NOTEBOOK
fire  which  tortures  him is  the  means  of making the
righteous comfortable.
If you shoot at your wife in the dark for a burglar you
always kill her, but you can't hit a burglar. You can
always kill a relative with a gun that isn't loaded.
"What is an Englishman?"
"A person who does things because they have been
done before."
"What is an American?"
"A person who does things because they haven't been
done before."
Theme for Story
Life in the interior of an iceberg. Luxuriously furnished
from the ship (how produce heat). Children born. Plate-
glass ice windows. All found dead and frozen after 130
years. Iceberg drifts around in a vast circle, year after
year, and every two or three years they come in distant
sight of the remains of the ship. The berg consists of
mountains, levels and valleys, and is twelve miles long by
eight broad. They invent amusements. The children born
reach marrying age and marry. Others try to make them
comprehend life on land in the world but wholly fail.
They understand life on the iceberg only. They tame
great flocks of birds and animals, to eat. Perhaps they
have no fire—eat raw. Children don't know what fire or
coal are.
This must be a woman's diary, beginning abruptly and
does not explain how they got there.
They don't know which is Sunday.
Believing they should never escape, and not wishing to
curse the children with longings unsatisfiable, both fami-
lies teach the young that the elders were born on the berg
and know no other world.