In another part of Chicago stood the Institute for Nuclear Research, in which men may have had theories upon the essential worth of human nature but were half ashamed of them, since no quantitative instrument had yet been designed to measure it. He had not quite put his foot down again. He lifted his foot to step over a Raggedy Ann doll smiling through its neglect as it lay there in the middle of the walk, a foundling not yet missed. So he smiled tolerantly at the children he passed and silently wished them a speedy and not too difficult ride through youth to the peace of the best that was yet to be. He didn’t think Earth would ever see again the sunlike hell of an atom exploded in anger. He didn’t think there would be another war. There was the atom bomb, of course, and this somewhat lascivious talk about World War III, but Schwartz was a believer in the goodness of human nature. With a wife in good health, two daughters safely married, a grandson to soothe these last best years, what had he to worry about? With a house of his own and money of his own, he could, and did, retire. After the struggles of youth in Europe and those of his early manhood in the United States, the serenity of a comfortable old age was pleasant. The last of life, for which the first was made.” He intoned them to himself, deep within the silent fortress of his mind, that very sunny and very bright early summer day of 1949: Most of it was obscure to him, but those first three lines had become one with the beating of his heart these last few years. By the sheer force of indiscriminate voracity, he had gleaned a smattering of practically everything, and by means of a trick memory had managed to keep it all straight.įor instance, he had read Robert Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra twice when he was younger, so, of course, knew it by heart. He looked exactly what he was: a retired tailor, thoroughly lacking in what the sophisticates of today call a “formal education.” Yet he had expended much of an inquisitive nature upon random reading. In a sense this was strange, since Schwartz would scarcely have impressed any casual passerby as the Browning-quoting type. Two minutes before he disappeared forever from the face of the Earth he knew, Joseph Schwartz strolled along the pleasant streets of suburban Chicago quoting Browning to himself.
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