Beyond proof & disproof
Garvey, John
regard it with love or reverence, to see ,it as a possible killing ground, is a sign of what we think of humanity. This is a religious issue, as slavery was, as war always is, as the arms...
...It had been painted red...
...I don't know enough about motorcycles to tell you much about this particular model...
...but I cannot imagine that God has waited for the U.S...
...Perhaps this is the result of the typical museum setting--especially in this country where Greek bronzes are reverently displayed in rooms of immaculate white, dramatically lit from above...
...Some congressmen have tried to get a congressional resolution passed which would simply define human life as beginning at conception...
...It isn't the religion most Americans are comfortable with, the publicly acceptable variety which endorses the way we live...
...I believe that human life begins at conception...
...regard it with love or reverence, to see ,it as a possible killing ground, is a sign of what we think of humanity...
...It has been doing this in practice for years, but I would hate to see it made official...
...You can't entrust things to men...
...Naturally, with such an unmistakable nudge from the authorities, one speaks in whispers...
...I've forgotten what it went for, but it'was a good deal-- as much as a new car with a lot of extras...
...Given-ness implies a giver, and a value conferred in the simple fact of existence...
...Their resentment is that an older orthodoxy is not willing to accept their victory, and die quietly...
...The men told motorcycle stories or World War II stories or just talked numbers--engine size, tire pressure, the price it might bring, the year Indian started in business, the year Indian went out of business...
...The treasures from the tomb of King Tutankhamun are enough to put anyone into a thoughtful mood...
...So did a number of other men...
...It didn't really...
...But to argue that life has no inherent value, or to argue that if there is such a value it matters so little that we may agree to disagree and stand by while lives whose value cannot be proven are destroyed--this is to argue something equally metaphysical, equally undemonstrable...
...Congress to endorse his work...
...The true value of that |ndian motorcycle--so miraculously preserved--could not be measured in dollars...
...Both times I remember thinking: this is our last chance to see so deeply into the past...
...Age has little to do with it...
...Greek bronzes can stop you in your tracks and elicit a kind of cathedral mood, but there's a formal quality to the encounter...
...In the national museum in Cairo, where I saw them in 1975, they were badly lit, crowded into display cases, erratically labeled, in no comprehensible order...
...They believe that life is given...
...There is something curious about the charged talismanic significance of objects of recent origin...
...the viewer was grabbed by the lapels and given a good talking to...
...They stood there arms folded, admiring the solid curve of the front fender, the headlight on a swivel mount, the brass fuel pump...
...That is, plainly, religious...
...Many pro-choice people want a surrender to their worldview, which was born at the Enlightenment...
...Originally its color had been olive drab...
...We understood him perfeectly...
...Can anyone in this world imagine the national museum in Cairo, or the Met in New York, will last 3200 years...
...The seat was the sort they call a bicycle seat--triangular in shape with a generous cupping curve in the rear supported by two large springs The feel of the seat was deep and liquid...
...At the Metropolitan Museum in New York the cues of lighting and' setting could hardly have been more emphatic...
...The gold masks and jewelry and painted boxes looked pretty much the same in both places: breathtakingly old, fragile, and alien...
...The pro-life people believe that life's value is inherent in the fact of its being there at all...
...Nobody doubted it...
...Now these things have been found, they'll soon be lost, dispersed, and destroyed for good...
...A rumor went around that a buyer for Robert Redford -- or maybe it was Steve McQueen--had come a thousand miles just to bid on this machine...
...Army but was discontinued after the first thousand...
...It is religious insofar as it involves attitudes toward life and life's meaning which lie beyond the realm of proof and disproof...
...But that isn't the only difference between the truly ancient and the barely antique...
...I heard somebody say it had been built for the U.S...
...Behind the seat was a pair of commodious leather saddlebags with chrome buckles, and in the righthand pocket was the original owner's manual...
...There is no easy way out of the dilemma...
...It says that value is conferred only, or at least most importantly, by human beings...
...make much difference...
...One is on one's good behavior...
...If Congress can take to itself the right to say what human life is, it can equally say what lives are not human, or at least what lives can be dealt with as if they were not...
...This is an appalling notion: it would extend the power of the state to a final and terrible degree...
...19 June 1981: 36t...
...What is not commonly seen is that it is religious on both sides: the people who oppose the anti-abortion movement on what they consider reasonable democratic grounds are, more often than not, believers in a world view as undemonstrable as that of their opponents...
...I certainly didn't have that kind of money for a motorcycle I might ride twice a year and neither did any of the other men, but | don't think any of us thought the buyer a fool...
...They'd survived in the tomb since 1325 B.C...
...This is a religious issue, as slavery was, as war always is, as the arms race is and will be...
...Finding those objects, and putting them on display, is our way of destroying them...
...It was a long, low, heavy, fat-tired machine, and I lingered around it, for reasons I can't easily explain, the better part of two hours...
...JOHN GARVEY I Of several minds: Thomas Powers YESTERDAY'S TALISMANS THE HIDDEN MEANING OF THE FLEA MARKET L AST SUMMER, at an auction in Vermont, I saw a 1940 Indian motorcycle...
Vol. 108 • June 1981 • No. 12
