It is a place where men do not hold up their heads and look free.
Where men dare not seek what they were born for: life.
Where many men work and starve, and many work and turn into cabbages,
and many steal and turn into rats, and a few own the land and turn into
hogs.
Where nature is not as important as law.
Where law is cause rather than effect.
Where religion is faith rather than affirmation.
Where love is never as strong as things.
Where age is decay rather than more life.
Where art is encouraged but not recognized.
Where revolt is the strongest of emotions and the weakest of actions.
* * * * *
What do you call this strange place where it is immoral to take life
deeply, and moral to be a half-thing?
Where it is beautiful to have theories of living, and ugly to apply
them.
Where it is right to dabble and wrong to realize.
Where ignorance is a virtue and knowledge a crime.
Where nature is obscenity and man’s abuse of it purity.
Where philistinism is a habit and intellectual groping a “fad.”
Where reputation is more vital than character.
Where sociability is a goal instead of a vice.
Where indirection is known as unselfishness and self-direction as
egotism.
Where thinking is only a sort of autistic stammering.
Where genius, “being youth and wisdom,” is sent to school to
learn—(Never mind; I can’t remember what).
Where impulse is assassinated before it can prove its worth.
Where one must achieve in gloom or be suspected of “lightness.”
Where beauty comes only when one has struggled beyond the need of it.
Where sex is known as the greatest human experience, and experience in
sex as the greatest human sin.
Where religion is known to be an unfolding, but experience in unfolding
looked upon as irreligious.
* * * * *
What do you call this fantastic place where age that is weak rules youth
that is strong?
Where parents prescribe life for children they cannot understand.
Where politicians and prostitutes and police and the press are despised
but honored and great spirits are suspected of greatness but feared and
cast out.
Where nations go to war for things they do not believe in and
individuals will not go to revolution for things they do believe in.
Where those who know the rottenness in Denmark cannot think through to
what caused it.
Where birds that fly are put into cages and men who soar are put into
jails.
* * * * *
What do you call this incredible place where men go inch by inch to
death in jails? Where they cease to hear and see and feel and smell and
talk and walk and sing and sleep and work and play and think and be—not
by order of gods or monsters but by order of men? What do you call a
place where those who must cease _to be_ are richer than those who
_are_?
What do you call this awful place where every great spirit walks not
only in rebellion and misunderstanding and isolation but in persecution?
Where there are no heroes to make an end of horrors.
Where even to live outdoors cannot clean men.
Where there is no imagination and no faith.
Where there is no silence....
* * * * *
Do you call it an asylum of crazed beings who annihilate each other? Not
at all. You call it the world. You say it is “a good old world, after
all.” And you resent the “freak” who tells you your world is upside
down.
Out of the loneliness of self-direction comes the only completion
of life.—“_The Scavenger._”