In the actual flesh, it seems to me the white man and the red man cause a feeling of oppression, the one to the other, no matter what the good will. The red life flows in a different direction from the white life. You can't make two streams that flow in opposite directions meet and mingle soothingly. Certainly, if Cooper had had to spend his whole life in the backwoods, side by side with a Noble Red Brother, he would have screamed with the oppression of suffocation. He had to have Mrs. Cooper, a straight strong pillar of society, to hang on to. And he had to have the culture of France to turn back to, or he would just have been stifled. The Noble Red Brother would have smothered him and driven him mad. So that the Natty and Chingachgook myth must remain a myth. It is a wish-fulfilment, an evasion of actuality. As we have said before, the folds of the Great Serpent would have been heavy, very heavy, too heavy, on any white man. Unless the white man were a true renegade, hating himself and his own race spirit, as sometimes happens. It seems there can be no fusion in the flesh. But the spirit can change. The white man's spirit can never become as the red man's spirit. It doesn't want to. But it can cease to be the opposite and the negative of the red man's spirit. It can open out a new great area of consciousness, in which there is room for the red spirit too. To open out a new wide area of consciousness means to slough the old consciousness. The old consciousness has become a tight-fitting prison to us, in which we are going rotten. You can't have a new, easy skin before you have sloughed the old, tight skin. You can't. And you just can't, so you may as well leave off pretending. Now the essential history of the people of the United States seems to me just this: At the Renaissance the old consciousness was becoming a little tight. Europe sloughed her last skin, and started a new, final phase. But some Europeans recoiled from the last final phase. They wouldn't enter the _cul de sac_ of post-Renaissance, "liberal" Europe. They came to America. They came to America for two reasons: 1. To slough the old European consciousness completely. 2. To grow a new skin underneath, a new form. This second is a hidden process. The two processes go on, of course, simultaneously. The slow forming of the new skin underneath is the slow sloughing of the old skin. And sometimes this immortal serpent feels very happy, feeling a new golden glow of a strangely-patterned skin envelop him: and sometimes he feels very sick, as if his very entrails were being tom out of him, as he wrenches once more at his old skin, to get out of it. Out! Out! he cries, in all kinds of euphemisms. He's got to have his new skin on him before ever he can get out. And he's got to get out before his new skin can ever be his own skin. So there he is, a torn, divided monster. The true American, who writhes and writhes like a snake that is long in sloughing.