Americans could
not understand; they themselves had been fair to all and only kept out
undesirable immigrants.

Gradually the world geared itself to a slower tempo. The gogetter
followed the brontosaurus to extinction, and we Americans with the
foresight to carry on our businesses from new bases profited by the
unAmerican backwardness of our competitors. At this time I daresay I was
among the hundred most important figures of the world. In the marketing
and packaging of our original products I had been forced to acquire
papermills and large interests in aluminum and steel; from there the
progression to tinmines and rollingmills, to coalfields and railroads,
to shippinglines and machineshops was not far. Consolidated Pemmican,
once the center of my business existence, was now but a minor point on
its periphery. I expanded horizontally and vertically, delighted to show
my competitors that Americans, even when deprived of America, were not
robbed of the traditional American enterprise.

_68._ It was at this time, many months after we had given up all hope of
hearing from Joe again, that General Thario received a longdelayed
package from his son. It contained the third movement of the symphony
and a covering letter:

"Dear Father--Stuart Thario--General-- I shall not finish this letter
tonight; it will be sent with as much of the First Symphony as makes a
worthy essence when it goes. The whole is greater than the sum of its
parts, but there is a place (perhaps not in life, but somewhere) for the
imperfect, for the incomplete. The great and small alike achieve
fulfillment, satisfaction--must this be a ruthless denial of all
between?

"I have always despised musicologists, makers of programnotes, little
men who tell you the opening chords of Opus 67 describe Fate Knocking at
the Door or the call of the yellowhammer. A child draws a picture and
writes on it, 'This is a donkey,' and when grown proves it to be a
selfportrait by translating the Jupiter Symphony into words. Having said
this, let me stultify myself--but for private ears alone--as a bit of
personal history, not an explanation to be appended to the score.

"I started out to express in terms of strings and winds the emotions
roused in me by the sight and thoughts of the Grass, much as LvB took a
mistaken idealization of his youth as a startingpoint for Opus 55; but
just as no man is an island, so no theme stands alone. There is a cord
binding the lesser to th