In America by Susan Sontag Page A

starched white shirt, cuff protectors, bow tie, and—God, too, wants to be modern—He is chewing tobacco. The dominant hues of the set are yellow and brown: the blond wood of His swivel chair and immense desk; the smooth brass fixtures of the desk, whose drawers are crammed with papers; the worn, slightly dented brass of the gooseneck lamp, of the nearby spittoon. Elbows on the desktop, which is stacked with ledgers, He has been consulting population reports, economic bulletins, land surveys. Now He has made an entry in one of the ledgers.
    Histories fusing. Obstacles faltering. Families sundering. News arriving. God the Travel Agent has dispatched messengers everywhere to proclaim that a New World beckons, where the poor can become rich and everyone stands equal before the law, where streets are paved with gold (this to illiterate peasants) and land is being given away (ditto) or sold on the cheap (this to those who can read). Villages are starting to empty out, the bravest or most desperate going first. Hordes of landless are surging toward the water (Bremerhaven, Hamburg, Antwerp, Le Havre, Southampton, Liverpool), surrendering themselves to be packed into the bottom of stinking ships. From the encrusted cities, which lie under the canopy of night with their lights on, the swell of departures is less noticeable—but steady. God is looking over shipping schedules. No more Middle Passage horrors, He thanks Himself: only those who want to go. Also—thanks, too—it is becoming much safer to cross the Atlantic, even if five of His faithful Franciscan nuns did perish last year when the Deutschland, soon after leaving Bremerhaven for North America, foundered off the treacherous Kentish coast. And quicker: by the new steamships it takes only eight days. Of course, God looks forward to the day when people can be moved across oceans in much less time. And eventually, and even more quickly, through the sky. God likes speed as much as the next pale person. Everything is speeding up now, getting faster. This is perhaps a good thing, since there are so many more people.
    God professes to be impatient. Which does not mean He is really impatient. He is … acting. (That’s one kind of great actor, one who feels or tries to feel nothing; to stay remote, impassive. In contrast to Maryna, who feels everything, and is so nervous.) But the people whom God the Prime Mover is shooing off to new destinies really are impatient, impatient to leave for places understood as free of inherited encumbrances, places that don’t have to be preserved but instead offer themselves endlessly to be remade, to shuck off the expectations of the past, to start anew with a lighter burden. The faster they go, the lighter will be their burden.
    And God is abetting all this. This longing for newness, emptiness, pastlessness. This dream of turning life into pure future. Perhaps He has no choice—though, in so doing, God the Star is signing His own death warrant as an actor, as the star of stars. No longer will He be guaranteed the major role in any drama of consequence attended by the most coveted, educated audiences. At best, minor roles from now on—except in picturesque backwaters, where people have never seen a play without Him. All this moving the audience about will amount to the end of His career.
    Does God know this? Probably He does. But that won’t stop Him: He’s a trouper.
    God spits.
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    IN MAY 1876, when Maryna Załężowska was still thirty-five and at the pinnacle of her glory, she canceled the remaining engagements of her season at the Imperial Theatre in Warsaw—and her guest engagements at the Polski Theatre in Kraków, the Wielki Theatre in Poznań, the Count Skarbek Theatre in Lwów—and fled seventy miles south of Kraków, her birthplace, where the party in the private dining room of the Hotel Saski took place in December 1875, to the mountain village