Since I'm talking about Norman Corwin, and like all writers
he is best exemplified by his work...some samples. Fragments.

Some days after the first atomic bomb was exploded over
Hiroshima, Norman wrote about the new power that had been unleashed.
His words, in part:

"...the atom can be more sullen than has yet been shown.

Attack it with another thrust of algebraic symbols and the
cutting edge of an equation, and there will be the grand
reaction.

The first news of it will arrive in your precinct as a shuddering
in the sky:

A glow, far off, brightening: heat beating outward in concentric
waves: the atmosphere a band of fire: the seas themselves, the
wet seas, tinder:

The hills that looked on Christ will heave and crackle, and
quarries vaporize as eagerly as the dust of Pharoahs:

The earth, the tamed and tonsured earth, with all its gardens and
substances, its places, breeds and patterns, its letters and its
airs, will plummet out of grace; will fail its orbit,

And soon enough will be a blistered ash, its moon trailing lonely
and ungoverned, like a dog after its master's corpse.

Do not smile, do not smile as though knowing better.
It could happen.
The model is any suicide.
The model is Sampson, destroying the temple and himself...."


The following is excerpted from Norman's book "Prayer for the 70s."

"We print your name on dollars
And are sure you stand over everything we say is under God
And all nations assume you are on their side and always
have been, war in and war out,
And every religion understands you better than every other religion,
and you in turn lean toward each with special inclinations.

You are called upon to bless babies and aircraft carriers
And you are ceremoniously and endlessly praised on the basis that
flattery will get us somewhere.

But there are those who pray as though tendering a bribe payable
on installments
So as to accumulate years in this life and credits in the next.
Some of us make you out a broker who supplieth needs and wants;
Attorney who defendeth against hard claims;
Expunger of guilts who cleareth the conscience so we may be free
to muck it up again;
Housekeeper of the soul who cometh in to clean once a week;
King of accountants auditing our secret selves,
Liquidating our trespasses as we liquidate those who trespass
against us,
Keeping batteries of books filled with fateful identifications,
Entering as much the fall of a sparrow as the crash of a plane.

We have heard it said you are not so smart after all, since it is
unlikely you could add as fast as a computer or remember half
so much;
And although you are known to be more than generous in the number and
variety of species, there seems to be little rationale for the
mosquito, and less for plague bacilli.

There have been complaints against you, charges of malfeasance,
Implications of sleeping on the job, trigger temper, pronenesss
to vengeance,
Tantrums of wrath that have consumed too many of the innocent with
too few of the heinous.

Some of your public begrudge you the benefit of doubt, and doubt
your beneficence
Protesting that it was antic of you to have sponsored us to begin
with, if we are to swarm like maggots on a rind too meager to
support our duplicating billions.
Some say the noblest ideas were set down by man
And that you have been served by holy ghost writers beyond your
desserts.

They say that the whole conspicuous distance between the worm and
Einstein, the drone of the bee and Beethoven,
The entire interval, has been filled with struggles trailing blood:
Ages of frightened proto-men, heavy with ignorance, recoiling from
fangs of fire, drowning in profligate floods, perishing in temblors,
staggering into the unknown,
Their wails and brute chants and broken grunts fructifying at last
into songs and sonnets and hallelujahs to your glory.
Well, dissidants suggest that during this grand span you sat it
out; that in the vast meanwhile you went off to fish in deeper
currents.

Lately it is announced that you are dead
Which means several things besides the receiver being off the hook
when we dial you.
It means that time must carry on by itself
And stars pinwheel through incandescent deserts and bottomless voids,
all on an orderly hunch;
It means the arching upward from the mud has been a drunken course,
and purposeless, and hardly worth the trip;
It means the very mansion of existence has no windows, and is just
a big white elephant, boarded up and haunted by your mistakes;
It means that springtime is a come-on and a put-on, and not at all
a show of dogged life, a riot of chlorophyll, a surge of sap and
elixers from wells so deep no radar can ever return to tell what
and where it touched;
It means that the love of man and woman is a table of percentages,
and their desire a disease of the id;
It means that birth is a happening between pills
And old age a phase held together by plastic parts;
It means the heart of a man is replaceable as soon as the donor is
legally dead
And death is a package deal with the best advertised mortuary.

So, God: if you are alive in that heaven we have come to know is
spotty with systems of gravity, each pulling for itself,
Then perhaps you must flex the muscle of divine authority to get
back into office
Because your antique miracles have been trumped by solemn science;
Daily the patent office registers intenser magic than the burning bush:
The serpent from the rod becomes a ruby laser;
The leper is healed by mycins;
The blind draw vision from an eye bank.

That being the case, dear busy God, please manifest thyself again
through one superlative, new-minted covenant:
Create for the lot of us -- all nations indivisible -- an Act of God
more stupendous than mere parting waters or a standing sun
A miracle harder to come by, that would, if consummated, cause dry
bones from all the hundred holocausts to meet and dance,
And charter stars to sing together in the brightest chancel of
imponderable space.

And this is what that miracle would be:

That man should love his kind in all his skins and pigments,
And kill no more.

Repeat:
That we should love our kind
And kill no more.

Yes, granted, such a miracle is asking very much of you
But it is long past time to ask."


That, gentle readers...*that* is Norman Corwin.