1
_I envy those chroniclers who assert with reckless but sincere
abandon: “I was there. I saw it happen. It happened thus.”
Now I too, in every sense, was there, yet I cannot trust myself
to identify with any accuracy the various events of my own life,
no matter how vividly they may seem to survive in recollection
... if only because we are all, I think, betrayed by those eyes
of memory which are as mutable and particular as the ones with
which we regard the material world, the vision altering, as it so
often does, from near in youth to far in age. And that I am by
a devious and unexpected route arrived at a great old age is to
me a source of some complacency, even on those bleak occasions
when I find myself attending inadvertently the body’s dissolution,
a process as imperceptible yet sure as one of those
faint, persistent winds which shift the dunes of sand in that
desert of dry Libya which burns, white and desolate, beyond
the mountains I see from the window of my room, a window
facing, aptly enough, the west where all the kings lie buried in
their pride._
_I am also conscious that I lack the passion for the business of
familiar life which is the central preoccupation of our race while,
worse still, I have never acquired the habit of judging the usual deeds
of men ... two inconvenient characteristics which render me uncertain
whenever I attempt to recall the past, confounding me sadly with the
knowledge that my recollections are, after all, tentative and private
and only true in part._
_Then, finally, I have never found it easy to tell the truth, a
temperamental infirmity due not so much to any wish or compulsion to
distort reality that I might be reckoned virtuous but, rather, to a
conception of the inconsequence of human activity which is ever in
conflict with a profound love of those essential powers which result
in human action, a paradox certainly, a dual vision which restrains me
from easy judgments._
_I am tempted to affirm that historic truth is quite impossible,
although I am willing to accept the philosophic notion that it may
exist abstractly, perfect and remote in the imagination. A windy attic
filled with lovely objects has always been my personal image of those
absolutes Aristotle conceived with such mellifluous optimism ... and I
have always liked the conceits of philosophy, the more extravagant the
better. I am especially devoted to Parmenides who was so strenuously
obsessed with the idea of totality that he was capable, finally, of
declaring that nothing ever changed, that what has been must still
exist if it is yet remembered and named, a metaphysical conception
which will, I suspect, be of some use to me as I journey in memory back
to that original crisis from which I have for so long traveled and to
which, despite the peril, I must return._
_I do not say, then, that what I remember is all true but I can
declare that what I shall recall is a relative truth as opposed to
that monstrous testament the one-half world believes, entrenching deep
thereby a mission at whose birth I officiated and one whose polished
legend has since become the substantial illusion of a desperate
race. That both mission and illusion were false, I alone can say
with certainty, with sorrow, such being the unsuspected and terrible
resolution of brave days. Only the crisis, which I shall record, was
real._
_I have said I am not given to making judgments. That is not precise.
It is true that in most “wicked” acts I have been able, with a little
effort, to perceive the possibilities for good either in actual
intention or (and to me more important) in uncalculated result; yet,
ultimately, problems in ethics have never much concerned me: possibly
because they have been the vital interest of so many others who,
through custom, rule society, more agreeably than not. On that useful
moral level I have been seldom, if ever, seriously engaged but once on
another, more arduous plane I was forced to make a choice, to judge,
to act: and act I did in such a way that I am still startled by the
implications of my choice, of my life’s one judgment._
_I chose the light in preference to the dreamless dark, destroying
my own place in the world, and then, more painful still, I chose
the light in preference to that twilight region of indeterminate
visions and ambiguities which most suited my nature, a realm where
decision was impossible and where the potentialities of choice were
endless and exquisite to contemplate. To desert these beloved ghosts
and incalculable powers was the greater pain, but I have lived on,
observing with ever-increasing intensity that blazing disk of fire
which is the symbol as well as material source of the reality I have
accepted entirely, despite the sure dominion in eternity of the dark
other._
_But now, as my private day begins to fade, as the wind in the desert
gathers in intensity, smoothing out the patterns in the sand, I shall
attempt to evoke the true image of one who assumed with plausibility in
an age of science the long-discarded robes of prophecy, prevailing at
last through ritual death and becoming, to those who see the universe
in man, that solemn idea which is yet called by its resonant and
antique name, god._
2
_Stars fell to earth in a blaze of light and, where they fell, monsters
were born, hideous and blind._
_The first dozen years after the second of the modern wars were
indeed “a time of divination,” as one religious writer unctuously
described them. Not a day passed but that some omen or portent was
remarked by an anxious race, suspecting war. At first, the newspapers
delightedly reported these marvels, getting the details all wrong but
communicating that sense of awfulness which was to increase as the
years of peace uneasily lengthened until a frightened people demanded
government action, the ultimate recourse in those innocent times._
_Yet these omens, obsessive and ubiquitous as they were, would not
yield their secret order to any known system. For instance, much of
the luminous crockery which was seen in the sky was never entirely
explained. And explanation, in the end, was all that the people
required. It made no difference how extraordinary the explanation was,
if only they could know what was happening: that the shining globes
which raced in formation over Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were mere
residents of the Andromeda Galaxy, at home in space, omnipotent and
eternal in design, on a cultural visit to our planet ... if only this
much could definitely be stated, the readers of newspapers would have
felt secure, able in a few weeks’ time to turn their attention to other
problems, the visitors from farther space forgotten. It made little
difference whether these mysterious blobs of light were hallucinations,
inter-galactic visitors or military weapons, the important thing was to
explain them._
_To behold the inexplicable was perhaps the most unpleasant experience
a human being of that age could know, and during that gaudy decade many
wild phenomena were sighted and recorded._
_In daylight, glittering objects of bright silver maneuvered at
unearthly speed over Washington, D. C., observed by hundreds, some
few reliable. The government, with an air of spurious calm, mentioned
weather balloons, atmospheric reflections, tricks-of-eye, hinting,
to, as broadly as it dared, that a sizable minority of its citizens
were probably subject to delusions and mass hysteria. This cynical
view was prevalent inside the administration though it could not of
course propound such a theory publicly since its own tenure was based,
more or less solidly, on the franchise of those same hysterics and
irresponsibles._
_Shortly after the mid-point of the century, the wonders increased,
becoming daily more bizarre. The recent advance in atomic research
and in jet-propulsion had made the Western world disagreeably aware
of other planets and galaxies and the thought that we would soon be
making expeditions into space was disquieting, if splendid, giving rise
to the not illogical thought that life might be developing on other
worlds somewhat more brilliantly than here at home and, further, that
it was quite conceivable that we ourselves might receive visitors long
before our own adventuring had begun in the starry blackness which
contains our life, like a speck of phosphorus in a quiet sea. And since
our people were (and no doubt still are) barbarous and drenched in
superstition, like the dripping “Saved” at an old-time Texas baptism,
it was generally felt that these odd creatures whose shining cars
flashed through our poor heavens at such speed must, of necessity, be
hostile and cruel and bent on world dominion, just like ourselves or at
least our geographic neighbors._
_The evidence was horrific and plentiful:_
_In Berlin a flying object of unfamiliar design was seen to land by
an old farmer who was so close to it that he could make out several
little men twinkling behind an arc of windows. He fled, however, before
they could eat him. Shortly after his breathless announcement to the
newspapers, he was absorbed by an Asiatic government whose destiny it
was at that time to regularize the part of humanity fortunate enough
to live within its curiously elastic boundaries, both temporal and
spiritual._
_In West Virginia, a creature ten feet tall, green with a red face and
exuding a ghastly odor, was seen to stagger out of a luminous globe,
temporarily grounded. He was observed by a woman and four boys, all
of unquestionable probity; they fled before he could eat them. Later,
in the company of sheriff and well-armed posse, they returned to the
scene of horror only to find both monster and conveyance gone: but
even the skeptical sheriff and his men could detect, quite plainly, an
unfamiliar odor, sharp and sickening among the clean pines._
_This particular story was unique because it was the first to describe
a visitor as being larger instead of smaller than a man, a significant
proof of the growing anxiety: we could handle even the cleverest
little creature but something huge, and green, with an awful odor ...
it was too much._
_I myself, late one night in July of the mid-century, saw quite plainly
from the eastern bank of the Hudson River where I lived, two red globes
flickering in a cloudless sky. As I watched, one moved to a higher
point at a forty-five-degree angle above the original plane which had
contained them both. For several nights I watched these eccentric twins
but then, carried away by enthusiasm, I began to confuse Mars and
Saturn with my magic lights until at last I thought it wise to remain
indoors, except for those brief days at summer’s end when I watched,
as I always used to do, the lovely sudden silver arcs meteors plunging
make._
_In later years, I learned that, concurrently with the celestial
marvels, farm communities were reporting an unusual number of calves
born two-headed, chickens hatched three-legged, and lambs born with
human faces; but since the somewhat vague laws of mutation were more
or less well understood by the farmers these curiosities did not alarm
them: an earlier generation, however, would have known, instinctively,
that so many irregularities forecast an ill future, full of spite._
_Eventually, all was satisfactorily explained or, quite as good,
forgotten. Yet the real significance of these portents was not so much
in the fact of their mysterious reality as in the profound effect they
had upon a people who, despite their emphatic materialism, were as
easily shattered by the unexpected as their ancestors who had, on other
occasions, beheld eagles circling Capitoline Hill, observed the sky
grow leaden on Golgotha, shivered in loud storms when the rain was red
as blood and the wind full of toads, while in our own century, attended
by a statesman-Pope, the sun did a dance over Portugal._
_Considering the unmistakable nature of these signs, it is curious
how few suspected the truth: that a new mission had been conceived
out of the race’s need, the hour of its birth already determined by a
conjunction of terrible new stars._
_It is true of course that the established churches duly noted these
spectacular happenings and, rather slyly, used them to enhance that
abstract power from which their own mystical but vigorous authority
was descended. The more secular, if no less mystical, dogmas ...
descended variously from an ill-tempered social philosopher of the
nineteenth century and an energetic, unreasonably confident mental
therapist, also a product of that century’s decline ... maintained, in
the one case, that fireworks had been set off by vindictive employers
to bedazzle the poor workers for undefined but patently wicked ends,
and, in the other case, that the fiery objects represented a kind of
atavistic recessional to the childish world of marvels; a theory which
was developed even further in a widely quoted paper by an ingenious
disciple of the dead therapist. According to this worthy, the universe
was the womb in symbol and the blazing lights which many people thought
they saw were only a form of hallucination, hearking back to some
prenatal memory of ovaries bursting with a hostile potential life which
would, in time, become sibling rivals. The writer demanded that the
government place all who had seen flying objects under three years’
close observation to determine to what extent sibling rivalry, or the
absence of it (the proposition worked equally well either way) had
affected them in life. Although this bold synthesis was universally
admired and subsequently read into the Congressional Record by a lady
Representative who had herself undergone nine years’ analysis with
striking results, the government refused to act._
3
_But although nearly every human institution took cognizance of these
signs and auguries, none guessed the truth, and those few individuals
who had begun to suspect what might be happening preferred not
to speak out; if only because, despite much private analysis and
self-questioning, it was not a time in which to circulate ideas which
might prove disagreeable to any minority, no matter how lunatic. The
body politic was more than usually upset by signs of non-conformity.
The atmosphere was not unlike that of Britain during the mad hour of
Titus Oates._
_Precisely why my countrymen behaved so frantically is a problem for
those historians used to the grand, eternal view of human events. I
have often thought, though, that much of our national irritability was
closely related to the unexpected and reluctant custody of the world
the second war had pressed upon the confused grandchildren of a proud,
agrarian, isolated people, both indifferent and strange to the ways of
other cultures._
_More to the point, however, was the attitude of our intellectuals who
constituted at this time a small, militantly undistinguished minority,
directly descended in spirit if not in fact from that rhetorical
eighteenth-century Swiss whose romantic and mystical love for humanity
was magically achieved through a somewhat obsessive preoccupation with
himself. His passion for self-analysis flourished in our mid-century,
at least among the articulate few who were capable of analysis and who,
in time, like their great ancestor, chose the ear of the world for
their confessional._
_Men of letters lugubriously described their own deviations (usually
apolitical or sexual, seldom aesthetic), while painters worked
devotedly at depicting unique inner worlds which were not accessible
to others except in a state of purest empathy hardly to be achieved
without a little fakery in a selfish world. It was, finally, the
accepted criterion that art’s single function was the fullest
expression of a private vision ... which was true enough though the
visions of men lacking genius are not without a certain gloom. Genius,
in this time, was quite as rare as in any other and, to its credit, it
was not a self-admiring age ... critics found merit only in criticism,
a singular approach which was to amuse the serious for several decades._
_Led by artists, the intellectuals voiced their guilt at innumerable
cocktail parties where it was accepted as an article of faith that
each had a burden of guilt which could, once recognized, be exorcised;
the means of recognition were expensive but rewarding: a trained
and sympathetic listener would give the malaise a name and reveal
its genesis; then, through confession (and occasionally “reliving”)
the guilt would vanish along with asthma, impotence and eczema. The
process, of course, was not easy. To facilitate therapy, it became
the custom among the cleverer people to set aside all the traditional
artifices of society so that both friends and strangers could confess
to one another their worst deeds, their most squalid fantasies in a
series of competitive monologues conducted with arduous sincerity and
surprisingly successful on every level but that of communication._
_I am sure that this sort of catharsis was not entirely valueless: many
of the self-obsessed undoubtedly experienced relief when dispensing
secrets ... it was certainly an instructive shock for them to find that
even their most repellent aberrations were accepted quite perfunctorily
by strangers too intent on their own problems to be outraged, or even
very interested. This discovery was not always cheering. There is a
certain dignity and excitement in possessing a dangerous secret life.
To lose it in maturity is hard ... and once promiscuously shared, it
does become ordinary, no more troublesome than obvious dentures._
_Many cherished private hells were forever lost in those garrulous
years and the vacuum each left was invariably filled with a boredom
which, in its turn, could only be dispelled by faith. As a result,
the pursuit of the absolute, in one guise or another, became the
main preoccupation of these romanticists who professed with some
pride a mistrust of the reason, derived quite legitimately from their
own stunning incapacity to assimilate the social changes created by
machinery, their particular Lucifer. They rejected the idea of the
reflective mind, arguing that since both logic and science had failed
to establish the first cause of the universe or (more important)
humanity’s significance, only the emotions could reveal to us the
nature of reality, the key to meaning. That it was actually no real
concern of this race why or when or how the universe came into being
was an attitude never, so far as I can recall, expressed by the
serious-minded of the day. Their searching, however, was not simply
the result of curiosity; it was more than that: it was an emotional,
senseless plunging into the void, into the unknowable and the
irrelevant. It became, finally, the burden of life, the blight among
the flowers: the mystery which must be revealed, even at the expense of
life. It was a terrible crisis, made doubly hard since the eschewal of
logic left only one path clear to the heart of the dilemma: the way of
the mystic, and even to the least sensible it was sadly apparent that,
lacking a superior and dedicated organization, one man’s revelation is
not apt to be of much use to another._
_Quantities of venerable attitudes were abandoned and much of the
preceding century’s “eternal truths and verities” which had cast,
rock-like, so formidable and dense a shadow, were found, upon
examination, to be so much sand, suitable for the construction of
fantastic edifices but not durable, nor safe from the sea’s tide._
_But the issue was joined: dubious art was fashioned, authorities
were invoked, dreams given countenance and systems constructed on the
evidence of private illumination._
_For a time, political and social action seemed to offer a way out,
or in. Foreign civil wars, foreign social experiments were served
with a ferocity difficult to comprehend; but later, when the wars
and experiments went wrong, revealing, after such high hopes, the
perennial human inability to order society, a disillusion resulted,
bitterly resolved in numerous cases by the assumption of some mystical
dogma, preferably one so quaintly rich with history, so sweeping and
unreasonable in its claims as to be thoroughly acceptable to the
saddened romanticist who wanted, above all else, to feel, to know
without reasoning._
_So in these portentous times, only the scientists were content as
they constructed ever more fabulous machines with which to split the
invisible kernels of life while the anti-scientifics leaped nervously
from one absolute to another ... now rushing to the old for grace, now
to the new for salvation, no two of them really agreeing on anything
except the need for agreement, for the last knowledge ... and that,
finally, was the prevailing note of the age; since reason had been
declared insufficient, only a mystic could provide the answer, only he
could mark the boundaries of life with a final authority, inscrutably
revealed. It was so perfectly clear. All that was lacking was the man._