“But she listened thoughtfully when I told her about our little gang in New York City, whose paintings were nothing alike except for one thing: they were about nothing but themselves. When I was all talked out, she sighed, and she shook her head. “It was the last conceivable thing a painter could do to a canvas, so you did it,” she said. “Leave it to Americans to write, ‘The End.’” “I hope that’s not what we’re doing,” I said. “I hope very much that it is what you’re doing,” she said. “After all that men have done to the women and children and every other defenseless thing on this planet, it is time that not just every painting, but every piece of music, every statue, every play, every poem and book a man creates, should say only this: ‘We are much too horrible for this nice place. We give up. We quit. The end!’” She said that our unexpected reunion was a stroke of luck for her, since she thought I might have brought the solution to an interior decorating problem which had been nagging at her for years, namely: what sort of pictures, if any, should she put on the inane blanks between the columns of her rotunda? “I want to leave some sort of mark on this place while I have it,” she said, “and the rotunda seems the place to do it. “I considered hiring women and children to paint murals of the death camps and the bombing of Hiroshima and the planting of land mines, and maybe the burning of witches and the feeding of Christians to wild animals in olden times,” she said. “But I think that sort of thing, on some level, just eggs men on to be even more destructive and cruel, makes them think: ‘Ha! We are as powerful as gods! There has never been anything to stop us from doing even the most frightful things, if even the most frightful things are what we choose to do.’ “So your idea is a much better one, Rabo. Let men come into my rotunda, and wherever they look at eye level let them receive no encouragement. Let the walls cry out: ‘The end! The end!’””
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