings of Patton, a movie that begins with the legendary World War II general standing in front of a vast American flag and declaring, \"We're not just going to shoot the bastards, we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks\"\u2014Nixon startled aides by ordering that U.S. troops invade Cambodia outright. \"If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant,\" Nixon told the nation, \"the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.\" Two years later, the president\u2014now sporting a pipe in homage to his new favorite tough guy, General Douglas MacArthur\u2014responded to a communist offensive by blockading North Vietnam's ports and mining its harbors. \"The bastards,\" he vowed, \"have never been bombed like they're going to be bombed this time.\"\n\nIn opening relations with China and initiating d\u00e9tente with the U.S.S.R., Nixon and Kissinger broke from cold war orthodoxy. But in their obsession with \"credibility\" they were still ultra-realists, guided by the axioms of NSC 68. For realists like Kennan and Morgenthau, credibility had meant convincingly pledging to defend America's core interests. Such pledges should be made sparingly, they believed, because making them credible required convincing the American people that the country in question was worth incurring huge costs to defend. Nixon and Kissinger, by contrast, suggested that American credibility was on the line wherever communists and anticommunists squared off. Like his old boss, Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon was trying to limit containment's price without curtailing its scope, which created a mismatch between means and ends. Eisenhower had found that mismatch easier to conceal, because with much of the third world still under colonial rule, global containment wasn't yet truly global, and because he could deploy the CIA without Congress looking over his shoulder. For Nixon and Kissinger, however, the discrepancy was harder to mask. No amount of bombing or bluster could obscure the fact that the American people were no longer willing to sacrifice their sons for Saigon.\n\nIn January 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed a peace deal that on paper kept South Vietnam alive. Afraid that American credibility would be damaged by Saigon's rapid military defeat, Nixon secretly promised its leaders that the United States would \"respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.\" But it was a bluff. Within months Congress passed legislation banning any further U.S. military operations in Vietnam. By April 1975, with Saigon on the verge of defeat, Gerald Ford, who had assumed the presidency after Nixon's resignation, made a last-ditch appeal to Congress for aid to save the crumbling regime: \"U.S. unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to our allies fighting for their lives would seriously affect our credibility throughout the world,\" Ford told a joint session of Congress in a speech written by Kissinger. Not a single member of Congress clapped, and two Democrats walked out. Congress rejected the aid and South Vietnam fell.\n\nVietnam was only the most graphic evidence that global containment was becoming the foreign policy equivalent of a bounced check. Nixon's resignation prompted a Democratic landslide in the midterm elections of 1974, which pushed Congress firmly into the post-toughness camp. \"Scratch a new House member,\" went the expression, \"and you're likely to find an old peace activist.\" Despite Nixon and Ford's efforts, the percentage of GDP spent on defense dropped from more than 8 percent in 1970 to less than 5 percent by 1977. Nixon and Kissinger helped get Chile's leftist president overthrown in 1973, just as Eisenhower had done in Guatemala in 1954. But Congress no longer tolerated that sort of thing. And when news of America's role in the coup became public, the Senate held investigations so grueling that they led to the conviction of Nixon's former CIA director for perjury. When civil war broke out in Angola, Ford funneled arms to anticommunist forces and Kissinger warned that \"if Moscow gets away with this one, it will try again soon in some other area.\" But Congress soon banned the aid and Ford meekly abandoned the policy, leading Kissinger to denounce his boss to reporters.\n\nWhat only a few New Left radicals had argued in the early 1960s\u2014that American democracy was threatened less by communists overseas than by what America's government did to fight them\u2014was becoming conventional wisdom. In 1974, Nixon resigned as a result of Watergate, a vast exercise in White House\u2013authorized criminality set in motion by his fury over newspaper leaks about Vietnam. And Watergate was only the most famous of the crimes that the U.S. government was found to have committed in the cold war's name. A few months after Nixon left office, the New York Times reported that the CIA had conducted a secret audit of its illegal behavior over the preceding decades, which insiders dubbed \"the family jewels.\" Pressed by Congress, Director of Central Intelligence William Colby tacitly admitted that the CIA had conspired to kill a bevy of foreign leaders. It had secretly opened and photographed hundreds of thousands of pieces of domestic mail. And it had administered LSD and other narcotics to unsuspecting Americans in an effort to develop tactics for mind control. In New York and San Francisco, the CIA had actually run brothels in which government-employed prostitutes lured men to secretly monitored rooms and then plied them with drugs to see how they would react. The Agency called it Operation Midnight Climax.\n\nAmerican foreign policy had passed through the looking glass. John Paton Davies was now back from Peru, with his government clearance restored. The policy that he had been persecuted for espousing\u2014diplomatic relations with communist China\u2014was becoming a reality. A New York Times columnist proposed that he be named America's first ambassador to the People's Republic. In 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee\u2014once a symbol of congressional timidity, now a symbol of congressional power\u2014invited him to a kind of coming-out party for global containment's early foes. As cameras flashed, Missouri's Stuart Symington called Davies a \"great American.\" Arkansas' William Fulbright added, \"It is a very strange turn of fate that you gentlemen who reported honestly about conditions [in China] were so persecuted because you were honest about it. This is a strange thing to occur in what is called a civilized country.\"\n\nMeanwhile, in 1975, the Senate committee created to investigate the CIA hauled in Edward Lansdale, the inspiration for Edwin Hillandale of Ugly American fame, to answer questions about U.S. efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. In incredulity and disgust, senators asked whether it was really true that Lansdale had proposed spreading a rumor among Cubans that Christ was about to return to take vengeance upon the godless Castro. (A U.S. submarine was then supposed to shoot flares into the night sky to convince Cubans that the Second Coming had begun.) Exploits that once seemed exciting and noble now looked immoral and a tad pathetic. The hubris of toughness, which Nixon and Kissinger had been keeping on life support, appeared dead. And in 1976, America elected the man who many assumed would be its undertaker.\n\nUnlike George McGovern, James Earl Carter had not spent his life opposing the cold war. In fact he hadn't thought about it much at all. His campaign autobiography, published in 1975, barely mentioned foreign policy, and he almost canceled a trip to Japan that same year when it turned out that none of his aides owned passports.\n\nBut the revelations of America's overseas crimes touched something deep within him. Jimmy Carter was, at his core, a scold. Growing up in a family marred by alcoholism, infidelity, and depression, he had been the straight arrow. When his father sent him to gather boll weevils that had fallen off the cotton shrubs near their Georgia home, young Jimmy rebuked other children for picking them directly from the plants. For his presidential inaugural address, he proposed a quote from Chronicles\u2014\"If my people...turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land\"\u2014until staffers convinced him it was too self-righteous. Well into his presidency, he still corrected aides' grammatical mistakes.\n\nCarter's moralism was also stoked by his experience with race. While only recently alerted to America's sins abroad, he was intimately familiar with the sins for which it needed to repent at home. And as a white Georgian who supported civil rights, he saw himself as something of an agent for that repentance. Carter's father was a staunch segregationist; he may even have taken part in a lynching. But Jimmy, the dutiful son in every other respect, bucked his father's views\u2014once even taking a date to a black church. As an adult, he courageously refused to join the racist White Citizens' Council, even though some members boycotted his business in response. In his inaugural address as Georgia's governor in 1971, he dramatically denounced racism in the state, thus gaining national attention. So while Carter entered presidential politics without firm foreign policy views, he was by temperament and experience conditioned to see world affairs less as a contest for power than as a quest for justice, less as a question of us versus them than right versus wrong. If the civil rights movement had overthrown a system of violence, fear, and hate, thus liberating the decency buried within his beloved South, Carter hoped to extend that struggle to America's role in the world. At home, building Martin Luther King's \"beloved community\" had required overcoming segregation. Around the world, building a \"global community\"\u2014one of Carter's favorite phrases\u2014would require overcoming the cold war.\n\nIn 1976, human rights were also shrewd politics. Liberals were outraged by the abuses of the CIA and by America's support for anticommunist tyrants overseas. Conservatives were furious over d\u00e9tente, which had led Nixon and Ford to downplay repression inside the U.S.S.R. During the campaign, Carter skillfully courted both sides, using human rights to attack Ford from both left and right. Unlike McGovern, Carter didn't challenge the toughness ethic head-on. In fact, his attacks on d\u00e9tente won him the support of many of the unreconstructed cold war Democrats, or \"neoconservatives,\" who had abandoned McGovern four years before.\n\nBut when Carter entered the White House, his balancing act collapsed. The reason was that when liberals and conservatives talked about human rights, they meant fundamentally different things. For conservatives, the essence of world affairs remained conflict. America was locked in an existential battle against an implacable foe, and human rights were a useful way of justifying and waging that battle. Since the cold war was a struggle between moral and immoral ideologies, anything that helped America win it was, in the long run, moral. For post-toughness liberals, by contrast\u2014as for the early New Left\u2014human rights were not a weapon in the cold war, but its antithesis. A moral foreign policy could only be built on love, not fear. And that meant seeing the world not as warring camps, but as a moral community, where all nations, regardless of ideology, cooperated to improve humanity's common estate.\n\nIf Carter flirted with both views during the campaign, as president he tilted clearly to the liberal side. His administration was not devoid of cold warriors: National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was a hawk, although, sensing Carter's proclivities, he did not fully bare his talons at first. But the bulk of Carter's appointments were more dovish. Key post\u2013cold war intellectuals such as Gelb, Warnke, and Lake all got important jobs. Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, and his assistant secretary of state for human rights, Patricia Derian, both came out of the civil rights movement. His first choice to head the CIA, Theodore Sorensen\u2014an outspoken liberal with no experience in intelligence work\u2014so frightened America's spooks that they derailed his nomination.\n\nCarter criticized human rights abuses in the Soviet Union but emphatically rejected the right's effort to use them to scuttle d\u00e9tente. To the contrary, he argued that it was obsessive anticommunism that had damaged human rights around the world. \"We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear,\" he declared a few months after taking office. The implication was clear: The world was less dangerous than the cold warriors had claimed. And if Americans stopped projecting their nightmares onto it, they could make it a more decent place.\n\nIn part that meant acknowledging the diminished significance of military force. Carter's first budget slashed defense spending by 5 percent, and he halted production of big-ticket weapons systems like the B-1 bomber and the neutron bomb. And he wasn't only less willing to build up America's armaments; he was less willing to deploy them. Six days into office, Carter pledged to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea, whose authoritarian regime he had repeatedly condemned. \"We have an aversion to military involvement in foreign countries,\" he explained. \"We are suffering, or benefiting, from the experience that we had in Vietnam.\" And there was more. Carter not only abandoned Lyndon Johnson's policy of sending U.S. troops to fight third-world communism; he also moved away from Richard Nixon's policy of selling weapons to help third-world allies resist communism themselves. If Nixon and Kissinger had tried to practice global containment on the cheap, Carter moved away from the doctrine altogether. He announced sharp cuts in U.S. arms sales to the third world and he halted, or slashed, aid to a throng of anticommunist dictatorships. Carter was not always consistent: Some pro-American tyrannies continued to get aid. But compared to every president since NSC 68, his policies marked a genuine shift. \"We have witnessed perhaps, the end of a phase in our own foreign policy, shaped largely since 1945,\" declared Brzezinski. \"Preoccupation particularly with the cold war as a dominant [concern] of U.S. foreign policy, no longer seems warranted.\"\n\nIf post-toughness foreign policy meant reducing military support for pro-Western tyrants, it also meant reaching out to the kind of leftist regimes that the United States had once tried to overthrow. In 1977, Carter began to do what Raskin had proposed a decade and a half earlier: normalize relations with Cuba. He removed U.S. travel restrictions to the island, and the two nations established low-level diplomatic ties. In an interview with ABC, Castro told Barbara Walters that Carter was the first American president he actually liked. Carter also moved to normalize relations with communist governments in Angola and a newly unified Vietnam.\n\nThe Carter administration pointed to its Angola policy with particular pride. When Marxists seized power there, and Cuban troops began patrolling the country, Kissinger and others had predicted disaster unless the United States intervened. Instead Congress cut off aid to anticommunist forces, and Carter refused to reinstate it. And by 1977, the regime in Luanda was seeking closer ties to Washington and the Cuban troops were guarding the refineries where American companies drilled for oil. For Carter officials, the lesson was clear: \"If we maintain calm, keep our doors open, we are likely, in most cases, to find common interests with new governments,\" explained Undersecretary of State David Newsom.\n\nThat was too rosy. Not every leftist regime would abandon its anti-Americanism for a price. Carter sometimes seemed to forget that if nations had interests in common, they also had interests in conflict. But if Carter failed to establish a global community that cut across the cold war divide, neither did his pullback from global containment imperil American security. Some third-world countries went communist on his watch, but given their lack of military and economic power, they added little, if anything, to Soviet strength. Communism brought misery to people in countries like Angola, but the anticommunist alternatives were usually little better, and by refusing to arm regimes and rebel movements that brutalized their people, Carter won the United States some modest goodwill. By the middle of his term, the burying of the hubris of toughness appeared well under way. \"In the early period of the Carter administration,\" wrote Marcus Raskin, \"attempts were made...to organize a foreign policy that was not totally dependent on military power.\"\n\nAnd then, in the blink of an eye, events intruded, and the post-toughness moment was gone.\n\n## CHAPTER ELEVEN\n\n## FIGHTING WITH RABBITS\n\nOn April 20, 1979, Jimmy Carter got into a fight with a rabbit. He was fishing on a pond at his Georgia farm, and had just cast his rod into the water when he noticed the creature paddling toward him. It seemed angry. Its nostrils were flaring, its teeth were bared, and it was hissing in a menacing way. When it tried to board his boat, Carter clubbed it with his oar.\n\nUpon returning to the White House, he recounted the story over lemonade to several aides. They were dubious. Rabbits, they pointed out, are not known either for swimming or for attacking people. And if the animal was so threatening, why had the Secret Service agents onshore not come to the president's aid? Carter did not take kindly to having his honesty questioned. He had, after all, campaigned for president by pledging never to tell a lie. And so, propelled by two of his signature personality traits\u2014self-righteousness and micromanagement\u2014he went searching for a photo to corroborate his account. Eventually he found one: a White House photographer had captured the furry predator speeding away from his boat. Triumphant, the president showed the evidence to his staff.\n\nThat should have been the end of it. But in August, Press Secretary Jody Powell, perhaps looking to humanize his boss, passed on the anecdote to the Associated Press. Big mistake. The media, desperate for copy in a slow news month, leaped on the story. \"Bunny Goes Bugs: Rabbit Attacks President,\" screamed a front-page article in the Washington Post. In homage to the 1975 blockbuster about a killer shark, the paper dubbed Carter's assailant \"Paws.\"\n\nAll three nightly news programs featured the incident. Carter was questioned about it for a week, and when journalists learned that there was a photo floating around the White House, they filed a Freedom of Information Act request for its release. Conservative columnists Robert Novak and George Will alleged that Carter's weak response to his amphibious attacker mirrored his weak response to the Soviet threat. (It didn't help that rather than admitting that he had clubbed the rabbit, Carter, fearful of offending animal rights activists and in violation of his no-lying pledge, told the press that he had merely splashed water on it with his oar.) Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell explained that in the book of Revelation, swamp rabbits are associated with Satan. Carter, he declared, should have throttled the beast.\n\nJournalists loved the rabbit story for the same reason they loved stories about Gerald Ford falling down stairs: It confirmed their stereotypes. By the summer of 1979, the press no longer viewed Carter as an idealistic outsider bringing down-home decency to Washington. They viewed him as a wimp. Post-toughness foreign policy, with its vision of a world defined more by cooperation than conflict, more by love than fear, had appeared politically ascendant in the mid-1970s, with the public sick of war and comforted by d\u00e9tente. But by the time rabbit-gate hit the papers, the world looked nastier, and for Jimmy Carter, Washington was getting nastier, too.\n\nCarter had been blunt: There would be no more Vietnams. In 1978, when Soviet arms and Cuban troops poured into Ethiopia to help its Marxist president retake a stretch of desert called the Ogaden from neighboring Somalia, Carter rebuffed Brzezinski's suggestion that America send a naval task force to the Indian Ocean in response. His caution made sense, given that Somalia had committed the initial aggression, and that the Soviets and Cubans were actually restraining Ethiopia from launching a wider war. Still, among hawkish foreign policy watchers, the events in Africa's horn rankled. D\u00e9tente had been sold to Americans, in part, as a way of curbing Soviet meddling in the third world. (It was one of Kissinger's creative untruths: Moscow had never promised to do any such thing.) Yet while U.S. diplomats were backslapping their Russian counterparts at chummy superpower summits, communists had taken Vietnam, then Angola, and now Ethiopia. Brzezinski warned that the mood in Washington was shifting. American losses in the third world, he told his boss, \"are creating the conditions for domestic reaction.\"\n\nHe didn't know how right he was. The Ogaden may not have mattered very much to the United States, but Iran did. For a quarter century it had been a prize ally. In 1973, with the U.S. economy reeling from an Arab oil embargo, Iranian crude had been an economic lifeline. And in Vietnam's wake, with the United States no longer willing to contain third-world communism with American boys, the Nixon administration had turned the Shah's kingdom into a virtual U.S. armory, selling it some $20 billion of weapons designed to keep the Soviets from the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. By 1976, there were seventy thousand Americans living in Iran, mostly tending to its oil industry and burgeoning military machine. And while Carter privately chided the Shah for his dismal human rights record, even he considered Tehran too valuable to alienate because of moral qualms. On December 31, 1977, the Carters went to celebrate New Year's Eve at the Shah's royal palace, which one journalist compared to Versailles in the days of Louis XIV. As the minutes counted down to 1978, and waiters distributed caviar, Dom Perignon, flaming ice cream, and diced partridge, the president called Iran \"an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.\" He noted the \"respect and the admiration and the love\" that Iranians felt for their leader. And he said he felt the same way: \"There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship.\"\n\nEight months later, the island of stability was underwater. Riots gripped the country; the Shah spent the following New Year's Eve under siege; by mid-January 1979 he was in exile, replaced by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose relationship to the United States was not exactly defined by gratitude and friendship. He called America the \"Great Satan.\"\n\nThen, in June, Nicaragua's pro-American dictator, Anastasio Somoza, fell to the leftist Sandinistas, giving Moscow its first new potential beachhead in the Western Hemisphere since the coup in Chile in 1973. In reality, these setbacks weren't as disastrous as Carter's critics claimed. Iran's new theocratic regime, while bad news for the United States, was bad news for the U.S.S.R., too, since it helped inspire Muslim opposition to communist rule across the border in Afghanistan and within the Soviet Union itself. Communist governments in Angola and Ethiopia offered the Soviets few benefits and lots of headaches. By decade's end, Moscow's new African clients were costing so much money and proving such poor Marxists that some Kremlin officials suggested pulling the plug. And, most important, even as communism made gains in the developing world, it was starting to rot inside the U.S.S.R. In 1975, a massive agricultural shortfall forced the Soviet Union to begin importing grain, something it would do every subsequent year until it ceased to exist. Despite high oil prices, which kept the Soviet economy afloat, Russians by 1979 were loudly complaining about shortages of medicine, soap, toothpaste, and thread. The Soviet Union was like a boxer who kept landing jabs but whose coronary arteries were contracting, slowly shutting off blood to the heart.\n\nBut in the late Carter years, Americans weren't particularly focused on the Soviet Union's weakness; they were too preoccupied with their own. A president skilled in the politics of manhood might have found ways of assuaging those fears at limited cost. But as a Democrat with little foreign policy experience, Carter was not well positioned to do so. And he didn't even fully grasp the problem. By 1979, the ethic of toughness\u2014which had appeared dead\u2014was rising from the grave. It would not be laid to rest until Carter was out of office and Ronald Reagan had taken his place.\n\nThe story of the resurgence of the toughness ethic in the 1970s is also the story of neoconservatism. And the story of neoconservatism is, to a large degree, the story of an impish, pugilistic garment worker's son named Irving Kristol. Even as a child, Kristol had the instincts of a conservative, which is to say, he revered authority and tradition. He experienced Orthodox Judaism in its crudest and dumbest form: The rabbi at his Brooklyn yeshiva told him to spit when he passed a church, slapped him in the mouth when he misbehaved, and made him deliver his bar mitzvah speech in Yiddish, a language Kristol did not understand. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, Kristol venerated traditional Judaism nonetheless, even if he could never quite explain why.\n\nIn the late 1930s, he enrolled at City College of New York and became a Trotskyist, ostensibly committed to world revolution. Yet underneath he remained a conservative. He began reading Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian theologians, which was an odd thing for a Jewish Trotskyist to do, and found himself attracted to their emphasis on original sin. He venerated Lionel Trilling, the great Columbia literary critic, who, like Niebuhr, emphasized the tragic element of the human condition. Then, after graduating, Kristol was drafted into World War II, where he fought in a unit \"heavily populated by thugs or near-thugs from places like Cicero, [Illinois] (Al Capone's home base).\" The experience left him even more skeptical of human nature. His fellow enlisted men, Kristol discovered, were \"inclined to loot, to rape, and to shoot prisoners of war. Only army vigilance kept them in check.\" And so for Kristol, the vigilance of people in power became very important. \"My wartime experience,\" he later wrote, \"did have the effect of dispelling any remnants of antiauthority sentiments (always weak, I now think) that were cluttering up my mind.\"\n\nBy the 1950s, Kristol was no longer a Troskyist; he was a cold war liberal. Calling himself a conservative barely occurred to him, since, as far as he could tell, there were no conservative intellectuals in 1950s America, and if there were, they hated the New Deal, which he did not. But it was the conservative elements of '50s liberalism\u2014its anticommunism, its anti-utopianism, its belief that ordinary people were no better than the societies in which they lived, and quite possibly worse\u2014that Kristol liked best. In the '50s, when you could be a liberal and a believer in the toughness ethic at the same time, Irving Kristol was both.\n\nBut by the early 1970s, that was no longer possible. The Democratic Party was repudiating the toughness ethic, and so Irving Kristol decided that to remain an old-fashioned toughness liberal, he had to become, oddly enough, a \"conservative.\" Many other \"neoconservatives\" clung to the term liberal. They accused the McGovern Democrats of linguistic theft. But for his part, Kristol embraced the new term. He explained that when you're named Irving, you learn not to worry about labels.\n\nWhat made Irving Kristol a neoconservative was not his support for Vietnam. In fact, like many neocons in the late 1960s and early '70s, he was ambivalent about the war. What Kristol and his allies really cared about was not the war but the movement against it: the New Left. And what they hated about the New Left was its revolt against authority, its belief that by liberating Americans from their existing institutions it could build far better ones in their place. For Kristol, who believed that people liberated from traditional constraints were little more than animals, this was utopianism: \"the main source of all evil in the world.\" And if liberals were no longer willing to do what the army had done to those thugs from Cicero, Illinois\u2014put down their convulsions by force\u2014then he would ally himself with whoever would.\n\nThe first institutions that the neoconservatives set out to defend against the utopian threat were universities, which held a special place in their heart. At City College in the 1930s, Kristol and his friends had been too poor to buy a sandwich. Yet they used that ramshackle institution as a springboard from the ghettos of Brooklyn and the Bronx into a world of intellectual exploration and middle-class comfort. It was quite a shock, therefore, to watch the \"rich college fucks\" (in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's words) of SDS denounce America's great universities as tools of cold war repression. Amazement turned to horror as the pampered radicals employed rhetorical and sometimes actual violence to achieve their demands. And horror turned to fury as campus administrators buckled before the student mob.\n\nBy the late 1960s, SDS, radicalized by Vietnam and by the brutality with which the police often greeted antiwar protest, had abandoned non-violence in favor of what some called \"armed love.\" (\"We must learn to fight as well as seek love,\" explained a New York\u2013based SDS faction called the Motherfuckers, which blended hippie values with antiwar fury. \"We must take up the gun as well as the joint.\") Kristol and the neoconservatives were not surprised: In their mind, liberation from existing authority usually ended in blood. In 1968, the SDS leader at Columbia, a suburban Jewish kid from New Jersey named Mark Rudd\u2014whose mother once brought him a home-cooked meal in the middle of a sit-in\u2014sent a letter to the university's president. \"There is only one thing left to say,\" he wrote. \"It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation.... 'Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stickup.'\" Two years later, a garment worker's son turned sociologist named Nathan Glazer, who had graduated from City College in 1944, announced that he had seen enough. \"How does a radical\" like himself, he asked, \"end up by early 1970s a conservative?\" His answer: by watching nihilists like Rudd, who sought the \"destruction of authority\u2014any authority.\" He had \"learned,\" Glazer explained, \"in quite strictly conservative fashion, to develop a certain respect for what was.\"\n\nIf that respect applied to universities, it also applied to cities. Neoconservatives loved cities; urban America was the only America most of them knew. And in the late 1960s, they came to believe that the New Left and its soft liberal enablers were destroying city life. In 1965, Kristol, Glazer, and Daniel Bell helped found the Public Interest, which cast a skeptical eye on liberal efforts to radically improve the estate of the urban poor. The writers for the Public Interest had no ideological problem with government; unlike traditional conservatives, they did not worship the free market. But they believed in authority. And they decided that in its efforts to liberate the poor from the conditions that oppressed them, the New Left was undermining the traditional forms of authority\u2014be they family, police, ward boss, church, or neighborhood school\u2014that made ghetto life tolerable at all. When reformers bused kids across town, or increased welfare payments to single mothers, or tore down old neighborhoods to build new ones in their place, they may have believed they were merely removing the obstacles that denied people opportunity and happiness. But they were actually meddling with entrenched patterns of life, patterns that reflected human nature as it really was, not as the New Left utopians wished it to be. Trying to change those patterns, warned Kristol and his colleagues, would create more misery and violence, not less. The more dramatic the effort at progress, the more dramatic the failure that would result.\n\nWhat was true for universities and cities, the neocons argued, was also true for families. Patriarchal authority might be arbitrary and unjust; it might involve force. But it was rooted in human nature. Efforts to liberate women and children from the traditional family, insisted Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz\u2014the second most important neoconservative polemicist, after Kristol\u2014would only make things worse.\n\nNeocons made a similar argument about the Democratic Party, an institution to which, in the 1970s, many of them still felt attached. Between 1968 and 1972, a commission headed by\u2014who else?\u2014George McGovern had instituted a flurry of reforms aimed at fumigating the party's smoke-filled rooms. But a little-known neoconservative political scientist named Jeane Kirkpatrick insisted that the reforms had backfired. Rather than making the party more democratic, they had merely shifted power to a new class of political consultants who were even more selfish and unrepresentative than the party bosses they replaced. It was no surprise that Kirkpatrick, like Kristol, admired Niebuhr. Like Niebuhr, she insisted that the language of reason often concealed the reality of interest, and that the pursuit of political perfection was a dangerous game. \"In party reform as in life,\" Kirkpatrick wrote, \"good intentions are not enough, and wishing does not make it so.\"\n\nIf neoconservatives loved universities, cities, patriarchy, and the Democratic Party, they also loved American power. Since many of them were second-generation American Jews, who had entered the middle class just a few years after their European brethren entered Dachau and Buchenwald, they felt with particular intensity that only American strength kept barbarism at bay. And since most of them knew little about Russia, but a lot about communism, having witnessed Stalinist thuggishness and duplicity from the other side of the City College cafeteria, they generally interpreted Soviet actions as the result of a fanatical ideological drive. Stalinism and Nazism had taught them that evil was real and that America\u2014even in its worst moments\u2014was not it. In the late 1960s they watched in disgust as the New Left compared Lyndon Johnson to Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro to Jesus Christ. And in the 1970s that disgust only grew as they saw America retreat, its enemies swarm, and post-toughness liberals declare that harmony was breaking out across the globe.\n\nThe neoconservatives generally insisted that when it came to foreign policy they held the same beliefs as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson; it was the post-toughness liberals who had changed. \"In order to become a neoconservative,\" Kristol quipped, \"all you had to do was stand in place.\" There was a lot of truth in that. Like Kennedy and Johnson, the neocons saw Hitlers everywhere, and like Kennedy and Johnson, they saw American power as constrained not by finite resources but merely by an irresolute will. What the neocons did not acknowledge was that in carrying on the ultra-realist tradition of the Best and the Brightest they were actually abandoning the older realist tradition of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, Lippmann, and Kennan, which had recognized that American power and wisdom were limited, and had seen anticommunism as a vital but partial truth. While Kristol and Kirkpatrick paid homage to the tragic toughness of the 1940s, they were actually heirs to the crusading toughness of the 1960s. In their obsession with anti-utopianism, they forgot that anti-utopianism, when pushed too far, can become hubristic, too.\n\nDuring the 1976 campaign, the neoconservatives had held out some hope for Jimmy Carter. They were still mostly Democrats, and he had attacked Ford from the right as well as the left. But when Carter stocked his administration with post-toughness liberals like Warnke, Lake, Gelb, and Young, the neocons were enraged. Carter offered only one of the neocons a job: as special envoy to Micronesia. (\"Not for Polynesia. Not for Macronesia,\" joked Podhoretz's stepson-in-law, Elliott Abrams. \"But Micronesia.\") So they decided to tear him apart.\n\nIf the Camelot gang had often compared the 1950s to the '30s, the neoconservatives now called the '70s America's decade of drift and peril. \"The parallels with England in 1937 are here, and this revival of the culture of appeasement ought to be troubling our sleep,\" wrote Podhoretz in 1977. (If that was too subtle, the essay was accompanied by a drawing of Carter carrying an umbrella.) Kennedy had cited the Gaither Commission as evidence that Moscow was pulling ahead while America slept. Now the neocons pointed to Team B, a group of cold warriors\u2014led by Paul Nitze, the crusty author of NSC 68; Richard Pipes, a right-leaning historian of Russia; and a young arms control wonk named Paul Wolfowitz\u2014who claimed that while America was slashing its defense budget Moscow had taken a decisive edge. And like the men of Camelot, the neocons often claimed that America's \"culture of appeasement\" was a culture of effeminacy; the missile gap stemmed, once again, from a manliness gap. Podhoretz, echoing Schlesinger in 1958, announced that homosexuality was sapping America's martial spirit, just as it had sapped Britain's after World War I. Carter, a writer for the Wall Street Journal declared, \"wouldn't twist arms. He didn't like to threaten or rebuke.\" He donned sweaters. \"He even kissed Brezhnev!\" He was America's first female president.\n\nThe neocon critique of Carter was even harsher than Kennedy's and Schlesinger's attack on Ike. For the restless cold war intellectuals of the late 1950s, Eisenhower was simply tired and complacent. For the neocons, by contrast, Carter's problem went deeper. He did not merely lack the energy to wield force; he inhabited a fantasy world in which force no longer mattered. He was like the university presidents who spoke of understanding student radicals because they lacked the guts to expel them or the mayors who talked about the root causes of crime because they feared locking up rioters. Like other authority figures unwilling to defend their domains, Carter was using the rhetoric of love to mask a failure of will.\n\nThe result, from the neocon perspective, was predictable. Because Carter would not use force to maintain order, the world's \"juvenile delinquents\"\u2014a phrase Kristol applied to anti-American regimes in the third world\u2014were running wild. And as in America's cities and college campuses, the result was not harmony and love, but barbarism and chaos. It was true, Kristol conceded, that American \"power may indeed corrupt.\" But \"we are now learning that, in the world of nations as it exists, [American] powerlessness can be even more corrupting and demoralizing.\"\n\nFor Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Oklahoma-born Baptist and mother of three who would become an unlikely icon in a movement dominated by Jewish men, it was d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. The same post-toughness na\u00efvet\u00e9 that had undermined traditional authority in the Democratic Party was now undermining American authority around the world. Once again a romantic view of human nature, and a lack of respect for institutions as they actually were, was producing unintended consequences of the ugliest kind. Kirkpatrick was very upset about Nicaragua and Iran. In her view, Somoza and the Shah were a bit like the bosses who had run the old Democratic Party. Their authority did not stem from democratic principle; it stemmed from tradition, and it relied on force. And so when antigovernment militants in Nicaragua and Iran rebelled, demanding liberation from authoritarian rule, Carter sympathized. He told Somoza and the Shah that America, with its new fidelity to human rights, would not support a military crack-down. Instead America's longtime clients would have to find a more democratic basis on which to continue their rule. In Kirkpatrick's view, this was na\u00efvet\u00e9 on stilts. Authoritarian regimes like Nicaragua's and Iran's were not thin crusts, which could be torn off to reveal a glimmering democracy underneath. They reflected the culture of their societies, societies no more capable of sustaining liberal democracy than of flying a man to the moon. In a 1979 Commentary essay titled \"Dictatorships and Double Standards,\" Kirkpatrick wrote that \"democratic governments have come into being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of participation.\" The process usually took \"decades, if not centuries.\" Believing Iran and Nicaragua could democratize overnight was like imagining that you could eliminate poverty by bulldozing a slum. Carter, she argued, \"is, par excellence, the kind of liberal most likely to confound revolution with idealism, change with progress, optimism with virtue.\"\n\nFor Kirkpatrick, it was the same, awful story: Believing people were fundamentally better than the institutions that governed their lives, and would create a freer, more loving society if liberated from external constraint, was as na\u00efve in Iran and Nicaragua as in Harlem. It was, she believed, high time that Americans accepted the world for what it was: a nasty place in which people were generally no better than their governments, professions of goodwill usually weren't worth the paper they were written on, and moral progress\u2014when it came at all\u2014was grindingly slow. Foreign policy was a long, hard, often ugly battle between a lesser evil called the United States and a network of greater evils headquartered in Red Square. To think it was anything else, or could become anything else anytime soon, would only make things worse. \"We are daily surrounded by assertions that force plays no role in the world,\" she declared. \"Unfortunately it does.\"\n\nIn the final months of 1979, those assertions suddenly stopped. On November 4, Iranian militants scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; then flung open the gates for their armed colleagues as local police stood by. By nightfall, seventy-six Americans sat blindfolded, tied to chairs or beds, in the ambassador's house. Nothing could have more graphically illustrated the neocons' claim that America was weak in a dangerous world.\n\nThe hostage crisis transfixed the nation. American television reporters set up shop outside the embassy gate, where they filmed shackled and blindfolded hostages being paraded before jeering crowds. Local news stations hunted down hostage relatives from their city or state, staking out their houses and broadcasting their anguished pleas. On the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite signed off every night by announcing the number of days the Americans had been held captive. If more than a decade earlier his on-air revulsion during the Tet offensive had marked the end of the toughness era, now his on-air revulsion at the hostage crisis seemed to mark the end of the post-toughness era as well.\n\nCarter tried diplomacy and imposed sanctions. But the big question\u2014the neocon question\u2014was force. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance argued no. He had been a junior member of the cold war establishment: Yale and Yale Law, a gunnery officer during World War II, a distinguished corporate lawyer, McNamara's deputy secretary of defense. But Vietnam had changed him; he was now a senior member of the post-toughness foreign policy class, a patron to men like Gelb, Warnke, and Lake. He was less of a moralist than McGovern and Carter but he shared their belief that military force was usually useless or worse. Diplomacy and accommodation, while hardly glamorous, were the best tools America had. \"Most Americans,\" he declared after the hostages were seized, \"now recognize that we alone cannot dictate events. This recognition is not a sign of America's decline. It is a sign of growing American maturity in a complex world.\"\n\nHis chief bureaucratic rival, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, did not believe that for a minute. Born in Poland and educated in Canada and at Harvard, Brzezinski was naturally aggressive. His relentless style and angular features led Carter's chief of staff to dub him \"Woody Woodpecker.\" Playing soccer once at a White House picnic, he charged the ball with such ferocity that colleagues ran for cover.\n\nIn his early career, he had been an unabashed hawk. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he called on the Kennedy administration to bomb. In 1965, he debated alongside McGeorge Bundy, and against Hans Morgenthau, in favor of American intervention in Vietnam. As late as 1968, he was still urging America to stay there, if necessary for thirty years. We must show \"we have the staying power,\" he pleaded. America must not \"chicken out.\"\n\nBut by the 1970s, Brzezinski could see which way the wind was blowing. And he was not one to tilt at windmills. So at Columbia, where he taught, he changed the name of his center from the Research Institute on Communist Affairs to the Research Institute on International Change and shifted his focus from anticommunism to interdependence. By the time he entered the Carter administration he was, like his boss, heralding the emergence of a \"global community\" where \"elements of cooperation prevail over competition.\"\n\nCritics suspected that this was all an act, that in his heart, Zbig still considered the world a harsh and unforgiving place. As early as 1978, he had urged a show of force in response to the Soviet intervention in the Horn of Africa. And in 1979, when Somoza and the Shah fell, he sloughed off his prior talk of global cooperation like an outer skin. On Iran he urged military action, even though it might endanger the hostages, so America's enemies would learn that molesting the United States still carried a price. He mocked Vance as \"the last Vietnam casualty,\" declaring that his colleague was \"so worried after the disastrous use of force in Vietnam that he lacks the will to use force again.\" When Carter fretted about the loss of life that an attack on Iran might bring, Brzezinski bluntly informed him that international affairs were \"not a kindergarten.\"\n\nIt was a sign of how far the pendulum had swung\u2014of how eager Carter now was to use force\u2014that he authorized a rescue effort that stood little chance of success. (The plan's proponents actually called that one of its virtues: The mission was so implausible, they argued, that it would take the Iranians by surprise.) On April 24, 1980, eight U.S. helicopters flew to a secret location in the Iranian desert. There they were meant to rendezvous with cargo planes that would help them refuel before flying hundreds more miles to another secret base, nearer Tehran. From there the rescuers would transfer to trucks, drive to the U.S. Embassy, overwhelm the captors, and bundle the hostages onto helicopters, which would fly to another secret location, where planes would whisk them out of Iran. That was the plan. In reality, as the helicopters reached their first desert outpost, massive clouds of dust caused several of them to malfunction, leading Carter to abort the mission. To make matters worse, a helicopter and a plane crashed into one another as they were trying to leave, killing eight American troops. At 1 A.M. on April 25, Carter broke the news to the American people. It was yet another humiliation. Vance had already resigned in disgust.\n\nAnalytically, it made little sense to blame the disasters in Iran on post-toughness foreign policy. The Islamic revolution, after all, was the bitter fruit of America's decades-long support for that country's tyranny. The real presidential villains were not Carter\u2014who just happened to be in office when the dam broke\u2014but Eisenhower, who had overthrown a democratically elected Iranian prime minister in 1953, and Nixon, whose endless weapons sales had made the Shah think he was invincible. The problem wasn't that America hadn't seen Iran through a cold war prism; it was that America had only seen Iran through a cold war prism. And had Carter followed Kirkpatrick's advice and taken forceful military action to save the Shah, he just would have made Iranians hate the United States, and its puppet regime, even more. As for the hostages, Carter did try military intervention. The failure of his rescue effort actually illustrated one of post-toughness foreign policy's main axioms: Military force often doesn't work.\n\nBut for Carter politically, the events in Iran were a catastrophe. And, incredibly, things got worse. In the middle of the hostage nightmare, eighty-five thousand Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to prop up a communist regime threatened by Islamist rebels (rebels who, ironically, drew inspiration from Iran). Never before had Moscow invaded a country it had not conquered during World War II. The neocons brandished their Munich analogies. Brzezinski warned that Afghanistan was the first step in a Soviet bid for the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, an area he called \"the arc of crisis.\"\n\nIn truth, as Soviet archives would later reveal, Kremlin officials had no such designs; they merely hoped to avoid a fundamentalist Afghan regime that might stir up rebellion among Muslims inside the U.S.S.R. At one point, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev even asked an aide where this \"arc of crisis\" that the Americans kept talking about actually was. Far from being a launching pad for further conquests, the Afghan invasion left the Soviet Union dangerously overstretched. To hear the neocons tell it, the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s was like Germany in the 1930s, growing ever more powerful as the Western democracies buried their heads in the sand. But, geopolitically, the 1970s actually proved a net loss for the Soviets, since both Egypt, once Moscow's most important ally in the Middle East, and China, once Moscow's most important ally in Asia, shifted to America's side. The Afghan invasion proved the biggest net loss of all, as Moscow threw vast sums of money and vast numbers of lives into a savage, unnecessary, unwinnable war that hastened the demise of the Soviet Union itself.\n\nBut to the Carter administration, already reeling from a string of setbacks and humiliations, the Afghan invasion looked downright apocalyptic. Aides offered Carter a range of retaliatory measures. He chose them all. He embargoed grain exports to the U.S.S.R., expelled Soviet diplomats, cut cultural ties, restricted Aeroflot flights into the United States, and announced that America would boycott the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. And that was only the beginning. If he had backed away from post-toughness foreign policy when the hostages were seized, he now ripped it to shreds. Human rights became an afterthought, as America rushed aid to autocratic allies like Pakistan. The CIA was unleashed. (\"We need to remove unwarranted restraints on America's ability to collect intelligence,\" declared Carter, failing to mention that he was one of the people who had imposed those restraints in the first place.) Arms control was now dead, as Carter told the Senate not even to bother voting on the SALT II nuclear agreement, which his administration had painstakingly negotiated. U.S. forces flooded into the Middle East as the Pentagon scrambled to build military installations in the dictatorships of Kenya, Somalia, and Oman. Americans, Carter declared, must abandon their dream of a \"simple world\" of \"universal goodwill\"\u2014who could have encouraged that?\u2014and face the \"sometimes dangerous world that really exists.\"\n\nIt was like a time warp; all the old analogies came flooding back. Brzezinski compared Carter's response to the Afghan invasion to Truman's response to communist aggression in Turkey and Greece. The White House unveiled a \"Carter Doctrine,\" deliberately meant to echo Truman's in 1947, under which America would forcibly repel any threat to the Persian Gulf. \"We must pay whatever price\"\u2014where had Americans heard that before?\u2014\"to remain the strongest nation in the world,\" Carter declared. \"Aggression unopposed,\" he warned, \"becomes a contagious disease.\"\n\nThat spring, Vice President Walter Mondale addressed the U.S. Olympic Committee, urging them to comply with Carter's call for a boycott of the 1980 games. Going to Moscow, he declared, would be like going to the Berlin Olympics of 1936. \"The story of Hitler's rise,\" he declared, was \"a chronicle of the free world's failure: of opportunities not seized, aggression not opposed, appeasement not condemned.\" Now America faced the same choice and \"history holds its breath.\"\n\nIt was a resurrection story, or so it seemed. Born from the shame of Munich, toughness foreign policy had grown to excess in the golden decades of the early cold war, died in the rice paddies of Vietnam, and was now being reborn in the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush. Except that it was not; it was all a mirage. The hubris of toughness was not being revived, any more than Franklin Roosevelt had revived Woodrow Wilson's hubris of reason during World War II. It had simply never received a proper burial. No post-Vietnam president had successfully reconciled the politics of manhood with the reality of limits. Until Ronald Reagan, a man who considered himself FDR's heir, and in a strange sort of way, actually was.\n\n## CHAPTER TWELVE\n\n## IF THERE IS A BEAR?\n\nOne summer day, sometime in the 1980s, an army colonel named Samuel Trautman went to see a Green Beret who had served under his command in Vietnam. The man had fallen on hard times. Upon his return to the United States, hippies had thrown garbage on him and called him \"baby killer.\" Brutal flashbacks from his days as a prisoner of war had left him unable to hold down a job. Now he was a prisoner again, arrested for rampaging through a northwestern town where he had gone to find the last remaining member of his unit, only to learn that the man had died from Agent Orange.\n\nTrautman came with an offer. The Green Beret could go free on one condition: He must return to Vietnam, on a top-secret mission to find the POWs still under Hanoi's control. In the courtyard of a prison labor camp, as inmates broke rocks under a sweltering sun, John Rambo looked at his former commander and asked, \"Do we get to win this time?\"\n\nIn 1985, Rambo became the smash hit of the summer by answering that question with an earsplitting, kick-ass \"Yes!\" In the film, Rambo returns to Vietnam, kills communists by the dozen, frees his imprisoned comrades, and is awarded the Medal of Honor by America's patriotic new president, Ronald Reagan.\n\nArt, if you can call it that, was imitating life. In the 1980s, Reagan\u2014a career Hollywood actor whose wife sometimes greeted him when he left the Oval Office by yelling \"cut\"\u2014often seemed to be starring in a movie of his own, which followed the Rambo script. Less than a month after taking office, he publicly awarded the Medal of Honor to a Green Beret who had saved the lives of eight men while enduring thirty-seven bullet and bayonet wounds in eastern Laos, but had been denied the award because of a technicality. America's Vietnam veterans, Reagan told a Pentagon crowd, \"came home without victory not because they'd been defeated but because they'd been denied permission to win.\"\n\nIn Reagan: The Movie, America, after a long string of indignities and defeats, finally remembers how to win. It returns to Vietnam, slays its demons, and recaptures the confidence of a bygone age. It was as if the country had turned back the clock to 1964, relegating the entire post-toughness era to the status of a bad dream. (The other big movie of 1985 was actually titled Back to the Future.) In 1982, Hasbro Toys resumed producing the G.I. Joe action figure, which it had discontinued the year after Saigon fell. By 1985, it was America's bestselling toy. That same year in New York, Vietnam vets got the ticker-tape parade they had long been denied. \"This country has really needed to flex its muscles,\" declared the man who played Rambo, Sylvester Stallone. \"The other little nations were pulling at us, saying, 'You're bullying. Don't tread on us.' So we pulled back.... And what happened, as usual, is people took kindness for weakness, and America lost its esteem. Right now, it's just flexing. You might say America has gone back to the gym.\"\n\nReagan: The Movie delighted audiences. But it was a fantasy. When it came to foreign policy, the real Reagan didn't turn back the clock to 1964. He never seriously considered enforcing global containment with U.S. troops. Instead of refighting Vietnam, he created Potemkin Vietnams where America won because it could not possibly lose. He served up victories on the cheap, triumphs without risk. Reagan's critics often accused him of reviving the chest-thumping spirit that had led to Vietnam. But they missed the point. For Reagan, chest-thumping was in large measure a substitute for Vietnams, a way of accommodating to the new restraints on U.S. power while still helping Americans feel strong and proud. Reagan didn't revive the hubris of toughness. He did what Carter had tried but failed to do: He performed the last rites.\n\nThe key was his relationship to evil. Or, more precisely, his lack of relationship. For a half century, evil had lain at the heart of the toughness ethic. American intellectuals had discovered it in the 1930s and '40s as the Depression and Stalinism and Nazism shattered the progressive dream of reason. By the mid-1960s, when America entered Vietnam, the discovery had become an obsession. Since evil was terrifying, so were the Vietcong, and since evil was permanent, it was always 1938. The New Left, and for a time, Jimmy Carter, had rebelled against that, insisting that despite their differences, nations\u2014like individuals\u2014were capable of cooperation, harmony, even love. But Carter's timing and his political instincts were both bad, and in 1979 post-toughness foreign policy collapsed.\n\nFor neoconservatives like Kristol and Kirkpatrick, Carter's failures reaffirmed the toughness ethic. They showed that in foreign policy, as in urban policy, dramatic progress was usually a mirage; people just weren't built that way. The key was to embrace the lesser evil and defend it with force. When Reagan's ideological allies talked about overcoming the Vietnam syndrome and getting back to fighting the cold war, that's what they meant. It's what they believed Ronald Reagan had been elected to do. But the joke was on them because Reagan didn't believe in evil, at least not as a powerful or permanent thing. He believed what the New Left believed: that beneath all bad authority lay good people, waiting to be set free. Communism, the nuclear standoff, the cold war\u2014he saw them as ugly crusts concealing the glorious humanity concealed beneath. \"We have it in our power to begin the world again,\" Reagan liked to say, quoting Thomas Paine. It was, the columnist George Will complained, \"the least-conservative sentiment conceivable,\" a hint of the transgressions to come.\n\nReagan didn't fret about evil because he didn't see misfortune. He was America's Mr. Magoo: No matter how many buildings collapsed around him, he kept marching to the merry beat of his internal drummer. (In this regard, he was the temperamental opposite of Richard Nixon, who seethed with bitterness no matter how high he climbed.) Reagan's childhood can fairly be described as harrowing\u2014yet he refused to be harrowed. His father was a drunk, a man who kept destroying the family's screen door because rather than opening it he would walk right on through. One day when Ron was eleven, he found his old man passed out, spread-eagle in the snow, and had to drag him by the armpits to bed. Not surprisingly, the family was poor. No longer able to afford chicken on Sunday, they began eating liver, which the local butcher usually sold as pet food. Yet in his autobiography, Reagan called his hometown \"heaven\" and his childhood \"one of those rare Huck Finn\u2013Tom Sawyer idylls.\" About the Depression, which hit just as he went looking for his first full-time job, and which sent armies of vagrants scavenging for food, Reagan remembered \"that there was a spirit of helpfulness and yes kindliness abroad in the land.\" Among friends, his optimism became a running joke. In Hollywood, when rain threatened to cancel a shoot, he would tell the director, \"Don't worry. It's going to clear up any time.\" He couldn't play villains because he couldn't get in touch with his dark side. And he hated attending funerals. During the recession of 1982, economic advisers showed him a litany of grim statistics in a bid to convince him to change his policies. To their amazement, Reagan focused on the only positive one.\n\nThis almost surreal optimism may have grown out of Reagan's childhood efforts to cope with his father's alcoholism. The children of alcoholics sometimes take refuge in dream worlds, and Reagan, remarked an early girlfriend, \"had an inability to distinguish between fact and fantasy.\" He also inherited his cheeriness from his mother, a deeply religious woman who raised him in the Church of Disciples, a spinoff from Unitarianism that downplayed the idea of sin. Reagan spent his youth marinating in this theological tradition. He spent every Wednesday night and virtually all of Sunday in church, dated the local minister's daughter, and attended Eureka College, a Disciples' institution. And from the Disciples he acquired a view of human nature right out of the Social Gospel. \"My personal belief,\" Reagan wrote to a friend in 1951, \"is that God couldn't have created evil so the desires he planted in us are good.\" In a 1981 speech, Kirkpatrick, whom Reagan appointed ambassador to the United Nations, called her boss's election a reproach to \"an age and to a society like ours, which regularly deny the existence of evil.\" But she had it all wrong. In a fundamental sense, Reagan did deny the existence of evil: He saw it as merely the transitory and artificial absence of good.\n\nTo be sure, Reagan loathed communism. His animosity was ancient and intimate; it dated from his fights with communists in Hollywood in the 1940s. But while Reagan shared the right's hatred of communism, he didn't share its fear. Communism didn't scare him because he saw it as an aberration, not as the manifestation of something terrible lodged in the soul. So while his passionate anticommunism set him apart from SDS, and from post-toughness liberals such as McGovern and Carter, his confidence that communism could be transcended, thus unlocking a harmonious world, created a strange ideological kinship with the New Left. The New Left believed it could end the cold war, and so did Reagan. He thought he could end it by overcoming communism; they thought they could end it by overcoming anticommunism. But intellectually, the connective tissue was a belief that evil\u2014however defined\u2014could be cast off, revealing something far better underneath.\n\nIf Carter's optimism about cooperating with the Soviets led him to initially ease up on the cold war, Reagan's optimism about defeating the Soviets led him to initially escalate it, in the hope that Moscow's empire might crack. To this end he dramatically boosted defense spending and aided anticommunist regimes and rebels in the third world. But even in those early years, when his cold war policies were most aggressive, Reagan still placed careful limits on the force he was willing to employ and the risks he was willing to take. In 1981, when Poland's communist government cracked down on the independent labor movement, Solidarity, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and George Will all urged Reagan to declare Warsaw in default of its overseas loans and thereby economically destabilize the Polish regime. But Reagan deferred to America's Western European allies, who feared that calling in the loans would destabilize the entire European banking system. Reagan, noted George Shultz, who in 1982 took over as his secretary of state, was \"a cautious though decisive man, sensitive about being viewed as too pugnacious.\" He wanted to halt, and even roll back, Moscow's advance, but not at too high a cost. He didn't ask Americans to \"pay any price, bear any burden\" to keep countries from going communist; he didn't think he had to, since time was on our side. He didn't see America's back as perpetually against the wall.\n\nIn part that is because his back wasn't perpetually against the wall. Since, unlike Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, he hailed from the political right, Reagan didn't have to worry as much about looking soft. In fact, he recognized, in a way his conservative supporters rarely did, that after Vietnam, looking like too much of a hawk was almost as bad as looking like too much of a dove. Aided by shrewd political advisers like James Baker, Michael Deaver, and Richard Wirthlin, Reagan grasped the public's curious relationship to Vietnam. On the one hand, they wanted to avenge it, to show the bad guys once and for all who was boss. When Carter rubbed salt into the wound by allowing America to be humiliated in the third world yet again, they turned on him. On the other hand, most Americans had internalized Vietnam's basic lesson: America should never again put its boys on the line trying to keep communists from power in the third world. The public loved Rambo because in the movies, America won and no Americans died. Reagan knew that if he could gin up a war like that, Americans would cheer. If he couldn't, it was better to let the bad guys win.\n\nAlthough neoconservatives sometimes called Reagan Kennedy's heir, the two presidents reflected their very different times. In the early 1960s, sacrifice had been a political winner. Almost two decades of nearly unbroken success had convinced the country, and particularly its foreign policy elite, that it was capable of anything, as long as it got off the couch. In the early '80s, by contrast, Americans didn't want to be told to sacrifice; between Vietnam and stagflation they had been sacrificing more than enough. (In 1984, when Walter Mondale pledged that if elected he would raise taxes, that call for sacrifice helped ensure his landslide defeat. For his part, Reagan told Americans that they could have it all: a big defense increase, popular domestic programs, and lower taxes.) Americans no longer wanted their president to find mountains for them to climb, because they were no longer sure mountains could be climbed. They wanted him to find a molehill and call it Mount Everest. It was like the 1984 Olympics, which the Soviets boycotted. Did Americans cheer any less loudly because their best opponents weren't on the field? Hell no. These weren't the Camelot years, when Kennedy compared the cold war to a game between Texas and Rice. Playing the best, he had said back then, brings out your best. By the '80s, America was happy to play Grenada. We needed the win.\n\nMost of Reagan's intellectual allies didn't understand this. They were still ultra-realists, too afraid of Moscow to endorse post-Vietnam limits on America's cold war fight. And since they didn't have to get elected themselves, they could afford to ignore the public's post-Vietnam terror of war. The result was a series of skirmishes, which pitted Reagan's conservative supporters and a few hard-line aides against his more pragmatic advisers, and most importantly, against Reagan himself. Time and again, the result was the same. When looking tough was risk-free, Reagan played the part for all it was worth. But when the ante went up, he cashed in his chips.\n\nTake Central America. To Reagan's liberal critics, it was Vietnam all over again. They watched in horror as he invoked the dreaded domino theory, warning that if the communists in Nicaragua consolidated their rule, and the pro-American regime in El Salvador fell, Mexico might be next. \"Here we go again,\" warned a dovish senator. \"El Salvador,\" read a bumper sticker of the time, \"is Spanish for Vietnam.\"\n\nHad Reagan wanted to refight Vietnam, El Salvador would have been a logical place. Its smaller size and greater proximity to the United States would have made the logistics easier. The American military had a better grasp of its language, culture, and terrain. Its leftist rebels were less unified and battle-hardened than the Vietcong. And if you saw those rebels as agents of Moscow, as Reagan did, the Monroe Doctrine offered a rationale for intervention that dated back to the nineteenth century.\n\nBut Reagan never even considered it. At a meeting early in 1981, his first secretary of state, Alexander Haig\u2014the senior official most interested in picking a direct fight south of the border\u2014told his colleagues that if Cuba didn't stop arming El Salvador's communist rebels, \"I'll make that island a fucking parking lot.\" Among conservative intellectuals, Haig's vision of a 1962-style blockade to prevent Castro from exporting arms caught on. William F. Buckley, the longtime editor of National Review, endorsed it explicitly, adding that it should be accompanied by declarations of war against both Cuba and Nicaragua. Norman Podhoretz wrote that \"the United States must therefore do whatever may be required, up to and including the dispatch of American troops, to stop and then to reverse the totalitarian drift in Central America.\" Irving Kristol added that, \"The world should know, and the American people must be told, that under no circumstances will we permit El Salvador to go the way of Cuba and Nicaragua, and that we will use all means to prevent this.\" But among Reagan's key advisers, Haig's talk of direct military action was greeted with a chorus of anxious references to Vietnam. Assured that Haig had been merely speaking for effect, Michael Deaver, the White House aide closest to the president, replied, \"It certainly had a good effect on me. It scared the shit out of me.\" From that meeting until Haig resigned more than a year later, Cuba wasn't blockaded; Haig was. Deaver ensured that Haig never saw the president alone. Chief of Staff James Baker kept him off television. And they were almost certainly reflecting the wishes of their boss. As Deaver later noted, Haig's comments \"scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan,\" too.\n\nHaig's problem was that his tough-guy act wasn't an act. He couldn't turn off the projector. \"You get a band of brothers from CIA, Defense, and the White House and you put together a strategy for toppling Castro. And in the process we're going to eliminate this lodgment in Nicaragua from the mainland,\" he instructed his assistant Robert McFarlane. But when McFarlane went looking for that band, he found the Pentagon in a distinctly unfraternal mood. Reagan's defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was a hoarder: He loved buying weapons; he just didn't like using them. He considered Vietnam \"the crime of the century\" because America's leaders had tried to fight it without enduring popular support. (In 1984, in a speech that left a lasting impression on his young military aide, Colin Powell, he would lay out a series of tests for military intervention\u2014including sustained public backing and clearly defined goals\u2014that El Salvador, like Vietnam, plainly flunked.) When McFarlane reported that the Defense Department had little interest in another Bay of Pigs, Haig flew into a rage, denouncing the Pentagon's caution as \"limp-wristed, traditional cookie-pushing bullshit.\" But Weinberger was living in reality, as manifested not only by opinion within the military, but in the nation at large. Three-quarters of Americans, according to a 1985 survey, opposed invading Nicaragua. A 1983 ABC poll found that Americans opposed sending troops to El Salvador by a margin of almost six to one, even if that meant allowing a communist takeover. That same year, when Reagan reassured a joint session of Congress that \"to those who invoke the memory of Vietnam: there is no thought of sending American combat troops to Central America,\" members of both parties erupted in cheers.\n\nCongress was a big reason for Reagan's restraint. An essential condition of the hubris of toughness had been the explosion of executive authority in the years between FDR and LBJ. In the 1980s, however, Reagan enjoyed no such free rein. Americans generally liked him, but after Vietnam they no longer associated unchecked presidential power with national success. Even his efforts to aid the Nicaraguan Contras provoked a brawl on Capitol Hill. In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA had overthrown third-world governments whenever presidents felt like it; Congress read about it in the newspapers, if at all. But in 1984, when the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Agency had been mining Nicaragua's harbors, the Senate denounced the move, 84\u201312. That same year, Congress outlawed covert aid to the Contras, and when news broke that the Reagan administration had been aiding them anyway\u2014selling arms to Tehran and funneling the profits to the Contras in what was dubbed the Iran-Contra Affair\u2014the political fallout was devastating. Reagan's chief of staff was forced to resign. Nine administration officials were indicted, and six convicted. Reagan's advisers feared he might be impeached.\n\nThe president's conservative backers were forever chanting \"let Reagan be Reagan,\" implying that a pantywaist State Department, a gun-shy military, an insolent Congress, and a slothful public were squelching his hawkish convictions. But for Reagan, convictions were often a malleable thing; he molded them to political reality without ever believing he had changed his mind. He certainly wanted to keep Central America from falling to communism, and his efforts in that regard helped get a vast number of Nicaraguans and Salvadorans killed. (As a percentage of its population, Nicaragua lost more people in the Contra-Sandinista war than the United States did in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined.) But Reagan knew he couldn't get any of his own citizens killed. So when hawks proposed sending U.S. troops to Central America, he pointed out that Latins didn't like \"the colossus of the north sending in the Marines.\" As hawks like Buckley, Podhoretz, and Kristol recognized, this anti-interventionism undermined Reagan's anticommunism, since the Contras were unlikely to topple Nicaragua's government by themselves. But Reagan refused to see the contradiction, because, like the public, he wanted to fight the cold war without sacrifice or risk. After Iran-Contra, when it became clear that Congress would no longer permit military aid to the Contras, Reagan did not dwell on his failure to overthrow a Soviet ally less than a thousand miles from the Rio Grande. He saw the bright side: He had prevented another Vietnam. Whereas he had once vowed to stare down Moscow and Havana, he now congratulated himself for staring down his own right-wing base. \"Those sons of bitches won't be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua,\" he told his chief of staff triumphantly in 1988, \"and I'm not going to do it.\"\n\nReagan knew how to do what Truman and Eisenhower had done in Korea but Kennedy and Johnson never managed in Vietnam: cut his losses. The best example came late in his first term, as he was turning his eye toward reelection. Over Weinberger's objection, and without thinking through the details (which for Reagan was not uncommon), he had approved the deployment of U.S. peacekeepers to Lebanon as part of a deal to end fighting between Israel and its Palestinian and Syrian foes. Originally the deployment was scheduled to last only a month. But U.S. Marines were sucked into the quicksand of Lebanese politics and eventually took up arms to assist a Christian, pro-Western government at war with segments of its own society. In the early morning of October 23, 1983, those segments took revenge. A terrorist with a thick mustache and a wide grin drove a Mercedes truck past Marine guards and around a series of concrete and barbed-wire obstacles before detonating twelve thousand pounds of TNT at the mouth of the four-story building where the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment slept. The building was shoved off its foundation and collapsed, killing 241 Marines. For more than six hours, rescuers waded through the rubble searching for wounded, guided by screams. Reagan called it the \"saddest day of my presidency, perhaps the saddest day of my life.\"\n\nDemocratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill demanded a U.S. withdrawal. But Reagan refused and accused him of appeasement. \"He may be ready to surrender,\" Reagan declared, doing his best Rambo imitation, \"but I'm not.\" Unfortunately for Reagan, the American people were. Immediately his approval ratings began to sink. Nearly 60 percent of the public disapproved of his policy. Congressional Republicans were growing restless. And so five days after calling O'Neill Neville Chamberlain for wanting to pull U.S. troops out of Beirut, Reagan decided to do exactly that. Midge Decter, Podhoretz's wife and a noted neoconservative in her own right, declared herself \"disgusted.\" Baker and Deaver were thrilled: Their boss's poll numbers soon ticked back up.\n\nBut the Lebanon retreat only illustrated part of Reagan's political brilliance. He buried the hubris of toughness not only by avoiding unpopular wars (after all, even Jimmy Carter did that), but by staging popular ones and thus expunging the stench of defeat. The day the Marine barracks were destroyed, Reagan was confronted by a different foreign crisis. In the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, known for its exports of nutmeg (if for anything at all), coup plotters had murdered the prime minister. Anarchy reigned and U.S. officials claimed that the eight hundred American students at the St. George's Medical School might be in danger. Reagan also feared that the coup would help Castro turn Grenada into a communist base. As with many of Reagan's pronouncements, the conviction was sincerely held but not entirely logical, since Castro's ties had been to the murdered prime minister, and the Cuban leader denounced the coup. Reagan's insistence that Cuba was building an airfield in Grenada for Soviet planes did not pass muster, either, since the planned runway was too small.\n\nBut Reagan was not a stickler for detail. (He was the same man, after all, who the year before had toasted the people of Bolivia at a state dinner in Brazil, and then explained away the mistake by claiming he was going to Bolivia next, which bewildered the government of Colombia, where he was due the following day.) So at 5:36 A.M. on October 25, just two days after the Lebanon attack, four hundred Marines landed on Grenada's western shore. A little after 6 A.M., U.S. Army Rangers parachuted into the southern part of the island. Thirty hours later, the war was won and American medical students were kissing the ground in Charleston, South Carolina. More than 70 percent of Americans backed the Grenada invasion. Mail to the White House ran more than ten to one in favor.\n\nAccording to his foremost biographer, Lou Cannon, Reagan didn't hatch the invasion to divert attention from Lebanon. But he was \"shameless\" in using it to turn the public mood from humiliation to pride. The Grenada invasion spawned more medals per soldier than any war in U.S. history. Reagan hosted the St. George's medical students at the White House, where they waved little American flags. Three years later, he staged another Potemkin war, dropping more than ninety 2,000-pound bombs on Libya in retaliation for its involvement in a Berlin terrorist attack that killed a U.S. soldier. Like Grenada, the Libya bombing garnered more than 70 percent support at home. \"Every nickel-and-dime fanatic and dictator knows that if he chooses to tangle with the United States of America, he'll have to pay a price,\" declared Reagan, morphing into Rambo again. The last phrase was key: It was our enemies who would pay the price, not us. Americans could thump their chests, swell with pride, and never get up from the couch.\n\n\"There's a bear in the woods.\" Viewers heard a menacing, pounding beat. Against a bleak landscape, the mammoth creature prowled across America's television screens in the fall of 1984. \"For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can be really sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as bear? If there is a bear?\" The screen went blank and then Reagan's picture appeared, above the words PREPARED FOR PEACE.\n\nAt first glance, it was everything the neoconservatives believed, in visual form. The world was a wilderness, devoid of civilization's rules. America shared it with a predator, deaf to morality and reason. And America was alone. In the commercial's final frame, you see the grainy outline of a man, standing only a few paces from the beast on a barren hillside. Does he have a gun? You sure as hell hope so.\n\nBut what about the last line: \"If there is a bear?\" You could almost see Jeane Kirkpatrick and Irving Kristol furrowing their brows. Of course there is. The bear is eternal. You can call him Hitler or Brezhnev or Beelzebub, but he's always there. And you had better not let down your guard.\n\nThe last line, however, was classic Reagan. For the moment, sure, there's a bear. But if you show you're strong he may turn into a teddy, in which case you can throw away your gun and have a picnic.\n\nKirkpatrick had made her reputation explaining why that couldn't happen. In her famous essay, \"Dictatorships and Double Standards,\" she argued that authoritarian regimes like those of Somoza and the Shah took decades or centuries to democratize, and that totalitarian regimes like Moscow's would never democratize at all. Her neoconservative allies generally agreed. There is not \"the slightest possibility that even the most minimal degree of civil or political liberty will ever be allowed under Communism,\" declared Norman Podhoretz in 1976. \"All hopes for 'liberalization' in the Soviet Union are so chimerical,\" added Irving Kristol in 1984. \"There may be occasional spasms in this direction, but they do not and cannot last.\"\n\nThat's what Kirkpatrick thought her boss believed as well. \"The Reagan administration...is less optimistic than recent American governments about the evolution of Soviet society,\" she explained in 1981. But that was wrong: Reagan was actually more optimistic about the evolution of Soviet society than his predecessors. Although his right-wing allies generally described the U.S.S.R. as a fearsome juggernaut, he thought\u2014correctly\u2014that it was running out of gas. In part that stemmed from his deep conviction that communism defied the laws of economics. But more fundamentally it flowed from his belief that evil systems could not forever keep good people down. Communism, he wrote in 1975, \"is a form of insanity\u2014a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature.\" Seven years later, in a speech to the British parliament, he said the Soviet Union was experiencing a \"revolutionary crisis\" because it \"runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens.\"\n\nThis was a far cry from the toughness ethic. For intellectuals like Niebuhr and Schlesinger, who in the 1930s had seen democracy fall in the most advanced societies on earth, and had watched the best minds of their generation enlist willingly in totalitarianism's armies of the night, the idea that an inexorable \"tide of history\" lifted humanity toward freedom was a progressive fantasy. Kirkpatrick and Kristol, as children of the toughness age, were heirs to that harsh view. \"Americans,\" demanded Kristol in 1982, should stop \"thinking that time is on our side.... For the Soviet leaders are utterly convinced that time\u2014i.e. history\u2014is on their side. And so far there is precious little evidence to prove them wrong.\"\n\nThis skepticism about progress was intimately related to skepticism about human nature. Among the cold war liberals of the 1950s, it had been widely accepted that people were generally no better than the political systems that governed them, and that when they sought revolutionary change, things usually got worse. For Kristol and Kirkpatrick, both former cold war liberals, the actions of the New Left graphically confirmed this view. And their new allies on the right, traditional conservatives like Buckley and George Will, took an ever darker view of humanity's propensity to evil. In a gurgling infant, they saw original sin. In a Siberian gulag, Reagan saw the untapped goodness of man.\n\nIf cold war conservatives and neoconservatives took a sober view of humanity in general, many took a particularly dim view of Russians. For Kirkpatrick, culture mattered; it was the soil in which abstractions like democracy either sprouted or withered. And Russia, she suspected, was arctic tundra. Like Kennan, she saw Soviet communism not merely as an ideological veneer but also as the latest expression of a tradition of \"oriental despotism\" that stretched back to the czars. The historian Richard Pipes, who had helped paint a menacing picture of Soviet strength on Team B and served as the first Soviet expert on Reagan's National Security Council, called Russian communism the triumph of the \"muzhik, the Russian peasant. And the muzhik had been taught by long historical experience that cunning and coercion alone ensured survival.... Marxism...has merely served to reinforce these ingrained convictions.\"\n\nReagan didn't know from muzhiks. When he thought about Russians, he imagined \"Ivan and Anya,\" decent folks who, but for an accident of birth, could have appeared on Father Knows Best. \"Just suppose with me for a moment that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm with a Jim and Sally, and that there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted,\" he told the nation in 1984, in a passage he wrote by hand. \"Before they parted company they would probably have touched on ambitions and hobbies and what they wanted for their children and the problems of making ends meet. And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would say to Ivan, 'wasn't she nice, she also teaches music.' Maybe Jim would be telling Sally what Ivan did or didn't like about his boss. They might even have decided that they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon. Above all, they would have proven that people don't make wars.\"\n\nThere was a parallel with Reagan's view of the United States. Commentators often noted that he saw America as one giant Hallmark card, obscured by an overgrown and dastardly federal government. But because of his reputation as a screeching hawk, they mostly failed to notice that he saw the U.S.S.R. the same way: as a land of good-hearted Ivans and Anyas laboring under an oppressive but artificial regime. In particular, critics were misled by his phrase \"evil empire,\" a term that drove the Kremlin and many liberals batty but that Reagan used exactly once, in 1983. It was the handicraft of a speechwriter named Anthony Dolan, a Buckley prot\u00e9g\u00e9. And the original text read: \"Now and forever, the Soviet Union is an evil empire.\" Reagan cut out the first three words. Asked four years later, when he and Mikhail Gorbachev were fast friends, why he no longer used the phrase, Reagan replied, \"I was talking about another time and another era.\" The bear was no longer a bear.\n\nBecause he believed the Soviet Union could radically change, Reagan also believed something else alien to the toughness tradition: that America could eventually disarm. In the mid-1940s, before he became a conservative, he, like McGovern, had been a member of the United World Federalists, a group that sought to outlaw nuclear weapons. And even as he moved right, Reagan clung to his dreams of nuclear abolition, although both his allies and his adversaries largely overlooked them, since they didn't fit his image as a cold war hawk. As was often the case with Reagan, movies played a big role. Reagan loved science fiction. And Colin Powell, who eventually became Reagan's national security advisor, believed his boss had been particularly affected by a 1951 film called The Day the Earth Stood Still. In it, earth is visited by an ambassador from a higher civilization, which has abolished violence by handing over military power to an army of intergalactic robots, who are programmed to destroy all planets that still resort to war. The aliens have been watching events on earth with dismay. They fear the earthlings will learn how to travel through space and thus infect the solar system with their bloodlust. Before departing in his flying saucer, the alien visitor warns that unless the people of earth abandon war, the robots will descend and kill them all.\n\nFor Reagan, this was powerful stuff. Again and again during his presidency, he cited a potential alien invasion as one reason America and the Soviets must overcome their differences. In 1985, he mentioned the idea to Gorbachev, who gave him a strange look and changed the subject. He frequently discussed the alien threat with aides, who worked feverishly to keep it out of his speeches. Whenever Powell got word that Reagan was ruminating about an attack from outer space, he would roll his eyes and say, \"Here come the little green men again.\"\n\nWhen it came to ensuring peace and harmony between the superpowers, Reagan saw nuclear abolition as the long-term goal. His short-term strategy was \"Star Wars,\" a missile shield that would protect America until the Soviets disarmed (and presumably protect against space aliens as well). To most scientific experts, seeing Star Wars as a quick fix was downright bizarre, since they didn't believe it would work ever, let alone anytime soon. And even the hawks who favored Star Wars generally did so because they considered it an alternative to disarmament treaties, a way of reducing the nuclear threat without having to rely on the Soviets to keep their word. But in the Disney movie that played inside Reagan's head, Star Wars and disarmament complemented each other. America would build a missile shield and share it with Moscow, thus rendering both sides invulnerable to attack. Then they would eliminate their nuclear weapons, eventually leaving them with no swords, only massive shields. Reagan\u2014who believed in reincarnation\u2014told Gorbachev that in a prior life he had probably been the inventor of the shield.\n\nStar Wars sparked excitement among Reagan's backers and ridicule from his critics. But during his first term, his desire to abolish nuclear weapons attracted much less notice. One reason is that Reagan, like many conservatives, believed that in the 1970s Moscow had taken the nuclear lead, and he didn't want to negotiate seriously on arms control until America had caught up. For many of those conservatives, however, the belief that America was too vulnerable to let down its guard was perpetual. It did not reflect their assessment of the superpower balance at one moment in time; it reflected their eternal view of world affairs. In 1984, the hawkish Committee on the Present Danger warned that the \"the gap between U.S. and Soviet military capabilities continues to grow.\" But Reagan disagreed. By the end of his first term, after several years of massive military expenditure, he believed that America had caught up.\n\nIn 1983, several events also triggered Reagan's latent terror of nuclear war. It began, predictably, with movies. In June, he took in WarGames, which starred Matthew Broderick as a hacker who breaks into the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and almost starts a nuclear war. Reagan\u2014who, as his view of Star Wars revealed, tended to believe that pretty much anything was technologically possible\u2014found the film disturbing. Two days later, at a meeting with members of Congress, he asked if anyone had seen the movie. None had, so Reagan began describing the premise. \"I don't understand these computers very well,\" he explained, \"but this young man obviously did. He had tied into NORAD!\" A few months later, the president was even more deeply affected by The Day After, a made-for-TV movie that depicts Lawrence, Kansas, in the aftermath of a nuclear war. \"It is very effective and left me greatly depressed,\" he wrote in his diary. \"[W]e have to do all we can...to see that there is never a nuclear war.\"\n\nReagan didn't draw a sharp contrast between reality and celluloid. (In the most bizarre example, he told Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir that he had visited Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II, an odd claim, given that he had spent the entire war inside the United States. In truth, he had seen footage of the camps in a film.) And so just a few days after viewing The Day After, when he attended a briefing on U.S. military procedure in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, Reagan saw the movies he had watched playing out before him in real life. His dread only grew when he learned that his nuclear buildup and anti-Soviet rhetoric had so terrified the Kremlin that they interpreted a NATO \"war game\" (there was that phrase again) called Able Archer as preparation for a real attack, and put their military on high alert.\n\nIn his mounting fear of war, Reagan once again reflected the public mood. After several years of epic military spending, cold war vitriol, and no superpower summits, the percentage of Americans favoring arms control had shot through the roof. In 1983, the House even passed a resolution endorsing a mutual freeze on the production of nuclear arms. Reagan's political advisers urged him to make an overture to the Kremlin so Democrats could not portray him as a warmonger in his 1984 reelection campaign.\n\nShultz, a beefy ex-academic with a tattoo of a Princeton tiger on his behind, was also eager to get disarmament talks going. And so in January 1984, more than a year before Gorbachev took power, Reagan began a dramatic rhetorical shift. Declaring that \"nuclear arsenals are far too high,\" he told the nation that \"my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth.\" Then, in September at the UN, he quoted Gandhi as saying that \"I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter under what clime it flourishes, and that if you approached people with trust and affection, you would have tenfold trust and thousand-fold affection returned to you.\" It was the kind of thing that could make a neocon's hair stand on end.\n\nEven after Reagan won reelection, the antinuclear talk continued. \"I just happen to believe that we cannot go into another generation of the world living under the threat of those weapons,\" he said in November. Irving Kristol was starting to get anxious. \"To be conciliatory on the arms-control issues during the election campaign might have been politically expedient,\" he wrote in December. \"But why take it so seriously now? Nothing of any significance is going to happen, and it would be the height of naivete to think otherwise.\" By toughness standards, however, Reagan was indeed na\u00efve, and growing more so. Nothing in the Soviet Union had yet changed, but he was insisting, with mounting vehemence, that cooperation, not conflict, must define relations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. He was increasingly repudiating the toughness ethic. For conservatives, he was becoming a dangerous man.\n\nOf course, none of this would have mattered nearly as much had the Politburo in March 1985 not chosen Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The fifty-four-year-old Gorbachev represented a younger generation that had come of age during Nikita Khrushchev's post-Stalin thaw, and had spent the subsequent decades quietly seething at the geriatric, mulish, often inebriated commissars who were driving Russia's economy into the ground. Gorbachev didn't want to abandon communism; he wanted to save it. But to revitalize Soviet industry and agriculture he had to slash defense spending, which by the mid-1980s was consuming a jaw-dropping 40 percent of his government's budget. And he knew that the Politburo wouldn't permit those cuts unless superpower relations improved and America looked like less of a threat.\n\nReagan made that possible. Within hours of Gorbachev's selection, and without knowing anything about the radical reforms upon which the Soviet leader would later embark, Reagan invited him to a summit meeting, without preconditions. Two days later, Gorbachev met with Vice President George H. W. Bush, who was in Moscow to attend the funeral of Gorbachev's predecessor. Bush's talking points would have made Jeane Kirkpatrick twitch. (As it happened, she had left her post several months earlier, declaring her \"disappointment\" that so \"many of the people in the administration\" did not share her \"foreign policy objectives.\") \"We should strive to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth,\" read Bush's notes. \"We should seek to rid the world of the threat or use of force in international relations.\"\n\nBy now Reagan was hungry to meet Gorbachev and begin dismantling the nuclear weapons he had spent so much money to build. Although for years he had denounced the never-ratified SALT II treaty on the grounds that it enshrined America's nuclear inferiority, in 1985 he overruled administration hard-liners and quietly scrapped some older submarines so that America would not exceed the treaty's limits and upset the Kremlin. In March, when Soviet troops in East Germany killed a U.S. soldier, giving Reagan a perfect excuse to avoid scheduling a superpower summit, he instead told journalists that such incidents just made him want to meet his Soviet counterpart more. And once the summit was set for November, he did something that astonished his aides: study. (This was, after all, the same man who in 1983 had refused to prepare for a meeting with world leaders because, as he told James Baker, \"the Sound of Music was on last night.\") Whereas in the past Reagan's advisers had been forced to prepare one-page \"mini-memos\"\u2014or actually commission short documentary films\u2014to get him to digest information, he now devoured twenty-five briefing papers on Soviet politics and culture. It was like that other classic Stallone character, Rocky, rousing himself from his lethargy before the big fight. At their meeting in Geneva, Reagan and Gorbachev were scheduled to meet one-on-one for only fifteen minutes. Instead they talked for almost five hours. At one point Reagan leaned over to his Soviet counterpart and whispered, \"I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.\"\n\nThey were bleeding soon enough. No treaties came out of Geneva, but the atmosphere was chummy and the two leaders agreed to meet again the following year, with both sides confident an arms control deal was just a matter of time. Podhoretz was beside himself. Gorbachev, he insisted, was the shrewdest, most sinister Soviet leader yet. He was duping the West into believing that Russia no longer posed a threat, and thus getting the United States to pay to revitalize the collapsing Soviet economy. But since the arms control deals that Washington and Moscow were contemplating were (of course) ridiculously skewed in the Kremlin's favor, Gorbachev was dismantling none of his massive military machine. With the West's guard down, and the military balance shifted further to Moscow's advantage, the Soviet leader would then follow up his charm offensive with a military one, ripping off his smiley mask and revealing himself as the Hitler-Stalin that he really was. As Reagan and Gorbachev edged closer to a disarmament treaty, Podhoretz published a stream of articles with titles like \"How Reagan Succeeds as a Carter Clone\" and \"What If Reagan Were President?\" In 1986, when Reagan refused to use Moscow's imprisonment of an American journalist as pretext to cancel his second summit with Gorbachev, Podhoretz accused him of having \"shamed himself and the country\" in his \"craven eagerness\" to give away the nuclear store. George Will said the administration had crumpled \"like a punctured balloon.\" What particularly galled Podhoretz and Will was that Reagan, because of his tough-guy reputation, was burying the toughness ethic more successfully than Carter could have dreamed of. If Gorbachev was a wolf dressed as a sheep, Reagan was a sheep dressed as a wolf, and as a result, America was being eaten alive.\n\nAt first most conservatives avoided attacking Reagan personally. Throughout 1985 and 1986, they largely blamed his advisers for sabotaging his allegedly hawkish views. But the truth was closer to the reverse. In January 1986, Gorbachev suggested eliminating all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Administration hard-liners were appalled, but Reagan was intrigued, reminding aides that \"I have a dream of a world without nuclear weapons.\" That fall, when the two leaders met in Reykjavik, Iceland, Gorbachev again proposed complete abolition, this time by 1996. It was a mind-bending proposal. Nuclear weapons were crucial to America's alliance with Western Europe, not to mention its power in the world. America's European allies were shocked, but Reagan was typically uninterested in the details. This was the happy ending that he believed every drama should have. He told Gorbachev that they should return to Iceland in ten years, each carrying their country's last nuclear missile. Then they would publicly demolish them and \"give a tremendous party for the whole world.\"\n\nIt never happened, since Gorbachev conditioned his offer on a U.S. promise not to deploy Star Wars, a promise Reagan would not make. Still, the following December they agreed to eliminate all Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF). This went far beyond anything Nixon or Carter had done. SALT I and II had merely limited how many new nuclear weapons the superpowers could build. Under Reagan, for the first time, the two sides began dismantling them.\n\nThe INF deal was sharply slanted in America's favor. Desperate to cut military spending, Gorbachev had given in on almost everything: agreeing to dismantle Soviet missiles in Asia as well as Europe, long a Kremlin red line, while allowing Britain and France to keep theirs. But for many on the American right, details weren't the point. Reagan was accepting that the Soviet Union was no longer really evil, that America no longer lived in a 1930s world. It was as if Churchill had invited Hitler over for tea and begun dismantling the Royal Air Force.\n\nNo longer could conservatives pretend that the president had been hoodwinked by his liberal advisers. In his final year in office, with Reagan himself almost giddy about his relationship with Gorbachev, the ultra-realists attacked him in exactly the same way they had long attacked the post-toughness left. Will accused Reagan of \"elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.\" The Wall Street Journal called him \"a utopian.\" Kirkpatrick insisted that Gorbachev \"is not the architect of Soviet retreat.\" A Republican congressman named Dick Cheney called glasnost a fraud.\n\nTo fight the INF deal, Podhoretz called for reviving the Committee on the Present Danger, originally founded in 1950 to lobby for NSC 68 and then reestablished in 1976 to oppose d\u00e9tente. It had grown moribund after Reagan's election, but now that Reagan had proved even worse than Carter, Podhoretz proposed reconstituting it. At a Ramada Inn in Tysons Corner, Virginia, another group of conservatives formed the Anti-Appeasement Alliance, which aimed to defeat the treaty in the Senate. In conservative newspapers across the country, they ran full-page ads declaring, \"Appeasement is as unwise in 1988 as in 1938.\" Underneath the text were pictures of Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neville Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler. It was the reductio ad absurdum, the comic ending to a story that was turning out magically well. If Munich had been a genuine tragedy, and in Vietnam the Munich paradigm had produced a blend of tragedy and farce, this was pure farce. Invited to a wedding, a few die-hards insisted that it was really a funeral and donned sackcloth and ashes, which made the whole affair merrier still.\n\nWith only months left in his presidency, Reagan traveled to Moscow, where Ivans and Anyas mobbed him everywhere he went. \"Systems may be brutish, bureaucrats may fail. But men can sometimes transcend all that,\" he told students at Moscow State University, sounding a little like the Port Huron Statement. \"The accumulated spiritual energies of a long silence yearn to break free.\"\n\nA year later, Eastern Europe did break free, and then the captive nations of the soon-to-be-former U.S.S.R. Reagan's vision of a world liberated from the cold war and of a Soviet Union liberated from communism had come true. In future years, many on the right would try to reverse the causality of these earthshaking events, arguing that it was Reagan's merciless pressure that brought the Soviet regime to its knees. Had that truly been the case, there would have been no reason for their anguish, no reason to call him a dupe and a fool. Conservatives called Reagan those things for good reason: because he had betrayed them, and the toughness tradition itself. He had refused to spill American blood fighting communism in the third world. And he had turned away from nuclear confrontation and toward nuclear peace before Gorbachev even took power, let alone deposited communism in history's dustbin. \"If Reagan had stuck to his hard-line policies in 1985 and 1986,\" wrote Anatoly Dobrynin, longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, \"Gorbachev would have been accused by the rest of the Politburo of giving everything away to a fellow who does not want to negotiate. We would have been forced to tighten our belts and spend even more on defense.\" The cold war ended, and Soviet communism collapsed, not because Reagan made America more frightening but because he made it less so; not because he learned the lessons of Munich but because he unlearned them, and helped the American people unlearn them, without surrendering their pride.\n\nThe claim that America had overthrown the Soviet empire by threat of force was a toxic seed that would grow in future decades into a hubris of its own, nourished by the rich soil of post\u2013cold war success. But no one could foresee that in the years of wonder that brought the cold war, and the hubris of toughness, to a close. George Kennan was an old man now, the sole surviving member of that extraordinary realist circle\u2014including Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Lippmann\u2014that had helped bury the hubris of reason a half century before. The others had all died in political despair. Lippmann had paid dearly for opposing Vietnam, eventually leaving Washington, where Lyndon Johnson and his henchmen had made him a figure of ridicule. It is a \"much less pleasant world to live in,\" he told an interviewer in his final days. \"I think it's going to be a minor Dark Age.\" Niebuhr also found Vietnam a brutal blow. \"I am scared by my own lack of patriotism,\" he confided near the end. \"For the first time I fear I am ashamed of our beloved nation.\" Morgenthau admitted to \"a general discouragement, sometimes bordering on despair\" in his declining years. \"I am no longer 'my usual combative self,'\" he told a friend in 1972. \"I have become convinced, however reluctantly, of the hopelessness of fighting.... Perhaps to save one's soul is all that is left.\"\n\nBy temperament, Kennan was the darkest of them all. Like the others, he had preached the gospel of toughness in the 1940s, when it was still an insurgent idea. He had told Americans to see world politics as an arena of struggle, not accord, a sphere governed by power, not reason or love, where progress was often a delusion and evil never died. But his ideas, so precious in moderation, had grown monstrous in the hands of the ultra-realists. He was containment's Dr. Frankenstein, and by the 1980s he had spent so many years raging at his creation to no avail that he too fell prey to national self-loathing and moral despair. \"Poor old West,\" he wrote, \"succumbing feebly, day by day, to its own decadence.\" Maybe it wasn't even worth defending. Maybe the greatest evil was within.\n\nReagan, he initially assumed, was rock bottom. His administration was \"piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile...like the victims of some sort of hypnosis, like men in a dream, like lemmings headed for the sea.\" Nearing eighty, Kennan turned back to the disaster that in his view had started it all: World War I. He embarked on a three-volume history of the origins of the conflict, all the while suspecting that it was mere prelude to the far greater catastrophe toward which America now blindly marched: a nuclear World War III \"from which there can be no recovery and no return.\" Perhaps, he mused, it was just recompense for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The chickens were coming home to roost.\n\nAll this cultural gloom made him an easy mark. The New Republic declared him senile and suggested that he be \"put out to pasture.\" \"The great container,\" it jeered, \"springs a leak.\"\n\nHis opinions marginalized, and his faculties derided, Kennan in 1981 suggested scrapping SALT II as insufficiently bold and instead cutting all nuclear stockpiles in half, en route to the eventual abolition of all nuclear weapons. It was a bizarre turn of events: the architect of the toughness ethic trying to stop his own runaway tradition by embracing the most utopian of post-toughness ideas. He never thought his proposal would gain a serious hearing. It was a cry in the dark, the desperate offering of a sad old man to a president he assumed held his views in contempt.\n\nInstead, five years later, Reagan offered the same proposal himself. For Kennan it was something of a mystery. He was suspicious of Reagan. He distrusted people who lacked an appreciation for tragedy, who insisted that history was forever moving in the right direction. But it was Reagan's peculiar sunniness, his insistence that the world need not be a dark and dangerous place, that helped tame Kennan's Frankenstein monster. The ethic of toughness, which had begun with the recognition that the optimism of the progressive era had its limits, was now ending with the recognition that the pessimism of the cold war had its limits, too. It was the unlikeliest of outcomes, led by the unlikeliest of peacemakers. But it was glorious nonetheless. The end of the cold war, admitted Kennan, \"is a fit occasion for satisfaction.\" For him, that was a scream of joy.\n\n## PART III\n\n## THE HUBRIS OF DOMINANCE\n\n## CHAPTER THIRTEEN\n\n## NOTHING IS CONSUMMATED\n\nIn April 1989, with the Soviet empire teetering on the brink of collapse, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called eighty-five-year-old George Kennan to explain what was happening to the world. It was a very unusual hearing. For one thing, Kennan was the sole witness. For two hours, he alone held the floor, his voice occasionally quivering, and dropping to little more than a whisper. For another, the senators didn't bloviate, at least not as much as usual. They listened like attentive schoolchildren, prefacing their questions with little tributes, telling him what a privilege this was, offering the thanks of a grateful nation. Since the United States had won the cold war as much with ideas as with armies\u2014and since containment was the most famous idea of all\u2014the little old man across the dais was the closest thing America had to a conquering general. (If the senators knew that Kennan had renounced containment almost four decades earlier, and watched in horror as it grew into a global crusade, they didn't let on.) When the hearing closed, everyone rose to applaud: the senators, their staff, even the committee stenographer. Of course she did, wrote the Washington Post's Mary McGrory, \"Considering the guff she usually has to take, the self-serving, pettifogging, jargon-ridden, sometimes semiliterate chest-pounding, Kennan's profound and luminous comments must have sounded like a Mozart oboe concerto.\"\n\nThere was only one discordant note. It came from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, no intellectual piker himself, a former Harvard government professor and ambassador to the UN and India, a man, quipped George Will, who had written more books than most of his colleagues had read. Moynihan had a score to settle on behalf of Woodrow Wilson. For half a century, the melancholy Kennan had been shadowboxing with America's twenty-eighth president, landing blow after blow against Wilson's righteous optimism, his faith that reason and democracy would eventually rule the world. For a long time now, Kennan had had his fellow Princetonian on the ropes. The Somme, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Gulag, Cambodia, Iran: History itself had sent Wilson down for the count. In the battle between the rationalizer and the misanthrope, Kennan had a mountain of skulls on his side.\n\nBut now, in the virtual blink of an eye, history had turned. From Asia to Latin America to Eastern Europe, from the mud villages of the third world to the citadels of totalitarian power, freedom was washing across the world like a mighty wave. It was time, Moynihan believed, to give Wilson his due.\n\n\"I know you have been skeptical about Wilson,\" Moynihan ventured, tiptoeing toward a rebuke. But has not the world \"accommodated [itself] to Wilson's visions?\" And there, in front of everyone, after a lifetime of intellectual combat, the conquering general raised the white flag. \"You are right. I was long skeptical about Wilson's vision,\" Kennan replied. \"But I begin today in the light of just what has happened in the last few years to think that Wilson was way ahead of his time.\"\n\nNineteen eighty-nine was a year that blew men's minds. Six months after Kennan's testimony, Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama, deputy director of the State Department's Office of Policy Planning, traveled to the south of France. Like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Pipes, he was a Sovietologist and a conservative, not a combination that traditionally inclined one toward optimism about world affairs. But he had been watching in wonder as Mikhail Gorbachev and his top advisers abandoned the language of Marxism and began speaking a tongue that sounded remarkably like America's own. Pipes was still comparing Gorbachev to Brezhnev. Norman Podhoretz was still comparing him to Lenin. But Fukuyama believed that something big was happening; he could feel the earth moving beneath his feet.\n\nWhen he arrived at the French Riviera for a NATO meeting, his European counterparts told him to calm down. Forget about it, declared the West German representative: Germany won't be unified in my lifetime. When Fukuyama went to Germany to see for himself, he heard more of the same. In East Berlin he snapped photos of demonstrators in the streets. Forget about it, said U.S. Embassy officials: East German communism is here to stay.\n\nTwo weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell.\n\nAn old mentor of Fukuyama's, a University of Chicago professor and pied piper of the intellectual right named Allan Bloom, was hosting a lecture series titled \"Decline of the West?\" It was the same old conservative gloom: America and its fellow democracies were culturally weak, morally weak, ideologically weak, militarily weak. It was still 1938. But Fukuyama had said good-bye to all that, and when Bloom asked him to take part, he gave a talk that was not gloomy at all. It was, in fact, the most breathtakingly optimistic statement by an American intellectual since Walter Lippmann and John Dewey glimpsed utopia in the rubble of World War I. Fukuyama's title: \"Are We Approaching the End of History?\"\n\n\"The twentieth century,\" he explained, \"has made us all into deep historical pessimists.\" He recounted the litany of horrors: \"two destructive world wars, the rise of totalitarian ideologies, and the turning of science against man in the form of nuclear weapons and environmental damage.\" Thoughtful people like Richard Pipes and Allan Bloom had witnessed so much despair over such a long time that they had come to believe it was the normal order of things. They were so used to tragedy that they could not recognize triumph, even when it stared them in the face.\n\nBut there it was, the triumph of democracy\u2014of Wilson's dream\u2014bursting out across the globe. In Poland, Lech Walesa was quoting Jefferson; in China, students hoisted a Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square. Things had come full circle. In 1918, with liberal revolution seemingly cascading across Europe, the New Republic had declared, in a fit of Wilsonian ecstasy, that \"at this instant of history, democracy is supreme.\" Now, more than seventy years later, after decades upon decades of blood and tears, Fukuyama was saying so again. History with a capital H, history as the epic struggle over how humanity should be ruled, was coming to an end. The fascist idea had died; the communist idea was dying; the democratic idea stood alone. Democracy was history's ultimate victor, the final ideological destination of man.\n\nThe battle of ideas was over. Intellectually, there was nothing left to contain. At the core of the toughness creed had been the belief that America's enemies were fearsome not merely militarily, but ideologically as well. The fascists and communists were terrifying because they tapped into something deep in human nature. They were part of us, the dark side of the soul. Ronald Reagan had never believed that: For him, there was no dark side of the soul. And now Fukuyama was turning Reagan's insurgent optimism into a new creed, a Wilsonianism for a one-superpower age. The ethic of toughness, which had emerged to explain and combat the great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, was being laid to rest alongside them. In Social Sciences 122, a lecture hall at the University of Chicago, the ethic of dominance was being born.\n\nFukuyama's lecture became an article, and then a book, and made him a star. The end of history became a synonym for intellectual audacity, for the biggest of big-think. But as a foreign policy doctrine, the ethic of dominance actually began life small. Like the ethic of reason and the ethic of toughness before it, it started off as a limited creed and then grew with success. Fukuyama in 1989, like Kennan in 1946, was Daedalus. He built wings, then watched his intellectual progeny fly them into the sun.\n\nFor Fukuyama it was democracy that was dominant, not necessarily the United States. America, in fact, was ending the cold war a bit like it ended World War II: triumphant, but exhausted and insecure. As one top U.S. official put it, we \"crossed the finish line out of breath.\"\n\nAmerica's totalitarian competitor may have been crumbling, but the United States wasn't the only democracy on the world stage, and in the late 1980s it wasn't the most vigorous. America's share of world GDP had been dropping for as long as anyone could remember. Its economic growth was sluggish; its education and health-care systems were embarrassing; its inner cities were terrifying; and everyone in the country seemed to be in debt, the government included. During the Reagan years, America had gone from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. And on October 19, 1987, roughly two years before the Soviet empire fell, the United States had suffered a day of reckoning of its own. The stock market plunged 22 percent, more than the worst day of 1929.\n\nSo while Fukuyama was dubbing the end of the cold war \"the end of history,\" he shared intellectual center stage with another academic super-star, Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who gave it a less triumphal name: \"the end of the American era.\" The United States and the Soviet Union, Kennedy claimed, were partners in decline, twin victims of a historical disease called \"imperial overstretch,\" in which great powers assume overseas obligations they cannot afford. In winning the cold war, in other words, America had actually lost. Germany and Japan, nations that could build cars and VCRs as opposed to missiles\u2014products people actually wanted to buy\u2014were eating our lunch. In a miracle of good timing, Random House published Kennedy's book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, only months after the stock market crash. Initially it printed nine thousand copies; within a year it had sold 225,000. For thirty-four weeks, Kennedy's book graced the New York Times' bestseller list. He had delivered his message, and the intellectual class heard him loud and clear: Before getting too self-congratulatory about the demise of our slow, dumb, overmuscled foe on the other side of the earth, Americans should take a hard look in the mirror. If the Soviets were geopolitical mastodons, we were Tyrannosaurus rex.\n\nSo 1989 was a heady time, but not a hubristic one. The American idea\u2014democracy\u2014was triumphant, but America itself was not. Economically the nation was anxious, and just as in the early days of containment, economic anxieties made America's leaders wary of projecting military power. One of the most popular phrases in early post\u2013cold war Washington was peace dividend. With no threat on the horizon, and America's military expenditures bleeding it dry, politicians looked forward to cutting back foreign deployments and cutting the Pentagon down to size. By scaling back America's ambitions overseas, they hoped to bind its festering wounds at home.\n\nThere was another inhibition as well. It wasn't just that America lacked the money to run its vast military machine; many influential Americans doubted whether that military machine was much use anyway. The conventional wisdom, as the cold war wound to a close, was that big armies were like Bentleys: nice to look at but unlikely to take you very far. In Afghanistan the Soviets had driven theirs into a ditch, and the Japanese and Germans were zipping ahead on civilian power alone. For its part, America hadn't fought a real war since it left Saigon with its tail between its legs in 1975, and Reagan, for all his Rambo bluster, had never dared send American troops in large numbers into harm's way. If the American economy stood in the shadow of a stock market crash and a prophecy of decline as the cold war closed, the American military, Reagan notwithstanding, still stood in the long shadow of Vietnam.\n\nBetween 1989, when the cold war ended, and 2003, when America invaded Iraq, all this changed. Militarily America won and won, until America's leaders found it hard to imagine America could lose. Economic decline turned to economic mastery, and soon resources seemed almost infinite. Success was like helium, and the ethic of dominance grew. Fukuyama's belief that history was moving democracy's way became George W. Bush's belief that within every dictatorship lay a democracy ready to burst free. And Fukuyama's belief that democratic ideals were supreme became Bush's belief that American power was supreme, that the United States could dominate\u2014ideologically, economically, and militarily\u2014every important region on earth. If the cold warriors had inflated the lessons of 1938 until they believed that virtually every foe could and must be stopped, the post\u2013cold warriors inflated the lessons of 1989 until they believed that virtually every foe could and must be smashed. By 2003 the ethic of dominance had become the equivalent of the ethic of reason in 1917 and the ethic of toughness in 1965: a good idea pushed too far, a theory that explained too much, a species of hubris, a very dangerous thing.\n\nIt started with a war Americans barely even remember, and a hidden struggle that presaged much that was to come. In 1988, with Ronald Reagan on his way out the door, a bureaucratic fight broke out within the bowels of his administration. It pitted two men who were almost caricatures of their breed. On one side was Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a big, bald, sixty-three-year-old good ol' boy whose lazy Oklahoma drawl made Ivy League civilians forget that he had a master's from Stanford and a doctorate from Princeton. On the other was Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, the quintessential neocon: a Jewish, New York\u2013born ex-liberal who had attended high school with the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, lived in Nathan Glazer's attic during law school, and married Norman Podhoretz's stepdaughter. The subject was Panama, where the United States and its longtime client, Manuel Noriega, were in the midst of a nasty divorce.\n\nGiven his pedigree, observers often assumed that Abrams was an ideological clone of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Reagan administration's most famous neocon. But there was a generational difference. Kirkpatrick was fifty-five when Reagan took the oath of office; Abrams was only thirty-two. As a result, Abrams, like his generational contemporary Francis Fukuyama, was more deeply influenced by the wave of democratization that began sweeping the world in the 1980s. In Reagan's first term he served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, a job in which, critics assumed, he would follow the Kirkpatrick line: soft on pro-American dictators. But that line was premised on pessimism that third-world autocracies could democratize anytime soon (and a corresponding belief that if America pushed them hard to do so, the result would be not democracy, but communism). In 1983, Irving Kristol was still writing that \"the traditions\u2014political, religious, cultural\u2014that shape Latin American thinking and behavior are such as to make it exceedingly difficult for the countries of Southern America to proceed along the [democratic] lines followed by Northern America and Western Europe.\" And yet, between 1980 and 1986, ten former autocracies embraced democracy in Latin America alone. So Abrams grew more optimistic about democracy's chances, more willing to push for human rights even in places like Chile, Paraguay, South Korea, and the Philippines, where the thugs were on our side.\n\nIn the summer of 1985, Abrams took over the State Department's Latin America bureau. A few months later, Noriega\u2014then receiving a $200,000 annual salary from the CIA (the same amount the U.S. government paid Ronald Reagan)\u2014ordered his henchmen to abduct Hugo Spadafora, a prominent critic of the regime. Over the course of seven hours, Noriega's men repeatedly rammed a stick up Spadafora's rectum, pounded his genitals until they were grotesquely swollen, pushed sharp objects under his fingernails, slashed the muscles in his thighs, broke several of his ribs, and then beheaded him. After obtaining photos of his brother's corpse, Winston Spadafora traveled to Washington, where he showed the pictures to anyone with the stomach to look at them. Even Jesse Helms was appalled.\n\nQuietly, Abrams began pushing for a tougher line against Noriega. By 1987 he was denouncing him publicly. And by 1988 he was proposing military force. It helped that with the superpower standoff winding down, Noriega's role as a conduit for aid to the Nicaraguan Contras no longer seemed as vital. During the cold war, the ethic of toughness had required embracing lesser evils like Noriega to contain the greater evil, communism. Now, in a world where America was becoming ideologically dominant, America could set its sights higher. Rather than merely containing evil, it could impose good.\n\nAbrams's desire to topple Noriega wasn't purely humanitarian, of course. In the late 1980s, Americans were in a frenzy over drugs. According to a 1988 Gallup poll, they rated drugs their number-one concern. Noriega was up to his eyeballs in the stuff, and in February of that year two Florida grand juries indicted him for helping to smuggle marijuana and cocaine into the United States. (In the past, U.S. officials had leaned on prosecutors not to charge Noriega, because he was providing useful cold war intelligence. But by 1988 he was no longer important enough to protect.) So Abrams's argument for armed regime change wasn't premised solely on spreading democracy. But in his mind, as in Woodrow Wilson's, spreading democracy and safeguarding American security were interlinked: Regimes that did bad things at home generally did bad things abroad. It was a crucial intellectual shift. Cold war conservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick had generally warned against trying to rapidly export democracy, both because they believed it wouldn't grow in barren third-world soil and because they feared the effort would imperil American security, which they believed pro-American thugs were serving rather well. Abrams, by contrast\u2014like many other young, post\u2013cold war conservatives\u2014believed that democracy could quickly take root in foreign lands; they had seen it happen before their eyes. And they feared that if it didn't, continued dictatorship might put American security at risk. For Kirkpatrick, toughness meant recognizing that in a world where evil never dies, trying to impose American values can imperil American interests. For Abrams, dominance meant believing that evil could be vanquished, and that by imposing its values, America could further its interests at the same time.\n\nUnlike Abrams, William Crowe wasn't particularly ideological. And that was precisely the point. In war games, he noticed that civilians were generally quicker than military men to resort to force, and he suspected that it was because for them, war was a kind of game. They lived in the world of theory; war didn't turn their stomach because they had never smelled it up close. Abrams, Crowe often noted, had procured an educational deferment to avoid Vietnam. His views \"were both na\u00efve in their formulation and reckless in their casual commitment of our military men and women. This latter phenomenon is not unknown among young political appointees who have never served in uniform. However, Mr. Abrams raised it to an art form.\"\n\nThroughout 1988, Abrams and Crowe battled. Abrams wanted to establish a democratic government in exile on Panamanian soil to pressure Noriega; Crowe didn't consider Panama's opposition very effective or very democratic. Abrams said the United States could overwhelm Noriega's Panamanian Defense Forces with a small force; Crowe made invading Panama sound like D-day. Abrams said the Panamanians would welcome U.S. troops as liberators; Crowe asked why, if the Panamanians loved democracy so much, they weren't fighting for it themselves. Abrams believed that Crowe couldn't get over Vietnam; Crowe believed that if Abrams had managed to get himself over to Vietnam in the 1960s, he wouldn't be demanding a repeat performance south of the border now.\n\nIn 1988, the Crowe-Abrams feud was a fairly one-sided affair. Ronald Reagan\u2014that dove in hawk's feathers\u2014had sent ground troops into battle only twice: in Grenada, against an opposing army of six hundred men, and in Lebanon, a disaster that still haunted his sleep. (According to his press secretary, Reagan's final words in the Oval Office were \"The only regret I have after eight years is sending those troops to Lebanon.\") Ideologically, Reagan was a transitional figure: more convinced than most of his conservative contemporaries that democracy would triumph across the globe, but more skeptical than many younger conservatives that U.S. troops could help bring that triumph about. So to Abrams's dismay, the president sided with Crowe, opposing any action that might require \"counting up the bodies.\" Instead Reagan tried unsuccessfully to cut a deal with Noriega: Prosecutors would drop the drug charges if he gave up power. America, insisted Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger after Reagan's decision, \"will never invade Panama.\" The Pentagon gleefully sent around a mock invitation to Noriega's farewell party as Panamanian leader. Across the front it read \"Due to circumstances beyond Elliott Abrams's control the farewell party has been indefinitely postponed.\"\n\nBut Abrams had the last laugh. When Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, ran to succeed him in 1988, Reagan's offer to drop the drug charges became a millstone around his neck. It didn't help that as director of the CIA in the 1970s, Bush had met Noriega and kept him on the U.S. payroll. Democratic Party bumper stickers read \"Bush-Noriega '88\u2014You know they can work together.\" And in response, Bush was forced to promise that if he won the White House, there would be no deals.\n\nOnce elected, Bush tried fomenting a coup in Panama. But the effort ended in disaster as Noriega's men foiled the plot and tortured its ringleader to death. In May, Panamanians went to the polls and overwhelmingly voted Noriega's allies out of office. But the dictator refused to cede power. Outraged, demonstrators flooded into the streets chanting, \"Down with the pineapple\" (a reference to Noriega's acne-covered face). They hung pineapples from telephone polls in disgust. (The fruit-based protest may also have been a subtle reference to Noriega's flexible sexuality, since it was an open secret that he was a bisexual who periodically dressed in hot yellow, lathered himself in perfume, and cavorted with a pilot boyfriend.) But Noriega foiled the protests by buying up the entire country's pineapple supply. And when Guillermo Endara, the man who had won Panama's presidential election, led a protest rally, government goons smashed him in the face with an iron bar.\n\nFinally, with the United States demanding that Noriega step down, Panamanian forces detained a U.S. Marine at a roadblock and then shot him as he tried to drive away. An American navy lieutenant who had the misfortune to witness the murder was blindfolded and repeatedly kicked in the head and groin. His wife was threatened with rape and forced to stand with her hands above her head until she collapsed.\n\nReagan might still have resisted military action; no one would have dared call him a wimp. But George H. W. Bush had a high-pitched, squeaky voice, goofy-preppy diction, and people did call him a wimp, often. In his native milieu, the fading world of Brahmin New England, where bravado was for the nouveau riche and the first-person singular was a dirty word, Poppy Bush had actually been something of a stud. He'd been tapped for his first secret society at fourteen, joined the navy as its youngest flier four years later, captained the baseball team at Yale, and made his first million by thirty. But the media did not care that he made his motorcade stop at red lights so as not to inconvenience other drivers or that he played a mean game of horseshoes. He might have been a masterful president before television, or perhaps radio. But he proved dismally unable to cultivate his public image in the CNN age. And because, unlike Reagan, he did not look like a wartime leader, he had to become one.\n\nIn late December 1989, wearing a pair of bright red socks\u2014one reading \"Merry\" and the other reading \"Christmas\"\u2014Bush authorized U.S. troops to invade Panama, taking the first, small step on the ladder from inhibition to confidence to hubris that would culminate with his son's invasion of Iraq. As Americans were just beginning to learn, war was easier in the post\u2013cold war age: Noriega, unlike Ho Chi Minh, had no rival superpowers to funnel him arms. Militarily the invasion was a rout. Noriega, who was visiting a brothel when the U.S. attack began, took refuge at the house of the papal nuncio, the Vatican's man in Panama. For two days and nights, U.S. troops surrounding the building blasted rock music (which Noriega loathed), including such topical choices as \"You're No Good,\" \"I Fought the Law,\" and \"Voodoo Child,\" a reference to the discovery in Noriega's apartment of tamales in which he had written the names of his political enemies. Eventually Noriega gave himself up and was flown to a Florida jail. In the entire operation, twenty-three U.S. soldiers died.\n\nBefore the war, according to polls, only a third of Americans had wanted to invade. But once the invasion proved a success, support jumped to 80 percent, and Bush's approval ratings hit 76 percent, the highest for any U.S. president since Vietnam. It was the first sign that in the post\u2013cold war age, starting a war could prove a political boon.\n\nFor a small war, the Panama invasion boasted an astounding number of code names: Nimrod Dancer, Sand Fleas, Ma Bell, Post Time, Klondike Key, Stumbling Block, Lima Bean, Purple Storm, Blind Logic, Prayer Book, Gabel Adder, Silver Bullet, Acid Gambit, Nifty Package, Robin Quart, Pole Tax, Krystal Ball, Just Cause, and Promote Liberty. But the last one proved the most apt. In the run-up to war, critics had called the idea of invading to impose democracy absurd. \"Surely it is a contradiction in terms and a violation of America's best ideals to impose democracy by the barrel of a gun,\" declared Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy. Jimmy Carter warned that \"any sort of military involvement there would immediately alienate the Panamanian people.\"\n\nBut on the ground, to the astonishment of many foreign observers, U.S. troops were in fact greeted as liberators. A CBS poll found that the war was even more popular in Panama than in the United States. When Vice President Dan Quayle arrived in Panama City soon after the invasion, he was greeted with signs reading \"Viva Quayle\" and \"Gringos Don't Go Home. Clean Panama First.\" (Only later, when the Bush administration reneged on its promise of $1 billion to \"clean up\" post-Noriega Panama, did the pro-gringo sentiment fade.) And confounding pessimists like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Irving Kristol, Panama didn't revert to dictatorship. Endara was sworn in as president, and then peacefully voted out four years later as Panama joined the swelling ranks of Latin American democracies.\n\nHow was all this possible in a country with weak democratic traditions and a history of nationalist resentment toward the United States? In a sermon several weeks after the war, a Panamanian priest offered an answer. The real Panama, he insisted, had not been invaded by the United States. The real Panama\u2014which offered its people freedom and a better life\u2014had actually been invaded years earlier by Noriega and his goons. It was this imposter nation, this tyrannical \"anti-country,\" whose sovereignty the United States had trampled, not the real Panama's. And because the United States had done so, \"the true country now starts to take its first difficult and costly steps toward its reconquest: a free country with justice and liberty.\" Authoritarianism, the priest was saying\u2014repudiating Kirkpatrick's argument in \"Dictatorships and Double Standards\"\u2014was not organic; it was artificial, unreal. When America peeled away Panama's ugly, tyrannical veneer, it found a democracy trapped underneath. Fukuyama had said history was on democracy's side; now America was learning that through war it could speed history up. Years later, Bush's defense secretary Dick Cheney would call the invasion \"good practice,\" \"a trial run.\"\n\nOn November 27, 1990, a little less than a year after Noriega fell, William Crowe, now retired, went to visit the man holding his old job, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell. That August, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. He had done so for simple, primal reasons, the same reasons a hungry predator devours farm-fattened prey. Iraq was a big, powerful country and it was starving. Its eight-year war with Iran had left it bankrupt, and without money to lubricate his rule, Saddam feared losing power. His regime owed $30 billion to its smaller, richer neighbor to the south, and the Kuwaitis\u2014disregarding Saddam's suggestion that they forgive his debts because he had defended the Arab world against Persian marauders\u2014were demanding that he pay up. The Kuwaitis also refused to cut oil production and thus hike prices, which Saddam hoped would raise some much-needed cash. And they refused to stop the \"slant drilling\" that Saddam claimed was stealing Iraqi oil. In principle, Kuwait's ruling Al-Sabah family had every right to spurn Saddam's pleas: Iraq's desperation was his own fault. But there was something brazen about their unwillingness to strike a deal. It was like a rich man walking past a street tough and waving his gold watch.\n\nThe CIA thought Saddam would merely dip his toe across the border and snatch a few oil wells. Instead he swallowed Kuwait whole. Suddenly, Saddam controlled 20 percent of the world's proven oil reserves, and within the Bush administration, there was unanimity on one thing: He could not have Saudi Arabia, which would give him more than 45 percent. Within days, America was dispatching troops to Saudi soil.\n\nBut when it came to Kuwait itself, the Panama divisions broke open again. In theory, everyone was for sanctions, which were meant to push Saddam back across the border nonviolently. In reality, however, some people were more for them than others. Many of Crowe's military buddies wanted to wait a year or more for the embargo to take its toll, in hopes of avoiding war. Top Pentagon civilians, by contrast, led by Cheney and his undersecretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, believed the United States should wait only a few months, and then draw its sword. On the surface, it was merely a debate about means: would economic pressure or military force best restore Kuwait? But under the surface, it was also emphatically a debate about ends. The doves wanted to restore the status quo ante; the hawks wanted to change it. The doves just wanted Saddam out of Kuwait. The hawks wanted him not only out of Kuwait, but so emasculated that he could never again threaten his neighbors and hopefully, so emasculated that he lost power.\n\nDuring the cold war, the hawkish option would probably not even have been on the table. From the late 1950s until the collapse of Soviet power, Iraq had been Moscow's ally, and the Kremlin would not have permitted the United States to beat Iraq to a pulp. Had Saddam invaded in 1980 instead of 1990, America would have been lucky to get him out of Kuwait at all, thus restoring the prewar balance of power. But now, in a one-superpower world, Cheney and Wolfowitz realized that they could do more than hold the line; they could extend it. They could do more than contain Saddam; they could cripple him. Still squinting in the light of a changed world, they were coming to see that with the cold war over, no great power could prevent America from expanding its dominance. In the Persian Gulf, the door to U.S. hegemony was wide open. The American military simply needed to walk through.\n\nCrowe, like many in uniform, dreaded the thought. He worried that Cheney and Wolfowitz\u2014who like Abrams had not served in Vietnam\u2014were unlearning its lessons, and that they didn't have blood in the fight this time, either. (He did. His son Blake was a Marine captain sweltering in the Saudi desert.) \"War is not neat, it's not tidy. It's a mess,\" Crowe told a Senate panel; the Pentagon had already ordered sixteen thousand body bags. For him the cold war was still the template, and the cold war proved the virtue of patience. Attacking Iraq before sanctions had time to work, he argued, would be like trying to militarily roll back the U.S.S.R.\n\nSitting in his old Pentagon office, now redecorated by Powell, Crowe tried to nudge his successor into doing what he wished his predecessors had done in Vietnam: lay his career on the line to prevent an ill-conceived war. The country isn't eager to fight, Crowe insisted; Powell nodded in agreement. War can be legitimate, Crowe went on, but only after you've been attacked. Powell nodded again. They were sitting at an antique table, as a steward in a bright yellow jacket served lunch. Finally, Crowe asked Powell straight out: \"Where are you on the Gulf deployment?\" Powell gestured toward the window, which offered a gorgeous view of the Potomac River, and Washington, D.C., on the other side. \"I've been for a containment strategy,\" he replied, \"but it hasn't been selling around here or over there.\"\n\nFor Colin Luther Powell, the army was more than a career; it was his way of claiming ownership of his country. His Jamaican immigrant parents had not felt fully American; they lived in a West Indian cultural bubble, dancing to calypso and revering the queen. His own generation knew America better, but for young Caribbean-Americans growing up in the shadow of Jim Crow, to know America was not necessarily to love it. Colin Powell was not the only son of West Indian immigrants to figure prominently in the politics of late-twentieth-century America, after all. The other three were Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farrakhan, and Malcolm X.\n\nAs a young man, Powell had seen the army as both a refuge from the actually existing United States and a vision of what it might one day be. By the time he entered the service in the late 1950s, the military was fully integrated, but America itself was not. As a young officer stationed in the South, leaving base meant searching in vain for a restaurant that would serve him a hamburger or let him use the bathroom. When he and his young wife went looking for housing near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1962, a real estate agent showed them an empty shack in the middle of a garbage dump. The army, by contrast, offered camaraderie, shared risk, and common purpose, across the color line. While hardly devoid of racism, it rewarded his talent and his willingness to play the game. \"I don't shove it in their face,\" he said years later, in explaining his success. \"I don't bring any stereotypes or threatening visage to their presence,\" and \"I perform well.\" That he did, in both senses of the word.\n\nHe had risen within the army by fiercely protecting its interests and risen in Washington by skillfully serving the interests of the civilians for whom he worked. But now, with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, those imperatives collided. Crowe had done only one tour in Vietnam; Powell had done two and thus the war was even more seared into his consciousness. He had seen it corrupt and degrade his beloved army; he had watched \"recently healthy young American boys, now stacked like cordwood\" and sat on helicopter rides alongside the bodies as they began the long journey home. Lebanon had left its mark, too. As Caspar Weinberger's military aide in 1983, he had taken the late-night call from Beirut informing him that hundreds of Marines had been blown to bits. Weinberger had responded by setting the bar for military action so high that it virtually guaranteed Reagan would not use force again, and that suited Powell just fine.\n\nWhen Bush administration officials discussed how to respond to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Powell felt the ghosts of Vietnam and Lebanon in the room. Civilians kept asking him about military options for liberating Kuwait; he kept asking whether Kuwait was worth dying for. Claims that Iraq could be defeated from the air terrified him; that's what Rostow and company had claimed in Vietnam. Bush said Iraq didn't look that tough; it hadn't even managed to beat Iran. \"But Iran paid in manpower,\" Powell replied. It lost close to half a million men.\n\nPowell's objections didn't help his relationship with Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Powell wasn't crazy about his boss. Only half in jest, he called Cheney a \"right wing nut,\" and as Crowe had done with Abrams, Powell often noted Cheney's deferments during Vietnam. It was harder to know what Cheney thought about Powell, or about most things, for that matter. That's why people called him \"the Sphinx.\" But he had a reputation for humiliating generals. \"You're chairman of the Joint Chiefs,\" he bellowed after a meeting where Powell raised questions about the wisdom of war. \"You're not secretary of state. You're not the national security advisor. And you're not secretary of defense. So stick to military matters.\"\n\nPowell didn't give up. If he was \"the skunk at the picnic,\" he said later, they could all \"take a deep smell.\" That fall, with U.S. troops streaming into the Gulf and war drawing nearer, he mounted another protest. First he tried to convince Cheney that they should give sanctions more time to work, but Cheney replied that Bush had already made up his mind. Then he went to Secretary of State James Baker, who he suspected wanted a diplomatic way out, and received mild encouragement. Then he talked to Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security advisor, who seemed annoyed that Powell wouldn't let the matter lie. Finally he got his meeting with Bush himself. It was a Friday afternoon in early October, and the president was in one of his light and goofy moods, which made Powell even more nervous. Powell wanted to make a stand, to do what he\u2014like Crowe\u2014wished his predecessors had done in Vietnam. He tried to make the case for containment, which he called \"strangulation\" because it sounded more aggressive. He acknowledged that his strategy could take as many as two years, but said he was convinced that the embargo would eventually work, at least in restoring the prewar status quo, which was all he thought America needed to do. What he didn't say\u2014it was just too difficult in that atmosphere; it might have elicited even harsher rebukes\u2014was that two years was sure as hell an acceptable wait if it meant sparing the thousands of young Americans about to be sent into the meat grinder, young Americans who were a lot more real to him than to his country-club bosses. But Powell didn't say that. He had built his career on giving people in power what they wanted and he knew even better than they did what they didn't want: an angry, self-righteous black man \"peeing on the floor.\" He could live, he declared, with whatever decision Bush made. And Bush\u2014who liked Powell, liked what he represented about America, sometimes almost forgot he was black\u2014seemed pleased.\n\nA decade later, when America's military confidence had swelled, and the Gulf War looked in retrospect like an easy and obvious thing, people often forgot how close the United States came to not fighting the war at all. The military wanted to give sanctions more time to work. Baker was itching to cut a diplomatic deal. Scowcroft was trying to anticipate Bush, and Bush\u2014although he grew more certain over time\u2014was tentative early on.\n\nFor its part, the public was hardly gung ho. Polls showed that Americans supported military action, but only when told it would be cheap and quick and that the blood would be spilled by the other side\u2014exactly what retired military leaders were telling them not to think. In Congress, virtually the entire Democratic leadership, and most of the rank and file, voted no; it was the closest vote on authorizing military force since 1812. Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that the war could produce twenty thousand U.S. casualties and \"potentially devastating economic consequences.\" Aging veterans of Camelot such as Robert McNamara and George Ball came out of the woodwork in opposition. In testimony opposing the war, Arthur Schlesinger urged senators to \"take a few quiet moments to revisit the Vietnam monument\" before casting their votes. \"Vietnam hangs in the collective subconscious like a bad dream, a psychic wound,\" observed Newsweek, \"It hovers over politicians and policymakers, the past that will not die.\"\n\nBut the past did begin to die. Analogies don't live forever, and just as the \"lessons\" of Munich had superseded the \"lessons\" of World War I, America's victories in the cold war and the Gulf began to undermine the \"lessons\" of Vietnam. Before the war, Saddam had warned that \"the United States relies on the Air Force and the Air Force has never been the decisive factor in a battle in the history of wars,\" which was pretty much Colin Powell's view. But they were both proved wrong. During the post-Vietnam years, while army men like Powell had been cursing airpower and the mirage-like promise that it would make warfare cheap and clean, airpower had undergone a technological revolution. During Nixon's Christmas bombings of Hanoi in 1972, the average B-52 missed its target by 2,700 feet. In the Gulf War, by contrast, planes using laser-guided smart bombs regularly came within a foot or two. The air force could now choose not merely which building to hit, but which floor. At one point a stealth fighter guided a bomb through an air shaft in the roof of the Iraqi air command.\n\nThe desert, it turned out, was an easier battlefield than the jungle; and Iraq, a more urbanized, industrialized country than North Vietnam, was more vulnerable to attacks from the air. War, Crowe had insisted, is never neat and tidy. But for America in the Gulf, the air war came close. Leslie Gelb called it \"immaculate destruction.\"\n\nBy the time American troops went in on the ground, the Iraqi military had been decapitated. Its various units were like limbs without a brain, unable to communicate with one another or do much of anything except flail. In one massive battle, Iraq lost eight hundred tanks; America didn't lose a single one. One hundred hours after the ground fighting began, it was over. Terrified Iraqi soldiers were streaming back along Highway 80 into Iraq. It was a terrible, savage war, but only for one side. Perhaps one hundred thousand Iraqis died. For the United States, the figure was 146.\n\nWar, American policymakers were coming to believe, was easier in a one-superpower world. Saddam, like Noriega, had no geopolitical big brother to come to his aid. The flip side was that because America didn't have to worry about holding off communists in other parts of the globe, it could focus its firepower on the Gulf. And because communism was dead, and the Bush administration had rallied most of the world to America's side, other countries paid the bills. Germany and Japan both ponied up; the Saudis alone pledged $15 billion. The Gulf War didn't land the U.S. government deeper in debt, as Brzezinski and others feared. By some accounts, America actually turned a profit on the war.\n\n\"By God,\" exclaimed President Bush, \"we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.\" In New York City, Colin Powell rode in a white Buick convertible, with Cheney in the car behind, while a million yellow ribbons fluttered, six tons of confetti fell, and close to five million people cheered. A radio station in Raleigh, North Carolina, began opening its programs with the words \"broadcasting from the most powerful nation in the world.\" House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich and spy novelist Tom Clancy consulted with an expert in Latin and coined the phrase Venimus, Vidimus, Icimos Gluteos: \"We came, We saw, We kicked ass.\"\n\nBut for all the chest-thumping, the victory felt incomplete. It \"is like coitus interruptus,\" declared Norman Podhoretz. \"Nothing is consummated.\" Precisely because America's military had proved so awesome, critics began to wonder why it hadn't removed Saddam from power. As in Korea forty years earlier, after MacArthur's stunning maneuver at Inchon, the thrill of success bred the temptation to reach for more. Polling showed that while only a third of Americans supported overthrowing Saddam before the war began, by a week into the air campaign the figure had more than doubled.\n\nBush also wanted Saddam gone. He had assumed that when Saddam's military rivals saw him thrashed they would oust him from power. The problem was that Saddam had no military rivals; he had murdered everyone with talent or an independent power base. As the war drew to a close, Bush encouraged Iraqis to \"take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam the dictator to step aside,\" but Bush's intended audience\u2014Saddam's fellow generals\u2014didn't respond. Instead, it was Iraq's Kurds and Shia, whom Saddam and his Sunni Arab clique had brutally repressed, who rose up against his rule.\n\nNo senior Bush administration official argued that America should march to Baghdad and depose Saddam itself. That idea, which many hawks would come to support in retrospect, was still virtually unthinkable in 1991. Assumptions about what the U.S. military could achieve, how much the U.S. economy could afford, and how much the American people would bear remained far too low, even after America's success in expelling Saddam from Kuwait. The hubris bubble had not yet fully swelled. The Vietnam syndrome was dying but not yet dead.\n\nThere was a narrower debate, however, which was revealing in its own right. Bush did not want to help the Kurds or Shia at all. On Powell's recommendation, he would not even ground Saddam's helicopters, which were slaughtering the Shia rebels who had risen up on what they thought was Bush's command. Partly that was because he feared getting sucked into an Iraqi civil war. But his reluctance ran deeper than that. Bush worried that if he helped the Shia, the Sunni Arab regimes that had backed the war, but deeply feared a Shia, pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad, would denounce him, shattering the international coalition that had prosecuted the war. That mattered because in 1991\u2014as opposed to 2003\u2014America's leaders didn't believe they could fight Saddam on their own dime. Poverty bred multilateralism and multilateralism induced restraint. In an era of economic scarcity, America needed rich allies like Saudi Arabia to foot the bill.\n\nWhat's more, Bush agreed with his Sunni Arab allies. Like them he saw the Shia rebellion not as a democratic uprising but as a sectarian one, likely to replace one species of tyranny with another, this one quite possibly fundamentalist. For Bush, the Shia rebellion in Iraq's south evoked less Poland in 1989 than Iran in 1979, and in this respect he was closer to Jeane Kirkpatrick than to Francis Fukuyama, closer to William Crowe than to Elliott Abrams. He didn't believe that within the cocoon of Saddam's dictatorship lay an Iraqi democracy ready to sprout wings. He had hoped for a coup that would produce a milder, pro-American version of Saddam, a Sunni general who would be our bastard, not his own. But when he saw that this was not possible, he stuck with Saddam as the lesser evil.\n\nFor Bush, lesser evils were about the best one could expect. The last American president to serve in World War II, he had come of age when democracy remained a rather exotic and beleaguered form of government. And his realist instincts were reinforced by Scowcroft, a Kissinger disciple with a gentle disposition but an extremely harsh view of the world. Bush simply did not believe that trying to promote American ideals would promote American interests; like Irving Kristol, he feared the unintended consequences of good intentions. He had not been particularly happy about the breakup of the Soviet Union, preferring autocratic stability to democratic chaos, preferring the devil he knew to the one not yet born. For him the Panama invasion had been about drugs, domestic politics, and American honor. Democracy hadn't played much of a role. And now he would not lift a finger to give democracy a chance in Iraq. His signature word\u2014it became a running joke on Saturday Night Live\u2014was prudence, which Merriam-Webster defines as \"caution or circumspection as to danger or risk.\" He was like Eisenhower in this way. His foreign policy was Hippocratic: First, do no harm.\n\nCheney and Wolfowitz were different: more optimistic and more aggressive. Cheney had been slow to recognize the changes in the U.S.S.R., but once he did, he wanted to dismember America's old foe. He wasn't trying to promote democracy necessarily; he wasn't a terribly idealistic sort. But he wanted to expand American power. To be truly safe, he believed, America must extend its dominance, and in that way he exemplified the spirit of the emerging post\u2013cold war age. Bush was comfortable limiting America's power and his own; limits protected you against bad things. He didn't want to restore the imperial presidency; he believed Johnson had only hurt himself by hoodwinking Congress on Vietnam. So he let Congress vote on the Gulf War, thus giving himself cover if it went bad. Cheney had opposed that. For him, letting Congress in the game wasn't cover; it was a straitjacket. Cheney hadn't wanted to run the war through the UN, either. Why give anyone else a say? And when the war ended, he was less inclined than Bush to defer to America's Arab allies. He didn't want to get drawn into an Iraqi civil war any more than Bush did, but he supported shooting down Saddam's helicopters. He didn't necessarily believe that a Shia government would be democratic, but he did think it might be more pliant. He was hungrier than Bush to extend America's reach and more willing to take risks to bring that about.\n\nLike Cheney, Wolfowitz also believed in extending American dominance. But he saw the spread of democracy and the spread of American power as more closely intertwined. Like Abrams and Fukuyama, who was his close friend, he had been in his thirties in the early Reagan years. And like them he had been shaped by the great tide of democratization that washed across the developing world. If Abrams's crucible had been Panama, Wolfowitz's had been the Philippines. At first, the Reagan administration\u2014in keeping with the Kirkpatrick line\u2014had embraced Manila's pro-American dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. But as Marcos weakened and a communist insurgency grew, Wolfowitz, as assistant secretary of state for East Asia, began pushing for reform. By late 1985, Kirkpatrick, now out of government, was accusing her former colleagues of the same democratic \"purism\" that had led to the downfalls of Somoza and the Shah. \"Anyone who thinks it [the Marcos regime] will be succeeded by an authentic parliamentary government with sensible economic policies,\" added Irving Kristol, \"has been swallowing too many happiness pills.\" But Wolfowitz kept swallowing them. In 1986, when Marcos rigged an election and Filipinos poured into the streets in protest, Wolfowitz helped convince Secretary of State George Shultz that America must force Marcos out, and Shultz in turn convinced Reagan. A democratic, pro-American government (with sensible economic policies) took power, and the communist insurgency faded. Wolfowitz later called it \"the high point of my career.\"\n\nNot surprisingly, then, Wolfowitz saw the Shia rebels differently than Bush and Scowcroft did: not as fundamentalists, but as democrats. Of all the top Bush officials, he was the most adamant that America come to their aid. He kept urging that Saddam's helicopters be shot down, even after the bureaucratic fight was lost.\n\nIn so doing, he slammed up against Powell. Like Abrams and Crowe before them, Wolfowitz and Powell were oil and water. Powell loathed disorganization; in Wolfowitz's office, the papers were stacked up so high you could barely see. Wolfowitz was a nerd: He spoke six languages and kept ten ballpoint pens inside his suit pocket. Powell distrusted intellectuals. \"There are some people at that school you hang out at,\" he later told a Harvard professor, \"who contribute nothing else to the national GDP except to create these great schemes.\"\n\nIn late March, with Wolfowitz still kicking up a fuss about the helicopters, Powell screamed at him that the question was closed. Inside the administration, cautious realism still held the upper hand. But things were changing. Before the war, critics had mostly called Bush reckless for going to war too early. It was a sign of the shifting political mood that they now called him timid for ending it too soon.\n\nBy any reasonable standard, the Gulf War was a success. Facing a public, a Congress, and a military still deeply scarred by Vietnam, Bush had taken America to war and won it at a price\u2014in money and lives\u2014that Americans were willing to pay. Yes, Saddam was still in power, but he was weaker. His military had been ravaged and as the price of defeat he was forced to accept a humiliating regime of sanctions and inspections designed to ensure that it was not rebuilt. The Kurds and Shia paid a terrible price for America's decision to end the war early, but the Bush administration eventually established a safe haven in Iraq's north that gave many Kurds some respite from Saddam's horrors. And in both north and south, American planes patrolled the skies to make sure Saddam did not menace his neighbors again. The hawks who had wanted not merely to liberate Kuwait but to cripple Iraq had achieved their goal.\n\nThe war also dramatically expanded American dominance of the Middle East. When Reagan took office, Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversaw U.S. military operations from Kenya to Kazakhstan, and ran the war in the Gulf, had not even existed. Back then, America had jostled for influence in the Middle East with the U.S.S.R. Now Syria, one of Moscow's former clients, had joined a U.S.-led war against one of its other former clients, Iraq, while the Soviets watched from the sidelines. In the 1980s, America's military presence on Middle Eastern soil had been limited to a navy supply base in tiny Bahrain and a few hundred peacekeepers in the Sinai desert. Now, after the Gulf War, U.S. ground troops occupied six Middle Eastern countries and U.S. planes patrolled the skies above much of Iraq. In 1985 the United States had accounted for 15 percent of arms sales to the Middle East. A decade later it was 72 percent.\n\nYet despite all this, as George Bush began his 1992 reelection campaign he found himself attacked by both conservatives and leading Democrats for having left Saddam in power. In April 1991, Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who only months earlier had agonized about whether to support the war at all, demanded that Bush develop a strategy of democratic regime change so that \"we advance the day not just when Saddam Hussein is out of power, but when there exists in Iraq a government that grants reasonable consideration to all its peoples.\" At the 1992 Democratic convention, Georgia governor Zell Miller said that President Bush \"talks like Dirty Harry but acts like Barney Fife.\" It was the same fate that had befallen Harry Truman when he pulled back from MacArthur's bid to liberate the Korean peninsula from communism. American power had expanded dramatically, just not as dramatically as American confidence. It was a telltale sign that hubris was starting to build. The higher America flew, the more fervently critics demanded that it fly higher still.\n\n## CHAPTER FOURTEEN\n\n## FUKUYAMA'S ESCALATOR\n\nFor Colin Powell, Bill Clinton's presidency constituted an irony, maybe even a cruel joke. He had been sad to see the Bushies go. Sure, Cheney was a bit icy. Wolfowitz's ideas were a little grand. But Powell liked Republicans. Like him, they believed in authority, discipline, order. With Republicans, meetings started on time; decisions got made; you knew who was in charge. He particularly liked Reagan and Bush. They were courtly and dignified, traditional in a way he appreciated. They looked the way he thought presidents should look. Powell considered many in his own age cohort, and among the slightly younger baby boomers, to be self-indulgent, whiny, unkempt. The military was a museum of old-fashioned virtues, and when it came to civilians, Powell found them best expressed in men and women a generation older than him.\n\nIt was a challenge, therefore, to serve a commander in chief who, on at least one occasion, sat in the Oval Office in his sweatpants, munching a banana smeared with peanut butter. Powell, who still had eight months left as chairman of the Joint Chiefs when Clinton took office, was a fanatic about punctuality: At his morning staff meetings, everyone took their seats at 8:30; he walked in at the stroke of 8:31. The new White House, by contrast, ran on what reporters called \"Clinton Standard Time\": anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours late. (It was an irony of the Clinton-Powell relationship. Powell had developed his mania for promptness in part to combat racist stereotypes of blacks. Clinton, a son of the redneck South, conformed to those stereotypes and partly as a result was dubbed \"the first black President.\") Powell rose early; Clinton stayed up late, often working\u2014and expecting his staff to work\u2014until 2 A.M. Powell was stoic: When injured for the second time in Vietnam, he asked the army not to inform his wife. Clinton loved to emote. At a touchy-feely, get-to-know-you session for cabinet members and White House staff, he described how painful it was as a young boy to be fat.\n\nFinally, Powell prized proper appearance. When meeting someone for the first time, he instinctively looked to see if their shoes were shined. Clinton, by contrast, often took reporters' questions in his tracksuit, while sweating profusely from his morning run. He was also a binge eater, whose intake increased with stress. And some of his advisers were worse. Powell's new boss at the Pentagon was Les Aspin, a disheveled, doughy man known to lunch on potato chips doused in mayonnaise. At a meeting with Jordan's King Hussein, Powell watched in horror as Aspin ate thirteen hors d'oeuvres.\n\nThere should have been at least one note of consolation: At least these graying beatniks wouldn't start many wars. Powell distrusted foreign policy makers who hadn't served in uniform, but he actually preferred those who had avoided Vietnam because they opposed it to couch-potato militarists like Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Cheney. In the culture war, he and the Clintonites were often on opposite sides, but when it came to real war, Powell hoped that the children of Woodstock and the children of Khe Sanh would find common ground in their resolve to never do anything like Vietnam again.\n\nThat's why the Clinton years were a cruel joke, because the hippies had changed. Vietnam no longer traumatized them; they were starting to appreciate war. It wasn't apparent right away, but by the mid-1990s, after some humiliating false starts, the Clintonites began learning many of the same lessons about the post\u2013cold war age that the Bushies had learned: that military force worked, that America's political and economic model was universal, and that when America pushed hard in one direction, its allies fell in line. There were partisan differences, to be sure, differences that would become clearer when Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Powell returned to office under a new President Bush. But by Clinton's second term, the hubris bubble was again starting to swell. The ethic of dominance, it turned out, was ideologically ambidextrous. In the Clinton years, American hegemony learned to hit from the left side.\n\nThe Clintonites, to be fair, had never really been hippies. During Vietnam they had formed the right edge of the antiwar movement, the students who wanted to save the system, not smash it, and the left edge of the establishment, the people nudging it to adapt to changing times. Many of them\u2014like Sandy Berger and Clinton himself\u2014had worked in the McGovern campaign. Some\u2014like Anthony Lake and Richard Holbrooke\u2014had served as discontented young diplomats in Vietnam. Virtually none had joined SDS.\n\nBut Powell was not wrong to assume that he could dissuade the Clintonites from using force. Compared to Cheney, who ate generals for breakfast, the Clintonites were more deferential to the military, or maybe just more afraid of it. And the military certainly wasn't very deferential to them. Two months into his presidency, when Clinton visited the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, its crew mocked him behind his back. \"What did Clinton do when a protester threw a beer at him?\" went one joke making the rounds of the ship. \"It was a draft beer so he dodged it.\" Two months after that, an air force general accused Clinton of \"pot-smoking, draft-dodging [and] womanizing.\" Clinton had taken office promising to lift the ban on gays in the military, but after encountering fierce resistance from Powell and the other Joint Chiefs, he backed down. After that, many in the military considered him an easy mark. Presumably he would back down even faster if they opposed going to war.\n\nClinton had talked tough on foreign policy during the campaign, slamming Bush for leaving Saddam in power, tolerating \"ethnic cleansing\" in the former Yugoslavia, and coddling the dictators in Beijing. But less important than what he said was how little he said it. In his four-thousand-word convention acceptance speech, foreign policy received only 141 words. He had been elected, Clinton told ABC's Ted Koppel, to \"focus like a laser beam on the economy.\" Foreign policy aides\u2014except for those who dealt with international economic issues like trade\u2014were warned not to take too much of his time. When a deranged man crashed a small plane onto the White House lawn in 1994, insiders joked that it was Clinton's CIA director trying to get a meeting.\n\nPowell suspected that as long as Clinton didn't devote much personal attention to foreign policy, his foreign policy wouldn't be particularly aggressive. And he was right. In Clinton's first two years as president, his personal hesitancy on international affairs\u2014combined with America's ongoing economic troubles and the fading, but not yet dead, legacy of Vietnam\u2014left him hesitant to use military force. The early Clinton years were to the rising ethic of dominance what the Eisenhower years had been to the rising ethic of toughness: an interregnum, a pause before the march toward hubris resumed.\n\nA big reason for that pause was the U.S. economy, which in 1993 still looked every bit as fragile as it had five years earlier when Paul Kennedy predicted America's decline. Echoing Kennedy, top Clinton officials privately warned that America couldn't afford costly new foreign commitments. \"We simply don't have the leverage, we don't have the influence, [or] the inclination to use military force,\" conceded Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff in May. \"We don't have the money to bring positive results any time soon.\"\n\nWestern Europe, by contrast, was feeling its geopolitical oats. No longer dependent on America for protection against the Soviet Union, many Europeans believed they were finally becoming masters of their own house. And in 1993 they proudly inaugurated the European Union, which was meant to help the continent speak with one loud voice on the world stage. The Gulf War may have left America dominant in the Middle East, but in Europe, American power appeared to be in retreat. As EU chairman Jacques Poos exulted, \"The Age of Europe has dawned.\"\n\nIf European problems were now meant to have European solutions, the test case was Yugoslavia, which in the early 1990s had ruptured in a gush of blood. From the beginning the Europeans called the tune. In 1991, when first Slovenia and then Croatia seceded from the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation, the Bush administration warned against recognizing their independence. But Germany\u2014recently unified, historically allied with Croatia, and basking in its newfound geopolitical power\u2014brushed Washington aside. Bonn recognized the two breakaway nations; the rest of Western Europe quickly followed suit, and American officials watched with a combination of passivity and indifference. As Secretary of State James Baker liked to say, \"We don't have a dog in this fight.\"\n\nSoon all hell broke loose. Slovenia contained barely any Serbs and thus made a fairly clean getaway. But in Croatia, Serbs comprised more than 10 percent of the population, and many of them wanted no part of an independent Croatian state led by ultranationalist, anti-Serb bigots. In May 1991, Serbs in the small eastern Croatian town of Borovo Selo raised the old Yugoslav flag. Croatian policemen arrived to take it down. Suddenly the Serbs began shooting. They not only killed a dozen policemen but also gouged their eyes out. It was a small taste of things to come.\n\nA year later, in the spring of 1992, heavily Muslim Bosnia seceded as well. But with Orthodox Christian Serbs comprising roughly a third of its population, and Catholic Croats another fifth, it was the most vulnerable of all. On April 6, the Europeans recognized Bosnia's independence; the next day America did, too. Two weeks later, local Serbs, backed by the Yugoslav army, laid siege to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, shelling it night after night. By midsummer, the city that had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics was a horror show. With its cemeteries overflowing, people began burying bodies in public gardens, even backyards. There was barely any water, food, or fuel. \"What is the difference between Sarajevo and Auschwitz?\" went a local joke. \"In Auschwitz at least they had gas.\"\n\nIt got worse. In the Bosnian hinterland, the Serbs were building concentration camps. In the town of Banja Luka, they dispossessed Bosnian Muslims of their homes and possessions, shaved their heads, herded them onto cattle trains, and dumped them at a place called Omarska, an old iron mine now encased by barbed wire. Inside, inmates were made to endure\u2014and commit\u2014unspeakable crimes. Men were forced at gunpoint to castrate their sons and rape their daughters. Lacking adequate supplies of food and water, some inmates were reduced to drinking their own urine; others tried to survive by eating grass. The goal was to \"cleanse\" Bosnia of Muslims: Some would be killed, others deported, and the rest would be too psychologically shattered to ever assert their independence again.\n\nEurope's response was to push through a UN arms embargo, which, given that Belgrade controlled virtually all of the Yugoslav army's heavy weaponry, merely prevented the Bosnians from defending themselves. Britain, France, and several other European nations also sent troops as part of a UN \"peacekeeping\" force. But in Bosnia there was no peace to keep. Allowed under UN guidelines to defend their aid convoys, but not allowed to defend Bosnians, the peacekeepers proved worse than bystanders. They became potential hostages, whom the Serbs could seize if the West threatened military action. Useless at preventing Bosnia's destruction, the UN troops proved effective only at preventing the world from doing anything about it.\n\nThe Clintonites were appalled. Vice President Al Gore, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, and Ambassador to Germany Richard Holbrooke began pushing a policy called \"lift and strike,\" aimed at saving Croatia and Bosnia by lifting the UN arms embargo and striking Serb positions from the air. But implementing \"lift and strike\" required overruling the Europeans, who still saw the former Yugoslavia as their show. And before the Clintonites could overrule the Europeans, they first had to overrule Colin Powell.\n\nThat proved impossible. On national security, Powell was Clinton's most powerful adviser. He had more foreign policy experience than the new president and many of his top aides, and was vastly more popular on Capitol Hill. Within the military, he sometimes seemed to be the only person preventing outright insubordination. Clinton was also terrified that Powell would resign and run against him for reelection in 1996. In their first clash, on gays in the military, it was the president\u2014not the general\u2014who had caved. \"Powell simply overwhelmed the administration,\" noted Holbrooke. \"He regarded the new team as children. And the new team in turn regarded him with awe.\"\n\nThe Gulf War had made Powell a national hero, but it hadn't altered his reluctance to use force. Bosnia struck him as a cross between Lebanon and Vietnam. As in Lebanon, America would be putting itself in the middle of a Byzantine, brutal civil war that had little direct bearing on its security. And as in Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia's terrain was a forbidding patchwork of forests and mountains, nothing like the open desert of Kuwait. Civilians sometimes called the Serbs a lackluster force, undisciplined and frequently drunk, but Powell likened them to the Vietcong: tenacious defenders of what they considered their home soil. Powell grew particularly agitated when Clintonites suggested that America could defeat the Serbs from the air. \"When I hear someone tell me what airpower can do,\" he declared, \"I head for the bunker.\" When administration officials asked him what it would take to save Bosnia, Powell replied two hundred thousand ground troops. That was meant to be a conversation-stopper, and usually was.\n\nDespite Powell's opposition, by May 1993 Clinton officials thought they had reached a consensus on \"lift and strike.\" Secretary of State Warren Christopher was dispatched to consult with the Europeans. But the key word was consult. The Christopher trip was multilateralism in its truest form. America was not presenting its allies with a fait accompli; it was genuinely seeking their opinion. It was a sign that when it came to Europe, the balance of power had changed: America would ask, not tell.\n\nThe Europeans, in turn, told Christopher to go to hell. British and French leaders refused to endanger their peacekeepers by taking steps sure to enrage the Serbs. \"We do not interfere in American affairs,\" declared one top European official. \"We hope they will have enough respect not to interfere in ours.\"\n\nWhen Christopher reached Bonn, he got a call from Les Aspin telling him he might as well come home. Clinton had changed his mind; he no longer supported \"lift and strike.\" Powell had given him a copy of Robert Kaplan's travelogue, Balkan Ghosts, which Clinton read as suggesting that the peoples of the region had been slaughtering each other for five hundred years. Soon Christopher was saying the same thing. In testimony before Congress soon after his return, he emphasized that the killing went both ways. State Department underlings were dispatched to find examples of atrocities committed by Bosnians against Serbs.\n\nChristopher's trip had been \"an exchange all right,\" snarled former Reagan official Richard Perle. \"Warren Christopher went to Europe with an American policy and he came back with a European one.\" But it was more complicated than that. The Europeans had rolled Christopher in large measure because Powell had again rolled Clinton. As usual there was a close association between presidential power and American assertiveness. It was no surprise that at the same moment Time magazine dubbed Clinton \"The Incredible Shrinking President,\" many in Europe were talking about the incredible shrinking United States.\n\nEventually Clinton's fortunes would turn around, and America would resume the upward climb that had begun with Panama and would end with Iraq. But in 1993 that was still several years away. Before the Clinton administration could ascend the ladder of dominance, it would taste even more humiliation first.\n\nIf the administration's inability to end the war in Bosnia was embarrassing, equally embarrassing was its inability to win the war three thousand miles to the south, in Somalia. In Bush's final months, in a move that struck some observers as exceedingly noble and others as exceedingly cynical, America had sent thirty thousand troops to Somalia, a cold war pawn turned failed state whose people were starving because warlords prevented the distribution of food. Throughout 1992, top Bush officials\u2014and particularly Powell\u2014had opposed military intervention, before quickly reversing themselves after Clinton's election in November. In trying to explain the about-face, some observers cited the mounting horror of the situation, captured on CNN: the skeletal children too weak to swat away flies. Cynics, who included some inside the Bush administration itself, offered a harsher explanation: Bush and Powell were going to war in East Africa so Clinton wouldn't be able to in the Balkans. In Somalia, admitted Scowcroft, it was \"a lot cheaper\" than in Bosnia \"to demonstrate that we had a heart.\"\n\nAmerican troops were supposed to be gone by the time Bush left office, but the deployment lingered on in a fit of absentmindedness. In the early Clinton administration, where foreign policy was often an afterthought, Africa was less than an afterthought, and anything closely associated with George Bush was suspect, Somalia received a fraction of the high-level attention devoted to the controversy at the White House travel office. No top Clinton official even visited Somalia. Aspin had wanted to go, but his less than robust constitution was so unsettled by the required inoculations that he canceled his trip.\n\nBut someone was paying attention: Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the imperious secretary-general of the United Nations. As an Egyptian, he had strong feelings about the hellhole nearby, and one of those feelings was intense hostility toward its strongest warlord, Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Over the course of 1993, Boutros-Ghali stood at the intersection of two dangerous trends. Militarily the peacekeeping force in Somalia was growing weaker as third-world troops gradually replaced their more intimidating U.S. counterparts. But politically the operation was growing more ambitious as peacekeepers expanded their mandate from merely safeguarding the distribution of food to building a functional Somali government, which required sidelining Aidid.\n\nOne day in June, Pakistani peacekeepers announced that they were planning to confiscate some of Aidid's weapons. Aidid's men responded by killing twenty-four of them and mutilating their bodies. The American general in charge of UN forces then upped the ante by putting a bounty on Aidid's head.\n\nBy now, Powell wanted U.S. forces removed. So did Aspin, but he was shouting into a void. (During his yearlong tenure as defense secretary, he had a grand total of two meetings with the president.) Powell might have gotten Clinton's attention, but he was weeks away from retirement and had largely checked out. So the White House sleepwalked toward a showdown with a warlord it knew little about in a war it thought it could ignore.\n\nOn October 3, U.S. Special Forces tried to capture two of Aidid's top lieutenants at a hotel in downtown Mogadishu. Suddenly one of their Black Hawk helicopters was shot down, leaving wounded American soldiers trapped in the middle of a Somali slum. Aidid's men burned tires to alert their comrades, and throngs of AK-47-wielding fighters descended on the besieged Americans. By day's end, eighteen Americans\u2014along with roughly one thousand Somalis\u2014were dead. CNN showed a Somali mob dragging one U.S. soldier's disfigured corpse through the streets.\n\nHolbrooke called it \"Vietmalia\": Vietnam plus Somalia. Powell had retired, but the Powell Doctrine\u2014that America should go to war in only the most extreme and auspicious of situations (and then with overwhelming force)\u2014was now more alive than ever. For one thing, after Mogadishu, presidential power over foreign policy declined even further. Four days after the massacre, West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, chairman of the powerful appropriations committee, literally screamed at Clinton that unless he withdrew U.S. troops immediately, Congress would cut off funding. A few months later, they were gone. When Clinton awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor to one of the soldiers killed in Somalia, the man's father told him he was unfit to be commander in chief.\n\nIf Bosnia had proved America weak in Europe, suddenly it looked weak almost everywhere. In Haiti, the UN had brokered a deal with the junta that overthrew elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Two hundred U.S. troops were to begin training the Haitian military as part of a plan to return the island to democracy. But when the U.S.S. Harlan County steamed into Port-au-Prince a week after the killings in Mogadishu, it encountered a mob on the dock chanting \"Somalia! Somalia!\" For a day the ship idled offshore as Clinton officials tried to decide what to do. Then it turned around and headed back home. Critics called it Somalia Two.\n\nRock bottom came the following year in the tiny central African nation of Rwanda. In January 1994, a Canadian major general named Rom\u00e9o Dallaire, who was heading the small UN peacekeeping mission there, received chilling news. An informant told him that Hutu militia-men, trained by Rwanda's overwhelmingly Hutu military, were planning to exterminate the country's Tutsi minority. Everything was in place. They were simply awaiting the signal to begin.\n\nDallaire faxed UN headquarters in New York. The informant was willing to show him where the militias stashed their weapons, and Dallaire wanted permission to seize them. His UN superiors refused. He was expanding the scope of his mission. It sounded like Somalia. The Clinton administration would never go along.\n\nThree months later, a plane carrying Rwanda's president was shot down: It was the signal to begin. Teams of Hutu extremists began hunting down Tutsis and moderate Hutus village by village, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house. In the city they used guns; in the countryside, where guns were scarcer, they used machetes, clubs studded with nails, hammers, screwdrivers, even the handlebars of bicycles. At a school where two thousand Tutsis had taken refuge among a few peacekeepers, the Tutsis pleaded with the UN troops to shoot them rather than leave. Death by machine gun was preferable to being hacked to death.\n\nDallaire appealed for reinforcements, but the Pentagon resisted fiercely. Even though the peacekeeping mission didn't include Americans, Clinton officials feared that the United States might get dragged in if the peacekeepers got in trouble. The best way to ensure that Rwanda didn't become Somalia was to withdraw the UN altogether. For its part, the U.S. Embassy staff was already on its way out. The American ambassador's chief steward, a Tutsi, begged to be taken along. \"We're in terrible danger,\" he pleaded. \"Please come and get us.\" The ambassador refused. The steward's family and more than thirty other Rwandans employed by the United States were subsequently killed.\n\nSpooked by Somalia, the Clinton administration did not hold a single high-level meeting to discuss intervention. Government spokesmen tied themselves in rhetorical knots to avoid calling the killings \"genocide,\" for fear that if they did, America would be obligated to try to stop it. By the time the carnage was over, one hundred days later, eight hundred thousand Rwandans were dead in what one journalist called \"the most efficient killing since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.\" Back home in his native Quebec, Dallaire swallowed a fistful of pills, washed them down with a bottle of Scotch, lay down on a park bench, and tried to die.\n\nFour years later, on a tour through Africa, Bill Clinton arrived in Rwanda's capital and apologized. He met survivors and handed the country's new president a plaque commemorating the dead. Back home, critics were scathing: Clinton apologized too often and too well. He had done so twice already on the same trip.\n\nBut the apology mattered. It mattered that when asked to name the greatest regret of his presidency, Clinton did not mention Somalia, as Reagan had mentioned Lebanon, an intervention gone bad. He mentioned Rwanda, an intervention never carried out. It mattered because in death the Rwandans came to matter more to American foreign policy than they had in life. Rwanda became the anti-Vietnam: a parable about the horror of not going to war. Along with Bosnia, it became the occasion for an historic reconciliation between the American left and American power.\n\nUnderstanding this reconciliation requires understanding that intellectually, Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz were not the only people who embraced Fukuyama's vision. In the 1990s, many liberals also came to believe that they were living at history's end. Among liberals, the idea that all people hungered for democracy and human rights was not new. Carter had said as much in the 1970s when he made human rights the rhetorical centerpiece of his foreign policy. But during the cold war, there had been a problem: If all people wanted human rights, why did so few governments\u2014especially in the third world\u2014respect them? Mainstream post-toughness liberals (unlike some on the New Left) did not admire dictators like Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Yet many liberals suspected that for all their nastiness, Castro and Ho were giving their people things that they genuinely wanted: the dignity that comes from casting off imperial rule, the rough-hewn social justice that comes from breaking up feudal estates and giving long-suffering peasants some land. Why else had the Vietnamese been more willing to fight for Hanoi than for Saigon and had the Cubans refused to rise up against Castro, despite the CIA's best efforts? Most liberals in the '70s still considered political freedom a universal desire. But many accepted that, in some places at least, economic development and economic justice might have to come first. In a nod to third-world autocracies, Carter even defined human rights as comprising not just freedom of speech and the secret ballot but also the right to food, shelter, health care, and education. \"A lot of third world countries...insisted that 'human rights begins at breakfast, and you cannot expect us to worry about frills like civil and political liberties until we can feed our people,'\" noted Jessica Tuchman, the human rights expert on Carter's National Security Council, \"and there was a lot of sensitivity to that in the State Department.\"\n\nIt was the liberal equivalent of Jeane Kirkpatrick's argument for why America should tolerate anticommunist third-world thugs. Kirkpatrick and other cold war conservatives said dictators like Somoza and Marcos were necessary evils. We should support them because at least they were better than communism. Many post-Vietnam liberals, by contrast, saw communists like Castro, Ho, and the Sandinistas as the necessary evils. We should tolerate them because at least they were better than imperialism. In the long, long term, both liberals and conservatives thought greater freedom was possible. Kirkpatrick believed that over the course of decades, or perhaps centuries, pro-American autocracies could evolve toward democracy. Liberals hoped that after fulfilling their people's basic needs, leftist tyrants would loosen up. But in the near term, both sides accepted that oppression was sometimes inevitable. Demanding immediate change might just make things worse.\n\nThe democratic revolutions of the 1980s\u2014culminating in the euphoria of 1989\u2014changed that. They not only shattered the right's cultural pessimism; they shattered the left's cultural relativism as well. From Asia to Africa to Latin America to Eastern Europe, dozens of poor countries embraced democracy, giving the lie to the claim that freedom must wait until everyone ate a good breakfast. What's more, it became painfully obvious that left-wing tyrannies hadn't been providing good breakfasts anyway; in former communist bastions like China and Vietnam, ex-revolutionaries began scrambling to lure investment from the capitalist West.\n\nThe impact on liberals was profound. The more human rights spread in the poor world, the easier it was to unequivocally condemn those regimes that still denied them. If South Africa was embracing liberal democracy, what was Rwanda's excuse? If democracy was breaking out in Budapest and Bucharest, what justification could there be for Belgrade's crimes? Communism's collapse also meant that where dictatorships remained, they often lost their leftist coloration. With the end of the cold war it became easy to see that Serbia's murderous leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was less a Marxist than a racist hypernationalist. The Bosnian genocide, many liberals insisted, was being perpetrated not by the far left, but by the far right: by \"fascists.\" Among liberals, fighting European fascism\u2014as George Orwell had done during the Spanish Civil War\u2014had a very good pedigree. And the fact that the Serbs were ravaging Bosnia, which was diverse, secular, and tolerant\u2014a liberal dream\u2014made the cause particularly compelling. \"Bosnia isn't Vietnam,\" declared Todd Gitlin, a former SDS president who shed his pacifism during the Balkan wars, \"it's Spain.\"\n\nLiberals didn't always acknowledge that they were viewing Bosnia and Rwanda through Fukuyama's prism. In fact, some suggested that these spasms of evil proved that he had been too optimistic about history's course. But Fukuyama had not claimed that political evil would disappear with history's end; he had claimed that political evil would no longer be intellectually respectable. Bad leaders in Serbia and Rwanda might still do bad things, but unlike the fascists or communists of old, their rationales would no longer capture the imagination of people across the world. This was a big change. In 1949, in the Vital Center, Schlesinger had argued that what made totalitarianism so frightening was its genuine appeal, even to the people fighting it. It had seduced some of the greatest minds in the Western world. It wasn't just an awesome foe militarily; it was an awesome foe intellectually, even spiritually.\n\nThe Serbs and Hutus, by contrast, didn't seduce anyone. They were not just militarily puny; they were intellectually puny. They offered no sweeping alternative vision for how to organize society. They had no sympathetic intellectuals at Berkeley and the Sorbonne. Unlike Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, which had provoked deep philosophical inquiry, the ideologies of Milosevic and the Hutu genocidaires were interesting only as anthropology. They represented not a competing vision of humanity's future, but an ugly vestige of its tribal past. When liberals remarked in horror that genocide was occurring in 1994, they were assuming that 1994 should be better than 1944. They were buying into Fukuyama's belief that history climbs upward, that progress is the normal course of things. And they were doing so because with the cold war's end they had seen so much progress themselves. In this regard, they were, like Fukuyama himself, heirs of Woodrow Wilson and the optimistic early-twentieth-century progressives. And they were unlike the chastened toughness intellectuals who emerged in their wake. Arthur Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr had not assumed that 1944 would naturally be better than 1904. They had not assumed that history only marched one way.\n\nSo intellectually, Clinton-era liberals were more confident than their cold war predecessors that human rights were achievable everywhere, soon. And militarily, they were more confident that America could defend those rights at the point of a gun. Comparing the liberal reaction to Bosnia and Rwanda to the liberal reaction to another genocide\u2014two decades earlier\u2014illustrates the point. In 1975, with the Khmer Rouge on the verge of taking power in Cambodia, President Gerald Ford had warned that their victory would spark a \"bloodbath,\" and urged continued military aid to prop up their anticommunist opponents. His warning was prophetic: In their three and a half years in power, the Khmer Rouge would kill or starve two million of Cambodia's seven million people. But in the mid-1970s, Americans were far too exhausted by Vietnam to seriously contemplate military action. And liberals, in particular, found it almost impossible to imagine\u2014after all the destruction the United States had wreaked in Southeast Asia\u2014that further American military action could serve the cause of human rights. \"It is argued that we must give military aid because if we do not there will be a bloodbath,\" noted New York Democratic congresswoman Bella Abzug, but \"there is no greater bloodbath than that which is taking place presently and can only take place with our military assistance.\"\n\nIf liberals in the 1970s found it hard to believe that an American military intervention could have humanitarian effects, they found it equally hard to believe that such an intervention could have a humanitarian intent. Ford's moral pleas, many assumed, were bogus; he just did not want another cold war domino to fall. But by the 1990s, when genocide broke out in Bosnia and Rwanda, the world was no longer a superpower chess-board, and liberals had to squint to see sinister geopolitical motivations behind the call for humanitarian war. To the contrary, what struck many as sinister was America's palpable indifference to atrocities in countries where it had few economic interests. If America could save Kuwait's oil, many liberals suggested, surely it should save Bosnia's people. Leslie Gelb, the young post-toughness intellectual who in 1971 had written that \"military force is a singularly inept instrument of foreign policy,\" was by 1993 a columnist for the New York Times. \"Diplomacy without force is farce,\" he thundered in a column on Bosnia; NATO should begin bombing immediately.\n\nBy the time Clinton took office, liberals were also shedding another inhibition against American military force: They were losing faith in the United Nations. In the Bush years, with the cold war over, the UN had gotten a new lease on life. Since Washington and Moscow no longer lined up on opposite sides of every third-world squabble, the Security Council finally seemed able to resolve them. It authorized the Gulf War, and in the early 1990s blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers fanned out across the world, including to Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. During the 1992 campaign, Clinton even mused about a standing UN army. Perhaps, many liberals hoped, it would be UN\u2014not U.S.\u2014muscle that saved poor Bosnia from destruction.\n\nBut by 1994, the UN dream was dying. In Somalia, even congressional Democrats were furious that Boutros-Ghali had led America by the nose into the Mogadishu massacre. In Rwanda, Dallaire's peacekeeping force had proved impotent. In truth, these disasters were as much America's fault as the UN's: In both cases the organization was largely doing America's bidding. But the UN, and especially its prickly secretary-general, were convenient scapegoats. Even among liberals, the vision of a UN-led order was losing its luster.\n\nBosnia killed it. The Europeans had run the show there from the beginning, and they had operated through the UN, which in theory was what multilateral-minded American liberals wanted. The problem was that in practice the UN operation was a gruesome farce. As Blue Helmets watched, the Serbs swallowed much of Bosnia. By the fall of 1994, those Bosnian Muslims who were not exiled or dead had mostly clustered in a few \"safe havens,\" supposedly protected by UN troops. Except that they weren't really protected at all. In October the Serbs attacked the \"safe haven\" of Bihac, shelling it with cluster bombs and napalm. (It was a symbol of how the moral symbolism had flipped. In Vietnam we used napalm. In Bosnia our enemies did.) When NATO warplanes bombed Serb positions in retaliation, the Serbs took UN peacekeepers hostage and threatened to kill them unless NATO stopped. So NATO stopped and the rape of Bihac went on.\n\nBy 1995, the UN in Bosnia had become a symbol of moral equivalence between murderers and the murdered, of pitiful weakness in the face of genocide. The post\u2013cold war liberal faith in international institutions had collided with the post\u2013cold war liberal faith in human rights. Eight years later, many liberal hawks would see the Iraq War in similar terms: as a choice between form and substance, process and outcome; between solidarity with a set of procedures and solidarity with flesh-and-blood human beings crying out in muffled agony from across the globe. For a whole generation of liberal intellectuals and policymakers, Bosnia preconditioned the answer. After Bosnia, full-throated multilateralism never regained its allure.\n\nThe disillusionment with the UN also reflected disillusionment with Europe. On the Security Council, the Russians protected their fellow Orthodox Christians, the Serbs. The French, who had been Belgrade's allies between World Wars I and II, sympathized with the Serbs as well, especially under French president Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand. The Germans looked out for their World War II allies, the Croats. Few European governments seemed to care much about the Bosnian Muslims, who they sometimes implied were not fully European because they were not Christian.\n\nFor American liberals, especially Jewish-American liberals, who were thickly represented among the Bosnia hawks, it all sounded hideously familiar. \"Fifty years ago, there was no room for Jews in Europe. Now there is no room for Muslims in Europe,\" wrote the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, whose parents both survived the Holocaust. \"There is no such place as 'the West.' There is Europe and there is America and they are distinct chapters in the history of decency.\" The implication was clear. The world's natural champion of human rights, the true executor of Fukuyama's vision of a postdictatorial world, was not the UN or even \"the West\" it was the United States. With their post\u2013cold war confidence that human rights were universal, their post\u2013Gulf War confidence in military force, and their Bosnia-induced disgust with Europe and the UN, many American liberals were turning, without apology, to American power.\n\nIn Washington, this intellectual ferment mattered. Bosnia didn't stir passions in Peoria, but Bill Clinton closely followed elite, as well as mass, opinion. (He was so frequently influenced by op-eds that Vice President Gore began writing rebuttals to ones he felt were leading the president astray.) And by 1995 the anger in elite circles over Bosnia was boiling over. The New York Times, which some suspected was trying to expiate its guilt for its inadequate coverage of the Holocaust, was relentless. (\"What the fuck would they have me do?\" Clinton exploded after reading one Times column.) Low-level State Department officials resigned in protest. Twenty-seven liberal human rights, religious, and professional groups\u2014many with histories of near pacifism\u2014jointly demanded military action. (In Bosnia, even the Quakers were for war.) At the dedication of the newly opened Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall, famed Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel demanded that \"something, anything, must be done.\" As Clinton shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the audience broke into applause.\n\nIn June 1995, the House of Representatives voted to unilaterally defy the UN arms embargo. It was a declaration of independence: America would no longer practice multilateralism at Bosnia's expense. The Europeans were furious; if America stopped enforcing the embargo, the UN's Bosnia mission would collapse. But it was collapsing anyway. In July, the Serbs went after the \"safe haven\" of Srebrenica, where forty thousand Bosnian Muslims had taken refuge. First the Serbs captured thirty of the Dutch peacekeepers supposedly keeping Srebrenica safe, dispossessing them of their weapons, vehicles, and berets. Since the UN had to approve any NATO military response, and such a response might get the Dutch hostages killed, that gave the Serbs an open door. While UN peacekeepers watched, the Serbs put Srebrenica's women, children, and elderly on buses, which eventually dumped them at another \"safe haven\" a few hours away. Along the route, Serb soldiers periodically stopped the buses to select attractive women for roadside rape. Srebrenica's adult men were blindfolded, stripped to their underwear, taken into the countryside, and, by the thousands, shot. For their part, the Dutch peacekeepers left Srebrenica for the Croatian capital of Zagreb, where they celebrated their freedom by drinking and dancing into the night. The Dutch commander informed reporters that \"the parties in Bosnia cannot be divided into 'the good guys' and 'the bad guys.'\"\n\nAfter Srebrenica, the UN in Bosnia was effectively done. Congress, led by Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, who was preparing to run against Clinton in 1996, voted again to lift the arms embargo. Britain and France reminded the White House that since their peacekeepers were members of NATO, the United States would be obligated to help airlift them out. It was the worst of both worlds. America would have to intervene militarily and Bosnia would still die.\n\nFor Bill Clinton, Srebrenica culminated a miserable first two years in office. The public had massively repudiated him in the 1994 midterm elections, and he was so overshadowed by the new Republican Congress that he was reduced to reminding reporters in April 1995 that \"the president is relevant.\" His foreign policy team was a shambles. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin had been fired in 1993. Secretary of State Warren Christopher had tried to resign in late 1994. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake had seriously considered doing the same. CIA director James Woolsey had left in early 1995 and would soon endorse Dole's presidential bid. After a trip to Washington, French president Jacques Chirac said the position of leader of the free world was \"vacant.\"\n\nFor liberal Bosnia hawks, Clinton was a wretched disappointment. At the very moment that American liberals were reconciling themselves to American power, a liberal president seemed unable to wield it. But Bill Clinton was a bad person to count out, because his entire career was a story of improbable last-second triumphs, of victories snatched from the jaws of defeat. He had lost his first race for reelection as Arkansas' governor before coming to politically dominate the state. Rumors of adultery had almost blown up his presidential candidacy early in the primaries, leading him to dub himself \"the comeback kid\" when a strong showing in New Hampshire saved his campaign. He had begun the general election in third place, behind Bush and Ross Perot. At 4:30 A.M. on inauguration morning, he was still writing his inaugural address.\n\nIf Clinton had a rendezvous with destiny, he usually arrived late. He often seemed unable to focus until his own indecisiveness or irresponsibility had brought events to the brink of crisis. But the worse things got, the better he performed. \"Do you know who I am?\" he once told Republican House leader Newt Gingrich. \"I'm the big rubber clown doll you had as a kid.... [T]he harder you hit me, the faster I come back up.\"\n\nNow, after Srebrenica's fall, it was five minutes to midnight. Congress and the Europeans were forcing Clinton's hand, and Bosnia was even starting to hurt politically. Clinton's political Svengali, Dick Morris, who had previously opposed military intervention, now decided that America's failure in Bosnia was reinforcing the public's perception of his boss as weak. All of a sudden, the famously tentative Clinton administration grew focused, aggressive, even domineering. Lake was dispatched to inform the Europeans that the next time the Serbs did something awful, America would bomb the hell out of them. The contrast with Christopher's 1993 trip was clear: America was no longer asking; it was telling. To make such bombing possible, the Clintonites bluntly informed Boutros-Ghali that NATO would no longer ask his permission to use military force. On Bosnia, the UN was being cut out of the game. Inside the administration, the military was also being shunted aside. Powell's successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, John Shalikashvili, was a capable, well-liked soldier with a made-for-Hollywood life story. Born in Poland to refugees from Soviet Georgia, he had come to America at age sixteen and learned English from John Wayne movies. But he was not a national icon able to awe the Clintonites into submission, and unlike Powell, he saw himself as part of the Clinton team. He deferred to them rather than the other way around.\n\nAlmost as important to the military's new willingness to use force was Shalikashvili's director of strategic policy and plans, a cerebral, tightly coiled lieutenant general named Wesley Clark. Within the military, Clark wasn't particularly popular. He didn't backslap, and he liked showing people how smart he was. He was the sort of person, one associate remarked, who would finish a three-hour exam in two hours and then tell you how easy it was.\n\nSome of Clark's uniformed colleagues considered him an apostate, a guy who cared more about helping the White House than sticking up for the military. The fact that he, like Clinton, was a Rhodes scholar from Arkansas fueled suspicions that the two men were close. That wasn't true, but the anti-interventionists in the Pentagon had reason to worry nonetheless. The reason was that Clark\u2014unlike Crowe on Panama or Powell on the Gulf or the Balkans\u2014was becoming emotionally invested in Bosnia's fate. On the morning of August 19, 1995, he was driving with a group of U.S. officials toward Sarajevo along a notoriously dangerous mountain road that they had been forced to traverse because Milosevic refused to offer them a safer route through Serb territory. Suddenly one of the American vehicles veered off the cliff and hurtled down the side of the mountain. Clark rushed to where it had landed and found the bodies of two of his colleagues. From then on, observers noted, he spoke about Milosevic with a particular intensity. Powell's voice had only welled up with emotion when discussing the army grunts in Vietnam or the dead Marines in Beirut. Clark began speaking that way about the people Milosevic killed.\n\nOn August 28, the Serbs did something awful: They shelled a Sarajevo market, killing thirty-seven Bosnian civilians. NATO responded with a massive bombing campaign. Planes from the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, the same aircraft carrier whose sailors had ridiculed Clinton two years earlier, blasted Serb positions. The bombing coincided with a ground push by the Croats, who had evaded the arms embargo with clandestine American help. Together these attacks forced the Serbs\u2014for the first time since the fighting began\u2014into a headlong retreat. And with the war suddenly turning against them, they showed a new willingness to discuss peace.\n\nThe man charged with discussing peace with them was Richard Holbrooke, who came to symbolize the newly aggressive Clinton style. On Bosnia, Holbrooke was white-hot. He had traveled there before Clinton even took office, meeting with concentration camp survivors and staying in a Sarajevo Holiday Inn whose rooms were stained with blood. He had also been on that road with Clark when their colleagues plunged to their death. But other U.S. officials were passionate, too. What distinguished Holbrooke was his combination of moral passion and comfort with raw power. He was a steamroller, far more interested in results than in procedural niceties. When you gave Holbrooke a mission, heads butted, china broke, feathers were often deeply ruffled, but the job got done. In this sense he was the temperamental opposite of Warren Christopher, whose 1993 trip to Europe had been characterized by excellent form, unfailing courtesy, and utter failure. Holbrooke embodied the new liberalism that in 1995 was being born: idealistic about ends, but somewhat brutal about means, committed not merely to containing evil but to vanquishing it, and confident that vanquishing evil and extending American dominance were usually one and the same.\n\nHolbrooke summoned the Balkan leaders to an air force base in Dayton, Ohio. It was a symbol that America\u2014not Europe\u2014was now in control. And after twenty days of extremely muscular diplomacy, he brokered a deal, which U.S. peacekeepers would help enforce. For Clinton, Dayton was part of a larger political comeback. That winter he bested the Gingrich Republicans in a standoff over the budget and the following year cruised to reelection. And for American foreign policy, Dayton was part of a comeback story as well: After two years of hesitation and failure, American confidence was again starting to build. A year earlier, the Clinton administration had finally forced out the Haitian junta that humiliated the U.S.S. Harlan County. If the Bushies had overthrown Noriega, the Clintonites had now also deposed a dictatorship that posed no military threat to the United States, and installed an elected leader in its place.\n\nIf the Gulf War had shown liberals that not every war need be Vietnam, Bosnia underscored the point. In the entire NATO bombing campaign, not a single American died. And for a whole generation of liberal foreign policy makers and commentators, Bosnia taught lessons directly at odds with the lessons of Vietnam: First, that military force could serve moral ends. Second, that the Pentagon's reluctant warriors did not always know best; their prophecies of disaster should be taken with spoonfuls of salt. Third, that the UN should be relegated to the backseat because it lacked the moral clarity and military muscle for humanitarian war. And fourth, that the Europeans were useful allies, but not equal partners, good to have along for the ride but utterly unable to steer the car. The Clintonites were still more multilateral than the emerging post\u2013cold war conservatives. They weren't ideologically hostile to international institutions. But they did want America firmly in command. As Clark exclaimed during Anthony Lake's trip to Europe, after U.S. officials told America's allies that Bosnia policy was about to change, \"The big dog barked today.\" It would bark even more loudly before the Clinton administration was through.\n\nIn 1996, the White House helped dump Boutros Boutros-Ghali as head of the UN, making him the first secretary-general ever denied a second term. The message was clear: Secretaries-general shouldn't get too haughty or independent. In managing the post\u2013cold war world, Turtle Bay would be subordinate to Pennsylvania Avenue, not the other way around.\n\nIf the age of the UN was now over, so was the age of Europe. In the early 1990s, many on both sides of the Atlantic had predicted that with no Soviet Union to contain, NATO would wither, and with it America's political and military hold over Western Europe. Instead the European Union would assume control, in partnership with the UN and perhaps the reconstituted Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The former Yugoslavia was to be the showcase for this new institutional order.\n\nBut NATO saved Bosnia and Bosnia in turn saved NATO, extending it\u2014and American power\u2014deep into the former Soviet bloc. Holbrooke, whose position as assistant secretary of state for European affairs put him in charge of NATO expansion, steamrolled a skeptical Pentagon, and America steamrolled Russia, which was desperately opposed. Even America's NATO allies, some of whom opposed expanding the alliance, and some of whom wanted to admit a different slate of members, were shunted aside. \"Washington was riding roughshod over its allies,\" lamented Germany's representative to NATO. \"When exactly did the Americans go from leadership to hegemony?\" wailed a top French official. The Russians ranted and raved but were plainly impotent. In the end they merely pleaded for NATO to stay off former Soviet soil.\n\nAmerica's appetite, however, grew with the eating. The success of NATO in incorporating countries like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic seemed to illustrate what academics called \"democratic peace\" theory\u2014the theory that democracies did not war with one another. Fukuyama had argued that all nations were moving toward democracy; now democratic peace theory suggested that the move toward democracy would also be a move toward peace. So NATO did eventually push onto former Soviet soil. There was nothing for Moscow to do but scream.\n\nThe Bosnia intervention was to Eastern Europe what the Gulf War had been to the Middle East: the gateway for a massive extension of American power. And Kosovo was to Bosnia what the Korean War had been to Truman's 1947 decision to aid Greece and Turkey: the same principle, stretched further. If the ethic of toughness had grown in the late Truman years because it brought success, the ethic of dominance grew in the late Clinton years for the same basic reason.\n\nUnlike Bosnia, Kosovo was not an independent country. It was a province of Serbia whose overwhelmingly Albanian Muslim population had enjoyed autonomy until Milosevic withdrew it as part of his effort to Serbianize everything. As the regime in Belgrade grew more brutal, a Kosovar guerrilla movement emerged, and its presence just made the Serb authorities crack down harder. Finally, in January 1999, the Serbs executed forty-five Kosovars\u2014men, women, and children\u2014and left their bodies in the snow.\n\nIn Bosnia, it had taken years of this sort of thing, and worse, to overcome the Clinton administration's inhibition about military force. But the Clintonites were not inhibited anymore. For one thing, a different foreign policy team was now in charge. Wesley Clark had become Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and while others in the Defense Department still feared military action, his position as NATO's top military man meant that the Pentagon's efforts at obstructing military action were virtually doomed from the start.\n\nRunning things on the civilian side was Clinton's second-term secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who in her own way embodied the administration's newly muscular style as much as Holbrooke did. If Holbrooke's comfort with American power was a function of personality, Albright's was largely a function of genealogy. Her father had been a high-ranking Czech diplomat who fled the Nazis and returned home after World War II only to flee again when Moscow took Czechoslovakia in its grip. Czechoslovakia's betrayal at Munich, Albright often noted, was her formative foreign policy experience, even though it happened when she was only one year old. She experienced it through her parents, and as frequently happens in such circumstances, personal and political history fused, giving the latter a special intensity. Albright's relationship to Vietnam, by contrast, was unusually distant. She had spent the Vietnam years as a wife, mother, and student, not a frustrated young diplomat like Anthony Lake or an earnest young protester like Clinton or Sandy Berger. Because her life had been touched by the crimes of America's enemies but not by America's own, and because America was her refuge, not merely her home, she combined a deep idealism about the United States with a very personal hostility to its dictatorial foes. And in combination, that made her the top Clinton official with the fewest moral or practical qualms about American force.\n\nWith Albright in charge, America no longer negotiated with Milosevic; it gave him orders at gunpoint. In February 1999, at a ch\u00e2teau in Rambouillet, France, he was handed a take-it-or-leave-it offer: Grant Kosovo autonomy, withdraw most Serbian troops from the province, and see them replaced with NATO peacekeepers, or else be bombed. It was an audacious proposal. Kosovo, unlike Bosnia, was not an independent country. America was now dictating internal Serbian affairs, telling Belgrade to remove soldiers from part of its own country.\n\nMilosevic tried stalling for time. At Rambouillet, the Serb delegates did little serious negotiating and much serious drinking, downing almost four hundred bottles of wine in the first five days alone. (This in turn spawned a great deal of singing, as woozy Serbs crooned patriotic tunes late into the night.) The Kosovars, by contrast, stayed sober and took America's deal. As a result, six days after the conference closed, the bombing began.\n\nThe air war started slowly and inefficiently, as the Clinton administration's fear of U.S. casualties limited its scope. But gradually, NATO airpower (which was to say, American airpower, since U.S. planes flew 80 percent of the sorties) proved ferociously effective\u2014more effective, even, than during the Gulf War. In 1991, only 9 percent of the bombs dropped on Iraq had been precision-guided; by 1999 in Kosovo, it was over 60 percent. Bombarded by NATO from the air and by Kosovar rebels on the ground, Serbian troops began to desert in mounting numbers. NATO also targeted the houses and businesses of Serbia's notoriously corrupt political elite, making them pay a highly personal price for keeping Kosovo in their clutches. Finally, Milosevic caved and Serbian forces withdrew. The United States and its allies had threatened to send in ground troops, but unlike in the Gulf, they never needed to. As the military historian John Keegan declared, \"There are certain dates in the history of warfare that mark real turning points.... Now there is a new turning point to fix on the calendar: June 3, 1999, when the capitulation of President Milosevic proved that a war can be won by airpower alone.\" In thirty-four thousand sorties, only two NATO planes had been shot down. Not a single American died in combat.\n\nIf the 1990s were a story of rising American military and ideological dominance, Kosovo was the apex. First, it represented yet another case of war made easy. From Panama to the Gulf to Bosnia and now to Kosovo, almost everything the U.S. military touched had turned to gold. The sole exception was Somalia, and even there the losses had been comparatively small: only eighteen dead, nothing like Vietnam, Korea, or even Beirut. By 1999, Somalia's cautionary tale had been forgotten amid the broader narrative of Clinton-era military success.\n\nSecond, Kosovo illustrated the increasing marginalization of the United Nations. Knowing that Russia would veto military action at the Security Council, America had circumvented it, using NATO instead. But once Milosevic was vanquished, the UN retroactively blessed the war and took over Kosovo's political administration. It was a lesson many liberal hawks would remember four years later during the debate over Iraq: Not only could the United States win wars without the help of Turtle Bay, but once it had, the UN would help tidy up the mess.\n\nThird, Kosovo underscored America's growing willingness to violate its enemies' sovereignty. In Panama, in the \"no-fly\" zones in northern and southern Iraq, in Haiti, and now in Kosovo, America had used force to prevent regimes from committing abuses on their own soil. In each case, U.S. officials had claimed those abuses threatened the United States or its allies, but that was a stretch; the threats were hardly imminent or grave. In reality, as America expanded its power, it was expanding its definition of what constituted a threat, just as it had during the early cold war, when the last hubris bubble grew. The more confident America's leaders became in the hammer of military force, the more closely they looked for nails.\n\nFourth, presidential power over foreign policy was again on the rise. Even as Clinton battled for his political life against Republican efforts at impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he waged war in Kosovo and bombed Iraq without congressional authorization. In late 1994, in a move of dubious legality, he also bypassed Congress to bail out Mexico, which was on the verge of financial default. In the 1970s and '80s, the left had championed restraints on presidential power. But now many liberals were beginning to feel about executive authority the way they had felt during the McCarthy years. The congressional Republicans of the late 1990s, like the congressional Republicans of the early 1950s, seemed so primitive and reckless that many liberals hoped the presidency would become a bit more imperial. When it came to foreign policy, they didn't want Congress in the game.\n\nFinally, there was something else that made Kosovo a harbinger of things to come: It was a \"preemptive\" war. In Kosovo, the United States did not merely respond to ethnic cleansing faster than it had in Bosnia; it responded before most of the ethnic cleansing even began. When NATO started bombing, the Serbs had not yet forced large numbers of Kosovars out of their homeland (although significant numbers had been internally displaced from their villages). In other words, the war was justified less by what Milosevic had already done in Kosovo than by what Americans believed he would do there in the future, judging by his behavior elsewhere. For many human rights\u2013minded liberals, this was what made Kosovo so exciting. It suggested that the United States and its allies could act before the slaughter and expulsions truly began. In Kosovo, the argument for preemption was strong: Given Milosevic's record in Bosnia, and what was already starting to happen on the ground, there was good reason to believe that terrible crimes were about to occur. But in America, where leaders did not usually justify war on preemptive grounds, Kosovo nudged open an intellectual door, a door George W. Bush would fling wide open four years later, when he cited \"preemption\" to justify his invasion of Iraq.\n\nIt was a giddy time, in some ways even more intoxicating than 1989. As the new millennium dawned, America dominated the world not only ideologically and militarily, but now economically as well. Germany and Japan, which a decade earlier had seemed poised to leave America in the dust, were by Clinton's second term growing at less than half the rate of the United States. Between 1992 and 1996, the U.S. stock market doubled in value. By 1997, unemployment was at its lowest rate in twenty-four years and economic growth was rising at a phenomenal 8 percent per year. In Washington, it began raining revenue, and by 1998 the budget deficit that Paul Kennedy had cited as evidence of America's impending economic doom was virtually gone. Entrenched cultural maladies like crime, welfare dependency, and teen pregnancy, which had vexed intellectuals and policymakers for decades, also began to improve dramatically.\n\nThe New York Times called the erasing of the deficit \"the fiscal equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall,\" and the psychological effect was comparable. By 1999, Americans had seen their country repeatedly conquer enemies and problems that supposedly could not be conquered. Saying America couldn't accomplish something looked like a fool's bet. Ideologically, the spread of democracy had erased the cultural pessimism and relativism that flourished on both right and left in the 1970s and '80s. Militarily, America's triumphs in Panama, the Gulf, and the Balkans had largely erased the specter of Vietnam. And economically, these wars hadn't bankrupted the United States. To the contrary, the further America extended its military power, the richer it grew.\n\nPaul Kennedy offered a mea culpa. \"Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power, nothing,\" he wrote in evident wonder. America was spending more on defense than the next nine nations combined, yet fiscally it wasn't even breaking a sweat. \"Being Number One at great cost is one thing,\" he observed. \"Being the world's single superpower on the cheap is astonishing.\" A decade earlier he had insisted that the laws of geopolitical gravity would force America down. Yet higher and higher it flew.\n\nIn myriad ways, this triple dominance\u2014ideological, military, and economic\u2014was self-reinforcing. America's \"end of history\" confidence that every country could sustain democracy and respect human rights boosted the arguments for military action in Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. And when military action worked\u2014sparking jubilation among the Panamanians, Haitians (at least initially), Bosnians, and Kosovars\u2014that ideological confidence only grew. The post\u2013cold war economic boom, like the post\u2013World War II economic boom, created a new abundance of resources, which quieted those who had warned that America couldn't afford far-flung military commitments. And the boom also subtly altered Americans' understanding of what had triumphed at history's end. In 1989, Fukuyama had merely heralded the ideological triumph of free-market democracy. Now, by 1999, with the European and Japanese versions seemingly discredited, many in Washington believed that American-style free-market democracy\u2014with its signature antipathy to high taxes and government regulation\u2014was history's final destination. By Bill Clinton's second term, what Americans called \"globalization\" was in the rest of the world increasingly being called \"Americanization.\" It meant more than the spread of capitalism and democracy. It meant the spread of a particularly American brand of democracy, symbolized by Clinton's political consultants, who introduced U.S.-style campaigning across the globe; and it meant a particularly American brand of capitalism, spread by American management consultants, economics professors, and investment bankers, with help from the U.S.-dominated IMF and World Bank. By 1999, Fukuyama's democratic triumphalism had morphed into American triumphalism. The \"end of history\" was not just an idea anymore; it was a place.\n\nSome countries had trouble getting with the program, of course. There were political laggards like Milosevic and the Hutu genocidaires who threatened to destabilize whole regions. There were also economic laggards in Latin America and East Asia whose late-1990s meltdowns almost took down the whole global economy. For many non-Americans, these economic crises suggested basic problems with the ultracapitalism America was spreading. But in turn-of-the-millennium Washington, the general assumption was that the Latin Americans and Asians had gotten into trouble not because they had followed the American gospel but because they had not followed it devoutly enough. In any case, the debate soon subsided because American-led economic intervention set things right (at least it looked that way from Washington) just as American-led military intervention had in Bosnia and Kosovo. After the East Asian crisis eased, Time pictured Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, his deputy Lawrence Summers, and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan above the words \"The Committee to Save the World.\"\n\nDuring the cold war, many Americans had seen the world as defined by two huge, opposing magnets: America and the Soviet Union, democracy and communism, good and evil. Each was a powerful attractive force, pulling nations and even individuals its way. No one could be sure which way the smaller magnets would go.\n\nThe cold war's end, however, had eliminated the evil magnet, and with it the grand historical uncertainty. Americans no longer related quite as easily to the movie Star Wars, with its story of two opposing armies: the light and dark sides of the force. To read the most influential 1990s commentators\u2014columnist Thomas Friedman, for instance, or the Economist magazine\u2014was to see the world not as dueling magnets, but as an escalator, with democratic capitalism at the top. Some nations were further along than others, of course. The journey was occasionally bumpy, and some nations were even trying to climb down. But the futility of the effort would force them to eventually turn around and begin trudging upward, in the same direction as everyone else.\n\nThe 1990s had shown that America\u2014and not any rival democracy or international body\u2014stood on the escalator's highest step. And they had shown that America could reach down and corral countries going in the wrong direction before they did too much damage to themselves and others. America did not have to wait for history's escalator to gradually move nations in the right direction; it could speed up the process, if need be by force.\n\nThis was not Fukuyama-ism; it was ultra-Fukuyama-ism. The escalator metaphor fit his theory, but he had never said that America could easily crank up the gears. To him, the 1990s hadn't proved that military intervention was easy; they had proved that it was hard. After all, to secure its military victories, the United States had been forced to station troops indefinitely in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and Iraq, and there was every reason to fear that once they left, things would spin back out of control. When it came to promoting democracy, Fukuyama argued, \"there are very sharp limits to American resources and patience.\" In fact, \"given that the United States can build democracy in a poor, agrarian country only through massive intervention over the course of a couple of generations, it is probably better in most cases not to try.\" The better strategy was simply to trade with authoritarian countries and thus bring them into the world economy, which might gradually produce a middle class that demanded political reform. Countries needed to evolve toward democracy at their own pace, he argued. The world wasn't as malleable as it seemed.\n\nBut Fukuyama's anxieties had little resonance in an era overflowing with optimism. \"We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history,\" declared Bill Clinton in 2000, in his final State of the Union address. \"Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats.\" A poll taken by the Pew Research Center on the cusp of the millennium found that \"Americans are near unanimous in their confidence that life will get better for themselves, their families and the country as a whole.\" Majorities predicted that the twenty-first century would bring cures for cancer and AIDS, a cleaner environment, and people living in space. A slightly smaller number, 44 percent, predicted Christ's return to earth.\n\nClinton compared the mood to his youth in the early 1960s, before Vietnam, the last time anything seemed possible. The political writer David Brooks reached back further, comparing young Americans at the twentieth century's end to young Americans at the twentieth century's dawn, before World War I, the last time a generation truly believed in the inevitability of progress and the goodness of man. Neither mentioned the historical corollary: that both times before, it had all ended in tears.\n\n## CHAPTER FIFTEEN\n\n## FATHERS AND SONS\n\nIn 1995, Irving Kristol published his fourth autobiographical essay. (That was nothing: Norman Podhoretz would soon publish his fourth autobiographical book.) In general, the essay's tone was jolly, even triumphant. America had won the cold war; American capitalism was booming; and even with a Democrat in the White House, right-wing ideas shaped the Washington debate. \"I have much to be cheerful about,\" declared Kristol, now seventy-five years old. \"I deem the neoconservative enterprise to have been a success.\"\n\nBut in the final paragraph, Kristol's tone darkened, and he offered a kind of warning. \"I am well aware that the unanticipated consequences of ideas and acts are often very different from what was originally intended,\" he noted, somewhat cryptically. \"That, I would say, is the basic conservative axiom, and it applies to conservatives as well as liberals and radicals.\"\n\nIf Kristol feared any particular unanticipated consequence of neoconservatism's success, he didn't say. Yet even as he wrote, his prophecy was coming true. Neoconservatism's progeny, buoyed by the very success Kristol was celebrating, were fashioning a foreign policy vision sharply at odds with his own. In retrospect, 1995 was a hinge year on the intellectual right, a year in which one generation's voice began to fade and another's began to rise. In the early 1990s it had been mostly the men and women of Kristol's generation who spoke, and what they advocated, for the most part, were limits on American power. In the late '90s their ideological offspring replied, and what they denounced, for the most part, were limits on American power. There was an odd time lag to the discussion. It was as if a group of parents had written their children a letter about the kind of nation America should be after the cold war, and waited for them to grow old enough to respond. And when the children did grow old enough, they read the letter and tore it to shreds.\n\nOf the older generation, the most important foreign policy thinkers were Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick, two tough old birds. Intellectually, their defining feature was their hostility to grand efforts to remake the world. At formative stages in their youth, each had bumped up against totalitarianism, and the collisions had left permanent scars. For Kristol, it had occurred at City College in the late 1930s, where he and a few Trotsykist dissenters squared off against hordes of thuggish, brain-dead Stalinoids. For Kirkpatrick, it had come in the early 1950s, when she worked at the State Department interviewing refugees who brought with them harrowing tales from Stalinist Eastern Europe and Maoist China. From these experiences, Kristol and Kirkpatrick drew a similar lesson: Totalitarianism was monstrous because it was unrealistic. Stalin and Mao wanted to create perfect societies; but perfect societies required perfect people, and since people were by nature imperfect, the communists took it upon themselves to perfect them by force, which required crushing the spirit and cracking the skull.\n\nWhen the New Left came along in the 1960s, Kristol and Kirkpatrick opposed it for the same reason: because they believed it was trying to remake the United States along utopian lines, a project they were sure would end in chaos and blood. They defended America's existing institutions and practices\u2014its universities, cities, families, political system, and cold war foreign policy\u2014not because they believed those institutions and practices were flawless, but because they believed they were pretty darn good considering what human beings were really like. It was no surprise that they both admired Reinhold Niebuhr; their foreign policy realism stemmed from their moral realism. Once, late in life, Kirkpatrick spent an afternoon with a friend and her two small children. Over hot chocolate, the children suggested a game of Sorry! Kirkpatrick agreed, and then trounced them. Asked afterward by their mother why she hadn't let the kids win, Kirkpatrick replied, \"I'm merciless when it comes to Sorry! It's the real world.\"\n\nLike other ultra-realists, Kirkpatrick and Kristol often read Niebuhr with one eye closed, ignoring his warning that if communism was messianic, self-righteous anticommunism could be messianic, too. But in their minds, global containment was not messianic; it was defensive. The communists were the utopians, trying to forcibly remake the world in their image. America was simply holding the line. \"Global political instability,\" Kirkpatrick insisted, \"stems from the fact that the Soviet Union is frankly, proudly, a revolutionary power.\" The United States, by contrast, employs a \"minimal use of force for limited, defensive purposes.\"\n\nWhether or not this defensive, anti-utopian interpretation of the cold war was correct, it proved very important when the cold war ended. When the Soviet empire crashed, Kirkpatrick and Kristol let out a sigh of relief and declared that it was time for America to become, in Kirkpatrick's words, \"a normal country in a normal time.\" The cold war, they argued, had been necessary, and even heroic, but also costly and unnatural. The presence of a revolutionary global superpower had forced the United States to become a defensive global superpower, expending blood and treasure in every continent on earth. Now, with its survival no longer threatened, America could climb down from the barricades. In Kirkpatrick's mind, the United States was like a man forced to defend his village against an invading army. The battle had gone on for a long time, and summoned within him great reservoirs of resourcefulness and courage. But it had also forced him to neglect hearth and home. His crops lay untended; his house was in disrepair; he barely knew his family anymore. Now the marauders had laid down their arms. Waking up the next morning, he should not strap on his armor and go looking for new armies to slay.\n\nKristol and Kirkpatrick saw no reason whatsoever for America to try to dominate the post\u2013cold war world. First, they didn't think America had the money. They had been willing to pay any price to contain Soviet power, but like Paul Kennedy, they believed the price had been high. When it came to foreign policy, Kirkpatrick argued, there was no longer any need for \"expansive, expensive, global purposes,\" which was a good thing, because the United States lacked \"boundless resources\" and could not \"continue to live beyond our means.\"\n\nIf America lacked the money for world dominance, it also lacked the will. Kirkpatrick and Kristol were convinced that if American elites tried to keep sending the nation's cash\u2014not to mention its sons and daughters\u2014around the world in the absence of a mortal threat, the America public would rise up. They urged disbanding NATO, withdrawing most U.S. troops from Europe (and perhaps Asia as well), cutting the defense budget, and preparing for a multipolar world. \"There are theorists who would happily burden us with the mission of monitoring and maintaining a 'balance of power' among other nations, large and small, in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, etc.,\" wrote Kristol. \"We are just not going to be that kind of imperial power.... [T]he American people violently reject any such scenario.\"\n\nThirdly, if America lacked the money and will for global dominance, it also lacked the wisdom. Kirkpatrick and Kristol did not want the United States to try to convert the world to its political ideology; that had been the Kremlin's ugly game. The democratic transformations of the 1980s had convinced younger conservatives like Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz that people around the world wanted democracy, and that America could help them get it. But Kirkpatrick and Kristol were both in their sixties when the cold war ended, and the new optimism about global democracy did not penetrate their hardened intellectual shells. They weren't at all sure that the desire for freedom was universal, and even if it was, they were adamant that trying to turn that desire into reality was beyond America's capacity. In 1990, at a conference of former cold warriors, Kirkpatrick congratulated the Bush administration for standing by while Moscow tried to crush Lithuania's fledgling democracy. \"Americans do not know at this stage what is best for the Soviet people,\" she explained. \"Any notion that the United States can manage the changes in that huge, multinational, developing society is grandiose. It is precisely the kind of thinking about foreign policy which Americans need to unlearn.\" On a later panel, Kristol denounced efforts to promote democracy in Ukraine. \"The function of the United States is not to spread democracy all over the world,\" he insisted, adding that historically such efforts had mostly failed. When someone suggested that the Reagan era offered grounds for optimism, Kristol called the supposed \"worldwide sweep of democracy\" a mirage. \"It is just too good to be true,\" he insisted. \"The world is not like that. It is not going to happen. Something will screw it up.\"\n\nWhen Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Kirkpatrick's first instinct was that it was not America's problem. Like George Kennan at the dawn of the cold war, before containment was inflated by success, she defined America's interests narrowly because she had grave reservations about its resources. It was unfair, she argued, for the world to expect America to fight Saddam when \"it is believed almost everywhere outside the US that the US is a world leader in serious economic decline.\"\n\nFor a while, she urged giving sanctions time to work. By November, when they still had not, and President Bush had staked his credibility on restoring Kuwait, she reconciled herself to war. But she still opposed sending U.S. ground troops, arguing that America should leave the land fighting to Arab nations and merely bomb from the air. If Saddam fell, she suggested, perhaps the Arabs could manage Iraq's reconstruction. The implication was clear: If America took the lead in fighting Saddam, it would find the price too high, and if America tried to dominate the Middle East, it would be drinking from a poisoned cup.\n\nKristol was less ambivalent: America needed Gulf oil, and so he supported an American war. But once the United States pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, he heaped scorn on those who advocated democratic regime change in Iraq itself. Unlike Wolfowitz, who believed the Shia and Kurdish rebels were fighting for freedom, Kristol saw them the way George H. W. Bush and Colin Powell did: as secessionists and fanatics fighting for nothing nobler than the chance to visit upon Iraq's Sunni Arabs what the Sunni Arabs had visited upon them. Kristol's view of the Arab world was suffused with old-fashioned conservative pessimism about the capacity of people in exotic lands to build democracy. Fukuyama-style universalists, he declared, find \"it close to impossible to understand that the world is populated by other people who are really different from us.\"\n\nWhen Bill Clinton took office, Kirkpatrick and Kristol took a generally dim view of his humanitarian wars. \"Military intervention in the internal affairs of another state is undesirable,\" wrote Kirkpatrick in 1995, in denouncing the U.S. occupation of Haiti. \"Overturning another government by force or threat of force is still more objectionable\u2014except if there are truly vital American interests and lives at stake.\" On the former Yugoslavia, Kristol made skeptical noises about military intervention early on, and then ignored the subject. Kirkpatrick supported lifting the arms embargo and even bombing the Serbs, but remained extremely wary of putting U.S. peacekeepers on the ground.\n\nNeither Kirkpatrick nor Kristol was an isolationist. But they were comfortable with a world where other powers\u2014be they European, Asian, or Arab\u2014supervised their corners of the globe, so long as those powers did not pursue a global, revolutionary mission like the Soviet Union's. And they had little interest in America telling other countries how to govern themselves, especially at gunpoint. Their belief that efforts to make society conform to an abstract ideal usually failed, whether in Mao's China or John Lindsay's New York, infused them with the same unsentimental skepticism about America's ability to reshape the world that Colin Powell had learned on his tours in Vietnam. Kirkpatrick and Kristol saw neither American interests nor American ideals as universal. They believed that the United States would be better off, most of the time, if it let other nations be.\n\nIn the early 1990s, Kirkpatrick's and Kristol's foreign policy vision held sway on the intellectual right. It was shared not only by older neo-conservatives like Nathan Glazer, Owen Harries, and James Q. Wilson, but by traditional conservatives like National Review's William F. Buckley and the columnist George Will. Patrick Buchanan, then still a respectable figure on the mainstream right, was even more hostile to a global American role. Not every older conservative foreign policy intellectual opposed American dominance, to be sure. Norman Podhoretz, for instance, was more bellicose and moralistic. But in 1996 even Podhoretz admitted that \"only a tiny\" number of neoconservatives supported \"expansive Wilsonian interventionism.\" A study of right-wing intellectuals published the same year noted their \"strengthening commitment to realism,\" \"narrowed view of American vital interests,\" and \"general reluctance to crusade.\"\n\n\"There are no normal times.\" With those words, written in 1991 and aimed straight at Jeane Kirkpatrick, the younger conservative generation fired its first shot.\n\nThe marksman was columnist Charles Krauthammer, an acid-tongued ex-psychiatrist from Montreal, and a man young enough to be Kirkpatrick's son. What Kirkpatrick meant by \"normal times\" was that since America no longer faced a superpower with messianic ambitions and the muscle to carry them out, it no longer needed to man barricades all over the globe. What Krauthammer meant by \"There are no normal times\" was that if America climbed down from those barricades the world would go to hell in a handbasket and from out of the chaos new and equally dangerous threats would arise. If Kirkpatrick saw America as a man who could abandon his patrol because invaders no longer threatened his village, Krauthammer warned that once he did, new marauders, seeing that the village was defenseless, would soon begin their attack.\n\nWho were these new marauders? Krauthammer gave two answers. Answer number one was what he called \"weapons states\": small, tyrannical third-world countries like Iraq and North Korea that through the miracle of high technology could build chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons and thus threaten America's allies or America itself. Answer number two was essentially: \"Who knows and it doesn't really matter.\" By patrolling the world, Krauthammer argued, America preserved global stability. If it stopped, the result would be global chaos, and from that chaos all manner of currently imperceptible dangers would emerge. You didn't have to know who would attack the village, only that if you stopped guarding it sooner or later someone would.\n\nAt first glance, Krauthammer was merely proposing that America keep doing what it had done during the cold war. Kirkpatrick wanted to come home; he wanted to stay on patrol. But in truth he was arguing for something far more aggressive than that. During the cold war, after all, America had tolerated \"weapons states\": not small ones with one or two warheads, but giant ones like the Soviet Union and China with hundreds or thousands of them. We had stood by as hostile powers developed huge nuclear arsenals, and we had responded with a policy of deterrence: warning that if they used their nukes, we would, too. Had Krauthammer simply wanted America to maintain the same level of security it enjoyed during the cold war, he would have proposed that the United States do the same thing now: deter any new \"weapons state\" with the threat of nuclear retaliation.\n\nBut Krauthammer was not proposing that. America, he argued, must \"confront\" and \"if necessary, disarm\" the weapons states. In other words, it must use force\u2014or the threat of force\u2014to make sure the arsenals were never built (and for Krauthammer, that meant not only nuclear arsenals, but even chemical and biological ones). This required doing a lot more than simply standing outside the village deterring invading armies. It required going around to neighboring villages looking for armies about to form, and attacking (or threatening to attack) them before they did. What Krauthammer was proposing was a doctrine of preventive (or what George W. Bush would wrongly call \"preemptive\") war. And since he wasn't merely worried about \"weapons states\" but also about the more amorphous threat of global instability\u2014which could break out in any strategically significant region not dominated by the United States\u2014Krauthammer was essentially suggesting that America encamp outside any significant village, even if there was no evidence that it was raising an army, just to make sure no one got any big ideas. During the cold war, America had patrolled large swaths of the globe, but it had still acknowledged that there were big, important regions where Moscow and its allies held sway. For the most part, America had been content to live in a bipolar world. Now, Krauthammer was arguing, America must dominate every important region on earth. \"The alternative to unipolarity,\" he declared, \"is chaos.\"\n\nIt was no coincidence that Krauthammer published his attack on Kirkpatrick soon after the Gulf War. As usual in the development of hubris bubbles, it was only once things that formerly looked hard\u2014like liberating Kuwait\u2014had been made to look easy that people set their sights higher. Had America proved militarily unable to keep Saddam from gobbling his neighbor, Krauthammer could not have seriously proposed launching a new war, inside Iraq itself, to rid him of his unconventional weapons.\n\nThe Gulf War gave Krauthammer confidence that America had the money and muscle for preventive wars. But he worried about public will. Kristol and Kirkpatrick insisted that average Americans would never permit the United States to play global policeman in the absence of a grave foreign threat, and Krauthammer half agreed. Yes, he conceded, Americans inclined toward isolationism. They could be roused from that isolationism, however, by the chance to accomplish great and moral deeds. \"Americans will venture abroad to do right things,\" he argued, \"but only to do right things. Otherwise they would rather stay home.\" This was not how the older generation saw it. In Kirkpatrick and Kristol's view, Americans had fought the cold war not because they wanted to remake the world but because they considered themselves in danger from communism. Krauthammer turned that argument on its head. Because Americans were naturally isolationist, he suggested, they would bury their heads in the sand even when they were in danger. The only way to get them to fight in their own defense was to tell them they were remaking the world.\n\nKrauthammer was making a subtle point. He wasn't arguing that America should fight wars to make the world a better place. He was arguing that unless Americans believed their wars were making the world a better place they would not fight in their own self-protection. And for him, self-protection required American hegemony. Dominance was Krauthammer's goal; idealism was the means of convincing Americans to achieve it.\n\nHerein lay the key difference between the younger, dominance-oriented conservatives and the liberal hawks. For the liberal hawks, spreading American power was worthwhile if it spread democracy and human rights. For the younger conservatives, by contrast, spreading human rights and democracy was worthwhile if they spread American power. Both groups were more confident than their ideological forefathers that democratic values and American might generally went hand in hand. But their criteria for war differed. Liberal hawks supported humanitarian interventions in strategically unimportant places like Haiti and Rwanda, though they might cloak those interventions in the language of national interest to win public support. Dominance conservatives supported cold-blooded, national-interest interventions like the Gulf War, though they might cloak them in moral garb to win public support. Such garb was crucial, Krauthammer argued, because otherwise the American people might not play along. It was an argument reminiscent of the pre-Vietnam years, when foreign policy elites often justified presidential duplicity as a way of protecting Americans from the consequences of their isolationism. Now, as memories of Vietnam faded, and another hubris bubble grew, Krauthammer was making that argument again.\n\nIf Krauthammer's attack on Kirkpatrick marked the first big sign that younger conservative intellectuals saw the world differently than their elders, the second came from within the Bush administration itself. Every two years, the Pentagon published something called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), a statement of America's foreign policy goals aimed at helping military planners decide where to spend money and deploy forces. In 1991, the document was unusually important, since with the cold war over, no one was quite sure what America's new foreign policy goals actually were.\n\nSecretary of Defense Dick Cheney delegated the job to his third in command, Paul Wolfowitz, who delegated it to an aide named I. Lewis \"Scooter\" Libby, who delegated it to a guy on his staff named Zalmay Khalilzad, who consulted with Richard Perle and a few others and then produced a draft. The goal of American foreign policy, Khalilzad declared, should be to \"prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.\" At first blush\u2014like Krauthammer's essay\u2014this sounded rather defensive. After all, preventing a \"hostile power\" (the Soviet Union) \"from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power\" (Europe, East Asia, or the Middle East) had been U.S. policy in the cold war. And just six months before Khalilzad wrote his draft, the United States had shown how this principle might work in the post\u2013cold war age: Saddam had invaded Kuwait, thus potentially dominating the Persian Gulf, and the United States had rallied a coalition to repel him. The goal seemed familiar; it even seemed affordable, since other countries would presumably share America's interest in preventing one power from dominating a key region of the world and thus help pick up the tab, as they had in the Gulf.\n\nBut Khalilzad's draft also said this: \"The U.S. may be faced with the question of whether to take military steps to prevent the deployment or use of weapons of mass destruction\" (WMD). Preventive war to stop countries from acquiring WMD was not a continuation of U.S. strategy in the cold war; it was a sharp break. And it offered a window into the very peculiar way in which Khalilzad's paper defined foreign \"domination\" of a key region. For Khalilzad, hostile nations could \"dominate\" key regions not just by conquering their neighbors but also by taking an \"aggressive posture\" internally\u2014in other words, by developing weapons of mass destruction. By that standard, preventing Soviet \"domination\" of Europe in the late 1940s would have required more than merely defending countries like Italy, Britain, and France; it would have required preventive war to make sure Moscow never acquired a nuclear bomb. Khalilzad's argument was a lot like Krauthammer's: Superficially, he was merely outlining a strategy to protect America against foreign threats. But the definition of what constituted a threat had been so radically lowered that protecting America now required crippling\u2014if not toppling\u2014any hostile regime in any important corner of the globe. Why America's allies would help pay for that, Khalilzad didn't say.\n\nWhen the White House learned of the draft through a leak to the New York Times, it flipped out. President Bush, who was in his late sixties, two decades older than Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, and Khalilzad, was comfortable talking about resistance to aggression, as he had during the Gulf War. But like Kirkpatrick and Kristol, he was wary of proactive moves to extend the frontiers of American power, as evidenced by his reluctance to dismember the Soviet Union, intervene in the former Yugoslavia, or help depose Saddam. He pleaded with reporters not to \"put too much emphasis on leaked reports, particularly ones that I haven't seen.\"\n\nWolfowitz and Khalilzad feared that their careers were over. But when Cheney finally read the draft, he loved it. It was the clearest sign yet that he and the rest of the Bush administration didn't see the world the same way. Unlike Bush, he had wanted to pry the Soviet Union apart and opposed running the Gulf War through the UN. Unlike Powell, he had opposed any significant post\u2013cold war cuts in defense spending and supported shooting down Saddam's helicopters. Now he wanted America to dominate every important region on earth. He told Libby to rewrite the document in subtler language but preserve its basic argument. Congratulations, he told Khalilzad. \"You've discovered a new rationale for our role in the world.\"\n\nKrauthammer loved the Defense Planning Guidance. So did two former Reagan administration officials, both even younger than him: Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Kagan was son of a conservative Yale classicist. Kristol was the son of Irving Kristol. With their rise to intellectual stardom, the intraconservative debate became an argument not only between generations, but between a father and son, except that increasingly, only one side spoke. In the late 1990s, Irving Kristol fell mostly silent as his son eviscerated his vision of America's role in the world.\n\nIf the first two major statements of dominance conservatism\u2014Krauthammer's 1991 essay and the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance\u2014came in the wake of America's victory in the Gulf, Kristol and Kagan's came in 1996, soon after America's triumph in Bosnia. Their basic argument was similar: that Americans should not be lulled into complacency by the absence of foreign threats, because unless the United States dominated every important region of the world, such threats would arise soon enough. But Kristol and Kagan added two important wrinkles. First, they embraced humanitarian war. The Defense Planning Guidance had largely ignored the topic, and Krauthammer was openly hostile. While he wanted to cloak hardheaded, security-based interventions in moral language to win public support, he opposed going to war on humanitarian grounds alone. \"In a country with strong isolationist tendencies,\" he wrote, \"you do not squander blood and treasure on teacup wars.\" Kristol and Kagan, by contrast, incorporated Bosnia into their argument for American dominance. Humanitarian wars, they argued, combated public isolationism by showing Americans the good their power could do. As a result, they primed the pump for the more strategically important battles to come.\n\nThe second innovative feature of Kristol and Kagan's call for American dominance was the person in whose name they issued it: Ronald Reagan. If foreign policy hubris consists of thinking that you are merely applying the lessons of the past while actually expanding them as the result of success, Kristol and Kagan's doctrine of \"neo-Reaganism\" was the great intellectual example of the post\u2013cold war age.\n\nThat Kristol and Kagan invoked Reagan is no surprise. Politically, he was their god. For them, as for Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and Francis Fukuyama, the Reagan presidency was a formative life experience. Kristol, who had joined the Reagan administration at age thirty-two and worked as chief of staff to Secretary of Education William Bennett (before staying into the Bush administration to do the same job for Vice President Dan Quayle), was particularly influenced by Reagan's political success. Kristol had no background in foreign affairs. He was an operator and a partisan, mostly interested in shaping media debates and getting Republicans elected. He was, noted one administration colleague, \"a man of action, not introspection,\" a man who \"understood it was all a game.\" The lesson of the Reagan years, he told a friend during the 1990s, was that when Americans focused on foreign policy, Republicans won.\n\nIn the Kristol-Kagan duo, Kristol was Art Garfunkel: He played little role in crafting the lyrics but helped to amplify the sound. Kagan was less partisan and more substantive: He was, in fact, the most gifted conservative foreign policy thinker of the post\u2013cold war age.\n\nKagan's career and Jeane Kirkpatrick's were in important ways mirror-images. He had entered the Reagan administration just as she was leaving, when she was fifty-eight and he was less than half that. Abrams, who had been her prot\u00e9g\u00e9, became his mentor. Nicaragua, one of her passions, became his as well. And it was on Nicaragua that Kagan's intellectual assault on Kirkpatrick began.\n\nShe had argued famously in \"Dictatorships and Double Standards\" that Carter's refusal to support Somoza as the necessary evil\u2014his utopian faith that democracy was possible everywhere, right away\u2014had ushered the Sandinistas to power. Kagan disagreed. After leaving Reagan's State Department, in fact, he wrote a nine-hundred-page book making exactly the opposite claim. Carter's real failure, Kagan insisted, had been to not dump Somoza earlier, when there was still a nonviolent, non-Marxist alternative. The implication of Kirkpatrick's argument was that Reagan should stick by pro-American tyrants like Ferdinand Marcos and Chile's Augusto Pinochet, which at first he did. The implication of Kagan's argument, by contrast, was that Reagan's great accomplishment had been switching course and helping to push those dictators aside. For Kagan, Reagan's greatness lay in his rejection of Kirkpatrick's moral pessimism\u2014his faith that democracy could indeed take root everywhere soon. Reagan, wrote Kagan, \"completely reversed the grim pronouncements of...traditional conservative Republicans. It was a message of optimism, rather than of despair; it pointed to opportunities rather than dangers. Reagan did not have to tell Americans that support for brutal dictatorships was a necessarily evil, nor that the struggle with communism was endless.\"\n\nIn 1997 Kagan made his critique of Kirkpatrick even more explicit. He took to the pages of Commentary, where in 1979 she had written \"Dictatorships and Double Standards,\" to publish an essay titled \"Democracies and Double Standards.\" Kirkpatrick, he noted, had denied that democracy could emerge \"anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.\" But she was wrong; the intervening two decades had proved that it could.\n\nFor Kagan and Kristol, being a \"neo-Reaganite\" meant believing that democracy could triumph anytime, anywhere, and that its triumph would likely extend American power. But it also meant believing that America could intervene aggressively to hasten those triumphs. As one critic later put it, Fukuyama was a Marxist: He believed history was moving inexorably toward America's democratic ideals. Kagan and Kristol were Leninists: They believed in speeding history up.\n\nIn Kagan and Kristol's rendition, Reagan was a Leninist, too. He had, they wrote, \"refused to accept the limits on American power imposed by the domestic political realities that others assumed were fixed.\" There was some truth to that: Reagan did spend far more on defense, and do far more to support anticommunist rebels, than any predecessor. But in other ways\u2014the most important ways, in fact\u2014he adhered scrupulously to the limits imposed by Vietnam. He never sent U.S. forces to El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Cuba, as many conservative commentators proposed, or even to Panama, despite Abrams's pleas. In Lebanon, his one nation-building campaign, he responded to a terrorist attack by quickly pulling the plug. When it came to direct military action to promote American ideals and power, Reagan wasn't a Leninist at all. He was, in fact, more cautious than either George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton, both of whom Kagan and Kristol considered wimps.\n\nKagan also claimed it was Reagan's \"ideological confrontation\" that had helped to bring down the Soviet empire. And at times, Reagan certainly had been ideologically confrontational. But in his final years in office, it was Reagan's lack of ideological confrontation\u2014his willingness to abandon his evil-empire rhetoric and negotiate the deepest arms reductions of the cold war, long before Gorbachev allowed freedom for Eastern Europe\u2014that led prominent conservatives to compare him to Neville Chamberlain. In fact, as Norman Podhoretz noted bitterly at the time, Reagan began moving away from ideological confrontation in 1984, before Gorbachev even took power. And it was that very lack of ideological confrontation\u2014not Reagan's initial defense buildup and rhetorical belligerence\u2014that helped Gorbachev convince Kremlin hard-liners that the U.S.S.R. could abandon its Eastern European safety vest without fearing U.S. aggression.\n\nReagan had indeed dreamed of regime change in the Soviet Union, of a world where America was ideologically and geopolitically dominant. But his efforts to bring it about had been highly constrained, both by the trauma of Vietnam, which made large-scale military action politically treacherous, and by his own very personal terror of war. Kristol and Kagan, by contrast, were writing after Panama, the Gulf War, and Bosnia had largely buried the Vietnam syndrome and made war less politically frightening. They also lived in a post\u2013cold war world in which America was squaring off not against another superpower, but against a series of second-and third-rate powers, which seemed like easy prey for America's awesome military machine. War just didn't scare them as much. In truth, Kristol and Kagan were less \"neo-Reaganites\" than \"ultra-Reaganites.\" If Lyndon Johnson had taken George Kennan's ethic of toughness and stretched it to the point of elephantiasis, now Kristol and Kagan were taking Reagan's ethic of dominance and doing the same. They shared Reagan's basic goals; they just abandoned the limits that had constrained his efforts to achieve them.\n\nLike the Camelot intellectuals of the late 1950s and '60s, Kristol and Kagan suffered from generational envy. Too young to have played major roles in the great anticommunist struggle, they were to the cold war what John F. Kennedy's generation had been to World War II: the junior officers, often relegated to watching events from belowdeck. Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick were not nostalgic for the cold war. They were a bit like Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s: They had seen enough of heroism and its awful price. Normalcy struck them as a pretty attractive thing. But the younger conservative intellectuals, who feared normalcy and its corresponding lack of potential for heroism, were intensely nostalgic. If Kennedy had tried to hang Churchill's paintings in the White House, Kristol and Kagan were constantly lighting votive candles to Reagan. Four years after their call for a \"Neo-Reaganite\" foreign policy, they edited a book called Present Dangers\u2014the title being a play on Podhoretz's 1980 polemic against d\u00e9tente, Present Danger, which had influenced Reagan. \"Surely we are entitled to hope for another Reagan,\" wrote Kristol in 1997. \"Who will be this era's Ronald Reagan?\" asked his new magazine, the Weekly Standard, in 1998. The answer was implicit: whoever listened to them.\n\nCamelot intellectuals like Bundy and Rostow had often compared the late 1950s to the late '30s: a moment of drift and peril requiring a heroic new generation to save freedom in what Kennedy called its \"hour of maximum danger.\" Now Kristol and Kagan announced that \"the current situation is reminiscent of the mid-1970's.\" If Eisenhower had been Neville Chamberlain, Bill Clinton was now Jimmy Carter. But if comparing the 1950s to the '30s was bad, comparing the 1990s to the '70s was even worse. Kagan and Kristol were sure the Clinton years were a period of grave and mounting danger, but they couldn't even quite identify what the mounting danger was. Like Krauthammer, they mentioned \"weapons states\" with WMD, threw in a resurgent Russia and a potentially expansionist China, and suggested that taken together, these threats were as fearsome as the U.S.S.R. (leading Irving Kristol's close friend Owen Harries to reply that \"a bad head cold plus a skin rash plus a slipped disk does not add up to a brain tumor\"). But Kristol and Kagan's fallback answer was that the danger was no particular enemy at all; it was America's unwillingness to recognize that it was in danger. \"The ubiquitous post\u2013Cold War question\u2014where is the threat?\u2014is thus misconceived,\" Kristol and Kagan explained. \"In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now is its own weakness.\"\n\nIt was a remarkable act of intellectual jujitsu. What Kristol and Kagan were proposing was brazenly aggressive: They didn't want merely to contain anti-American regimes; they wanted to overthrow them, and not through the slow and subtle infiltration of global capitalism, but through ideological warfare and quite possibly outright force. As they themselves declared, the United States should pursue \"benevolent global hegemony.\" Yet global hegemony, they insisted\u2014echoing Krauthammer and the Defense Planning Guidance\u2014was merely defensive; it was ultimately no different than repelling the marauders at the gates because any region that America did not dominate would ultimately represent a mortal threat. Essentially, their slogan was \"Give me dominance or give me death.\"\n\nIt took a special kind of person to gaze out at America in the Clinton years\u2014a country with a defense budget bigger than all its competitors' combined\u2014and see weakness, but Kristol and Kagan were not comparing post\u2013cold war America to any other country at any other time; they were comparing it to what they considered possible. Like the proponents of NSC 68, they assumed America's economic resources were nearly infinite. (Of the fifteen essays in Present Dangers, not one discussed how to pay for the massive increase in military spending that the book proposed.) Because they had come of age during a great wave of global democratization, they tended to believe that democracy could arise quickly anywhere on earth. And because they had seen America win wars so easily, the prospect of military confrontation did not fill them with dread. Kristol and Kagan wanted to replicate the triumphs of their elders: to conquer new Soviet Unions and usher in their very own 1989, and they planned to do it the way they imagined that Reagan had: by confrontation and force. They were the very thing that Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick feared most: intellectuals with a messianic vision to remake the world and little sense that national or human fallibility might stand in their way. The whole thing was drenched in irony. Irving Kristol had always associated utopianism with the left; it was the monster he had spent his career trying to slay. Now, in the twilight of his life, it had returned, on the right, championed by his own son. Unanticipated consequences indeed.\n\nBy decade's end, the dominance conservatives had congealed into a potent network, which brought policymakers and pundits together in common cause. Abrams, who now also called himself a \"neo-Reaganite,\" penned an essay for Present Dangers, as did Wolfowitz. Both men also wrote for the Weekly Standard and helped Kristol and Kagan establish a think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose other founding associates included Scooter Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. (Just as significant were the people who did not join: Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Owen Harries, William F. Buckley, George Will, and Colin Powell.) In the late 1990s, PNAC called for overthrowing Slobodan Milosevic, signaling that for the dominance conservatives, going to war to stop genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo was not enough; without democratic regime change there could be no \"full and complete victory\" in the Balkans. The bar for going to war kept going down, and the bar for achieving victory kept going up. But in 2000, complete victory was achieved: A democracy movement forced Milosevic from power. That left PNAC free to focus on overthrowing Saddam Hussein.\n\nThe intellectual infrastructure for global dominance was now in place. With the U.S. economy booming, money no longer appeared to be a problem, and no one in the PNAC circle worried that America lacked the wisdom. The final obstacle was the one that Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick had seen as their ultimate safeguard: the American people. Did they have the will?\n\nThe dominance conservatives feared the answer was no. The Republican Congress, after all, was rather isolationist. Clinton had managed to take the country to war in the Balkans nonetheless, but his administration seemed to assume that in an era devoid of grave threats, the public would only support wars that got no Americans killed. For the PNAC crowd, this was evidence of a severe cultural rot. Sounding a lot like Arthur Schlesinger in 1958, they declared that Americans had grown soft. \"We have become a nation obsessed with risk avoidance and safety,\" wrote Kristol's Weekly Standard colleague David Brooks, who delved most deeply into this alleged malaise. Americans, Brooks claimed, had \"replaced high public aspiration with the narrower concerns of private life.\" It was up to government to call them to a higher purpose, one that required sacrifice and strain. Four decades earlier, Schlesinger had denounced America's \"vacation from public responsibilities\" Krauthammer now spoke of a \"holiday from history.\" Schlesinger had lamented the \"decline of greatness\" Brooks decried \"post-greatness America.\" To remedy the problem, he and Kristol offered a new vision: \"National Greatness Conservatism.\" The phrase was cribbed from Theodore Roosevelt, the scourge of softness who had inspired JFK's fifty-mile hikes.\n\nWhen it came to domestic policy, national-greatness conservatism was paper thin. Like Schlesinger, both Kristol and Brooks wanted government to lead heroic missions at home as well as abroad. But unlike Schlesinger, they were conservatives who believed that, domestically at least, government usually screwed things up. They disliked the extreme hostility to government that had taken hold on the post\u2013cold war right, which they believed offered Americans no goal nobler than being left alone, but they struggled to explain what large domestic initiatives they actually trusted government to undertake. Brooks suggested constructing grand public buildings like the Library of Congress, a project unlikely to rouse Americans from their e-trades, or privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and education, which hardly seemed like a grand public mission at all. Krauthammer added that America should journey to Mars. But as the conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg noted, all this \"was very hard to understand except as public relations.\" Brooks and Kristol had diagnosed what they believed was a cultural malady, and a political one, too, since the Gingrich Congress's strident hostility to government was proving unpopular. But their bid to solve it through inspiring government-led projects kept running into a fundamental problem: As conservatives, they still basically believed that when government messed around in the free market, it usually made things worse.\n\nThe only domestic character-building project that gained any traction was the campaign to impeach Bill Clinton. For the writers at the Weekly Standard, Clinton embodied the cultural degradation that was preventing America from achieving true greatness. \"He is supremely self-seeking, in every conceivable sense,\" wrote one of Kristol's Standard colleagues about the president. \"His politics, too, are based on self-interest; the stroking and stoking of many small appetites. He does not lead citizens but rapacious consumers, whose sense of grievance he tries to exaggerate. His mode is to focus on the small glitch and call it a crisis, so that he can step in to cushion still further the already soft edges of boomer life.\"\n\nThe impeachment crusade, however, ended in disaster. The American people, who generally liked Clinton's small-bore, low-strain policies and wanted no part of a jihad against the era in which they lived, punished Republicans at the polls in the midterm elections of 1998. Rather than striking a blow against America's cultural decay, the impeachment struggle became, in Kristol's view, further evidence of it. Rather than serving as the great public cause for which the national-greatness conservatives hungered, it simply reaffirmed how desperately Americans needed such a cause, how badly America needed to become something other than what it was: a pampered, indulgent, dull place.\n\nFukuyama had seen all this coming. \"The end of history will be a very sad time,\" he had written back in 1989. \"The willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.\" After returning home with the battle won, the warrior might spend some happy time cultivating his crops, fixing his house, loving his wife, and enjoying the soft comforts of home. If he had grown old fighting, and years of hardship had sapped the animal energies of youth, he might even be content to pass his remaining days in this state of repose. But what about his son? Would he not feel the call to struggle, to danger, to greatness?\n\nPerhaps most Americans did not feel this pull. For them, safety and prosperity were not yet boring. They still had roofs to repair and fields to sow. But Kristol and his colleagues found all this tinkering tedious, even degrading; unlike Clinton, they took no joy in helping Americans with such mundane work. And they searched for signs that average Americans might be growing tired of it as well. How else, they asked, to explain the wave of World War II nostalgia that hit America in the late 1990s, culminating with Tom Brokaw's bestseller, The Greatest Generation, and the movie Saving Private Ryan\u2014the palpable envy with which younger Americans discussed the savage trials of their parents and grandparents? The dominance conservatives were sure that something was stirring, if only it could be harnessed.\n\nAfter all, there were still places that history had not yet tamed. Those places could be depicted as a menace to everything Americans held dear, perhaps as great a menace as any that had come before. And even better, because the grand ideological contest was over, and history's escalator was inexorably moving America's way, the outcome of this new battle was preordained. It was the best kind of battle, the kind you could not lose. In the summer of 2000, Jonah Goldberg, the young conservative who had derided Brooks's and Kristol's national-greatness vision as mere public relations, hit upon a mission of his own: Invade Africa. \"I mean going in\u2014guns blazing if necessary\u2014for truth and justice,\" he explained. \"I am quite serious about this.... We should spend billions upon billions doing it. We should put American troops in harm's way. We should not be surprised that Americans will die doing the right thing.\" It was a curious pronouncement, a kind of eruption of the dominance conservative id. But there was an honesty to it, a recognition that if the problem was deep boredom born of profound success, the solution did not lie in building big libraries and tinkering with Social Security. It would take something grander, and bloodier, too.\n\n## CHAPTER SIXTEEN\n\n## SMALL BALL\n\nNational-greatness conservatives had a presidential candidate in 2000, and his name wasn't George W. Bush. It was John S. McCain, III, a man who had been surfing America's waves of hubris and tragedy since he was in his teens. They were, in a sense, the story of his life.\n\nMcCain had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958, the last time America seemed invincible. He was a navy flier, restless and brash, a cocky kid at a cocky time. The Camelot gang, reared on the lessons of Munich, was itching for its own showdown with totalitarianism in the jungles of the developing world. And like them, McCain\u2014the son and grandson of admirals who served in World War II\u2014yearned to fight the dark-skinned Hitlers of his age. It never occurred to him that the Hitlers might win. \"I believed,\" he later explained, \"that militarily we could prevail in whatever conflict we were involved in.\"\n\nVietnam changed that. Five years in a Hanoi prison turned McCain's hair white. By the time he returned home, he could no longer raise his arms above his head, and he no longer believed America could vanquish every foe. \"The American people and Congress now appreciate that we are neither omniscient nor omnipotent,\" he told the Los Angeles Times. \"If we do become involved in combat, that involvement must be of relatively short duration and must be readily explained to the man in the street in one or two sentences.\" Colin Powell couldn't have said it better himself.\n\nIn the 1980s, McCain won a seat in Congress, where he proved a Reaganite in the true sense of the word: slow on the trigger when it came to military force. Like Powell he was appalled by the 1982 intervention in Lebanon, which he saw as Vietnam writ small. In 1987 he opposed putting U.S. flags on Kuwaiti oil tankers for fear the United States would be drawn into war with Iran. When Iraq invaded Kuwait three years later, his first instinct was anything but bellicose. \"If you get involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think [public] support will erode significantly,\" he warned. \"Nor should it be supported. We cannot even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood.\"\n\nOn the Gulf War, McCain\u2014like Jeane Kirkpatrick\u2014eventually came around. But he still opposed marching to Baghdad, and every other war of the early 1990s. He railed against Clinton's intervention in Haiti and sponsored legislation to pull U.S. troops from Somalia. And \"on Bosnia,\" wrote a hostile Robert Kagan in 1995, \"Senator John McCain led the Republican attack, warning that any use of military power there would result in another failure like Vietnam or Lebanon.\"\n\nMcCain would later say that Srebrenica changed him: All those Bosnians herded to the rape chamber and the slaughterhouse while UN peacekeepers skulked away. But in fact, days after the massacre, he still denied that \"our security is so gravely threatened in Bosnia that it requires the sacrifice, in great numbers, of our sons and daughters.\" What changed McCain wasn't Serb barbarism; it was American success. It was only once NATO warplanes had pounded the Serbs into submission\u2014once it became clear that Bosnia wasn't Vietnam\u2014that he grew talons and became a hawk.\n\nBy the 2000 presidential primaries he had come full circle, back to the jaunty confidence of his youth. On Kosovo, while many Republicans wrung their hands, McCain called the Clinton administration's air war timid and urged invading on the ground. He hooked up with his former detractors at the Weekly Standard and, at their urging, proposed what he called a \"21st century...Reagan Doctrine.\" Just as President Reagan had allegedly overthrown the evil empire by force of arms, President McCain would now overthrow its pipsqueak heirs: Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. Once a Reaganite, McCain was now an ultra-Reaganite, which meant he was reenacting the Gipper's foreign policy\u2014minus the dread of war.\n\nEqually exciting, in Kristol, Brooks, and Kagan's eyes, McCain wrapped his policy agenda in the rhetoric of national greatness. He railed against the tranquilizer of affluence, which had left Americans snoozing lazily on the couch, too fat, happy, and selfish to do anything big, like fight another cold war. The Standard compared him to Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, and, surprisingly for a conservative magazine, JFK. It was 1958 all over again, and after decades of Vietnam-induced caution, John McCain had rediscovered a lost part of himself.\n\nMcCain's chief rival for the Republican nomination, Texas governor George W. Bush, didn't have such strong foreign policy views, in large part because foreign policy hadn't directly influenced his life. While McCain had been rethinking American omnipotence between torture sessions at the Hanoi Hilton, Bush had been sipping banana daiquiris and playing midnight water polo at a swanky Houston singles complex called Chateau Dijon. He too had been a brash, restless kid, eager to match the heroism of his greatest-generation dad. But unlike McCain, he had discovered no grand cause into which to channel his swagger. He never found his own World War II, and even when he tried to walk his father's path in smaller ways, he usually stumbled and fell.\n\nThe generational contrast was downright painful. George H. W. Bush had excelled at Andover; George W. almost flunked out. H.W., even as a teenager, had been the family star, dutiful and upright; the teenage W., by contrast, had a mortifying habit of walking up to older women at church and asking whether they still enjoyed sex. (He also relished a good fart joke in mixed company, a predilection that continued into the White House.) H.W. was an accomplished athlete, captaining the baseball team at Yale, as his father had before him; W. was a benchwarmer on the junior varsity, and commissioner of an intramural stickball league. H.W. drank in moderation; W. drank to excess, repeatedly driving drunk with his younger siblings in the car. In his early twenties, H.W. married the daughter of a prominent local family; at the same age, W. tried to do the same thing, but his fianc\u00e9e broke off the engagement. H.W.'s exploits as a fighter pilot in World War II were the stuff of family legend; during Vietnam, W. hoped to be a pilot as well, but never made it off American soil, serving instead with other trust funders in the \"champagne unit\" of the Texas National Guard. H.W. started an oil company with a Spanish name (Zapata) and made a million by the time he was thirty; W. started one, too (Arbusto), but it went belly-up.\n\nBy the 1970s, Bush's life was a shambles. Well into his thirties, he still didn't have a steady job. He was drinking almost every night and had downsized from Chateau Dijon to a dingy apartment above a garage. After one particularly ignominious professional failure, his father confessed himself \"disappointed.\" At a state dinner, W. introduced himself to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II as the family's black sheep.\n\nEventually, with middle age fast approaching, Bush found himself\u2014which meant, in large part, no longer trying to be his dad. In 1977 he ran for Congress, a decision that violated his father's code: that no Bush should enter politics before ensuring his family's financial security first. But for W. the experience was empowering. Even though he lost, he discovered a talent for good-ol'-boy glad-handing that his father lacked. In 1985 he quit drinking and embraced evangelical Christianity, rejecting his father's high WASP Episcopalianism in favor of a more emotional, populist faith, which helped him forge ties to social conservatives who distrusted his dad. (Bush's newfound religious fervor also helped him turn the tables on his judgmental parents: After his conversion, W. told his mother that unless she became born-again, too, she wouldn't get into heaven.) Then, in 1989, he became managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, finally finding a job in which\u2014at least in his own mind\u2014he excelled.\n\nBy the early 1990s, Bush had developed a signature personal and professional style. Instead of biding his time, playing by the rules, and carefully preparing the ground, as his father had done, he would seize the initiative, aim high, and follow his gut. At a time when complex statistical analysis was transforming the way front offices analyzed baseball, Bush disregarded the advice of his scouts and judged players less on the numbers than on their character. Lacking his father's penchant for dispassionate analysis, he fell back on the emotional intelligence that he considered his strength. He sized up players quickly and made bold, unorthodox decisions, like trading Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox for Harold Baines. In the pickup games he organized for team owners, Bush played the same way. \"I remember him striking out a lot,\" one observer remembered. He took \"wild swings with lots of muscle. But he was swinging so hard, trying so hard, he didn't take the chance to watch the ball.\"\n\nSosa went on to hit 608 home runs after Bush traded him, while Baines only hit another 195, and in Bush's five years as managing partner, the Rangers hugged the bottom of their division. But Bush considered his baseball years a success. He sold his stake in the Rangers for $18 million, finally making himself a man of means. And the job raised his public profile, setting the stage for another political bid.\n\nIf Bush was growing more confident in his aggressive, intuitive style, he was also emboldened by seeing his father's more cautious approach fail when it mattered most. In W.'s mind, his dad lost his 1992 reelection bid because he had grown preoccupied with the minutiae of governance and offered the country no rousing agenda for a second term. \"The vision thing matters,\" W. later told Bob Woodward, in explaining what he had learned from his father's defeat. In politics, the younger Bush decided, victory goes to the bold.\n\nIn 1994, Bush told his parents that he wanted to run for governor of Texas. \"You can't win,\" barked his mother, worried that he would siphon off contributions from his more studious brother Jeb, who was seeking Florida's top job. But W. turned out to be the best campaigner in the family, and his grand, if vague, campaign slogan, \"What Texans Can Dream, Texans Can Do,\" appealed to the state's outsize image of itself. By 2000, the family screw-up was the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president. His chief competitor was John McCain.\n\nAt first glance, the Bush and McCain campaigns were utterly different. McCain attacked corporate interests; Bush seemed at times to be a virtual front man for them. Bush was most comfortable discussing \"compassionate conservatism,\" which mostly meant standardized tests in schools and government money for religious charities, topics in which McCain showed little interest. McCain spoke in considerable detail, and with great passion, about foreign policy. Bush couldn't publicly name the leaders of India or Pakistan, and in private didn't know that Germany was a member of NATO. His foreign policy statements often seemed guided by no coherent principle at all except the desire to be against whatever Bill Clinton was for.\n\nBut rhetorically, the Bush campaign actually shared a theme with McCain, and with JFK as well: the need for Americans to find a cause larger than the pursuit of mere material things. Bush's slogan was \"Prosperity with a Purpose.\" As he told the convention that nominated him, \"Prosperity can be a tool in our hands used to build and better our country, or it can be a drug in our system dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty. Our opportunities are too great, our lives too short, to waste this moment. So tonight, we vow to our nation we will seize this moment of American promise. We will use these good times for great goals.\" This was a slap at Clinton, of course, who to conservatives embodied purposeless prosperity and degraded, hedonistic ease. But it was also, more subtly, a slap at Bush's father, who Bush believed had wasted his presidency pushing paper. If elected president, Bush vowed, he would not play \"small ball.\" (The Gulf War, which had once turned the knuckles of America's leaders white, was now \"small ball.\" It showed how much national confidence had swelled in the decade since the end of the cold war.) Bush's own term in office would be, in his baseball-heavy vocabulary, a \"game changer.\"\n\nSo if McCain was speaking the language of national greatness, Bush was, too. It was just harder to know what he thought greatness meant. For a Republican, he talked a lot about poverty\u2014about kids betrayed by bad schools and lives disfigured by drugs. But like the national-greatness intellectuals, he was handicapped in proposing bold solutions by his distrust of government. On foreign policy, his answers mostly left Kristol and Kagan cold. While they believed Clinton had been timid in his use of military force, Bush seemed to score him for being too aggressive. He denounced the intervention in Haiti, talked about removing U.S. peacekeepers from the Balkans, and warned that American forces were being spread too thin.\n\nBut Bush also struck another chord, which echoed, if not Kristol and Kagan, then at least Charles Krauthammer. He opposed the Clinton interventions, he explained, because they were small ball, a distraction from the main event. \"We must be selective in the use of our military precisely because America has other great responsibilities that cannot be slighted or compromised,\" he declared in his first foreign policy address of the campaign. What were those great responsibilities, which might require America to unsheathe its sword? Paul Wolfowitz, one of Bush's foreign policy advisers, spoke\u2014as Krauthammer and McCain did\u2014about toppling dictatorships that were developing WMD. But other advisers said nothing of the sort. It was impossible to know exactly what Bush had in mind, or whether he had anything in mind at all. Unlike McCain, he did not have a bold foreign policy agenda. He had something more inchoate: a taste for boldness, a disdain for merely managing problems, a sense that his political and personal calling lay in epic, world-altering things, if only he could figure out what they were. In 2000, it was only an instinct, and on foreign policy it had little intellectual scaffolding. But it went to the core of who George W. Bush was, who he had decided to be. And in ways that only became clear later, it fit the moment, since a whole cadre of younger conservative intellectuals, emboldened by more than a decade of American military, ideological, and economic triumph, were growing bolder, too. The observers who assumed that W. would be a dumber, looser version of his father, content to \"amble into history\" with a cigar in one hand and an O'Doul's in the other, didn't understand the man\u2014and the moment\u2014at all.\n\nAmong those who didn't understand the new president was his secretary of state, Colin Powell. The years out of government had been good to Powell. His memoir had sold more than a million copies, and polls rated him among the most admired people on earth. Seeking to bask in his reflected glow, both Bush and McCain had promised during the campaign to appoint him to high office. And when Bush eventually did, observers mused that he might become the most powerful secretary of state ever. Watching the press conference where his selection was unveiled, in which Powell answered question after question with effortless command while his new boss fidgeted in the background, the Washington Post noted that \"Powell seemed to dominate the President-elect.\" In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman added, \"I sure hope Colin Powell is always right in his advice to Mr. Bush because he so towered over the President-elect...that it was impossible to imagine Mr. Bush ever challenging or over-ruling Mr. Powell on any issue.\"\n\nPowell had not been a close adviser during the campaign, and he didn't know Bush well. But he knew his father\u2014knew and admired him\u2014and assumed that the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree. Certainly W.'s vague and vaguely realist campaign pronouncements didn't suggest a radical change. Bush had, to be sure, distanced himself from his dad during the campaign, and invoked Reagan's name instead, but that didn't worry Powell. After all, he knew the real Reagan, the guy who wouldn't even invade Panama. All in all, Powell's return to government looked like the capstone to a glittering career. Facing the cameras as he stepped back onto the public stage, he had every reason to believe that when it came to foreign policy, he would be regent to a dutiful boy king.\n\nThe Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting began on January 30, 2001, at 3:35 P.M. exactly. A good omen, Powell thought. The new president, it turned out, was as fanatical about punctuality as he was. He was also an early riser and a stickler for proper dress, never entering the Oval Office except in suit and tie. The NSC meeting was carefully choreographed, each official in his or her assigned seat, each speaking in turn, by order of rank. Powell was impressed. It was good to have Republicans back in charge.\n\nBut there were other, darker omens, whose significance Powell did not yet fully grasp. To Bush's right sat old frosty himself, Dick Cheney, now vice president. In the half century since the NSC was created, vice presidents had rarely participated. Cheney, however, would attend almost every session, even taking part by videoconference when he was on the road. He also sat in on the president's morning CIA briefing; that was unprecedented, too. (In fact, the CIA first briefed Cheney alone, which allowed him to instruct the briefers to emphasize certain points with the president and downplay others\u2014in other words, to stack the deck.) Cheney had also headed Bush's transition team\u2014again, highly unusual. For top cabinet posts, he had chosen the candidates Bush interviewed, and while Bush made the final decision, he ratified Cheney's recommendations every time. The result was an administration teeming with vice presidential Mini-Me's. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was Bush's close friend. But she was sandwiched between Cheney's own powerful adviser on national security, Scooter Libby, who in the first Bush administration had outranked her, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, who had worked for Cheney at the Pentagon and whom Powell's close ally Richard Armitage called the vice president's \"mole.\" The new treasury secretary was Paul O'Neill, a longtime Cheney associate. At Defense was Cheney's mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, a renowned bureaucratic shark. (Powell had wanted Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, a less formidable figure, but Cheney pushed hard for Rummy, his old boss from the Nixon and Ford administrations, a man Henry Kissinger\u2014Henry Kissinger!\u2014once called the \"most ruthless\" government official he had ever met.) Rumsfeld's Pentagon deputy was Wolfowitz, another former Cheney subordinate, and a former boss and mentor to both Hadley and Libby. Cheney even stocked Powell's own State Department with moles, including Undersecretary John Bolton, who would spend Bush's first term spreading anti-Powell gossip, and Cheney's own thirty-six-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.\n\nAt the January 30 meeting, Powell spoke first, warning that violence between Israel and the Palestinians was spiraling out of control, and urging that the administration push the parties back to the negotiating table. Nothing doing: Cheney and Rumsfeld declared the peace process a waste of time and shifted the conversation to Iraq. Powell was ready: He suggested refining the sanctions that the UN had imposed after the Gulf War, making them more enforceable and less onerous for the Iraqi people. But Rumsfeld said sanctions would never stop Iraq from acquiring WMD and proposed using U.S.-patrolled no-fly zones to bomb Iraq instead. The conversation then turned to possible covert action to topple Saddam, and eventually adjourned. The Bush administration was only days old but it already had two Iraq policies: Powell was working to contain Saddam; Rumsfeld\u2014with Cheney's patronage\u2014was working to overthrow him.\n\nAt a \"Principals\" meeting (an NSC meeting the president does not attend) ten days later, Rumsfeld went further. It would be convenient, he mused, if the Iraqis shot down a plane enforcing the no-fly zone; that would justify a major U.S. air strike. (It would be a kind of aerial Tonkin Gulf.) Wolfowitz suggested dramatically expanding support for Iraqi opposition forces, perhaps even helping them establish a provisional government in Iraq's Shia south. \"Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with U.S. interests,\" Rumsfeld declared. \"It would change everything in the region and beyond it.\"\n\nChange everything: That's what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were back in government to do. Even in the first Bush administration, Cheney and Wolfowitz had been the house gamblers, eager to dismember the U.S.S.R. rather than stabilize it, and to help the Shia topple Saddam, even at the risk of Iranian influence or civil war. On their way out the door, they had sketched a blueprint for global dominance, which contemplated preventive war to ensure American hegemony over every important region of the world. And after eight years on the sidelines, watching even the feckless Clintonites win war after war, they were even more confident of what American power could do. If Bush had an instinct for boldness, Cheney and company had at least the beginnings of a plan.\n\nIn imagining a transformed Iraq, flipped from adversary to client, which would further America's dominance of the Middle East, and the world, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz believed they were walking in Reagan's footsteps. Like John McCain, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan, Wolfowitz had spent the late 1990s advocating a new \"Reagan doctrine.\" In Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola, he argued, Reagan's aid to anticommunist rebels had helped bring the Soviet Union to its knees. In the Balkans, Bill Clinton had gone even further, not only aiding the Croats, the Bosnians, and later the Kosovars but also bombing the Serbs on their behalf. (The dominance conservatives had an odd relationship to Clinton: They bashed him mercilessly, but when it came to foreign policy, they stood on his shoulders.) The lesson seemed clear: By offering money, weapons, and air support to the opponents of Saddam, the United States could turn Iraq from a hostile tyranny to a democratic ally.\n\nCheney and Rumsfeld were less concerned about the democratic part, but for Wolfowitz, Islamic democracy had become something of a passion. After his success in helping to oust Ferdinand Marcos, he had become Reagan's ambassador to Indonesia, where, in his final days in his post, he had given a controversial speech urging Jakarta to embrace democracy. At the time it seemed quixotic, but in 1999, Indonesia\u2014the world's largest Muslim country\u2014held its first free presidential election.\n\nIt underscored what Wolfowitz called \"a remarkable phenomenon of our time\u2014the triumph of democracy in country after country, including some with no previous history of democratic rule.\" And this ideological optimism left him susceptible to the charms of one Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the opposition group the Iraqi National Congress (INC), who spent the 1990s telling Wolfowitz, Cheney, and anyone else who would listen that pro-American democracy could triumph in Iraq, too. Chalabi, the scion of one of Iraq's wealthiest families, an elegant man with a University of Chicago mathematics Ph.D., knew how to market his movement to Americans. Its very name, the INC, evoked Nelson Mandela's ANC, which had brought democracy to South Africa. And Chalabi's most important intellectual ally, a rumpled Brandeis professor named Kanan Makiya, had authored a democratic charter for Iraq that was explicitly modeled on the work of Eastern European dissidents like Vaclav Havel. Wolfowitz was a smart man: He didn't believe Chalabi and Makiya could turn Iraq into the Czech Republic overnight. But from the Philippines to Panama to Indonesia to Serbia, he had spent the previous decade and a half watching Fukuyama's prophecy come true. So maybe Iraq wouldn't be the Czech Republic. Surely, however, it could be Romania, the Eastern European country with the nastiest dictator and the bumpiest path from communism to freedom. Romania, that was Wolfowitz's preferred analogy\u2014not perfection, but one hell of a game changer nonetheless.\n\nWhat Wolfowitz and his \"neo-Reaganite\" allies seemed not to understand was that in imagining that military aid and air support for the INC could usher in a pro-American, democratic Iraq, they were going well beyond what Reagan (or Clinton, for that matter) had actually done. As frequently happens during hubris bubbles, they were invoking the successes of the past to justify something far more ambitious in the present. Of the three countries where the \"Reagan Doctrine\" had been tried\u2014Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola\u2014America's proxies had won military victory in only the first. And in Afghanistan, that had happened largely because the occupying Soviet army withdrew\u2014a precedent with little relevance to Saddam's Iraq, where there was no foreign occupier. (Nor was Afghanistan exactly a victory for democracy, since America's allies, the mujahideen, were mostly theocrats.) The Clinton analogies were equally misleading, since the Bosnia war was aimed at preserving a regime (and its people), not overthrowing one. It was true that in 2000, fifteen months after the Kosovo war, Slobodan Milosevic did fall, but he was toppled by peaceful revolution, not U.S. bombs or Kosovar troops.\n\nWolfowitz had every reason to be optimistic about the long-term spread of global democracy. Many new countries had indeed embraced representative government in the 1980s and '90s, but with the exception of Panama, none of those democratic revolutions had come primarily through the barrel of an American gun. (And even Panama had held a democratic election seven months before the United States invaded. After deposing Noriega, the United States simply installed the man Panamanians had already elected.) What Wolfowitz was proposing for Iraq\u2014an American-proxy war to produce a pro-American democracy\u2014was not the \"Reagan Doctrine.\" It was the \"Reagan Doctrine\" on steroids.\n\nIt all made Colin Powell extremely queasy. When he heard people talk about forcibly remaking whole regions of the world, his mind sometimes drifted back to his days as a second lieutenant, stationed in West Germany in the late 1950s. He had been drinking with some other up-and-coming young officers, and they were all feeling pretty good about themselves when their captain decided to take them down a notch. \"You guys think you're really hot stuff,\" he bellowed. \"You've got all your little troops in bed and you're sitting here patting yourselves on the back about how you solved all the world's problems today. And you're going to go home and lie down with your little wives and sleep well. But you know what? While you're sleeping, the world is going to get fucked up all over again and you're going to have to get up in the morning and start at the beginning.\" Powell didn't believe in game changers. For him, foreign policy leadership, like military leadership, mostly consisted of holding things together, keeping all hell from breaking loose, making incremental change. He had no problem with small ball. It was small ball\u2014realistic expectations, meticulous attention to detail\u2014that kept your men alive. If Bush's sports vocabulary was baseball, Powell's was football, a rougher game, and more complex, too. \"Success doesn't always come with a deep pass,\" he liked to say. \"Sometimes it's a ground game...building up slowly but surely, layer by layer.\"\n\nPowell didn't have much patience for the Iraqi exiles. If Wolfowitz likened them to the Nicaraguan Contras, the Bosnians, and the Afghan mujahideen, Powell viewed them through the lens of South Vietnam, where America's local allies had promised much, delivered little, and gotten a lot of his buddies killed. He viewed Wolfowitz's proposal for a liberated enclave in the Iraqi south the same way William Crowe had viewed Elliott Abrams's proposal for a liberated enclave in Panama: as the kind of militarily ludicrous suggestion you got from people who had spent their twenties in think tanks, not foxholes. For Powell, Iraq was a problem\u2014not an existential crisis, not a golden opportunity, just a problem to be managed. At his confirmation hearings, he had called Iraq a \"broken, weak country.\" In February he declared that containment was working, and that Saddam posed no threat to his neighbors. It was an extraordinary statement considering that Cheney, Wolfowitz, and their intellectual allies were declaring containment dead, and Iraq as grave a danger as the U.S.S.R. But Powell downplayed the threat from Saddam in part because he feared the costs of trying to eliminate it. Less confident that America had the power, wisdom, and money to midwife a democratic, pro-American Iraq, he was content to muddle through. And muddling through was exactly what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were determined not to do.\n\nIt was same argument that had pitted Crowe against Abrams more than a decade earlier: whether to tolerate adversaries or topple them. And in the Bush administration's early months, Iraq was only one of the places it played itself out. In March, with the South Korean president about to arrive in town, Powell told the Washington Post that the Bush administration would continue Clinton's position of negotiating with the Stalinist North. When the Post story came out the next day, he got an irate call from Rice: He had misstated the administration's position. The new policy was not negotiation; it was regime change.\n\nPowell was stunned. The cabinet had never met on North Korea; if coercive regime change was the new line, no one had asked his opinion. To Powell's staff, it smelled like a Cheney power play: a policy hatched in secret and then wielded like a club to show that Powell was not as powerful as everyone thought. It was classic Cheney. Whenever he started a new job, he liked to take down some big game just to prove who was in charge. At the Pentagon in the early 1990s, he had taken down generals. Now that Cheney was vice president, the big game was Colin Powell.\n\nIt was ironic. During the Clinton years, Powell had moaned about the length of meetings, about Clinton's inability to make up his mind, about the fact that even junior officials demanded their say. Now information was so tightly held, and decisions so briskly made, that even he was not always in the room. After Rice's call, he sheepishly told the press that he had misstated administration policy. \"Sometimes,\" he explained, \"you get a little far forward on your skis.\"\n\nEven the fights Powell won were painful. A few weeks after the Korea humiliation, a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese jet off the coast of China and made an emergency landing on Chinese soil. Before returning the crew, Beijing demanded an apology and a halt to U.S. spying over what it claimed were its territorial waters. For a week Powell negotiated for the crew's release, finally securing it with a classic diplomatic fudge, a letter that in English offered no apology but did so in the Chinese translation. Powell was ecstatic; this was high-level, cool-headed problem-solving, just what he did best. But not everyone was pleased. The White House refused to let him go on television to trumpet his achievement. Kristol and Kagan, whose anti-Chinese rhetoric had been growing louder and louder, called the non-apology apology a \"national humiliation\" and implied that Cheney and Rumsfeld disapproved. Then, a few weeks later, Bush told ABC News that America would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, junking several decades of carefully crafted diplomatic ambiguity aimed at keeping the United States out of a Pacific war. Wolfowitz and PNAC had called for just such a declaration in 1999, and Powell aides even suspected that top Pentagon officials were pushing Taiwan to declare independence, a move that might well prompt Beijing to strike. Was this Bush's effort at a game changer, a bold, impulsive move aimed at punishing the Chinese for their temerity and showing once and for all that in East Asia, the United States was in charge? The White House walked Bush's statement back, but the Standard said Bush had known exactly what he was saying, and Cheney seemed to go out of his way to reaffirm Bush's original remark. That same month, the Pentagon offered Taiwan its largest arms sale in a decade.\n\nHad Powell been kneecapped again? It was hard to be sure, since Cheney\u2014a man known for driving around his home state of Wyoming and only speaking to fellow passengers once or twice per hour\u2014said little, at least when Powell was around. Rumsfeld was opaque, too, often speaking in what Powell called the \"third-person passive once removed\"\u2014with statements like \"one would think\" and \"one might expect.\" Powell's deputies were equally baffled. When they went to meetings with Hadley, Libby, Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, they often suspected that their Pentagon and White House colleagues knew things they didn't, that the real decisions were being made someplace else. (Only later would they learn that Cheney's office sometimes used the National Security Agency to spy on State Department officials when they traveled abroad, and that when Powell's aides received e-mails, blind copies were frequently sent to the vice president's staff.)\n\nWhat was clear, by the summer of 2001, was that unnamed colleagues were gunning for Powell in the press. One article declared that he was \"on a short leash...nothing more than a silent symbol or a messenger boy.\" In anonymous quotes, administration officials suggested that he had lost a step. \"Powell's megastar wattage looks curiously dimmed, as if someone has turned his light way down,\" declared a September 10 cover story in Time. For Kristol and Kagan, who were unhappy that the Bush administration was not hewing consistently to a \"neo-Reaganite line,\" Powell had become enemy number one.\n\nIn ways Powell hadn't fully appreciated, Washington had changed since the end of the cold war. In Congress, moderate Republicans like himself were now rare. The right had also built a much stronger intellectual and journalistic network, symbolized by magazines like the Standard, think tanks like PNAC, nationally syndicated radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and talking-head TV channels like Fox News, which had not even existed in the Reagan years. They provided Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz an echo chamber that Powell lacked. That Powell was having problems with the media was surprising; he had long been considered a master of the press. But his appeal was personal, not ideological. As a pragmatist, distrustful of theory, his perspective lacked appeal for the conservative journals, think tanks, and chat shows that specialized in big, aggressive, Manichean visions. In his years out of power, American dominance had become, for a whole generation of conservative commentators, an ideology. And Powell, for all his political savvy, was less formidable in this more ideological age.\n\nAs the summer of 2001 faded into fall, Powell was growing weary; Bush II was not going as planned. But he still had one ace in the hole: the American people. It was the very thing that drove the national-greatness conservatives mad. In an era without obvious threats, the public would only support wars in which barely any Americans got killed. Inside the Beltway, the dominance conservatives were winning the bureaucratic battle, but in the country at large, Powell's low-key, low-cost, low-blood foreign policy still enjoyed the upper hand.\n\nIf Powell took solace from his public standing, he also retained hopes for Bush himself. In his more optimistic moments, he considered the president a work in progress, with potential to grow in the job. Perhaps as Bush grew more confident, Powell thought, he would bring the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz nexus under control. In a sense, Powell was right: Bush hadn't fully settled into the presidency. He had pushed through new policies on education, taxes, stem cells, and funding for religious charities, but his agenda, in his first eight months, was hardly epic or stirring; it just wasn't an epic or stirring time. Even Bush's \"successes,\" chief speechwriter Michael Gerson later acknowledged, \"had a quality of randomness, disconnected from larger purposes.\" At times Bush seemed to be coasting, spending long stretches at his Texas ranch. Powell hoped that when the president found his feet, and his true calling, he would become a wiser, more diligent, more responsible steward of the nation's fortunes, more his father's son. After eight months, he still didn't really know the man at all.\n\n## CHAPTER SEVENTEEN\n\n## THE OPPORTUNITY\n\n\"We have to think of this as an opportunity.\" It was an odd thing for President Bush to say at 9:30 P.M. on September 11, 2001, with thousands of New Yorkers and Virginians freshly dead beneath mountains of twisted concrete. But he kept saying it. \"This is a new world.... This is an opportunity,\" he told a National Security Council meeting two days later. And then again, in an interview: \"I will seize the opportunity.\"\n\nOpportunity for what? When it came to the Muslim world, Bush did not yet know. South Asia and the Middle East were not regions with which he had deep experience, to put it mildly. Before entering the White House, he had been to the Middle East exactly once, in 1998, on a brief swing designed to burnish his foreign policy credentials, and he had never traveled to the subcontinent at all. Asked about the Taliban by Glamour magazine in 2000, he had responded with a blank stare, and then, after being reminded that they ruled Afghanistan, chuckled, \"I thought you said some band.\" As late as January 2003, according to visitors to the Oval Office, he seemed unaware that Iraq was divided between Sunni and Shia.\n\nBut it was precisely because Bush knew so little about the greater Middle East that he so easily made it a mirror of his views about the United States. The terrorists, he decided, had attacked America because they considered it weak, and they considered it weak because Americans lacked moral purpose. \"[T]here is the image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we're almost hedonistic, that we don't have values, and that when struck, we wouldn't fight back,\" he explained. Al Qaeda had created \"a mythology of American weakness and decadence,\" explained Gerson. \"President Bush set out radically to change this course of events and smash this myth.\"\n\nIt was a remarkable act of projection. To be sure, Osama bin Laden disdained Western culture, and had once called America the \"weak horse\" as a way to rally his troops. But he hadn't toppled the Twin Towers because he saw America as weak; he had toppled them because America had grown so ferociously strong, because its victories in the cold war and Gulf War had made it the undisputed master of the Middle East, patron to the Arab and Israeli leaders whom bin Laden loathed, and military defiler of Saudi Arabia's sacred soil. If bin Laden had been truly emboldened by weakness, he would have attacked his old foes in Russia on 9\/11. They were the ones who had shown real decadence in the 1990s, watching in a vodka-induced stupor as their entire empire collapsed. Instead, bin Laden had attacked the Soviets after they invaded Afghanistan in the early 1980s, when their empire pushed deep into the Muslim world. Now he was attacking America, the world's new behemoth, because it held Muslim lands in its grasp.\n\nIt was not bin Laden who had spent the Clinton years bemoaning American weakness and decadence; it was the national-greatness conservatives. And it was not bin Laden who had railed against Clinton's prosperity without purpose, his blend of 1960s depravity and political small ball; it was George W. Bush. Now, after 9\/11, Bush turned that critique into a deeply solipsistic explanation for why three thousand Americans lay dead. Clinton, he declared, had invited attack by responding to past provocations with \"pinprick\" strikes that merely \"pounded sand.\" America had emboldened bin Laden with a policy of what Rumsfeld called \"reflexive pullback.\" Now that would change: Bush's anti-terror policies would be bold, consequential, decisive. As he told members of Congress soon after 9\/11, \"I'm not going to fire a two-million-dollar missile at a ten-dollar empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.\"\n\nAs a description of Clinton's actual foreign policy, this was sheer fantasy. Clinton's \"reflexive pullback\" had extended NATO to the borders of the former U.S.S.R., produced a military budget larger than all of America's competitors combined, and left awed foreigners comparing the United States to ancient Rome. Among Clinton's \"pinprick\" strikes had been Operation Desert Fox in 1998, a four-day campaign conducted without UN approval, in which the United States launched more cruise missiles against Iraq than it had during the entire Gulf War, killed 1,400 Iraqi troops, and\u2014U.S. weapons inspectors later learned\u2014frightened Saddam into aborting his efforts at producing WMD. In reality, American power had expanded mightily in the Clinton years; it just hadn't expanded as much as the national-greatness conservatives wanted, since, engorged by more than a decade of military, ideological, and economic triumph, they believed America could, and should, vanquish every important adversary on earth.\n\nIf Bush's interpretation of 9\/11 fit the mounting hubris of the time, it also fit his personal history. The parable of big goals replacing small ball, and moral responsibility replacing self-indulgence, was not merely his narrative for the \"war on terror\" it was his narrative for his entire life. As a man, he had meandered aimlessly and self-destructively, then found a higher purpose by overcoming the evil of alcoholism. And now, as president, the story was playing itself out again. In his first eight months in office, he had searched in vain for his presidential calling; now evil had arrived and made that calling clear. He told aides that 9\/11 gave his fellow baby boomers a chance to invest their lives with deeper meaning, to show the kind of spirit that their parents had shown in World War II. \"In our grief and anger,\" he told a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks, \"we have found our mission and our moment.\" At the White House, amid the anguish and fear, there was exhilaration. \"No more stilted generational summonses, no more made-up 'callings,'\" declared White House speechwriter Matthew Scully after Bush's speech. \"Here, finally, was the real thing\u2014a real calling with real heroism.\" That's what Bush meant, at least initially, by 9\/11's \"opportunity.\" It was the opportunity to infuse an aimless presidency, and a pampered age, with heroism, purpose, greatness.\n\nAs usual, Powell was the odd man out. When the towers fell, he was in Lima for a meeting of the Organization of American States, listening to Peru's president plead for a reduction in U.S. cotton tariffs. As a result, he was not in Washington that evening to help shape Bush's address to the nation, in which the president declared that in the new \"war on terror,\" the enemy would be not merely the terrorists who had struck Virginia and New York, but the regimes that harbored them.\n\nPowell disliked the formulation. At a cabinet meeting the next morning, he tried to narrow the focus, declaring that America should concentrate \"first on the organization that acted yesterday.\" But Cheney pushed back. \"To the extent we define our task broadly,\" he replied, \"including those who support terrorism, then we get at states.\" On September 13, the dispute spilled into public view. \"It's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism,\" Wolfowitz declared at a Pentagon briefing. Once again Powell tried to dial things back. \"We're after ending terrorism,\" he told reporters, \"and if there are states and regimes\u2014nations\u2014that support terrorism, we hope to persuade them that it is in their interest to stop doing that. But I think 'ending terrorism' is where I would leave it and let Mr. Wolfowitz speak for himself.\"\n\nBehind the newfangled war-on-terror lingo, it was the same debate that had been playing itself out since Panama: negotiation or regime change. Wolfowitz wanted to \"end\" terror-supporting regimes; Powell wanted to persuade them to change their ways and thus restrict the war to Al Qaeda itself. Wolfowitz's strategy would extend the frontiers of American dominance, creating new clients in countries where the United States did not currently hold sway. Powell's was cheaper in both money and blood.\n\nIn the days immediately following 9\/11, the debate was about two countries: Afghanistan and Iraq. For Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, it was Iraq that really mattered. For starters, they genuinely believed that Saddam had had a hand in the attack, and they didn't much care that the administration's terrorism experts thought they were nuts. (On the subject of Iraq and terrorism, Wolfowitz was used to people thinking him nuts. He believed Saddam had masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and for a time even suspected him of orchestrating the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. Wolfowitz-watchers considered it an intellectual eccentricity, like an otherwise rational man who decides carrot juice can cure cancer.) Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz also considered Afghanistan a bad place to fight a war: the mountainous terrain made ground operations difficult, and the country was so primitive that there was barely anything worthwhile to bomb. Finally, and most important, Afghanistan wasn't a game changer. A geopolitical backwater, it lacked strategic position or critical resources (a polite way of saying oil). \"If the war [on terror] does not significantly change the world's political map,\" Rumsfeld wrote in a memo to Bush, \"the U.S. will not achieve its aim\"\u2014and attacking Afghanistan didn't do that. It was like invading Haiti: a lot of work for little reward.\n\nPowell thought they were in cloud-cuckoo-land. \"What the hell, what are these guys thinking about? Can't you get these guys back in the box?\" he moaned to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Henry Shelton. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz wanted to go after Iraq because doing so might reshape the Middle East. Powell wanted to go after Afghanistan because that's where the terrorists were. He wanted to fight Al Qaeda; they believed that to effectively fight Al Qaeda, America must expand its hegemony in the Arab world. In his mind, it was a bait and switch.\n\nInitially, Bush split the difference. He too believed Saddam was involved in 9\/11, but he knew he couldn't prove it. He loved the idea of doing something big. As Gerson put it, \"All of his instincts tended toward a single ambition: a desire to reshape the security environment we found in the world, rather than endlessly responding to escalating dangers and attacks\"\u2014and he feared that merely getting bin Laden and his cronies was not big enough. But still, he could see Powell's point. Americans wanted bin Laden's head on a stick; Afghanistan had to be first. Anything else risked a public revolt. \"Start with bin Laden, which Americans expect,\" he told his advisers. \"And then if we succeed, we've struck a huge blow and can move forward.\" It was a shrewd insight into the politics of hubris. If America won easily in Afghanistan, then the public would grow more malleable on Iraq. After overthrowing the Taliban, overthrowing Saddam would no longer seem so hard.\n\nBut in the days after 9\/11, even overthrowing the Taliban seemed hard. In 2002, once American confidence had swelled further, toppling the regime would be remembered as easy and obvious, a mere appetizer before the Mesopotamian main course. But it didn't look that way at the time. Initially the military wanted no part of Afghan regime change, which it assumed would require tens of thousands of troops. In fact, when Shelton addressed Bush's war cabinet on September 15, two of the three military options he proposed involved no U.S. ground forces at all. Afghanistan was a \"graveyard for the interests of great powers,\" cautioned the New York Times, \"a general's nightmare and guerrilla commander's fantasy.\" U.S. allies were even more squeamish. French foreign minister Hubert V\u00e9drine warned that bin Laden had set a \"diabolical trap\" for the United States, luring it into a war it could not win. His German counterpart worried that invading Afghanistan might \"create more instability.\" When administration representatives traveled to Russia, a country that knew something about Afghan wars, a Kremlin official told them, \"With regret, I have to say you're really going to get the hell kicked out of you.\"\n\nPowell feared the Russians were right. Like his old colleagues in the military, and like the CIA, he wanted to blow up some Al Qaeda bases and lure the Taliban from their alliance with bin Laden, not overthrow them. \"It is not the goal at the outset to change the regime,\" he told a Principals meeting on September 23, \"but to get the regime to do the right thing.\" It was a lot like his debate with Wolfowitz at the close of the Gulf War. Once again Powell preferred sticking with the barbaric regime he knew to deposing it and potentially getting mired in civil war.\n\nFor the dominance conservatives, Powell was on the wrong side of history yet again. \"It is deeply troubling to see the secretary of state begin to wobble,\" wrote Charles Krauthammer in late September. \"Eleven years ago, then-President Bush overrode Powell's resistance to fighting Saddam,\" wrote William Kristol. \"Bush was vindicated in doing so. Will the current President Bush follow Powell's lead? Or will Bush lead and demand that Powell follow?\" Like Wolfowitz, both Krauthammer and Kristol would have been happy for America to go after Saddam right away, but they understood Bush's logic. If America didn't successfully overthrow the Taliban first, there would be no war in Iraq.\n\nOn Afghanistan, Powell lost. To Bush, merely lobbing missiles meant pounding sand, killing camels, Clinton stuff. \"We'll attack with missiles, bombers and boots on the ground,\" he told the NSC on September 17. \"Let's hit them hard. We want to signal this is a change from the past.\"\n\nIronically, while Bush believed he was breaking with Clinton, he was actually building on Clinton's example. America's Afghan war strategy, devised largely by the CIA, involved massive U.S. airpower, and a small number of U.S. trainers, arming and advising the Northern Alliance so they could defeat the Taliban on the ground. It was a lot like what the Clinton administration had done in the Balkans, where the United States had assisted first Croat, and then Kosovar, ground forces while NATO pounded Serb forces from the air. And it was because this \"Clinton Doctrine\" (or \"Reagan Doctrine,\" in Wolfowitz's terminology, since the Republican bloodlines had to be kept pure) had worked in Bosnia and Kosovo that Bush pushed it further in the Hindu Kush. It was another example of how success begets ambition. Commentators would later say that the 9\/11 attacks made overthrowing the Taliban inevitable, that doing less was inconceivable after the murder of three thousand on American soil. But had Kosovo turned into Vietnam, or even Somalia, doing less would have been highly conceivable. September 11 was crucial to America's decision to invade Afghanistan, of course; without the attacks, invading would never have been seriously discussed. But without the self-confidence engendered by a decade of military, economic, and ideological triumph, policymakers might well have chosen the safer and more limited military response that Powell and many in the military and intelligence community preferred. When it came to the Afghan War, September 11 was the match. American self-confidence was the dry tinder that burst into flame.\n\nAt first, everything went wrong. Starting in early October, America bombed Afghanistan for days, and then weeks, but the Taliban didn't buckle. Efforts to foment a rebellion among Pashtuns in the Afghan south failed miserably, as a key anti-Taliban exile was captured just hours after crossing with his fighters onto Afghan soil. \"Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word 'quagmire' has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad. Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?\" mused a late October news analysis in the New York Times. With the Northern Alliance looking amateurish and ineffectual, and American air strikes having little apparent effect, the military began making plans for the dreaded land invasion\u2014fifty thousand troops, for starters. To Powell, it just made the Vietnam analogy all the more apt: When bombing and local allies failed, the next step was always U.S. troops on the ground. He began to protest, telling a Principals meeting that \"I'd rule out the United States going after the Afghans [on the ground], who have been there for 5,000 years.\" It was one of Powell's verbal tics. When he wanted America to stay out of someone else's war\u2014whether in Lebanon, Bosnia, or now Afghanistan\u2014he claimed the people there had been fighting for hundreds or thousands of years. It was a window into his view of the world, his sense that problems were often incorrigible and that at least in some places, not only was history not ending, but it didn't progress much at all.\n\nIt was a crucial moment, those days just before and after Halloween 2001, and it set the stage for much that was to come. The Europeans were skittish; the New York Times was talking quagmire; Powell seemed to want to cut America's losses. Bush hated quitters; his natural instinct, when challenged, was to double down. He began privately cursing the media, suggesting that they wanted him to fail. The Weekly Standard attacked Powell as defeatist and demanded that Bush send in the army. At one point Bush took Cheney aside and asked him if he still believed they would win. Cheney said he had absolute faith.\n\nThen, suddenly, the tide turned. On November 2, an American air strike destroyed a famed transmission tower that the Soviets had tried for years to hit, but never could. The smart bombs that had worked such wonders in the 1990s were finally working their magic again. Outside the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, a U.S. Special Forces soldier on horseback spotted a clump of Taliban fighters, tapped their coordinates into his laptop, and summoned an armed pilotless drone\u2014the newest gadget in America's high-tech arsenal\u2014along with a B-52 bomber. Nineteen minutes later, the Taliban fighters were dead.\n\nQuickly, the Taliban began to crumble. Between November 9 and November 12, the Northern Alliance increased its share of the country from 15 percent to 50 percent. On November 13, Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, fell. Kites, an Afghan passion banned by the Taliban as unIslamic, started to dot the sky. Indian pop music, also formerly banned, soon blared from taxi radios and boom boxes. In Kabul's main stadium, which the Taliban had used to publicly execute those who defied religious law, soccer games broke out. Women began removing their burkas; men shaved their beards. Girls, doomed under the Taliban to a life of illiterate, beastlike submission, began\u2014often for the first time in their lives\u2014to attend school. By Christmas, Afghanistan had sworn in a new leader, Hamid Karzai, not a Northern Alliance warlord, but an apparently decent and modern man with brothers who ran restaurants in Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Boston, a democrat. His new government did not merely replace tribe with tribe; it represented Afghan's ethnic diversity. Karzai himself was a Pashtun. In January, at Bush's State of the Union address, he sat next to first lady Laura Bush, along with a female member of the new Afghan cabinet.\n\nIt was, in a sense, the culmination of all the success America had achieved since 1989. Militarily, the accomplishment was breathtaking, exceeding even what the United States had done in Panama, the Gulf, Bosnia, and Kosovo. From a standing start, America had gone to war in a forbidding, landlocked country half a world away, a legendary graveyard of empire that had brought the mighty U.S.S.R to its knees. It had done so with a ground force of 316 Special Forces troops and 110 CIA agents. And in just over a month, it had brought down the enemy regime at a total cost of $1 billion to $2 billion, less than a single B-2 bomber. In the wake of Afghanistan, suggested an article in the conservative magazine National Review, \"we face the prospect of being able to dominate the world at the touch of a button\u2014and at virtually no cost in casualties.\" It was a dream come true.\n\nIdeologically, the victory was just as heady. Even more than Panama or the Balkans, Afghanistan was a place that by history, culture, location, and economics seemed condemned to despotism, yet its people were embracing democracy with tears of joy. Afghan's new leaders rushed to tell Americans the same thing that the Panamanian priest had told them more than a decade before: that their real country was a free, decent, modern place, concealed from the world by a small, monstrous faction. The Taliban were not Afghanistan's true face; they were its mask. And America was not Afghanistan's occupier, bringing alien, unwelcome ideas, but its liberator, allowing it to become, once again, its truest self. A country that only weeks before had been marching backward toward the seventh century now seemed like just another young democracy, hopping onto Fukuyama's escalator, wobbling a bit, but peering up toward the light.\n\nGeopolitically, the war extended American power deep into Central Asia, just as the Gulf War had in the Middle East and Bosnia had in Eastern Europe. By 2002, not only was the U.S. Army deployed across Afghanistan, but American troops and planes were nestled at bases in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, in the former U.S.S.R.\n\nFor the Bush administration and its intellectual allies, who only days before had been accused of leading the nation into a second Vietnam, vindication was sweet and reinforced one of the central tenets of dominance conservatism, not to mention George W. Bush's life: that glory goes to those with ambition and faith, not the faint of heart. \"Critics of the U.S. war in Afghanistan have been wrong about virtually everything,\" crowed an article in the Weekly Standard. At a press conference in late November, Rumsfeld taunted the press, declaring that from the beginning the Afghan War had gone as planned, but that thanks to negative reporting, \"It looked like we were in a\u2014all together now\u2014QUAGMIRE!\" In the wake of Bush's success, the press grew more quiescent; a Saturday Night Live skit showed reporters so intimidated by Rumsfeld that they would not ask any questions at all. In December, People named the sixty-nine-year-old defense secretary one of the sexiest men of the year, after which Bush dubbed him \"Rumstud.\"\n\nPolitically, Bush looked like quite a stud himself. September 11 had sent his approval rating into the stratosphere, as Americans rallied around the flag, but it was the Afghan victory that kept it there. By the fall of Kabul, according to Gallup, he enjoyed the support of 87 percent of Americans. On September 10, he had been an accidental president, widely considered out of his depth. Now he dominated Washington as few presidents ever had.\n\nAs Bush grew stronger, so did the presidency itself. As Gerald Ford's thirty-four-year-old chief of staff in the dying days of Vietnam, Dick Cheney had run a White House under siege, as the hubris of toughness collapsed amid an orgy of congressional and journalistic recrimination. Deeply scarred by the ordeal, Cheney had devoted his career to the restoration of the imperial presidency of the early cold war. Now 9\/11 and Afghanistan gave him the power to make that dream come true. In January 2002, with no input from Congress, he steamrolled Powell and convinced Bush that the combatants the United States had picked up on the Afghan battlefield should not enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention. In February, at Cheney's insistence, the White House went to federal court to deny the General Accounting Office (GAO) access to records of an energy task force he had led. The Bush administration, wrote the GAO's head, \"seeks to work a revolution in separation of powers principles, one that would drastically interfere with Congress's essential power to oversee the activities of the executive branch.\" Bush and Cheney won the case.\n\nBy every measure, it looked like an awesome performance. The war in Afghanistan was not over, to be sure. In a rugged mountainous region called Tora Bora, roughly fifteen hundred Al Qaeda fighters had escaped across the border into Pakistan. They would need to be mopped up. But few worried about that in the thrilling winter of 2001. \"The initial reaction to 9\/11,\" Gerson later remembered, \"had been successful beyond expectation, and perhaps beyond precedent.\" And Bush was determined not to rest on his laurels, as his father had done after the Gulf War. There was even greater glory to come. \"They won in Afghanistan when everybody said it wouldn't work, and it's got them in a euphoric mood of cockiness,\" trembled one Powell ally, \"and anyone who now preaches any approach of solving problems with diplomacy is scoffed at. They're on a roll.\"\n\n## CHAPTER EIGHTEEN\n\n## THE ROMANTIC BULLY\n\nWhy did America invade Iraq? The Bush administration's answer went something like this: Before September 11, Saddam Hussein was a problem. He had attacked his neighbors; he was building weapons of mass destruction (or so it seemed); he was defying UN resolutions; he cavorted with terrorists. Then came 9\/11, and America's leaders peered into the abyss. If terrorists could kill three thousand Americans with boarding passes and box cutters, imagine what they could do with weapons of mass destruction. The anthrax attacks a month later underscored the danger. So the Bushies asked the obvious question: Who might supply terrorists with WMD? Who had the motive and the means? Saddam!\n\nAmerica invaded, in other words, out of fear. September 11 showed that the terrorist threat was graver than previously understood, and so America took graver steps to confront it. It's not hard to see why Bush officials favored this argument: It made the Iraq War sound defensive. But it ignored something crucial: Fears don't exist in isolation. They tend to rise and fall depending on what people think they can do about them. In Robert Kagan's words, \"A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger.... The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation.\"\n\nHad September 11 happened in 1977, or 1983, or 1989, America would have been more like the man with the knife. Back then, Vietnam still haunted discussions of military force; America's post\u2013cold war triumphs had not yet exorcised the ghost. In the 1970s and '80s, nothing in America's recent experience suggested that America could successfully invade and occupy a large, distant country like Iraq (especially after it had just invaded and occupied another large, distant country: Afghanistan). After all, the United States hadn't even managed to rescue the hostages in Iran in 1980 or protect its Marines in Beirut in 1983. And if America's leaders doubted their capacity to rid the world of Saddam, they would have likely hesitated before describing him as a mortal threat. Why stoke public fear unless you can put it to rest?\n\nBush, by contrast, stoked public fear relentlessly. In the run-up to war with Iraq, he claimed that while deterrence had worked against the Soviet Union and China, it couldn't work against dictators like Saddam. As an argument about threats, that made little sense: There was little in Saddam's record to suggest that he was less deterrable than Stalin or Mao. But Bush encouraged Americans to believe that the threat was greater because he thought he could eliminate it. During the cold war, America had chosen deterrence because preventive war against the Soviet Union or China was too frightening to seriously contemplate. Preventive war against Iraq, however, was not so frightening, especially given America's recent run of military success. Top Bush officials thought America could invade and occupy Iraq with relative ease. And so they depicted Saddam, and his presumed weapons, as an intolerable, undeterrable threat.\n\nThe timing of Bush's decision to go to war illustrates the point. In October 2001, when Afghanistan looked like a quagmire, there had been little talk inside the White House about a second war. When Rumsfeld raised the issue at an NSC meeting on October 9, he was rebuffed. But when the Taliban fell in mid-November, the mood quickly changed. Eight days after the capture of Kabul, Bush told Rumsfeld to develop a strategy for toppling Saddam. By February 2002, the U.S. military was shifting forces from Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi threat had not grown as a result of America's apparent victory over the Taliban, but the Bush administration's self-confidence had.\n\nThat confidence came in three parts, the first\u2014and least appreciated\u2014of which was economic. In 2002, as the White House prepared for a second war, the budget surplus of the 1990s turned to deficit. But the dominance conservatives, like the authors of NSC 68, did not fear deficits. After all, Reagan had racked up huge ones fighting the cold war, and although Paul Kennedy and others had predicted catastrophe, those deficits had disappeared by century's end. For the Bush administration's \"neo-Reaganites,\" the moral of the story was that deficits were a small and temporary price to pay for vanquishing America's foes. At a meeting in November 2002, when Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill warned that America was \"moving toward a fiscal crisis,\" Cheney interrupted. \"Reagan,\" he declared, \"proved deficits don't matter.\"\n\nRather than raising taxes to reduce the deficit and pay for America's two wars, the Bush administration cut them in 2002, and then again in 2003. The tax cuts, it insisted, would largely pay for themselves as the economy boomed, and so would Iraq, whose vast oil wealth would fund its own postwar reconstruction. When White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey suggested that toppling Saddam might cost $200 billion, he was reprimanded, then fired. Top administration officials derided his suggestion as ludicrous. After all, toppling the Taliban had cost less than 1 percent of that.\n\nIf the Bushies were brimming with economic confidence, their military confidence was equally high. It wasn't just that America had spent the last decade winning wars\u2014since Bosnia, it had been winning wars with barely any U.S. ground troops. From this, Donald Rumsfeld drew a striking conclusion: The era of massive land armies was over. The future of war belonged to the lean, fast, and ultrahigh-tech. In his mind, Afghanistan proved the point. Before the war, General Tommy Franks, head of Central Command, had told him that overthrowing the Taliban would require tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of GIs, a hulking force that would take nine months to fully deploy. Instead the CIA had parachuted in one hundred or so agents carrying laptops and suitcases of cash, and, with help from the U.S. Air Force, the Northern Alliance, and a few hundred Special Forces troops on horseback, they had taken down the Taliban in little more than a month.\n\nIt was more than the hypercompetitive Rumsfeld could bear. His doctrine had apparently been vindicated, but his CIA rivals were getting the glory. A haughty man in the best of times, he developed an epic disdain for the army's top brass, whom he considered timid, conformist, and flat-out dumb. He felt special contempt for Franks, no one's idea of an intellectual, a man whose favorite movie was The Nutty Professor. As a result, in early December, when Franks said invading Iraq would require close to four hundred thousand troops, Rumsfeld shot him down, remarking that \"I'm not sure that that much force is needed given what we've learned coming out of Afghanistan.\" Over the next fifteen months, he forced the troop number down by almost a third.\n\nWhen William Crowe or Colin Powell ran the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America's generals had not been so easily bullied. But by 2002, after more than a decade of successful wars, the civilian-military balance of power had shifted. The military's warnings no longer made civilians' teeth chatter. \"America's senior generals have opposed nearly every intervention that the United States has undertaken in the post\u2013cold war era,\" wrote William Kristol and the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan. (The implication was too obvious to require spelling out: Every time, the generals had been wrong.) In the summer of 2002, Bush was seen toting a book called Supreme Command, which argued that the greatest wartime leaders regularly overruled their generals. And with his backing, Rumsfeld developed a relationship with the uniformed military that approximated the relationship between a batterer and his spouse. \"Shut up. I don't want any excuses. You are through and you'll not have time to clean out your desk if this is not taken care of,\" he barked at one admiral. Asked once by the president for his opinion, Franks replied jokingly, \"I think exactly what my secretary thinks, what he's ever thought, what he will ever think, or whatever he thought he might think.\" In early 2002, when Bob Woodward asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers to describe Rumsfeld's personality, the highest-ranking general in the U.S. military simply buried his head in his arms.\n\nFor Rumsfeld and Cheney, economic and military confidence was enough. They did not much care whether Iraq became a democracy after Saddam fell, as long as it served America's will. Their foreign policy strategy, like their management style, was directed less at hearts and minds than at the lower regions of the anatomy, in the belief that if intense pressure was applied there, heart and mind would surely follow. Where \"there was no room for idealism or sentimentality,\" remarked one White House lawyer, \"you'd find the vice president there.\"\n\nBut for Bush, idealism did play a role. For him, ideological confidence\u2014his belief that Iraq could become a democracy and a model for the region, a shining Arab city on a hill\u2014was as important as military and economic confidence. In this regard, the president was a more contradictory figure than his vice president and secretary of defense. On the one hand, he believed as they did in establishing dominance and inspiring fear. Bush may have become a committed Christian in middle age, but he had been a bully all his life. You could see it in his habit of assigning nicknames, which established a subtle supremacy over those around him. (Bush's subordinates were never encouraged to give him nicknames in return.) It was evident during his dad's presidential campaigns, in which he played the role of enforcer. And even family members quietly testified to his thuggery. Once during an intramural basketball game at Harvard Business School, W. had brazenly elbowed the opposing captain in the mouth, nearly sparking a brawl. Many years later, the recipient of that blow met Jeb and recounted the incident. George, his younger brother explained, \"truly enjoys getting people to knuckle under.\"\n\nSo it was little surprise that Bush attributed 9\/11 to the fact that America wasn't sufficiently frightening. But that was only half the story. If the president was part bully, he was part romantic, too. Cheney and Rumsfeld were not huggers, and they did not openly weep. But Bush did both, often. As public policy, compassionate conservatism may have been thin gruel, but for Bush emotionally, it was real. Running for reelection as Texas governor, he had encountered a skinny fifteen-year-old black kid named Johnny Baulkmon in a juvenile prison. \"What do you think about us?\" Baulkmon asked, catching the governor off guard. \"I think you can succeed,\" Bush responded. \"The state of Texas still loves you all. We haven't given up on you,\" and as he spoke, he almost began to cry. For Bush, the author Robert Draper notes, the incident produced \"a strange euphoria.\" For weeks he spoke about it to anyone who would listen, not only in public\u2014where the encounter became part of his stump speech\u2014but also in private. His imagined communion with the kid became, in his own mind, the raison d'\u00eatre of his campaign. (For the kid, the experience was less revelatory. Asked about the experience years later, Baulkmon\u2014now an adult criminal\u2014said Bush \"doesn't care about anything but himself. He's complete trash, a horrible evil person.\")\n\nAfter 9\/11, Bush began to feel a bond with people suffering oppression in the Muslim world similar to the bond he had felt with Johnny Baulkmon. It started with the heartrending scenes from liberated Kabul. After that, Bush started seeking out Iraqis who had endured Saddam's horrors, and upon hearing their stories, he often broke down. Bush's critics would later call his freedom rhetoric cynical, a pretext hatched once it became clear that Saddam had no WMD. But many of those close to the president saw it the other way around: For Bush personally, they believed, WMD was the pretext for war and democratic transformation the real cause. \"For Bush,\" wrote Press Secretary Scott McClellan, \"removing the 'grave and gathering danger' that Iraq supposedly posed was primarily a means for achieving the far more grandiose objective of reshaping the Middle East as a region of peaceful democracies.\" Cheney told confidants in March 2003, \"Democracy in the Middle East is just a big deal for him [Bush]. It's what's driving him.\" And a White House aide told the Standard in February that Iraqi democracy is \"what animates him. It's on his heart, his mind, his agenda. This is what he wants to talk about.\" It is certainly true that Bush didn't stress democracy as a public justification for war until after Saddam was gone, but that may be more because he believed it wouldn't convince the American people than because it didn't convince him.\n\nThat Bush believed Iraq capable of dramatic transformation was not surprising; dramatic transformation was the story of his life. His victory over alcohol had not been slow, messy, and complex; he had freed himself in one epic act of will. That had been the template for compassionate conservatism. When it came to poverty, Bush showed scant interest in structural conditions and incremental improvements. He believed people could radically improve their lives if they changed their hearts. He believed the vehicles for that change would be religious charities, the same \"armies of compassion\" that had changed his life. And now, after 9\/11, he envisioned the U.S. military as the greatest army of compassion of all. In 2002, Bush exhibited no more curiosity about the cultural and historical roots of Iraqi tyranny than he had exhibited about the cultural and historical roots of American poverty. Rather, he identified with ordinary Iraqis suffering under Saddam and believed them capable of transforming their lives, just like Johnny Baulkmon\u2014and like Bush himself\u2014if only someone gave them a chance.\n\nFor a conservative, Michael Gerson noted, Bush had a view of human nature that was uncommonly bright, and his brand of Christianity striking untroubled by original sin. Like the New Left activists who rebelled against the ethic of toughness in the 1960s, and like his hero, Ronald Reagan, Bush believed that people were generally better than their governments. And he believed this was true of people of all nations and creeds, from the inner-city criminal to the Iraqi peasant. Bush's critics sometimes called him a Christian crusader, leading a \"clash of civilizations\" against Islam. But in reality, Bush's faith made him a universalist, a fervent believer that all God's children were basically the same, and basically good. \"The human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth,\" he declared in February 2003. \"In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.\"\n\n\"Always and everywhere\"? In the age of Hitler and Stalin, when democracy looked like a fading force and men like Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger understood that totalitarianism also had a claim on the human heart, declaring that freedom was humanity's inevitable choice would have sounded bizarre. But Bush's personal optimism mingled with the ideological optimism of an era in which country after country had overthrown tyranny. As he prepared for war with Iraq, Bush peppered his speeches with the language of democratic peace theory and of Fukuyama's end of history. Just as democracies did not war with each other, he argued, democracies would not incubate terrorism. And democracy was possible in the Middle East, because democracy was the universal yearning of all humanity. \"The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress,\" Bush told cadets at West Point. \"For most of the twentieth century, the world was divided by a great struggle over ideas: destructive totalitarian visions versus freedom and equality,\" declared his administration's National Security Strategy. \"That great struggle is over.\"\n\nThe war with Iraq had not yet begun, but ideologically the great global struggle was already over. The implication was clear. Ultimately America could not fail in Iraq, because American ideals were the ultimate destination of all humankind. History itself was moving America's way; George W. Bush was simply giving it a push.\n\nHad Bush been a more introspective man, he might have pondered the tension between the two sides of his nature: the bully who wanted to frighten Arabs and Muslims into submission and the romantic who wanted to liberate them from bondage. Had he known more about the Middle East, he might have recognized that to people with a history of imperial subjugation, whose parents and grandparents had been subjugated by idealists carrying Maxim guns, this twin mission would look both familiar and ominous.\n\nBut there is no evidence that he did. In Bush's own life, after all, virtue and power had gone hand in hand; when he quit drinking he became a better person and a more successful one, too. He saw recent American history the same way. Under Reagan, he believed, America had done well by doing good. From Latin America to East Asia to Eastern Europe, the United States had pursued dominance and democracy at the same time; now America just needed to apply that template to the Middle East. The older, darker conservative view, born in the totalitarian age and embodied by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Irving Kristol\u2014which stressed the limits of good intentions and the incorrigibility and inscrutability of far-off lands\u2014had less resonance in an era that had witnessed so much moral and geopolitical triumph. And it was particularly alien to the sunny, unreflective mind of George W. Bush.\n\nThat's why Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress proved so useful. They told the Bushies that post-Saddam Iraq would be pro-American, even pro-Israeli, and yet democratic as well. They squared the circle that Bush needed squared: between American dominance and Iraqi freedom. By depicting himself as the heir of Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, Chalabi allowed the \"neo-Reaganites\" to imagine Iraq as the reincarnation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, or at least Romania after the cold war: countries where democratic transformation and pro-American transformation had occurred in tandem. He allowed them to disregard warnings that in the Arab world, a region with fewer democratic traditions than Eastern Europe and much fiercer hostility to the United States, making Iraq an American client would be hard, making it a stable democracy would be harder, and making it both would be hardest of all.\n\nThe Iraqi exiles\u2014who had been in Washington long enough to know what the Bushies wanted to hear\u2014insisted not only that all this was possible, but that it would be cheap. In the run-up to war, the administration and its supporters sometimes cited the examples of Germany and Japan, where America had toppled hostile dictatorships and built pro-American democracies in their place. But those analogies, if taken seriously, would have implied a long and costly postwar occupation\u2014exactly what the Bush administration was insisting Iraq would not require. The more influential, and more comforting analogy, was to the Reagan Doctrine, which Wolfowitz had written about so much in the 1990s. In this model, America didn't need to occupy and govern Iraq. It just needed to install its allies, who would do the occupying and governing themselves. In the 1980s, those allies had been the Contras and the Afghan mujahideen. In the 1990s, they had been the Bosnians and the Kosovars. And after 9\/11, they had been Hamid Karzai and the Northern Alliance. As Bush himself told a reporter, America would do in Iraq \"the same [thing] we did in Afghanistan\u2014it's a blueprint, a model.\"\n\nThe Afghan example was particularly reassuring because America seemed to have birthed a fledgling democracy with very few troops, thus reconciling Bush's dream of democratic transformation with Rumsfeld's hatred of nation building. And with Chalabi's help, top Bush officials hoped to do the same in Iraq. In February 2003, when General Eric Shinseki famously warned that occupying Iraq would require several hundred thousand U.S. troops, Wolfowitz said he was wrong because \"we are training free Iraqi forces to perform functions of that kind,\" by which he meant the Iraqi National Congress. Wolfowitz and other top Pentagon civilians hoped to establish the INC as a provisional government-in-exile even before the war began, with its own U.S.-trained army, and then hand it the reins soon after Saddam fell. \"[W]e had in mind our recent experience in Afghanistan,\" explained Douglas Feith, \"where the United States immediately recognized an interim government of Afghans and never became an occupying power.\"\n\nFor Rumsfeld and Cheney, the INC's democratic bona fides were secondary. It mattered less that they were democrats than that they were ours. But for Wolfowitz, who had become captivated by the idea of Islamic democracy during his time as ambassador to Indonesia and after watching Iraq's Shia rise up against Saddam in 1991, those bona fides mattered a lot. More than Rumsfeld or Cheney, he shared Bush's passion for spreading freedom, and because he did, he gained influence beyond his station. Wolfowitz, noted the Weekly Standard's well-connected White House reporter Fred Barnes, did more to shape Bush's post-9\/11 thinking than any other adviser. They were an odd pair: the bookish, Jewish defense intellectual and the swaggering, faith-based president. But they had both come to see dictatorship as unnatural, alien to the basic yearnings of humankind. In his discussion of Iraq, Wolfowitz resisted the terms occupation and nation building, preferring liberation instead. It was a revealing choice. Nation building implies constructing something new; liberation implies freeing something that already exists. \"'Export of democracy' isn't really a good phrase,\" Wolfowitz told an interviewer. \"We're trying to remove the shackles on democracy.\" Wolfowitz's faith in liberation\u2014his belief that if repressive structures were torn down, humanity's innate goodness would break free\u2014put him philosophically closer to the New Left of the 1960s, which also believed that human beings were fundamentally superior to the societies in which they lived, than to older conservatives like Kirkpatrick and Irving Kristol. For Wolfowitz, it was as if democracy already existed in the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis. This nascent democracy sat captive within the walls of Saddam's prison-state. All America had to do was turn the key.\n\nFor Colin Powell, by contrast, Saddam's Iraq was not a prison; it was a vase. It would not unlock, releasing the democracy inside; it would shatter, bloodying America's hands. When discussing Iraq, Powell liked to cite the \"Pottery Barn rule\": You break it, you own it. (In fact, Pottery Barn had no such rule and accused Powell of slandering the company and driving away business.) To Wolfowitz and Bush, Saddam was Iraq's jailer; to Powell, he was its glue.\n\nBy the summer of 2002, Powell was no longer the commanding figure he had been when the administration began. He was still popular among his foreign counterparts, but admiration was now tinged with pity. To get something done with the Americans, diplomats whispered, you had to deal with the barbarians at the White House. That's where the power lay.\n\nPowell doubted that Rice, whom he considered far too eager to please, was telling Bush about the dangers of war, and he was sure that Cheney wasn't. In the conservative press, the mantra repeated again and again was that it was \"hard to imagine\" how toppling Saddam could leave America and Iraq worse off. (It was another revealing turn of phrase. People who had grown accustomed to seeing dictatorship give way to democracy, not chaos, and had little memory of an American war gone horrifically wrong, found such things \"hard to imagine.\") But Powell could imagine it; Vietnam and Lebanon were like shrapnel lodged in his brain. In early August 2002, on a flight back from Asia, he resolved to tell Bush everything that might go wrong.\n\nOn the evening of August 5, he dined with Bush and Rice at the White House. \"When you hit this thing,\" he warned, \"it's like crystal glass.... [I]t's going to shatter. There will be no government. There will be civil disorder.\" He cited Iraq's lack of democratic traditions, the war's potentially massive economic costs, and its destabilizing impact on America's Arab allies. It was a grim litany, a clear call for Bush to reconsider his path. And then Powell reached the punch line, the advice he had been waiting months to give: Ask for UN support. Huh? It didn't make sense. Many of the horrors Powell was outlining were intrinsic to any invasion of Iraq; they were likely even if the UN did give its blessing. Perhaps Powell believed the Security Council would resist the push for war and make Bush back down\u2014in other words, that the French, Russians, and Chinese would do his work for him. But by making an argument about how to go to war, not whether to go, Powell implicitly conceded the central point.\n\nIt was eerily similar to his encounter with Bush's father before the Gulf War. Once again he had summoned his courage, built up a head of steam, and then swerved at the last minute to avoid a collision. Once again he had refused to go baldly into opposition, to put his reputation, and his job, on the line. Those close to him believed it just wasn't in his nature. His great strength\u2014which set him apart from Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Bush\u2014was that he lacked certainty. He was not an ideologue; he distrusted abstractions; he saw shades of gray. But precisely because he did lack certainty, he could not say with total conviction that the war was a mistake. It must have crossed his mind that he had warned of disaster three times before\u2014before the Gulf War, Bosnia, and Afghanistan\u2014and each time disaster had not struck. Three times presidents had ignored his advice, and three times everything had worked out fine, both for America and for him. If a decade of military triumph had made the hawks too willing to disregard his warnings, perhaps it had made him too comfortable seeing them disregarded.\n\nIf Powell did not go baldly into opposition, neither did the leaders of the Democratic Party. Before the Gulf War, the Democratic leadership had lined up in loud and virtually unanimous opposition. But by 2002, after a decade of military triumph, opposing an American war seemed like an excellent way to kill your political career. Everyone knew the parable of Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who by forcefully opposing the Gulf War had sunk his chances of reaching the White House. Nor did it escape notice that of the ten Senate Democrats who had backed the Gulf War, two of them\u2014Joe Lieberman and Al Gore\u2014had ended up on the 2000 Democratic presidential ticket. When the resolution authorizing the Iraq War came before Congress in October 2002, Democrats with safe seats and without national ambitions generally voted no. But most of the party hierarchy\u2014and almost every Democrat thinking seriously of running for president, from John Kerry to John Edwards to Joseph Biden to Hillary Clinton\u2014voted yes.\n\nDuring the debate over the Gulf War, congressional Democrats had endlessly invoked Vietnam. But this time, even though America was contemplating a far more ambitious mission, Vietnam analogies were scarce. In his 1991 speech opposing the Gulf War, Massachusetts Senator Kerry, who had launched his political career protesting Vietnam, mentioned it ten times. In his 2002 speech supporting war against Iraq, he mentioned Vietnam only once.\n\nFor many Washington Democrats in 2002, there was something pass\u00e9 about citing Vietnam. It was the foreign policy equivalent of wearing tie-dye. It pegged you as a relic of a bygone age, too traumatized by the past to see that military force now worked. This was particularly true among younger Democrats. Fifty-eight percent of House Democrats ages forty-five or younger voted to authorize the Iraq War, compared to only 35 percent over forty-five. (In the Senate, there were only two Democrats younger than forty-five, and both voted yes, compared to 56 percent of older Senate Democrats.) Age forty-five was a useful dividing line because someone who was under forty-five in 2002 would have been under fifteen in 1972, meaning they would likely have been too young to be directly shaped by Vietnam. Even among older Democrats, who did remember that war, its impact had been dulled by America's post\u2013cold war military success. But among younger Democrats, who had seen nothing but military success, Vietnam's impact was fainter still.\n\nAs a result of their experience, younger Democrats were also particularly inclined to believe that military force and liberal values could go hand in hand. That faith had begun during Panama and the Gulf War, when liberals learned that the American military could shoot straight, that it could do more than napalm villages; it could win wars. It had grown during Bosnia and Kosovo, when liberals saw that not only could America win, but it could win in liberalism's cause, that the fight for human rights truly could be waged through the barrel of a gun.\n\nFor many liberal intellectuals in the 1990s, Sarajevo had been the perfect city: cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, secular, and fighting for its life. And Milosevic's Serbs had been the perfect enemy: racist, sexist, bloodthirsty. Fascist! The word gained currency on the Clinton-era left; it evoked a spirit of World War II\u2013era leftist hawkishness long thought dead. Then came 9\/11. Now another multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan, culturally left-wing city was under attack, and it was the very city where many of the liberal hawks lived: New York. Like Sarajevo, it had been gouged by people in love with purity, willing to kill to prevent the mongrelization of races and religions, the very things liberals loved. If liberal hawks had seen Milosevic as the face of a resurrected European fascism, climbing out of history's grave, they coined a parallel term to describe Al Qaeda and the Taliban: Islamofascism. Although later associated with the neocons, the term was actually coined by Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, two of the most eloquent left hawks. Its function was to explain that America's new terrorist enemy\u2014like its Balkan enemy a few years earlier\u2014resided on the ideological right, and that fighting it was thus more than kosher; it was the great liberal duty of the age.\n\nWhen liberal hawks said that America was fighting fascism, they meant it in part as a rebuke to Fukuyama. Berman attacked \"the deluded, triumphalist atmosphere of 1989,\" when Fukuyama declared that democracy had won. Totalitarianism, Berman insisted, had never really died; Americans had just failed to recognize it in its new, Islamic garb. But Berman and the other liberal hawks owed more to Fukuyama than they cared to admit. Al Qaeda and the Taliban may indeed have been totalitarian, but unlike the totalitarianisms of the mid-twentieth century, they posed no serious ideological challenge to democracy. The Taliban was a mud-hut pariah regime, and while bin Laden enjoyed some prestige in the Muslim world for having bloodied the American Goliath, his vision of society stirred few Middle Eastern hearts and minds. Barely anyone believed that Al Qaeda and the Taliban offered an economic model that could outperform democratic capitalism, as many had believed about fascism and communism during the Depression. The jihadists were not only militarily weak, they were ideologically weak. Like Milosevic, they were totalitarians in a post-totalitarian age\n\nSome liberal hawks tacitly acknowledged this. As Berman himself wrote, in \"the revolutions of 1989...the notion that one or another race or culture or religion is hopelessly allergic to liberal ideas\u2014this notion did pretty much explode.\" In other words, America's new anti-totalitarian struggle differed fundamentally from the struggles against Nazism and Stalinism because 1989 had shown that liberal democracy could penetrate every society on earth. Mid-century intellectuals like Niebuhr and Morgenthau had not been nearly so confident that democracy was the world's universal creed. They had hoped merely to contain Soviet totalitarianism and perhaps soften it, but held out little hope that it could be wiped from the earth. Berman and the liberal hawks, by contrast\u2014like Bush and Wolfowitz\u2014believed in America's ideological dominance; they saw their anti-totalitarian struggle as a kind of ideological mopping-up operation, with the ultimate outcome preordained by the trajectory of history itself. The war on terror was less a sequel to the anti-totalitarian struggles of the twentieth century than an epilogue. There were a few more pages to write, some new characters and plot twists, but everyone already knew how the story would end.\n\nFor the liberal hawks, like the dominance conservatives, Afghanistan added to the ideological swagger. Before the war, some left-wing doves had warned that intervening would bring military disaster and moral horror. Noam Chomsky, the anarchist-linguist who decades earlier had invoked Randolph Bourne to oppose Vietnam, warned that if America attacked the Taliban millions might die. But America attacked, and instead of mass murder there was celebration, and an embryonic democracy. As suspected, the new Islamic totalitarianism was not very strong at all.\n\nThus emboldened, many liberal hawks urged war against Saddam. As in Bosnia, the UN\u2014whose weapons inspectors had left Iraq in 1998\u2014seemed feckless. So once again liberal hawks turned to American power. \"Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs,\" wrote Michael Ignatieff, another influential liberal hawk. Or as one younger liberal foreign policy hand put it, \"I can't say with a straight face that it's fine to go around the UN for Kosovo and not do it in Iraq.\"\n\nBut Iraq was not Kosovo, or even Afghanistan. In the Balkans, the casus belli had been genocide, an unfolding moral emergency. In Afghanistan, whatever the human rights side benefits, the casus belli had been self-defense. In Iraq, by contrast, not only was there no imminent threat; there was no genocide, either. Some liberal hawks argued that Saddam's rule constituted a moral emergency in and of itself. But by that standard so did Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and a host of other nasty dictatorships. Intellectually, the liberal hawks who went from backing war in the Balkans and Afghanistan to backing war in Iraq were not walking a treadmill; they were climbing a ladder.\n\nSo it was that a significant portion of the left, whether because of political ambition or moral ambition or both, waved the Bush administration on as it sped toward war. And so did many on the older, anti-dominance right. Jeane Kirkpatrick, now seventy-six years old, privately worried that trying to violently remake Iraq was utopian, and would bring not freedom, but chaos. But she never said so publicly, where it might have made a difference. She was personally close to the Cheneys and to many other leading hawks. Perhaps she thought public dissent would give aid and comfort to the enemies of her friends, or perhaps, after a decade of victorious wars, she, like Powell, had lost the confidence of her convictions. For whatever reason, she not only failed to publicly object; she flew\u2014at the Bush administration's request\u2014to Geneva to defend the war before the UN Human Rights Commission. Later she insisted that she had not defended Bush's decision to invade Iraq, only his right to do so under international law. It was a subtle distinction, and utterly lost in the clamor for war.\n\nIrving Kristol, now eighty-two, said even less. With his son leading an assault on the foreign policy axioms that he had espoused for much of his life, the man sometimes called the godfather of neoconservatism wrote barely a single word about what many were calling the neocon war. One writer heard him mutter that his son was trying to turn George W. Bush into Napoleon. Others heard rumors that he was privately critical of what the Standard wrote. But publicly, he said virtually nothing at all.\n\nAnother father also held his tongue. In August 2002, George H. W. Bush's former national security advisor and close confidant, Brent Scowcroft, publicly denounced the impending war. Scowcroft would later claim that the elder Bush shared his views, but the elder Bush himself stayed silent. In January 2003, the former first lady, Barbara Bush, approached ex-Democratic senator David Boren at a dinner and asked, \"Are we right to be worried about this Iraq thing?\" Boren answered yes. \"Well, his father is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it,\" she replied. \"He's up at night worried.\" Boren suggested that the former president talk to his son, but she answered, \"He doesn't think he should unless he's asked.\" For his part, W. told Fox News that he didn't frequently consult his father on foreign policy, because his dad didn't have the latest intelligence.\n\nOne conservative who did publicly object was Francis Fukuyama, the Daedalus of the dominance age, inventor of a doctrine that was soaring beyond his control. In 1998, he had signed a letter\u2014along with William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Elliott Abrams, and Paul Wolfowitz\u2014urging that America pursue regime change in Iraq. But in 2002, when they went a step further\u2014urging that America pursue regime change with U.S. troops\u2014he grew skittish. The Iraq War, Fukuyama warned in December 2002, is \"an immensely ambitious exercise in the political re-engineering of a hostile part of the world,\" exactly the kind of exercise that once made conservatives tremble. \"The United States is not good at either implementing or sticking to such projects over the long run,\" he added, picking up one of Irving Kristol's favorite themes. And \"it is not at all clear that the American public understands it is getting into an imperial project.\" Eventually, Fukuyama argued, liberal democracy could sprout in the Middle East, as it had in other formerly authoritarian parts of the world. And when that happened, America would be safer. But that growth would have to be organic. Spilling Iraqi blood in a preventive war, he insisted, would not fertilize the soil.\n\nFukuyama did not just publish these arguments; he said them to Paul Wolfowitz's face. The two men had been friends for thirty-five years, since Fukuyama's days as an undergraduate at Cornell. Wolfowitz had given Fukuyama his first government job in the 1970s, then hired him again during the Reagan years, and later brought him to teach at Johns Hopkins's School of Advanced International Studies, where Wolfowitz was dean. After 9\/11, Wolfowitz convened three study groups to make suggestions for the broad direction of the war on terror, and asked Fukuyama to head one. One day in January 2003, Fukuyama went to an office building in Arlington, Virginia, to present his findings. Jihadist terrorism, he argued, was not another great totalitarian foe like communism or fascism, and America should not treat it as such. The important thing was not to overreact, not to take military action that alienated Muslims, thus strengthening Al Qaeda's inherently weak hand. Instead America should rely on diplomacy, intelligence gathering, law enforcement, and patience. History was on its side, but history could not be rushed.\n\nFukuyama was arguing against making the war on terror a grand, heroic project, a successor to the cold war; he was urging small ball. It was an assault on the basic premises underlying Bush and Wolfowitz's war on terror, phrased in the language of a more cautious conservatism, forged in a more humble age. More than many conservatives, who only mumbled their fears, Fukuyama was showing intellectual courage. His was the only presentation Wolfowitz attended. The deputy defense secretary listened and then exited the room without comment. The two never discussed Fukuyama's presentation again.\n\nFrom liberals to conservatives to economists to generals, by 2003 many of the people who in the past might have resisted war had either fallen silent or been shoved aside. Without them, Colin Powell was a very vulnerable man. \"Someday when you're retired and I'm retired,\" he told Democratic senator Joseph Biden, \"I'll tell you about all the pressure I've been put under over here.\"\n\nOn January 13, Bush called Powell into the Oval Office, sat down in front of the fireplace, and announced, \"I really think I'm going to have to do this.\" Powell asked if he was sure. It was a silly question: Bush was always sure. \"Are you with me on this?\" Bush asked. \"I'm with you, Mr. President,\" came the reply. The entire conversation lasted twelve minutes. Bush had still never asked Powell whether he thought war was wise. \"I didn't need his permission,\" he later explained.\n\nPowell was on the hook, which in the Bush administration was a dangerous place to be. On January 25, Bush asked him to publicly make the case that Saddam was hiding WMD. \"You have the credibility to do it,\" Bush explained. He was right: According to one poll, Americans trusted Powell over the president on Iraq by a margin of almost three to one. Cheney put it more aggressively. \"You've got high poll ratings,\" he said, jabbing his finger into Powell's chest; \"you can afford to lose a few points.\" This, in Bush and Cheney's mind, was what Powell was there for: not to make Iraq policy but to sell it. He was\u2014there was no gentler way to say it\u2014being used.\n\nThree days later, the White House sent Powell a forty-eight-page, single-spaced memo drafted, Powell suspected, in Cheney's office. It was filled with falsehoods, like the claim that 9\/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had met Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague. Powell tossed the document aside and on Saturday, February 1, parked himself\u2014along with key aides\u2014at the CIA, where he began looking for the truly convincing evidence on Iraqi WMD, the stuff that you didn't have to be a fanatic to believe. Tensions ran high, as Cheney's staff\u2014whom Armitage privately called \"the Gestapo\"\u2014kept pushing to restore allegations that officials from State and the CIA considered garbage. As Powell's chief of staff, a no-nonsense retired colonel named Lawrence Wilkerson, later admitted, \"We were beginning to get leery of our own presentation.\" But Powell could not afford to get too leery. By telling Bush he would support him on the war, he had bolted the door behind him. So he did what he always did: He managed the situation, making the best of the circumstances he was in. After a while, he grew more comfortable with the presentation. He had never bailed out before, and things had always turned out okay.\n\nJust before 10:30 A.M. on a frigid Wednesday, February 5, Powell strode into the UN Security Council chamber, dressed in a dark suit and red tie, and made the case for preventive war. \"Every statement I make today,\" he declared, \"is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.\" Even members of Powell's own staff doubted that was true.\n\nIn the United States, commentators pronounced the speech a triumph. The Washington Post called it \"irrefutable\" (though, in fact, UN weapons inspectors began refuting it almost instantly). The New York Times called it \"the most powerful case to date.\" A Newsweek poll found that the percentage of Americans supporting war jumped almost instantly. The White House was overjoyed: Good old Colin Powell had finally shown he was on the team. But Powell's wife, who had traveled with him to New York, was overcome with apprehension, a premonition of bad things ahead. His daughter, who heard the presentation on the radio, thought her father did not sound like himself. When Powell's talk was over, Wilkerson left the UN for his Manhattan hotel room, where he fell into a restless sleep and awoke in despair. It was, he would later say, \"the lowest moment of my life.\" When he returned to Washington, he ordered plaques for everyone who had worked on the speech. But when Powell handed them out, he noticed that his chief of staff hadn't ordered one for himself. I don't want one, Wilkerson explained.\n\nAt 10:15 P.M., on Wednesday, March 19, 2003, President Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office. The invasion of Iraq had begun. In the days before the Gulf War, his father had found it difficult to sleep; he had lost weight and occasionally struggled to breathe. The decision to send young Americans to their death, he wrote to his children, \"lingers and plagues the heart.\" Before the Iraq War, by contrast, his son let those around him know that he was sleeping well. \"There is no doubt in my mind we're doing the right thing,\" he insisted. \"Not one doubt.\" Just before the cameras rolled, as he prepared to tell the nation it was at war, Bush pumped his fist and said, \"Feels good.\"\n\nThe beginning of the Iraq War resembled the beginning of the Afghan War: Progress was alarmingly slow. While Saddam's regular troops largely melted away, the United States met fierce resistance from Iraqi paramilitaries in civilian clothes who hid among the local population and launched raids on America's supply lines, which U.S. forces lacked sufficient numbers to defend. On television, retired generals began saying that the Bush administration had attacked with too few troops, and that as a result, things were going dangerously wrong.\n\nThen Rumsfeld's light but ultrafast force reached Baghdad, and everything changed. On April 9, only days after the TV generals had warned of a quagmire, Saddam's regime collapsed. In the city's main square, Marine Corporal Edward Chin attached a hook from his tank to a statue of the tyrant and hauled it down, as locals cheered. The next day, a group of distraught Iraqis led Lieutenant Colonel Frank Padilla and his battalion to a forbidding, walled compound. When the Marines broke through its outside gate, 150 disheveled, beaten, and malnourished children\u2014some as young as seven\u2014rushed into the arms of the Iraqis waiting outside. It was a children's prison where Saddam kept the sons and daughters of families he considered disloyal. The Iraqi parents showered the Marines with kisses. If this wasn't liberation, nothing was.\n\nIn an age of intoxicating military victories, it was the most intoxicating of all. Toppling Saddam had taken three weeks and left 108 U.S. soldiers dead from hostile fire, fewer than in the Gulf War. None of the parade of horribles that Powell, Fukuyama, Scowcroft, and others predicted had come true. The Arab street had not risen up; Saddam had not torched his oil fields or attacked Israel; Iraq's neighbors had not intervened. There was looting, to be sure, but top Bush officials and their intellectual allies generally shrugged it off. \"It is hard to be overly troubled by the sight of Iraqis looting the homes and offices of leading Baathists,\" wrote Max Boot in the Weekly Standard. \"Why shouldn't the people take back a few of the regime's ill-gotten gains?\"\n\nCommentators struggled to comprehend the magnitude of America's military achievement. \"The stunning success of the 'combat portion' of Operation Iraqi Freedom challenges any understanding based upon previous military history,\" declared one article in the Standard. \"One gets the impression that U.S. military dominance is now so overwhelming that the rules of conflict are being rewritten,\" added David Brooks. \"We could be entering the age of decapitating wars, in which the United States can change evil regimes without widespread loss of life.\" General Tommy Franks declared that America's ultrasophisticated technology meant that it could now see the battlefield with the \"kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods.\"\n\nIdeologically, American dominance seemed equally profound. \"In the images of celebrating Iraqis,\" Bush declared on May 1, from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, \"we have also seen the ageless appeal of human freedom.... Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food and water and air.\" For Brooks, this was what national greatness was all about: a heroic leader leading a heroic people in heroic deeds. The post\u2013cold war generation had found its calling. The Iraq War, Brooks wrote, is \"what the United States is on earth to achieve.\"\n\nThe dominance conservatives began imagining a new global order, redesigned to reflect America's epic might. Kristol said it was time to consider withdrawing from the UN; America would have more power, and more legitimacy, without it. Another article in the Standard suggested pulling out of the G-8, the world's club of major industrial democracies, because it gave antiwar countries like France and Germany too much say. Krauthammer went furthest of all, arguing that even NATO, by refusing to endorse the war, had made itself worthless. If the post\u2013cold war era had begun with visions of a new, Wilsonian world of international cooperation and international law, the opposite had now come to pass. America be-strode the world unfettered, Gulliver freed from the Lilliputians' chains.\n\nBush's approval rating, which had drooped into the mid-50s in March, spiked back up to 77 percent. Donald Rumsfeld basked in the adulation as well. On April 14, Michael Jordan's final home game in the NBA, Rumsfeld presented Jordan with an American flag at Washington's MCI Center and got a standing ovation even more thunderous than the greatest basketball player of all time. Tommy Franks and CIA director George Tenet did well from the war, too. After retiring from the army, Franks signed a multimillion-dollar book contract, and pocketed a million more in speaking fees. In 2004, Bush awarded both him and Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom.\n\nThe only top administration official who didn't prosper from Saddam's fall was Colin Powell. Before the war, he had been merely vulnerable. Now he was expendable, and the jackals circled. On April 22, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a longtime ally of Cheney's, and a member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, charged Powell's State Department with a \"deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the President's policies.\" Asked by reporters whether he agreed with Gingrich's charge, Rumsfeld dodged the question. Bush also declined to defend his secretary of state.\n\nIn mid-April, Cheney invited Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and an old Ford administration colleague and war booster named Kenneth Adelman to a celebratory dinner at his house with their wives. They talked about what a mistake it had been to halt the Gulf War in 1991 and marveled at how easy taking Baghdad had ultimately proved. They traded affectionate stories about their friend and ally Rumsfeld, and they toasted the president. Then someone mentioned Powell, and they all laughed.\n\n## CHAPTER NINETEEN\n\n## I'M DELIGHTED TO SEE MR. BOURNE\n\n\"The scenes we've witnessed in Baghdad and other free Iraqi cities belie the widespread early commentary suggesting that Iraqis were ambivalent or even opposed to the coalition's arrival in their country.\" Donald Rumsfeld was lecturing the press, two days after Saddam's fall. Behind him, photos flashed across a Pentagon screen. \"Iraqis share laugh with a U.S. Army soldier,\" read the caption beneath one. \"Jubilant Iraqis cheer U.S. Army soldiers\" read another. \"Happy Iraqis pose with a U.S. Army soldier,\" read a third.\n\nA reporter piped up. \"Mr. Secretary, you spoke of the television pictures that went around the world earlier of Iraqis welcoming US forces with open arms. But now television pictures are showing looting and other signs of lawlessness....\"\n\nRumsfeld responded philosophically. \"I think the way to think about that is that if you go from a repressive regime...and then you go to something other than that\u2014a liberated Iraq\u2014that you go through a transition period. And in every country, in my adult lifetime, that's had the wonderful opportunity to do that, to move from a repressed dictatorial regime to something that's freer, we've seen in that transition period there is untidiness.\"\n\nThe reporter tried again: \"Do you think that the words 'anarchy' and 'lawlessness' are ill-chosen....\"\n\nRumsfeld cut him off. \"Absolutely. I picked up the newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it was just Henny Penny\u2014'the sky is falling.' I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that is being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free!\"\n\nSixty-two hundred miles away, in Baghdad, newly liberated Iraqis were liberating their government of refrigerators, desks, chairs, mattresses, even a plastic Santa Claus. From the house of Saddam's son Uday, vandals snatched liquor, guns, lewd paintings, and white Arabian horses. From the house of one of Saddam's first cousins, they seized a battery-powered model Ferrari, a parachute, and a motorized water scooter. One enterprising burglar managed to haul away a boat. All in all, looters gutted seventeen of Iraq's twenty-three government ministries, burning many to the ground. The total cost of the rampage: $12 billion.\n\nIt seemed like a paradox. In Afghanistan and now Iraq, the American military had ventured halfway across the globe and toppled hostile governments at low cost and lightning speed, awing the world. Yet this global Goliath, which used Google-age technology to ensure that even as Iraq's government fell its public infrastructure remained largely unscathed, could not stop unarmed Iraqi civilians from plundering that infrastructure like the armies of Genghis Khan.\n\nPart of the answer was that America had not really tried to stop them. To Powell's chagrin, Rumsfeld had kept the invading force ultra-lean, fast enough to sprint to Baghdad in record time but too small to squat there and police a city of more than six million people, where American troops were the only law. What's more, those troops were given little guidance about what to do once Saddam fell, largely because Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks didn't want them to do much of anything except turn around and go home. When an anguished colonel pleaded with Lieutenant General David McKiernan, commander of U.S. ground forces, that \"You have got to stop this.... [E]verything's being destroyed,\" McKiernan replied in cold fury: \"I don't ever want to hear that from your lips again. This is not my job.\"\n\nIt was the job of a breezy retired general named Jay Garner, head of the Pentagon's newly created Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which held its first major planning meeting less than a month before the war began, and arrived in Baghdad only after looters had already picked Iraq's government clean. Garner's office, confided Britain's top diplomat in postwar Iraq, \"is an unbelievable mess.\" Lawrence Diamond, a Stanford sociologist dispatched to Iraq to help build democracy, found the Pentagon's postwar efforts so appalling that he rifled through the California penal code searching for an appropriate indictment. He settled on \"criminal negligence.\"\n\nSo America's failure to control postwar Baghdad was partly a matter of choice. But it was a matter of ability, too. The American military was built for fast wars and bloodless occupations, occupations of stable, peaceful countries like Germany, South Korea, and Japan, and small ones like Bosnia and Kosovo, where America's allies contributed most of the troops. The GIs who found themselves running (or not running) Baghdad in the weeks after Saddam's fall were mostly trained to kill enemy soldiers, not stop looters, restock ransacked hospitals, and direct traffic. The 1.3 million-person active-duty U.S. Army contained only 16,000 military police and civil affairs officers (with another 47,000 in the National Guard and Reserves). Garner's office, which was supposed to run the occupation's civilian side, boasted barely any Arabic-speakers, partly because Rumsfeld and his top aides distrusted regional experts, whom they suspected of ideological disloyalty, but mostly because there were only fifty or sixty fluent Arabic-speakers in the entire U.S. diplomatic corps. Garner himself was so ignorant of the country he was supposed to rebuild that when someone mentioned Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful man, he responded with a blank stare. Successfully occupying Iraq, as opposed to merely invading it, required lots of deployable bodies, lots of local knowledge, and lots of patience, traits that had not been required during America's flurry of post\u2013cold war wins, and which the American military\u2014and indeed, American society\u2014did not possess.\n\nIn truth, the scene was not as paradoxical as it appeared. The American military was extraordinarily good at some things and not very good at others\u2014and those others proved crucial when Saddam fell. It was like watching Michael Jordan play baseball. In the summer of 2003, as American soldiers in full body armor cursed and sweltered under Baghdad's 110-degree sun, America's military confidence, which had been growing like a wave for a decade and a half, began to break. America's ideological confidence would soon follow, and then its economic confidence after that. The hubris of dominance was beginning to come apart.\n\nIf postwar Iraq confounded the Bush administration's military expectations, it confounded its ideological expectations as well, and the two were intertwined. For his part, Rumsfeld didn't much care how Iraqis governed themselves with Saddam gone. The invasion had toppled one enemy, scared others, and vindicated his vision of a light, agile, high-tech military\u2014or, at least, vindicated it if you considered the postwar irrelevant, which Rumsfeld basically did. For Bush and Wolfowitz, however, what happened in post-Saddam Iraq mattered a great deal. They opposed nation building not out of indifference but out of faith, not because they didn't care whether democracy arose in Iraq but because they believed it would arise spontaneously, without lots of U.S. money or troops. For Wolfowitz, in particular, Chalabi's exiles were crucial. In late 2002, he proposed training them to fight alongside U.S. troops, thus perpetuating the idea that, as in Nicaragua, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, America's local allies were actually liberating themselves, with the United States playing only a supporting role. Chalabi's fans in the media often talked about \"Free Iraqi\" forces, an allusion to the \"Free French\" who had fought alongside America and Britain in World War II, and a memo by Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman, which Rumsfeld forwarded to Bush's entire war cabinet, made the analogy explicit. \"Had FDR and Churchill actually imposed an occupation government\" in France, Rodman argued, \"the Gaullists would have been neutered.\" The implication was clear: Chalabi was Iraq's de Gaulle, and with him and his army in charge, the United States could quickly draw down its forces and watch an indigenous, pro-American Iraqi democracy blossom.\n\nChalabi certainly had de Gaulle's ego, but in most other respects he and his men proved dismally unable to play the role the Bushies had assigned them. As often happens in a hubris bubble, policymakers who thought they were merely learning the lessons of the past actually stretched and distorted them. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, Bosnia and Kosovo in the '90s, and Afghanistan again after 9\/11, a nationalist fighting force had already existed. In Iraq, by contrast, Wolfowitz and his allies simply assumed that one should exist because it fit a historical pattern that they believed had brought great success. (Iraq did have one indigenous rebel force, the Kurdish Peshmerga, but they fought for Kurdistan, not Iraq, which was exactly the problem.) At Wolfowitz's insistence, in the months before the war, the Pentagon began hastily raising a prefabricated \"Free Iraqi\" army. Chalabi promised 10,000 men; the U.S. military planned for 6,000. Ultimately, after crippling problems with recruitment, screening, and instruction, the force dispatched to Iraq totaled 73.\n\nIn mid-April, the United States flew Chalabi and some supporters to the outskirts of the southern Iraqi city of Nasariyah, where they took part in a political assembly designed to form the nucleus of a post-Saddam regime. But to the surprise and dismay of his American backers, Chalabi turned out to have virtually no local following. He hadn't lived in Iraq since 1958, during which time Islamists had largely supplanted the secular elite from which he hailed. Moreover, he didn't exactly endear himself to his countrymen once he hit the ground. When Baghdad fell, Chalabi's men quickly claimed a series of mansions favored by one of Saddam's sons. Then they appropriated some of Saddam's SUVs, which they allegedly sold overseas for a fat profit. Then fellow Iraqis began accusing them of stealing reconstruction funds. In 2004, Iraqi and American forces raided Chalabi's offices on charges of embezzlement, theft, kidnapping, and passing classified U.S. intelligence to Iran. Polls showed him with the lowest approval ratings of any Iraqi politician, including Saddam.\n\nIn Iraq, it turned out, Chalabi was not the man he had appeared to be in Washington. To his boosters at the American Enterprise Institute, the Pentagon, and the Weekly Standard, he had seemed like the archetypal end-of-history figure: a man dedicated to putting his nation on the escalator to democracy, an Arabic version of the leaders who had toppled dictators from Poland to Panama and South Africa to South Korea. But back in Iraq, he became ideologically inscrutable, a man of shadowy dealings, hidden loyalties, and dark misdeeds. And in this sense, he typified the Bush administration's experience with Iraq more generally, a place that\u2014like Vietnam and like Europe during World War I\u2014grew more alien the deeper America waded in.\n\nIn May, the White House replaced Garner with Paul Bremer, a man even more culturally ignorant and even more ideologically self-assured. Bremer, who had never before served in the Arab world, saw Saddam's regime the way Bush and Wolfowitz did: as an ugly skin concealing the pro-American democracy trapped inside. So being a can-do guy (critics preferred the phrase \"control freak\"), Bremer boldly tore off the remaining scab. Four days after arriving in Iraq, in his first public act as head of the newly formed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), he banned thirty thousand members of Saddam's Baath Party from holding jobs in Iraq's new government. Assuming\u2014wrongly\u2014that Baathists dominated Saddam's armed forces, he followed up a week later by dissolving the Iraqi military, interior ministry, and presidential guards. Then he abolished all restrictions on foreign imports and began rapidly privatizing the two hundred state-owned companies that had formed the backbone of the Iraqi economy. Soon, more than a million government employees were out of work. \"We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished,\" Bremer wrote to President Bush. \"The dissolution of his chosen instrument of political domination, the Baath Party, has been very well received.\"\n\nMeanwhile, throngs of angry former soldiers and government workers began to congregate at the CPA's gates. \"We will start ambushes, bombings and even suicide bombings. We will not let the Americans rule us in such a humiliating way,\" declared one fired Iraqi officer. \"The only thing left for me is to blow myself up in the face of tyrants,\" said another. Bremer vowed that he would not be blackmailed by terrorists. Around the same time, the first roadside bomb hit an American Humvee driving from the Baghdad airport. Later, those bombs would gain a name: improvised explosive devices (IEDs).\n\nOnce again Iraq was deviating from the ideological script. Ever since Panama, a central premise of dominance foreign policy had been that anti-American dictators were alien to the societies they ruled and that pro-American rebels represented the true popular will. But in Iraq it was Chalabi who lacked deep roots in the political soil, and Saddam's army and political party that proved far more entrenched than Bremer and his fellow ideologues had imagined. If the Iraqi military and Baath Party were Iraq's ugly outer skin, they were also\u2014as Powell had warned\u2014its glue. Many Sunnis, in particular, had become Baathists as a requirement for employment. And even more had joined the army, which in Sunni communities was a key source of status and jobs. With the army dissolved, large numbers of Sunnis suddenly found themselves unemployed, humiliated, and heavily armed. When Bremer ripped off Iraq's governing skin, he gashed a large segment of Iraqi society in the process, and opened a sore that soon began gushing blood.\n\nSoon Americans and Iraqis were engaged in a darkly comic, savagely violent, dialogue of the deaf. In the center of Baghdad, behind seventeen-foot-high concrete walls topped with razor wire, the CPA created the Green Zone, an Epcot America where the televisions played Fox, the radios blared classic rock, the recreation officers taught yoga and salsa dancing, and the stores sold Cheetos, Dr. Pepper, booze, protein powder, and T-shirts reading \"Who's Your Baghdaddy?\" At the cafeteria in Saddam's former Republican Palace, well-mannered South Asian workers served cheeseburgers, hot dogs, grits, fried chicken, and freedom fries. The menu, which had a distinctly southern flavor, included large quantities of pork, which Iraqi Muslims might have found offensive to prepare. But that wasn't an issue, since Iraqis weren't permitted to work in the dining hall for fear they would poison the food.\n\nWhen Americans ventured into \"the red zone\"\u2014otherwise known as Iraq\u2014they passed through the looking glass, into a parched, dust-brown riddle of a country where American logic often seemed turned upside down. When the Americans set about building an army to replace the one they had disbanded, they dubbed it the New Iraqi Corps, or NIC, only to later learn that in Iraqi Arabic nic resembles the word for \"fuck.\" When a visiting administration official toured Iraq's streets, he was pleased to see kids flash him the thumbs-up sign, only to be told that in Iraq a raised thumb was the equivalent of a raised middle finger. U.S. officials talked incessantly about freedom. (At one CPA briefing, an Iraqi journalist asked an American general why U.S. helicopters flew so low to the ground, scaring local children. \"What we would tell the children of Iraq,\" the general replied, \"is that the noise they hear is the sound of freedom.\") But Arabic-speakers noticed that when Iraqis spoke back, they talked less about \"freedom\" (hurriya)\u2014which according to George W. Bush all people desired like food and water\u2014than \"justice\" (adil ), which had a more confrontational ring. \"Marines are from Mars, Iraqis are from Venus,\" wrote one young major in an e-mail to friends. \"I started to realize,\" noted the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning correspondent, Anthony Shadid, \"how little any of us\u2014journalists, policy makers, citizens\u2014really understood about Iraq.\"\n\nThe assumptions of ideological dominance were proving wrong, with consequences that undermined America's military dominance as well. Between the spring and fall of 2003, the number of insurgent attacks against occupying forces and Iraqi sympathizers tripled, to roughly one thousand per month. Mortar attacks on the Green Zone became a near-daily occurrence, and Bremer's staff began carrying guns to their offices. In September, 94 percent of Iraqis said Baghdad was more dangerous than it had been under Saddam.\n\nAs Iraq grew more savage, the U.S. military grew more isolated. Troops hunkered down in heavily fortified mini Green Zones across the country, periodically venturing out in full body armor, accompanied by Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Apache attack helicopters for raids against suspected insurgents. But the more raids they conducted, the bloodier the insurgency got. Given America's ignorance of Iraq, its military strategy was the equivalent of putting a blindfolded man in a room filled with fragile objects, handing him a flyswatter, and telling him to smash the buzzing sound. For every insurgent that U.S. forces captured or killed when they stormed through Iraqi neighborhoods, they enraged dozens of ordinary Iraqis whose homes were violated, damaged, or destroyed, and whose relatives were arrested, injured, or killed. Realizing that they lacked the information to hunt insurgents effectively, America's military leaders began a frantic search for better intelligence. U.S. troops rounded up tens of thousands of detainees and dispatched them for interrogation. But here again, America's vaunted military was not up to the job. The endless shipments of detainees overwhelmed the small number of military police assigned to handle them, turning the military prison system into a black hole into which innocent Iraqis disappeared for weeks, months, or even years. Worse, the stress of handling far too many detainees under dangerous and chaotic conditions, while being pressured to gather more and more intelligence, led to a grotesque moral breakdown, as ill-trained and traumatized prison guards brutalized their wards in ways that turned the stomach of the world.\n\nBy spring 2004, when this breakdown made Abu Ghraib prison a household name, the battle for Iraqi hearts and minds had turned into a rout. A Gallup poll found that only 5 percent of Iraqis believed the United States was in Iraq \"to assist the Iraqi people\" and only 1 percent thought it was there to establish democracy. By contrast, 50 percent believed America's primary mission was \"to rob Iraq's oil.\" In March, four U.S. contractors were kidnapped and murdered in the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah; their bodies were mutilated and hanged from the city's main bridge, as locals cheered. Days later, a rebel Shia militia\u2014led by the virulently anti-American and exceedingly popular cleric Moqtada al-Sadr\u2014rose up as well, seizing control of the vast Baghdad slum known as Sadr City. Suddenly a large chunk of Sunni Iraq and a large chunk of Shia Baghdad were in insurgent hands. Between the fall of 2003 and the fall of 2004, insurgent attacks tripled again, to roughly three thousand a month. U.S. troops began writing their blood type on the inside of their helmets before going out on patrol.\n\nUnderlying the ethic of dominance had been an assumption of mutual innocence, the belief that beneath every tyrant lay a decent, democratic people, and that America could be the agent of their liberation because its own government was so committed to decency and democracy around the world. But by 2004, after the mutilations in Fallujah and the molestations at Abu Ghraib, Americans and Iraqis looked at each other with cold, un-innocent eyes. Average Americans increasingly saw Iraqis as ungrateful, bloody-minded savages, and average Iraqis saw Americans as haughty, rapacious occupiers. What's more, some Americans began to suspect that the Iraqis were right: that the experience of occupation was debasing America's military, and its entire government. The Iraqis believed America was defiling Iraq, and growing numbers of Americans believed Iraq was corrupting America's soul.\n\nDuring Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson's brave public face had concealed private agony. He had raged against his predicament: a war he didn't want to fight but thought he couldn't afford to lose; an ethic of foreign policy toughness that was supposed to protect his beloved domestic agenda but was swallowing it instead. George W. Bush was different: He didn't agonize; he believed. In late 2003 and early 2004, as Iraq descended into hell, he gave Americans platitude-laden pep talks, which boiled down to \"Buck up, we're going to win.\" And in private, to the amazement of White House visitors, he said essentially the same thing. \"It takes an optimistic person to lead. Who's going to follow a leader who says, 'Follow me, things are going to get worse?'\" he told aides. \"I'm the calcium in the backbone.\" Calcium in the backbone\u2014Bush loved the phrase and repeated it often. The implication was clear: Doubt, even private doubt, perhaps especially private doubt, makes you spineless. \"If you're weak internally,\" he insisted, \"this job will run you all over town.\"\n\nBush's harshest critics often assumed he didn't believe his own words, that he was simply lying, which was understandable given his tendency to say things like \"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.... [F]or those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them\"\u2014as he did in late May 2003. But the accusations of duplicity partly missed the point. According to Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Bush genuinely believed that Saddam had possessed WMD, not just in 2003 and 2004, but as late as 2006. If Bush was lying, he was first and foremost lying to himself.\n\nFar from admitting error, in fact, Bush was doubling down. Soon after Saddam's fall, he created the Greater Middle East Initiative, a White House office meant to promote freedom across the Muslim world. It was led by Elliott Abrams, the man who a decade and a half earlier had helped to inaugurate dominance foreign policy by pushing to invade Panama. Then, in January 2005, Bush delivered an inaugural address that employed variations of \"freedom\" and \"liberty\" forty-four times, including nine in the last two paragraphs alone. \"History,\" he declared, \"has a visible direction.\" And America would help push it forward, \"with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.\"\n\nFor a moment, events actually seemed to be moving that way. In January, an impressive 59 percent of Iraqis went to the polls to elect a National Assembly. In February, the Cedar Revolution brought an end to Syria's three-decade occupation of Lebanon. In March, the Tulip Revolution brought democracy to Kyrgyzstan. Palestinians held relatively free elections in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Like the toppling of Saddam Hussein in spring 2003, the democratic breakthroughs of spring 2005 offered a tantalizing glimpse of a transformed world. But once again it proved a mirage. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinians elected the theocratic, virulently anti-Israeli militia Hamas\u2014which led the Bush administration, in flagrant violation of its democratic sermonizing, to privately urge its moderate Palestinian allies to try to overturn the election results by force. In Lebanon, the coalition that had risen up against Syrian rule fractured along largely religious lines, with the theocratic, virulently anti-Israeli militia Hezbollah emerging as the nation's most powerful force. In Iraq, Sunnis largely boycotted the vote and multi-ethnic, secular parties were crushed. The insurgency raged on.\n\nThe democracy escalator, it turned out, was not progressing ever upward. Not in the Arab world, where people kept electing medievalists, sectarians, and thugs. Not in theocratic Iran, which was exploiting Iraq's weakness to challenge American dominance of the Persian Gulf. Not in Latin America, where Hugo Ch\u00e1vez's illiberal, anti-American populism was metastasizing across the continent. Not in Russia, which under Vladimir Putin was marching brazenly down the escalator toward autocracy while ordinary Russians cheered. And, most important, not in China, whose dictatorship Americans had once assumed was living on borrowed time. Now Chinese tyranny seemed stable, prosperous, and confident\u2014an alternative model for the world. Beijing \"no longer...tries to cultivate influence in distant African countries as it did in the 1960s,\" Fukuyama had written in 1989, in explaining that America no longer had global ideological competitors. But by Bush's second term, Beijing was cultivating widespread influence in Africa, and across the globe. One academic declared it \"the end of the End of History.\"\n\nIn 2006, Jeane Kirkpatrick died. Her final years had been rough. She had struggled to finish a book on post\u2013cold war foreign policy, a task that grew harder as her faculties diminished and her strength ebbed. Among top officials at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she had once been a towering force, she became a figure of ridicule. When discussing which scholar to recommend for a prestigious commission in 2005, one AEI administrator joked, \"Maybe we'll send Jeane,\" prompting snickers among colleagues. Eventually, after almost three decades, AEI booted her out the door without so much as a farewell party.\n\nBut the book did finally appear, posthumously, with the help of a friend. From the grave, Kirkpatrick lashed out against the Iraq War and planted a final flag for the older, grimmer conservatism that institutions such as AEI had abandoned. \"Democracy requires security as a prerequisite,\" she declared. \"That is why, throughout history, if the single force of political stability in a region is removed without critical institutions in place to fill the resulting vacuum of power, the security of societies and their budding institutions will be precarious at best.\" It was \"Dictatorships and Double Standards\" all over again, an attack on the assumption that beneath every tyrant was a democracy waiting to flower. Kirkpatrick, noted her co-author, had learned her politics in the shadow of the Holocaust. Unlike George W. Bush, she believed \"that we are born not as angels, but more like animals,\" pulled as powerfully toward darkness as toward light.\n\nThe book itself garnered only modest attention. But by 2006, the year of Kirkpatrick's death, her ideas were gaining new life, even among some of the younger conservatives who had once scorned them. \"I used to see the world as a landscape of rolling hills,\" wrote David Brooks. \"People everywhere seemed to want the same things: to live in normal societies, to be free, to give their children better lives. Now it seems that was an oversimplified view of human nature.\" Conservatism, declared George Will, had become infected by a missionary, crusading spirit, and it was time for an exorcism. \"Three years ago,\" he wrote, \"the [Bush] administration had a theory: Democratic institutions do not just spring from a hospitable culture, they can also create such a culture. That theory has been a casualty of the war that began three years ago.\"\n\nIn March, Fukuyama joined the counterattack, publishing America at the Crossroads, a kind of eulogy for Kirkpatrick and Irving Kristol's older, more cautious neoconservatism. The dominance conservatives, he argued, had betrayed their ideological parents and left a once-proud intellectual tradition in ruins. Kagan responded with a book called The Return of History and the End of Dreams, which claimed that it was actually Fukuyama who had been too quick to count dictatorship out. \"The autocratic tradition,\" Kagan insisted in a companion article, \"has a long and distinguished past, and it is not as obvious as it once seemed that is has no future.\" All of a sudden, the most important intellectuals on the foreign policy right were loudly denying that democracy was on the march, and attacking each other for ever having been so na\u00efve as to believe such a thing.\n\n\"I'm delighted to see Mr. Bourne with us today.\" Casey Blake, a Columbia University history professor, was welcoming Randolph Bourne back to his alma mater, which was a little odd, given that Bourne had been dead for more than eighty years. But surveying the crowd of antiwar students in the fall of 2004, Blake detected Bourne's presence. The tiny, bent figure with the acid pen had been rescued from oblivion once before, during Vietnam, when anti-toughness intellectuals like Marcus Raskin and Noam Chomsky needed a muse. Now, Blake was suggesting, he had returned again. In 2001, activists opposed to the war on terror had founded the Randolph Bourne Institute. Earlier in 2004, the Atlantic's James Fallows had invoked Bourne to protest the Bush administration's wartime propaganda. Now Columbia was sponsoring a symposium on Bourne's new relevance. And Bourne wasn't the only ghost of hubris past to haunt American foreign policy during the Iraq years. At around the same time, a political scientist and former army officer named Andrew Bacevich\u2014who would become one of the war's most influential critics\u2014set out to revive the memory of Bourne's old professor, Charles Beard.\n\n\"If Bourne's ghost hovers around us,\" declared the historian Robert Westbrook, one of the speakers at the Columbia symposium, \"it is less William Kristol, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz who would interest him than the likes of Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Ignatieff, left-wing intellectuals who echoed the arguments of [John] Dewey and other pro-war progressives as they rushed to support the war in Iraq as above all a war for human rights.\" Bourne would have known what to do with such people, Westbrook suggested. He would have gutted the liberal hawks as mercilessly as he gutted their intellectual forefathers during World War I.\n\nBy 2004, the gutting was well under way on the intellectual left. Before Iraq, what had united liberal hawks and dominance conservatives was the belief that the spread of human rights and the spread of American military power generally went hand in hand. That had been the lesson of the Balkans, where American bombers helped stop genocide, and of Afghanistan, where GIs escorted little girls to school. But in Iraq, many liberals again learned the lesson of Bourne and the New Left: that war was not an instrument of democracy, but a menace to it. The \"war-technique,\" wrote Westbrook, quoting Bourne, \"determines its own end\u2014victory, and government crushes out automatically all forces that deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path of organization to that end.\" In the opinion of many liberals, that was exactly what America's government had done in Iraq. To justify the war it had hyped the threat of WMD, and to prosecute the war it had sodomized innocents at Abu Ghraib. And since the \"war on terror\" threatened to go on forever, the \"war-technique\" threatened to eat away at American democracy until it was an empty shell. If influential conservatives were turning against dominance foreign policy because they doubted war could bring democracy to Iraq, many liberals were turning against it because they believed the war in Iraq was corroding democracy in the United States.\n\nThe hubris of dominance, like the hubris of reason and the hubris of toughness before it, had relied on faith in political authority. Public trust and public malleability had permitted elites to march the nation to war. But in the late Bush years, Iraq generated a distrust of political authority unseen since Vietnam. Hollywood began pumping out TV shows and movies that pictured Islamic terrorists as mere pawns of the world's true villains, who resided at the White House, Pentagon, and CIA. In Syriana (2005), the CIA assassinates a reformist Arab prince trying to free his nation from America's imperial death grip. In the Bourne trilogy (no relation to Randolph), a latter-day James Bond uses quick wits, martial arts, and high-tech gadgets to defeat the bad guys and get the girl\u2014except that in this case, the bad guys are his own former bosses at the CIA. In Mission: Impossible III (2006), another supertough, supercool intelligence agent battles a dastardly international arms smuggler, only to learn that the smuggler is a front man for neoconservatives eager to provoke war in the Middle East. Even the television series 24, which initially depicted the war on terror as a brutal but necessary struggle, in 2006 swerved into antigovernment paranoia. The show's first president, the wise and honest David Palmer, is succeeded by Charles Logan, who tries to provoke a terrorist attack against America so he can seize Central Asia's oil.\n\nIf, in Iraq's wake, filmmakers saw Washington as a treacherous place, so did a new generation of liberal activists dedicated to exposing the fiction that America's governing elite was either wise or benign. Just as Vietnam had helped create the adversary journalism of the 1970s\u2014unwilling to take official statements at face value, always on the prowl for corruption, disdainful of the deference previously accorded people in power\u2014Iraq also created a brazen, in-your-face journalistic culture, this time on the Internet. On the \"netroots\" blogs of the late Bush years, profanity was common, insults were rampant, and the guiding assumption was that the \"Washington establishment\" (a term that covered pundits as well as politicians) was stupid, pompous, predatory, and corrupt. Iraq, of course, was Exhibit A. The netroots, explained Matt Stoller, one of its stars, \"is a group of people who came to the web because we felt betrayed by a system we formerly trusted.\" The most successful liberal bloggers, he noted, win their audiences by exposing the fact \"that power and authority was built on silly illusions.\"\n\nAs in the 1920s and the 1970s, this revolt against political authority was, above all, a revolt against presidential authority. In 2007, in a sign that the Internet's adversarial culture was permeating the journalistic establishment, the New York Times announced that it would no longer attend the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, which had become a symbol of the media's incestuous relationship with the executive branch. In 2005 and 2006, Congress placed the first real restrictions on Bush's ability to detain and torture \"war on terror\" suspects. It also squashed his domestic agenda, rebuffing White House efforts to alter immigration law, partially privatize Social Security, and extend tax cuts. \"What you have seen,\" said Republican senator Lindsey Graham, \"is a Congress, which has been AWOL through intimidation or lack of unity, get off the sidelines and jump in with both feet.\"\n\nThe judiciary also awoke from its slumber. In 2004, after three years of docility, the Supreme Court ruled that judges could decide whether non-Americans were wrongfully imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba. Two years later, it deemed the military tribunals that the Bush administration had established there unconstitutional. In 2007, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the Bush administration to release information about Gitmo detainees. And in 2008, in a fourth straight legal slap, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees could challenge their detention in federal court. \"The irony,\" noted former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein, \"is that the president has now ended up with lesser powers than he would have had if they had made less extravagant, monarchial claims.\"\n\nFinally, the public itself delivered the most crushing blow to Bush's once-imperial presidency, handing the Democrats control of both houses of Congress in the landslide midterm elections of 2006. Rumsfeld was fired. On his last night as defense secretary, the man who in 2003 had received a louder ovation than Michael Jordan took his family to an upscale Washington restaurant. It was not exactly a triumphant scene. \"I'm not serving a war criminal,\" shouted the chef, who only relented after another cook agreed to prepare Rumsfeld's meal.\n\nFor his part, Cheney now registered lower public approval ratings than Michael Jackson after he was accused of pedophilia and O. J. Simpson after he was tried for murder. In Bush's second term, his network of allies and moles\u2014Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and, most important, Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, who was sentenced to thirty months in prison for lying under oath\u2014largely came apart, substantially reducing the vice president's influence. Thirty pounds overweight, suffering from gout, and the victim of no less than eight cardiac episodes during his time in the White House, the most powerful vice president in history was now less fearsome than pitiable.\n\nBush, who after 9\/11 had boasted the highest presidential approval rating in American history, was now the most disliked president on record. Pollsters found that attaching his name to even popular proposals turned the public against them. Even within the military, a Republican bastion, he could not escape public fury over the war. \"See? It's not worth it,\" yelled a family member at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio during Bush's visit, pointing to their disfigured relative. At the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, the mother of a dying soldier burst into tears, then screamed at the president, \"This is not your daughter!\" In the summer of 2008, Bush became the first sitting president since Lyndon Johnson not to attend his party's presidential convention.\n\nAt first, Bush's descent and Iraq's went hand in hand. In February 2006, a Sunni attack on a Shia shrine in the town of Samarra triggered an orgy of sectarian slaughter horrifying even by Iraqi standards. Cities, neighborhoods, even streets were \"ethnically cleansed.\" People on the wrong side of the sectarian divide ended up with limbs hacked off or drill holes in their head.\n\nIn May, with domestic opinion turning hard against the war, Congress tried to seize control. It created an outside panel, the Iraq Study Group, led by George H. W. Bush's former secretary of state, James Baker, and stocked with former Bush I officials. It was the foreign policy equivalent, one panelist quipped, of a family intervention. The Study Group proposed withdrawing tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops from Iraq and initiating negotiations with the anti-American dictatorships in neighboring Syria and Iran. Militarily, the group was suggesting, America could not impose its will on Iraq, and ideologically it could not impose its will on the Middle East. For the first time in the dominance era, a prominent, bipartisan group of foreign policy elites was demanding the retrenchment of American power.\n\nIn 1968, when the titans of the foreign policy establishment told Lyndon Johnson that the jig was up in Vietnam, he cursed and moaned, but ultimately conceded defeat. But in 2006, when they delivered the same news to George W. Bush, he told his father's consiglieres to go to hell. He made no bold diplomatic overtures to Damascus and Tehran, and instead of withdrawing troops from Iraq, he added them, in what became known as \"the surge.\" He would keep the troops in Iraq, Bush vowed, even if his only supporters were his wife, Laura, and Barney, the dog.\n\nMost foreign policy experts, most politicians, and most ordinary Americans reacted with a mixture of disbelief and rage. Soon, however, something extraordinary happened: The situation in Iraq began to improve. By the time additional U.S. troops arrived in 2007, Iraq's Sunnis had come to a strange and painful realization: America was their last, best hope. Ever since the Iraq War began, Sunni leaders had deluded themselves into believing that if they drove out the U.S. occupiers they could reestablish their historic dominance over Iraq's Shia majority. In the civil war of 2006, however, that dream died as Shia militias expelled Sunnis from much of Baghdad. Suddenly, the 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq no longer looked like the barrier standing between Sunnis and supremacy; they looked like the barrier standing between Sunnis and extermination. As a weapon against the Americans, many Sunni leaders had found Al Qaeda useful. But now those leaders wanted U.S. protection, which required casting the jihadists aside. This they did with little remorse, since the jihadists had alienated even conservative Sunnis with their nasty habit of maiming and killing Iraqis for alleged violations of Islamic law.\n\nThe timing was most fortuitous. At the very moment Sunnis realized they needed American protection, American troops started flooding their cities and towns. The United States not only had more forces in Iraq as a result of the surge but also began deploying them differently, sending troops out of their isolated bases to live among ordinary Iraqis, as dictated by the counterinsurgency doctrine embraced by General David Petraeus. By late 2007, Sunni tribesmen were turning en masse against Al Qaeda and toward the United States.\n\nThis, in turn, changed Shia politics. When Sunni violence was rampant, many Shia had turned to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army for protection. But over time, the Mahdi Army had degenerated into a criminal gang, offering protection of a Soprano-esque sort while muscling in on local businesses. When Sunni violence declined, the Mahdi Army's services became less appreciated, and when a resurgent Iraqi army\u2014backed by more U.S. troops\u2014began challenging Sadr's men for control of the Shia streets, the Mahdi Army lost public support. Realizing that he could summon neither the military firepower nor the popular enthusiasm necessary to defeat the Americans, Sadr called a cease-fire and then dropped out of sight.\n\nIt was a stunning turnaround: Attacks on U.S. soldiers, which had totaled roughly 1,500 a week when the surge began, dropped to around 150 a week by spring 2009. But the larger truth remained: Dominance foreign policy was dead. The ethic of dominance had been premised on the belief that the United States could win wars fast, and with minimal outlays of American cash or blood. But by 2009, an occupation that was supposed to last six months was entering its sixth year, and \"the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq,\" noted military expert Thomas Ricks, was that the United States would still be fighting there in another six. In 2002, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey had been fired for suggesting that the war might cost $200 billion; by 2009, according to one estimate, it had cost America $3 trillion. On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda had taken three thousand American lives; by 2009, the war in Iraq had taken more than four thousand.\n\nPetraeus's counterinsurgency strategy had proved brilliant, but it was also slow, costly, painful, and morally ambiguous\u2014exactly what the Bush administration had promised the Iraq War would not be. The United States had not vanquished the Sunni insurgents; it had cut deals with them. Iraqis who killed Americans had not received retribution; they had received paychecks. The American military had shown that it could fight an insurgency, but the Iraqi insurgents had offered the world an instruction manual for grounding the American juggernaut: Bog the Americans down in a protracted, gruesome guerrilla war and bleed them until their ADD-afflicted public demands that their leaders turn off the TV. Even if you don't force the Americans out, you will force them to the bargaining table, where they will shower you with money, which you can use for the power struggle that begins in earnest when they leave.\n\nThe Taliban got the message loud and clear. In 2008 and 2009, even as Americans grew more optimistic about Iraq, they grew increasingly despondent about Afghanistan. Exploiting the Bush administration's refusal to launch a serious nation-building effort in 2002 and 2003, the Taliban and Al Qaeda had come roaring back, seizing large chunks of the Afghan south and sizable portions of neighboring Pakistan. In the United States, views of Afghanistan were coming full circle. Right after 9\/11, many foreign policy commentators had warned that building a functioning, liberal, pro-American regime there was impossible: the country was too backward, too savage, too xenophobic. By 2002, that pessimism had been largely forgotten as Americans celebrated their rapid overthrow of the Taliban. By 2009, however, all the old clich\u00e9s\u2014\"quagmire,\" \"graveyard of empires\"\u2014were back. Vietnam analogies, which had been so out of style when America went to war in Iraq, were suddenly everywhere. Commentators who had once noted fondly that Hamid Karzai had brothers who were restaurateurs in Boston and Baltimore now discovered that another brother was one of Afghanistan's biggest drug kingpins. Americans were again speaking about Afghanistan in the language of despair.\n\nBy 2009, even policymakers who believed victory in Afghanistan was possible were defining it far more modestly than they had in the hubris-swollen days of 2002 and 2003. For America's top military leaders, the lesson of Iraq was that the United States would have to pay a far higher price for far humbler goals. On Iraq, Petraeus called himself a \"minimalist.\" The United States, explained his strategic adviser, Major General David Fastabend, will have \"to settle for far less than the vision that drove it to Baghdad.\" And when Petraeus was named head of Central Command, which gave him authority over the Afghan War, he encouraged this minimalism there, too. Even as the new administration of President Barack Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan, it signaled a willingness to cut deals that allowed the brutal, misogynistic Taliban a share in power. The Taliban, Obama officials bluntly conceded, would never be vanquished.\n\nIn both Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush, the dream of ideological dominance was fading. After a massively rigged Afghan election in 2009, few Americans still saw Karzai as a committed democrat. And in Iraq, noted the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack, \"Many Iraqis (and Americans) believe [Prime Minister Nuri al-] Maliki intends to make himself a new dictator.\" American policymakers still hoped that democracy would survive in Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, but the bald truth was that ensuring its survival was no longer part of America's mission. In both countries, America now defined \"victory\" not as the creation of governments that served as ideological models for the Muslim world, or even governments that served as bases for U.S. power, but merely governments that could prevent their territory from incubating attacks against the United States. In defining victory down, U.S. officials backhandedly accepted Kirkpatrick's old logic: that in some parts of the world, the lesser evil was the best America had a right to expect.\n\nIf America's military and ideological dominance was ebbing, its economic dominance soon followed. In the late 1990s, when Governor George W. Bush was pondering a presidential run, Lawrence Lindsey had warned him that a bubble was developing on Wall Street as the result of inflated high-tech stocks. \"There's a good chance it'll burst while you're president,\" Lindsey cautioned. Bush took little heed. In fact, as president he occasionally needled Lindsey on the subject. \"How's that bubble doing, Lindsey?\" he joked, as mortgage-backed securities replaced Internet stocks as the darling of Wall Street and the stock market soared ever higher. \"Gonna burst any day now?\"\n\nIn the fall of 2008, it did. Even before the meltdown, commentators had warned that U.S. economic power was waning. From 2001 to 2008, America's share of world GDP declined every year. America remained the world's largest consumer, the primary place where Chinese factories disgorged their mountain of manufactured goods, and the largest recipient of foreign investment, the primary place where Chinese and Middle Eastern investment funds parked their vast savings. All this investment subsidized the profligate habits of America's government and people, both of whom lived beyond their means. Even before the crash, however, experts warned that all this borrowing was sapping America's geopolitical muscle. As the Council on Foreign Relations' Bradley Setser noted in a 2008 paper, \"a debtor's capacity to project military power hinges on the support of its creditors.\" One of dominance foreign policy's critical, if generally unspoken, assumptions was that the United States could economically sustain its aggressive military posture. But that aggressive posture, according to Setser, now required the forbearance of China, which served as America's bank.\n\nThen came the financial deluge. In the short term, investment in the United States actually rose, since in a time of panic America seemed a safer bet than most other places. But to forestall an economic depression, Washington began printing money wildly\u2014and plunged massively into debt. In financial circles, observers grew increasingly pessimistic about the long-term value of the dollar, sparking fear that Asian and Middle Eastern investors might stop buying as many greenbacks, which might force Americans to begin living within their means\u2014a frightening prospect for a populace and a government that have not done so in a very long time.\n\nAnd if the financial crisis threatened to drain America of cash, it also drained it of prestige. In the late 1990s, America's ideological dominance had rested not only on the belief that history's escalator was carrying the world toward democracy, but that it was carrying the world toward American-style capitalism as well. But that trajectory looked far less inevitable after the financial crash, when America\u2014which had spent the past two decades telling the world to deregulate its financial markets\u2014began struggling to reregulate its own. \"The teachers now have some problems,\" noted Chinese vice premier Wang Qishan drolly. French president Nicolas Sarkozy was blunter: \"Le laisser-faire, c'est fini.\"\n\nIt was a good moment to be Paul Kennedy. In the 1990s he had been a figure of intellectual sport, the poor sap who bet against the United States just before it left the world in its dust. But the critics weren't laughing anymore. In 2006, China published a new edition of Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, accompanied by an eight-part television series, largely cribbed from its pages. In 2008, the American Political Science Association hosted a panel to mark the twentieth anniversary of Kennedy's book. Its title: \"Is the United States in Decline Again?\"\n\nWith a roar, American intellectuals shouted yes. In January 2008, in a New York Times Magazine cover story, the New America Foundation's Parag Khanna heralded the birth of the \"Non-American world.\" Four months later, Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria published The Post-American World. And in 2009, National Journal's Paul Starobin came out with After America, which lionized Paul Kennedy for being ahead of his time. \"Kennedy was savaged in certain quarters,\" noted Starobin in a companion article. \"And then he was ridiculed.... [But] these days, Kennedy is looking less like a heretic and more like a prophet.\"\n\n\"American civilization,\" wrote Starobin, \"has reached the end of its long ascendancy in the world.\" And many ordinary Americans seemed to agree. A 2009 Pew Research Center poll found that only 36 percent of Americans believed their children would have a better life than them, down 19 points from 1999. Among Indians, by contrast, the figure was 78 percent, and among Chinese, 89 percent.\n\nAmong the American pessimists was George Kennan. His great realist contemporaries\u2014Morgenthau, Lippmann, and Niebuhr\u2014had all died during the Vietnam War or its aftermath, and spent their final years in political despair. Kennan, however, had lived to see the miracle of the cold war's end, and having seen it, he told family and friends that he was now content to die. But he didn't die. He lived on, past the fat, carefree '90s, past 9\/11, and all the way to Iraq, a war that filled him with dread. \"I take an extremely dark view of all this\u2014see it, in fact, [as] the beginning of the end of anything like a normal life for all the rest of us,\" he wrote to his nephew on the eve of the war. \"What is being done to our country today is surely something from which we will never be able to restore the sort of country you and I have known.\" He asked that the letter be destroyed, but it never was. Having lived to see his greatest hopes realized, he had now lived to see them dashed again. A decade and a half after tipping his hat to Wilson, his pessimism had been vindicated after all. In 2005 he died, like the others, in political despair.\n\n## CONCLUSION\n\nTHE BEAUTIFUL LIE\n\n\"We need some great failures...we ever-successful Americans\u2014conscious, intelligent, illuminating failures.\"\n\n\u2014LINCOLN STEFFENS\n\nEasy for him to say. It's hard to be illuminated by failure in a country where success is a national religion. It's hard to say \"no, we can't\" in a country that spent its first century conquering a continent and its second conquering much of the world. The American character, wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., \"is bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish.\"\n\nBut that conviction is a lie. Much is beyond our power to accomplish, especially when it comes to the world beyond our shores. When America's leaders fall in love with the lie, when success convinces them it might actually be true, when they forget we fly on wings of wax, the gods take their revenge.\n\nYet if they denounce the lie, expose its absurdity, declare themselves deaf to its infantile charms, they exile themselves from our political tradition. Intellectuals may warn that we are too ignorant and overstretched to remake the world; ordinary Americans may quietly acknowledge that we will never fully vanquish our foes\u2014in the same way they quietly acknowledge that politicians will always have affairs. But woe to the leader who speaks those heresies out loud. \"My fellow Americans, we must lower our sights, reconcile ourselves to evils that have no remedy, admit that the world will not bend to our will\"\u2014the words cannot be spoken. You cannot stand up in church and denounce the virgin birth. Privately, we speak in different tongues, but officially, can-do-ism is the only vocabulary we have.\n\nSo the lie is politically essential. But more than that: It's morally essential. In bad times, it helps us to look beyond the dismal present, to find hope in the unseen. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.'s, analysis of the American character, after all, was delivered during the winter of 1942, when Nazi flags flew from the Atlantic to the Volga and the Arctic to the Sahara. His optimism was less an invitation to overreach than a counsel against despair. For the French and British in the 1940s, or the Bosnians and Kosovars in the 1990s, American can-do-ism was a very welcome thing.\n\nWhat America needs today is a jubilant undertaker, someone like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan who can bury the hubris of the past while convincing Americans that we are witnessing a wedding, not a funeral. The hubris of dominance, like the hubris of reason and the hubris of toughness before it, has crashed against reality's shoals. Woodrow Wilson could not make politics between nations resemble politics between Americans. Lyndon Johnson could not halt every communist advance. And we cannot make ourselves master of every important region on earth. We have learned that there are prices we cannot pay and burdens we cannot bear, and our adversaries have learned it, too. We must ruthlessly accommodate ourselves to a world that has shown, once again, that it is not putty in our hands.\n\nFor starters, that means remembering that we did not always believe we needed to dominate the world in order to live safely, profitably, and ethically in it. In the decade and a half after the Soviet empire fell, dominance came so easily that we began to see it as the normal order of things. We expanded NATO into East Germany, then into Eastern Europe, then onto former Soviet soil, while at the same time encircling Russia with military bases in a host of Central Asian countries that once flew the hammer and sickle. We established a virtual Monroe Doctrine in the Middle East, shutting out all outside military powers, and the Bush administration set about enforcing a Roosevelt Corollary, too, granting itself the right to take down unfriendly local regimes. In East Asia we waited expectantly for China to democratize or implode and thus follow Russia down the path to ideological and strategic submission. And we stopped thinking about Latin America much at all, since we took it as a virtual fact of nature that no foreign power would ever again challenge us in our backyard.\n\nWe were like the warrior guarding his village who suddenly finds that the enemy has abandoned the battlefield, leaving vast tracts of territory undefended, and so takes them for his own, since the acquisition apparently involves little risk and cost. And once those lands have been incorporated, he sees that even more is available: The inhabitants offer little resistance and even appear pleased to join the realm. And as his domain extends outward, the warrior begins to see its new size less as a choice than a necessity: the bare minimum necessary to keep his family safe. The old borders, which he once deemed sufficient, now strike him as frighteningly exposed. In fact, he comes to suspect that even his current territory is inadequate; he has grown so used to expansion that mere stasis strikes him as a form of retreat. And meanwhile, the lands just beyond his domain are no longer so welcoming or unguarded, and mutinies have broken out in some of his recent acquisitions. Fulfilling his obligations is no longer so effortless and the resources at his disposal are no longer so plentiful. His challenge is to step back from the border skirmishes that now consume his time and try to recover the more disciplined habits of mind that guided him in the days before the recent windfall, because the days of windfall are now clearly gone.\n\nIf the men and women who shape American foreign policy conduct this intellectual audit they will discover a sharp discontinuity between some of today's widely held assumptions and the assumptions of successful American policymakers in eras past. After 9\/11, in the name of fighting terror, the Bush administration declared war or cold war on Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas, virtually every significant regime and militia in the greater Middle East that did not kiss our ring. And in its pursuit of regional dominance, it claimed that it was merely doing in the Muslim world what past generations had done in Europe and Asia. But that's not right. Franklin Roosevelt did not wage World War II so America could be the world's sole superpower, or even Europe's. He wanted Four Policemen; unipolarity was Hitler's goal. And FDR did not wage war against all the enemies of freedom. He allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler and Tojo. Similarly, during the cold war America did not take on the entire communist world, except for a period of hubristic intoxication that began with McCarthyism and culminated in Vietnam. In the late 1940s we made common cause with the communists in Belgrade, and in the 1970s and '80s we made common cause with the communists in Beijing, all to contain the communists we feared most, who resided in Moscow. George Kennan saw the purpose of containment as ensuring that no single power controlled the world's centers of economic and military might, not ensuring that that single power was the United States.\n\nHow could our forefathers have been so cowardly and immoral? Stalin was a monster; so was Mao. And they both had nuclear weapons aimed at us. Why did we live with that sword of Damocles? Why did we accept their dominion over billions of souls? Once upon a time, the answer was obvious: because we lacked the power not to. Franklin Roosevelt knew the American people would not sacrifice their sons by the thousands to keep Eastern Europe from Soviet hands. During Korea, Harry Truman blundered into war with Beijing and realized that in Asia too the price of denying America's communist foes a sphere of influence was far too high. Even Ronald Reagan proved so reluctant to challenge Soviet control over Poland in the early 1980s that conservative commentators cried betrayal. In different ways, all these presidents understood that in foreign policy, as in life, there are things you may fervently desire but cannot afford. And in foreign policy, that recognition is even more important, since you are not merely spending other people's money; you are spilling other people's blood.\n\nIn our time, these tragic choices have been largely airbrushed from public memory. World War II has become the story of America single-handedly saving Europe from Nazi totalitarianism, even though U.S. troops didn't hit the beaches of Normandy until our Soviet totalitarian allies\u2014who lost ninety men for every one of ours\u2014had already turned the tide. The cold war has become the story of America's triumph over communism, even though we played off one communist giant against the other. As a result, many policymakers and pundits have come to see prioritizing among adversaries as immoral and un-American, a view exemplified by the Bush administration, which spurned Iran's offers of help against Al Qaeda, did little to turn Damascus against Tehran, waited until 2007 to exploit divisions between nationalist and jihadist insurgents in Iraq, and made no meaningful distinction between Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The assumption was that a nation as powerful as ours did not need to choose.\n\nNow the days of reckoning have arrived. Our commitments have grown massively since the cold war's end, but our resources\u2014economic, military, and ideological\u2014are not what they once appeared. In Walter Lippmann's phrase, American foreign policy is \"insolvent.\" Our obligations exceed our power. Yet like a homeowner unwilling to sell his house for $500,000 because he once believed it worth $1 million, we cling to illusions born in easier times. We lack even the vocabulary for hard choices. In public debates over foreign policy, commentators talk endlessly about combating foreign threats and promoting American values, but much less about safeguarding American interests. Without a prior conception of interests, however\u2014a conception of what the world must look like for America to be safe, prosperous, and free\u2014intelligently deciding what constitutes a threat is impossible. And without a prior conception of interests, promoting American values is an infinite project. Talking about threats makes us feel tough and talking about values make us feel virtuous, but only talking about interests forces us to acknowledge the limits of our ability to be either tough or virtuous. This discomfort with the language of interest is a symptom of America's post\u2013cold war inability to prioritize. We remain in thrall to a series of assumptions about American omnipotence that, if not challenged, threatens to drive our foreign policy deeper into the red.\n\nThe first assumption concerns terrorism. After September 11, America's leaders warned that Al Qaeda would likely strike again on American soil and with even greater force. Partly this was a natural response to the agony of the moment. But the decision to describe terrorism in apocalyptic terms\u2014to see 9\/11 not as the limit of Al Qaeda's capacities but as a mere warm-up for the real horror to come\u2014also stemmed from America's extraordinary post\u2013cold war confidence. We defined the terrorist threat as virtually unlimited because we believed we had virtually unlimited resources to fight it. Today, by contrast, our resources are gravely strained, and yet in Washington, official rhetoric about terrorism remains almost as apocalyptic as it was eight years ago, even though Al Qaeda has not struck the United States\u2014or any other country\u2014on nearly the scale of 9\/11. Obviously, jihadist terrorism remains a threat. Yet our refusal to reevaluate the severity of that threat in the face of new information carries a cost. Since, officially, the terrorist threat has not been downgraded, homeland security and defense spending remain politically sacrosanct, despite a budget deficit that has swelled dramatically. And since, officially, the terrorist threat has not been downgraded, it remains politically treacherous to eschew the most aggressive counterterrorist actions\u2014drone attacks in Pakistan, for instance, which kill large numbers of civilians and spark hatred of the United States\u2014even if those actions harm American security more than they help. In their unwillingness to revise official rhetoric about terrorism in the face of eight years' worth of evidence that Al Qaeda is not\u2014thank God\u2014the danger Americans once imagined, American politicians resemble Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk, who in the mid-1960s spoke about the communist threat as if Moscow and Beijing were still allies and Stalin was still alive.\n\nThe second assumption concerns nuclear deterrence. In 2002, George W. Bush declared the concept dead. In the post-9\/11 world, he insisted, threats of nuclear retaliation were not only useless against Al Qaeda; they were also useless against anti-American dictatorships with WMD. Analytically the argument made little sense. Why, exactly, would deterrence not work against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea? Because they were led by ruthless dictators who espoused fanatical ideologies, aided terrorists, and butchered their own people\u2014unlike, say, Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, whom America successfully deterred during the cold war? The logic behind deterrence does not rely on a regime's decency; it relies on a regime's desire to stay in power, something a nuclear exchange would put at risk. In fact, even as the Bush administration repudiated deterrence, it began quietly deterring North Korea, which it had permitted to produce several nuclear bombs.\n\nThere is no guarantee that deterrence will work always and everywhere, of course. Although Tehran's theocratic rulers have no history of suicidal behavior (they have never given their terrorist allies biological or chemical weapons, for instance), America and the world would certainly be better off if they didn't get the bomb. But America and the world would have been better off had Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong Il never gotten the bomb, too; we relied on nuclear deterrence not because it was ideal but because the military alternatives were ghastly. Now the military alternatives are ghastly again. An American or Israeli strike would have grave consequences for the two wars America is already fighting on Iran's border: in Afghanistan and Iraq. If commentators who urge military action against Tehran are willing to imperil success in those conflicts to prevent an Iranian bomb, so be it. But pro-war commentators rarely make that argument, because it would require painful choices among competing priorities. And in Washington today, such choices are rarely publicly acknowledged. Seven years after the invasion of Iraq, the illusions of omnipotence remain: We are so powerful that we do not need to choose.\n\nThe third area in which these illusions warp our foreign policy debate concerns Russia. Officially, the United States remains committed to admitting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, thus continuing the eastward expansion that began when the Soviet Union fell. The logic behind this expansion was that Washington and its allies were so strong, and Moscow was so weak, that we could push closer and closer to Russia's border without ever paying a price. But in 2008, when it invaded Georgia, Russia showed that it could indeed exact a price. Since NATO is a mutual defense pact, admitting Georgia would mean that if Russia attacked again, the United States would be obligated to send young men and women from Cleveland to fight and die for Gori, something the American people would never tolerate.\n\nThe United States has been in this kind of situation before. During the cold war, Washington and Moscow struck a de facto bargain over Finland, the U.S.S.R.'s neighbor to the northwest. The United States tacitly accepted Soviet influence over Finnish foreign policy while the Soviets allowed Finland to remain democratic and self-governing in its domestic affairs. The arrangement was ugly and unfair. It required acknowledging that Finland, because of its size and location, would not enjoy the full privileges of sovereignty. But America's leaders knew that they would be doing the Finns no favors by encouraging them to poke the Kremlin in the eye, since America would not protect them from the Soviet response. Today a similar arrangement is likely the best America can expect when it comes to Georgia and Ukraine. But acknowledging that is unpleasant and so most politicians do not. Instead they perpetuate the fiction that we can keep pushing the frontiers of American hegemony outward, even though it requires writing the foreign policy equivalent of bounced checks.\n\nThere is a reason politicians do this: In our political culture, publicly acknowledging that something is beyond America's power is perilous. The president who presides over a nuclear Iran or concedes a Russian sphere of influence in parts of the former U.S.S.R. or admits that we will never fully vanquish jihadist terrorism will be, politically, a marked man. He will be accused of betraying Americanism itself, of having desecrated the church of optimism. The aftershocks may not be as great as the ones that upended American politics after we conceded China in 1949 or fled Vietnam in 1975, but they will be tumultuous nonetheless. Ideologues and opportunists alike will insist that the talk of limits was an illusion, that the only limits that mattered were the limits of presidential will. They will insist that everything would have been possible had only real Americans roamed the corridors of power. If only the men and women in the White House had truly believed.\n\nTo survive this onslaught\u2014to truly lay the hubris of dominance to rest\u2014Barack Obama will need to redefine our national faith, to decouple American optimism from the project of American global mastery. He will need to find new, more manageable missions that draw upon that beautiful American lie: that nothing is beyond our reach.\n\nFirst, that means redirecting American can-do-ism inward. During the Bush years, a strange inversion occurred: America's government grew more ambitious overseas even as it grew more complacent at home. When it came to protecting the environment, improving health care, or overseeing Wall Street, President Bush oozed fatalism even as he invaded two countries and vowed to end tyranny on earth. This gets things backward. In politics, as in life, we should be most ambitious in those spheres where we have the most power. There are limits to the federal government's capacities at home as well, of course: limits of both money and knowledge. But we know better how to rebuild New Orleans than how to rebuild Afghanistan, more about how to regulate the U.S. financial system than how to establish one in Iraq. The main purpose of foreign policy is to serve, in Lippmann's words, as the \"shield of the republic\": to protect our democracy so it can thrive. If American power swells overseas but the quality of life for Americans deteriorates at home, then American foreign policy has failed.\n\nThe Bush administration's combination of domestic complacency and overseas grandeur stemmed partly from ideology. But it also stemmed from a particular allocation of American resources. Defense now accounts for well over half of the federal government's discretionary budget, close to five times as much as discretionary spending on health care and education combined. All that money is both a cause and an effect of the fact that Americans think more highly of the military than of other institutions of government. The U.S. military is, to be sure, a remarkable institution, more than worthy of pride. But practically and psychologically, we rely on it too much. As our diplomatic capacity has withered, the military\u2014whose budget is ten times that of the State Department\u2014has become our primary instrument for interacting with the world. As our welfare state has withered, the military has become one of our few effective instruments for economic security and upward mobility at home. It has also become an island of discipline, self-sacrifice, and public-spiritedness in a culture that is materialistic, hedonistic, and guilty about it. We are like a high school that cheers lustily every Friday night for its champion football team, thus distracting itself from its overcrowded classrooms, mediocre test scores, and dismal chess club. And when we do acknowledge that the school is in disrepair, our solution is to ask the football coaches to start purchasing computers and establishing after-school math programs because they have all the money and are the only ones we trust to get anything done.\n\nNow the days of easy gridiron triumph are over, and we must find new sources of school spirit. We must focus more attention on\u2014and devote more money to\u2014the other ways in which we compete with the world: from educational standards to environmental quality to scientific achievement to public health. We must remember that the military and geopolitical triumphs we commemorate were, at their core, economic triumphs. We won World War II as much on the factory floor\u2014where American workers churned out more and better planes and tanks than their German and Japanese counterparts\u2014as on the battlefield. And we won the cold war because America and its democratic allies made capitalism stable and humane while the Soviets never made communism creative and dynamic. We must retell our narrative of national success as a narrative of economic and technological success. We must remember the things we admired about our country when militarism and Americanism were not so deeply intertwined.\n\nBut redirecting American ambition inward will not, by itself, reconcile Americans to the new limits on our power. Americans want their government to project optimism and energy at home, but they also want to be strong overseas. Obama's challenge is to show that strength and dominance are not the same thing. In this regard, he should learn from Ronald Reagan, who scrupulously avoided Vietnam-type military interventions yet found symbolic ways\u2014like awarding the Medal of Honor to overlooked Vietnam hero Roy Benavidez\u2014to make Americans feel proud and strong. As Reagan understood, foreign policy debates are often cultural debates in disguise. Whether it was the Swift Boat attack on John Kerry in 2004 or the attacks on Obama himself for not wearing a flag lapel pin, liberals are often vulnerable during such debates because conservatives cast their criticisms of U.S. policy as evidence of lack of patriotism. Politically, the answer is not for liberals to abandon such criticism, which itself represents a form of patriotism, but rather to leaven patriotic criticism with patriotic affirmation. That means more than ritual incantations about flag and country; it means aggressively challenging those who unfairly deride the United States and its institutions. From a purely foreign policy perspective, publicly confronting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hugo Ch\u00e1vez when they malign the United States may seem useless, or even counterproductive. Likewise, there may be no purely foreign policy rationale for publicly confronting universities that ban military recruiters from campus. But there is no such thing as pure foreign policy; foreign policy requires domestic support. If Barack Obama does not want to be Jimmy Carter, if he does not want Americans to equate his restraint with their humiliation, he must be as aggressive as Reagan in finding symbolic balm for America's wounded pride.\n\nEven this, however, is not enough. Great presidents reconcile a respect for limits not merely with an affirmation of American pride, but with an affirmation of American ideals. Despite everything, we remain a missionary nation with an enduring desire to repair and redeem the world. That missionary zeal, which has at times produced delusion and catastrophe, can be a force for extraordinary progress if it is tempered by two kinds of humility.\n\nThe first is the humility of time. What distinguished George W. Bush in 2003\u2014and Woodrow Wilson in 1917\u2014from more successful presidents was not their belief that liberty could spread around the world; it was their millenarianism, their belief that through the wars they launched it could spread in one big bang. We need more patience. In general, America cannot bludgeon dictatorships into democratizing. In fact, we cannot even deny large authoritarian regimes like those in Russia and China influence over their smaller neighbors. In the short term, our strategy should resemble the vision of great-power cooperation across ideological lines that animated Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. In a world threatened by global warming, financial panic, and swine flu, in fact, the need for such cooperation is even greater now than it was in FDR's day. And because none of the current great powers espouses a revolutionary ideology aimed at overturning the current international order, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did, the opportunity for cooperation is greater, too.\n\nBut if cooperation with authoritarian powers requires realism, we should be short-term realists with long-term, nonrealist dreams. Like Roosevelt and Harry Truman, we should seek to enmesh undemocratic regimes in an open, rule-based, global trading system, because capitalism can slowly and subtly create pressures for the rule of law. It is capitalism, after all, that has turned China from a totalitarian state into an authoritarian one, thus allowing over one billion people a degree of personal freedom unimaginable in Mao's day. In addition, like Roosevelt and Truman, we should try to convince governments to sign declarations\u2014about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and free elections\u2014that rebuke their own behavior. Critics will dismiss these declarations as worthless because the words will fall far short of current reality, and the organizations created to monitor them will be weak, and America will continue to do business with some of the worst offenders. But forcing regimes into hypocrisy will be precisely the point. In a world where technology gives citizens the power to organize as never before, ordinary people may be able to wield these charters as weapons against an unjust status quo, as dissidents in the Soviet bloc did after the Helsinki Accords, and as Americans themselves did when they protested the Bush administration's violations of the international ban on torture. Activists may even band together across borders in ways scarcely imaginable in the pre-Internet age. \"Ideals,\" wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, \"have a way of taking vengeance upon the facts which momentarily imprison them.\" When it comes to ugliness in far-off places, America usually lacks the power to vindicate those ideals in the here and now. But we can help plant seeds that others may one day reap.\n\nFor that to happen, however, the declarations must bind us as well. Precisely because freedom and dignity are universal values, they are not ours alone to define. George W. Bush not only lacked the humility of time; he lacked the humility of place. His universalism was oddly parochial. The freedom agenda, as the Bush administration defined it, meant pressure for democratic elections, but only if they produced the outcomes we wanted; pressure for human rights, but not in war-on-terror allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan; and a refusal to even contemplate the possibility that America's own anti-terror policies might violate the principles we preach. What non-Americans know\u2014and Americans should admit\u2014is that our national interests and prejudices will always taint our pursuit of universal ideals. We are not some deracinated global umpire, sitting in judgment over humankind; we are one of the players on the field.\n\nIt is this recognition that our idealism is tainted by self-interest that should make us pause and pause and pause again before unilaterally invading tyrannical nations on the assumption that their people will thank us for it. Even if we genuinely believe that we are acting from altruistic motives, the people whose country we invade will generally be more suspicious, especially if they have been on the receiving end of armed Western altruism before, and especially once an American soldier shoots their cousin or breaks down their door. And even if we are initially welcomed as liberators, countries with awful governments usually have awful political cultures, which do not change easily or quickly. Unless we are willing to stay long enough to change those political cultures\u2014and Americans are not known for our patience, especially when it comes to costly endeavors in far-off lands\u2014we will be building castles in the sand.\n\nGeorge W. Bush was right that people want freedom and dignity for themselves, but they also want freedom and dignity for their nation, and they don't always draw a bright line between the two. This is particularly true for people whose nations have suffered the indignity of imperial rule, nations that wield far more global influence today than they did a generation or two ago. The shift in power from countries that were once colonizers to countries that were once colonized constitutes one of the most profound trends in world politics, and any project that looks like idealism to us but imperialism to them will collide disastrously with the nationalism of peoples whose historical memory has left them with a chip on their shoulders about Western governments telling them what to do.\n\nOften, our ignorance leaves us unable to even understand why the chip is there. Listening to the foreign policy debate in Washington, one would not know that the United States was once a quasi-imperial power in China, or that we helped overthrow an elected prime minister of Iran. As a result, Americans are often genuinely confused when Iranians and Chinese\u2014including Iranians and Chinese deeply committed to human rights\u2014bristle at our lectures. For such a lustily nationalistic people, we remain curiously blind to the nationalism of others.\n\nThe challenge is to convince postcolonial regimes that their quest for greater dignity and power ultimately rests on providing their people greater freedom, and that America can be their partner in that effort. In this regard, we should keep pushing to reshape global bodies like the UN Security Council, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund so their composition no longer reflects the imperial age. We should stop demanding that third-world nations halt their pursuit of nuclear weapons without simultaneously acknowledging our own responsibility to curb our arsenals. We should accept that as a rich nation, which industrialized with little heed to its effect on the environment, we bear more of the initial burden of curbing global warming. And we should acknowledge that the struggle against global poverty\u2014a struggle that looms far larger in countries where millions go hungry\u2014is also a struggle for human rights, and that in this struggle, America can do far more.\n\nAll these efforts differ from the hubris of dominance in one fundamental way: Rather than merely requiring that other nations change, they require that we change as well. They combine greater modesty in our demands of others with more strenuous demands of ourselves. They require that instead of imagining that we stand, self-satisfied, on history's highest rung, we see ourselves as fellow travelers on a path whose course we alone do not set, and along which we have far to climb.\n\nLurking behind many of America's current anxieties is the fear that what will follow hubris is decay; that we are in the autumn of our power; that other nations will soon occupy history's center stage. But we have been through this before. In 1969, with America neck-deep in Vietnam, the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote that \"history has begun to catch up with Americans, the fabled immunity from frustration and defeat has faltered.... America has at last encountered problems that are difficult to reconcile with traditional myths of indomitable optimism.\" Four decades later, we can see that although communism won the war for Vietnam, capitalism won the war for East Asia, and democracy has won stirring battles there, too. The trauma of our defeat gradually faded, yet American optimism endured, not because we clung to the impossible dream of global containment but because we abandoned it and created space for other, better dreams to take its place. Now another generation of Americans must jettison our visions of invincibility. We should do so joyfully, for the recognition that no collection of mortals can impose its will on an unruly globe is not a sign of decay, but of wisdom. And tempered by wisdom, American optimism is\u2014and always will be\u2014one of the great wonders of the world.\n\n## NOTES\n\nIntroduction\n\n\"tyrants to which men are ever subject\": William Graham Sumner, War and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 36.\n\nRepublicans over the age of sixty-five: According to Pew, 94 percent of Republicans under the age of thirty backed the Iraq War, compared to only 65 percent of Republicans over sixty-five. By contrast, 61 percent of Democrats under thirty backed the war compared to only 33 percent over sixty-five. \"Generations Divide over Military Action in Iraq,\" Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, October 17, 2002, http:\/\/people-press.org\/commentary\/?analysisid=57. A later Pew poll, in February 2003, once again found that Americans under thirty were more pro-war than Americans over sixty-five, although this time the gap was only eight points. \"Public Favors Force in Iraq, but U.S. Needs More International Backing,\" Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, February 20, 2003, http:\/\/people-press.org\/reports\/pdf\/173.pdf.\n\nrevealed the same generational skew: At my request, two enterprising Yale undergraduates, Chris Chen and Adam Stempel, surveyed the views of influential bloggers, television and radio pundits, and print columnists on the Iraq War between September 1, 2002, and March 15, 2003. To gather their cohort of influential bloggers they used a list published in June 2003 by the Online Journalism Review (http:\/\/www.ojr.org\/ojr\/glaser\/1056050270.php), disregarding those bloggers whose views on Iraq could not be discerned. For the print columnists, they surveyed all the signed op-eds written about the war in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal between September 1, 2002, and March 15, 2003. (If a columnist's opinion was ambiguous, or the columnist was a government official or member of Congress, he or she was not included.) For television and radio pundits, they surveyed the views of the hosts of the twenty-five most-watched television talk shows and most-listened-to radio talk shows, according to the Nielsen television ratings and Arbitron radio ratings closest to October 2002 (http:\/\/www.mediabistro.com\/tvnewser\/original\/0409_q3ratings.pdf; http:\/\/www.talkers.com\/talkhosts.htm). (If a television or radio host did not offer explicit views on the war, he or she was discarded.) They also surveyed the views of a list of influential Iraq-specific pundits compiled by Slate in 2003 (http:\/\/slate.msn.com\/id\/2080099\/). Where a search of Wikipedia pages, personal profiles, Library of Congress listings, and dates of college graduation did not reveal a commentator's age, he or she was discarded. Ultimately, Chen and Stempel found that 72 percent of the bloggers, op-ed writers, and television and radio pundits under the age of forty-five supported the war, compared to only 60 percent of those over forty-five. Forty-five was chosen as the cutoff date because someone who was forty-five in 2003 would have been only fifteen when the final U.S. ground troops left Vietnam in 1973, and thus, likely too young to have been heavily influenced by that war. The raw data that Chen and Stempel used is available at http:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/icarussyndromebook.\n\n\"vital interests of the republic\": Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., \"White Slaves in the Persian Gulf,\" Wall Street Journal, January 7, 1991, A14.\n\n\"30 years ago for intervention in Vietnam\": Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., \"How to Think About Bosnia,\" Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1993, A16.\n\n\"they should have reflected on Vietnam\": Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., \"Are We Trapped in Another Vietnam?\" The Independent, November 2, 2001, 5.\n\nuntil Nazi troops reached French soil: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917\u20131950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 231\u201332.\n\nleading, perhaps, to wisdom: Schlesinger's famous book on cycles of reform and reaction in American politics is The Cycles of American History (New York: Mariner, 1999).\n\ndefined it as insolence toward the gods: An alternative theory, associated with the classicist N.R.E. Fisher, argues that while the Greeks were certainly interested in godly retribution against humans who displayed excessive pride, the word hubris or hybris actually meant something different: an act of aggression by one person against another designed to inflict shame or assert superiority. See N.R.E. Fisher, Hybris: A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1992).\n\nhacks him to death in the bath: Aeschylus, 1: The Oresteia, trans. David R. Slavitt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).\n\n\"but not on good advice \/ he'd overrule all gods\": Aeschylus, Persians, trans. Janet Lembke and C. J. Herington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 76\u201377.\n\nplunges to his death, into the sea: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David R. Slavitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 154\u201355.\n\nwould bring forth into the world: My own book The Good Fight: Why Liberals\u2014and Only Liberals\u2014Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (New York: HarperCollins, 2006) is somewhat guilty of this.\n\nrefused to join us in Vietnam: Sylvia Ellis, Britain, America and the Vietnam War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 116; Fredrik Logevall, \"De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963\u20131964,\" Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 1 (1992): 91\u201393; Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 156\u201360; David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000), 315.\n\nhad never done in its entire history: Jennifer K. Elsea and Richard F. Grimmett, \"Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force: Historical Background and Legal Implications,\" Congressional Research Service, March 8, 2007, http:\/\/fas.org\/sgp\/crs\/natsec\/RL31133.pdf.\n\noffered by America's recent past: For a detailed discussion of how policymakers can effectively use historical analogies, see Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986).\n\nhated and feared universal doctrines: \"There are very few general observations which can be made about the conduct of states which have any absolute validity at all times and in all cases,\" Kennan wrote. \"The few that might have such validity are almost invariably to be found in the realm of platitude. If this absolute validity is lacking, the chances are that the utterance in question will some day rise to haunt us in a context where it is no longer fully applicable. If, on the other hand, the utterance remains in the realm of platitude, then there is all the more reason why we should not associate ourselves with it.\" John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 51\u201352.\n\non Russia's northwest border: For a list of Kennan's diplomatic postings, see David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xiii\u2013xiv.\n\nAmerican foreign policy during the Russian Revolution: Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and The Dove (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 9, 158, 166; Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 31.\n\nbe clones of their Soviet counterparts: For a discussion of the destruction of the \"China hands\" and its effect on Vietnam policy, see David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 103\u20134, 188\u201391; and E. J. Kahn, Jr., The China Hands: America's Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them (New York: Penguin, 1972).\n\nnever before been posted to the Arab world: Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Vintage, 2007), 545.\n\ngo home and prepare for the future: For an argument about the shifting relationship between Xerxes and the chorus, see Harry C. Avery, \"Dramatic Devices in Aeschylus' Persians,\" American Journal of Philology 85, no. 2 (1964): 180\u201383.\n\n\"not a guide by which to live\": Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 286\u201387; \"The Politics of Restoration,\" Time, May 24, 1968, http:\/\/www.time.com\/ time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,844434,00.html.\n\nPART I: THE HUBRIS OF REASON\n\nChapter 1: A Scientific Peace\n\nno one ever called him cold and removed: John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 246\u201347; Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: John Day, 1956), 16.\n\n\"a ten-cent mackerel in brown paper\": Walter LaFeber, The American Age, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1994), 270.\n\n\"I didn't know whether God or him was talking\": Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 213.\n\nthey often talked back: John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 273.\n\n\"His thoughts and mine are one\": Godfrey Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 10.\n\n\"even when he was cutting your throat\": Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand, 2; Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), 17.\n\nColonel House wanted to meet him outside: Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Transaction, 1999), 17, 20, 107, 109, 117, 129; Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 1900\u20131925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 88\u201389, 109.\n\na project of the most fearsome secrecy: Steel, Walter Lippmann, 127; Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917\u20131919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 26.\n\nfive million Germans were either wounded or dead: James McRandle and James Quirk, \"The Blood Test Revisited: A New Look at German Casualty Counts in World War I,\" Journal of Military History 70 (2006): 688; Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 32.\n\nfour thousand villages had simply ceased to exist: LaFeber, The American Age, 316.\n\nhe returned to the White House and wept: Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era 1910\u20131917 (New York: Harper, 1954), 282.\n\nthey would call it simply \"the Inquiry\": Gelfand, the Inquiry, 41.\n\nwhat House called a \"scientific peace\": Lloyd Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 32.\n\nhistorians insist, was not one thing: See, for instance, Daniel T. Rodgers, \"In Search of Progressivism,\" Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 113\u201332.\n\na fourth branch of government: Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, 6\u20138; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 189; Sidney Kaplan, \"Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals,\" Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956): 355.\n\nhanding them control over the economy: John Patrick Diggins, Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 20\u201324, 194\u201396.\n\nto the world beyond America's shores: Edward M. House, Philip Dru: Administrator, A Story of Tomorrow 1920\u20131935 (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1912), http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/dirs\/ etext04\/8phlp10h.htm.\n\n\"like the individual, must go to school\": Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, 43\u201344.\n\nthat made them act like beasts: For Veblen, for example, prehistoric society was \"characterized by considerable group solidarity.... The prime requisite for survival under the conditions would be a propensity unselfishly and impersonally to make the most of all the material means at hand and a penchant for turning all resources of knowledge and materials to account to sustain the life of the group.\" Quoted in David W. Noble, The Progressive Mind, 1890\u20131917 (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1981), 50. On Beard's belief that absent the distorting effect of unregulated capitalism people would incline toward cooperation, see Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, and Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968), 175\u201377.\n\nevil resided in the world, not in man: Noble, The Progressive Mind, 76.\n\n\"lost innocence of the race\": Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1890\u20131963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Knopf, 1965), 143\u20134.\n\nkeeping himself awake by reading Tolstoy: Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 27\u201335; William Henry Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961), 47\u201356; Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Ballantine, 1980), 321\u201325.\n\nrecognition of their union: For conditions in the anthracite mines, see Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, 169; James Abrams, \"Anthracite Mining Unionism and the UMW: An Oral History,\" Pennsylvania History 58 (1991): 330\u201337; Perry K. Blatz, \"Local Leadership and Local Militancy: The Nanticoke Strike of 1899 and the Roots of Unionization in the Northern Anthracite Field,\" Pennsylvania History 58 (1991): 278\u201397.\n\nlackeys bloodied workers into submission: The historian John Blum calls Roosevelt's actions during the coal strike \"an extraordinary departure from the protection that presidents had long afforded to management.\" John M. Blum, The Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson (New York: Norton, 1989), 40.\n\nwithout anyone's getting shot: Robert H. Wiebe, \"The Anthracite Strike of 1902: A Record of Confusion,\" Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (1961): 229\u201351; Jonathan Grossman, \"The Coal Strike of 1902\u2014Turning Point in U.S. Policy,\" Monthly Labor Review, October 1975, http:\/\/www.dol.gov\/oasam\/programs\/history\/coalstrike.htm; Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, 67.\n\nand to shut down slaughterhouses if they did: Blum, The Progressive Presidents, 39\u201344; Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870\u20131920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 161\u201363.\n\norder might break down once more: \"Behind the apparent optimism of the belief in the inevitability of progress,\" writes one analyst of Wilson's thought, \"there was the perception of a demand that society be driven forward lest it should again split apart into warring camps.\" Niels Aage Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 15. See also Mulder, The Years of Preparation, 12, 29; Knock, To End All Wars, 3; Anthony Gaughan, \"Woodrow Wilson and the Legacy of the Civil War,\" Civil War History 43 (1997): 225\u201343.\n\nthe production of unbiased expertise: Gaughan, \"Woodrow Wilson and the Legacy of the Civil War,\" 225\u201343; Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 12, 126\u201329, 192.\n\n\"at our leisure as they become necessary\": Mulder, The Years of Preparation, 34, 38\u201339, 41\u201342, 51\u201352, 56, 66, 82\u201383, 270; Arthur S. Link, \"His Presbyterian Inheritance,\" in The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971), 16; Knock, To End All Wars, 4.\n\nin the history of American politics: Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 28.\n\n\"if he could speak to enough of them\": Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (New York: Greenwood, 1968), iii, 173.\n\nthe most dazzling first terms in American history: \"During his first term,\" writes John Milton Cooper, \"Wilson compiled a spectacular, possibly unmatched, record of legislative and party leadership.\" Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 229.\n\ndoubled since the Civil War: Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 35; Karen E. Schnietz, \"The 1916 Tariff Commission: Democrats' Use of Expert Information to Constrain Republican Tariff Protection,\" Business and Economic History 23 (1994): 179.\n\npolitical rather than scientific criteria to make loans: Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 69\u201371; Blum, The Progressive Presidents, 69\u201370; Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 45, 48\u201349; Bruce Champ, \"The National Banking System: Empirical Observations,\" Working Paper 07-19, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, December 2007, 26\u201329, http:\/\/www.clevelandfed.org\/research\/work paper\/2007\/wp0719.pdf.\n\nthe first banking reorganization in almost fifty: Schnietz, \"The 1916 Tariff Commission,\" 178\u201379; Bruce Champ, \"The National Banking System: A Brief History,\" Working Paper 07-23, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, December 2007, http:\/\/www.clevelandfed.org\/ research\/workpaper\/2007\/wp0723.pdf.\n\naverted a potentially bloody nationwide strike: Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 59, 61\u201363, 67\u201374; Blum, The Progressive Presidents, 72\u201374, 78\u201379; Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 251.\n\nan unshakable faith in the number 13: Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand, 211; Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 59\u201361. For Wilson's appalling views of blacks, see Lloyd E. Ambrosius, \"Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation: American Democracy and International Relations,\" Diplomacy and Statecraft 18 (2007), 689\u2013718.\n\na serious economic downturn in twenty-five: Some might call the Spanish-American War traumatic, but it cost the United States a mere 385 combat deaths, with another 1,662 Americans wounded. U.S. troops kept fighting off and on in the Philippines until the 1930s, but after the election of 1900 those skirmishes were never a major domestic political issue. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1994), 284\u2013301; E. Berkeley Tompkins, \"Scylla and Charybdis: The Anti-Imperialist Dilemma in the Election of 1900,\" Pacific Historical Review 36 (1967): 143\u201361; Fred H. Harrington, \"The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898\u20131900,\" Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22 (1935): 211\u201330.\n\nsoon be a thing of the past: Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877\u20131920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 141; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 116.\n\n\"the inevitability of progress, in the perfectibility of man\": Steel, Walter Lippmann, 45.\n\n\"even here in this life upon earth\": William T. R. Fox, \"Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,\" World Politics 2 (1949): 68.\n\n\"illogical passion in us all?\": Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, 224\u201325.\n\n\"possibility of amelioration was retained\": J. A. Thompson, \"American Progressive Publicists and the First World War, 1914\u20131917,\" Journal of American History 58 (1971): 369.\n\n\"and human rights, shall prevail\": Noble, The Progressive Mind, 184.\n\nwe used to call the 'balance of power'\": Inis L. Claude, Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1988), 82.\n\n\"because we are a tough bunch\": MacMillan, Paris 1919, 23.\n\n\"the balance of power in its own favor\": David Steigerwald, Wilsonian Idealism in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 55.\n\n\"political fortunes for our own benefit\": Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 37.\n\nexternal aggression and internal disorder: Mark T. Gilderhus, Pan American Visions: Woodrow Wilson in the Western Hemisphere 1913\u20131921 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 49.\n\npreventing meddling by European powers: Walter H. Posner, \"American Marines in Haiti, 1915\u20131922,\" Americas 20 (1964): 231\u201366; Bruce J. Calder, \"Caudillos and Gavilleros versus the United States Marines: Guerrilla Insurgency during the Dominican Intervention, 1916\u20131924,\" Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 649\u201375.\n\n\"South American republics to elect good men!\": Wiebe, The Search for Order, 247.\n\nSouth American banks and businesses from Europe: Gilderhus, Pan American Visions, 37.\n\nworld governed by reason, not force: Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand, 231.\n\n\"a part of impartial mediation\": Blum, The Progressive Presidents, 86.\n\n\" friendship and disinterested service\": Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 273.\n\nless than two to one: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 199, 200, 203.\n\n\"and not as it ought to be\": Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 85.\n\nHuns were growing too strong: Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 154.\n\n\"Central America?\" he asked in 1915: Henry A. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 42.\n\nif Germany went after that next: Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 277\u201378.\n\nby sinking whatever tried to pass: David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 199\u2013214.\n\nwhen they heard the news: Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 288.\n\nLodge and TR were already there: William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 185\u2013198; Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, 474\u2013476.\n\n\"and the like,\" Wilson instructed House: Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism During World War I (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1991), 40, 49.\n\n\"utterances since the Monroe Doctrine\": Steel, Walter Lippmann, 96.\n\n\"a town without a brothel\": LaFeber, The American Age, 294\u201395.\n\n\"prevail is the desire of enlightened men everywhere\": Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft, 113\u201314.\n\nrunning low on subs anyway: Paul Birdsall, \"Why We Went to War,\" in The Shaping of Twentieth Century America, ed. Richard Abrams and Lawrence Levine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 317; Blum, The Progressive Presidents, 91\u201392; Stevenson, Cataclysm, 210\u201312, 254\u201356.\n\nhis government was doing just that: David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5.\n\n\"American has set foot on the continent\": LaFeber, The American Age, 294; Stevenson, Cataclysm, 264\u201366.\n\nbroke off diplomatic relations with Berlin: Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 268.\n\nkilling fifteen Americans: \"Thrown from a Small Boat,\" New York Times, March 20, 1917, 1.\n\na wave of public support for war: Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 271\u201373.\n\nthe moderate, pro-Western Alexander Kerensky: Stevenson, Cataclysm, 247\u201354.\n\n\"our terms for our democracy and civilization\": John Dewey, \"In a Time of National Hesitation,\" in John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 10, 1899\u20131924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 259.\n\n\"democratic revolution the world over\": Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 113.\n\n\" fruits of this experiment\": John Dewey, \"America in the World,\" in John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 11, 72.\n\nAmerica was at war: Woodrow Wilson, \"War Message,\" speech to Joint Session of Congress, Washington, D.C., April 2, 1917, http:\/\/wwi.lib.byu.edu\/index.php\/Wilson%27s_War_Message_to_Congress; \"Must Exert All Our Power,\" New York Times, April 3, 1917, 1; Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917\u20131921 (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), 1; Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 282.\n\ndesigning the postwar world: At the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson claimed that he had never seen the secret treaties, a claim that his press secretary, Ray Stannard Baker, reasserted in his early biography of Wilson. But this is probably untrue. After America entered the war, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour traveled to Washington to confer. During a series of meetings with Colonel House, Balfour explained the content of the secret agreements concluded by the French, British, Italians, and Russians. Balfour also promised to provide copies of these agreements to Wilson and House. Godfrey Hodgson notes that House and Wilson corresponded about the secret agreements well before Lenin's government published them in late 1917. Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand, 144\u201347.\n\nthe Inquiry's headquarters night and day: Gelfand, The Inquiry, 37, 39, 41\u201342, 45, 103, 121; Steel, Walter Lippmann, 129.\n\nwere thus largely ignored: Gelfand, The Inquiry, 33, 187\u201390.\n\n\"the policy of the United States\": Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 101.\n\nthan did most members of Congress: Gelfand, The Inquiry, 120\u201321, 243, 317, 330\u201331.\n\nsecret treaties dividing up the spoils of war: Arno J. Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917\u20131918 (New York: Meridian, 1969), 279.\n\n\"and nothing else will do\": Steel, Walter Lippmann, 129, 133.\n\n\"at half past twelve\": Knock, To End All Wars, 142.\n\ndetermined by reason, not force: Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin, 267\u201368; Knock, To End All Wars, 143\u201344; LaFeber, The American Age, 309\u201310.\n\n\"great hope of mankind which we are trying to realize\": Steel, Walter Lippmann, 141\u201343.\n\nsneaked across the border into Sweden: MacMillan, Paris 1919, 157\u201358; E. Eyck, \"The Generals and the Downfall of the German Monarchy 1917\u20131918,\" Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2 (1952): 47\u201367; D. K. Buse, \"Ebert and the German Crisis, 1917\u20131920,\" Central European History 5 (1972): 234\u201355; Klaus Epstein, \"Wrong Man in a Maelstrom: The Government of Max of Baden,\" Review of Politics 26 (1964): 215\u201343.\n\non the basis of the Fourteen Points: Steel, Walter Lippmann, 149\u201350; David Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans: The Generation That Changed America's Role in the World (New York: Vintage, 1996), 260.\n\nno subordinate would steal the glory: Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 267\u201369; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 3.\n\ncut through the gray sky: Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 138; Steel, Walter Lippmann, 151; Knock, To End All Wars, 194; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 3.\n\nthe largest crowd in French history: Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 284\u201385; Knock, To End All Wars, 194\u201395; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 15\u201316.\n\nsurrounded by sacred candles: MacMillan, Paris 1919, 15; Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 139\u201340.\n\n\"he became a Messiah\": Kennedy, Over Here, 356; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 262; John B. Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 2004), 95\u201396; Knock, To End All Wars, epigraph.\n\n\"and yet again it might be a tragedy\": MacMillan, Paris 1919, 27.\n\nChapter 2: The Frightening Dwarf\n\nand the Bible by kindergarten: Carl Resek, \"Introduction,\" in Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915\u20131919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis: Harper & Row, 1999), viii\u2013ix; Eric J. Sandeen, \"Bourne Again,\" American Literary History 1 (1989): 491\u201392; Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press), 1, 8.\n\nthe men who changed his life: Resek, \"Introduction,\" viii, ix\u2013x.; Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917\u20131930 (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1970), 36\u201338 Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 76\u201379.\n\nprogressivism's greatest historian: Ellen Nore, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 4\u201312.\n\nits greatest philosopher: Charles F. Howlett, Troubled Philosopher (Port Washington, NY: National University Publications, 1977), 59\u201360; Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 156\u201358.\n\nwho transcended their selfish desires: Randolph Bourne, \"Twilight of Idols,\" in Bourne, War and the Intellectuals, 60; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 195.\n\ndemocracy and anarchy to organization: Noble, The Progressive Mind, 28.\n\n\"the incarnation of reason\": Kaplan, \"Social Engineers as Saviors,\" 350\u201351.\n\njob at the fledgling New Republic: Resek, \"Introduction,\" xi.\n\nmight transform the country and the world: Steel, Walter Lippmann, 109.\n\npublishing his political writing at all: Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, 249, 283.\n\n\"a concert among the nations\": Frederic A. Ogg and Charles A. Beard, National Governments and the World War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 570.\n\n\"systematic utilization of the scientific expert\": John Dewey, \"What Are We Fighting For?\" in John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 11, 99, 104.\n\nlaboratories for tinkering with human behavior: Bourne, \"Twilight of Idols,\" 56.\n\n\" from the path of organization to that end\": Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 208; Randolph Bourne, \"A War Diary,\" in Bourne, War and the Intellectuals, ed. Resek, 41.\n\n\"permitted to do their own thinking\": Kennedy, Over Here, 59\u201360; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 290.\n\nthe causes and purposes of the war: Thomas C. Kennedy, Charles Beard and American Foreign Policy (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1975), 32\u201333; Nore, Charles A. Beard, 74.\n\n\"the more violent appeals to passion\": John Dewey, \"What America Will Fight For,\" in John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 10, 273; Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 223.\n\nit took a jury twenty-five minutes to acquit: Walter I. Trattner, \"Progressivism and World War I: A Reappraisal,\" Mid-America 44 (1962): 137; Kennedy, Over Here, 68, 80; Knock, To End All Wars, 133.\n\n\"including Dewey mad, drove Bourne sane\": Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 4.\n\n\"they had been waiting for each other\": Randolph Bourne, \"The War and the Intellectuals,\" in Bourne, War and the Intellectuals, ed. Resek, 11; Bourne, \"Twilight of Idols,\" 60.\n\n\"because they knew this was an illusion\": Bourne, \"A War Diary,\" 41, 45.\n\nthat his nemesis be fired: Louis Filler, Randolph Bourne (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1943), 113; Resek, \"Introduction,\" xiii; Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 229, 232\u201335; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 212, 233\u201335.\n\ninfluenza just weeks after the war's end: Sandeen, \"Bourne Again,\" 504; Resek, \"Introduction,\" xiii; Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 255\u201356.\n\nno journal would print his work: Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 74.\n\na newly unified Germany: MacMillan, Paris 1919, 63.\n\nkeep vigil even from the grave: Gregor Dallas, At the Heart of a Tiger: Clemenceau and His World 1841\u20131929 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), 111\u201312; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 27\u201328, 33.\n\nwere made in German factories: MacMillan, Paris 1919, 26, 28, 31\u201332; Gerhard Weinberg, \"The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the European Balance of Power,\" Central European History 2 (1969): 256\u201357.\n\n\"it is desolation, it is death\": MacMillan, Paris 1919, 22, 28, 185.\n\ndid not want to be swayed by emotion: Eventually, in March, Wilson did make a brief battlefield tour. But it did not mollify the insulted French. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 22.\n\nfewer \"hysterical\" French: MacMillan, Paris 1919, 27, 168.\n\n\"only disinterested people at the Peace Conference\": MacMillan, Paris 1919, 9.\n\n\"we are here to see you get nothing\": Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 135.\n\n\"And a very good thing too!\": Steigerwald, Wilsonian Idealism in America, 77; Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 54; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 23\u201324, 33.\n\nthe economic balance of power with Berlin: MacMillan, Paris 1919, 170\u201373, 191; Sally Marks, \"The Myths of Reparations,\" Central European History 11 (1978): 254\u201355.\n\nBut Wilson rejected that, too: Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 68\u201369; Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 75\u201377.\n\n\"of the public opinion of the world\": Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 78.\n\nthe Allies could occupy it for fifteen years: Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 72.\n\nalready pledged to do under the League: Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 71.\n\n\"over the heads of their rulers\": Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd, eds., The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace, vol. 5 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), 259; E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919\u20131939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 32\u201334; Knock, To End All Wars, 162.\n\nrather than the Royal Navy: LaFeber, The American Age, 315.\n\ncovered them over in disgust: Kennedy, Over Here, 357. Wilson also threatened to appeal to the people of France against their government's hard line on Germany, predicting that if he did, Clemenceau's government would fall. Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 322.\n\n\"a world governed by intrigue and force\": Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft, 113\u2013114.\n\nnot as punitive as legend suggests: As Margaret McMillan writes, \"When historians look, as they have increasingly been doing, at the other details, the picture of a Germany crushed by a vindictive peace cannot be sustained. Germany did lose territory; that was an inevitable consequence of losing the war. If it had won, we should remember, it would have certainly taken Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of the north of France and much of the Netherlands. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk showed the intentions of the German supreme command for the eastern frontiers. Despite its losses Germany remained the largest country in Europe west of the Soviet Union between the wars. Its strategic position was significantly better than it had been before 1914. With the reemergence of Poland, there was now a barrier between it and the old Russian menace. In place of Austria-Hungary, Germany had only a series of weaker and quarreling states on its eastern frontier. As the 1930s showed, Germany was well placed to extend its economic and political sway among them.\" MacMillan, Paris 1919, 481\u201382.\n\nwhen they exited the war in May 1918: McMillan, Paris 1919, 161, 481\u201382; Weinberg, \"The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the European Balance of Power,\" 260; Stevenson, Cataclysm, 323\u201324.\n\n\"our own security in this hemisphere\": \"The Political Scene,\" New Republic, March 22, 1919, 14.\n\nnearly all backed U.S. entrance into the League: Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 91, 146.\n\nwere certain to vote no: The Irreconcilables were themselves divided into three categories: a group of isolationists who opposed all binding U.S. commitments overseas, a group of idealists or pacifists who thought the League didn't go far enough toward disarmament and decolonization, and a group of realists who considered the League utopian. Ralph A. Stone, \"The Irreconcilables' Alternatives to the League of Nations,\" Mid-America 49 (1967): 165\u201371; Robert J. Maddox, William E. Borah and American Foreign Policy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 62, 64.\n\nwith the fury of lovers scorned: Steel, Walter Lippmann, 163.\n\ncould take America to war: Historians have long debated whether the Senate's \"strong Reservationists,\" led by Henry Cabot Lodge, were sincere in their reservations, or were simply using them as cover to defeat the League. David Mervin portrays Lodge as deeply opposed to U.S. membership in the League but unwilling to say so publicly for political reasons. But Lloyd Ambrosius and William Widenor make a convincing case that Lodge would have swallowed U.S. membership, with reservations, in return for America's ratification of the French security treaty, about which he cared passionately. They cite numerous examples of Lodge declaring, in private, that he could support U.S. entry into the League if, as he told the novelist Edith Wharton in early 1919, it is \"so constituted that it will...not endanger or imperil the United States.\" David Mervin, \"Henry Cabot Lodge and the League of Nations,\" Journal of American Studies 4 (1971): 210; Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy, 308\u201311; Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition,137.\n\ndropped dead of a heart attack: Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, 518\u201319.\n\n\"brothers under the skin\": Hans Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest (New York: Knopf, 1951), 29.\n\nnot Lincoln the impartial reconciler: Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy, 19\u201321, 216, 217, 284.\n\n\"but as one of the allies\": Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 86.\n\n\"impossible for her to break out again\": Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy, 298.\n\n\"by a statute or a written constitution\": Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 86; Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy, 351.\n\n\"count his personal fortunes in the reckoning\": Knock, To End All Wars, 251, 259; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 490; Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882\u20131928 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972), 565, 583.\n\nemerged to watch his successor sworn in: Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 348, 350; Kennedy, Over Here, 361; Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 169; Knock, To End All Wars, 262\u201363.\n\nWilson's European crusade as one big waste: Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 187, 252.\n\n\"the lonely citadel of his soul\": Hodgson, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand, 215\u201356; George and George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, xv.\n\nthe two-thirds needed for ratification: Knock, To End All Wars, 263\u201364.\n\nwith France, and so it died as well: Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 212\u201314; Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 141\u201342.\n\n\"discount all the more violent appeals to passion\": John Dewey, \"What America Will Fight For,\" in John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 10, 273.\n\nfor \"pro-German\" leanings himself: Carol Signer Gruber, \"Academic Freedom at Columbia University, 1917\u20131918: The Case of James McKeen Cattell,\" AAUP Bulletin 58 (1972): 297, 301\u20133; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 117, 222.\n\n\"inculcate disrespect for American institutions\": Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 189; Nore, Charles A. Beard, 78\u201379.\n\n\"unconventional views in political matters\": Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 259\u201360.\n\nwhile their teacher wept: Nore, Charles A. Beard, 81; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 259\u201360; William Summerscales, Affirmation and Dissent: Columbia's Response to the Crisis of World War I (New York: Teachers College Press, 1970), 94\u201396.\n\nbanned some of his books from its training camps: Kennedy, Charles Beard and American Foreign Policy, 38; Nore, Charles A. Beard, 84.\n\n\"amid howling gales of passion\": Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 210.\n\nwho had died just weeks before: Kennedy, Over Here, 90; John Dewey, \"The Cult of Irrationality,\" in Characters and Events: Essays in Social and Political History, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: Henry Holt, 1929), 587\u201391; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 210, 239.\n\nwhere he spent the next two years: Howlett, Troubled Philosopher, 39; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 239\u201340, 256.\n\nto build a world free of force: Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 260.\n\n\"its own necessities and experiences\": Nore, Charles A. Beard, 99\u2013100; Kennedy, Charles Beard and American Foreign Policy, 45, 49\u201350.\n\nParis was now on its own: Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 93, 104.\n\nrequired the Germans to substantially disarm: Hans W. Gatzke, \"Russo-German Military Collaboration During the Weimar Republic,\" American Historical Review 63 (1958): 565\u201397.\n\npaying more than that themselves: Sally Marks, \"Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,\" Central European History 2 (1969): 359\u201361, 365; Gustav Stolper, Karl Hauser, and Knut Borchardt, The German Economy: 1870 to the Present (New York: Harcourt, 1967), 83; Marks, \"The Myths of Reparations,\" 237.\n\nwhich Germans swallowed with barely a whimper: Although the Treaty of Versailles has gone down in historical memory as savagely harsh, and the Allies' treatment of Germany after World War II is, by contrast, remembered as generous and enlightened, the truth is in some ways the reverse. After World War II, Germany, along with Berlin, was divided and occupied by the Allied powers, with full civil authority only being restored in 1949 (and reunification not coming until 1990). While the reparations imposed on Germany after World War I have become synonymous with sadistic excess, they were at least restricted to a particular figure (with the real figure, as noted above, far below that). After World War II, by contrast, the Potsdam Agreement set no reparations limit; it simply allowed each occupying power to expropriate from its occupation zone as it saw fit. The Soviets and French responded by treating their occupation zones as cash cows, stripping them of vast amounts of industrial machinery, supplies, and other materials, which they shipped back home. Finally, it is true that the victors dispossessed Germany of slightly less land in 1945 than in 1919 (10 percent of Germany's prewar total compared to 13 percent), but much of the post\u2013World War I territory was populated by non-German speakers, while after World War II German speakers comprised the vast bulk of people living on land parceled out to Germany's neighbors. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 465; Joseph B. Schechtman, \"Postwar Population Transfers in Europe: A Survey,\" Review of Politics 15 (1953): 151.\n\ntheir dreams of European hegemony: Historians once saw World War I as a mere accident, stumbled into by powers that did not truly want war. But that view has been significantly undermined in recent decades by the German historian Fritz Fischer, who argued in his 1961 book, Germany's Aims in the First World War, that a wide swath of the German political elite had since the early 1900s been eager for war with Russia, which they believed would give Germany hegemony over the European continent. Germany, Fischer argues, was not dragged into World War I by its weak ally, Austria-Hungary, but actually pushed a hesitant Hapsburg empire to make extreme demands of the Serbs following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, demands that Berlin knew would likely lead to war. In recent years, historians have gone even further, suggesting that German leaders desired war even though they knew Britain would probably enter the fray, and even though they knew the conflict might be long and painful. See, for instance, Keir A. Lieber, \"The New History of World War I and What It Means for International Relations Theory,\" International Security 32, no. 2 (2007): 155\u201391; Frederick A. Hale, \"Fritz Fischer and the Historiography of World War One,\" History Teacher 9 (1976): 258\u201379.\n\nto seize German mines and steel plants as collateral: Marks, \"The Myths of Reparations,\" 241.\n\nwhose popularity was beginning to build: Stolper, Hauser, and Borchardt, The German Economy, 74\u201389.\n\n\"utterly brutal and insane\": Warren Cohen, Empire Without Tears (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 92.\n\na litany of senators denounced French militarism: Royal J. Schmidt, Versailles and the Ruhr: Seedbed of World War II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 210\u201312.\n\nAmerican enforcement of Versailles: Betty Glad, Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence: A Study in American Diplomacy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), 223; Melvyn P. Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America's Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919\u20131933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 83; Jolyon P. Girad, \"Congress and Presidential Military Policy: The Occupation of Germany, 1919\u20131923,\" Mid-America 56 (1974): 211\u201319.\n\ncould now default with virtual impunity: Frank Costigliola, \"The United States and the Reconstruction of Germany in the 1920s,\" Business History Review 50 (1976): 493; Marks, \"The Myths of Reparations,\" 249.\n\n\"a disinterested position in relation to international affairs\": Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), 131.\n\nall won the Nobel Prize: Kissinger, Diplomacy, 272\u201376.\n\nthe two-front strategy on which French security relied: Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 65; Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 106\u20137.\n\nthe Maginot Line: Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 49\u201350; Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 107; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 176, 481; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 280.\n\n\"are still absolutely in control\": John C. Farrell, \"John Dewey and World War I: Armageddon Tests a Liberal's Faith,\" Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 329.\n\nthat there was nobility in war: John Dos Passos, \"The Scene of Battle,\" in The Culture of the Twenties, ed. Loren Baritz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 5\u201311; Henry May, The Discontent of the Intellectuals: A Problem of the Twenties (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), 21\u201322; Cohen, Empire Without Tears, 45; Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 330.\n\n\"the Department of Peace\": J. Chalmers Vinson, \"Military Force and American Policy, 1919\u20131939,\" in Isolation and Security: Ideas and Interests in Twentieth Century American Foreign Policy, ed. Alexander DeConde (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1957), 57.\n\n250,000 Americans inquired about taking part: Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 25; Charles De Benedetti, \"The $100,000 American Peace Award of 1924,\" Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98 (1974): 224\u201349.\n\nhow barbaric human beings had once been: Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations, 324\u201325.\n\nIt passed the Senate, 74\u20130: Cohen, Empire Without Tears, 46\u201347; Maddox, William E. Borah and American Foreign Policy, 86\u201387.\n\nnaval spending dropped by one-third: Glad, Charles Evans Hughes, 270; Phillips Payson O'Brien, British and American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900\u20131936 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 149\u201376, 180\u201381, 230\u201336.\n\na de facto belligerent on France's side: Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 62, 64, 73, 80.\n\nthat war became almost unthinkable: Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 260\u201371.\n\nat the rate of six hundred per day: Howlett, Troubled Philosopher, 87\u201388; Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 33\u201335, 232\u201333, 239.\n\nin the history of international affairs: Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 208, 218; Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations, 348; Farrell, \"John Dewey and World War I,\" 331.\n\nChapter 3: Twice-Born\n\nwon only 4 percent of the vote: Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 135\u201336; Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Westminster, MO: John Knox, 2002), xxviii.\n\nscores to settle from World War I: Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 3\u20134; Martin Halliwell, The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Culture (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 60.\n\n\"out-and-out loyalty\": Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 3\u201321, 28\u201329, 42, 45, 52\u201356; William G. Crystal, \"'A Man of the Hour and of the Time': The Legacy of Gustav Niebuhr,\" Church History 49 (1980): 417.\n\nHe called Wilson a dupe: Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 53, 58\u201359.\n\n\"as potential criminals\" by their adopted nation: Reinhold Niebuhr, \"What the War Did to My Mind,\" Christian Century, September 27, 1928, 1161\u201362.\n\n\"a child of the age of disillusionment\": Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 72, 74, 79, 83, 99; Niebuhr, \"What the War Did to My Mind,\" 1161.\n\njoining the Socialist Party: Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 94\u2013100, 109\u201310.\n\nless than one-third its level in 1929: Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 305.\n\ngarbage dumps for something to eat: Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 321.\n\nthe time for pedagogy is done: Dewey's foremost biographer, Robert Westbrook, argues that Niebuhr's attack was unfair. \"Although at an earlier stage in Dewey's career Niebuhr's contention that he hoped to persuade the powerful to admit the injustice of their rule and to relinquish their power might have had some force, by the early thirties it was misplaced. Dewey's call for an 'intelligent' politics was not a plea to the oppressed to abandon the effort to match power with power in favor of reasoning with the 'dominant economic interests' but rather an appeal to them to wage their struggles intelligently.\" Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 526\u201327. Niebuhr's best biographer, Richard Wightman Fox, concurs, writing that \"Niebuhr was not making a close study of his opponent's thought; he was constructing an ideal-type opponent who was easy to take down.\" Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 136\u201337.\n\neducate those in power to remedy them: Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2005), 374\u201375.\n\nrevolution was the only option left: John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1932), 306\u201310.\n\nthey were voting communist for president: David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929\u20131945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 222; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919\u20131933 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 436\u201337.\n\nhad made him a multimillionaire: Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 4\u201317.\n\nmention that he became president: Australian Prospectors and Miners Hall of Fame, \"Herbert Hoover,\" http:\/\/mininghall.com\/MiningHallOfFame\/HallOfFameDatabase\/Inductee.php?InducteeID=1164.\n\n\"want[ing] nothing...from Congress [except] efficiency\": Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, 37, 43.\n\n\"began his career in California and will end it in heaven\": Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, 44; Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 80.\n\nhoover, meaning \"to help\": Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, 46\u201347.\n\n\"Hooverize when it comes to loving you!\": Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, 59\u201360.\n\nwould ever shed their murderous ways: Selig Adler, The Uncertain Giant: 1921\u20131941; American Foreign Policy Between the Wars (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 126.\n\nthey could not process all the mail: Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), 160.\n\ndestroyers, cruisers, and submarines: O'Brien, British and American Naval Power, 212\u201314.\n\n\"until she has to be thrashed again\": Adler, Uncertain Giant, 128\u201329; Cohen, Empire Without Tears, 104\u20135; Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919\u20131933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 589\u201391; Henry Blumenthal, Illusion and Reality in Franco-American Diplomacy 1914\u20131945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 158\u201359.\n\nthe Reichstag's second-largest party: Steiner, Lights That Failed, 642; E.J. Feuchtwanger, From Weimar to Hitler: Germany, 1918\u20131933 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 337.\n\nwhich Versailles explicitly banned: Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919\u20131933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 235.\n\n\"I never did\": Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 108.\n\nby a young hypernationalist: Steel, Walter Lippmann, 288; Adler, Uncertain Giant, 140\u201341; Wilfrid Fleisher, \"Premier Is Shot by Tokyo Fanatic; Feared to Be Dying,\" New York Times, November 14, 1930, 1; James B. Crowley, Japan's Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930\u20131938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 78.\n\narmy and navy were firmly in control: Crowley, Japan's Quest for Autonomy, 168\u201375.\n\nJapan walked out: Myung Soo Cha, \"Did Takahashi Korekiyo Rescue Japan from the Great Depression?\" Journal of Economic History 63 (2003): 127\u201344; Adler, Uncertain Giant, 146.\n\n\"peace among other nations by force\": Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, 205; Elting E. Morrison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 382; Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Row, 1948), 244; J. Chalmers Vinson, \"Military Force and American Policy, 1919\u20131939,\" 57.\n\ndid not commission a single new warship: Cohen, Empire Without Tears, 106.\n\narmaments be cut by at least a quarter: Steiner, Lights That Failed, 781.\n\ntaken to the White House by police escort: Associated Press, \"Says Hoover Plan Saved Arms Parley,\" New York Times, November 17, 1932, 8; Chatfield, For Peace and Justice, 161.\n\nwas downright terrifying: Steiner, Lights That Failed, 767.\n\n\"which it was not prepared to make?\": Steiner, Lights That Failed, 777; Blumenthal, Illusion and Reality, 165, 181.\n\na plurality of the vote: Cohen, Empire Without Tears, 121\u201322; Leffler, Elusive Quest, 274\u2013301; H. Arthur Steiner, \"The Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932,\" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 168 (1933): 214\u201317; Marlies Ter Borg, \"Reducing Offensive Capabilities: The Attempt of 1932,\" Journal of Peace Research 29 (1992): 147\u201353; Blumenthal, Illusion and Reality, 180\u201387.\n\nand raised it to the wind: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932\u20131945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 336; Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 41\u201342; Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 152; Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion and the War Against Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xxiii.\n\nthen becoming governor of New York: Blum, Progressive Presidents, 108\u20139; Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 40, 42; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 8.\n\na potential German threat: Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 50; Willard Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt's World Order (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1959), 20; Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 383\u201394; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 9\u201310.\n\n\"handing out to a gullible public\": Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 9\u201310.\n\n\"merely a beautiful dream, a Utopia\": Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt's World Order, 29, 31, 168.\n\nessential to a nation's power: Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 71\u201372, 123; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 7\u20138; Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations, 411; Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Seapower upon History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890).\n\nevery summer from ages seven to fifteen: Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 102; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 3.\n\nthe Western Hemisphere would offer no refuge: Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 389.\n\nurging louder cheering at football games: Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 164\u201365.\n\nher former assistant, Lucy Mercer: Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 291\u201393; James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), 84, 155; Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007), 153, 159; Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 96; \"Livingston Davis Commits Suicide,\" New York Times, January 12, 1932, 18.\n\nclassmates called him behind his back: Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 152.\n\nparalyzed from the waist down by polio: Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 648\u201350. In 2003, in the Journal of Medical Biography, several medical experts speculated that, in fact, FDR's disease may have been not polio, but Guillain-Barr\u00e9 syndrome. Armond S. Goldman, Elisabeth J. Schmalstieg, Daniel H. Freeman, Jr., Daniel A Goldman, and Frank C Schmalstieg, Jr., \"What Was the Cause of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Paralytic Illness?\" Journal of Medical Biography 11 (2003): 232\u201340.\n\n\"a medieval torture chamber\": Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 668\u201369.\n\nthen, somehow, found it again: Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 655.\n\n\"twice-born man\": Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, 669, 677\u201378, 680.\n\nLivingston Davis, shot himself: \"Livingston Davis Commits Suicide,\" 18.\n\ndefend America's home waters: Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt's World Order, 95; Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 54\u201355; Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 19; Adler, Uncertain Giant, 152\u201353, 157; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 15\u201316, 54, 75.\n\n\"intellectual parents of the New Deal\": Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 133; Kennedy, Charles A. Beard and American Foreign Policy, 73.\n\nretreat at the first sign of foreign resistance: Blumenthal, Illusion and Reality, 183, 223; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 292\u201393, 302\u20135, 378.\n\na naval blockade if he refused: Fromkin, In The Time of the Americans, 335\u201336; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 102\u20133.\n\n\"preserve our own oasis of liberty\": Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 386.\n\nhurled essentially the same charge: Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 388; Adler, Uncertain Giant, 160\u201366; Richard W. Leopold, \"The Problem with American Intervention, 1917: An Historical Retrospect,\" World Politics 2 (1950): 412\u201313, 418\u201320; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 102; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 377.\n\nUS intervention in World War I a mistake: Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 394; Hadley Cantril, Public Opinion, 1935\u20131946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 201.\n\nthey did so at their own risk: Adler, The Uncertain Giant, 173\u201375, 182.\n\n\"I also learned much of what not to do\": Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 152.\n\nensure a reelection landslide: Jane Karoline Vieth, \"The Diplomacy of the Depression,\" in Modern American Diplomacy, ed. John M. Carroll and George C. Herring (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 88.\n\n\"Western Hemisphere will not be attacked\": Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 16.\n\nabout an international \"quarantine\": Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 17\u201318; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 148.\n\nCongress threatened impeachment: Adler, Uncertain Giant, 190; Vieth, \"The Diplomacy of the Depression,\" 91.\n\nscreamed the Wall Street Journal: Travis Beal Jacobs has argued that, contrary to early historical interpretations, popular reaction to the quarantine speech was not particularly negative. But there is no doubt that the speech stirred isolationist anger, and rightly or wrongly, FDR interpreted that isolationism as the dominant public mood. Travis Beal Jacobs, \"Roosevelt's 'Quarantine Speech,'\" Historian 24 (1962): 488. See also Dorothy Borg, \"Notes on Roosevelt's 'Quarantine' Speech,\" Political Science Quarterly 72 (1957): 405\u201333.\n\n\"even hostile and resentful ears\": Kissinger, Diplomacy, 379.\n\nexcept in cases of foreign attack: Adler, Uncertain Giant, 195\u201396; Chatfield, For Peace and Justice, 283\u201385; Vinson, \"Military Force and American Policy, 1919\u20131939,\" 80.\n\n\"trying to lead and to find no one there\": Vieth, \"The Diplomacy of the Depression,\" 91\u201392; Burns and Dunn, The Three Roosevelts, 357.\n\noffering only the mildest of protests: Vieth, \"The Diplomacy of the Depression,\" 92.\n\n\"of whom we know nothing\": Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 884.\n\nMoscow would not act alone: Blumenthal, Illusion and Reality, 242\u201343; Taylor, Munich, 99\u2013102.\n\nDaladier replied, \"With what?\": Kissinger, Diplomacy, 293, 302\u20133, 308\u20139; Blumenthal, Illusion and Reality, 243\u201344.\n\nlacked the planes to defend London: Taylor, Munich, 801\u20132, 807, 835\u201338; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 312\u201314.\n\na two-word cable: \"Good man\": Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 161\u201366; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 314; Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 21; Vieth, \"The Diplomacy of the Depression,\" 94.\n\ntheir fate and Europe's were intertwined: Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 25; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 383.\n\nEvents would have to speak for themselves: For FDR, writes the historian Robert Dallek, America \"would have to enter the fighting with a minimum of doubt and dissent, and the way to achieve this was not through educational talks to the public or strong Executive action, but through developments abroad which aroused the country to fight.\" Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 267. John Milton Cooper adds that \"the chief lesson Roosevelt drew from Wilson was not to pitch his appeals to people too high or to expect too much in the way of educating the public. The deviousness and self-deception in his policies toward the warring powers from 1939 through 1941 reflected that lesson.\" Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 360\u201361.\n\nBritain and France decided to fight: Divine, Second Chance, 29.\n\n\"picking up again an interrupted routine\": Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 197\u201398; Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 484\u201388.\n\n\"ruled by force in the hands of a few\": Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 199, 215; Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 489.\n\ncarried them away in their own ships: Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 29.\n\n\"unpitying masters of other continents\": Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 31.\n\n\"she was expecting salvation\": Blumenthal, Illusion and Reality, 260\u201361.\n\nhad surrendered twenty-two years before: Cantril, Public Opinion, 1935\u20131946, 971\u201372; Adler, Uncertain Giant, 229.\n\nmilitary bases in the Western Hemisphere: Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 33\u201335.\n\nwhich essentially provided them for free: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 248\u201349, 255\u201360.\n\nwas now a rabid isolationist: Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations, 379.\n\nprevent them from falling into Nazi hands: Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14; Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 527; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 245; Blum, The Progressive Presidents, 149; Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 43; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 389\u201390.\n\nhe had already decided to enter the war: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 530; Casey, Cautious Crusade, 11, 14\u201315.\n\nwould return to haunt the nation: Adler, Uncertain Giant, 259; Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 48\u201349; Cantril, Public Opinion, 1935\u20131946, 977; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 285\u201386.\n\n\"control and domination of the seas\": Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 44.\n\n\" from the effects of a Nazi victory\": Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations, 425.\n\ncutting off Tokyo's supply of oil: Walter LaFeber, The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations (New York: Norton, 1997), 192\u2013200.\n\nwould unify the country behind war: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 303\u201310.\n\n\"than he had appeared in a long time\": Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 311.\n\nfew epithets were worse: Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 193\u201394.\n\n\"as effectively as that can be done\": Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 149.\n\nend up in the same place politically: Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 35\u201336, 55\u201356.\n\nthe same phrase FDR's uncle had applied to him: Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Free Press, 1962), 300.\n\n\" it is still a civilization\": Justus D. Doenecke, \"Reinhold Niebuhr and His Critics: The Interventionist Controversy in World War II,\" Anglican and Episcopal History 64 (1995): 461.\n\nwhether democracy could ever really work: See, for instance, Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion! (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922); Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993); and Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).\n\n\"have a very good mind\": Steel, Walter Lippmann, 291, 382.\n\nDewey felt he was reliving a nightmare: Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 512; Howlett, Troubled Philosopher, 145.\n\nBeard wrote to a friend: Kennedy, Charles Beard and American Foreign Policy, 93, 105, 120\u201321, 126\u201327, 152.\n\n\"what is beginning is too much for me\": Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 512.\n\n\"because it is not pure enough\": Richard W. Fox, \"Reinhold Niebuhr and the Emergence of the Liberal Realist Faith, 1930\u20131945,\" Review of Politics 38 (1976): 257\u201358.\n\n\"tyranny, sadism, and human defilement\": Nore, Charles A. Beard, 183, 200.\n\nFDR's foreign policy a Jewish plot: Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 265; W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Scribner, 1965), 461\u201365.\n\nChapter 4: I Didn't Say It Was Good\n\nthe most expensive film yet made: Thomas J. Knock, \"'History with Lightning': The Forgotten Film Wilson,\" American Quarterly 29 (1976): 529.\n\ntribute to the former president: Divine, Second Chance, 57, 168, 213.\n\neven made him seem friendly: Knock, \"'History with Lightning,'\" 535, 538.\n\nhis blood pressure spiked to 240 over 130: FDR saw the movie while meeting with Churchill in Quebec. Divine, Second Chance, 169\u201370; Knock, To End All Wars, 272; John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), 8; United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Conference at Quebec, 1944 (1944), http:\/\/digicoll.library.wisc.edu\/cgi-bin\/FRUS\/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1944&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=292; Howard G. Bruenn, \"Clinical Notes on the Illness and Death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt,\" Annals of Internal Medicine 72 (1970): 587.\n\n\"somewhere within the rim of his consciousness\": Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), 227.\n\nit was the twenty-sixth: Forrest Davis, a journalist FDR repeatedly took into his confidence, says this outright: \"In his management of foreign affairs, Franklin Roosevelt follows more closely the path of his distant cousin, Theodore, than of Woodrow Wilson.\" Forrest Davis, \"Roosevelt's World Blueprint,\" Saturday Evening Post, April 10, 1943, 110.\n\nbetween America, Britain, and France: William Clinton Olson, \"Theodore Roosevelt's Conception of an International League,\" World Affairs Quarterly 29 (1959): 346; Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 333.\n\n\"to be realistic\": Divine, Second Chance, 43\u201344; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 359\u201360.\n\nwould control the Asian mainland: Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesmen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 86; Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt's World Order, 178; Robert L. Messer, \"World War II and the Coming of the Cold War,\" in Modern American Diplomacy, ed. Carroll and Herring, 125\u2013126.\n\n\"too many nations to satisfy\": George Schild, \"The Roosevelt Administration and the United Nations: Re-Creation or Rejection of the League Experience?\" World Affairs 158 (1995): 29. The descriptions of Molotov are Churchill's. Raymond H. Anderson, \"A Lifetime of History: Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Close Associate of Stalin, Is Dead in Moscow at 96,\" New York Times, November 11, 1986, B1, B7.\n\n\"the military force to uphold it\": Davis, \"Roosevelt's World Blueprint,\" 20, 110.\n\nwhich nations should exist, and where: The State Department, at the urging of Undersecretary Sumner Welles (one of the strongest Wilsonians in the Roosevelt administration), did launch a postwar planning effort involving regional experts inside and outside government, but it had far less impact given Roosevelt's realist proclivities.\n\nas much at Newfoundland: Schild, \"The Roosevelt Administration and the United Nations,\" 30; Divine, Second Chance, 43\u201344; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 359\u201360.\n\nby 1944, 72 percent did: Divine, Second Chance, 68; Knock, \"'History with Lightning,'\" 540.\n\n\"blow off steam\": Divine, Second Chance, 158; Kimball, The Juggler, 86.\n\nrespiratory problems and in chronic pain: Kimball, The Juggler, 88, 238.\n\ndemanding that they call it a sheep: Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 603.\n\nmost powerful player in Eastern Europe: Messer, \"World War II and the Coming of the Cold War,\" 118, 124\u201325.\n\nrevolt against the additional loss of life: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 6\u20137; Messer, \"World War II and the Coming of the Cold War,\" 111; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 433\u201334.\n\nto defeat Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo: Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, 390.\n\nin his upcoming reelection bid: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 436; Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 92.\n\n\"and we reject it\": Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 439.\n\n\"in favour of the great\": Schild, \"The Roosevelt Administration and the United Nations,\" 31; Leland M. Goodrich, \"From League of Nations to United Nations,\" International Organization 1 (1947), 8\u201310; Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, 66; Evan Luard, A History of The United Nations, Volume 1: The Years of Western Domination, 1945\u20131955 (New York: St. Martin's, 1982), 44.\n\nthe body afforded large nations: Divine, Second Chance, 196\u201399.\n\n\"Hull knows the whole story\": Forrest Davis, \"What Really Happened at Teheran,\" 46; Divine, Second Chance, 201.\n\n\"Americans might be shocked\": Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 59; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 479; Joseph M. Siracusa, \"The Night Stalin and Churchill Divided Europe: The View from Washington,\" Review of Politics 43 (1981): 381\u2013409; Kimball, The Juggler, 162.\n\n\"as they affect sentiment in America\": Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 599; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 503; Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 54\u201357.\n\nrarely challenged his postwar efforts: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 483\u201384; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 516, 528\u201329; Divine, Second Chance, 219; John Foster Dulles, War or Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 124\u201325.\n\n\"the almost ravaged appearance of his face\": Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 442, 481.\n\nwrapped himself in a large cape to stay warm: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 508; Burns, Roosevelt, 564.\n\nManchuria and northern China: Messer, \"World War II and the Coming of the Cold War,\" 133.\n\nmake decisions by majority vote: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 466\u201367; Kimball, The Juggler, 98; Divine, Second Chance, 276.\n\nexiled prewar Polish leadership in London: Melvyn P. Leffler, \"Adherence to Agreements: Yalta and the Experiences of the Early Cold War,\" International Security 11 (1986): 94\u201395; Jaime Reynolds, \"Communists, Socialists and Workers: Poland 1944\u20131948,\" Soviet Studies 30 (1978): 517.\n\n\"but in fact she had her sins\": LaFeber, The American Age, 439\u201340; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 516; Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 10.\n\n\"and have always failed\": Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 618; Franklin D. Roosevelt, \"Address to Congress on Yalta,\" March 1, 1945, http:\/\/millercenter.org\/scripps\/archive\/speeches\/detail\/3338.\n\nRoosevelt did not want a public row: Richard F. Staar, \"Elections in Communist Poland,\" Midwest Journal of Political Science 2 (1958): 202\u20133; Reynolds, \"Communists, Socialists and Workers,\" 519\u201322; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 524\u201325; Kimball, The Juggler, 176\u201378.\n\n\"in an admittedly imperfect world\": Franklin D. Roosevelt, \"State of the Union Address,\" January 6, 1945, http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/index.php?pid=16595.\n\nmore than twenty-six years earlier: Divine, Second Chance, 277; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 528; Burns, Roosevelt, 600.\n\nopening ceremony of the United Nations: Divine, Second Chance, 287; John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 5.\n\nkept their colonial possessions: Divine, Second Chance, 297; UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948, http:\/\/www.un.org\/Overview\/rights.html.\n\ndeferred seating Russia's puppet government: Divine, Second Chance, 290.\n\n\"other is Franklin D. Roosevelt\": Divine, Second Chance, 311.\n\nsparked no cheering or applause: Divine, Second Chance, 290, 311\u201314.\n\nkilling eighty thousand in a single night: Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945\u20131953 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 92\u201393.\n\nimprisoned for most of the war: LaFeber, The American Age, 406; Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese-Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 250.\n\n\"I said it was the best I could do\": Divine, Second Chance, 285, 297; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 521.\n\nnot reading highbrow journals: Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), 319\u201320.\n\n\"to atomic war\": Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 1\u20132.\n\n\"the Christian doctrine of original sin\": Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1944), 16.\n\nto see the past in prelapsarian terms: It was during the 1920s, after all, that Sigmund Freud made his American splash. Among the many U.S. intellectuals he influenced during that decade was Walter Lippmann, whose extremely influential books about public irrationality hardly brimmed with optimism about the human condition. See Steel, Walter Lippmann, 173, 262; and Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 146\u201347, on Freud's influence on 1920s intellectual life.\n\ntragedy about the human condition: Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 358; Kevin Mattson, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 34\u201335.\n\n\"unwarranted optimism about man\": Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 40.\n\nresist the Nazis nonetheless: I am grateful to Professor Casey Blake for the analogy. Norman Graebner makes a similar point in The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 4.\n\nmight not have won the war?: Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 653\u201358, 666; Graebner, The Age of Doubt, 51.\n\n\"necessary for human conduct\": Mortimer J. Adler, \"This Pre-War Generation,\" Harper's, October 1940, http:\/\/radicalacademy.com\/adlerprewargeneration.htm.\n\n\"good and bad, right and wrong\": Mortimer J. Adler, \"God and the Professors,\" Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion (1941), http:\/\/radicalacademy.com\/adlergodprofessors.htm; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 518.\n\nits confrontations with the old world: Joel H. Rosenthal, Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 2\u20137; Greg Russell, Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 62, 66; Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 219\u201320; William E. Scheuerman, \"Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond,\" in Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations, ed. Michael C. Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 62\u201377; Richard Little, \"The Balance of Power in Politics Among Nations,\" in Realism Reconsidered, ed. Williams, 153\u201354.\n\n\"cured by means of reason\": Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 71.\n\nincurable lust for power: Ghazi A. R. Algosaibi, \"The Theory of International Relations: Hans Morgenthau and His Critics,\" in Realism Reconsidered, ed. Williams, 229, 240.\n\ncourts that ruled aggression illegal: Morgenthau, Scientific Man, 50\u201351.\n\nmoral norms it did not uphold itself: Divine, Second Chance, 180\u201381; Steel, Walter Lippmann, 405, 426.\n\n\"not at all what I always knew\": Walter Lippmann, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (New York: Pocket, 1943), viii.\n\nate most of his meals alone: Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Touchstone, 1986), 76\u201378, 228; Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 24\u201326.\n\nthey conjured the mother he had never had: Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 140, 145, 147, 153, 165, 227; Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 101.\n\n\"not a member of its household\": Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 74.\n\nunelected wise men like, well, himself: On Kennan's prejudices, see Joshua Botts, \"'Nothing to Seek and...Nothing to Defend': George F. Kennan's Core Values and American Foreign Policy, 1938\u20131993,\" Diplomatic History 30 (2006): 839\u201366.\n\nits own circumstances and needs: Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 147\u201351; Rosenthal, Righteous Realists, 25\u201326.\n\nan intimate understanding of the participants: Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 170.\n\nwhen it meets with some unanswerable force\": X, \"The Sources of Soviet Conduct,\" Foreign Affairs 25 (1947): 574.\n\nwas losing patience with Moscow: See Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 550\u2013551; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 14\u201315; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., \"Origins of the Cold War,\" Foreign Affairs 46 (1967): 24. For an opposing view, see Kimball, The Juggler, 180; Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, 73\u201379.\n\nlarge and brutal neighbor: John Lewis Gaddis, \"Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point?\" Foreign Affairs 52 (1974): 388.\n\nthe challenges he would face: Offner, Another Such Victory, 22\u201325.\n\n\"are the one in trouble now\": Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, ix.\n\nin the war as had the United States: Gaddis, The Cold War, 9.\n\nbegan to get tough: Messer, \"World War II and the Coming of the Cold War,\" 128\u201329.\n\n\"the straight one-two to the jaw\": Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, 137. In recent years, some historians have suggested that in his memoirs Truman exaggerated how tough he actually was on Molotov during their April 1945 meeting. See Geoffrey Roberts, \"Sexing Up the Cold War: New Evidence on the Molotov-Truman Talks of April 1945,\" Cold War History 4 (2004): 105\u201325. More generally, Wilson Miscamble has argued that Truman's hard line evolved more slowly and fitfully than traditional accounts suggest. From Roosevelt to Truman, 87\u2013332. But regardless of the speed at which the change occurred, there is no question that U.S. policy toward the U.S.S.R. grew tougher over the course of 1945.\n\nbread and a pistol under his pillow: \"Gun No. 242332,\" Time, September 12, 1955, http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,893108,00.html.\n\nthe longest ever sent from the embassy in Moscow: Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 99; Walter L. Hixson, George Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 32; Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, 279.\n\nwe were now it: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 18\u201320, 380.\n\nnot one postwar world, but two: Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 100; Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992), 272; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 56.\n\nhe was speaking entirely metaphorically: Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 472; Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, 70\u201371.\n\ninflaming the Germans: Mary N. Hampton, \"NATO at the Creation: U.S. Foreign Policy, West Germany and the Wilsonian Impulse,\" Security Studies 4 (1995): 619\u201320.\n\nEurope's suffering to its advantage: Beisner, Dean Acheson, 69\u201371, 76\u201389.\n\n\" facts which momentarily imprison them\": Mary S. McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 65, 160; Smith, Realist Thought, 113\u201314, 130; Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 59.\n\nFDR created a sleeping beauty: Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans, 647.\n\nPART II: THE HUBRIS OF TOUGHNESS\n\nChapter 5: The Murder of Sheep\n\nSecretary of State George Marshall: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 61; Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 272; Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947\u20131950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 218.\n\na man they didn't really know at all: Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 15, 36\u201347.\n\n\"we also laughed at Hitler\": Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 266\u201369.\n\nthat Stalin, like Hitler, wanted a world war: Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 275; Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 109\u201310.\n\n\"Lenin's religion-philosophy\": Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 110\u201311; Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 280.\n\nState Department's Policy Planning staff: Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 278; Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 10.\n\nthe byline read simply \"By X\": Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 113; X, \"The Sources of Soviet Conduct,\" 566\u201382; George Kennan, Memoirs 1925\u201350 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1967), 354\u201358.\n\nfriends began calling her \"Miss X\": Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 276; Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 64, 66; Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 75\u201376.\n\nto undermine Soviet control in Eastern Europe: Gregory Mitrovitch, Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947\u20131956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 5\u201346.\n\nunnecessary and probably counterproductive: Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 153\u201355.\n\nla guerre froide, the cold war: Steel, Walter Lippmann, 444\u201345.\n\n\"both in money and military power\": Walter Lippmann, The Cold War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 22\u201323.\n\n\"many views with which I profoundly agreed\": Steel, Walter Lippmann, 445; Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 78.\n\ntoo much publicity already, refused: Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 68.\n\nthe columnist had gotten his views all wrong: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 79; Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 67; Kennan, Memoirs 1925\u20131950, 359\u201362.\n\nsimilar pledges in other corners of the globe: Robert Jervis, \"The Impact of the Korean War on the Cold War,\" Journal of Conflict Resolution 24 (1980): 574.\n\nKennan's insistence on containment's geographic limits: Melvyn P. Leffler, Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 304\u201311.\n\nslashed military spending by 15 percent: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 91; Jervis, \"The Impact of the Korean War on the Cold War,\" 568.\n\nAnd this time, America passed: Offner, Another Such Victory, 138\u201343; Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 321\u201334.\n\nto defend Greece or Turkey, either: Beisner, Dean Acheson, 54.\n\nthe Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East: Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 123\u2013124, 143; Beisner, Dean Acheson, 39.\n\ncome to Greece and Turkey's aid: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 71.\n\nKennan pleaded in a memo to his superiors: Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 349.\n\nregained their foreign policy edge: Offner, Another Such Victory, 201\u20139; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, 46, 57, 127.\n\nan upset reelection victory that fall: Offner, Another Such Victory, 254\u201366.\n\n\"a whole new approach to the affairs of the world\": Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 217.\n\nDavies, a man rather similar to himself: Kennan openly admitted this, saying that Davies was responsible for \"whatever insight I was able to muster in those years into the nature of Soviet policies toward the Far East.\" Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 215\u201316.\n\nDavies was the first person he hired: Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 213, 218; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 384; Kahn, The China Hands, 54.\n\n\"control of the communist movement\": Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 173. In Moscow, as Soviet archives would later reveal, Stalin was already worrying about exactly that. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, 56.\n\n\"pouring sand in a rat hole\": Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 307\u20138; Offner, Another Such Victory, 200.\n\ndemanded that the latter be brought in line: See, for instance, Richard Freeland's account of a congressional hearing on March 20, 1947, in which Representative James Fulton of Pennsylvania repeatedly tried to get Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson to promise that American policy in China would abide by the principles laid out in Truman's Greece and Turkey speech. Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and Internal Security, 1946\u20131948 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 112\u201313.\n\nbillions in economic and military aid to Chiang: Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 179.\n\nMao did not pose a grave threat: Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 227.\n\nthen it hit him: treason!: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 117.\n\nhad been cut in half: Ernest R. May, \"Lessons\" of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 78\u201379.\n\n\"with a Harvard accent\": Beisner, Dean Acheson, 307.\n\n\"the Communists took over in China\": Geoffrey S. Smith, \"National Security and Personal Isolation: Sex, Gender and Disease in the Cold War United States,\" International History Review 14 (1992): 319; Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 66; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 240.\n\nthat they would not defend Seoul: Beisner, Dean Acheson, 326\u201328; Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, Volume II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947\u20131950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 420\u201327; William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 30.\n\n\"Iran, Berlin and Greece\": May, \"Lessons\" of the Past, 77, 81\u201382.\n\n\"continue to take responsibility for it\": Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 324; Stueck, The Korean War, 61, 63; Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 119.\n\n\"suspicious foreign government\": Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 326; Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 123.\n\nto do just that: Chen Jia, \"The Sino-Soviet Alliance and China's Entry into the Korean War,\" working paper of the Cold War History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, D.C., 1991; Michael Hunt, \"Beijing and the Korea Crisis,\" Political Science Quarterly (1992): 453\u201378.\n\nhis men would be home by Christmas: Stueck, The Korean War, 93\u201394, 97\u2013103; Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 123; Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945\u20131975 (New York: Wiley, 1976), 121\u201322; Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 327.\n\nTruman fired him: Stueck, The Korean War, 167\u201368; David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 597\u2013606.\n\n\"the Munich conference in 1938\": Goran Rystad, Prisoners of the Past? The Munich Syndrome and Makers of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War Era (Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, 1982), 37; David McLellan, \"Dean Acheson and the Korean War,\" Political Science Quarterly 83 (1969): 32.\n\nflooded with pro-MacArthur mail: LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 128; Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908\u20131960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 398\u2013399.\n\nhadn't wrecked America's economy: Alan Brinkley, Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (New York: Knopf, 1993), 817.\n\n\"not do if it wanted to do it\": Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 92.\n\nwould not rise significantly as a percentage of GNP: Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 355\u201360; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 88, 91.\n\nwithin the United States itself: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 95, 111.\n\nboth to others and to ourselves: On the idea of credibility, and its importance to American foreign policymakers, see Robert J. McMahon, \"Credibility and World Power: Exploring the Psychological Dimension in Postwar American Diplomacy,\" Stuart L. Bernath Memorial Lecture, Diplomatic History 15 (1991), 455\u201371; Daryl G. Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Ted Hopf, Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965\u20131990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).\n\n\"in each and every one of us\": Gaddis, The Cold War, 46.\n\napplied them only to the other side: National Security Council, \"NSC\u201368: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,\" April 14, 1950, http:\/\/www.fas.org\/irp\/offdocs\/nsc-hst\/nsc\u201368.htm.\n\nsedatives, tranquilizers, and shots of insulin: Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 440, 450\u201351, 460.\n\nhe turns the sword on himself: Sophocles, Ajax, trans. John Tipton (Chicago: Flood, 2008).\n\nwith a thud, thirteen floors below: Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 465.\n\nwhen he entered a room: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 381.\n\ninto the U.S. government: Hixson, George Kennan, 164\u201365; Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 202, 205; Kahn, The China Hands, 244\u201346; Michael T. Kaufman, \"John Paton Davies, Diplomat Who Ran Afoul of McCarthy over China, Dies at 91,\" New York Times, December 24, 1999, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1999\/12\/24\/world\/john-paton-davies-diplomat-who-ran-afoul-of-mccarthy-over-china-dies-at\u201391.html.\n\nsustaining his family by building furniture: Kahn, The China Hands, 258, 261\u201362; Hixson, George Kennan, 167; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 381.\n\n\"to be of much practical use to you\": Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 277\u201378.\n\nChapter 6: The Problem with Men\n\nit does nothing for eight years: Herbert S. Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999), xiii, xvii.\n\n\"the sacrifice to capture a worthless objective\": Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 87\u201388, 96\u201397, 181, 189\u201392, 270.\n\nthe least lamentable casualty of war: Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, 629\u201330; John E. Mueller, \"Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam,\" American Political Science Review 65, no. 2 (1971): 360\u201361; William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 157.\n\nshould cede much of the combat to South Koreans: Robert A. Divine, Foreign Policy and U.S. Presidential Elections, 1952\u20131960 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974), 10, 45\u201346, 53\u201354, 71, 74, 80.\n\n\"the contest ended that night\": Elie Abel, \"General in Pledge, First Task Would Be Early and Honorable End of the War,\" New York Times, October 25, 1952, A1; Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades, 143; Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 18\u201319; Halberstam, The Coldest Winter, 626.\n\nwhere it had been when the war began: Roger Dingman, \"Atomic Diplomacy During the Korean War,\" International Security 13, no. 3 (1988\/1989): 85\u201388; Ambrose, Eisenhower, 294\u2013295, 327\u2013331; Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War, 171\u2013181; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, 71, 155; Stueck, The Korean War, 224, 302; Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, 27\u201331; Philip West, \"Review: Interpreting the Korean War,\" American Historical Review 94, no. 1 (1989): 80.\n\n\"bills at the local department store\": Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 132.\n\nEisenhower's policies on national defense: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 162, 169; Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (New York: Penguin, 1997), 131; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 40.\n\nsupposedly kept Latin leaders in power: John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Irvin R. Dee, 2006), 99\u2013123, 166\u201383, 215, 275\u201380, 432; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 94, 171\u201372; Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006), 136\u201338.\n\n\"blow the hell out of them\": Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 167\u201370, 199\u2013202; Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 52, 78\u2013107; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 147, 167, 169.\n\nprevent both sides from taking the first step: Craig, Destroying the Village, 52\u2013118.\n\nor worse later, refused: George C. Herring and Richard H. Immerman, \"Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dienbienphu: 'The Day We Didn't Go to War' Revisited,\" Journal of American History 71 (1984): 343\u201363.\n\nU.S. forces were gone: Gordon H. Chang, \"To the Nuclear Brink: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis,\" International Security 12, no. 4 (1988): 96\u2013123; H. W. Brands, Jr., \"Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management in the Taiwan Strait,\" International Security 12, no. 4 (1988): 124\u201351; Leonard H. D. Gordon, \"United States Opposition to the Use of Force in the Taiwan Strait, 1954\u20131962,\" Journal of American History 72, no. 3 (1985): 637\u201360; Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, 55\u201366, 97\u2013104; Ambrose, Eisenhower, 469.\n\nthe war a mistake fell by 15 points: Stephen G. Rabe, \"Eisenhower Revisionism,\" Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (1993): 100; Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 114.\n\nhorrors that made them old before their time: Bell, The End of Ideology.\n\n\"the unromantic realm of more-or-less\": Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 138, 140.\n\nthey had experienced almost ceaseless boom: John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941\u20131960 (New York: Norton, 1988), 345; Diane Kunz, Butter and Guns: America's Cold War Economic Diplomacy (New York: Free Press, 1997), 66; The Misery Index, \"The U.S. Inflation Rate, 1950\u20131960,\" http:\/\/www.miseryindex.us\/iRbyyear.asp?StartYear=1950&EndYear=1960.\n\n\"malaise of the privileged\": Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, 240.\n\n\"and a search for passion\": Bell, The End of Ideology, 404, 300.\n\njunior senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., \"The Crisis of American Masculinity,\" in The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 292\u201393, 295, 303.\n\n\"were days of intense physical pain\": Edward J. Renehan, Jr., The Kennedys at War, 1937\u20131945 (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 7\u20138; John Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 9; Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 309\u201312. On Kennedy's poor health, see Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917\u20131963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), 85\u201388, 100\u20135, 397\u201399, 704\u20136.\n\n\"when he really wasn't\": Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 354; Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession, 9; Thomas, Robert Kennedy, 39; Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 7, 220.\n\nAnd he went to war: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 162.\n\nthe coconut shell in a case on his desk: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 82\u201388, 95\u201398; Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 223, 256\u201371.\n\nthe real purpose of world affairs: making money: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 21; Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 34, 63, 142.\n\nof succumbing to pressure from Jews: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 54; Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 16, 24, 45, 71, 105, 142.\n\nstay in London with the nation's men: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 80, 117\u201318, 160, 175.\n\nCommittee Against Military Intervention in Europe: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 73, 74, 91\u201392, 182.\n\nthe form of government most likely to survive: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 92, 138.\n\n\"don't want to take sides too much\": Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 139.\n\ncalling his book Why England Slept: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 139, 153\u201354; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 65; John D. Fair, \"The Intellectual JFK: Lessons in Statesmanship from British History,\" Diplomatic History 30, no. 1 (2006), 129\u201330.\n\nclear his and his father's names: Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession, 21. Arthur Krock claimed that Joe Jr. \"was seeking to prove by its [his mission's] very danger that the Kennedys were not yellow. That's what killed that boy.... And his father realized it.\" Ronald Steel, In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 33.\n\ncowardice, if not treason: Renehan, The Kennedys at War, 254.\n\nnot the United States: John Noble Wilford, \"With Fear and Wonder in Its Wake, Sputnik Lifted Us into the Future,\" New York Times, September 25, 2007, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/09\/25\/science\/space\/25sput.html.\n\nscience labs to math teachers: Brinkley, Unfinished Nation, 885\u201386; LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 203.\n\nnowhere near as many ICBMs: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 182\u201386; David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower and the Cold War (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1999), 154\u201356, 180\u201381; Peter J. Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 118\u201340.\n\n\"the politics of fatigue\": Schlesinger, \"The New Mood in Politics,\" in The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage, 109.\n\nprime minister who had preceded Chamberlain: William V. Shannon, \"Eisenhower as President,\" Commentary 26, no. 5 (1958): 398.\n\n\"like a man, can grow soft and complacent\": Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Walker, 2001), 223.\n\nJack relished the line: Elie Abel, \"Stevenson Called Appeaser by Nixon,\" New York Times, October 17, 1952, 19; Thomas G. Paterson, \"Bearing the Burden: A Critical Look at JFK's Foreign Policy,\" Virginia Quarterly Review 54 (1978): 196; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 160, 259.\n\n\"have the largest rockets in the world\": Robert Dean, \"Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy,\" Diplomatic History 22, no. 1 (1998): 45\u201346.\n\n\"lack of physical fitness is a menace to our security\": John F. Kennedy, \"The Soft American,\" Sports Illustrated, December 26, 1960, www.ihpra.org\/soft_american.htm.\n\n\"the best of our energies and abilities\": John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 201, quoted in Dean, \"Masculinity as Ideology,\" 29; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 232.\n\nIke's soft, grandfatherly game: Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 70; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 198; Dean, \"Masculinity as Ideology,\" 47; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 183; Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 471\u201372; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 472.\n\nhe wore thermal underwear: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 241.\n\n\"by a hard and bitter peace\": John F. Kennedy, \"Inaugural Address,\" January 20, 1961, http:\/\/www.jfklibrary.org\/Historical+Resources\/Archives\/Reference+Desk\/Speeches\/JFK\/003POF03Inaugural01201961.htm.\n\n\"From Innocence to Engagement\": McGeorge Bundy, \"Foreign Policy: From Innocence to Engagement,\" in Paths of American Thought, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Morton White (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 293\u2013308.\n\n\"the world was plastic and the future unlimited\": Paterson, \"Bearing the Burden,\" 203.\n\nDavid Halberstam called \"ultra-realists\": Ambrosius, Wilsonianism, 146; C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 313.\n\ninnocence, inaction, and mounting danger: For an example of Kennedy comparing the 1950s to the '30s, see his November 13, 1959, speech to the annual convention of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, printed in Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, 193, and quoted in Dean, \"Masculinity as Ideology,\" 45.\n\none of his paintings in the White House: Fair, \"The Intellectual JFK,\" 133, 141.\n\nfar behind: On America's military advantage over the Soviet Union when Kennedy took office, see Gareth Porter, The Perils of Dominance (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 8\u20139, 15; David Rosenberg, \"The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945\u20131960,\" International Security 7, no. 4 (1983): 27\u201371; James G. Hershberg, \"The Cuban Missile Crisis,\" in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 2: Crises and D\u00e9tente, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 66.\n\nChapter 7: Saving Sarkhan\n\nare obsessed with astrology and palm-reading: William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: Norton, 1958), 14\u201315, 69, 84\u201385, 91, 109\u201312, 116, 127, 145, 174\u201381, 187.\n\nan adviser on Cuba instead: Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale's Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 71, 191; Dean, \"Masculinity as Ideology,\" 36\u201337, 43, 49; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 172\u201379; John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 17.\n\npurposely serving him an awful lunch: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 165, 167; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 95.\n\n\"the lands of the rising people\": Ambrose and Brinkley, Rise to Globalism, 173.\n\n\"the ' future' is all that counts\": Bell, The End of Ideology, 405.\n\n\"on which so much of our destiny hinges\": Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 45.\n\n\"He tells us what he's going to do\": Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 176; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 350; David Milne, America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2008), 75; Jack Anderson with Daryl Gibson, Peace, War and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (New York: Forge, 1999), 103.\n\nto learn how not to drown: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 216; George J. W. Goodman, \"The Unconventional Warriors,\" Esquire, November 1961, 130; Dean, \"Masculinity as Ideology,\" 51, 56; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 187\u201397.\n\nlanded at the proud president's feet: Goodman, \"The Unconventional Warriors,\" 129; Dean, \"Masculinity as Ideology,\" 50; Joseph Kraft, \"Hot Weapon in the Cold War,\" Saturday Evening Post, April 28, 1961, 88; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 123\u201324; Reeves, President Kennedy, 284.\n\nAmerican-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista: J. David Truby, \"Castro's Curveball,\" Harper's, May 1989, 32\u201334.\n\nfoment Marxist revolution across the Americas: Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 241, 249; Prados, Safe for Democracy, 236\u201342, 265; Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 124\u201327; Reeves, President Kennedy, 69\u201370.\n\ninvading Cuba would sabotage that effort: Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 124.\n\n\"Operation Castration\": Thomas, The Very Best Men, 237; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 362; Skip Willman, \"The Kennedys, Fleming, and Cuba,\" in Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, ed. Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt, and Skip Willman (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 178, 193; Dean, \"Masculinity as Ideology,\" 48.\n\n\"a shift from defensive reaction to initiative\": Thomas, The Very Best Men, 251; Reeves, President Kennedy, 72; Paterson, \"Bearing the Burden,\" 195\u201396.\n\nhe would face a firestorm on his right: Reeves, President Kennedy, 71. Historians are divided over whether Eisenhower, had he still been in office, would have approved the Bay of Pigs operation. Several of his comments to Kennedy before and after the invasion were quite hawkish. Also, having sent U.S. Marines into Lebanon in 1958, Eisenhower was not opposed to military interventions in the third world. Yet he also demonstrated caution during the Dien Bien Phu and Quemoy-Matsu crises. Further, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, he reportedly cautioned Kennedy against future military intervention. Ambrose, Eisenhower, 385, 553\u201354; Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, 65; Prados, Safe for Democracy, 264.\n\n\"appeaser of Castro\": Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 358.\n\nto try to dissuade Kennedy: Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 148; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 67.\n\nfirst American military aid to Vietnam: Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 49\u201350, 233\u201334; Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America's Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 73, 78\u201379.\n\nso did almost everyone else: Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War, 291\u2013301, 303\u20134. Senator William Fulbright, invited to a meeting at the White House to discuss the proposed invasion, did protest on moral grounds, but was dismissed as na\u00efve. Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 132\u201333; Thomas, The Very Best Men, 251\u201352.\n\n\"bold as everybody else\": Paterson, \"Bearing the Burden,\" 202.\n\na place he often went to fish: Reeves, President Kennedy, 83; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 363; Thomas, The Very Best Men, 243, 260\u201361; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, \"One Hell of a Gamble\": The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1997), 99\u2013100.\n\nU.S. attack would bring\u2014refused: Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 141\u201344.\n\nwould have no choice but to invade: As Dulles acknowledged in private notes, \"We [the leadership of the CIA] felt that when the chips were down, when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail.\" Thomas, The Very Best Men, 247.\n\nalone in his bedroom, in tears: Reeves, President Kennedy, 93, 95; Thomas, The Very Best Men, 263; Prados, Safe for Democracy, 263.\n\nthe limits of American power: Only four American airmen died in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Prados, Safe for Democracy, 263.\n\nthat he was soft: Reeves, President Kennedy, 95; John F. Kennedy, \"Address Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors,\" April 20, 1961, http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/index.php?pid=8076&st=&st1; Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 337.\n\nmight take the whole region down with it: Reeves, President Kennedy, 74; George Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950\u20131975 (New York: McGrawHill, 2002), 92; Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 294\u201395.\n\n\"conscientious objectors from World War I\": Reeves, President Kennedy, 74; Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 295\u201396.\n\n\"You start using atomic weapons!\": Logevall, Choosing War, 24\u201325; Reeves, President Kennedy, 111; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 353; Michael Hunt, Lyndon Johnson's War: America's Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945\u20131968 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 55.\n\nmilitary alliances with neither east nor west: Reeves, President Kennedy, 75, 115\u201316; Thomas G. Paterson, J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. Hagan, \"JFK: A Can-Do President,\" in To Reason Why: The Debate About the Causes of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War, ed. Jeffrey P. Kimball (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 183.\n\n\"the obscurity that it richly deserves\": Galbraith's comment actually referred to all of Southeast Asia. \"The Importance of Obscurity,\" Time, May 6, 1966, http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,901831,00.html. In truth, Laos did not return to complete obscurity after the U.S.-Soviet deal. North Vietnamese forces remained there and steadily expanded sections of the Ho Chi Minh trail, thus helping supply communist forces in South Vietnam. In 1964, fighting resumed between the Pathet Lao and the royal Laotian military. As U.S. involvement in Vietnam deepened, America began massive air strikes against North Vietnamese forces in Laos. The royal government slowly lost control of the country to the better-equipped and better-trained Pathet Lao, and in 1975 the Pathet Lao seized complete control of the country. Herring, America's Longest War, 340\u201341; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997), 346\u201347.\n\n\"the United States is in a yielding mood\": Milne, America's Rasputin, 123; Reeves, President Kennedy, 157.\n\nthere would be war: Reeves, President Kennedy, 160\u201372; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 407; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, 180, 236, 243\u201353.\n\nbacked by the United States: Reeves, President Kennedy, 185, 187, 203; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, 195; Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet\u2013East German Relations, 1953\u20131961 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 227.\n\nThe place to start was Vietnam: Reeves, President Kennedy, 173; Herring, America's Longest War, 96.\n\nwas increasingly paying the bills: Herring, America's Longest War, 6\u201329; Khong, Analogies at War, 237.\n\nIndochina was lost: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 94; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 167, 185\u201387.\n\nwould unite the country once again: Herring, America's Longest War, 49.\n\nAmerican Friends of Vietnam: Diane Kunz, \"Camelot Continued: What If John F. Kennedy Had Lived?\" in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson (London: Papermac, 1998), 378.\n\n\"the finger in the dike\": Mann, A Grand Delusion, 200.\n\n\"real in powerful men's minds\": Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 148.\n\ntravel to South Vietnam to investigate: Herring, America's Longest War, 80\u201383; Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 322\u201323.\n\nAmerica was utopia: Milne, America's Rasputin, 21, 23, 26, 35, 60\u201363; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 202.\n\n\"becoming a bore\": Milne, America's Rasputin, 63.\n\n\"something you know nothing about?\": Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 159.\n\nLincoln Center for the Performing Arts: Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 18\u201319; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 162\u201363, 171\u201372, 468\u201370.\n\nit was to answer that question yes: Maxwell D. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959); Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 162\u201363.\n\nscare the North into stopping the war: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 169\u201370; Herring, America's Longest War, 97; Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 323\u201327.\n\nwithout U.S. soldiers: Herring, America's Longest War, 100; Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 222; Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 330\u201334; Khong, Analogies at War, 96.\n\nthey excelled at killing dangerous snakes: Reeves, President Kennedy, 335\u201336, 343; Nashel, Edward Lansdale's Cold War, 71, 239; Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 153\u201359; Prados, Safe for Democracy, 298\u2013306.\n\n\"the next President of the United States\": Hershberg, \"The Cuban Missile Crisis,\" 67\u201370; Fursenko and Naftali, \"One Hell of a Gamble,\" 92, 97\u201398, 139\u201340; Reeves, President Kennedy, 339, 343\u201347, 350, 368\u201370, 372.\n\n\"and appearances contribute to reality\": Hershberg, \"The Cuban Missile Crisis,\" 72; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 175.\n\nwould later cast doubt on the claim: See, for instance, Press, Calculating Credibility; Hopf, Peripheral Visions; Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).\n\nwould get his brother impeached: Reeves, President Kennedy, 401.\n\n\"ultimately leads to war\": Hershberg, \"The Cuban Missile Crisis,\" 71\u201373; Reeves, President Kennedy, 395\u201396; John F. Kennedy, \"Report to the American People on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba,\" October 22, 1962, http:\/\/www.jfklibrary.org\/Historical+Resources\/Archives\/Reference+Desk\/Speeches\/JFK\/003POF03CubaCrisis10221962.htm.\n\nto withdraw the missiles in Turkey: Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Knopf, 2008), 310\u201311; Reeves, President Kennedy, 400\u201324; Hershberg, \"The Cuban Missile Crisis,\" 80\u201383; Fursenko and Naftali, \"One Hell of a Gamble,\" 285\u201387, 321.\n\n\"back away from rash initiatives\": Reeves, President Kennedy, 428.\n\ngained seats in the Senate: Reeves, President Kennedy, 426, 429.\n\n\"take the wrong lessons away from the crisis\": Reeves, President Kennedy, 427.\n\ntaken his private heresies even further: Fursenko and Naftali, \"One Hell of a Gamble,\" 291\u201393; Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight, 45\u201346; Hershberg, \"The Cuban Missile Crisis,\" 81.\n\nhalf the South Vietnamese cabinet: Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 325\u201326; Herring, America's Longest War, 59\u201360, 77\u201378.\n\nincluding weddings and funerals: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 181\u201382; Herring, America's Longest War, 101, 108\u20139.\n\nkilling two adults and six children: Mann, A Grand Delusion, 284.\n\nit was the Vietnamese word for \"monk\": Mann, A Grand Delusion, 284\u201386; Reeves, President Kennedy, 491.\n\nhelped convince U.S. officials that he needed to go: Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 368; Logevall, Choosing War, 45\u201350.\n\nturned pale and fled silently from the room: Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 390\u201395; Reeves, President Kennedy, 649.\n\nMcNamara's Pentagon until the last minute: Reeves, President Kennedy, 507; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 619.\n\nhad taken his life fourteen years before: John F. Kennedy, \"Commencement Address at American University,\" June 10, 1963, http:\/\/www.jfklibrary.org\/Historical+Resources\/Archives\/Reference+Desk\/Speeches\/JFK\/003POF03AmericanUniversity06101963.htm; Reeves, President Kennedy, 447; Bird, The Color of Truth, 251\u201352.\n\nBillings, Montana, and Salt Lake City, Utah: Reeves, President Kennedy, 606\u20137; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 295\u201396.\n\n\"get the American people to reelect me\": Reeves, President Kennedy, 444; Logevall, Choosing War, 38\u201349.\n\nmaybe he could square the circle: Logevall, Choosing War, 73; Reeves, President Kennedy, 600\u20131; Nashal, Edward Lansdale's Cold War, 57.\n\nChapter 8: Things Are in the Saddle\n\nLyndon Johnson was its face: Dallek, Lone Star Rising, 7.\n\n\"when the parts were Lyndon Johnson's\": Robert Dallek, \"Presidential Address: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: The Making of a Tragedy\" Diplomatic History 20, no. 2 (1996): 155; Robert Caro, Master of the Senate (New York: Knopf, 2002), 121\u201322.\n\n\"I want his pecker in my pocket\": Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 434, 436\u201337.\n\nhow democracy survived: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 444; Rystad, Prisoners of the Past, 55; D. B. Hardeman and Donald C. Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987), 265\u201370; Dallek, Lone Star Rising, 226\u201327.\n\nbecame the industry's champion, and its beneficiary: Dallek, Lone Star Rising, 292, 294, 383.\n\n\"terribly shaken\": Dallek, Lone Star Rising, 323\u201324, 399; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 590\u201391; Lyndon B. Johnson, \"Nightmares of Crucifixion,\" in To Reason Why, ed. Kimball, 45\u201346.\n\ntime trying to recover them: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 298.\n\ngrew and grew: Logevall, Choosing War, 108, 321; Kaiser, American Tragedy, 304\u20135; Herring, America's Longest War, 133\u201339.\n\ndecided to take the fight to Hanoi: Herring, America's Longest War, 139; Kaiser, American Tragedy, 331.\n\n\"repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States\": Herring, America's Longest War, 142\u201344; Logevall, Choosing War, 196\u2013205; Hunt, Lyndon Johnson's War, 79.\n\n\"would rather not have\": Logevall, Choosing War, 205; Kaiser, American Tragedy, 336\u201338; Ambrose and Brinkley, Rise to Globalism, 142; Paterson, \"Bearing the Burden,\" 211; David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 4, 39.\n\nits vote was unanimous: Dallek, Lone Star Rising, 84\u201385; Dallek, \"Presidential Address: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam,\" 151; Herring, America's Longest War, 144; Logevall, Choosing War, 198; Kaiser, American Tragedy, 336\u201338.\n\n\"there were better ones, golden ones, ahead\": Rystad, Prisoners of the Past, 56; Logevall, Choosing War, 205; Herring, America's Longest War, 145; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest,423.\n\n\"conflict between parents and children is letting up\": Kaiser, American Tragedy, 483; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 221; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 423; \"Students: On the Fringe of a Golden Era,\" Time, January 29, 1965, http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/printout\/0,8816,839175,00.html; \"Lyndon B. Attitudes,\" Time, September 10, 1965, http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/printout\/0,8816,834259,00.html.\n\n\"We can do it all\": Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 5.\n\nend poverty for good: Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961\u20131973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 184; Lyndon B. Johnson, \"Inaugural Address,\" January 20, 1965, http:\/\/www.bartelby.org\/124\/pres57.html.\n\n\"I was born in a manger\": Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 431; \"Lyndon B. Attitudes.\"\n\n\"raggedy-assed little fourth-rate country\": Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 512.\n\nbuoying morale in the South: For a discussion of the Johnson administration's planning for military action in November 1964, see Kaiser, American Tragedy, 355\u201374.\n\n\"They'd impeach a President who'd run out, wouldn't they?\": Logevall, Choosing War, 145; Kaiser, American Tragedy, 319\u201320.\n\nZero Hour: Summons to the Free: McGeorge Bundy, \"They Say in the Colleges...,\" in Zero Hour: A Summons of the Free, ed. Stephen Vincent Ben\u00e9t (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1940), 79\u2013116; Bird, The Color of Truth, 66\u201367; Leonard Lyons, \"The New Yorker,\" Washington Post, July 20, 1940, 4; Thomas C. Lyons, \"Books of the Times,\" New York Times, August 3, 1940, 17.\n\n\"the isolationist-interventionist debate\": Bird, The Color of Truth, 107; Khong, Analogies at War, 197.\n\n\"shall not perish from this earth\": Logevall, Choosing War, 324\u201327; Bird, The Color of Truth, 306\u20137; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 523.\n\nJohnson himself had counseled caution: Herring and Immerman, \"Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dienbienphu,\" 353\u201354; Hunt, Lyndon Johnson's War, 76, 101.\n\nclose to twice the number in 1952: Mueller, \"Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam,\" 360\u201361; Khong, Analogies at War, 102.\n\nIt had worked so far: Logevall, Choosing War, 360\u201361.\n\nhe was already over the edge: Logevall, Choosing War, 330, 370; Herring, America's Longest War, 156\u201358, 162.\n\n150,000 troops and more intense bombing: Logevall, Choosing War, 367; Herring, America's Longest War, 162\u201363.\n\n\"but that he did pay [Dean] Rusk\": Daniel DiLeo, George Ball, Vietnam and the Rethinking of Containment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 25\u201329; George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (New York: Norton, 1982), 152\u201353, 365; Kaiser, American Tragedy, 350\u201351, 362, 395\u201396, 402, 405\u20136; Logevall, Choosing War, 361\u201362.\n\n\"an haughty spirit before a fall\": Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 558\u201380; Fredrik Logevall, \"First Among Critics: Walter Lippmann and the Vietnam War,\" Journal of American-East Asian Relations 4, no. 4 (1995), 351\u201354, 364\u201372.\n\n\"a fatally unfortunate conclusion\": Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 277\u201379; Hixson, George Kennan, 227; Khong, Analogies at War, 174.\n\n\"[as justification] for the present war\": Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 284\u201385.\n\n\"general discouragement, sometimes bordering on despair\": Jennifer W. See, \"A Prophet Without Honor: Hans Morgenthau and the War in Vietnam, 1955\u20131965,\" Pacific Historical Review 70, no. 3 (2001), 437, 439\u201340; Bird, The Color of Truth, 321; CBS News, \"Dean Bundy Meets Professor Morgenthau,\" in Louis Menashe and Ronald Radosh, eds., Teach-Ins: USA Reports, Opinions, Documents (Washington, DC: Praeger, 1967), 198\u2013206; Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 221.\n\nanother hundred thousand troops to South Vietnam: Khong, Analogies at War, 151; Herring, America's Longest War, 164\u201365.\n\nChapter 9: Liberation\n\nuntil the fateful day arrived: Freedman, Kennedy's Wars, 142, 145; Prados, Safe for Democracy, 262\u201363; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 68.\n\nwould no longer be required: Bird, The Color of Truth, 200; Marcus Raskin and Robert Spero, \"Ahead of History: Marcus Raskin and the Institute for Policy Studies,\" in The Four Freedoms Under Siege: The Clear and Present Danger of Our National Security State, ed. Marcus Raskin and Robert Spero (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 276; Marcus Raskin, interview with author, February 22, 2008.\n\nwhere he began causing trouble: Raskin and Spero, \"Ahead of History,\" 273\u201374.\n\nretire once the decisions were made: Bird, The Color of Truth, 187, 219; Marcus Raskin, interview with author, February 22, 2008.\n\n\"that he won't pee on the floor\": Bird, The Color of Truth, 200, 206\u20137; Marcus Raskin, interview with author, February 22, 2008.\n\nthat America try to end the cold war: James Roosevelt, ed., The Liberal Papers (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 17, 27, 58\u201359, 146, 175, 251\u201352, 267, 279, 321, 326.\n\nBy year's end he was gone: Bird, The Color of Truth, 218\u201319; Raskin and Spero, \"Ahead of History,\" 277.\n\n\"we are intellectually and emotionally spastic\": Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 426\u201327; Gilbert Seldes, \"'Patient' Diagnosis of 'Dr. Strangelove,'\" New York Times, April 5, 1964, X7.\n\nHouse Un-American Activities Committee: Paul Buhle and William Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire (New York: Routledge, 1995), 115\u201316; Jonathan M. Wiener, \"Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959\u20131980,\" Journal of American History 76 (1989): 407.\n\na generational manifesto that would sell sixty thousand copies: Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1986), 313; James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 13; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), 111.\n\nof nuclear bombs: Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (New York: Twayne, 1998), 149\u201350; Charles DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 389; Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 149.\n\nCollege enrollment nearly quadrupled between 1946 and 1970: Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 308.\n\n\"know a Communist if they tripped over one\": Herring, America's Longest War, 219.\n\ndeclared the Port Huron Statement: Students for a Democratic Society, \"The Port Huron Statement,\" June 15, 1962, http:\/\/history.hanover.edu\/courses\/excerpts\/111hur.html.\n\nlay down his body for justice and peace: Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 151\u201355.\n\nintegrate interstate transport across the South: Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 99\u2013101.\n\nthe 1963 March on Washington: John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 37\u201350, 327\u201360.\n\nfounded on pacifist principles as well: Akinyele O. Omoja, \"The Ballot and the Bullet: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement,\" Journal of Black Studies 29 (1999): 560\u201361.\n\nthe following year: Eric Stoper, \"The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: Rise and Fall of a Redemptive Organization,\" Journal of Black Studies 8 (1977): 31; Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 451; Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), 53\u201355.\n\n\"all men are really good at heart\": Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 127.\n\n\"made sonsofbitches of us all\": Marcus Raskin, \"A National Security Manager Tries to Explain,\" in Essays of a Citizen: From National Security State to Democracy, ed. Marcus Raskin (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 104.\n\nfound his view of human nature too bleak: Halliwell, The Constant Dialogue, 230\u201336; David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 45.\n\n\"releases the prisoners; abolishes repression\": Douglas Martin, \"Norman O. Brown Dies, Playful Philosopher was 89,\" New York Times, October 4, 2002; Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 277\u201379; Brick, Age of Contradiction, 134\u201335.\n\nevery one dollar of damage it did to North Vietnam: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 241; Herring, America's Longest War, 168, 172\u201377, 179; Logevall, Choosing War, 409\u201310.\n\nthe membership of the SDS quadrupled: DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal, 107\u20138, 111\u201312, 132, 150; Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 320.\n\nurged Johnson to halt the bombing: Mueller, \"Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam,\" 363; Thomas, Robert Kennedy, 334\u201335; Herring, America's Longest War,267.\n\n\"the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today\": DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal, 172.\n\nthrew bottles and bags of blood: Gitlin, The Sixties, 254.\n\na picture of his father mounted on the wall: Bird, The Color of Truth, 323, 372, 397\u201398, 401.\n\nbegan to break under the strain: Deborah Shapley, Power and Promise: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 408, 483.\n\nher father did not: DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal, 129; Shapley, Power and Promise, 354\u201355.\n\nbursting into tears: Bird, The Color of Truth, 345.\n\nBundy and McNamara were both gone: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 629; Bird, The Color of Truth, 342, 347.\n\n\"a fanatic in sheep's clothing,\" in one detractor's words: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 628; Milne, America's Rasputin, 7.\n\n\"I think we can hold out longer than that\": Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 637\u201338.\n\nantiwar senators were taking orders from the Kremlin: Dallek, \"Presidential Address: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam,\" 467.\n\npulled out his penis and screamed, \"This is why!\": Dallek, Flawed Giant, 448, 452, 491, 526.\n\n\"I am alive and it has been more torturous\": Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 640.\n\n\"bitch of a war\": Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 268.\n\n\"A man without a spine\": Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 253.\n\n\"the end begins to come into view\": Herring, America's Longest War, 221.\n\n\"choked with rubble and rotting bodies\": Herring, America's Longest War, 225\u201331; Karnow, Vietnam, 538\u201340.\n\n\"I thought we were winning the war!\": Herring, America's Longest War, 232; Dallek, Flawed Giant, 506.\n\n\"it will only be a matter of time before they give in\": Herring, America's Longest War, 229\u201331; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 648.\n\nsubordinate it to his own: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 256; Herring, America's Longest War, 163; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 597.\n\nand billed him another five thousand dollars: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 650\u201351.\n\nwho was beholden to whom: Dallek, Lone Star Rising, 39\u201340.\n\na plurality of Americans opposed the war: Beisner, Dean Acheson, 633; Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 391; Gitlin, The Sixties, 293.\n\n\"has dampened expansionist ideas\": Herring, America's Longest War, 245\u201357; Kunz, Butter and Guns, 114\u201319; Walter LaFeber, Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Elections (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 55\u201357; Robert M. Collins, \"The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the 'American Century,'\" American Historical Review 101 (1996): 396\u2013422.\n\n\"have bailed out\": Herring, America's Longest War, 250. Although a majority of the \"wise men\" argued that it was time to disengage from Vietnam, a few hawks\u2014such as Maxwell Taylor and Supreme Court justice (and crony of Johnson) Abe Fortas\u2014argued for seeing the war through. Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, 702\u20133.\n\n\"in disarray around him\": Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 102; Gitlin, The Sixties, 304; Dallek, Flawed Giant, 528.\n\nand perhaps his life itself: Dallek, Flawed Giant, 522\u201323.\n\n\"it was like committing actual suicide\": Dallek, Flawed Giant, 601\u20135, 613\u201314.\n\nin the party's gallery of honor: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 658; Dallek, Flawed Giant, 573, 617.\n\n\"dissolved in the morass of war in Vietnam\": \"Lyndon Johnson, 36th President, Is Dead,\" New York Times, January 23, 1973, 81.\n\nin an essay on intellectuals and war: Bourne, War and the Intellectuals, ed. Resek; Lillian Schlissel, ed., The World of Randolph Bourne: An Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1966); Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 69\u2013103, 300\u20131; Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 4\u20138.\n\na model for post-Vietnam foreign policy: Marcus Raskin, \"The Erosion of Congressional Power,\" in Washington Plans an Aggressive War, ed. Stavins, Barnett, and Raskin, 255; Marcus Raskin, interview with author, February 22, 2008.\n\nDewey was an inspiration: Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 16, 149; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 547\u201349.\n\nhad rarely been uttered without a sneer: For instance, \"If there is to be a politics of the New Left...our work is necessarily structural\u2014and so, for us, just now\u2014utopian.\" C. Wright Mills, \"The New Left,\" in Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 254. And \"the masses of hungry, aspiring, utopian peoples [are] intervening in history for the first time.\" Tom Hayden, quoted in Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, 101.\n\nthe economic motives for war: Kennedy, Charles Beard and American Foreign Policy, 160, 165\u201367; H. W. Brands, What America Owes the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 242\u201343.\n\na young, militant historian named Ronald Radosh: Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 51.\n\na second, more positive look: See, for instance, Wilson, Herbert Hoover.\n\nendemic to American foreign policy and American life: Herring, America's Longest War, xiv, 267.\n\nhoping that LBJ might appoint him ambassador to the UN: Dominic Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism (New York: Knopf, 2004), 120\u201321, 127, 133.\n\n\"I know it didn't, sir\": Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy, 17\u201318, 132\u201333, 139, 145, 155.\n\nAn old monk told him to seize the day: Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy, 171.\n\neven though the crowd had not yet arrived: Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy, 190\u201391.\n\nstared at the beast until it trotted away: Steel, In Love with Night, 39, 125.\n\nwimps when they pointed out the risks: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 70; Steel, In Love with Night, 25\u201326, 49, 76\u201378.\n\n\"We do not have...to be afraid\": Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy, 150, 195; Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 421.\n\nChapter 10: The Scold\n\nthe arc of his own career: Schlesinger, \"Vietnam: Lessons of the Tragedy,\" in The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage, 514.\n\na moratorium on the production of nuclear weapons: Robert David Johnson, Congress and the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 146; Benjamin O. Fordham, \"The Evolution of Republican and Democratic Positions on Cold War Military Spending,\" Social Science History 31 (2007): 609, 627; Theodore White, The Making of the President 1972 (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 46.\n\ncut the number of American troops in Europe in half: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 318.\n\n\"an exercise in futility\": Schlesinger, \"Vietnam: Lessons of the Tragedy,\" in The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage, 522.\n\nPotomac Electric Power Company: Bird, Color of Truth, 356; Karnow, Vietnam, 471.\n\n\"a singularly inept instrument of foreign policy\": Paul C. Warnke and Leslie H. Gelb, \"Security or Confrontation: The Case for a Defense Policy,\" Foreign Policy 1 (1970\/1971): 15.\n\n\"it's going to mean our foreign policy has been idiotic\": \"The Real Paul Warnke,\" New Republic, March 26, 1977, 22\u201325.\n\naccused the new intellectuals of isolationism: Norman Podhoretz, for instance, wrote that \"the new isolationism, then, was what happened to the [New Left] Movement's ideas about the American role in world affairs when they were cleaned up to 'work within the system.'\" Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 291\u201392.\n\nborn too late to remember Munich: Anthony Lake, \"Introduction,\" in The Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society and the Future of American Foreign Policy, ed. Anthony Lake (New York: New York University Press, 1976), xxviii.\n\ntwo of whose three congressmen had opposed World War I: \"Detailed Vote in the House of Representatives on the Passage of the Resolution Declaring War,\" New York Times, April 7, 1917, 4.\n\nwhich denounced the UN as too weak: Bruce Miroff, The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 30; Bernard Hennessy, \"A Case Study of Intra-Pressure Group Conflicts: The United World Federalists,\" Journal of Politics 16 (1954): 76\u201395; \"Group Asks Drive for World Rule,\" New York Times, November 2, 1947, 50.\n\n\"the get tough policy of the Truman administration\": George McGovern, Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern (New York: Random House, 1977), 45; Miroff, The Liberals' Moment, 123.\n\n\"Somehow we have to settle down and live with them\": McGovern, Grassroots, 49; Miroff, The Liberals' Moment, 36, 132; White, The Making of the President 1972, 116\u201317.\n\nfated to live in a hostile world: Michael T. Kaufman, \"Paul Warnke, 81, a Leading Dove in Vietnam Era, Dies,\" New York Times, November 1, 2001.\n\n\"outdated stereotypes of military confrontation and power politics\": George McGovern, \"Acceptance Speech Before Democratic National Convention,\" July 14, 1972, http:\/\/www.4president.org\/speeches\/mcgovern1972acceptance.htm; John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945\u20131994 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 59.\n\nhe quoted them in his autobiography: McGovern, Grassroots, 35.\n\nlike \"pee[ing] on the floor\": Bird, The Color of Truth, 200.\n\n\"those young men will some day curse us\": Miroff, The Liberals' Moment, 38.\n\nan absolute dread of flying a plane: McGovern, Grassroots, 20\u201323.\n\n\"'I killed more people than any of you guys'\": McGovern, Grassroots, 25\u201328; Miroff, The Liberals' Moment, 29\u201330.\n\nto retreive American prisoners of war: \"Senator McGovern Presenting His Views on Foreign Policy,\" New York Times, October 6, 1972, 26; Frum, How We Got Here, 308; Jonathan Rieder, \"Rise of the 'Silent Majority,'\" in Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 262.\n\nboasted about eating sheep's testicles: Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 23; DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal, 239; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 332; Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 259\u201367; Herring, The Longest War,291.\n\nrejected by the fancy Manhattan firms: Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1991), 8, 10; Perlstein, Nixonland, 20\u201324.\n\ninsinuating that he espoused the \"communist line\": Irwin F. Gellman, The Contender: Richard Nixon, The Congress Years 1946\u20131952 (New York: Free Press, 1999), 65, 84\u201385; Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon, Vol. 1: The Education of a Politician, 1913\u20131962 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 117\u201340; Wicker, One of Us, 39\u201350.\n\n\"sitting on their fat butts\": Ambrose, Eisenhower, 272; Wicker, One of Us, 9, 10.\n\nwhen gentile boys approached: Jeremy Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 39\u201341, 45, 221; Isaacson, Kissinger, 26, 30, 33.\n\n\"The weak, the old had no chance\": Jussi Hanhim\u00e4ki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3\u20134; Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 34\u201335; Isaacson, Kissinger, 28, 30, 52.\n\nlimit the length of all future submissions: Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century, 29; Isaacson, Kissinger, 65, 561, 697.\n\nwithin the hearts of women and men: This is a major theme of Suri's Henry Kissinger and the American Century.\n\n\"the kind of guy who would send you to the showers\": Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 170\u201371; Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century, 207\u201310; Isaacson, Kissinger, 279\u201380, 393.\n\nto be dangerously soft: Shulman, The Seventies, 24\u201325; Isaacson, Kissinger, 120.\n\nhelped spur dissident movements in Eastern Europe: Hanhim\u00e4ki, The Flawed Architect, 433\u201337; Raymond L. Gartoff, D\u00e9tente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), 527\u201337.\n\n\"step on them, crush them, show them no mercy\": Isaacson, Kissinger, 328.\n\nNixon called it \"the madman theory\": Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 106\u20137.\n\nmused that Kissinger required psychiatric care: Isaacson, Kissinger, 262\u201363, 391.\n\nkept trying to topple the government of South Vietnam: Hanhim\u00e4ki, The Flawed Architect, 43\u201346.\n\nordering that U.S. troops invade Cambodia outright: Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 194\u2013200; Perlstein, Nixonland, 472.\n\n\" free nations and free institutions throughout the world\": McMahon, \"Credibility and World Power,\" 467.\n\n\"like they're going to be bombed this time\": Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 385; Isaacson, Kissinger, 419.\n\n\"should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam\": Hanhim\u00e4ki, The Flawed Architect, 256\u201357, 267\u201368.\n\nCongress rejected the aid and South Vietnam fell: Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 472\u201373; Isaacson, Kissinger, 642\u201343; Hanhim\u00e4ki, The Flawed Architect, 393; Gerald Ford, \"Reporting on the United States Foreign Policy,\" April 10, 1975, http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/?pid=4826.\n\n\"and you're likely to find an old peace activist\": DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal, 304.\n\nless than 5 percent by 1977: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 319.\n\ndenounce his boss to reporters: Prados, Safe for Democracy, 425\u201326, 429\u201330; Garthoff, D\u00e9tente and Confrontation, 564\u201365; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 329; Isaacson, Kissinger, 683\u201384; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 218\u201341.\n\nOperation Midnight Climax: Prados, Safe For Democracy, 437; Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (New York: Grove, 1985), 32.\n\nAmerica's first ambassador to the People's Republic: C. L. Sulzberger, \"Our Next Man in Peking,\" New York Times, June 27, 1971, E15.\n\n\"what is called a civilized country\": Kahn, The China Hands, 283\u201384, 290; U.S. Congress, Senate, Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, The Evolution of U.S. Policy Toward Mainland China, 92nd Cong., 1st Sess., Report No. 67-891 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 7.\n\nimmoral and a tad pathetic: Cecil Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 339; U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., Report No. 94-465 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 142.\n\nnone of his aides owned passports: Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), 27; Westad, The Global Cold War, 195.\n\nhe still corrected aides' grammatical mistakes: Kenneth E. Morris, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 5\u20136, 30\u201331, 47\u201348, 60, 67, 141.\n\ndenounced racism in the state: Morris, Jimmy Carter, 30\u201332, 72, 118, 152.\n\nattack Ford from both left and right: Joshua Muravchik, The Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy (Washington, DC: Hamilton, 1986), 2\u20137.\n\nderailed his nomination: Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 51; Muravchik, The Uncertain Crusade, 8\u20139; Robert A. Strong, Working in the World: Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 12\u201313.\n\nhe declared a few months after taking office: Jimmy Carter, \"University of Notre Dame Commencement,\" May 22, 1977, http:\/\/millercenter.org\/scripps\/digitalarchive\/speeches\/spe_1977_0522_carter.\n\nthe B-1 bomber and the neutron bomb: Jerel A. Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community: Beliefs and Their Impact on Behavior (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 122; David Skidmore, Reversing Course: Carter's Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and the Failure of Reform (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 45; Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 79\u201381; Morris, Jimmy Carter, 272.\n\naid to a throng of anticommunist dictatorships: Rosati, Quest for Global Community, 120\u201322, 129\u201330; Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 54, 103\u20134, 148.\n\nhis policies marked a genuine shift: Rosati, Quest for Global Community, 154.\n\n\"no longer seems warranted\": Rosati, Quest for Global Community, 41.\n\nin Angola and a newly unified Vietnam: Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 116\u201317; Rosati, Quest for Global Community, 119; Skidmore, Reversing Course, 30.\n\nexplained Undersecretary of State David Newsom: Skidmore, Reversing Course, 41\u201342.\n\n\"not totally dependent on military power\": Raskin, Essays of a Citizen, 82.\nChapter 11: Fighting with Rabbits\n\nshould have throttled the beast: Jody Powell, The Other Side of the Story (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 104\u20138; Brooks Jackson, Associated Press, \"Bunny Goes Bugs: Rabbit Attacks President,\" Washington Post, August 30, 1979, A1; \"The Bunny Encounter: Carter Says He Splashed 'Nice Rabbit' but Denies There Was an Attack by Either,\" Washington Post, September 1, 1979, A2; Art Buchwald, \"Carter Staff Pondering Harey Question: Why Not the Beast?\" Washington Post, September 11, 1979, E1; Morris, Jimmy Carter, 274\u201375.\n\nThey viewed him as a wimp: On press coverage of Carter, see John M. Orman, Comparing Presidential Behavior: Carter, Reagan, and the Macho Presidential Style (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 158, 164\u201365.\n\n\"creating the conditions for domestic reaction\": Westad, The Global Cold War, 195, 282\u201383; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 282\u201385; Elizabeth Drew, \"A Reporter at Large: Brzezinski,\" New Yorker, May 1, 1978, 113\u201316; Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 153\u201356; Gartoff, D\u00e9tente and Confrontation, 698\u2013705, 713\u201314.\n\nIranian crude had been an economic lifeline: Kunz, Butter and Guns, 223\u201341.\n\noil fields of the Persian Gulf: Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End, 1983), 239.\n\ncalled America the \"Great Satan\": Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 181\u201387; Strong, Working in the World, 59\u201361.\n\nshortages of medicine, soap, toothpaste, and thread: Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 329, 333; Westad, The Global Cold War, 242, 284\u201385, 307\u20138, 315, 323. For a discussion of the stagnation of the Soviet economy, beginning in the 1970s, see Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945 (London: Pearson Education, 2003), 128\u201363.\n\neven if he could never quite explain why: Irving Kristol, \"An Autobiographical Memoir,\" in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, ed. Irving Kristol (New York: Free Press, 1995), 4.\n\nostensibly committed to world revolution: The more common term, Trotskyite, Kristol insisted, was invented by their Stalinist foes, and never used by Trotskyists themselves. Irving Kristol, \"Memoirs of a Trotskyist,\" New York Times, January 23, 1977, 43.\n\n\"that were cluttering up my mind\": Kristol, \"An Autobiographical Memoir,\" 6\u20137, 13; Kristol, \"My Cold War,\" in Neoconservatism, ed. Kristol, 483\u201384.\n\nthey hated the New Deal, which he did not: Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 78\u201379; Irving Kristol, \"American Conservatism, 1945\u20131995,\" Public Interest 121 (1995): 82\u201384; Kristol, \"An Autobiographical Memoir,\" 32.\n\naccused the McGovern Democrats of linguistic theft: Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism, 46.\n\nnot to worry about labels: Irving Kristol, \"Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed\u2014Perhaps the Only\u2014Neoconservative,\" in Reflections of a Neoconservative, ed. Irving Kristol (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 74.\n\nhe was ambivalent about the war: Robert R. Tomes, Apocalypse Then: American Intellectuals and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 194, 219; Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 91\u201392; Irving Kristol, \"American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy,\" in Neoconservatism, ed. Kristol, 76.\n\n\"the main source of all evil in the world\": Irving Kristol, \"The Twisted Vocabulary of Superpower Symmetry,\" in Scorpions in a Bottle: Dangerous Ideas About the United States and the Soviet Union, ed. Lissa Roche (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 1986), 20.\n\ntoo poor to buy a sandwich: Kristol, \"Memoirs of a Trotskyist,\" 43.\n\ntools of cold war repression: Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (New York: Madison, 1996), 109.\n\n\"the gun as well as the joint\": David Farber, \"The Counterculture and the Antiwar Movement,\" in Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, ed. Melvin Small and William D. Hoover (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 19.\n\nsent a letter to the university's president: Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 332\u201333.\n\n\"'Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stickup'\": Daniel Bell, \"Columbia and the New Left,\" Public Interest 13 (1968): 66.\n\n\"develop a certain respect for what was\": Nathan Glazer, \"On Being Deradicalized,\" Commentary 50, no. 4 (1970): 74\u201376; James Traub, \"Nathan Glazer Changes His Mind, Again,\" New York Times Magazine, June 28, 1998, 23.\n\nradically improve the estate of the urban poor: Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 118\u201319.\n\nwould only make things worse: Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 363\u201364.\n\nKirkpatrick, like Kristol, admired Niebuhr: Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Personal Virtues, Public Vices,\" in The Reagan Phenomenon, and Other Speeches on Foreign Policy, ed. Jeane Kirkpatrick (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1983), 214.\n\n\"wishing does not make it so\": Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism, 119.\n\n\"all you had to do was stand in place\": J. David Hoeveler, Jr., Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 85.\n\n\"But Micronesia\": Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books, 1986), 128.\n\n\"troubling our sleep\": Norman Podhoretz, \"The Culture of Appeasement,\" Harper's, October 1977, 32.\n\nMoscow had taken a decisive edge: Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, 197\u2013204.\n\nsapped Britain's after World War I: Podhoretz, \"The Culture of Appeasement,\" 29\u201331.\n\nAmerica's first female president: John H. Mihalec, \"Hair on the President's Chest,\" Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1984, 30.\n\nregimes in the third world\u2014were running wild: Kristol, \"We Can't Resign as 'Policeman of the World,'\" New York Times, May 12, 1968, 109; Irving Kristol, \"Our Foreign Policy Illusions,\" Wall Street Journal, February 4, 1980, 26.\n\n\"even more corrupting and demoralizing\": Irving Kristol, \"Foreign Policy: The End of an Era,\" Wall Street Journal, January 18, 1979, 16.\n\nit was d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu: Hoeveler, Watch on the Right, 153; Michael Novak, \"In Praise of Jeane Kirkpatrick,\" December 8, 2006, http:\/\/www.aei.org\/publications\/filter.all,pubID.25268\/pub_detail.asp.\n\n\"change with progress, optimism with virtue\": Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Dictatorships and Double Standards,\" Commentary 68, no. 5 (1979): 5, 13.\n\n\"Unfortunately it does\": Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, 162.\n\ntied to chairs or beds, in the ambassador's house: Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 8\u201367, 127\u201329.\n\nnumber of days the Americans had been held captive: Ellen Goodman, \"And That's the Way It Is\u2014Or Is It?\" Washington Post, June 17, 1980.\n\nend of the post-toughness era as well: Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah, 189\u201391.\n\nCarter tried diplomacy and imposed sanctions: Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 199; Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 139.\n\nMcNamara's deputy secretary of defense: Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 40.\n\na patron to men like Gelb, Warnke, and Lake: Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 111\u201312; I. M. Destler, Leslie Gelb, and Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 95\u201398; Marilyn Berger, \"Cyrus R. Vance, A Confidant of Presidents, Is Dead at 84,\" New York Times, January 13, 2002.\n\n\"growing American maturity in a complex world\": Frum, How We Got Here, 343.\n\n\"Woody Woodpecker\": Drew, \"A Reporter at Large: Brzezinski,\" 106.\n\ncolleagues ran for cover: Strong, Working in the World, 11.\n\ncalled on the Kennedy administration to bomb: Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 36.\n\nin favor of American intervention in Vietnam: CBS News, \"Dean Bundy Meets Professor Morgenthau,\" 198\u2013206.\n\nAmerica must not \"chicken out\": Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 110; Simon Serfaty, \"Brzezinski: Play It Again, Zbig,\" Foreign Policy 32 (Fall 1978): 6.\n\nfrom anticommunism to interdependence: Gerry Argyris Andrianopoulos, Kissinger and Brzezinski: The NSC and the Struggle for Control of US National Security Policy (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), 40\u201342; Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 115, n. 9.\n\n\"elements of cooperation prevail over competition\": Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 41, 56; Zbigniew Brzezinski, \"American Policy and Global Change,\" address before the Trilateral Commission, Bonn, West Germany, October 30, 1977.\n\ninternational affairs were \"not a kindergarten\": Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 37, 199; Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 115, n. 14.\n\nCarter broke the news to the American people: Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah, 226\u201333, 445\u201368.\n\nVance had already resigned in disgust: Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 203\u20134; Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 229.\n\nmade the Shah think he was invincible: Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America's Fateful Encounter with Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1985), 13\u201314, 173.\n\na country it had not conquered during World War II: Ambrose and Brinkley, Rise to Globalism, 293\u201395.\n\nthat the Americans kept talking about actually was: Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 336; Westad, The Global Cold War, 322.\n\nripped it to shreds: Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 142\u201344; Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 224\u201328, 230.\n\nimposed those restraints in the first place: Jimmy Carter, \"State of the Union Address,\" address to Joint Session of Congress, January 23, 1980.\n\nhis administration had painstakingly negotiated: Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 243.\n\ndictatorships of Kenya, Somalia, and Oman: Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 144\u201345.\n\n\"sometimes dangerous world that really exists\": Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 81.\n\n\"to remain the strongest nation in the world\": Rosati, The Carter Administration's Quest for Global Community, 88; Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 230.\n\n\"becomes a contagious disease\": Ambrose and Brinkley, Rise to Globalism, 288.\n\n\"history holds its breath\": Smith, Morality, Reason and Power, 227\u201328; Steven R. Weisman, \"Mondale Expects Support,\" New York Times, April 12, 1980, 5.\n\nChapter 12: If There Is a Bear?\n\n\"Do we get to win this time?\": Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 127\u201329.\n\nan earsplitting, kick-ass \"Yes!\": Box Office Mojo, \"Rambo First Blood: Part II,\" http:\/\/www. boxofficemojo.com\/movies\/?page=main&id=rambo2.htm.\n\nAmerica's patriotic new president, Ronald Reagan: Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America, 129, 142.\n\na movie of his own, which followed the Rambo script: Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Touchstone, 1991), 186.\n\ndenied the award because of a technicality: Initially it was believed that there had been only one witness to his heroism, not the required two. Gerry J. Gilmore, \"USNS Benavidez Honors Army Medal of Honor Hero,\" American Forces Press Service, http:\/\/www.defenselink.mil\/news\/newsarticle.aspx?id=45442; Albin Krebs and Robert McG. Thomas, Jr., \"Notes on People: A Green Beret's Bravery Gains Additional Recognition,\" New York Times, February 20, 1981, C24.\n\n\"because they'd been denied permission to win\": Ronald Reagan, \"Remarks on Presenting the Medal of Honor to Master Sergeant Roy P. Benavidez,\" Public Papers of the President, 155, February 24, 1981.\n\nBy 1985, it was America's bestselling toy: Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Reagan Invented the 80s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 241; ICON Group International, Inc., Hobbies: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases (San Diego: ICON Group International, 2008), 36.\n\nthe ticker-tape parade they had long been denied: Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America, 2.\n\n\"You might say America has gone back to the gym\": Gerald J. DeGroot, Noble Cause: America and the Vietnam War (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000), 357.\n\na hint of the transgressions to come: George F. Will, \"'Fresh Starts' and Other Fictions,\" in The Morning After, ed. George F. Will (New York: Free Press, 1986), 343.\n\nhad to drag him by the armpits to bed: Cannon, President Reagan, 207\u20138.\n\nwhich the local butcher usually sold as pet food: John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: Norton, 2007), 58.\n\n\"one of those rare Huck Finn\u2013Tom Sawyer idylls\": Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, 244; Leffler For the Soul of Mankind, 342.\n\nReagan focused on the only positive one: Cannon, President Reagan, 25, 179, 746; Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 67, 73.\n\n\"inability to distinguish between fact and fantasy\": Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 130.\n\nspinoff from Unitarianism that downplayed the idea of sin: Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 25.\n\nEureka College, a Disciples' institution: Stephen Vaughn, \"The Moral Inheritance of a President: Reagan and the Dixon Disciples of Christ,\" Presidential Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1995): 109\u201327; Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 106; Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005), 7\u20138; Wilentz, The Age of Reagan, 130.\n\n\"the desires he planted in us are good\": Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 30.\n\n\"which regularly deny the existence of evil\": Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"The Reagan Reassertion of Western Values,\" in The Reagan Phenomenon, ed. Kirkpatrick, 34.\n\nfights with the communists in Hollywood in the 1940s: Cannon, President Reagan, 284\u201387; Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 99\u2013101.\n\nhe didn't share its fear: Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 340.\n\ndestabilize the entire European banking system: Dan Morgan and Robert G. Kaiser, \"Group of Aides Sought Tougher Stand on Poland,\" Washington Post, January 15, 1982, A1; Dan Morgan, \"West Faces Dilemma on Polish Debt,\" Washington Post, January 11, 1982, A15; George F. Will, \"Reagan's Dim Candle,\" Newsweek, January 18, 1982, 100; Norman Podhoretz, \"The Neo-Conservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy,\" New York Times, May 2, 1982, 30.\n\n\"sensitive about being viewed as too pugnacious\": Robert Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977\u20131990 (New York: Free Press, 1996), 270.\n\n\"is Spanish for Vietnam\": Thomas Paterson, \"Historical Memory and Illusive Victories: Vietnam and Central America,\" Diplomatic History 12, no. 1 (1988): 2\u20133.\n\ndated back to the nineteenth century: Paterson, \"Historical Memory and Illusive Victories,\" 3, 18.\n\n\"a fucking parking lot\": Cannon, President Reagan, 196.\n\ndeclarations of war against both Cuba and Nicaragua: William F. Buckley, \"Who Was Right?\" in Right Reason, ed. Richard Brookhiser (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 123\u201325; Buckley, \"Next in Central America?\" in Right Reason, ed. Brookhiser, 257.\n\n\"reverse the totalitarian drift in Central America\": Norman Podhoretz, \"Appeasement by Any Other Name,\" Commentary 76, no. 1 (1983): 38.\n\n\"we will use all means to prevent this\": Irving Kristol, \"The Muddle in Foreign Policy,\" Wall Street Journal, April 29, 1981, 28.\n\na chorus of anxious references to Vietnam: Kagan, A Twilight Struggle, 175.\n\n\"scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan\": Cannon, President Reagan, 196\u201397.\n\n\"limp-wristed, traditional cookie-pushing bullshit\": Cannon, President Reagan, 345, 348.\n\nopposed invading Nicaragua: William Schneider, \"'Rambo' and Reality: Having It Both Ways,\" in Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy, ed. Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber, and Donald Rothchild (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), 60.\n\nallowing a communist takeover: Barry Sussman, \"Poll Finds a Majority Fears Entanglement in Central America,\" Washington Post, May 25, 1983, A1.\n\nmembers of both parties erupted in cheers: Podhoretz, \"Appeasement by Any Other Name,\" 27; Steven R. Weisman, \"President Appeals Before Congress for Aid to Latins,\" New York Times, April 28, 1983, A1; Gerald F. Seib, \"Central America Leftists Called Threat by Reagan,\" Wall Street Journal, April 28, 1983, 3.\n\nReagan's advisers feared he might be impeached: Cannon, President Reagan, 380, 718; Troy, Morning in America, 244; Wilentz, The Age of Reagan, 232, 242.\n\nWorld War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined: Westad, The Global Cold War, 347.\n\n\"and I'm not going to do it\": Cannon, President Reagan, 336, 337.\n\n\"perhaps the saddest day of my life\": Cannon, President Reagan, 389\u2013457, 442.\n\nReagan decided to do exactly that: Cannon, President Reagan, 445, 454\u201357, 510.\n\ndeclared herself \"disgusted\": Bernard Weinraub, \"On the Right: Long Wait for Foreign Policy Hero,\" New York Times, July 12, 1985, A12.\n\nTheir boss's poll numbers soon ticked back up: Dan Balz and Thomas B. Edsall, \"The Invasion of Grenada; GOP Rallies Around Reagan,\" Washington Post, October 26, 1983, A8; David Shribman, \"Poll Finds a Lack of Support for Latin Policy,\" New York Times, April 29, 1984, A1; Cannon, President Reagan, 510\u201311.\n\nsince the planned runway was too small: Cannon, President Reagan, 445\u201349.\n\nMore than 70 percent of Americans backed the Grenada invasion: Cannon, President Reagan, 448, 462; Schneider, \"'Rambo' and Reality,\" 59.\n\nmore than ten to one in favor: Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 249.\n\nfrom humiliation to pride: Cannon, President Reagan, 448\u201349.\n\nwhere they waved little American flags: Jon Western, Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media and the American Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 95; Francis X. Clines, \"Medical Students Cheer Reagan at a White House Ceremony,\" New York Times, November 8, 1983, A10.\n\nmore than 70 percent support at home: Cannon, President Reagan, 653\u201354; Troy, Morning in America, 246.\n\nmorphing into Rambo again: Cannon, President Reagan, 663.\n\ndeclared Norman Podhoretz in 1976: Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, 178.\n\n\"they do not and cannot last\": Irving Kristol, \"An Automatic-Pilot Administration,\" Wall Street Journal, December 14, 1984, 26.\n\nshe explained in 1981: Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"The Reagan Phenomenon and the Liberal Tradition,\" in The Reagan Phenomenon, ed. Kirkpatrick, 15.\n\n\"human freedom and human dignity to its citizens\": Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 339\u201340.\n\n\"precious little evidence to prove them wrong\": Irving Kristol, \"The Succession: Understanding the Soviet Mafia,\" Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1982, 30.\n\n\"oriental despotism\" that stretched back to the czars: Adam Wolfson, \"The World According to Kirkpatrick: Is Ronald Reagan Listening?\" Policy Review 31 (1985): 70.\n\n\"served to reinforce these ingrained convictions\": Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, 149.\n\n\"people don't make wars\": Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 360\u201361; James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York: Viking, 2009), 80.\n\n\"another time and another era\": Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 3, 8, 29; Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, 304.\n\na group that sought to outlaw nuclear weapons: Cannon, President Reagan, 62.\n\ndidn't fit his image as a cold war hawk: On Reagan's nuclear abolitionism, see Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.\n\nthe robots will descend and kill them all: Cannon, President Reagan, 61\u201362.\n\n\"Here come the little green men again\": Cannon, President Reagan, 62\u201363.\n\nthe inventor of the shield: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 300.\n\nuntil the Americans had caught up: Beth A. Fischer, \"Toeing the Hardline? The Reagan Administration and the Ending of the Cold War,\" Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 3 (1997): 483.\n\nit reflected their eternal view of world affairs: In 1982, for instance, Podhoretz attacked Reagan for saying that once America caught up with the Soviets he would support a mutual freeze on the production of new nuclear weapons. Podhoretz, \"The Neo-conservative Anguish,\" 30.\n\n\"the gap between U.S. and Soviet military capabilities continues to grow\": Walter Pincus and Don Oberdorfer, \"A-Arms Balance Holds,\" Washington Post, December 16, 1984, A1.\n\n\"He had tied into NORAD!\": Cannon, President Reagan, 58, 85.\n\n\"to see that there is never a nuclear war\": Fischer, The Reagan Reversal, 120.\n\nhe had seen footage of the camps in a film: Cannon, President Reagan, 486\u201390.\n\nplaying out before him in real life: \"In several ways,\" Reagan noted, \"the sequence of events described in the briefings paralleled those in the ABC movie.\" Barbara Farnham, \"Reagan and the Gorbachev Revolution: Perceiving the End of Threat,\" Political Science Quarterly 116, no. 2 (2001): 232. See also Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 359; and Fischer, The Reagan Reversal, 120\u201321.\n\nput their military on high alert: Fischer, The Reagan Reversal, 122\u201336; Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983\u20131991 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 65\u201367.\n\npercentage of Americans favoring arms control had shot through the roof: Schneider, \"'Rambo' and Reality,\" 43; John Rielly, \"American Opinion: Continuity, Not Reaganism,\" Foreign Policy 50 (1983): 96.\n\na mutual freeze on the production of nuclear arms: Troy, Morning in America, 138.\n\na warmonger in his 1984 reelection campaign: Cannon, President Reagan, 508\u201311, 740; Jeremi Suri, \"Explaining the End of the Cold War: A New Historical Consensus?\" Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 4 (2002): 92; Fischer, \"Toeing the Hardline?\" 496; Farnham, \"Reagan and the Gorbachev Revolution,\" 233\u201334.\n\nalso eager to get disarmament talks going: Cannon, President Reagan, 309; Barbara Farnham, \"Reagan and the Gorbachev Revolution,\" 230; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 362.\n\n\"nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth\": Ronald Reagan, \"Address to the Nation and Other Countries on United States-Soviet Relations,\" January 16, 1984, http:\/\/www.reagan.utexas.edu\/archives\/speeches\/1984\/11684a.htm.\n\n\"thousand-fold affection returned to you\": Fischer, The Reagan Reversal, 40\u201341.\n\n\"under the threat of those weapons\": Fischer, The Reagan Reversal, 42.\n\n\"it would be the height of naivete to think otherwise\": Kristol, \"An Automatic-Pilot Administration,\" 26.\n\na jaw-dropping 40 percent of his government's budget: Zubok, Failed Empire, 277.\n\nAmerica looked like less of a threat: Suri, \"Explaining the End of the Cold War,\" 70\u201378.\n\na summit meeting, without preconditions: Fischer, \"Toeing the Hardline?\" 494.\n\nin Moscow to attend the funeral of Gorbache's predecessor: Bernard Weinraub, \"Bush Sent to Rites,\" New York Times, March 12, 1985, A1.\n\ndid not share her \" foreign policy objectives\": Bernard Weinraub, \"Reagan Is Told by Kirkpatrick She Will Leave,\" New York Times, January 31, 1985, A6.\n\n\"the threat or use of force in international relations\": Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 364\u201365.\n\nbriefing papers on Soviet politics and culture: Cannon, President Reagan, 57, 155, 157, 746\u201349.\n\ntalked for almost five hours: Fischer, The Reagan Reversal, 48.\n\n\"bleeding when we shake hands\": Cannon, President Reagan, 754.\n\n\"craven eagerness\" to give away the nuclear store: Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind, 197\u2013200.\n\n\"like a punctured balloon\": George Will, \"Reagan Botched the Daniloff Affair,\" Washington Post, September 18, 1986, A25.\n\n\"a dream of a world without nuclear weapons\": Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 387\u201388, 392.\n\n\"give a tremendous party for the whole world\": Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 366; Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Knopf, 2007), 230; Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era, 169\u201374, 207\u20138; Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995), 93\u201398; Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, 217\u201326.\n\nthe two sides began dismantling them: Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 394, 401.\n\nwhile allowing Britain and France to keep theirs: Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 400.\n\n\"elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy\": Diggins, President Reagan, 384.\n\n\"a utopian\": \"Mad Momentum,\" Wall Street Journal, April 13, 1988, 28.\n\n\"is not the architect of Soviet retreat\": Jeane Kirkpatrick, The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State and Other Surprises (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1990), 52; Hedrick Smith, \"The Right Against Reagan,\" New York Times Magazine, January 17, section 6, 36.\n\nDick Cheney called glasnost a fraud: Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 384.\n\nPodhoretz proposed reconstituting it: Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind, 199; Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, 152\u201354.\n\nNeville Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler: Smith, \"The Right Against Reagan,\" 36; John Hanrahan, United Press International, \"Conservatives Escalate Anti-Treaty Campaign,\" January 20, 1988.\n\nsounding a little like the Port Huron Statement: Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 392.\n\n\"a long silence yearn to break free\": Cannon, President Reagan, 787.\n\n\"tighten our belts and spend even more on defense\": Barbara Farnham, \"Reagan and the Gorbachev Revolution,\" 250. The historian Thomas Risse-Kappen adds that there is \"not a shred of substantiation for the claim that there is any connection between the US [military] buildup and the Soviet turnabout.\" Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 405. Walter Uhler has debunked the claim that it was fear of SDI that led Gorbachev to seek to end the cold war. Walter C. Uhler, \"Misreading the Soviet Threat,\" Journal of Slavic Military Studies, March 2001, www.walter-c-uhler.com\/Reviews\/Misreading.html. Reagan himself wrote that \"I might have helped him see that the Soviet Union had less to fear from the West than he thought, and that the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe wasn't needed for the security of the Soviet Union.\" Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 374.\n\n\"a minor Dark Age\": Steel, Walter Lippmann, 592.\n\n\"I am ashamed of our beloved nation\": Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 285.\n\n\"Perhaps to save one's soul is all that is left\": Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau, 221\u201322.\n\n\"succumbing feebly, day by day, to its own decadence\": Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 299.\n\n\"no recovery and no return\": Hixson, George Kennan, 283\u201385.\n\nchickens were coming home to roost: Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, 314.\n\nsuggested that he be \"put out to pasture\": Henry Fairlie, \"Mr. X: The Special Senility of the Diplomat,\" New Republic, December 24, 1977, 9\u201311.\n\n\"springs a leak\": Paul Seabury, \"George Kennan vs. Mr. 'X': The Great Container Springs a Leak,\" New Republic, December 16, 1981, 17\u201320.\n\nthe eventual abolition of all nuclear weapons: Hixson, George Kennan, 282.\n\n\"is a fit occasion for satisfaction\": George Kennan, \"Republicans Won the Cold War?\" New York Times, October 28, 1992, in George Kennan, At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982\u20131995 (New York: Norton, 1995), 187.\n\nPART III: THE HUBRIS OF DOMINANCE\n\nChapter 13: Nothing Is Consummated\n\n\"like a Mozart oboe concerto\": Mary McGrory, \"Kennan\u2014A Prophet Honored,\" Washington Post, April 9, 1989, B1; Don Oberdorfer, \"Revolutionary Epoch Ending in Russia, Kennan Declared,\" Washington Post, April 9, 1989, A22.\n\n\"Wilson was way ahead of his time\": Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Future of U.S.-Soviet Relations: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, 101st Cong., 1st sess., 1989, 27\u201328; Ray Moseley, \"Expert on USSR Says Communism Is Dying,\" Chicago Tribune, April 5, 1989, 1.\n\nstill comparing Gorbachev to Brezhnev: Richard Pipes, \"The Russians Are Still Coming,\" New York Times, October 9, 1989, A17.\n\nstill comparing him to Lenin: Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind, 199.\n\nEast German communism is here to stay: Francis Fukuyama, interviews with the author, July 15 and 21, 2008.\n\n\"nuclear weapons and environmental damage\": Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), xiii, 3.\n\nGoddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square: Peter LaBarbera and Paul Bedard, \"Walesa Thanks America for Aiding Poland,\" Washington Post, November 16, 1989, A1.\n\n\"democracy is supreme\": \"The Pivot of History,\" New Republic, November 16, 1918, 58.\n\n\"crossed the finish line out of breath\": Robert Kagan, \"A Retreat from Power?\" Commentary 100, no. 5 (1995): 22.\n\nworld's largest creditor to its largest debtor: Samuel Huntington, \"The US\u2014Decline or Renewal?\" Foreign Affairs 67, no.2 (1988): 78.\n\nthe worst day of 1929: E. S. Browning, \"Exorcising Ghosts of Octobers Past: Despite Housing Slump, Crashes Such as in 1987 Likely to Stay Memories,\" Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2007, C1.\n\nit had sold 225,000: James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004), 161.\n\nthe New York Times' bestseller list: Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), xiii; Hawes Publications, \"New York Times Bestseller List,\" http:\/\/www.hawes.com\/1988\/1988.htm.\n\nAdmiral William Crowe, chairman: Frederick Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator: America's Bungled Affair with Noriega (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 294; Dennis Hevesi, \"Adm. William Crowe Dies at 82; Led Joint Chiefs,\" New York Times, October 19, 2007; Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989), 407.\n\nNorman Podhoretz's stepdaughter: Eric Alterman, \"Elliott Abrams: The Teflon Assistant Secretary,\" Washington Monthly, May 1987; Michael Crowley, \"Assessment: Elliott Abrams,\" Slate, February 17, 2005, http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2113690\/; Jay Winik, On the Brink: The Dramatic, Behind-the-Scenes Saga of the Reagan Era and the Men and Women Who Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 425\u201332.\n\nAbrams was only thirty-two: Winik, On the Brink, 433.\n\n\"Northern America and Western Europe\": Irving Kristol, \"What Choice Is There in Salvador?\" Wall Street Journal, April 4, 1983, 16.\n\nthe thugs were on our side: Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, \"Is Chile Next?\" Foreign Policy, 63 (1986): 58\u201359, 71\u201373; David P. Forsythe, \"Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: Retrospect and Prospect,\" Political Science Quarterly 105, no. 3 (1990): 435\u201354; Christopher Madison, \"Abrams Policy Skills to Be Put to Test in Central America Hot Seat at State,\" National Journal 17, no. 28 (1985): 1619\u201322; George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph (New York: Scribner, 1993), 972, 974.\n\na prominent critic of the regime: Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 26; Emily Yoffe, \"A Presidential Salary FAQ,\" Slate, January 3, 2001, http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/1006798\/.\n\nJesse Helms was appalled: Kevin Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 27\u201328, 41\u201342; Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 176\u201377.\n\nhe was denouncing him publicly: Buckley, Panama, 90; Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 169, 294.\n\nimportant enough to protect: Eytan Gilboa, \"The Panama Invasion Revisited: Lessons for the Use of Force in the Post Cold War Era,\" Political Science Quarterly 110, no. 4 (1995): 541, 546\u201347.\n\nnever smelled it up close: Elaine Sciolino, \"Washington at Work: Crowe v. Abrams: A Private Feud over Handling Panama Becomes Public,\" New York Times, October 23, 1989, A14.\n\ndeferment to avoid Vietnam: Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 299.\n\n\"raised it to an art form\": William Crowe, letter to the editor, \"Elliott Abrams Remains Reckless on Panama,\" New York Times, October 16, 1989.\n\nweren't fighting for it themselves: Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 297, 303\u20134; Buckley, Panama, 138.\n\nsouth of the border now: Gilboa, \"The Panama Invasion Revisited,\" 548\u201349.\n\nstill haunted his sleep: Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171.\n\n\"sending those troops to Lebanon\": Marlin Fitzwater, phone interview with the author, August 7, 2008.\n\nif he gave up power: Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 311; Buckley, Panama, 143\u201345.\n\n\"will never invade Panama\": Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 116.\n\n\"the farewell party has been indefinitely postponed\": Buckley, Panama, 166.\n\nthere would be no deals: Buckley, Panama, 147\u201348, 169; Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 11, 28, 313, 347.\n\nsmashed him in the face with an iron bar: Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator, 83, 225; Buckley, Panama, 152\u201356, 208; Woodward, The Commanders, 84.\n\nabove her head until she collapsed: Woodward, The Commanders, 84, 157\u201358; Buckley, Panama, 227.\n\npeople did call him a wimp, often: See, for instance, Margaret Warner, \"Bush Battles the 'Wimp Factor,'\" Newsweek, October 19, 1987, 28.\n\nplayed a mean game of horseshoes: Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes (New York: Random House, 1992), 9, 116\u201317; Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (New York: Random House, 2008), 23, 31\u201332, 34.\n\nthe names of his political enemies: Woodward, The Commanders, 168, 191\u201393; Buckley, Panama, 247.\n\nflown to a Florida jail: Andrew Rosenthal, \"Noriega's Surrender: Overview; Noriega Gives Himself Up to U.S. Military; Is Flown to Florida to Face Drug Charges,\" New York Times, January 4, 1990, A1; Adam Pertman, \"Closed Door Arguments Continue over Relocating Noriega,\" Boston Globe, January 13, 1990, A4.\n\ntwenty-three U.S. soldiers died: Woodward, The Commanders, 195.\n\nany U.S. president since Vietnam: Bruce Jentleson, \"The Pretty Prudent Public,\" International Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1992): 55; Russell Crandall, Gunboat Democracy: US Interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 209.\n\n\"alienate the Panamanian people\": Crandall, Gunboat Democracy, 25, 197, 204, 215; Woodward, The Commanders, 85, 90, 136, 138, 144, 173, 189; Karin von Hippel, Democracy by Force: US Military Intervention in the Post\u2013Cold War World (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35; Buckley, Panama, 179.\n\nthe swelling ranks of Latin American democracies: Crandall, Gunboat Democracy, 209\u201311, 216; Buckley, Panama, 179, 259.\n\n\"a free country with justice and liberty\": Crandall, Gunboat Democracy, 210.\n\n\"a trial run\": Stephen Hayes, Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 224.\n\nwaving his gold watch: Christian Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 21, 26, 44, 56; Thomas C. Hayes, \"The Oilfield Lying Below the Iraq-Kuwait Dispute,\" New York Times, September 3, 1990.\n\nmore than 45 percent: Energy Information Administration, \"International Petroleum (Oil) Reserves and Resources Data,\" http:\/\/www.eia.doe.gov\/pub\/international\/iealf\/crudeoilre serves.xls.\n\ndispatching troops to Saudi soil: Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 89.\n\nand then draw its sword: Steve A. Yetiv, Explaining Foreign Policy: U.S. Decision-Making and the Persian Gulf War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 127\u201329; Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 185\u201386; Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 94.\n\nthe United States to beat Iraq to a pulp: Tareq Y. Ismael and Andrej Kreutz, \"Russian-Iraqi Relations: A Historical and Political Analysis,\" Arab Studies Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2001): 89\u201390.\n\nsweltering in the Saudi desert: Woodward, The Commanders, 37.\n\n\"been selling around here or over there\": Woodward, The Commanders, 35\u201339.\n\ndancing to calypso and revering the queen: Karen DeYoung, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell (New York: Vintage, 2007), 19, 23.\n\nin the middle of a garbage dump: DeYoung, Soldier, 49, 69\u201370.\n\n\"I perform well\": Henry Louis Gates, Jr., \"Powell and the Black Elite,\" New Yorker, September 25, 1995, 73.\n\nseared into his consciousness: Patricia Sullivan, \"William Crowe, Jr.; Joint Chiefs Leader Had Diplomat's Touch,\" Washington Post, October 19, 2007, B6; DeYoung, Soldier, 51\u201368, 74\u201391.\n\nthey began the long journey home: DeYoung, Soldier, 76.\n\nhad been blown to bits: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 118.\n\nlost close to half a million men: Woodward, The Commanders, 342; DeYoung, Soldier, 193; Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 67; Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 33, 130\u201333; James A. Bill, \"Why Tehran Finally Wants a Gulf Peace; Iraq's Missile Blitz Broke Their Will to Keep Fighting,\" Washington Post, August 28, 1988, B1; Patrick E. Tyler, \"Gulf War Cease-Fire Begins,\" Washington Post, August 20, 1988, A1; Lawrence Freedman and Ephraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990\u20131991 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 74, 203.\n\nCheney's deferments during Vietnam: Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York Ballantine, 1995), 393; Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 39.\n\npeople called him \"the Sphinx\": Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 38.\n\na reputation for humiliating generals: Hayes, Cheney, 216, 234\u201338; Gordon and Trainor, The Generals' War, 100\u20131.\n\n\"So stick to military matters\": Powell, My American Journey, 451\u201352.\n\nalmost forgot he was black\u2014seemed pleased: DeYoung, Soldier, 195; Woodward, The Commanders, 41\u201342, 299\u2013301.\n\nitching to cut a diplomatic deal: Yetiv, Explaining Foreign Policy, 117, 128; Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, 94, 107.\n\nwas tentative early on: Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 53; George [H. W.] Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 315\u201318.\n\ntelling them not to think: Richard Morin and E. J. Dionne, \"Vox Populi: Winds of War and Shifts of Opinion,\" Washington Post, December 23, 1990, C1; Donna Cassata, Associated Press, \"Former Military Leaders Caution Against Rushing to War,\" November 29, 1990; Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 285.\n\nauthorizing military force since 1812: Adam Wolfson, \"Humanitarian Hawks? Why Kosovo but Not Kuwait,\" Policy Review 98 (2000): 30; Jeane Kirkpatrick, Making War to Keep Peace (New York: Harper, 2007), 25; Max Elbaum, \"The Storm at Home,\" Crossroads, April 1991, http:\/\/www.revolutionintheair.com\/histstrategy\/gulf1.html.\n\n\"potentially devastating economic consequences\": Zbigniew Brzezinski, interview with Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, Crossfire, CNN, September 21, 1990; Zbigniew Brzezinski, \"Patience in the Persian Gulf, Not War,\" New York Times, October 7, 1990, 19.\n\ncame out of the woodwork in opposition: Senate Committee on Armed Services, Crisis in the Persian Gulf Region: US Policy Options and Implications, 101st Cong., 2nd sess., December 3, 1990; House Committee on Armed Services, Crisis in the Persian Gulf: Sanctions, Diplomacy and War, 101st Cong., 2nd sess., December 20, 1990.\n\nbefore casting their votes: Senate Committee on Armed Services, Crisis in the Persian Gulf Region: US Policy Options and Implications, 101st Cong., 2nd sess., December 3, 1990.\n\n\"the past that will not die\": Evan Thomas, \"No Vietnam,\" Newsweek, December 10, 1990, 24.\n\nthe average B-52 missed its target by 2,700 feet: Marshall L. Michel, III, Eleven Days of Christmas: America's Last Vietnam Battle (New York: Encounter, 2001), 223.\n\nin the roof of the Iraqi air command: Mark Clodfelter, \"Of Demons, Storms, and Thunder,\" Airpower Journal (1991), http:\/\/www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil\/airchronicles\/apj\/apj91\/win91\/clod.htm.\n\nvulnerable to attacks from the air: Clodfelter, \"Of Demons, Storms, and Thunder.\"\n\n\"immaculate destruction\": David Halberstam, War in the Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 56. Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor call the Gulf War \"the first war in history in which airpower not ground forces played the dominant role.\" Gordon and Trainor, The Generals' War, x.\n\nAmerica didn't lose a single one: Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 171.\n\nthe figure was 146: Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America's Purpose (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1992), 74; Gordon and Trainor, The Generals' War, 457.\n\nAmerica actually turned a profit on the war: Tucker and Hendrickson, The Imperial Temptation, 74.\n\n\"the Vietnam syndrome once and for all\": Tucker and Hendrickson, The Imperial Temptation, 152.\n\nclose to five million people cheered: DeYoung, Soldier, 209.\n\n\"the most powerful nation in the world\": Peter Applebome, \"After the War: National Mood; War Heals Wounds at Home, but Not All,\" New York Times, March 4, 1991, A1.\n\n\"We kicked ass\": Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 177.\n\n\"Nothing is consummated\": Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 34.\n\nthe figure had more than doubled: Jentleson, \"The Pretty Prudent Public,\" 67\u201369.\n\nindependent power base: Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 192\u201393.\n\nand depose Saddam itself: Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 403.\n\nwhat they thought was Bush's command: Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 215; Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 193; Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 420.\n\n\"caution or circumspection as to danger or risk\": \"Prudence,\" Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, http:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/prudence.\n\nto dismember America's old foe: Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 44, 208, 541.\n\nto run the war through the UN, either: Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 101, 152\u201353.\n\nshooting down Saddam's helicopters: Gordon and Trainor, The Generals' War, 455; Lewis D. Solomon, Paul D. Wolfowitz: Visionary Intellectual, Policymaker and Strategist (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 68.\n\nthe downfalls of Somoza and the Shah: Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Our Interests in the Philippines,\" Chicago Tribune, December 15, 1985, 23.\n\n\"swallowing too many happiness pills\": Irving Kristol, \"Now What for US Client States?\" Wall Street Journal, March 3, 1986, 18.\n\nShultz in turn convinced Reagan: Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy (New York: Times Books, 1987), 432; Solomon, Paul D. Wolfowitz, 30\u201337.\n\n\"the high point of my career\": Michael Dobbs, \"For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized,\" Washington Post, April 7, 2003, A17.\n\nthe most adamant that America come to their aid: Gordon and Trainor, The Generals' War, 451, 455; Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 193; Solomon, Paul D. Wolfowitz, 68.\n\nso high you could barely see: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 263.\n\ninside his suit pocket: Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 57; Bill Keller, \"The Sunshine Warrior,\" New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2002, 48.\n\n\"to create these great schemes\": Gates, \"Powell and the Black Elite,\" 73.\n\nthat the question was closed: Gordon and Trainor, The Generals' War, 456.\n\nin the Gulf, had not even existed: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 89.\n\nabove much of Iraq: Joe Stork and Martha Wenger, \"The US in the Persian Gulf: From Rapid Deployment to Massive Deployment,\" Middle East Report 168 (1991): 25; Kenneth Katzman, \"The Persian Gulf: Issues for U.S. Policy, 2000,\" CRS Report for Congress, November 3, 2000, 18\u201324; Multinational Force and Observers, \"Assembling the Force,\" http:\/\/www.mfo.org\/1\/4\/22\/25\/base2.asp, MFO.\n\nA decade later it was 72 percent: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, \"SIPRI Arms Transfers Database,\" http:\/\/armstrade.sipri.org.\n\n\"talks like Dirty Harry but acts like Barney Fife\": Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 208, 214.\n\nChapter 14: Fukuyama's Escalator\n\na banana smeared with peanut butter: John F. Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House (New York: Random House, 2005), 16.\n\nwalked in at the stroke of 8:31: DeYoung, Soldier, 186.\n\nanywhere from a few minutes to a few hours late: Harris, The Survivor, 54.\n\n\"the first black President\": Toni Morrison, \"The Talk of the Town,\" New Yorker, October 5, 1998, 31\u201332.\n\nexpecting his staff to work\u2014until 2 A.M.: Harris, The Survivor, 53.\n\nhe asked the army not to inform his wife: DeYoung, Soldier, 81.\n\nas a young boy to be fat: Harris, The Survivor, 35.\n\nif their shoes were shined: Gates, \"Powell and the Black Elite,\" 64.\n\nwhose intake increased with stress: Harris, The Survivor, xxiii, 56\u201357.\n\nas Aspin ate thirteen hors d'oeuvres: Bob Woodward, \"The Secretary of Analysis,\" Washington Post, February 21, 1993, W8; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 245\u201346.\n\nmilitarists like Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Cheney: DeYoung, Soldier, 227.\n\nhad worked in the McGovern campaign: David Maraniss, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 264\u201386; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace,20.\n\ndiscontented young diplomats in Vietnam: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 180\u201381.\n\nVirtually none had joined SDS: Former SDS president Todd Gitlin, e-mail message to author, June 30, 2008.\n\n\"It was a draft beer so he dodged it\": Harris, The Survivor, 51.\n\n\"pot-smoking, draft-dodging [and] womanizing\": John Lancaster, \"Accused of Ridiculing Clinton, General Faces Air Force Probe,\" Washington Post, June 8, 1993, A1.\n\nhe backed down: Harris, The Survivor, 16\u201318; DeYoung, Soldier, 230\u201333.\n\nforeign policy received only 141 words: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 193.\n\n\" focus like a laser beam on the economy\": Steven Mufson, \"Clinton to Send Message with Economic Choices; Appointments Will Show Administration's Direction,\" Washington Post, November 8, 1992, A33; William Clinton, interview with Ted Koppel, Nightline, ABC News, November 4, 1992.\n\nnot to take too much of his time: William G. Hyland, Clinton's World: Remaking American Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1999), 18; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 242.\n\nClinton's CIA director trying to get a meeting: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 244; \"White House Has Not Been Impenetrable; Security Breached on Many Occasions,\" Washington Post, May 21, 1995, A14.\n\n\"bring positive results any time soon\": Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 64. For more on the controversy regarding Tarnoff's statements, see Jim Anderson, \"The Tarnoff Affair,\" American Journalism Review, March 1994, http:\/\/ajr.org\/Article.asp?id=1255.\n\n\"The Age of Europe has dawned\": Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 85.\n\n\"We don't have a dog in this fight\": Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin USA, 1996), 198\u2013201; David C. Gompert, \"The United States and Yugoslavia's Wars,\" in The World and Yugoslavia's Wars, ed. Richard H. Ullman (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), 127\u201328.\n\nmade a fairly clean getaway: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 31.\n\nultranationalist, anti-Serb bigots: Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 92\u201398.\n\na small taste of things to come: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 96\u201397.\n\nit was the most vulnerable of all: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 121.\n\nshelling it night after night: Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 222\u201328.\n\nburying bodies in public gardens, even backyards: Ian Traynor, \"The Slow but Sure Sacking of Sarajevo,\" Guardian, May 11, 1992, 22; Christine Bertelson, \"Escape from Sarajevo, and Death,\" St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 19, 1993, A1; John Pomfret, \"The Hidden Agony of Mostar's Muslims,\" Washington Post, August 22, 1993, A1.\n\n\"In Auschwitz at least they had gas\": Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 123.\n\nto ever assert their independence again: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 129\u201330; Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 251, 269.\n\nas part of a UN \"peacekeeping\" force: UN Department of Public Information, \"Background: United Nations Protection Force,\" September 1996, http:\/\/www.un.org\/Depts\/dpko\/dpko\/co_mission\/unprof_b.htm; Power, A Problem from Hell, 248\u201349; Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 198\u201399.\n\npreventing the world from doing anything about it: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 125\u201327; Thomas Weiss, \"Collective Spinelessness: U.N. Actions in the Former Yugoslavia,\" in Ullman, ed., The World and Yugoslavia's Wars, 59\u201396.\n\nstriking Serb positions from the air: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 158, 196\u201397; Hyland, Clinton's World, 34.\n\n\"the new team in turn regarded him with awe\": Harris, The Survivor, 49.\n\nlittle direct bearing on its security: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 118.\n\nPowell replied two hundred thousand ground troops: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 42; Michael R. Gordon, \"Powell Delivers a Resounding No on Using Limited Force in Bosnia,\" New York Times, September 28, 1992, A1; Colin L. Powell, \"Why Generals Get Nervous,\" New York Times, October 8, 1992, A35; Nancy Soderberg, The Superpower Myth: The Uses and Misuses of American Power (New York: Wiley, 2006), 23\u201327.\n\ntaking steps sure to enrage the Serbs: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 227.\n\n\"enough respect not to interfere in ours\": Owen Harries, \"The Collapse of the West,\" Foreign Affairs 72 (September\/October 1993), http:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.org\/19930901faessay8562\/owen-harries\/the-collapse-of-the-west.html.\n\nhe no longer supported \"lift and strike\": Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 228.\n\nslaughtering each other for five hundred years: In fact, Kaplan's book was not mostly about Bosnia at all, but about Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and other parts of the former Yugoslavia. And despite depicting Balkan hatreds as ancient, Kaplan actually supported U.S. military intervention in Bosnia. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: Vintage, 1996), ix\u2013xii; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 228; Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 157; Paul Starobin, \"The Liberal Hawk Soars,\" National Journal, May 15, 1999, 1310.\n\natrocities committed by Bosnians against Serbs: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 230; Power, A Problem from Hell, 308.\n\n\"he came back with a European one\": Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 229.\n\nthe incredible shrinking United States: Harris, The Survivor, 62; Michael Duffy, \"The Incredible Shrinking President,\" Time, June 29, 1992, http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,975890,00.html.\n\n\"to demonstrate that we had a heart\": Western, Selling Intervention and War, 133, 135\u201337, 155, 163, 172; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 248\u201352; Maryann K. Cusimano, \"Operation Restore Hope: The Bush Administration's Decision to Intervene in Somalia,\" Case Study No. 463, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1995, 4\u20136; Ken Menkhaus and Louis Ortmayer, \"Key Decisions in the Somalia Intervention,\" Case Study No. 464, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1995, 2\u20138.\n\ninoculations that he canceled his trip: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 252, 254.\n\nwhich required sidelining Aidid: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 254\u201357; Menkhaus and Ortmayer, \"Key Decisions in the Somalia Intervention,\" 13\u201323; Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (New York: Random House, 1999), 93, 110.\n\nputting a bounty on Aidid's head: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 257\u201358.\n\ntwo meetings with the president: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 244.\n\nat a hotel in downtown Mogadishu: Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999), 3, 8.\n\nU.S. soldier's disfigured corpse through the streets: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 261\u201362; Bowden, Black Hawk Down, 108\u201325.\n\n\"Vietmalia\": Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 217.\n\nCongress would cut off funding: Harris, The Survivor, 122; Michael Kranish, \"Clinton Builds Force, Sets Pullout; Says Somalia Withdrawal Can't Be Instant,\" Boston Globe, October 8, 1993, A1.\n\nhe was unfit to be commander in chief: Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 79.\n\nCritics called it Somalia Two: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 270\u201371; Harris, The Survivor, 123.\n\nlay down on a park bench, and tried to die: Power, A Problem from Hell, 273\u201377, 388\u201389.\n\ntwice already on the same trip: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 277; James Bennet, \"Clinton in Africa: The Overview; Clinton Declares U.S., with World, Failed Rwandans,\" New York Times, March 26, 1998, A1; John F. Harris, \"Clinton Tells Rwandans: World Too Slow to Act; Genocide Survivors Give Accounts of '94 Horror,\" Washington Post, March 26, 1998, A1.\n\nan intervention never carried out: Virginia Heffernan, \"Looking Back Across a Decade, with Bloody Regret,\" New York Times, April 1, 2004, E1.\n\nshelter, health care, and education: Richard A. Falk, \"Ideological Patterns in the United States Human Rights Debate: 1945\u20131978,\" in The Dynamics of Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Natalie Kaufman Hevener (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1981), 43.\n\nsensitivity to that in the State Department: Muravchik, The Uncertain Crusade, 92.\n\n\"it's Spain\": Todd Gitlin, \"Bosnia Isn't Vietnam, It's Spain,\" Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1993, F7.\n\nCambodia's seven million people: Power, A Problem from Hell, 143.\n\nthe cause of human rights: A surprising and honorable exception was George McGovern. Power, A Problem from Hell, 132\u201336.\n\n\"with our military assistance\": Power, A Problem from Hell, 103.\n\nNATO should begin bombing immediately: Leslie Gelb, \"Balkan Strategy, Part II,\" New York Times, February 28, 1993, 15.\n\nincluding to Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda: In the four decades between the UN's creation and 1991, the organization authorized eighteen peacekeeping missions. Between 1991 and 1995, it authorized twenty-two. In 1992 alone, the number of UN peacekeepers worldwide more than quadrupled, from 11,000 to 52,000. United Nations, \"List of Operations, 1948\u20132009,\" http:\/\/www.un.org\/Depts\/dpko\/dpko\/list.shtml; Marrack Goulding, \"The Evolution of United Nations Peacekeeping,\" International Affairs 69, no. 3 (1993): 451.\n\nabout a standing UN army: Harris, The Survivor, 125.\n\nrape of Bihac went on: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 284\u201385.\n\nbecause they were not Christian: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 90\u201391, 304\u20135.\n\n\"distinct chapters in the history of decency\": Leon Wieseltier, \"Curses,\" New Republic, October 25, 1993, 46.\n\nwere leading the president astray: Drew, On the Edge, 158.\n\ncoverage of the Holocaust, was relentless: Starobin, \"The Liberal Hawk Soars,\" 1314.\n\nafter reading one Times column: George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human (Boston: Back Bay, 2000), 216.\n\neven the Quakers were for war: Power, A Problem from Hell, 428, 435.\n\nbroke into applause: Harris, The Survivor, 42\u201343.\n\nthe UN's Bosnia mission would collapse: Michael Dobbs, \"Embargo Vote Is Bipartisan Slap at Clinton; Dismay over Bosnia Reflects Setbacks,\" Washington Post, June 9, 1995, A22.\n\n\"'the good guys' and 'the bad guys'\": Power, A Problem from Hell, 394, 417; David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 326.\n\n\"the president is relevant\": Harris, The Survivor, 178.\n\nwould soon endorse Dole's presidential bid: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 285\u201386, 299.\n\nleader of the free world was \"vacant\": Hyland, Clinton's World, 40.\n\nstill writing his inaugural address: Harris, The Survivor, xxiv, 11.\n\n\"the faster I come back up\": Harris, The Survivor, 334.\n\nbomb the hell out of them: Power, A Problem from Hell, 438; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 340; Harris, The Survivor, 194, 196, 201.\n\nas part of the Clinton team: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 319, 324\u201328; Harris, The Survivor, 197.\n\ntell you how easy it was: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 391, 431\u201332.\n\nabout the people Milosevic killed: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 395.\n\na new willingness to discuss peace: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 339.\n\ntheir colleagues plunged to their death: Power, A Problem from Hell, 294; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 395; Holbrooke, To End a War, 6\u201313, 231\u2013312.\n\nU.S. peacekeepers would help enforce: Holbrooke, To End a War, 308\u20139.\n\nnot a single American died: Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 131.\n\n\"The big dog barked today\": Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 340.\n\nthe first secretary-general ever denied a second term: United Nations, \"Former Secretaries-General,\" http:\/\/www.un.org\/sg\/formersgs.shtml.\n\nthis new institutional order: James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether but When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 3, 17.\n\nfor NATO to stay off former Soviet soil: Jonathan Eyal, \"NATO's Enlargement: Anatomy of a Decision,\" International Affairs 73, no. 4 (1997): 709; Mark Kramer, \"The Myth of a No-NATO-Enlargement Pledge to Russia,\" Washington Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2009): 39\u201361; Goldgeier, Not Whether but When, 73, 110\u201317, 120\u201321, 135\u201338, 140\u201343; Strobe Talbott, interview with author, July 10, 2008.\n\nleft their bodies in the snow: R. Jeffery Smith, \"This Time, Walker Wasn't Speechless,\" Washington Post, January 22, 1999, A15.\n\nMoscow took Czechoslovakia in its grip: Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 378\u201379.\n\nwhen she was only one year old: Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 146.\n\nafter the conference closed, the bombing began: Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 77\u201384; Power, A Problem from Hell, 447\u201348; Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary (New York: Miramax, 2005), 505\u201318.\n\nfear of U.S. casualties limited its scope: Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 106, 122.\n\nthan during the Gulf War: Stuart Croft, \"Guaranteeing Europe's Security? Enlarging NATO Again,\" International Affairs 78, no. 1 (2002): 98.\n\n\"war can be won by airpower alone\": Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 471\u201374, 478; Power, A Problem from Hell, 456; Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 200\u20132.\n\ntwo NATO planes had been shot down: Power, A Problem from Hell, 459.\n\nNot a single American died in combat: Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 214.\n\ntook over Kosovo's political administration: North Atlantic Treaty Organization, \"Resolution 1244 (1999),\" adopted by UN Security Council, June 10, 1999, http:\/\/www.nato.int\/Kosovo\/docu\/u990610a.htm.\n\nthe verge of financial default: Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 166, 229.\n\ninternally displaced from their villages: Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 40\u201341, 108\u20139.\n\nhalf the rate of the United States: World Bank Development Data, http:\/\/devdata.worldbank.org\/data-query.\n\nat a phenomenal 8 percent per year: Harris, The Survivor, 263; President William J. Clinton, \"President Clinton Addresses the Citizens of Colorado on the Global Economy,\" Littleton, Colorado, June 19, 1997.\n\nbegan to improve dramatically: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, \"U.S. Teen Sexual Activity Factsheet,\" January 2005, http:\/\/www.kff.org\/youthhivstds\/upload\/U-S-Teen-Sexual-Activity-Fact-Sheet.pdf; Jeffrey Grogger, Stephen J. Haider, and Jacob Klerman, \"Why Did the Welfare Rolls Fall During the 1990s?\" Labor and Population Program Working Paper Series 03\u201307, Santa Monica, California, Rand Corporation, March 2003, 1; U.S. Department of Justice, \"Crime Trends,\" Bureau of Justice Statistics, http:\/\/bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov\/dataonline\/Search\/Crime\/Crime.cfm.\n\nthe psychological effect was comparable: Harris, The Survivor, 263.\n\n\"single superpower on the cheap is astonishing\": Paul Kennedy, \"The Eagle Has Landed,\" Financial Times, February 2, 2002.\n\n\"The Committee to Save the World\": Joshua Cooper Ramo, \"The Three Marketeers,\" Time, September 15, 1999, http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,990206,00.html.\n\n\"sharp limits to American resources and patience\": Francis Fukuyama, \"The Beginning of Foreign Policy,\" New Republic, August 17, 1992, 24\u201332.\n\nthat demanded political reform: Francis Fukuyama, \"The Global Optimists,\" New Republic, February 6, 1995, 40\u201342.\n\n\"so few external threats\": Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 278.\n\npredicted Christ's return to earth: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, \"Optimism Reigns, Technology Plays a Key Role,\" October 24, 1999, http:\/\/people-press.org\/report\/51\/optimism-reigns-technology-plays-key-role.\n\nthe last time anything seemed possible: Harris, The Survivor, 393.\n\nprogress and the goodness of man: David Brooks, \"The Organization Kid,\" Atlantic, April 2001, http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/print\/200104\/brooks.\n\nChapter 15: Fathers and Sons\n\nhis fourth autobiographical essay: Kristol, \"An Autobiographical Memoir.\" The first three were \"Memoirs of a Trotskyist\" \"Memoirs of a Cold Warrior,\" New York Times Magazine, February 11, 1968; and \"My Cold War,\" National Interest 31 (1993): 141.\n\npublish his fourth autobiographical book: Podhoretz's four autobiographies are Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), Breaking Ranks (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), Ex-Friends (New York: Free Press 1999), and My Love Affair with America (New York: Free Press, 2001).\n\n\"as well as liberals and radicals\": Kristol, \"An Autobiographical Memoir,\" 40.\n\nStalinist Eastern Europe and Maoist China: Hoeveler, Watch on the Right, 82\u201383, 153.\n\n\"Sorry! It's the real world\": Jacquelyn Hardy, interview with the author, July 10, 2008.\n\n\" frankly, proudly, a revolutionary power\": Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"The Search for a Stable World Order,\" in Legitimacy and Force: Political and Moral Dimensions, ed. Jeane Kirkpatrick, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), 367.\n\n\" for limited, defensive purposes\": Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Moral Equivalence,\" in Legitimacy and Force, ed. Kirkpatrick, 70.\n\n\"a normal country in a normal time\": Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"A Normal Country in a Normal Time,\" National Interest 21 (1990): 40\u201345.\n\n\"continue to live beyond our means\": Kirkpatrick, \"A Normal Country in a Normal Time,\" 40\u201345; Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Counseling the President,\" National Review, February 10, 1989, 28.\n\npreparing for a multipolar world: Kirkpatrick, The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State, 165; Kirkpatrick, \"A Normal Country in a Normal Time,\" 40\u201343; Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Marriage of Convenience for the New Europe,\" Financial Post, July 10, 1990, 9; Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"An 'Alice in Wonderland' Defense Budget,\" Washington Post, April 5, 1993, A21; Irving Kristol, \"Defining Our National Interest,\" National Interest 21 (1990): 23.\n\n\"people violently reject any such scenario\": Kristol, \"Defining Our National Interest,\" 23.\n\nLithuania's fledgling democracy: Does \"the West\" Still Exist? A Conference of the Committee for the Free World (New York: Orwell, 1990), 39.\n\n\"which Americans need to unlearn\": Kirkpatrick, \"A Normal Country in a Normal Time,\" 43; Ralph Z. Hallow, \"Neoconservatives Meet in Search of Common Ground,\" Washington Times, April 24, 1990, A3.\n\n\"Something will screw it up\": Does \"the West\" Still Exist, 109, 117; Kristol, \"In Search of Our National Interest,\" Wall Street Journal, June 7, 1990, A14.\n\n\"serious economic decline\": Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Ultimate Responsibility Falls on Arab Shoulders,\" Financial Post, August 16, 1990, 11.\n\ngiving sanctions time to work: Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Gulf Crisis Proves That the World Needs a Policeman,\" Financial Post, August 28, 1990, 9.\n\nmerely bomb from the air: Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Will We Liberate Kuwait...,\" Washington Post, November 12, 1990, A19.\n\nhe supported an American war: Irving Kristol, \"The Gulf: Born-Again Isolationists,\" Washington Post, August 22, 1990, A21.\n\n\"people who are really different from us\": Irving Kristol, \"After the War, What?\" Wall Street Journal, February 22, 1991, A10; Irving Kristol, \"Tongue-Tied in Washington,\" Wall Street Journal Europe, April 15, 1991, A14.\n\n\"vital American interests and lives at stake\": Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"Haiti's Looking Like Another Clinton Mistake,\" Post and Courier, March 14, 1995, A11.\n\nthen ignored the subject: Kristol, \"Defining our National Interest,\" 21; Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism, 184; Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 99.\n\nputting U.S. peacekeepers on the ground: Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"U.S. Must Retaliate Strongly Against Serbs,\" Post and Courier, June 11, 1995, A21; Jeane Kirkpatrick, \"U.S. Needs Clear Goals in Bosnia,\" Post and Courier, November 19, 1995, A23.\n\nand the columnist George Will: Buckley defined his foreign policy vision as \"measured internationalism\" or \"prudent isolationism.\" William F. Buckley, \"American Power\u2014For What? A Symposium,\" Commentary 109, no. 1 (2000): 23\u201324. In 1991, Will wrote that \"concerning the question of U.S. military intervention in Iraq's civil war, President Bush has the traditional conservative's wariness about uncertain undertakings, a prudent skepticism about the promiscuous minting of abstract rights and duties, and an inclination to anchor U.S. policy in the rock of U.S. national interests. Today's imperial conservatives consider such thinking crabbed, mean-spirited and (adopting the language of liberal sensitivity-mongers) 'insensitive.' They want America to do for the world what Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was supposed to for America: fix it.\" George Will, \"Conservative Factions Debate What's Best for Kurds,\" Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 18, 1991, A13. Will's own writing left little doubt that he was on Bush's side.\n\n\"expansive Wilsonian interventionism\": Norman Podhoretz, \"Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,\" Commentary 101, no. 3 (1996): 24.\n\n\"general reluctance to crusade\": Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism, 184, 206.\n\nthe younger conservative generation fired its first shot: Charles Krauthammer, \"The Unipolar Moment,\" Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990): 29.\n\nyoung enough to be Kirkpatrick's son: Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 81; Winik, On the Brink, 457.\n\n\"if necessary, disarm\" the weapons states: Charles Krauthammer, \"The Lonely Superpower,\" New Republic, July 29, 1991, 27; Krauthammer, \"The Unipolar Moment,\" 29\u201333.\n\n\"is chaos\": Krauthammer, \"The Unipolar Moment,\" 32.\n\n\"Otherwise they would rather stay home\": Krauthammer, \"The Lonely Superpower,\" 27.\n\nrunning the Gulf War through the UN: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 201\u20132; Woodward, The Commanders, 106; Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 28; Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 101.\n\nshooting down Saddam's helicopters: Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 32; Gordon and Trainor, The Generals' War, 455.\n\n\"our role in the world\": Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 208\u201313; Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 38\u201343; Patrick E. Tyler, \"US Strategy Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,\" New York Times, March 8, 1992, A1; Barton Gellman, \"Keeping US First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower,\" Washington Post, March 11, 1992, A1; Patrick E. Tyler, \"Senior US Officials Assail Lone-Superpower Policy,\" New York Times, March 11, 1992, A6; Barton Gellman, \"Aim of Defense Plan Supported by Bush: But President Says He Has Not Read Memo,\" Washington Post, March 12, 1992, A18.\n\nthe Defense Planning Guidance: Charles Krauthammer, \"What's Wrong with the 'Pentagon Paper'?\" Washington Post, March 13, 1992, A25.\n\nRobert Kagan and William Kristol: Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 139\u201340; Robert Kagan, \"American Power\u2014A Guide for the Perplexed,\" Commentary 101, no. 4 (1996): 30.\n\nafter America's triumph in Bosnia: Kagan did write two essays in Commentary in 1994 and 1995 (\"The Case for Global Activism,\" September 1994, 40\u201344; and \"A Retreat from Power,\" 19\u201325) that previewed his globalist worldview, but neither got nearly as much attention as his Foreign Affairs essay with William Kristol in the summer of 1996, \"Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,\" Foreign Affairs 75, no. 4 (1996), http:\/\/www.carnegieendowment.org\/publications\/index.cfm?fa=view&id=276.\n\n\"blood and treasure on teacup wars\": Charles Krauthammer, \"American Power\u2014For What? A Symposium,\" Commentary, January 2000, 34.\n\nstrategically important battles to come: Robert Kagan, \"America, Bosnia, Europe: A Compelling Interest,\" Weekly Standard, November 6, 1995, 27.\n\n\"understood it was all a game\": John Podhoretz, Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies, 1989\u20131993 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 114.\n\non foreign policy, Republicans won: Unnamed Washington writer, interview with the author, August 7, 2009.\n\nher prot\u00e9g\u00e9, became his mentor: Kagan, A Twilight Struggle, x.\n\n\"the struggle with communism was endless\": Kagan, A Twilight Struggle, 55\u201377, 212.\n\ndecades had proved that it could: Robert Kagan, \"Democracy and Double Standards,\" Commentary 104, no. 2 (1997): 19\u201326.\n\nin speeding history up: Ken Jowitt, \"Rage, Hubris, and Regime Change,\" Policy Review 118 (2003): 33\u201342.\n\n\"others assumed were fixed\": Kagan and Kristol, \"Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.\"\n\nbring down the Soviet empire: Kagan, \"American Power\u2014A Guide for the Perplexed,\" 26.\n\nbefore Gorbachev even took power: Norman Podhoretz, \"The First Term: The Reagan Road to D\u00e9tente,\" Foreign Affairs 63, no. 3 (1984): 447\u201364.\n\nwithout fearing U.S. aggression: See Farnham, \"Reagan and the Gorbachev Revolution,\" 225\u201352; Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 436; Suri, \"Explaining the End of the Cold War,\" 60\u201392.\n\nPresent Danger, which had influenced Reagan: Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger: Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980); William Kristol and Robert Kagan, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter, 2000).\n\n\"another Reagan\": William Kristol, \"Reagan's Greatness,\" Weekly Standard, November 10, 1997, 31.\n\nthe Weekly Standard, in 1998: William Kristol, \"Clinton's Feckless Foreign Policy,\" Weekly Standard, May 25, 1991, 11.\n\n\"is reminiscent of the mid-1970's\": Kagan and Kristol, \"Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.\"\n\n\"does not add up to a brain tumor\": Owen Harries, \"American Power\u2014For What? A Symposium,\" Commentary 109, no. 1 (2000): 28\u201329.\n\n\" faces now is its own weakness\": Kagan and Kristol, \"Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.\"\n\n\"benevolent global hegemony\": Kagan and Kristol, \"Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.\"\n\nwhat they considered possible: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 215.\n\nPresent Dangers, as did Wolfowitz: Elliott Abrams wrote a chapter titled \"Israel and the 'Peace Process.\" Wolfowitz's was called \"Statesmanship in the New Century.\" Abrams called himself a \"neo-Reaganite\" in his contribution to \"American Power\u2014For What? A Symposium,\" Commentary 109, no. 1 (2000): 21.\n\nDonald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney: Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 130.\n\n\"complete victory\" in the Balkans: \"Letter to President Clinton,\" Project for the New American Century, September 11, 1998, http:\/\/www.newamericancentury.org\/kosovomilosevicsep98.htm; William Kristol and Robert Kagan, \"Victory,\" Weekly Standard, June 14, 1999.\n\nthis alleged malaise: David Brooks, \"Politics and Patriotism: From Teddy Roosevelt to John McCain,\" Weekly Standard, April 26, 1999, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/check.asp?idArticle=10411&r=onujh.\n\n\"the narrower concerns of private life\": David Brooks, \"A Return to National Greatness: A Manifesto for a Lost Creed,\" Weekly Standard, March 3, 1997, 16.\n\n\"holiday from history\": Schlesinger, \"The New Mood in Politics,\" in The Politics of Hope and the Bitter Heritage, 109; Charles Krauthammer, \"Holiday from History,\" Washington Post, February 14, 2003, A31.\n\n\"post-greatness America\": Schlesinger, \"The Decline of Greatness,\" in The Politics of Hope and the Bitter Heritage, 37; Brooks, \"A Return to National Greatness,\" 16.\n\ninspired JFK's fifty-mile hikes: Roosevelt used the phrase \"national greatness\" in an essay titled \"National Life and Character,\" which was published in the collection American Ideals (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1920), 268.\n\ngrand public mission at all: Brooks, \"A Return to National Greatness,\" 16.\n\nAmerica should journey to Mars: Charles Krauthammer, \"On to Mars: America Has Been Lost in Space; It's Time to Find Our Nerve Again,\" Weekly Standard, January 31, 2000, 23.\n\n\"except as public relations\": Jonah Goldberg, \"Grading Greatness,\" National Review Online, May 21, 2001, http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/goldberg\/goldbergprint052101.html.\n\n\"the already soft edges of boomer life\": Noemie Emery, \"Ask Not: John McCain Belongs to Our Oldest Political Party\u2014the Party of Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan\u2014the Patriot Party,\" Weekly Standard, February 21, 2000, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/check.asp?idArticle=10542&r=ivvnb.\n\n\"sophisticated consumer demands\": Francis Fukuyama, \"The End of History?\" National Interest 16 (1989): 18.\n\n\"Americans will die doing the right thing\": Jonah Goldberg, \"A Continent Bleeds: Taking Africa\u2014and Our Responsibilities\u2014Seriously,\" National Review Online (May 3, 2000), http:\/\/article.nationalreview.com\/?q=YmMzMDA0MWVhN2JjY2RhN2E4NmVkNTU1ZjJjMDU0MzQ.\n\nChapter 16: Small Ball\n\n\"in one or two sentences\": Norman Kempster, \"Vietnam War Leaves Legacy of Anguish; Still Overshadows Lives, U.S. Policies,\" Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1985, 1.\n\nbe drawn into war with Iran: Matt Bai, \"The McCain Doctrines,\" New York Times Magazine, May 18, 2008, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/05\/18\/magazine\/18mccain-t.html?ref=magazine.\n\n\"trading American blood for Iraqi blood\": Jacob Weisberg, \"Gulfballs,\" New Republic, March 25, 1991, 19.\n\n\"another failure like Vietnam or Lebanon\": Kagan, \"A Retreat from Power,\" 20.\n\nhe grew talons and became a hawk: John B. Judis, \"Neo-McCain,\" New Republic, October 16, 2006, http:\/\/www.tnr.com\/article\/politics\/neo-mccain.\n\n\"21st century...Reagan Doctrine\": Brooks, \"Politics and Patriotism\" David D. Kirkpatrick, \"Response to 9\/11 Offers Outline of McCain Doctrine,\" New York Times, August 17, 2008, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/08\/17\/us\/politics\/17mccain.html.\n\na conservative magazine, JFK: David Brooks and William Kristol, \"The McCain Insurrection; The Republican Establishment and the Conservative Movement Rallied to George W. Bush. The Voters Went for the Insurgent,\" Weekly Standard, February 14, 2000, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/check.asp?idArticle=10561&r=jyqrp; Noemie Emery, \"Ask Not\" David Brooks, \"The Anti-Boomer Candidate,\" Weekly Standard, February 21, 2000, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/check.asp?idArticle=10534&r=ghwet.\n\nsingles complex called Chateau Dijon: Jo Thomas, \"Governor Bush's Journey; After Yale, Bush Ambled Amiably into His Future,\" New York Times, July 22, 2000, A1; Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 46.\n\nheroism of his greatest-generation dad: David Greenberg, \"Fathers and Sons: George W. Bush and His Forebears,\" New Yorker, July 12, 2004, http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive\/2004\/07\/12\/040712crbo_books.\n\nalmost flunked out: Nicholas Lemann, \"The Redemption,\" New Yorker, January 31, 2000; Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 38\u201340.\n\nwhether they still enjoyed sex: Todd S. Purdum, \"43+41=84,\" Vanity Fair, September 2006, http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2006\/09\/bushes200609.\n\nan intramural stickball league: Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon, Reagan's Disciple: George W. Bush's Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 4, 5, 19; Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (New York: Anchor, 2005), 153.\n\nhis younger siblings in the car: Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 46\u201347.\n\nhis fianc\u00e9e broke off the engagement: Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 44.\n\nbut it went belly-up: Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, xvi, 32, 34, 49; Schweizer and Schweizer, The Bushes, 140.\n\nhis father confessed himself \"disappointed\": Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 47, 49.\n\nas the family's black sheep: Gail Sheehy, \"The Accidental Candidate,\" Vanity Fair, October 2000, http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2000\/10\/bush200010.\n\nshe wouldn't get into heaven: Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 50\u201352, 79\u201380, 83\u201384.\n\nin his own mind\u2014he excelled: Schweizer and Schweizer, The Bushes, 388.\n\n\"the chance to watch the ball\": Schweizer and Schweizer, The Bushes, 133, 389.\n\nhugged the bottom of their division: \"Harold Baines,\" http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/b\/baineha01.shtml; \"Sammy Sosa,\" http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/s\/sosasa01.shtml; \"Rangers Year-by-Year Results,\" http:\/\/texas.rangers.mlb.com\/tex\/history\/year_by_year_results.jsp.\n\nno rousing agenda for a second term: Schweizer and Schweizer, The Bushes, 458, 504.\n\nlearned from his father's defeat: Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 341.\n\nwas seeking Florida's top job: Schweizer and Schweizer, The Bushes, 413; Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 62.\n\nstate's outsize image of itself: Sam Howe Verhovek, \"Texas Governor Succeeds, Without the Flash,\" New York Times, June 14, 1995.\n\nGermany was a member of NATO: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 255; Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 146.\n\n\"Prosperity with a Purpose\": Lemann, \"The Redemption.\"\n\n\"good times for great goals\": \"GOP Platform 2: Prosperity with a Purpose,\" ABC News, July 31, 2000, http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Politics\/story?id=123292&page=1&page=1.\n\nwasted his presidency pushing paper: Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 65, 105.\n\nnot play \"small ball\": Michael Gerson, Heroic Conservatism: Why Conservatives Need to Embrace America's Ideals (and Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't) (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 42\u201343.\n\n\"game changer\": Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 299.\n\nfirst foreign policy address of the campaign: George W. Bush, \"A Period of Consequence,\" address given at the Citadel, South Carolina, September 23, 1999, http:\/\/www.citadel.edu\/r3\/pao\/addresses\/pres_bush.html; Terry M. Neal, \"Bush Outlines Defense Plan in Address at Citadel,\" Washington Post, September 24, 1999, A3.\n\nand the moment\u2014at all: Frank Bruni, Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, 80.\n\n\"over-ruling Mr. Powell on any issue\": DeYoung, Soldier, 282, 287\u201388, 295, 297\u201398; Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 232, 238.\n\nregent to a dutiful boy king: DeYoung, Soldier, 286\u201388, 301\u20132; Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 160.\n\nexcept in suit and tie: Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9\/11 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 151; Purdum, \"43+41=84\" Schweizer and Schweizer, The Bushes, 501.\n\nRepublicans back in charge: DeYoung, Soldier, 314.\n\nwhen he was on the road: Barton Gellman, The Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2008), 54; Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 176.\n\nin other words, to stack the deck: Gellman, The Angler, 244\u201345; Walter Pincus, \"Under Bush, the Briefing Gets Briefer,\" Washington Post, May 24, 2002, A33.\n\ncalled the vice president's \"mole\": Gellman, The Angler, 32\u201333, 36, 38, 189. In the first Bush administration, Libby was the Pentagon's principal deputy undersecretary for strategy and resources and later deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, positions that ranked higher in the interagency process than director of the National Security Council, which was Rice's job. Gellman, The Angler, 43\u201344.\n\na longtime Cheney associate: Hayes, Cheney, 301.\n\n\"most ruthless\" government official he had ever met: Roger Morris, \"The Undertaker's Tally: Sharp Elbows,\" Tom Dispatch, February 13, 2007, http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/indexprint.mhtml?pid=165669; Bradley Graham, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 201.\n\nmentor to both Hadley and Libby: Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 169; Gellman, The Angler, 42.\n\nthirty-six-year-old daughter, Elizabeth: DeYoung, Soldier, 320; Gellman, The Angler, 37.\n\nwas working to overthrow him: DeYoung, Soldier, 314\u201317.\n\n\"everything in the region and beyond it\": Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 85, 96\u201397; DeYoung, Soldier, 345; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 16\u201317.\n\na new \"Reagan doctrine\": Paul Wolfowitz, \"Historical Memory: Setting History Straight,\" Current, June 2000, 22; Paul Wolfowitz, \"American Power\u2014For What? A Symposium,\" Commentary 109, no. 1 (2000): 47; Paul Wolfowitz, \"Statesmanship in the New Century,\" in Present Dangers, ed. Kagan and Kristol, 323.\n\nheld its first free presidential election: Solomon, Paul D. Wolfowitz, 39.\n\n\"history of democratic rule\": Paul Wolfowitz, \"Is the Atlantic Community Obsolete?\" in The Congress of Phoenix: Rethinking Atlantic Security and Economics, ed. Gerald Frost (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1998), http:\/\/www.aei.org\/docLib\/20040217_book35.pdf.\n\ndissidents like Vaclav Havel: Jane Mayer, \"The Manipulator,\" New Yorker, June 7, 2004, http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive\/2004\/06\/07\/040607fa_fact1; George Packer, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 12.\n\na game changer nonetheless: Michael Dobbs, \"For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized,\" Washington Post, April 7, 2003, A17; Peter J. Boyer, \"The Believer: Paul Wolfowitz Defends His War,\" New Yorker, November 1, 2004, http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive\/2004\/11\/01\/041101fa_fact.\n\nthrough the barrel of an American gun: While the Contras may have played some role in the decision by Nicaragua's Sandinista regime to hold the free elections that led to their losing power in 1990, the much larger factor was the Soviet Union's collapse, which left the Sandinistas\u2014like so many other third-world communist regimes\u2014orphaned.\n\n\"start at the beginning\": DeYoung, Soldier, 426.\n\nmaking incremental change: As Douglas Feith notes, \"Powell presented himself as the practical man of affairs, taking the world as he found it, focused on the here and now, intent on getting organized for the next day's set of meetings on whatever crisis was at hand.\" Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008), 60.\n\n\"slowly but surely, layer by layer\": DeYoung, Soldier, 487.\n\n\"broken, weak country\": DeYoung, Soldier, 305, 345; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 22.\n\nno threat to his neighbors: Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 27.\n\nthe big game was Colin Powell: DeYoung, Soldier, 323\u201325.\n\nhe was not always in the room: DeYoung, Soldier, 329.\n\n\"little far forward on your skis\": Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 278.\n\nto trumpet his achievement: Woodward, Bush at War, 13.\n\nCheney and Rumsfeld disapproved: Robert Kagan and William Kristol, \"A National Humiliation,\" Weekly Standard, April 16, 2001, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/check.asp?idArticle=11457&r=elzif; Robert Kagan and William Kristol, \"The 'Adults' Make a Mess,\" Weekly Standard, May 14, 2001, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/check.asp?idArticle=583&r=oglxj.\n\nkeeping the United States out of a Pacific war: Bob Woodward, State of Denial (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 33.\n\nmight well prompt Beijing to strike: Solomon, Paul D. Wolfowitz, 48; Graham, By His Own Rules, 679; Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy (New York: Scribner, 2007), 140.\n\nreaffirm Bush's original remark: Kagan and Kristol, \"The 'Adults' Make a Mess\" \"Interview with Dick Cheney,\" Fox News Sunday, Fox News Network, April 29, 2001.\n\nlargest arms sale in a decade: Solomon, Paul D. Wolfowitz, 49.\n\nwhen Powell was around: Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 38; Todd S. Purdum, \"A Face Only a President Could Love,\" Vanity Fair, June 2006, http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/fea tures\/2006\/06\/cheney200606; Hayes, Cheney, 6.\n\n\"one might expect\": Woodward, Plan of Attack, 182\u201383.\n\nwere being made someplace else: DeYoung, Soldier, 335; Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, 213.\n\nsent to the vice president's staff: Gellman, The Angler, 242\u201343, 376\u201377; Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum, \"Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House,\" Vanity Fair, February 2009, http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2009\/02\/bush-oral-history200909; Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, 220.\n\nsuggested that he had lost a step: DeYoung, Soldier, 335\u201336.\n\nSeptember 10 cover story in Time: Johanna McGeary, \"Odd Man Out,\" Time, September 10, 2001, http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,1101010910\u2013173441,00.html.\n\n\"disconnected from larger purposes\": Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, 73. The author Robert Draper, who interviewed Bush at length, concurs with Gerson, noting that Bush \"was at root a man who craved purpose\u2014a sense of movement, of consequence. And things did not seem especially consequential in the summer of 2001.\" Robert Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Free Press, 2008), 133.\n\nlong stretches at his Texas ranch: Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 114.\n\nChapter 17: The Opportunity\n\n\"I will seize the opportunity\": Woodward, Bush at War, 32, 62, 282.\n\ntraveled to the subcontinent at all: \"George W. Bush, Travelling Man?\" Washington Post, November 28, 2007, A10.\n\n\"I thought you said some band\": Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 255.\n\ndivided between Sunni and Shia: Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 162; Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 207.\n\n\"we wouldn't fight back\": Woodward, Bush at War, 38\u201339.\n\n\"smash this myth\": Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, 82\u201383.\n\na way to rally his troops: In mid-November 2001, in a videotaped speech from Kandahar, Afghanistan, bin Laden used the \"weak horse\" line; http:\/\/www.npr.org\/news\/specials\/re sponse\/investigation\/011213.binladen.transcript.html.\n\n\"pounded sand\": Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 188; Feith, War and Decision, 12.\n\n\"reflexive pullback\": Woodward, Bush at War, 20; Cockburn, Rumsfeld, 151.\n\n\"hit a camel in the butt\": Cannon and Cannon, Reagan's Disciple, 184.\n\ncomparing the United States to ancient Rome: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 215.\n\nhis efforts at producing WMD: Ricks, Fiasco, 19, 21; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 14.\n\nhad shown in World War II: Judy Keen, \"Same President, Different Man in Oval Office,\" USA Today, October 29, 2001, http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/sept11\/2001\/10\/29\/bushmood-usat.htm; Woodward, Bush at War, 205.\n\n\"our mission and our moment\": George W. Bush, \"Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,\" September 20, 2001, http:\/\/georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov\/news\/releases\/2001\/09\/20010920\u20138.html.\n\n\"real calling with real heroism\": Matthew Scully, \"Present at the Creation,\" Atlantic, September 2007, http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/200709\/michael-gerson.\n\nthe regimes that harbored them: DeYoung, Soldier, 338, 346\u201347; Woodward, Bush at War, 31\u201332.\n\n\"let Mr. Wolfowitz speak for himself\": Woodward, Bush at War, 43, 60\u201361; Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 302.\n\nthe 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City: Sam Tanenhaus, \"Bush's Brain Trust,\" Vanity Fair, July 2003, 114.\n\nbarely anything worthwhile to bomb: Woodward, Bush at War, 33, 83; Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 31; Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 187; Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, 196, 235.\n\nattacking Afghanistan didn't do that: Feith, War and Decision, 82.\n\nChiefs of Staff chairman Henry Shelton: Woodward, Bush at War, 61.\n\nbut he knew he couldn't prove it: Woodward, Bush at War,99.\n\ncronies was not big enough: Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, 122.\n\n\"and can move forward\": Woodward, Bush at War,43.\n\nno U.S. ground forces at all: Woodward, Bush at War, 79\u201380.\n\n\"guerrilla commander's fantasy\": \"Rendezvous with Afghanistan,\" New York Times, September 14, 2001, A26; \"War Without Illusions,\" New York Times, September 15, 2001, A22.\n\n\"create more instability\": Charles M. Sennott, \"Allies Caution Bush Against Military 'Trap,'\" Boston Globe, September 18, 2001, A21.\n\n\"get the hell kicked out of you\": Woodward, Bush at War, 103.\n\nbin Laden, not overthrow them: Mike Allen and Alan Sipress, \"Attacks Refocus the White House on How to Fight Terrorism,\" Washington Post, September 26, 2001, A03; Feith, War and Decision, 78\u201380.\n\ngetting mired in civil war: Woodward, Bush at War, 123, 124.\n\nwrote Charles Krauthammer in late September: Charles Krauthammer, \"The War: A Road Map,\" Washington Post, September 28, 2001, A39.\n\n\"and demand that Powell follow?\": William Kristol, \"Bush vs. Powell,\" Washington Post, September 25, 2001, A23.\n\n\"this is a change from the past\": Woodward, Bush at War, 98.\n\ndefeat the Taliban on the ground: Woodward, Bush at War, 314; Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, 79.\n\nfighters onto Afghan soil: Molly Moore and Kamran Khan, \"Slain Rebel's Brief but Disastrous Foray,\" Washington Post, October 28, 2001, A20.\n\nnews analysis in the New York Times: R. W. Apple, Jr., \"A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam,\" New York Times, October 31, 2001.\n\n\"who have been there for 5,000 years\": Woodward, Bush at War, 275, 291.\n\nsuggesting that they wanted him to fail: Woodward, Bush at War, 262.\n\ndemanded that Bush send in the army: Fred Barnes, \"Bush Only Needs to Do One Thing; Win the War,\" Weekly Standard, November 5, 2001, 12.\n\nCheney said he had absolute faith: Hayes, Cheney, 360.\n\ntried for years to hit, but never could: Woodward, Bush at War, 312.\n\nthe Taliban fighters were dead: Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 35\u201336.\n\nits share of the country from 15 percent to 50 percent: Woodward, Bush at War, 312.\n\nto attend school: Ilana Ozernoy, \"Liberation Day,\" U.S. News & World Report, November 26, 2001, 30; Nancy Gibbs, \"Blood and Joy,\" Time, November 26, 2001, 28; Anthony Davis, \"Eyewitness to a Sudden and Bloody Liberation,\" Time, November 26, 2001, 58.\n\nBaltimore, and Boston, a democrat: Christiane Amanpour and Andrea Koppel, \"Hamid Karzai No Stranger to Leadership,\" October 10, 2002, http:\/\/archives.cnn.com\/2001\/WORLD\/asiapcf\/central\/12\/21\/ret.karzai.profile\/.\n\nfemale member of the new Afghan cabinet: George W. Bush, \"President Bush's State of the Union Address to Congress and the Nation,\" New York Times, January 30, 2002, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2002\/01\/30\/us\/state-union-president-bush-s-state-union-address-con gress-nation.html.\n\nSpecial Forces troops and 110 CIA agents: Woodward, Bush at War, 314.\n\nless than a single B-2 bomber: Steven M. Kosiak, \"Estimated Cost of Operation Enduring Freedom: The First Two Months,\" Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, December 7, 2001, available at http:\/\/www.csbaonline.org; Federation of American Scientists, \"B-2 Spirit,\" Nuclear Information Project, November 30, 1999, http:\/\/www.fas.org\/nuke\/guide\/usa\/bomber\/b\u20132.htm.\n\n\"virtually no cost in casualties\": Stanley Kurtz, \"Push-Button Warriors,\" National Review Online, November 29, 2001, http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/contributors\/kurtz112901.shtml.\n\nin the former U.S.S.R.: Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 47.\n\n\"wrong about virtually everything\": Joe Loconte, \"Rumsfeld's Just War; Generals Meet Theologians at the Pentagon,\" Weekly Standard, December 24, 2001, 13.\n\n\"all together now\u2014QUAGMIRE!\": Woodward, Plan of Attack, 37.\n\nafter which Bush dubbed him \"Rumstud\": Mann, Rise of the Vulcans,307.\n\n87 percent of Americans: Gallup Organization, \"Presidential Job Approval in Depth,\" http:\/\/www.gallup.com\/poll\/116500\/Presidential-Approval-Ratings-George-Bush.aspx.\n\ncongressional and journalistic recrimination: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 72.\n\nshould not enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention: DeYoung, Soldier, 365\u201372; Gellman, The Angler, 170.\n\n\"activities of the executive branch\": Gellman, The Angler, 106.\n\nacross the border into Pakistan: Mann, Rise of the Vulcans,308.\n\n\"perhaps beyond precedent\": Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, 122.\n\n\"They're on a roll\": Seymour M. Hersh, \"The Iraq Hawks: Can Their War Plan Work?\" New Yorker, December 24, 2001, 58.\n\nChapter 18: The Romantic Bully\n\nmotive and the means? Saddam!: For an example of this reasoning, see Feith, War and Decision, 504.\n\n\"likely make a different calculation\": Robert Kagan, \"Power and Weakness,\" Policy Review 113 (June\u2013July 2002), http:\/\/www.hoover.org\/publications\/policyreview\/3460246.html.\n\non October 9, he was rebuffed: Woodward, Bush at War, 216.\n\nstrategy for toppling Saddam: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 1\u20134.\n\nAfghanistan to the Persian Gulf: Packer, The Assassin's Gate, 45; Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer, \"Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide,\" Washington Post, October 22, 2004, A1.\n\nturned to deficit: U.S. Office of Management and Budget, FY2008 Budget Request, http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/omb\/budget\/fy2008\/pdf\/hist.pdf.\n\n\"proved deficits don't matter\": Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 291.\n\nand then again in 2003: Glenn Kessler and Juliet Eilperin, \"In House, a Magic Balancing Act,\" Washington Post, March 14, 2002, A7; Jonathan Weisman, \"Late Deals Got Tax Cut Done,\" Washington Post, May 30, 2003, A5.\n\nhe was reprimanded; then fired: Packer, The Assassin's Gate, 116.\n\nless than 1 percent of that: Kosiak, \"Estimated Cost of Operation Enduring Freedom\" Murphy and Purdum, \"Farewell to All That.\"\n\nnine months to fully deploy: Woodward, Bush at War,43; Packer, The Assassin's Gate, 118; Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 39\u201340.\n\nconformist, and flat-out dumb: Cockburn, Rumsfeld, 153.\n\nThe Nutty Professor: Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 40\u201341; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 27\u201328.\n\n\"learned coming out of Afghanistan\": Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 32; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 41.\n\ntroop number down by almost a third: Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 54\u201355.\n\n\"has undertaken in the post\u2013cold war era\": Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (San Francisco: Encounter, 2003), 117.\n\nrelationship between a batterer and his spouse: William Kristol, \"From Truth to Deception,\" Washington Post, October 12, 2002, A31.\n\nsimply buried his head in his arms: Woodward, State of Denial, 19, 72; Woodward, Bush at War, 23, 251.\n\n\"you'd find the vice president there\": Gellman, The Angler, 161\u201362. In his memoir, Douglas Feith calls Rumsfeld \"thoroughly antisentimental.\" Feith, War and Decision, 75.\n\n\"truly enjoys getting people to knuckle under\": Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, 215. Robert Draper recounts a similar story of bullying, this one from Bush's time as Texas governor. In a meeting of economic advisers, Karl Rove had been speaking at great length, annoying Bush with his self-importance. \"Karl,\" Bush suddenly yelled. \"Hang up my jacket.\" The room fell silent, and Rove did as he was told. Draper, Dead Certain, 102.\n\nthey did not openly weep: Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, 204.\n\nBut Bush did both, often: Robert Draper, \"The Prez & I,\" GQ Online, http:\/\/men.style.com\/gq\/features\/full?id=content_7778.\n\n\"complete trash, a horrible evil person\": Draper, Dead Certain, 51.\n\noften broke down: Cannon and Cannon, Reagan's Disciple, 195; Woodward, State of Denial, 270.\n\n\"region of peaceful democracies\": Scott McLellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), xii\u2013xiii.\n\n\"It's what's driving him\": Woodward, Plan of Attack, 412.\n\n\"he wants to talk about\": Fred Barnes, \"Bush Zeroes In,\" Weekly Standard, February 10, 2003.\n\nwas the story of his life: Gerson makes this point explicitly, writing that Bush was \"convinced that societies are capable of hopeful change because individuals are capable of hopeful change, based on his own experience.\" Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, 51.\n\nuntroubled by original sin: Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, 51, 99.\n\n\"hatred and the tactics of terror\": George W. Bush, \"President Discusses the Future of Iraq,\" February 26, 2003, http:\/\/georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov\/news\/releases\/2003\/02\/print\/20030226\u201311.html.\n\nBush told cadets at West Point: George W. Bush, \"President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point,\" June 1, 2002, http:\/\/georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov\/news\/re leases\/2002\/06\/print\/20020601\u20133.html.\n\n\"That great struggle is over\": White House, \"The National Security Strategy of the United States,\" September 2002, 1, http:\/\/georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov\/nsc\/nss\/2002\/nss1.html.\n\n\"it's a blueprint, a model\": Draper, Dead Certain, 188.\n\nby which he meant the Iraqi National Congress: House Budget Committee, Hearing on FY2004 Defense Budget Request, 108th Cong., 1st sess., 2003.\n\nsoon after Saddam fell: Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 121\u201322.\n\n\"became an occupying power\": Feith, War and Decision, 403.\n\nBush's post-9\/11 thinking than any other adviser: Fred Barnes, Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Crown Forum, 2006), 48, 61.\n\n\"remove the shackles on democracy\": Mark Bowden, \"Wolfowitz: The Exit Interviews,\" Atlantic, July\/August 2005, http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/200507\/bowden.\n\nYou break it, you own it: Cannon and Cannon, Reagan's Disciple, 196; DeYoung, Soldier, 401\u20132.\n\nand driving away business: Helen Huntley, \"Rule That Isn't Upsets Pottery Barn,\" St. Petersburg Times, April 20, 2004, http:\/\/www.sptimes.com\/2004\/04\/20\/Business\/Rule_that_isn_t_its_r.shtml.\n\nThat's where the power lay: DeYoung, Soldier, 392.\n\nhe was sure that Cheney wasn't: DeYoung, Soldier, 417.\n\nleave America and Iraq worse off: In January 2002, Kristol and Kagan wrote that \"it is almost impossible to imagine any outcome for the world both plausible and worse than the disease of Saddam with weapons of mass destruction.\" Robert Kagan and William Kristol, \"What to Do About Iraq,\" Weekly Standard, January 21, 2002, 23. \"That things might be worse without him [Saddam] is of course a possibility,\" wrote Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan in their 2003 book advocating war. \"But given the status quo in Iraq, it is difficult to imagine how.\" Kristol and Kaplan, The War over Iraq, 96. \"It's hard to imagine how the alternative [to Saddam] could possibly be worse,\" wrote Max Boot in the Standard. Max Boot, \"The False Allure of 'Stability,'\" Weekly Standard, December 9, 2002. And in slapping down Shinseki in February 2003, Wolfowitz declared, \"It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army\u2014hard to imagine.\" Ricks, Fiasco, 97\u201398; House Budget Committee, Hearing on FY2004 Defense Budget Request, 108th Cong., 1st sess., 2003.\n\neverything that might go wrong: Woodward, Bush at War, 334.\n\n\"There will be civil disorder\": DeYoung, Soldier, 401\u20132.\n\nimpact on America's Arab allies: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 149\u201351; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 81.\n\nit just wasn't in his nature: DeYoung, Soldier, 509.\n\nvoted yes: Cannon and Cannon, Reagan's Disciple, 93.\n\nhe mentioned Vietnam only once: Authorization of the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq, 107th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 148 (October 9, 2002), S10170\u2013S10175.\n\n56 percent of older Senate Democrats: \"Final Vote Results for Roll Call 455,\" H.J. Res. 114, October 10, 2002, http:\/\/clerk.house.gov\/evs\/2002\/roll455.xml; \"U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 107th Congress\u20142nd Session,\" H.J. Res. 114, October 11, 2002; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http:\/\/bioguide.congress.gov\/biosearch\/biosearch.asp.\n\nthe very things liberals loved: For a good example of this argument, see David Talbot, \"The Making of a Hawk,\" Salon.com, January 3, 2002, http:\/\/www.salon.com\/books\/fea ture\/2002\/01\/03\/hawk\/print.html.\n\nit was the great liberal duty of the age: Peter Beinart, \"Ism Schism,\" New Republic, September 25, 2006, 6.\n\nwhen Fukuyama declared that democracy had won: Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2004), 176.\n\n\"this notion did pretty much explode\": Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 190.\n\nthe Taliban millions might die: Noam Chomsky, interview with Svetlana Vukovic and Svetlana Lukic, Radio B92, Belgrade, September 19, 2001, http:\/\/www.b92.net\/intervju\/eng\/2001\/0919-chomsky.phtml.\n\nanother influential liberal hawk: Michael Ignatieff, \"The American Empire; The Burden,\" New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2003\/01\/05\/magazine\/the-american-empire-the-burden.html.\n\n\"Kosovo and not do it in Iraq\": Former Clinton administration official, phone interview with the author, June 27, 2008.\n\nwould bring not freedom, but chaos: Kirkpatrick, Making War to Keep Peace, 279.\n\nhad lost the confidence of her convictions: Jacquelyn Hardy, phone interview with the author, July 10, 2008.\n\nunder international law: Kirkpatrick, Making War to Keep Peace, 281.\n\nturn George W. Bush into Napoleon: Washington, D.C., writer, interview with the author, June 9, 2008.\n\ncritical of what the Standard wrote: Washington, D.C., writer (different from above), interview with the author, July 15, 2008.\n\ndenounced the impending war: Brent Scowcroft, \"Don't Attack Saddam,\" Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002, http:\/\/www.opinionjournal.com\/editorial\/feature.html?id=110002133; Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, 167.\n\nBush himself stayed silent: Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, 217.\n\n\"He doesn't think he should unless he's asked\": Woodward, State of Denial, 114.\n\ndidn't have the latest intelligence: \"Text of Bush Interview,\" Fox News, September 22, 2003, http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/story\/0,2933,98006,00.html.\n\nAmerica pursue regime change in Iraq: \"Letter to President Clinton on Iraq,\" Project for a New American Century, January 26, 1998, http:\/\/www.newamericancentury.org\/iraqclintonlet ter.htm.\n\nwould not fertilize the soil: Francis Fukuyama, \"American Conservatism: Beyond Our Shores,\" Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2002, A10.\n\nbut history could not be rushed: Robert S. Boynton, \"The Neocon Who Isn't,\" American Prospect Online, October 5, 2005, http:\/\/www.prospect.org\/cs\/articles?articleId=10304.\n\nFukuyama's presentation again: Francis Fukuyama, interview with the author, July 15, 2008.\n\n\"I've been put under over here\": Draper, Dead Certain, 186.\n\n\"his permission\": Woodward, Plan of Attack, 269\u201374.\n\n\"the credibility to do it\": Woodward, Plan of Attack, 291.\n\n\"you can afford to lose a few points\": DeYoung, Soldier, 441, 448.\n\nIraqi intelligence officials in Prague: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 289\u201391; DeYoung, Soldier, 436\u201341.\n\n\"leery of our own presentation\": DeYoung, Soldier, 444\u201345; Murphy and Purdum, \"Farewell to All That.\"\n\n\"conclusions based on solid intelligence\": DeYoung, Soldier, 449.\n\nUN weapons inspectors began refuting it almost instantly: Ian Fisher, \"Reporters on Ground Get Iraqi Rebuttal to Satellite Photos,\" New York Times, February 8, 2003, A8; Ian Fisher, \"U.N.'s Chief Inspectors Will Press Iraq for Hard Data That Could Avert War,\" New York Times, February 9, 2003, A14; Peter Slevin and Colum Lynch, \"U.S. Meets New Resistance at U.N.,\" Washington Post, A1; Glenn Kessler and Colum Lynch, \"Blix's Report Deepens UN Rift over Iraq,\" Washington Post, March 9, 2003, A1.\n\nI don't want one, Wilkerson explained: DeYoung, Soldier, 450\u201352.\n\nThe invasion of Iraq had begun: Woodward, Bush at War,356.\n\n\"lingers and plagues the heart\": Schweizer and Schweizer, The Bushes, 398\u201399.\n\nhe was sleeping well: Woodward, State of Denial, 155.\n\n\"Not one doubt\": Woodward, Bush at War,256.\n\n\"Feels good\": Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 70.\n\nthings were going dangerously wrong: Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 273\u201374; 346\u201361.\n\nIf this wasn't liberation, nothing was: Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 490; Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand, 401.\n\nfewer than in the Gulf War: \"Iraq Coalition Casualty Count\u2014Deaths by Year and Month,\" March-April 2003, http:\/\/www.icasualties.org\/Iraq\/ByMonth.aspx; Department of Veterans Affairs, \"Fact Sheet: America's Wars,\" May 2008, http:\/\/www1.va.gov\/opa\/fact\/amwars.asp.\n\n\"regime's ill-gotten gains?\": Max Boot, \"Good News, Operation Iraqi Freedom Went About as Well as Anyone Could Have Hoped. Why Is the Media So Glum?\" Weekly Standard, April 15, 2003, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/002\/551wqxuo.asp.\n\ndeclared one article in the Standard: Thomas Donnelly, \"Lessons of a Three Week War,\" Weekly Standard, April 28, 2003, http:\/\/www.aei.org\/article\/17006.\n\n\"without widespread loss of life\": David Brooks, \"The Phony Debate,\" Weekly Standard, March 31, 2008.\n\n\"Homer had given his gods\": Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22.\n\n\" food and water and air\": \"President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended,\" Remarks by the President from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, Released by the Office of the Press Secretary, May 1, 2003, http:\/\/georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov\/news\/releases\/2003\/05\/20030501\u201315.html.\n\n\"United States is on earth to achieve\": David Brooks, \"Today's Progressive Spirit: The Scenes in Baghdad Flow from Understandings Realized at the American Founding,\" Weekly Standard, April 9, 2003, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/002\/519jigox.asp.\n\nand more legitimacy, without it: Wes Vernon, \"Kristol: U.N. Has Gone from 'Useless' to 'Harmful,'\" March 11, 2003, http:\/\/archive.newsmax.com\/archives\/articles\/2003\/3\/11\/110420.shtml.\n\nFrance and Germany too much say: Fred Barnes, \"The Tempting of the President,\" Weekly Standard, April 21, 2003, http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/002\/543ayyjy.asp.\n\nhad made itself worthless: Charles Krauthammer, \"A Costly Charade at the U.N.,\" Washington Post, February 28, 2003, A23.\n\nspiked back up to 77 percent: Ricks, Fiasco, 134.\n\ngreatest basketball player of all time: Linton Weeks, \"23 Skiddoo; Michael Jordan Flies Down the Court for the Last Time at MCI Center,\" Washington Post, April 15, 2003, C1.\n\nmillion more in speaking fees: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 413.\n\n\"to undermine the President's policies\": Newt Gingrich, \"Transforming the State Department: The Next Challenge for the Bush Administration,\" American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., April 22, 2003, http:\/\/www.aei.org\/publications\/filter.all,pubID.16992\/pub_detail.asp; Woodward, State of Denial, 251.\n\ndeclined to defend his secretary of state: DeYoung, Soldier, 466\u201368.\n\nsomeone mentioned Powell, and they all laughed: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 409\u201312.\n\nChapter 19: I'm Delighted to See Mr. Bourne\n\n\"vicious dictator, and they're free!\": Department of Defense, \"DoD News Briefing by Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers,\" April 11, 2003, http:\/\/www.defenselink.mil\/transcripts\/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2367; Woodward, State of Denial, 164.\n\ncost of the rampage: $12 billion: John Kifner and John F. Burns, \"As Tanks Move In, Young Iraqis Trek Out and Take Anything Not Fastened Down,\" New York Times, April 10, 2003; John F. Burns, \"Looting and a Suicide Attack as Chaos Grows in Baghdad,\" New York Times, April 11, 2003; Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005), 282; Woodward, State of Denial, 179, 183; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (New York: Random House, 2006), 40.\n\n\"This is not my job\": Woodward, State of Denial, 179.\n\npicked Iraq's government clean: James Fallows, \"Blind into Baghdad,\" Atlantic, January\/February 2004, http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/200401\/fallows.\n\n\"is an unbelievable mess\": Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 541.\n\nsettled on \"criminal negligence\": Diamond, Squandered Victory, 292.\n\nthe National Guard and Reserves: Department of Defense, \"Defense Manpower Requirements Report,\" June 1999, http:\/\/www.defenselink.mil\/prhome\/docs\/fy2000.pdf; Lawrence Kapp, \"Reserve Component Personnel Issues,\" CRS Report for Congress, January 18, 2006, 4; Stephen Daggett and Amy Belasco, \"Defense Budget for FY2003: Data Summary,\" CRS Report for Congress, March 29, 2002, 15.\n\nthe entire U.S. diplomatic corps: Cockburn, Rumsfeld, 106\u20137; Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 545\u201347; Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 4; \"Highlighting Public Diplomacy Needs,\" American Academy of Diplomacy Newsletter no. 59 (October 2003), http:\/\/www.academyofdiplomacy.org\/publications\/newsletter_archive\/ newsletter_issue_59.htm.\n\nresponded with a blank stare: Diamond, Squandered Victory, 35.\n\nUnited States playing only a supporting role: Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 121\u201322.\n\n\"the Gaullists would have been neutered\": Ricks, Fiasco, 124; Bradley Graham, \"US Airlifts Iraqi Exile Force for Duties near Nasiriyah,\" Washington Post, April 7, 2003, A1; Linda Robinson and Kevin Whitelaw, \"Deploying the 'Free Iraqi Forces,'\" U.S. News & World Report, April 7, 2003, http:\/\/www.usnews.com\/usnews\/news\/iraq\/articles\/fiff030407.htm; Feith, War and Decision, 253.\n\nfighting force had already existed: Military analyst Stephen Biddle made exactly that point in an analysis of America's overthrow of the Taliban. Noting the crucial role that the Northern Alliance played, he wrote that \"we should be wary of suggestions that precision weapons, with or without special operations forces to direct them, have so revolutionized warfare that traditional ground forces are now superseded.\" Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2002), ix.\n\nforce dispatched to Iraq totaled 73: Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 122\u201323, 360; Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 49; Graham, \"US Airlifts Iraqi Exile Force for Duties near Nasiriyah\" Robinson and Whitelaw, \"Deploying the 'Free Iraqi Forces.'\"\n\nthe nucleus of a post-Saddam regime: Graham, \"U.S. Airlifts Iraqi Exile Force for Duties Near Nasariyah\" Marc Santora with Patrick E. Tyler, \"Pledge Made to Democracy by Exiles, Sheiks and Clerics,\" New York Times, April 16, 2003, A1.\n\nsecular elite from which he hailed: Dexter Filkins, \"Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi,\" New York Times Magazine, November 5, 2006, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/11\/05\/magazine\/05CHALABI.html.\n\nmansions favored by one of Saddam's sons: Gellman, The Angler, 247.\n\nsold overseas for a fat profit: Jane Mayer, \"The Manipulator,\" New Yorker, June 7, 2004, http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive\/2004\/06\/07\/040607fa_fact1.\n\nstealing reconstruction funds: Mayer, \"The Manipulator\" Ricks, Fiasco, 124.\n\nclassified U.S. intelligence to Iran: Scott Wilson, \"U.S. Aids Raid on Home of Chalabi,\" Washington Post, May 21, 2004, A1.\n\nany Iraqi politician, including Saddam: ABC News, \"Poll: Iraq\u2014Where Things Stand,\" March 15, 2004, http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/images\/pdf\/949a1IraqPoll.pdf.\n\neven more ideologically self-assured: Cannon and Cannon, Reagan's Disciple, 199.\n\npro-American democracy trapped inside: Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 545.\n\nboldly tore off the remaining scab: Diamond, Squandered Victory, 349, n. 38; Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, 63.\n\nholding jobs in Iraq's new government: Sharon Otterman, \"Iraq: Debaathification,\" CFR Backgrounder, April 7, 2005, http:\/\/www.cfr.org\/publication\/7853\/iraq.html; Gordon, Cobra II, 549; Ricks, Fiasco, 158\u201359.\n\ninterior ministry, and presidential guards: In fact, of Iraq's 80,000 commissioned officers, only 8,000 were members of the Baath Party. Walter Slocombe, \"Status of Rebuilding and Training the Iraqi Army,\" press conference, State Department, Washington, D.C., September 17, 2003, http:\/\/2002\u20132009-fpc.state.gov\/24230.htm.\n\nbackbone of the Iraqi economy: Naomi Klein, \"Baghdad: Year Zero,\" Harper's, September 2004, http:\/\/www.harpers.org\/archive\/2004\/09\/0080197; Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell, Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire (London: Zed, 2004), 186.\n\nimprovised explosive devices (IEDs): Woodward, State of Denial, 202, 205\u20136, 211; Ricks, Fiasco, 164.\n\n\"Who's Your Baghdaddy?\": Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, 4, 14\u201315, 18, 130.\n\nfear they would poison the food: Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, 9\u201310.\n\nseemed turned upside down: Ricks, Fiasco, 206.\n\nresembles the word for \" fuck\": Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, 554; Feith, War and Decision, 434.\n\nequivalent of a raised middle finger: Woodward, State of Denial, 290.\n\n\"is the sound of freedom\": Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, 127.\n\na more confrontational ring: Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (New York: Picador, 2006), 15.\n\nin an e-mail to friends: Draper, Dead Certain, 204.\n\n\"really understood about Iraq\": Shadid, Night Draws Near, 8.\n\nto roughly one thousand per month: Hayes, Cheney, 426; Woodward, State of Denial, 261.\n\nbegan carrying guns to their offices: Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, 181\u201382.\n\nmore dangerous than under Saddam: Diamond, Squandered Victory, 26.\n\nraids against suspected insurgents: Ricks, Fiasco, 234, 236, 301\u20132.\n\narrested, injured, or killed: The International Red Cross report described U.S. raids this way: \"Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexicuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped and sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and sticking with rifles. Individuals were often led away in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest\u2014sometimes in pyjamas [sic] or underwear\u2014and were denied the opportunity to gather a few essential belongings, such as clothing, hygiene items, medicine or eyeglasses.\" Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, 235.\n\nturned the stomach of the world: Ricks, Fiasco, 195\u2013200, 238\u201340, 283\u201392.\n\n\"to rob Iraq's oil\": Diamond, Squandered Victory, 25\u201326.\n\nslum known as Sadr City: Ricks, Fiasco, 335\u201338.\n\nroughly three thousand a month: Woodward, State of Denial, 368.\n\nbefore going out on patrol: Ricks, Fiasco, 350.\n\n\"this job will run you all over town\": Draper, Dead Certain, x, 357; Woodward, State of Denial, 490.\n\nas he did in late May 2003: Woodward, State of Denial, 209.\n\nbut as late as 2006: Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 209.\n\npushing to invade Panama: Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 134.\n\nthe last two paragraphs alone: Woodward, State of Denial, 378.\n\n\"ending tyranny in our world\": George W. Bush, \"Second Inaugural Address,\" January 20, 2005, http:\/\/georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov\/news\/releases\/2005\/01\/20050120\u20131.html.\n\nto elect a National Assembly: Angus Reid Global Monitor, \"Iraq: Election Tracker,\" Angus Reid, http:\/\/www.angus-reid.com\/tracker\/view\/5143.\n\nbrought democracy to Kyrgyzstan: Karl Vick, \"New Leadership Established in Kyrgyzstan,\" Washington Post, March 26, 2005, A8.\n\noverturn the election results by force: David Rose, \"The Gaza Bombshell,\" Vanity Fair, April 2008, http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2008\/04\/gaza200804.\n\nin Africa, and across the globe: Gary J. Bass, \"Humanitarian Intervention in the 21st Century,\" Tocqueville Review\/La revue Tocqueville 30, no. 1 (2009): 25; Fukuyama, \"The End of History?\" 17.\n\n\"the end of the End of History\": Azar Gat, \"The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers,\" Foreign Affairs 86, no. 4 (July\/August 2007), available at http:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.org.\n\nwithout so much as a farewell party: Joshua Muravchik, interview with the author, September 4, 2008.\n\n\"institutions will be precarious at best\": Kirkpatrick, Making War to Keep Peace, 279.\n\ntoward darkness as toward light: Allan Gerson, \"Postscript,\" in Kirkpatrick, Making War to Keep Peace, 308.\n\n\"oversimplified view of human nature\": David Brooks, \"The Jagged World,\" New York Times, September 3, 2006, http:\/\/select.nytimes.com\/2006\/09\/03\/opinion\/03brooks.html.\n\n\"war that began three years ago\": George F. Will, \"Can We Make Iraq Democratic?\" City Journal, Winter 2004, http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/html\/14_1_can_we_make_iraq.html; George Will, \"How Bush Can Try to Recover from Errors in Iraq War,\" Chicago Sun-Times, March 19, 2006, B7.\n\nquick to count dictatorship out: Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Knopf, 2008).\n\n\"seemed that it has no future\": Robert Kagan, \"End of Dreams, Return of History,\" Policy Review 144 (August\u2013September 2007), http:\/\/www.hoover.org\/publications\/policyre view\/8552512.html.\n\ndead for more than eighty years: Casey Blake, \"Randolph Bourne's America,\" lecture, Columbia University, October 11, 2004, http:\/\/www.randolphbourne.columbia.edu\/panel_1.pdf.\n\nfounded the Randolph Bourne Institute: See http:\/\/randolphbourne.org\/.\n\nadministration's wartime propaganda: James Fallows, \"We've Been Here Before,\" January 21, 2004, http:\/\/thebigstory.org\/fallows.htm.\n\nBourne's old professor, Charles Beard: Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 11\u201323.\n\n\"path of organization to that end\": Robert Westbrook, \"Randolph Bourne's America,\" lecture, Columbia University, October 11, 2004, http:\/\/www.randolphbourne.columbia.edu\/panel_1.pdf.\n\nso he can seize Central Asia's oil: Logan is actually the show's third president. Its second, Jack Keeler, decides not to seek a second term after being wounded in a terrorist attack. For a thoughtful discussion of Iraq's impact on Hollywood, see Ross Douthat, \"The Return of the Paranoid Style,\" Atlantic, April 2008, http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/200804\/iraq-movies.\n\n\"authority was built on silly illusions\": Matt Stoller, \"PDF2007: The Rise of the Netroots,\" Personal Democracy Forum, May 18, 2007, http:\/\/personaldemocracy.com\/node\/1432.\n\nincestuous relationship with the executive branch: Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts, \"White House Press Dinner: De-Wonked!\" Washington Post, April 21, 2008, C3.\n\ntorture \"war on terror\" suspects: Eric Schmitt, \"Senate Moves to Protect Military Prisoners Despite Veto Threat,\" Washington Post, October 6, 2005, A22; Gellman, The Angler, 357.\n\n\" jump in with both feet\": Jim VandeHei and Charles Babington, \"Newly Emboldened Congress Has Dogged Bush This Year,\" Washington Post, December 23, 2005, A5.\n\nat Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba: Charles Lane, \"Justices Back Detainee Access to U.S. Courts; President's Powers Are Limited,\" Washington Post, June 29, 2004, A1.\n\nrelease information about Gitmo detainees: Josh White, \"Government Must Share All Evidence on Detainees,\" Washington Post, July 21, 2007, A2.\n\nchallenge their detention in federal court: Robert Barnes, \"Justices Say Detainees Can Seek Release,\" Washington Post, June 13, 2008, A1.\n\n\"extravagant, monarchial claims\": Gellman, The Angler, 355; Jonathan Mahler, \"After the Imperial Presidency,\" New York Times Magazine, November 9, 2008, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/11\/09\/magazine\/09power-t.html.\n\ncook agreed to prepare Rumsfeld's meal: Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006\u20132008 (New York: Penguin, 2009), 77.\n\nafter he was tried for murder: Hayes, Cheney, 504; Richard Morin, \"18%? Just How Low Is,\" Washington Post, March 5, 2006, B3.\n\nsubstantially reducing his influence: Gellman, The Angler, 364.\n\nnow less fearsome than pitiable: Todd S. Purdum, \"A Face Only a President Could Love,\" Vanity Fair, June 2006, http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2006\/06\/cheney200606; Gellman, The Angler, 389.\n\nmost disliked president on record: See Kathy Frankovic, \"Bush's Popularity Reaches Historic Lows,\" CBS News, January 15, 2009, http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/stories\/2009\/01\/15\/opinion\/ pollpositions\/main4724068.shtml; Frank Newport, \"Bush Job Approval at 28%, Lowest of Administration,\" Gallup News, April 11, 2008, http:\/\/www.gallup.com\/poll\/106426\/Bush-Job-Approval\u201328-Lowest-Administration.aspx.\n\nturned the public against them: Cannon and Cannon, Reagan's Disciple, 292.\n\npointing to their disfigured relative: Woodward, State of Denial, 437\u201338.\n\n\"This is not your daughter!\": Draper, Dead Certain, 350.\n\nattend his party's presidential convention: Murphy and Purdum, \"Farewell to All That.\"\n\neven by Iraqi standards: Ellen Knickmeyer and K. I. Ibrahim, \"Bombing Shatters Mosque in Iraq,\" Washington Post, February 23, 2006, A1.\n\ndrill holes in their heads: Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends, 163.\n\na family intervention: Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, 218.\n\nLaura, and Barney, the dog: Todd S. Purdum, \"Inside Bush's Bunker,\" Vanity Fair, October 2007, http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2007\/10\/purdum200710.\n\nthen dropped out of sight: Sabrina Tavernise, \"A Shiite Militia in Baghdad Sees Its Power Wane,\" New York Times, July 27, 2008.\n\n150 a week by spring 2009: Michael E. O'Hanlon and Jason H. Campbell, \"Iraq Index: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq,\" Brookings Institution, August 20, 2009, http:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/saban\/~\/media\/Files\/Centers\/Saban\/Iraq%20Index\/index20090820.pdf.\n\nwould still be fighting there in another six: Ricks, The Gamble, 325.\n\nit had cost America $3 trillion: Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, \"The $3 Trillion War,\" Vanity Fair, April 2008, http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2008\/04\/stiglitz200804.\n\nIraq had taken more than 4,000: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, http:\/\/www.icasualties.org\/Iraq\/index.aspx.\n\nsizable portions of neighboring Pakistan: Kenneth Katzman, \"Afghanistan: Post-War Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy,\" CRS Report for Congress, November 26, 2008, 22\u201324.\n\nwere suddenly everywhere: See, for instance, Peter Baker, \"Could Afghanistan Become Obama's Vietnam?\" New York Times, August 22, 2009, WK1; and Frank Rich, \"Obama at the Precipice,\" New York Times, September 26, 2009, WK12.\n\nAfghanistan in the language of despair: For instance, see Helene Cooper, \"Obama's War: Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan,\" New York Times, January 25, 2009, http:\/\/www. nytimes.com\/2009\/01\/25\/weekinreview\/25cooper.html; Michael Crowley, \"Obama vs. Osama: Has He Picked the Right War?\" New Republic, December 24, 2008, http:\/\/www.tnr.com\/article\/obama-vs-osama.\n\nPetraeus called himself a \"minimalist\": Ricks, The Gamble, 287.\n\n\"less than the vision that drove it to Baghdad\": Ricks, The Gamble, 156.\n\nwould never be vanquished: As Robert Gates has said, \"there has to be ultimately...reconciliation\" with the Taliban. Kristin Roberts, \"Pentagon Sees Reconciliation with Taliban, Not Qaeda,\" Reuters, October 9, 2009, http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/idUSTRE4987PH20081009.\n\n\"Maliki intends to make himself a new dictator\": Kenneth M. Pollack, \"The Battle for Baghdad,\" National Interest, September\/October 2009, http:\/\/www.nationalinterest.org\/Article.aspx?id=22018.\n\n\"Gonna burst any day now?\": Draper, Dead Certain, 119.\n\nshare of world GDP declined every year: Roger Altman, \"The Great Crash, 2008,\" Foreign Affairs (January\/February 2009): 11.\n\n\"hinges on the support of its creditors\": Brad W. Setser, \"Sovereign Wealth and Sovereign Power,\" Council on Foreign Relations, Council Special Report No. 37, September 2008, 3\u20134.\n\n\"Le laisser-faire, c'est fini\": Altman, \"The Great Crash, 2008,\" 11.\n\n\"Non-American world\": Parag Khanna, \"Waving Goodbye to Hegemony,\" New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2008, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/01\/27\/magazine\/27world-t.html.\n\n\"more like a prophet\": Paul Starobin, \"Beyond Hegemony,\" National Journal, December 1, 2006, http:\/\/www.nationaljournal.com\/about\/njweekly\/stories\/2006\/1201nj1.htm.\n\n\"ascendancy in the world\": Paul Starobin, After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age (New York: Viking, 2009), 6.\n\namong Chinese, 89 percent: Pew Global Attitudes Project, \"Confidence in Obama Lifts U.S. Image Around the World,\" July 23, 2009, http:\/\/pewglobal.org\/reports\/pdf\/264.pdf; Paul Taylor, Cary Funk, and Peyton Craighill, \"Once Again, the Future Ain't What It Used to Be,\" Pew Research Center, May 2, 2006, http:\/\/pewresearch.org\/pubs\/311\/once-again-the-future-aint-what-it-used-to-be; Starobin, After America, 94.\n\nhe was now content to die: John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study in Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 177.\n\ndestroyed, but it never was: Lukacs, George Kennan, 187.\n\nConclusion: The Beautiful Lie\n\n\"intelligent, illuminating failures\": Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 788.\n\n\"beyond its power to accomplish\": Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., \"What Then Is the American, This New Man?\" American Historical Review 48, no. 2 (1943): 244. Walter Russell Mead echoes the point in his excellent book, God and Gold: \"Optimism is the default mode of Anglo-American historical thought. How could it not be? The Whig narrative teaches us plainly that God is on our side, and centuries of victorious experience and economic progress confirm that the message is right.\" Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007), 314.\n\nOur obligations exceed our power: Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy, 5.\n\nharm American security more than they help: See David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, \"Death from Above, Outrage from Below,\" New York Times, May 16, 2009.\n\nif they didn't get the bomb: For a history of Iranian foreign policy since the Islamic revolution, which makes this point, see Ray Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).\n\ndemocratic and self-governing in its domestic affairs: On the superpowers and Finland, see Jussi Hanhim\u00e4ki, Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the \"Finnish Solution\" (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997); and Jussi Hanhim\u00e4ki, \"Self-Restraint as Containment: United States' Economic Policy, Finland, and the Soviet Union, 1945\u20131953,\" International History Review 17, no. 2 (May 1995): 287\u2013305.\n\nto protect our democracy so it can thrive: Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy, iii.\n\nhealth care and education combined: Anup Shaw, \"World Military Spending,\" Global Issues, http:\/\/www.globalissues.org\/article\/75\/world-military-spending#USMilitarySpending.\n\nthan of other institutions of government: Thomas Sander, \"Trust Declining in All Institutions Other Than the Military,\" Social Capital Blog, http:\/\/socialcapital.wordpress.com\/2009\/06\/08\/trust-declining-in-all-institutions-other-than-the-military\/.\n\nprimary instrument for interacting with the world: Bureau of Public Affairs, \"International Affairs\u2014FY 2010 Budget,\" U.S. Department of State, http:\/\/www.state.gov\/r\/pa\/prs\/ps\/2009\/05\/123160.htm; Department of Defense, \"A New Era of Responsibility,\" http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/omb\/assets\/ fy2010_new_era\/Department_of_Defense.pdf.\n\n\" facts which momentarily imprison them\": Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 59.\n\n\"traditional myths of indomitable optimism\": C. Vann Woodward, \"A Second Look at the Theme of Irony,\" in The Burden of Southern History, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 214, 216.\n\n## SEARCHABLE TERMS\n\nThe pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.\n\nAble Archer, 233\n\nAbraham Lincoln, U.S.S., 355\n\nAbrams, Elliott, 211, 248\u201351, 274, 304, 365\n\n\"neo-Reaganite,\" 308, 450n\n\nPanama and, 248\u201351, 262, 305, 322\u201325\n\nAbu Ghraib, 364, 369\n\nAbzug, Bella, 277\n\nAcheson, Dean, 77, 119, 120, 125, 137, 182\u201383, 418n\n\nAdelman, Kenneth, 356\n\nAdler, Mortimer, 95\n\nAeschylus, 3\u20134, 11, 392\n\nAfghanistan, 327\u201339, 383\n\nbeginning of the war, 332\u201336\n\nliberal hawks and, 349\u201350\n\n9\/11 and, 8, 327\u201329, 330\u201332\n\n\"quagmire in,\" 2, 338\u201339, 373\u201374\n\nSoviet Union and, 206, 216\u201317, 331\n\nAgency, the. See CIA\n\nAgnew, Spiro, 197\n\nAjax (Sophocles), 124\n\nAlbright, Madeleine, 269, 286\u201387\n\nAlgeria, 142\n\nAlliance for Progress, 145\n\n\"alliances,\" 57\u201358\n\nAllison, John, 120\n\nal-Maliki, Nuri, 374\n\nAl Qaeda, 327\u201328, 330, 331\u201332, 336, 348\u201349, 352, 372, 373\u201374, 381, 382\n\nAlsace-Lorraine, 44\n\nal-Sadr, Moqtada, 364, 372\u201373\n\nal-Sistani, Sayyid Ali, 359\n\nAlsop, Joseph, 137, 150\n\nambition and hubris, 3\u20136\n\nAmbrosius, Lloyd, 405n\n\nAmerica at the Crossroads (Fukuyama), 367\u201368\n\nAmerican Civil War, 21\u201322\n\nAmerican Communist Party, 80, 82\n\nAmerican Enterprise Institute (AEI), 361, 366\u201367\n\nAmerican Food Administration, 64\n\nAmerican Friends of Vietnam, 152\n\nAmerican Geographical Society, 35\n\n\"Americanization,\" 290\n\nAmerican Political Science Association, 376\n\nAmerican Socialist Party, 62, 79\n\nAmerican University, 159\n\nAndrews, Charles, 93\n\nAngola, 198\u201399, 203, 206\n\nanthracite mining, 19\u201320, 28, 400n\n\nanthrax attacks, 337\n\nanti-Americanism, 102, 164, 203, 362, 366\n\nAnti-Appeasement Alliance, 236\u201337\n\nanticolonialism, 142, 151\n\nanticommunism. See Communism anti-imperialism, and Kennedy, 142, 145, 167\n\nanti-Semitism, 82, 194\u201395\n\nanti-totalitarianism. See totalitarianism antiwar movement, 176\u201380, 184\u201385, 188\u201389, 208\u20139, 266\u201367, 368\n\nappeasement, 120, 127, 134, 135, 140, 159, 211, 236\u201337\n\nAristide, Jean-Bertrand, 273\n\nArmistice Day (1932), 57\n\nArmitage, Richard, 319, 353\n\narms control, 37, 56\u201358, 57, 66\u201367, 217, 231\u201337\n\narms embargoes, 269, 280, 281, 283, 297\n\narms sales, 202, 264, 324\n\nAsian financial crisis of 1997, 290\n\nAspin, Les, 266, 270\u201371, 272, 281\n\nAssociated Press (AP), 33\n\nAtlantic, 60\u201361\n\n\"Atlantic Charter,\" 84\u201385\n\natomic bombs. See nuclear weapons\n\nAtta, Mohammed, 353\n\nBaath Party, 361\u201362, 461n\n\nBacevich, Andrew, 368\n\nBack to the Future (movie), 219\n\nBaines, Harold, 315\n\nBaker, James, 222, 224, 227, 234, 257\u201358, 268, 371\u201372\n\nBaker, Newton, 16\n\nBaker, Ray Stannard, 402\u20133n\n\nbalance of power, 25\u201326, 28\u201329, 42, 47, 97, 102\u20133\n\nBaldwin, Stanley, 137\n\nBalfour, Arthur, 402\u20133n\n\nBalkan Ghosts (Kaplan), 270\u201371, 445n\n\nBall, George, 169, 171, 179\u201380, 258\n\nBarnes, Fred, 345\n\nBartlett, Charles, 160\n\nBatista, Fulgencio, 144\n\nBaulkmon, Johnny, 341\n\nBay of Pigs, 144\u201348, 165, 172, 423n\n\nBeard, Charles, 18, 39\u201340, 51\u201353, 64, 70\u201371, 72, 81\u201382, 184\u201385, 368\n\nbeautiful lie, 378\u201390\n\nBell, Daniel, 80, 131\u201332, 143, 209\n\nBenavidez, Roy, 386\n\nBennett, William, 304\n\nBenton, Thomas Hart, 19\n\nBerchtesgaden, 74\n\nBerger, Sandy, 266\u201367\n\nBerlin Wall, 244\u201345\n\nBerman, Paul, 348\u201349\n\nBethesda Naval Hospital, 124\n\nBiddle, Stephen, 461n\n\nBiden, Joseph, 347, 352\n\nBigelow, Albert, 176\u201377\n\nbin Laden, Osama, 327\u201328, 331, 349\n\nBismarck, Otto von, 29, 99\n\nBissell, Richard, 144\u201347\n\nBlack Monday (1987), 246\n\nBlake, Casey, 368\n\nBloom, Allan, 245\n\nBlum, John, 400n\n\nBohlen, Charles, 103\n\nBok, Edward, 57\n\nBolivia, 227\n\nBolshevik Revolution. See Russian Revolution\n\nBolton, John, 319, 371\n\nBoot, Max, 355, 458n\n\nBorah, William, 48, 55, 57, 59\n\nBoren, David, 351\n\nBosnia, 2, 268\u201371, 276, 280\u201385, 308, 313, 332, 348\n\nBourne, Randolph, 39\u201343, 52\u201353, 60, 82, 184\u201385, 349, 368\u201369\n\nBoutros-Ghali, Boutros, 272, 278, 282, 284\n\nBowles, Chester, 146, 148\n\nBradlee, Ben, 161\n\nBradley, Omar, 115\n\nBrando, Marlon, 141\n\nBremer, Paul, 11, 361\u201362, 363\n\nBrest-Litovsk Treaty (1918), 405n\n\nBrezhnev, Leonid, 216\n\nBriand, Aristide, 57\u201359\n\nBroderick, Matthew, 232\n\nBrokaw, Tom, 311\n\nBrooks, David, 292, 309, 311, 355, 367\n\nBrown, Norman O., 177\u201378\n\nBrzezinski, Zbigniew, 201, 202, 205, 214\u201317, 258, 259\n\nBuchanan, Patrick, 298\n\nBuchwald, Art, 181\n\nBuckley, William F., 224, 229, 298, 449n\n\nbudget deficits, 114, 122, 182, 289, 338\u201339.\n\nSee also defense spending\n\nBuffett, Warren, 6\n\nBullitt, William, 75, 87\n\nBundy, McGeorge, 139, 152\u201355, 167\u201374, 179\u201380, 192, 195, 214\n\nBundy, Stephen, 179\n\nBundy, William, 167, 179\n\nBureau of Corporations, 20\n\nBureau of Labor, 20\n\nBurnham, James, 80\n\nBush, Barbara, 351\n\nBush, George H. W., 251\u201364\n\nBush, George W., and, 314\u201316, 318\n\nDPG statement and, 301, 302\u20133\n\nGulf War and, 5, 254\u201363, 296\u201397\n\nIraq War and, 351\n\nPanama and, 251\u201354\n\nreelection campaign of 1992, 264, 267\n\nSomalia and, 271\u201372\n\nSoviet Union and Gorbachev and, 234\n\nBush, George W., 314\u201348, 382\u201385\n\nAfghanistan and, 2, 8, 330\u201336, 338\u201339, 344\n\ndominance ethic and, 5, 247\u201348, 369\n\nfreedom agenda, 297, 341\u201343, 388\u201389\n\nidealism of, 340\u201343\n\nIraq War and, 10\u201311, 319\u201323, 337\u201348, 354\u201356, 359\u201360, 365\u201366\n\nmidterm elections of 2006, 370\u201371\n\nmillenarianism of, 387\n\n9\/11 and, 327\u201329, 337, 341\n\nPowell and, 317\u201320, 323\u201326, 329\u201333, 335\u201336, 345\u201347\n\npresidential campaign of 2000, 313, 316\u201317\n\nReagan and, 318, 320, 322, 325, 338, 342, 343, 344\n\nwar on terror, 329, 349, 351\u201352, 370, 380\n\nBush, John Ellis \"Jeb,\" 316\n\nbushido, 65\n\nButler, Nicholas Murray, 51, 52, 57\n\nByrd, Robert, 273\n\nCalverton, V. F., 80\n\nCambodia, 197, 277\u201378\n\nCannon, Lou, 227, 435n\n\ncapitalism, 64, 79, 143, 387\n\nCard, Andrew, 365\n\nCarmichael, Stokely, 256\n\nCarnegie, Andrew, 24\u201325\n\nCarnegie Endowment for International Peace, 24\u201325\n\nCarter, Jimmy, 200\u2013207, 211\u201317\n\nAfghanistan and, 216\u201317\n\ncivil rights and, 200\u2013201\n\nhuman rights and, 201\u20132, 206, 212, 216\u201317, 274\u201375\n\nIran and, 206, 213\u201316\n\nneocons and, 204\u20135, 207\u20138, 211\u201313, 219\u201320, 304\n\npost-toughness foreign policy, 194, 201\u20133, 207, 211\u201312\n\nrabbit story, 204\u20136\n\nSoviet Union and, 202, 205\u20137, 214\u201315, 221\u201322\n\nCasablanca (movie), 95\n\nCastro, Fidel\n\nCarter and, 202\u20133\n\nCIA plots against, 129, 199\u2013200, 275\n\nCuban Missile Crisis and, 155\u201357\n\nMcGovern and, 191\n\nReagan and, 223\u201324, 227\n\nCatt, Carrie Chapman, 59\n\nCattell, James McKeen, 51\u201352\n\nCedar Revolution, 366\n\nCentral American policy. See Latin America policy\n\nCentral Intelligence Agency. See CIA\n\nChalabi, Ahmed, 321, 344\u201345, 360\u201362\n\nChamberlain, John, 62\n\nChamberlain, Neville, 74\u201375, 134\u201335, 137, 227, 305\n\nCh\u00e1vez, Hugo, 366, 386\n\nChekhov, Anton, 10\n\nChen, Chris, 397\u201398n\n\nCheney, Dick\n\nAfghanistan and, 329\u201330, 335\u201336\n\nbudget deficits and, 338\u201339\n\nDPG statement and, 301\u20132\n\nGulf War and, 254\u201355, 257, 261\u201362\n\nIraq and, 318\u201320\n\nIraq War and, 341\u201342, 345, 346, 352\u201353, 356, 371\n\nPowell and, 319\u201320, 324\u201325, 329\u201330, 352\u201353\n\nSoviet Union and, 236\n\nCheney, Elizabeth, 319\n\nChiang Kai-shek, 117\u201318, 121, 125\n\nChicago White Sox, 315\n\nChildren of Light, Children of Darkness (Niebuhr), 94\u201395\n\nChile, 198, 206, 304\n\nChin, Edward, 354\n\nChina, 116\u201322, 125, 294\u201395, 375, 387\n\nHainan Island incident (2001), 323\u201324\n\nJapanese invasion of Manchuria, 65\u201366\n\nNixon and, 9, 195\u201396\n\nTiananmen Square protests of 1989, 245\n\nChirac, Jacques, 281\n\nChomsky, Noam, 184, 349, 368\n\nChristopher, Warren, 270\u201371, 281\u201383\n\nChurchill, Winston\n\n\"Atlantic Charter,\" 84\n\nFour Policemen idea, 86\u201388, 89\n\nKennedy and, 134, 139\u201340\n\nWorld War II and, 76, 78, 79, 90\u201391, 92, 126\u201327, 134\n\nYalta Conference, 90\u201392, 101\n\nChurch of Disciples, 221\n\nCIA (Central Intelligence Agency)\n\nAfghanistan and, 332, 339\n\nCheney and, 318\u201319\n\nContras and, 225\u201326, 249, 322\n\nCuba and, 129, 144\u201347, 199\u2013200, 275\n\nHollywood images of, 369\n\nIraq and, 254, 353\n\nPakistan and, 216\u201317\n\nPanama and, 251\u201354\n\nVietnam War and, 168\u201369\n\nCity College of New York, 81, 207\u201310, 294\n\nCivil Rights Act of 1964, 166\n\ncivil rights movement, 176\u201377, 200\u2013201\n\nCivil War, 21\u201322\n\nClancy, Tom, 259\u201360\n\nClark, Mark, 128\n\nClark, Wesley, 282\u201384, 285\u201386\n\nClemenceau, Georges, 26, 43\u201347, 49, 54, 83, 85\n\nClifford, Clark, 182\n\nClinton, Bill, 265\u201374, 281\u201392, 320\n\nBalkans and, 2, 268\u201371, 280\u201385, 297, 320\n\nHaiti and, 273, 297\n\nimpeachment of, 288, 310\n\nKosovo and, 285\u201388\n\nneocons and, 297, 305, 307, 309\u201310\n\n9\/11 and, 328\n\nRwanda and, 273\u201374\n\nSomalia and, 271\u201373\n\nVietnam and, 266\u201367\n\nClinton, Hillary, 347\n\n\"Clinton Standard Time,\" 265\n\nCoalition Provisional Authority (CPA), 361\u201363\n\nColby, William, 199\n\ncold war, 172\u201387, 290\u201391, 294\u201395\n\nReagan and, 221\u201323, 227\u201337\n\nColumbia University, 39, 51\u201352, 209, 368\n\nCommentary, 210, 213, 305\n\nCommittee Against Military Intervention in Europe, 135\n\nCommittee on Public Information, 41\n\nCommittee on the Present Danger (CPD), 232\n\nCommittee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA), 79\n\nCommunism. See also China; Soviet Union\n\nEisenhower and, 126\u201331\n\nJohnson and, 180\u201383, 202\n\nKennedy and, 136, 141\u201345, 147\u201352, 154\u201355, 159\n\nNiebuhr and, 79\u201380\n\nNixon and, 193\u201399\n\nReagan and, 221\u201323, 227\u201337\n\nTruman and, 116\u201322\n\n\"compassionate conservatism,\" 316, 341, 342\n\nComprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, 159\u201360\n\nCongress of Racial Equality (CORE), 176\u201377\n\nconservatism. See dominance conservatism; national-greatness conservatives; neoconservatism\n\ncontainment\n\nCarter and, 202\u20133\n\nEisenhower and, 126\u201331\n\nKennan and, 10\u201311, 100, 102\u20134, 109\u201319, 123\u201324, 190, 380\u201381\n\nKennedy and, 142\n\nMcGovern and, 190\u201391\n\nPowell and, 257\u201358\n\nTruman and, 102\u20134, 114\u201319\n\ncontinentalism, 52\u201353\n\nContras, 225\u201326, 249, 322, 453n\n\nCoolidge, Calvin, 55, 59\n\nCooper, John Milton, 412n\n\ncosmopolitanism, 68\u201369\n\nCouncil on Foreign Relations, 111\n\ncounterculture, 177\u201380, 208\u20139, 266\u201367, 368\n\ncounterinsurgency, 141, 143, 372\u201373\n\nCowley, Malcolm, 62\n\ncredibility, 123, 196\u201398, 419n\n\nCreel, George, 41\n\nCroatia, 268\u201371, 276\u201380\n\nCroly, Herbert, 18, 35, 40\n\nCromwell, Oliver, 19\n\nCronkite, Walter, 181, 213\u201314\n\nCrowe, Blake, 255\n\nCrowe, William, 248, 250\u201351, 254\u201357, 259, 322\u201323\n\nCuba\n\nBay of Pigs, 144\u201348, 165, 172, 423n\n\nCarter and, 202\u20133, 205\n\nCIA plots against, 129, 199\u2013200, 275\n\nKennedy and, 144\u201348, 155\u201357, 172, 214\n\nMcCarthy and, 187\n\nMcGovern and, 191\n\nReagan and, 223\u201324, 227, 305\n\nCuban Missile Crisis, 155\u201357, 214\n\nCuster, George Armstrong, 181\n\nCzechoslovakia, 47, 56, 57, 74\u201375, 286\n\nDaedalus, 3\u20136\n\nDaladier, Edouard, 74\n\nDallaire, Rom\u00e9o, 273\u201374, 278\n\nDallek, Robert, 412n\n\nDa Nang, 168\n\nDaniels, Josephus, 68, 69\u201370\n\nDardanelles, 84, 115, 116\n\nDavies, John Paton, 117\u201318, 120, 125, 146, 199, 418n\n\nDavis, Forrest, 85, 89, 413n\n\nDavis, Livingston, 69, 70\n\nDawes, Charles, 55\n\nDay After, The (movie), 232\u201333, 438n\n\nDay the Earth Stood Still, The (movie), 231\n\nDayton Accords (1995), 283\u201384\n\ndeath instinct, 177\u201378\n\nDeaver, Michael, 222, 224, 227\n\nDeclaration on Liberated Europe, 91\n\nDecter, Midge, 227\n\nDefense Planning Guidance (DPG), 301\u20133\n\ndefense spending, 114\u201315, 122\u201324, 128\u201329, 137, 163, 182, 198, 202, 305, 307\u20138, 385\n\ndeficits. See budget deficits; defense spending de Gaulle, Charles, 149, 161, 169\n\n\"Democracies and Double Standards\" (Kagan), 305\n\ndemocracy (democratization), 246\u201348, 274\u201377, 300\u2013301\n\nIraq and, 341\u201345\n\nDemocratic National Convention\n\n1932, 70\u201371\n\n1968, 184, 188, 191\n\n1972, 184\n\n1992, 264, 267\n\nDemocratic Party\n\nGulf War and, 347\n\nIraq War and, 347\u201348\n\nneocons and, 208, 210\u201311, 212\n\n\"democratic peace\" theory, 285, 343\n\nDepression, the, 62\u201363, 65\u201366, 122, 220\n\nDerian, Patricia, 201\n\nd\u00e9tente, 195\u201396, 201\u20132\n\nDewey, John, 39\u201343, 184\u201385, 190\n\nBourne and, 39, 42\u201343\n\neducation and, 18, 40, 95\n\nFrance and, 56\n\nHoover and, 63\u201364\n\nNiebuhr and, 60\u201363, 81\u201382, 408\u20139n\n\nOutlawry of War, 58\u201359, 184\n\nRussian Revolution and, 33\u201334\n\nWorld War I and, 40\u201342, 51, 52, 53, 60\u201361\n\nWorld War II and, 81\u201382\n\nDewey, Thomas, 90\n\nDial, 42\n\ndialectical materialism, 110\u201311\n\nDiamond, Lawrence, 358\n\n\"Dictatorships and Double Standards\" (Kirkpatrick), 213, 228, 253, 304, 305, 367\n\nDiem, Ngo Dinh, 151\u201352, 157\u201359, 164\n\nDien Bien Phu, 130, 145, 151, 168, 423n\n\nDirksen, Everett, 119, 174\n\ndisarmament, 37, 56\u201358, 66\u201367, 217, 231\u201337\n\nDisarmament Conferences, 67, 71\n\nDobrynin, Anatoly, 237\n\nDr. Strangelove (movie), 174\n\nDolan, Anthony, 230\n\nDole, Robert, 281\n\ndominance, 261\u201362\n\ndominance conservatism (conservatives), 301, 303, 308\u201311, 320, 325\u201326, 331\u201332, 335, 355, 367\u201369\n\ndominance ethic, 246\u201348, 267\u201368, 289\u201390, 295\u201396, 298\u2013311, 338, 369, 373, 379\n\nDos Passos, John, 39, 57, 62\n\nDraper, Robert, 341, 454n\n\nDraper, Theodore, 146\u201347\n\nDreiser, Theodore, 39, 82\n\nDru, Philip, 18\n\ndrug war, 249\u201350\n\nDulles, Allen, 129, 144\u201345, 147\u201348\n\nDulles, John Foster, 114, 127, 129\n\nEagleburger, Lawrence, 251\n\nEarle, George, 72\n\nEast Asian crisis of 1997, 290\n\nEast Berlin, 150, 244\n\nEastern Europe, and Soviet Union, 87, 89\u201393, 101\u20132, 111\u201312\n\nEastman, Max, 80\n\neconomic crisis of 2008, 375\u201376\n\nEconomist, 291\n\nEden, Anthony, 86\n\neducation, 18, 40, 95, 131, 184\n\nEdwards, John, 347\n\nEisenhower, Dwight, 126\u201331\n\ncontainment policy, 126\u201331, 198\n\nCuba and, 129, 145\u201346\n\nKorean War and, 127\u201328, 130\u201331\n\nNixon and, 194, 198\n\nSoviet Union and, 128\u201330, 136\u201337\n\nEliot, T. S., 95\n\nElizabeth II of England, 314\n\nEl Salvador, 223\u201325, 305\n\nemasculation, 132\u201333, 137\u201338, 309\n\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo, 171\n\nEndara, Guillermo, 251, 253\n\n\"end of history,\" 245\u201346, 274\u201377, 289\u201390, 310, 343, 366\n\nEnd of Ideology, The (Bell), 131\u201332, 143\n\nengineering (engineers), 63\n\nEnglebrecht, H. C., 72\n\nErhard, Ludwig, 166\n\nEsquire, 132\n\nEthiopia, 205, 206\n\nEureka College, 221\n\nEuropean Union (EU), 268\n\nevil, 5, 18, 80, 114\n\nReagan and, 219\u201320, 221\n\nexcessive fear, as warning sign, 7\u20138\n\nexecutive powers, 77, 165, 225, 288\n\nFallows, James, 368\n\nFalwell, Jerry, 205\n\nFarewell to Reform (Chamberlain), 62\n\nFarmer, James, 176\n\nFarrakhan, Louis, 256\n\nFastabend, David, 374\n\nFaulkner, William, 57\n\nfederalism, 35\n\nFederal Reserve, 23, 24, 35\n\nFederal Trade Commission (FTC), 23, 24, 35\n\nFein, Bruce, 370\n\nFeith, Douglas, 324, 345, 453n\n\nFellowship for Reconciliation, 176\n\nfinancial crisis of 2008, 375\u201376\n\nFinland, 64, 384\n\nFischer, Fritz, 407n\n\nFischer, Louis, 80\n\nFisher, N.R.E., 398n\n\nFleming, Ian, 145\n\nFord, Gerald, 198\u201399, 277\u201378\n\nFord, Henry, 61\u201362, 166\n\nForeign Affairs, 111\n\nForrestal, James, 103, 109\u201315, 117, 124\n\nForrestal, Michael, 159\n\nFortas, Abe, 429n\n\nFour Policemen idea, 85\u201390, 100, 103\n\nFourteen Points, 37, 46\n\nFox, Richard Wightman, 409n\n\nFox News, 325, 351\n\nFrank, Waldo, 41\u201342\n\nFrankfurter, Felix, 35\n\nFranks, Tommy, 339\u201340, 355, 356, 358\n\nfreedom, 275\u201376\n\nBush and, 297, 341\u201343, 388\u201389\n\nfreedom of the seas, 31, 37, 46\n\nFreeland, Richard, 418n\n\nfree markets, 26, 209, 309\n\nFreud, Sigmund, 16, 177\u201378, 415n\n\nFriedman, Thomas, 291, 318\n\nFromkin, David, 105\n\nFukuyama, Francis, 244\u201346, 291\u201392\n\n\"end of history,\" 245\u201346, 274\u201377, 310\n\nIraq War and, 348\u201349, 351\u201352, 367\u201368\n\nFulbright, William, 199, 423n\n\nFulton, James, 418n\n\nGaither, H. Rowan, 137, 211\n\nGalbraith, John Kenneth, 148\u201349\n\nGarner, Jay, 358\u201359, 361\n\nGates, Robert, 464n\n\ngays in the military ban, 267, 270\n\nGaza Strip, 366\n\nGelb, Leslie, 189, 190, 201, 259, 278\n\nGeneral Accounting Office (GAO), 336\n\nGeneva Convention, 336\n\ngenocide, 274, 276\u201380, 308\n\nGeorge Washington, 38\n\nGeorgia, 383\u201384\n\nGerson, Michael, 326, 327, 331, 336, 342, 457n\n\nG.I. Joe, 219\n\nGingrich, Newt, 259\u201360, 281, 283, 309, 356\n\nGlazer, Nathan, 209, 248, 298\n\n\"globalization,\" 290\n\nGoldberg, Jonah, 309, 311\n\nGold Crisis of 1968, 182\u201383\n\nGolden Rule, 176\n\nGoldwater, Barry, 166\n\nGorbachev, Mikhail, 230\u201337, 244, 306, 439n\n\nGordon, Michael, 443n\n\nGore, Albert, Jr., 264, 269\n\nGore, Thomas, 16\n\nGraham, Lindsey, 370\n\nGrayson, Cary, 49\u201350\n\nGreat Depression, 62\u201363, 65\u201366, 122, 220\n\nGreater Middle East Initiative, 365\n\ngreatness. See national-greatness conservatives\n\nGreat Society, 180\u201381, 182, 184\n\nGreece, 89, 115\u201318, 121, 154\n\nGreek literature, 3\u20134. 6, 11, 398n\n\nGreenspan, Alan, 290\n\nGreen Zone (Iraq), 362\u201363\n\nGreer, U.S.S., 77\u201378\n\nGrenada, 227\u201328, 250\u201351\n\nGromyko, Andrei, 149\n\ngross domestic product (GDP), 128, 198, 375\n\ngross national product (GNP), 123\n\nGroton School, 68, 69, 173\n\nGuant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, 370\n\nGuatemala, 129, 172, 198\n\nGuevara, Ernesto \"Che,\" 172\n\nGulf of Tonkin, 164\u201366\n\nGulf War, 2, 5, 254\u201363, 296\u201397, 300, 312\u201313, 347\n\nHadley, Stephen, 319\n\nHaig, Alexander, 223\u201325\n\nHainan Island incident (2001), 323\u201324\n\nHaiti, 273, 284, 297, 313\n\nHalberstam, David, 139, 152, 158, 166\n\nHaldeman, H. R., 195\n\nHamas, 10, 366, 380\n\nHand, Learned, 35\n\nHanighen, F. C., 72\n\nHarding, Warren, 53, 55, 57\n\nHarlan County, U.S.S., 273, 284\n\nHarries, Owen, 298, 307\n\nHarriman, Averell, 89\u201390, 103, 149\n\nHarvard Crimson, 69, 179\n\nHarvard University, 69, 133, 135, 161\n\nHassett, William, 92\n\nHavel, Vaclav, 321, 344\n\nHawthorne, Nathaniel, 95\n\nHayden, Tom, 176, 184\n\nHearst, William Randolph, 71\n\nHelms, Jesse, 249\n\nHelsinki Accords (1975), 196\n\nHemingway, Ernest, 57\n\nHepburn Act of 1906, 20\n\nHindenburg, Paul von, 37\n\nHiroshima, 93\u201394, 176\n\nHiss, Alger, 194\n\nHitchens, Christopher, 348, 368\n\nHitler, Adolf, 10, 71\u201372, 74\u201380, 91, 112, 134, 135, 174, 210\n\nHobbes, Thomas, 194\u201395\n\nHo Chi Minh, 7, 151\u201352, 183, 275\n\nHoffa, Jimmy, 186\n\nHolbrooke, Richard, 267, 269, 270, 272, 283\u201386\n\nHolocaust, 194\u201395, 279\u201380\n\nHolocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, D.C.), 280\n\nhomosexuality, 119, 132, 211\n\nHook, Sidney, 62, 80\n\nhoover, 64\n\nHoover, Herbert, 63\u201367, 77\n\nHopkins, Harry, 78\u201379, 86\n\nHouse, Edward M., 15\u201319, 31, 36\u201340, 50, 96, 402\u20133n\n\nHouse Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 174\u201375\n\nHowe, Irving, 80\n\nhubris, 4, 398 n\n\nHughes, Charles Evans, 57, 58\n\nHull, Cordell, 71, 85\u201386, 89, 103\n\nhumanitarian wars, 277\u201378, 284, 297, 300\u2013301, 303\n\nhuman nature, 29, 80, 95, 123\u201324, 176\u201378, 191\u201392, 229, 245\u201346\n\nhuman rights, 93, 201\u20132, 216\u201317, 274\u201375, 300\u2013301\n\nHumphrey, Hubert, 170, 185, 188\n\nHussein, Saddam\n\nGulf War and, 2, 254\u201363, 296\u201397, 300, 312\u201313\n\nIraq War and, 345\u201346, 352\u201355, 457\u201358n\n\n9\/11 and, 330\u201331, 341\u201342\n\nHussein, Uday, 358\n\nHutus, 273\u201374, 276\u201377\n\nIcarus, 3\u20136, 11\n\nidealism, 388\n\nIdea of the National Interest (Beard), 72\n\nIgnatieff, Michael, 350, 368\n\nimprovised explosive devices (IEDs), 362\n\nInchon, 120, 260\n\nIndochina, 125, 185\n\nIndonesia, 320\n\n\"Inquiry, the,\" 17\u201318, 35\u201337\n\nInter-Allied Military Control Commission, 56\n\nintercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 137\n\ninterdependence, 189\u201390, 214\u201315\n\nIntermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF), 236\n\ninternationalism, 48\u201349, 77\n\nInternational Monetary Fund (IMF), 102, 290, 389\n\nInterstate Commerce Commission, 20, 35\n\nIn Time to Come (play), 83\n\nIran, 212\u201316, 366, 381, 383\n\nhostage crisis, 213\u201316\n\nShah and, 205\u20136, 212\u201313\n\nSoviet Union and, 115\n\nIran-Contra Affair, 225\u201326\n\nIraq, 319\u201323\n\nGulf War, 254\u201363, 296\u201397, 312\u201313\n\n9\/11 and, 330\u201336\n\nno-fly zone, 319\u201320\n\nOperation Desert Fox, 328\n\nregime change, 264, 323\u201325\n\nsanctions, 254\u201355, 257, 296\u201397, 319\n\nwar. See Iraq War\n\nIraqi National Congress (INC), 321, 344\u201345, 360\u201361\n\nIraq Study Group (ISG), 371\u201372\n\nIraq War, 7\u20138, 10\u201311, 337\u201365\n\nDemocratic Party and, 347\u201348\n\ndemocratization rationale for, 341\u201345\n\nfailure to control postwar Baghdad, 357\u201362\n\ninvasion begins, 354\u201356\n\nliberal hawks and, 348\u201350, 368\u201369\n\nneocons and, 350\u201352, 457\u201358n\n\npublic support, 1\u20132, 397n\n\nrun-up to, 338\u201345\n\nsurge strategy, 371\u201375\n\ntiming of Bush's decision, 338\u201340\n\nIrreconcilables. See Senate \"Irreconcilables\"\n\nIslamic terrorism. See Al Qaeda; jihadist terrorism\n\nIslamofascism, 10\u201311, 348\u201349\n\nisolationism, 32, 42\u201343, 51, 52\u201353, 59, 64, 71\u201373, 82, 92, 189, 300\n\nIsrael, 226, 319, 328, 366\n\nJackson, Michael, 371\n\nJacobs, Travis Beal, 411n\n\nJames, William, 16\n\nJapan, 57, 65\u201366, 73, 78, 85, 133\u201334, 151, 289\n\njihadist terrorism, 10\u201311, 348\u201349, 352, 382, 384. See also Al Qaeda\n\nJohnson, Luci Baines, 183\n\nJohnson, Lyndon B., 161\u201371\n\nCommunism and, 119, 162\u201363, 167, 175, 379\n\nGreat Society, 180\u201381, 182, 184\n\nneocons and, 210\u201311\n\ntoughness ethic, 5, 162, 166, 180\u201383, 210\u201311\n\nVietnam War and, 8, 10, 162, 163\u201371, 178\u201384, 238\n\nJordan, Michael, 355\u201356\n\nJungle, The (Sinclair), 20\n\nKagan, Robert, 303\u201310, 313, 337, 367\u201368, 450n, 457\u201358n\n\nKaplan, Lawrence, 340\n\nKaplan, Robert, 270\u201371, 445n\n\nKarzai, Hamid, 334, 344, 374\n\nKearny, U.S.S., 77\u201378\n\nKeating, Kenneth, 155\n\nKeegan, John, 287\n\nKeeler, Jack, 463n\n\nKellogg, Frank, 58\u201359, 66\n\nKellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 59, 66\n\nKennan, George Frost, 98\u2013100, 376\u201377\n\ncontainment strategy, 10\u201311, 100, 102\u20133, 109\u201319, 123\u201324, 190, 380\u201381\n\nKorean War and, 120\n\nReagan and, 238\u201339\n\nSoviet Union and, 10, 99\u2013100, 102\u20133, 157, 238\u201339, 243\u201344\n\nVietnam War and, 125, 169\u201370\n\nKennedy, Edward, 253\n\nKennedy, John F., 133\u201362\n\nassassination of, 160, 163\n\nCommunism and, 136, 141\u201345, 147\u201352, 154\u201355, 159\n\nCuba and Bay of Pigs, 144\u201348, 172\n\nCuban Missile Crisis, 155\u201357, 214\n\ndeveloping world and, 141\u201343\n\nJohnson compared with, 161\u201362\n\nLaos and, 148\u201349\n\nneocons and, 210\u201311\n\n\"peace speech\" (1963), 159\n\npresidential campaign of 1960, 137\u201338\n\nSoviet Union and, 136\u201338, 143, 149\u201351, 154\u201357, 159\u201360\n\ntoughness ethic, 132\u201333, 137\u201340, 148, 156\u201357, 162\n\nThe Ugly American and, 141\u201342, 155\n\nVietnam War and, 151\u201354, 157\u201359, 163\u201364\n\nWorld War II and, 133\u201336\n\nKennedy, Joseph, Sr., 133, 134\u201336, 161\n\nKennedy, Paul, 246\u201347, 267\u201368, 289, 376\n\nKennedy, Robert, 11, 133, 141\u201342, 186\u201387, 188\n\nCuba and, 147, 148, 155\n\nVietnam War and, 11, 179, 180, 186\u201387\n\nKerry, John, 347, 386\n\nKeynes, John Maynard, 122\n\nKeyserling, Leon, 122\u201323\n\nKhalilzad, Zalmay, 301\u20133, 308\n\nKhanh, Nguyen, 164, 185\n\nKhanna, Parag, 376\n\nKhmer Rouge, 277\u201378\n\nKhomeini, Ruhollah, 206\n\nKhrushchev, Nikita, 137\u201338, 143, 149\u201351, 154\u201357, 159\u201360\n\nKing, Martin Luther, Jr., 177, 179\n\nKirkpatrick, Jeane, 210, 212\u201313, 294\u2013301, 306, 366\u201367\n\nCarter and, 211\u201313, 215\n\nClinton and, 297\n\ndemocratization and, 212\u201313, 275, 367\n\n\"Dictatorships and Double Standards,\" 213, 228, 253, 304, 305, 367\n\nGulf War and Bush, Sr., 296\u201397, 301\u20132\n\nIraq War and Bush, Jr., 350, 366\u201367\n\nKagan and, 304\u20136, 308\n\nKrauthammer and, 298\u2013301\n\nPoland Solidarity and, 222\n\nReagan and, 221\u201322, 228\u201330, 234, 236, 248\u201350, 262, 305\u20136\n\nKissinger, Henry, 194\u201399\n\nKnox, Frank, 77\n\nKoppel, Ted, 267\n\nKorean War, 119\u201322, 127\u201328, 130\u201331, 168\n\nKosovo, 276\u201377, 285\u201388, 308, 313, 332, 348\n\nKrauthammer, Charles, 298\u2013301, 309, 317, 332, 355\n\nKristol, Irving, 207\u201311, 212, 293\u201398, 303, 306, 308\n\nCarter and, 211\u201312\n\nGulf War and Bush, Sr., 211\u201312\n\nIraq War and, 350\u201351\n\nNicaragua and, 224\n\nPoland Solidarity and, 222\n\nReagan and, 222, 224, 228\u201329, 233, 248\u201349, 262\n\nVietnam War and, 208\u20139\n\nKristol, William, 303\u201310, 332, 340, 355, 457\u201358n\n\nKrock, Arthur, 111, 135\u201336, 421n\n\nKubrick, Stanley, 174\n\nKurds, 260\u201362, 263, 297, 360\n\nKuwait, Gulf War, 254\u201363, 296\u201397, 300, 312\u201313\n\nKyrgyzstan, 335, 366\n\nlabor strikes, 19\u201320\n\nlabor unions, 62, 166\n\nLa Follette, Robert, 23\n\nLake, Anthony, 189, 190, 201, 267, 269, 281\u201382, 284, 286\n\nLansdale, Edward, 141, 155, 160, 199\u2013200\n\nLansing, Robert, 35\u201336\n\nLaos, 148\u201349, 154, 181, 218, 424n\n\nLasch, Christopher, 18\u201319, 184\n\nLatin America policy. See also specific countries\n\nReagan and, 223\u201326, 248\u201352\n\nWilson and, 26\u201329\n\nLatvia, 46, 49, 88\n\nLeague of Nations, 37, 45\u201351, 56, 68, 71, 75, 84, 86, 88\n\nLeague to Enforce Peace, 31\u201332, 37\n\nLebanon, 226\u201327, 250\u201351, 256, 270, 305\u20136, 366, 423n\n\nLederer, William, 141\u201342\n\nLemnitzer, Lyman, 149\n\nLenin, 36, 99, 110\n\nLerner, Max, 80\n\nLewinsky, Monica, 288\n\nLibby, I. Lewis \"Scooter,\" 301\u20133, 308, 319, 356, 371, 453n\n\nliberal hawks, 279, 287, 300\u2013301, 348\u201350, 368\u201369\n\nliberalism. See Democratic Party; New Left; progressivism\n\nLiberal Papers, 174\n\nLiberal Project, 173\n\nLiberation, 177\n\nLibya, 227\u201328\n\n\"lift and strike,\" 269, 270\n\nLincoln, Abraham, 21, 49\n\nLindsey, Lawrence, 339, 373, 375\n\nLippmann, Walter, 16\u201319, 24, 26, 104\u20135, 381\n\ncontainment strategy, 113\n\nFreud and, 415n\n\nHoover and, 65\n\nKennedy and, 135\n\n\"the Inquiry,\" 35\u201337, 47\n\nVersailles Treaty and, 47, 48, 52\n\nVietnam War and, 169\u201370, 238\n\nWorld War I and, 16\u201317, 32\u201340, 47\u201348, 81\n\nWorld War II and, 81, 97\u201398\n\nLithuania, 88, 296\n\nLloyd George, David, 45, 46\u201347\n\nLocarno Treaty (1925), 55\u201356\n\nLodge, Henry Cabot, 29\u201331, 33, 48\u201351, 83, 405n\n\nLodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 158\n\nLondon Naval Treaty (1930), 65\u201366\n\n\"Long Telegram\" (Kennan), 10, 109, 110\n\nLook, 83\n\nLos Angeles Times, 312\n\nLovett, Robert, 122\n\nLowell, Abbott Lawrence, 35\n\nLSD, 178, 199\n\nLuard, Evan, 89\n\nLuce, Clare Boothe, 67\n\nLuce, Henry, 118, 149\n\nLudendorff, Erich, 37\n\nLudlow Amendment, 73\n\nLusitania, 30\u201331\n\nMacArthur, Douglas, 120\u201321, 122, 127, 163, 197, 260, 264\n\nMcCain, John S., III, 312\u201314, 316\u201317\n\nMcCarthy, Eugene, 183, 185\u201387, 188, 196\n\nMcCarthy, Joseph, 10, 118\u201319, 121, 125, 160, 163, 175, 186\u201387, 191\n\nMcClellan, Scott, 341\n\nMcCloy, John, 182, 183\n\nMacDonald, Ramsay, 65\n\nMcFarlane, Robert, 224\n\nMcGovern, George, 190\u201393, 196\n\nMcGrory, Mary, 243\n\nMcKiernan, David, 358\n\nMcMahon, Brien, 93\n\nMacmillan, Harold, 149\n\nMcMillan, Margaret, 405 n\n\nMcNamara, Robert, 157, 178, 179\u201380, 258\n\nMaddox, U.S.S., 164\u201365\n\nMaginot Line, 56\n\nMahan, Alfred T., 68, 70\n\nMahdi Army, 364, 372\u201373\n\nMakiya, Kanan, 321\n\nMalcolm X (Malcolm Little), 256\n\nManchuria, 65, 66, 77\n\nManila, 262\n\nMansfield, Mike, 160, 188\n\nMao Zedong, 117\u201319, 121, 125, 127, 175, 380\u201381\n\nMarch on Washington (1963), 176\n\nMarcos, Ferdinand, 262, 304, 320\n\nMarshall, George, 109, 113, 119\n\nMarshall Islands, 176\u201377\n\nMarshall Plan, 103\u20134, 112\n\nMarx, Karl (Marxism), 79, 110, 153, 244\n\nMatsu, 129, 130, 165, 423n\n\nMead, Walter Russell, 465n\n\nMeat Inspection Act of 1914, 20\n\nMencken, H. L., 57, 67\n\nMercer, Lucy, 69, 92\n\nMerchants of Death (Englebrecht and Hanighen), 72\n\nMervin, David, 405n\n\nMexico, 27, 33\n\nMicronesia, 211\n\nmilitary tribunals, 370\n\nmillenarianism, 387\n\nMiller, Zell, 264\n\nMillis, Walter, 72\n\nMills, C. Wright, 139, 184\n\nMilo\u0161evic, Slobodan, 276, 277, 282\u201383, 285\u201388, 290, 308, 321, 348\n\nMiscamble, Wilson, 416n\n\nMission: Impossible III (movie), 369\n\nMitterrand, Fran\u00e7ois, 279\n\nMogadishu, 272, 273, 278\n\nMolotov, Vyacheslav, 85, 101\u20132, 416n\n\nMondale, Walter, 217, 223\n\nMonroe Doctrine, 28, 32, 233, 379\n\nMoral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 60\n\nMorgenthau, Hans, 48, 96\u201399, 169\u201371, 190, 238, 349\n\nMorgenthau, Henry, 103, 104\u20135\n\nMorris, Dick, 282\n\nMorris, Gouverneur, 19\n\nMoscow State University, 237\n\nMotherfuckers, 209\n\nMoynihan, Daniel Patrick, 208, 243\u201344\n\nmultilateralism, 261, 270, 279, 280, 350\n\nMumford, Lewis, 82\n\nMussolini, Benito, 65\n\nNation, The, 55, 57, 79\n\nNational Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW), 59\n\nnational-greatness conservatives, 309, 311\u201314, 316\u201317, 328\n\nnational interest, 97, 301, 381\u201382\n\nNational Naval Medical Center (Bethesda), 371\n\nNational Press Club, 181\n\nNational Review, 224, 298, 334\n\nNational Security Council (NSC), 143, 172\u201373, 318\u201319\n\nReport 68, 122\u201324, 130, 140, 144, 182, 236\n\nNational Security Strategy, 343\n\nNational War College, 109, 110\u201311, 123\u201324\n\nnation building, 345, 359\u201361\n\nNATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 104, 112, 114, 278\u201389, 328, 355, 379, 383\u201384\n\nNaval War of 1812, 69\n\nNazi Party (Nazism), 54\u201355, 65, 75\u201377, 81, 82, 96, 110, 184\n\nneoconservatism (neocons), 207\u201317, 293\u2013311\n\nAfghanistan and, 216\u201317\n\nCarter and, 204\u20135, 207\u20138, 211\u201316, 219\u201320\n\nCommunism and, 221\u201323, 227\u201330, 236\u201337, 305\u20136\n\ndominance ethic and, 295\u201396, 298\u2013311\n\nDPG statement and, 301\u20133\n\nIran hostage crisis and, 213\u201316\n\nIraq War and, 350\u201352, 366\u201368\n\nReagan and, 221\u201323, 227\u201330, 236\u201337, 248\u201350, 303\u20136\n\n\"neo-Reaganism,\" 303\u20136, 308\n\nnetroots, 370\n\nNeutrality Acts, 72\u201373, 76, 77\n\nNew America Foundation, 376\n\nNew Deal, 62, 79\n\nNew Left, 173\u201380, 184\u201387, 208\u201311, 219\u201320, 294\n\nNew Republic, 16, 18, 35, 40, 42, 239, 245, 279, 340\n\nNewsom, David, 203\n\nNew Statesmen, 135\n\nNewsweek, 111, 258, 353, 376\n\nNew York Herald Tribune, 138\n\nNew York Public Library, 17, 35, 85\n\nNew York Times, 111, 135\u201336, 146, 150, 153, 174, 184, 186, 199, 246, 278, 280, 289, 302, 318, 331, 333, 353, 370, 376\n\nNgo Dinh Diem, 151\u201352, 157\u201359, 164\n\nNgo Dinh Nhu, 158\n\nNicaragua, 206, 212\u201313, 223\u201326, 304, 305, 453n\n\nNicaraguan Contras, 225\u201326, 249, 322, 453n\n\nNicholas II of Russia, 33\u201334\n\nNiebuhr, Reinhold, 60\u201363, 79\u201381, 82, 277, 388\n\nDewey and, 60\u201363, 81\u201382, 408\u20139n\n\nhuman nature and evil, 5, 94\u201395, 177, 191\n\nKristol and Kirkpatrick and, 207, 210, 294\u201395\n\nVietnam War and, 169\u201370, 238\n\nWorld War I, 60\u201361\n\nWorld War II and, 79\u201381, 82\n\n9\/11 terrorist attacks (2001), 8, 327\u201332, 348, 382\n\nAfghanistan and, 330\u201336\n\nIraq War and, 337\n\nNitze, Paul, 122\u201323, 211\n\nNixon, Richard, 9, 127, 137\u201338, 193\u2013202, 205\u20136\n\nNORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), 232\u201333\n\nNoriega, Manuel, 248\u201354\n\nNorthern Alliance, 332\u201334, 339, 344, 461n\n\nNorth Korea, 119\u201322, 127\u201328, 130\u201331, 323\u201324, 383\n\nNovak, Robert, 204\u20135\n\nNSC. See National Security Council\n\nNSC Report 68, 122\u201324, 130, 140, 144, 182, 236\n\nnuclear deterrence, 382\u201383\n\nNuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963), 159\u201360\n\nnuclear weapons, 66\u201367, 93\u201394, 101\u20132, 129\u201330, 155, 174, 176\u201377, 231\u201337. See also weapons of mass destruction\n\nNunn, Sam, 347\n\nNye, Gerald, 72\n\nObama, Barack, 374, 384\u201385, 386\n\nO'Donnell, Kenneth \"Kenny,\" 146\n\nOffice for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), 358\u201359\n\nOklahoma City bombing (1995), 330\n\nOlympic Games\n\n1936, 217\n\n1980, 216, 217\n\n1984, 223, 269\n\nO'Neill, Paul, 319, 338\n\nO'Neill, Thomas Phillip \"Tip,\" 226\u201327\n\nOpen Door at Home (Beard), 72\n\nOperation Desert Fox, 328\n\nOperation Iraqi Freedom, 355\n\nOperation Midnight Climax, 199\n\nOperation Mongoose, 155\u201356\n\nOPLAN 34A, 164\u201365\n\nOriental Seminary, 99\n\nOrlando, Vittorio Emanuele, 47\n\nOutlawry of War, 58\u201359\n\noverconfidence, as warning sign, 6\u20137\n\nOvid, 4\n\npacifism, 42, 43, 51, 59, 64, 71\u201372, 82\n\nPadilla, Frank, 354\n\nPaine, Thomas, 220\n\nPakistan, 216\u201317, 272, 336, 382\n\nPalestinians, 319, 366\n\nPanama, 248\u201354, 305, 322\u201323\n\nParis Peace Conference (1919), 43\u201348, 83, 402\u20133n\n\nparochialism, 21, 27, 388\n\nPartial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), 159\u201360\n\nPartisan Review, 80\n\nPathet Lao, 424n\n\npatriarchal authority, 210\n\npatriotism, 386, 394\n\nPatten, Simon, 24\n\nPatton (movie), 197\n\nPeace Corps, 143\n\npeace dividend, 247\n\nPearl Harbor, 78\u201379, 93\n\nPepper, Claude, 93\n\nPerkins, Frances, 70\n\nPerle, Richard, 271, 301\u20133\n\nPerot, Ross, 281\n\nPersians, The (Aeschylus), 3, 11\n\nPetraeus, David, 372\u201374\n\nPew Research Center, 1\u20132, 292, 376\n\nPhiladelphia Public Ledger, 35\n\nPhillips, William, 80\n\nPinochet, Augusto, 304\n\nPipes, Richard, 211, 230\n\nPodhoretz, Norman, 293, 298\n\nCarter and, 211\n\n\"new isolationism\" and, 430n\n\nNicaragua and, 224\n\nPoland Solidarity and, 222\n\nReagan and, 222, 224, 228, 235\u201336, 305\u20136, 438n\n\nSoviet Union and, 235\u201336, 244, 305\u20136, 438n\n\ntraditional family values and, 210\n\nVietnam War and, 260\n\nPoland, 47, 56, 57, 88, 91\u201392, 93, 222, 245, 381\n\npolio, 70\n\nPollack, Kenneth, 374\n\nPoos, Jacques, 268\n\nPopular Front, 80\n\nPork Chop Hill, 127\n\nPort Huron Statement, 175, 178, 184, 428n\n\nPotomac Electric Power Company, 189\n\nPotsdam Agreement, 407n\n\n\"Pottery Barn rule,\" 345\n\nPowell, Colin, 317\u201320, 322\u201326\n\nAfghanistan and, 329\u201333\n\nBush, Jr., and, 317\u201320, 323\u201326, 329\u201333, 335\u201336, 345\u201347\n\nClark and, 282\u201383\n\nClinton and, 265\u201367, 269\u201372, 323\n\nGulf War and, 254\u201360, 297\n\nIraq War and, 345\u201347, 352\u201354, 356, 358\n\n9\/11 and, 329\u201332\n\nReagan and, 231\n\ntests for military intervention, 224, 272\u201373, 312\n\nWolfowitz and, 263, 322\u201323\n\nPowell, Jody, 204\n\nPowell Doctrine, 272\u201373\n\nPreminger, Otto, 83\n\nPresent Dangers (Kristol and Kagan), 306, 307\u20138\n\npresidential powers, 77, 165, 225, 288\n\npreventive (\"preemptive\") war, 10\u201311, 288, 299\u2013303, 307\u20138, 338\n\nPrinceton University, 22, 98, 109\n\nprogressivism, 17\u201329, 32, 39\u201342, 58, 62, 96\u201397\n\n\"the Inquiry,\" 17\u201318, 35\u201337\n\nProject for the New American Century (PNAC), 308\u20139, 324, 325\n\nPromote Liberty, 253\n\nPropaganda Commission, 37\n\nPT-109, 133\u201334\n\nPublic and Its Problems, The (Dewey), 184\n\nPublic Interest, 209\n\nPutin, Vladimir, 366\n\nQaeda, al. See Al Qaeda\n\nQuayle, Dan, 253, 304\n\nQuemoy, 129, 130, 165, 423n\n\nRadosh, Ronald, 184\u201385\n\nRahv, Philip, 80\n\nRambo (movie), 218, 219, 222\n\nRandolph Bourne Award, 82\n\nRandolph Bourne Institute, 368\n\nRapallo Treaty (1922), 53\n\nRaskin, Marcus, 172\u201374, 175, 177, 184, 191, 203, 368\n\nRauschenbusch, Walter, 18, 131, 191\u201392\n\nRayburn, Sam, 162\n\nReagan, Ronald, 218\u201339\n\nCentral American policy, 223\u201326, 248\u201352\n\nCommunism and, 221\u201323, 227\u201337\n\nevil and, 219\u201320, 221\n\nGrenada and, 227, 250\u201351\n\nKennan and, 238\u201339\n\nLebanon and, 226\u201327, 250\u201351, 305\u20136\n\nLibya and, 227\u201328\n\n\"neo-Reaganism,\" 303\u20136, 308\n\noptimism of, 220\u201321, 245\u201346\n\nPanama and, 248\u201354\n\nSoviet Union and, 228\u201337, 305\u20136, 381\n\nReagan Doctrine, 320\u201322, 332, 344\n\nReagan: The Movie, 219\n\nrealism, 70, 99, 131\u201332, 387\n\nreason, 17\u201318, 58\n\nregime change, 264, 306, 323\u201325\n\nreparations, 53\u201355, 406\u20137n\n\nResearch Institute on International Change, 214\n\nReservationists. See Senate \"Reservationists\"\n\nReston, James, 150\n\nReturn of History and the End of Dreams (Kagan), 367\u201368\n\nReuben James, U.S.S., 77\u201378\n\nReuther, Walter, 166\n\nReynaud, Paul, 76\n\nRhee, Syngman, 128\n\nRhineland, 44\u201345\n\nRice, Condoleezza, 319, 323, 346\n\nRice University, 138\n\nRicks, Thomas, 373\n\nRidge, Tom, 319\n\nRidgway, Matthew, 168\n\nRiesman, David, 132\n\nRise and Fall of the Great Powers (Kennedy), 246\u201347, 376\n\nRisse-Kappen, Thomas, 439n\n\nRoad to War (Millis), 72\n\nRockefeller, Nelson, 149\n\nRodman, Peter, 360\n\nRomania, 47, 57, 89, 321, 344\n\nRoosevelt, Eleanor, 68, 69\u201370, 79, 101\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin Delano, 67\u201379, 83\u201394, 104\u20135\n\nBeard and, 70\u201371, 72\n\ndeath of, 92\n\nFour Policemen idea, 85\u201390, 100, 103\n\nKennedy, Sr., and, 134\n\nNew Deal and, 62, 79\n\npostwar vision, 83\u201390\n\nquarantine speech, 73, 411n\n\nreelection campaign of 1944, 90\n\nSoviet Union and, 74, 76, 79, 86\u201393, 100\u2013101, 104\u20135, 381\n\nWilson and, 69, 72\u201373, 78, 83\u201384, 85, 138\n\nWorld War I and, 68, 73, 84\n\nWorld War II and, 9, 73\u201379, 81\u201382, 90, 100\u2013101, 103, 380\n\nYalta Conference, 90\u201392, 101\n\nRoosevelt, Theodore \"Teddy,\" 19\u201320\n\nFDR and, 67\u201368, 69, 84\n\nKennedy and, 133, 138\n\nLippman and, 16\n\nSenate \"Reservationists\" and, 48\n\nWilson and, 15\n\nWorld War I and, 29\u201331, 33\n\nRoosevelt Corollary, 379\n\nRosenberg, Ethel, 248\n\nRosenberg, Julius, 248\n\nRostow, Walt, 143\u201345, 149, 150, 152\u201354, 167, 180\n\nRoyal Lao Army, 148\n\nRubin, Robert, 290\n\nRudd, Mark, 209\n\nRuhr Valley occupation, 54\u201355, 56\n\nRumsfeld, Donald, 308\n\nAfghanistan and, 328, 330, 335\n\ndismissal of, 370\u201371\n\nIraq no-fly zone and, 319\u201320\n\nIraq regime change and, 323\u201325, 324\u201325\n\nIraq War and, 338\u201341, 344, 345, 354\u201360\n\nRusk, Dean, 146, 148, 159, 169, 179, 185, 195\n\nRussell, Bertrand, 81\n\nRussell, Richard, 167\n\nRussia, and NATO, 383\u201384\n\nRussian Revolution, 10, 33\u201334, 36\u201337, 43\u201344.\n\nSee also Soviet Union\n\nRwanda, 273\u201374, 276\u201377\n\nsacrifice, 104, 222\u201323, 309, 381\n\nSadr, Moqtada al-, 364, 372\u201373\n\nSt. George's Medical School (Grenada), 227\u201328\n\nSt. Lawrence Seaway, 118\n\nSALT II treaty, 217, 234\u201337, 239\n\nSaltonstall, Leverett, 165\n\nsanctions, 66, 214\n\nIraq and, 254\u201355, 257, 296\u201397, 319\n\nSandinistas, 206, 304, 453n\n\nSantayana, George, 16\n\nSarajevo, 268\u201369, 282, 283, 348\n\nSarkozy, Nicolas, 376\n\nSaturday Evening Post, 85\n\nSaturday Night Live (TV show), 261, 335\n\nSaudi Arabia, 254, 261, 328\n\nSaving Private Ryan (movie), 311\n\nSchlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 1\u20133, 131, 132\u201333, 137, 173, 309\n\nCuba and Bay of Pigs, 145\n\nGulf War and, 2, 258\n\nKennedy and, 145, 154, 157\n\nVietnam War and, 154, 157, 188\u201389\n\nThe Vital Center, 1\u20133, 94, 95, 276\n\nSchlesinger, Arthur, Sr., 378, 379\n\nScientific Man vs. Power Politics (Morgenthau), 96\n\nscientific peace, 17\u201318, 37\n\nScowcroft, Brent, 257, 258, 261, 271, 351\n\nScully, Matthew, 329\n\nself-interest, 18, 25\u201327, 62, 97, 105, 388\n\nSenate Armed Services Committee, 163\n\nSenate Foreign Relations Committee, 89, 185, 199, 243\n\nSenate \"Irreconcilables,\" 48, 50\u201352, 59, 405n\n\nSenate Judiciary Committee, 52\n\nSenate \"Reservationists,\" 48, 50\u201352, 405n\n\nSentinel anti-ballistic missiles, 188\n\nSeptember 11th terrorist attacks (2001), 8, 327\u201332, 348, 382\n\nAfghanistan and, 330\u201336\n\nIraq War and, 337\n\nSerbs (Serbia), 268\u201371, 276\u201388, 297, 313, 348\n\nSetser, Bradley, 375\n\nSeven Arts, 42\n\nsex instinct, 177\u201378\n\nShadid, Anthony, 363\n\nShah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, 115, 205\u20136, 212, 215\u201316\n\nShalikashvili, John, 282\n\nShelton, Henry, 330, 331\n\nSherwood, Robert, 83\n\nShia Muslims, 260\u201363, 297, 320, 327, 345, 364, 371\u201373\n\nShinseki, Eric, 344\u201345\n\nShipping Board, 23\n\nShultz, George, 222, 233, 262\n\nSimpson, O. J., 371\n\nSinclair, Upton, 20\n\nSistani, Sayyid Ali al-, 359\n\nSlovenia, 268\u201371\n\nSocial Darwinism, 18, 26\n\nSocial Gospel, 18, 131, 191\u201392, 221\n\nSolidarity (Polish trade union), 222\n\nSomalia, 205, 271\u201373, 278\n\nSomoza, Anastasio, 206, 212, 215, 304\n\nSophocles, 124\n\nSorensen, Theodore, 201\n\nSosa, Sammy, 315\n\nSouthern Christian Leadership Conference, 176\n\nSouth Korea, 119\u201322, 127\u201328, 130\u201331, 202\n\nSouthwest Texas State Teachers' College, 165\n\nSoviet Union\n\nAfghanistan and, 206, 216\u201317, 331\n\nCarter and, 202, 205\u20137, 214\u201315, 221\u201322\n\nEastern Europe and, 87, 89\u201393, 101\u20132, 111\u201312\n\nfall of Berlin Wall, 244\u201345\n\nFour Policemen idea, 85\u201390, 100, 103\n\nFukuyama and, 244\u201345\n\nIraq and, 255\n\nKennan and, 10, 99\u2013100, 102\u20133, 109\u201317, 157, 238\u201339, 243\u201344\n\nKennedy and, 136\u201338, 143, 149\u201351, 154\u201357, 159\u201360\n\nKorean War and, 128\n\nneoconservatism and, 221\u201323, 227\u201330, 236\u201337, 305\u20136\n\nNew Left and, 174\u201375, 189, 210\n\nNixon and, 137\u201338, 195\u201396, 202\n\nReagan and, 221\u201323, 228\u201337, 305\u20136\n\nspace race, 136\u201337\n\nTruman and, 101\u20133, 114\u201316\n\nWorld War II and, 74, 76, 79\n\nYalta Conference, 90\u201392, 101\n\nspace race, 136\u201337\n\nSpadafora, Hugo, 249\n\nSpanish-American War, 9, 68, 401n\n\nSpanish Civil War, 276\n\nSpecial Forces, U.S., 143\u201344\n\nSports Illustrated, 138\n\nSputnik, 136\u201337\n\nSrebrenica, 280\u201382, 313\n\nStages of Economic Growth (Rostow), 153\n\nStalin, Joseph, 80, 82, 86\u201391, 110\u201311, 210\n\nFour Policemen idea, 86\u201390\n\nKorean War and, 121, 128\n\nYalta Conference, 90\u201391, 101\n\nStallone, Sylvester, 219, 235\n\nStanford University, 63\n\nStarobin, Paul, 376\n\n\"Star Wars,\" 231\u201333, 236\n\nState Department, U.S., 57, 88, 109, 120, 143, 145\n\nSteffens, Lincoln, 16, 62, 378\n\nStempel, Adam, 397n\n\nStevenson, Adlai, 137\n\nStevenson, Coke R., 163\n\nStimson, Henry, 65, 66, 77\n\nStoller, Matt, 370\n\nStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 176, 178\n\nStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS), 175, 176, 178\u201389, 208\u20139\n\nsubmarines, 30, 31, 32, 234\n\nSudetenland, 74\u201375\n\nSummers, Lawrence, 290\n\nSumner, William Graham, 1, 10\n\nSussex, 32\n\nSymington, Stuart, 199\n\nSyria, 10, 226, 263\u201364, 366\n\nSyriana (movie), 369\n\nTaft, Robert, 127\n\nTaliban, 327\u201336, 330\u201335, 338\u201339, 348\u201349, 373\u201374, 461n\n\nTardieu, Andr\u00e9, 67\n\nTariff Commission, 24, 27, 35\n\ntariffs, 23, 36, 329\n\nTarnoff, Peter, 268\n\nTaylor, Maxwell, 128, 152\u201354, 429n\n\nTenet, George, 356\n\nterrorism. See Al Qaeda; jihadist terrorism; war on terror\n\nTet offensive, 181, 182, 213\u201314\n\nTexas National Guard, 314\n\nTexas Rangers, 315\n\nTheodore Roosevelt, U.S.S., 267, 283\n\nThompson, John, 25\n\nTiananmen Square protests of 1989, 245\n\nTime, 94, 118, 149, 166, 271, 290\n\nTonkin Gulf, 164\u201366\n\nTonkin Gulf Resolution (1964), 165\n\nTora Bora, 336\n\ntorture, 336, 370\n\ntotalitarianism, 381\n\nBerman and, 348\u201349\n\nBush and, 342\u201343\n\nKennedy and, 135\n\nKristol and Kirkpatrick and, 294\n\nNiebuhr and, 79\n\nNixon and, 197\n\nReagan and, 245\u201346\n\ntoughness ethic, 175\u201376, 229, 245\u201346\n\nJohnson and, 5, 162, 166, 180\u201383, 210\u201311\n\nKennedy, John F., and, 132\u201333, 137\u201340, 148, 156\u201357, 162, 210\u201311\n\nKennedy, Robert, and, 186\n\nneoconservatism and, 207, 210\u201311, 220, 229\n\nNixon and, 193\u201394\n\nNSC Report 68, 122\u201324\n\nTragedy of American Diplomacy (Williams), 174\u201375\n\nTrainor, Bernard, 443n\n\nTrautman, Samuel, 218\n\nTreaty of Versailles. See Versailles Treaty\n\nTrilling, Lionel, 95, 207\n\nTrotskyists, 207, 294, 433n\n\nTruman, Harry, 101\u20134, 114\u201324\n\nChina and, 116\u201322\n\ncontainment policy, 102\u20134, 114\u201319, 123\u201324\n\nGreece and Turkey speech, 115\u201319, 154\n\nKorean War and, 119\u201322, 123, 381\n\nSoviet Union and, 101\u20133, 114\u201316\n\nTuchman, Jessica, 275\n\nTulip Revolution, 366\n\nTurkey, 115\u201318, 121, 156\u201357\n\nTurner, Frederick Jackson, 35\n\nTurner Joy, U.S.S., 164\u201365\n\nTutsi, 273\u201374, 276\u20137724 (TV series), 369\n\nUgly American, The (Burdick and Lederer), 141\u201342, 199\n\nUkraine, 296, 383\u201384\n\nultra-realism, 190, 197\u201398\n\nUncertain Trumpet, The (Taylor), 154\n\nunilateralism, as warning sign, 7\n\nUnitarianism, 221\n\nUnited Auto Workers (UAW), 166, 175\n\nUnited Nations (UN), 88\u201394\n\narms embargos, 269, 280, 281, 283, 297\n\nBalkans and, 278\u201382, 284\u201385, 287\n\nGeneral Assembly, 88\u201389, 91, 93\n\nHuman Rights Commission, 350\n\nIraq War and, 346, 350, 353\u201354\n\nLeague of Nations compared with, 88\n\nopening ceremony, 92\u201393\n\npeacekeeping missions, 446n\n\nSecurity Council, 88\u201389, 93, 278\u201379, 287, 346, 353\u201354, 389\n\nUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, 93\n\nVietnam War and, 169\n\nUnited World Federalists, 190\u201391, 231\n\nUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, 93\n\nuniversal foreign policy doctrine, 10\u201311\n\nuniversalism, 99\u2013100, 104, 112\n\nUniversity of Virginia, 22\n\nU.S. News & World Report, 111\n\nU.S.S.R. See Soviet Union utopianism, 79\u201380, 184, 208\u20139, 211, 294\u201395, 308\n\nVance, Cyrus, 214, 215\n\nVandenberg, Arthur, 89, 114\n\nVeblen, Thorstein, 18, 35, 400n\n\nV\u00e9drine, Hubert, 331\n\nVersailles Treaty (1919), 47, 48, 50\u201354, 56, 64\u201365, 83, 406\u20137n\n\nVietnam War\n\nBosnia compared with, 2, 270\n\nClinton and, 266\u201367\n\nGulf War compared with, 258\u201359\n\nJohnson and, 8, 10, 162, 163\u201371, 178\u201384, 238\n\nKennedy, John F., and, 151\u201354, 157\u201359, 163\u201364\n\nKennedy, Robert, and, 11, 179, 180, 186\u201387\n\nKristol, Irving, and, 208\u20139\n\nMcCain and, 312, 314\n\nNew Left and, 184\u201385, 188\u201389\n\nNixon and, 197\u201398\n\nReagan and, 218\u201319, 222\n\nvigor (virility), 132\u201333, 137\u201340\n\nVillard, Oswald Garrison, 55\n\nVital Center, The (Schlesinger), 1\u20133, 94, 95, 276\n\nWalesa, Lech, 245, 344\n\nWallace, Henry, 190\u201391\n\nWall Street, 375\u201376\n\nWall Street Journal, 73, 211, 225, 236\n\nWalters, Barbara, 202\u20133\n\nWang Qishan, 376\n\nWar Games (movie), 232\n\nwarning signs, 6\u20139\n\nWarnke, Paul, 189\u201391, 201\n\nwar on terror, 329, 349, 351\u201352, 370, 380\n\n\"war-technique,\" 368\u201369\n\nWashington Naval Conference, 57\n\nWashington Post, 161, 181, 204, 243, 318, 323, 353, 363\n\nWatergate scandal, 199\n\nweapons of mass destruction (WMD), 301\u20133, 307, 319, 328, 337, 341, 352\u201353, 365, 369, 457\u201358n\n\n\"weapons states,\" 298\u2013300, 307\n\nWeekly Standard, 306, 308, 309, 310, 313\u201314, 325, 333, 335, 345, 355, 361\n\nWeinberger, Caspar, 224\u201325, 226, 256\n\nWelles, Sumner, 85\u201386, 413n\n\nWells, H. G., 38\n\nWest Berlin, 116, 150, 154\u201355, 174, 244\u201345\n\nWestbrook, Robert, 368\u201369, 408\u20139n\n\nWestmoreland, William, 168\u201369, 181\u201382\n\nWhile England Slept (Kennedy), 135\u201336\n\nWhite, Theodore, 191\n\nWhite Citizens' Council (WCC), 200\n\nWhite House Correspondents' Association Dinner, 370\n\nWhyte, William, 132\n\nWidenor, William, 405n\n\nWiesel, Elie, 280\n\nWieseltier, Leon, 279\n\nWilder, Gene (Jerry Silberman), 173\n\nWilhelm I (the Great), 43\n\nWilkerson, Lawrence, 353\u201354\n\nWill, George, 204\u20135, 220, 222, 235, 236, 243, 298, 367, 449n\n\nWillett, Edward, 110\u201311\n\nWilliams, William Appleman, 174\u201375, 184\n\nWilson (movie), 83, 86\n\nWilson, Edith, 50\u201351\n\nWilson, Edmund, 62\n\nWilson, James Q., 298\n\nWilson, Woodrow, 15\u201317\n\nJohnson and, 183\n\nKennan and, 99, 243\u201344\n\nLatin America policy, 26\u201329\n\nLeague of Nations and, 45\u201346, 47\u201351\n\nParis Peace Conference, 43\u201344\n\nprogressivism of, 20\u201325, 35\u201337\n\nWorld War I and, 7, 16\u201317, 19, 25\u201338, 61, 72\u201373, 83\n\nWirthlin, Richard, 222\n\nWMD. See weapons of mass destruction\n\nWolfowitz, Paul, 211, 308, 317\n\nDPG statement and, 301\u20133\n\nFukuyama and, 351\u201352\n\nGulf War and, 254\u201355, 261\u201363\n\nIraq and, 319\u201322, 324\u201325\n\nIraq War and, 344\u201345, 356, 359\u201360, 458n\n\n9\/11 and, 329\u201330, 351\u201352\n\nWoodward, Bob, 316, 340\n\nWoodward, C. Vann, 390\n\nWoolsey, James, 281\n\nWorld Bank, 290, 389\n\nWorld Trade Center attack (2001), 8, 327\u201332, 348, 382\n\nAfghanistan and, 330\u201336\n\nIraq War and, 337\n\nWorld Trade Center bombing (1993), 330\n\nWorld War I\n\nBeard and, 40\u201343, 51\u201353\n\nBourne and, 39\u201342\n\nDewey and, 40\u201341, 51\n\nFDR and, 68, 73, 84\n\nHoover and, 63\u201364\n\nKennan and, 238\u201339\n\nNiebuhr and, 60\u201361\n\nreparations, 54, 406\u20137n\n\nVersailles Treaty, 47, 48, 50\u201354, 56, 64\u201365, 83\n\nWilson and, 7, 16\u201317, 19, 25\u201338, 47\u201348, 61, 72\u201373, 83\n\nWorld War II, 73\u201382, 381\n\nChurchill and, 76, 78, 79, 90\u201391, 92, 126\u201327, 134\n\nEisenhower and, 126\u201327\n\nJohnson and, 162\n\nKennedy, John F., and, 133\u201334, 135\u201336\n\nKennedy, Sr., and, 134\u201335\n\nKristol, Irving, and, 207\n\nLippmann and, 81, 97\u201398\n\nMcGovern and, 192\u201393\n\nNiebuhr and, 79\u201381, 82\n\nnostalgia for, in late 1990s, 310\u201311\n\nreparations, 54, 406\u20137n\n\nRoosevelt and, 9, 73\u201379, 81\u201382, 90\u201394, 100\u2013101, 103, 380\n\nYalta Conference, 90\u201392, 101\n\nXerxes, 3, 5, 11\n\nYale Divinity School, 60\n\nYalta Conference, 90\u201392, 101\n\nYenching University, 117\n\nYoung, Andrew, 201\n\nYugoslavia, 57, 89, 267, 268\u201371, 278\u201388\n\nZakaria, Fareed, 376\n\nZero Hour: Summons to the Free (Bundy), 167\n\nZimmermann, Arthur (Zimmermann Telegram), 33\n\n## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nWhile writing this book, I often felt that I was living my subject\u2014that I had embarked upon my own personal act of hubris. Again and again, I wandered into an intellectual thicket, lost my way, and called out for help. This book only exists because brilliant and generous people\u2014many of them initially strangers\u2014answered my pleas.\n\nI met the first Good Samaritan, ironically, at a bar mitzvah. The University of Virginia's Melvyn Leffler is among the most eminent historians of twentieth-century American foreign policy alive. I met him over hors d'oeuvres at a South Carolina synagogue, and grasping this thin reed, asked if he would chair the Council on Foreign Relations study group for my book in Washington, D.C. Not only did he agree, but he undertook the task with extraordinary diligence\u2014repeatedly driving up from Charlottesville, reading successive drafts, suggesting numerous sources, painstakingly correcting my mistakes, and allowing me to see, up close, how a great historian thinks. In return, he got a couple of meals at Asian restaurants, and this paragraph of thanks, which barely begins to repay my debt of gratitude.\n\nWhat Mel Leffler is to the historical study of American foreign policy, Fareed Zakaria is to public commentary on American foreign policy: the best. When I asked him to chair the study group for my book in New York, he had every reason to say no, given the crushing demands on his time. He said yes because he found the subject interesting, and because he is a mensch. And every time we discussed the book, he asked the big, hard questions that forced me to dig myself out from underneath the avalanche of historical minutiae and figure out what I was trying to say.\n\nLloyd Ambrosius of the University of Nebraska and David Steigerwald of Ohio State, two men I e-mailed cold and still have never met in person, devoted hours to helping me understand Woodrow Wilson. American University's Robert Beisner corrected my misperceptions of the Truman years, while his wife, the classicist Valerie French, offered insights into the Greeks. I spent several long afternoons with George Washington University's James Hershberg, shamelessly cribbing from his encyclopedic knowledge of Kennedy, Johnson, and Vietnam. David Greenberg of Rutgers tutored me on Nixon, Reagan, and everything in between. Princeton's Gary Bass taught me most of what I know about humanitarian intervention in the 1990s. Elliot Leffler was my guide to Aeschylus. Robert Brustein warned me against lazy writing and buoyed my spirits with his praise. Christopher Chen and Adam Stempel helped me confirm a hunch about the generational skew among politicians and pundits over the Iraq War. Alexander Star, a brilliant editor, and Amanda Fazzone, a brilliant copyeditor, each read the manuscript with great care and skill. Columbia's Robert Jervis suggested dozens of useful modifications and sources. Stephen Winch generously supported my work. So did Roger Hertog, who despite considering me hopelessly left-wing, has for many years been a cherished professional and personal guide.\n\nIn addition, I worked on this project with three remarkable recent college graduates, who served, in succession, as my research assistants. The first was William Evans, a political junkie with the soul of a scholar who has forgotten more about Theodore Roosevelt than I will ever know. The second was Conor Savoy, who became an invaluable partner in trying to understand the Vietnam years, and was a delight to have around. The third was Jamie Holmes, who worked long and sometimes frantic days in the project's final months, and exhibited an astounding level of organizational ability, analytical skill, determination, and good humor. Between them, Will, Conor, and Jamie shaped every page of this book and made my work life a pleasure for three years. I will watch with pride the great things they do in the years ahead.\n\nIn molding their research into a book, I was extremely lucky to work, once again, with my agent, Tina Bennett, and with Tim Duggan at HarperCollins. At critical moments, I relied on Tina's signature combination of intellectual sophistication and professional savvy. And Tim shepherded me through the writing and editing process with insight, diligence, and an infectious enthusiasm. Allison Lorentzen at HarperCollins patiently and expertly answered dozens of e-mails.\n\nMany other people also gave generously of their time and talent. They include Peter Ackerman, Spencer Ackerman, Madeleine Albright, Eric Alterman, William Antholis, Jeremy Bash, Robyn Bash, Warren Bass, Michelle Baute, Amanda Beck, Rand Beers, Daniel Benjamin, Paul Berman, Casey Blake, John Morton Blum, Laura Blumenfeld, Nina Blustein, Stacy Bosshardt, Spencer Boyer, Nell Breyer, Howard Brick, Clive Brock, Christian Brose, Tina Brown, Frank Calzon, Derek Chollet, Conor Clarke, Steve Clemons, Warren Cohen, Steven Cook, Matthew Continetti, Kristin Cullinson, Greg Craig, Robert Dallek, Jacquelyn Davis, Joy Demenil, James Denton, Alan Dershowitz, Carolyn Dershowitz, John Patrick Diggins, E. J. Dionne, Trish Dorff, Ross Douhat, Colin Dueck, Edward Felsenthal, Michael Flamm, Nic Fokas, Richard Fox, Annabelle Friedman, Caroline Friedman, Peter Friedman, David Frum, Francis Fukuyama, John Lewis Gaddis, Adam Garfinkle, Carl Gershman, Allen Gerson, Mark Gerson, Todd Gitlin, James Goldgeier, Mahen Gunaratna, Jonah Goldberg, Andrew Gundlach, Leigh Gusts, Jacquelyn Hardy, Breton Harned, Owen Harries, Marie Hastreiter, Melvin Heineman, Michael Hirsh, Richard Holbrooke, Peter Holquist, Deneen Howell, Isabell Hull, Lena Hull, Heather Hurlburt, Walter Isaacson, Maurice Isserman, Alan Jones, Katherine Jordan, John Judis, Erez Kalir, Lawrence Kaplan, Paul Kennedy, Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, David Knoll, William Kristol, Charles Kupchan, Mark Lagon, Julie Lascar, Nicholas Lemann, Meagan Liaboe, Robert Lieber, Matt Lieppe, Kelli Long, Oliver Lough, Brian Lowe, Marc Lynch, Joe Eugene McCarraher, Joseph McCartin, Cara McCarty, Doyle McManus, Joe McReynolds, Walter Russell Mead, Dmitri Mehlhorn, Shelton Metcalf, Susan Moeller, Sylvia Moss, John Mueller, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Donald Mullen, Joshua Muravchik, Gita Murthy, Henry Nau, Richard Niemi, Lia Norton, Brendan O'Connor, Dan O'Hara, Priscilla Painton, Davide Panagia, Richard Pells, Richard Plepler, Ramesh Ponnuru, Sasha Pulakow-Suransky, Romesh Ratnesar, Jonathan Rauch, Kathy Reich, John Renehan, Berenice Ronthal, Lamiya Rahman, Marcus Raskin, Jonathan Rauch, Patrick Rigby, Gideon Rose, Mark Schmitt, Howard Schuman, Peter Scoblic, Stephen Sestanovich, Brad Setser, Aaron Silverman, Anne-Marie Slaughter, David Sloan, Michael Sofer, Michael Smith, Tom Smith, Jose Sorzano, Marcia Sprules, Connie Stagnaro, Allan Stam, Paul Starobin, Alexandra Starr, Sally Steinberg, Craig Stern, Strobe Talbott, Ray Takeyh, Paul Testa, Francoise Thiese, Nicholas Thompson, Stephen Trachtenberg, Nicholas Valentino, Reed Van Beveren, Don Vieira, Peter Wallsten, Baruch Weiss, Maureen White, Steven Whitfield, Leon Wieseltier, George Will, Marshall Wittmann, Adam Wolfson, Matthew Yglesias, and Barron YoungSmith. Needless to say, the book's flaws are not theirs, but mine.\n\nBeyond relying on exceptional individuals, I relied on exceptional institutions. The Council on Foreign Relations, where I was a Senior Fellow from 2007 to 2009, is a phenomenal place to write a book. The only problem with being surrounded by excellent facilities, skilled librarians, stimulating colleagues, and free food is that if your book is lousy, you have no one to blame but yourself. For creating this atmosphere, and allowing me to partake in it, I am grateful to Richard Haass, Gary Samore, James Lindsay, Nancy Roman, and Kay King. I am also grateful to the Smith-Richardson Foundation, and particularly Mark Steinmeyer, for supporting my work at CFR.\n\nI completed the book at the New America Foundation, where I am privileged to be a Schwartz Senior Fellow. New America is a vibrant, iconoclastic, entrepreneurial place, and the atmosphere is infectious. I am grateful to Steve Coll and Andr\u00e9s Martinez for giving me the chance to come there and to Faith Smith for making me feel so welcome. As this book was winding down, I also began an association with the City University of New York, where I am Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science, and my bosses there, Stephen Shepard, Judith Watson, Matthew Goldstein, William Kelly, Joe Rollins, and Ruth O'Brien, have been extremely supportive as well.\n\nNow the hard part: my family. My parents, Doreen Beinart and Julian Beinart, read the manuscript and offered comments and encouragement. But they also contributed to the book in a more fundamental way. As a child, I saw America through their immigrant eyes, and glimpsed the combination of profound gratitude and ironic detachment they felt toward their adopted land. From them, I learned that irony is not the enemy of devotion. To the contrary, a willingness to chuckle occasionally at national pieties keeps patriotism from becoming unthinking and insincere. The American right has long believed that seeing America ironically makes America weaker. But long before I first encountered the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, my parents taught me what he taught the nation: that the root of the word irony is iron.\n\nMy sister, Jean Stern, provided advice on graphic elements of the book. But, more important, she provided what she has always provided: wisdom and love. One of my greatest hopes for my own son is that he gains as much joy from his sister as I have gained from my mine.\n\nMy wife's parents, Marlene and Arthur Hartstein, have\u2014since I first married into their family\u2014treated me like a son. And I've relied particularly heavily on their generosity and affection during the writing of this book. My sister-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel Bonnie Hartstein, and her husband, Gal Shweiki, contributed to the book as well, mostly through the power of their example. Since September 11, 2001, they have lived the history that I only write about. I only wish all of America's wartime leaders had handled their burdens with as much integrity, dedication, and grace.\n\nThere is simply no way I can adequately thank my wife, Diana Hartstein Beinart, for everything she has endured over the past three years. Writing a book is like inviting an old college buddy to live in your house. You see him as a pleasant, stimulating companion; your spouse ends up picking up his sweat socks. Day after day, in the most mundane ways and in the most profound, Diana has shouldered the burdens that come with young children, an old house, and an addled husband, all the while excelling in her own, very demanding, career. And she's done so with the same warmth, determination, and charisma that made me fall in love with her almost a decade ago.\n\nFinally, this book is dedicated to the smallest and biggest people in Diana's and my lives: Ezra Beinart, age four, and Naomi Beinart, age two. I used to think that writing books gave me joy. Now I have a better understanding of the word. A while back, Ezra informed me that he was writing a book of his own. When I asked what it was about, he replied, \"Orange hubris.\" How lucky I am, I thought. My days of thinking about hubris are almost over. But my days of thinking about orange hubris have only just begun.\n\n## About the Author\n\nPETER BEINART is Associate Professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast and a contributor to Time. Beinart is a former fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and is the author of The Good Fight. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.\n\nVisit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.\n\n## Credits\n\nJacket design by Jarrod Taylor\n\n## Copyright\n\nTHE ICARUS SYNDROME. Copyright \u00a9 2010 by Peter Beinart. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.\n\nPublished in cooperation with the Council on Foreign Relations.\n\nThe Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries. Founded in 1921, CFR carries out its mission by maintaining a diverse membership, with special programs to promote interest and develop expertise in the next generation of foreign policy leaders; convening meetings at its headquarters in New York and in Washington, DC, and other cities where senior government officials, members of Congress, global leaders, and prominent thinkers come together with CFR members to discuss and debate major international issues; supporting a Studies Program that fosters independent research, enabling CFR scholars to produce articles, reports, and books and hold roundtables that analyze foreign policy issues and make concrete policy recommendations; publishing Foreign Affairs, the preeminent journal on international affairs and U.S. foreign policy; sponsoring Independent Task Forces that produce reports with both findings and policy prescriptions on the most important foreign policy topics; and providing up-to-date information and analysis about world events and American foreign policy on its Web site, www.cfr.org.\n\nThe Council on Foreign Relations takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with the U.S. government. 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