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.No, no, that was Kafka territory.She'd have to find her own city.Bridgeport, perhaps.She looked at Anna, to whom Jim Morrison meant something.In Prague, rock still meant something.Not just nostalgia or marketing spin-offs or pretentious videos, but something.That night Anna took her to the Stalin Monument high on a hill overlooking the Vltava.The monument itself, a statue of Stalin almost as large as the Statue of Liberty, had been torn down in the early sixties.Underneath it, a warren of tunnels and concrete reinforced bunkers had been discovered: a bomb shelter and command center built in the fifties as a home for the elite after Armageddon.The new Czech government had turned it over to a group of students who had turned it into an art gallery and rock club called Totalitarian Zone.Margaret stood rather uncomfortably in the cold cave of a place.Tomorrow she would deliver her talk.She was supposed to inform a roomful of people who had recently risked their lives in pursuit of the ideals of the Enlightenment about the Enlightenment.To tell a group of Czech students about an erotic bastardization of Locke when they were in the midst of an authentic realization of Locke's ideas—this was absurd, this was preposterous, this was chutzpah!Water dripped from the concrete beams onto the dirt floor.Papier-mâché grotesques, huge murals, metal sculptures, and mobiles of standard SoHo design sprawled through these dark catacombs, lit by bare, hanging bulbs.Whether the works were interesting or not, Margaret could not tell because there, underground in Stalin's abandoned legacy of a bunker, they were more than interesting—they were inspired.This was a celebration.The kids lounged against piles of cement rubble, and in spite of being dressed in generic European semipunk style, they did not look like German or French youth, angry and disgusted, posturing selfconsciously.They weren't angry or disgusted.They were delighted.Margaret stood beside a sculpture—boots and catsup bottles hanging from ribbons and wires.She began to feel more comfortable, that she somehow belonged here, that there existed a certain affinity, not so much between her and the students as between her and their exhibits.With a flood of relief, Margaret realized that she was expected not so much to instruct her betters as to be another colorful part of the celebration.Her talk, which she had worried would be irrelevant and trivial, an offense to the real business of democratic revolution that was taking place, was important simply because it was possible for it to be given.Oh, thank God, Margaret thought.I'm just part of the fun, an example of Western culture to be freely displayed.Ich bin eine catsup bottle.She was an American abroad, and no one minded.In Prague, people liked Americans.Intellectuals liked Americans.Intellectuals in America didn't like Americans.And there was Anna, an authentically revolutionary student, carrying in the pocket of her black leather jacket a Penguin edition of The Princess Casamassima.Margaret gazed at the sculptures and listened to the crude Euro-rock coming from the stage.The Enlightenment lived.The lecture went smoothly.She talked, they listened, and Margaret was relieved.She read from Rameau's Niece, then spoke, carefully reading her notecards, on which she had written every single word she would say, underlining those she ought to stress.Was Rameau's Niece a libertine novel? she asked them.Or was it a philosophical tract exploring empiricism? Or was it both? In the eighteenth century the desire to know was wedded to desire itself.In order to fool customs officials, smugglers placed pages of Beneath the Naughty Nun's Nightgown between pages of geography books or the Gospels.This interlarding was called "marrying," an amusing and rather suggestive name, Margaret said.Pornography was used to discredit the clergy and aristocracy as decadent, perverted, impotent, and scrofulous.Philosophical, political, and pornographic works were lumped together by the book trade, which called them all "philosophical books." Why? Because empiricism and philosophy itself are both sensuous and sensual.The desire to know is desire.Her audience, about fifty students and writers, seemed satisfied but rushed immediately off to a reading by Allen Ginsberg which had been inadvertently scheduled to overlap with Margaret's talk
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