Mindwalk

Hello?

Hello, Tom?

Jack? Jack, it's... What, is there a red alert on or something?

Am I calling too late?

No, no... It's just that the hours are later here...

Are you O.K.? Is everything all right?

Not really.

I need some help.

You think a speechwriter's going to fix it? Do you think that's the only problem?

If I did, would I be calling you?

I'm sorry I missed your presidential campaign. I just thought it was nuts.

It looks like the voters agreed with you.

Maybe it was crazy, anyway, I'm supposed to be running again...

for the re-election to the Senate, and people aren't giving any more.

Now, they are giving, but maybe I just don't want the money.

I don't have anything to say. I feel tapped out.

Get away from there, it's a snake pit. It's a hall of mirrors for narcissists.

Get a long way away.

Oh, I wish, but it's impossible right now.

No, come on. It's always like that. That's always part of the problem.

Are you offering me a place?

Yeah, sure. You could come over here. Come on over.

It may not be the White House but, you know, at least here you're wanted.

I'm so glad I came here.

I should not have invited him.

Incredible!

Look, there it is again.

The Middle Ages got left behind on this rock. Time just moved on.

There he goes again. That's him all right.

Always enthused and always ready, with the right words for all occasions.

As if everyone was still waiting for his opinion.

As if life itself was one giant press conference.

Maybe that's all there is, this public persona.

Maybe I've been fooling myself these last 20 years...

always looking for the real guy behind the facade.

Maybe the facade is the real guy.

This is amazing!

Sure it is. Everything's always amazing to this guy.

Why am I bitching all the time?

Maybe it's a premonition that this trip's going to be a disaster.

I can't say that I need Jack's company. This time of my life I'm residing quite...

contentedly in my own midlife crises, thank you very much.

This is as far away from Washington as I could possibly get.

Thank you.

There he goes.

That's why he irritates me, and that's why I love him, too.

Behind the innocence there may be a calculating politician...

but behind the politician there's an innocent.

He's still american enough. He doesn't lie well at all, he means it.

You want to stop the car and get out? Take a look around?

There it is. Mont-Saint-Michel.

What do you think?

Beautiful.

You want to do something different? You want to walk over there?

Walk across that swamp?

Yeah, just like our ancestors did centuries and centuries ago.

You're the one who wanted to do all the walking. Come on, let's go.

Maybe you ancestors used to do this...

but unless my mother lied to me, I don't...

Thank you.

- So, we're gonna do something today? - Thought I'd finish my book.

You always have a book to read. I'm bored.

Where's Roman?

I don't care what Roman's doing. I wanted to do something with you.

I should not have come. I should've just done something with dad.

Come on, Kit.

You just stay cooped up in this medieval island, just reading your books.

You're not even aware of what's going on around you.

You could be anywhere, it wouldn't even make a difference.

You should go out more. Meet some people.

I will.

I'm going.

Bye.

Are you moving to France permanently?

What?

I thought you couldn't live anywhere but in New York.

What about the theater? Did you give that up for good?

Oh, it may have given me up for good.

I don't think I'm enough involved in real estate to live in Manhattan...

or any other business. Some other hustle.

I lived in New York when I was young inside. My friends and I were more interested...

in our work than our investments.

We weren't invidious. We were nurturing.

And then, you know. Alimony, the IRS...

being denied the right to parent my own child custody--

They brought reality in, and hey, who needs it?

When Nixon got on that chopper in 1972 I think the fight went out of all of us.

The big business took over and set the agenda.

Boy, when you buy into big business, when you buy into that, man...

you got to emancipate yourself from your morals...

or you live a life of squeamishness.

Is this our same old argument? I lost my morals, did I?

Automatically, by going to work and staying inside the system?

You're taking me a little personally. I was talking about myself.

I was saying that I got a little squeamish, you know?

I know people that work a lot crasser jobs than you, and they're happy.

They're happy, they're healthy, they're not depressed.

They enjoy the material blessings. Me? I couldn't handle it.

I couldn't stand it. I just couldn't...

Confucius say "Of the 39 steps of escape the best one's flight." So I fled.

Here I am in France where I can pull down my pants.

I'm enough of a retarded romantic to believe France is still a place to go and think.

So I'll stay, I guess... or I won't. We'll see.

This place is like a fairy tale.

How did we wind up here?

I'll bet there's some secret plan of yours behind all this.

I bet I could say the same thing about you. No, I just thought you'd like to come here.

To discover that precious quality that the world so desperately lacks.

Ah, yeah. Vision.

Perspective. Perspective, Jack.

This is where the dead are placed, in the middle of town among the houses.

Death is a part of life, not separate from it.

There aren't enough graves for all the generations of Mont-Saint-Michelains.

So every decade or so, the bones are dug up so new bodies can be buried here.

And since they believed you will need your bones again on Judgment day...

they placed them nearby in the charnel house--

- Ucch! That's disgusting. - I like cemeteries.

And in the back there, in the church, there is a relic of a saint.

What's a relic?

Oh, maybe a shaving of the saint's fingernail, or a scrap of the saint's robe.

Tell me Jack, how do you expect to govern these people?

That's a good question.

There was an italian premier once, just before Mussolini...

somebody asked him if it was difficult to govern italians.

He said: "Difficult to govern italians? No, not difficult. Only useless"

You didn't say that on the 6:00 news.

No, but I thought it night and day. Maybe that's why I lost.

Anyway, did they really think that their bones would keep until judgment day?

You got to remember for them Judgment day was...

right around the corner. They expected it almost hourly.

Just like us.

I wouldn't say so. Judgment day, for us is different.

It's an interruption, a violation, a break in our concept of time--

The bomb, the big one. Judgment day for them was the ultimate day off.

Not the ultimate off day.

There wasn't mechanical time, time was season to season, Sabbath to saint day.

And everything led toward Judgment day. That was the reason everybody was alive.

It was the day of deliverance. Like sunday, when you get the Times delivered.

Time was sacred.

They'd ring a bell in the morning, they'd ring a bell in the evening...

and those moments would change a little. But the...

rhythm of their era was so different from ours...

that I don't think we can even imagine it.

I guess we're a little early.

No saint stands alone.

What?

No saint stands alone.

Every time I come here, these lines comes to me, God knows from where.

Sometimes it takes me weeks, even years to figure out what they mean.

Did you ever read any of the books I sent you?

No, not since you stopped thinking about helping me with speeches.

Did you ever read the speeches I sent you?

I tried. I mean, the old attention span, isn't what it used to be.

That's true. Mine neither.

I don't have any attention anymore for anything that's not specific.

Poetry just confuses me.

Yeah, politics-- Politics confuses everybody.

Including its practitioners.

But I know what "No saint stands alone" means.

Oh, yeah? What?

It's the essence of my profession.

Because between every politician and his own point of view...

there's always three fat cats, two pac lobbyists, half dozen of microphones.

"No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent...

part of the main, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls...

it tolls to thee."

Can't you just feel the place watching you?

- It makes you feel pretty small. - It was supposed to.

The individual in the human body was supposed to feel small...

dwarfed, denied all independent existence.

We lost some of the sense of being all one, but we got our freedom.

That's not a bad trade-off.

I don't know. I still don't know if we haven't lost more than we've gained.

All I ever hear anybody talk about today is themselves.

I wrote a poem once. It's titled "The Stones Speak, I am Silent"

At least you're free to think what you want and do what you can about it.

Think of the guy who had to carry these stones up the hell to built this place.

He didn't have any say in life, or try running for office some day.

Someone else sets the agenda, someone else sets the schedule.

Somebody else decides what you can say and what you better not say.

Talk about losing yourself. People have been known to forget their own names.

Maybe you're too smart to be president.

A television correspondent told me that once.

What did you say?

I got a little steamed.

I said american voters want their leaders to be dumber than they are.

They figure they'll do less harm that way. That is an expensive form of cynicism.

- You said that on TV? - Yup.

Maybe you're not so smart after all.

We go through here.

What's up here?

After you.

Look at this. Look at this!

This thing has been functioning for hundreds of years--

since before the beginning of modern times.

But this is different from the kind of time you were talking about before.

Sunrise to Sunset, Sabbath to Sabbath, isn't it?

This is... mechanical time.

You bet, you bet it is.

I sometimes think that this clock, this machine is what...