Evening in Byzantium Read Online Free PDF Page B

time.” She began to applaud. A tall young man with a beard was standing at the bottom of the aisle in front of the stage holding up his hand for silence. “That’s the director,” she confided.
    “Do you know anything else he’s done?”
    “No.” She applauded vigorously. “I’m a director buff.”
    The director was wearing a black armband, and he began his speech by inviting the members of the audience to do the same as a sign of mourning for the four students who had been killed at Kent State. In his final sentence he said that he was dedicating his film to their memory.
    Although Craig did not doubt the young man’s sincerity, the speech and the somber decoration made him vaguely uncomfortable. In another place, perhaps, he would have been touched. He certainly was as saddened by the death of the four youths as anybody there. After all, he himself had two children of his own who might be brought down in a similar massacre. But he was in an auditorium that was gilded and luxurious, seated among an audience that was festive and there to be amused. He could not rid himself of the feeling that the whole thing smacked of showmanship, not grief.
    “Are you going to wear black?” the girl asked him, whispering.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Nor I,” she said. “I don’t dignify death.” She sat up, straight and alert, enjoying herself. He tried to pretend he didn’t know she was sitting beside him.
    As the house lights went down and the film began, Craig made a conscious effort to rid himself of all preconceptions. He knew that his distaste for beards and long hair was foolish and arose only because he had grown to manhood at a different time, accustomed to different styles. The manner of dress of the young people around him was at worst merely unsanitary. Fashions in clothes came and went, and a single glance at an old family album sufficed to show how ridiculous once thoroughly conservative garb could seem to later eyes. His father had worn plus fours on a holiday at the beach. He still remembered the photograph.
    “ Woodstock ,” he had been told, spoke for the young. If it actually did, he was ready to listen.
    He watched with interest. It was immediately clear that the man who had made the picture had considerable talent. A professional himself, Craig appreciated the quality in others, and there was no hint of amateurism or idle playfulness in the way the film was shot and put together. The evidence of hard thought and painstaking labor was everywhere. But the spectacle of four hundred thousand human beings gathered together in one place, no matter who they were or in what place they had congregated, or for what purpose, was distasteful to him. There was a maniacal promiscuity reflected on the screen that depressed him more and more as the film went on. And the music and the performances, with the exception of two songs sung by Joan Baez, seemed coarse and repetitive to him and inhumanly loud, as though the whisper or even the ordinary tone of daily conversation had dropped from the vocal range of young Americans. For Craig the film was a succession of orgiastic howls without the release of orgasm. When the camera discovered a boy and a girl making love, undisturbed by the fact that their act was being recorded, he averted his eyes.
    He watched in disbelief as one of the performers, like a cheerleader before a crowd at a football game, shouted out, “Give me an F!” Four hundred thousand voices gave him an F. “Give me a U!” Four hundred thousand voices gave him a U. “Give me a C!” Four hundred thousand voices responded with a C. “Give me a K!” Four hundred thousand voices gave him a K. “What’s that spell?” the cheerleader shouted, his voice limitlessly magnified by the public address system.
    “FUCK!” came the response in a hoarse, Nurembergrally tidal wave of sound. Then a wild cheering. The audience in the theatre applauded. The girl beside him, Craig noticed, sat with her hands