"But what is reality?" asked the gnomelike man. He gestured at the tall
banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park, with their countless
windows glowing like the cave fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. "All
is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine."
Dan Burke, struggling for clarity of thought through the fumes of
liquor, stared without comprehension at the tiny figure of his
companion. He began to regret the impulse that had driven him to leave
the party to seek fresh air in the park, and to fall by chance into the
company of this diminutive old madman. But he had needed escape; this
was one party too many, and not even the presence of Claire with her
trim ankles could hold him there. He felt an angry desire to go
home--not to his hotel, but home to Chicago and to the comparative peace
of the Board of Trade. But he was leaving tomorrow anyway.
"You drink," said the elfin, bearded face, "to make real a dream. Is it
not so? Either to dream that what you seek is yours, or else to dream
that what you hate is conquered. You drink to escape reality, and the
irony is that even reality is a dream."
"Cracked!" thought Dan again.
"Or so," concluded the other, "says the philosopher Berkeley."
"Berkeley?" echoed Dan. His head was clearing; memories of a Sophomore
course in Elementary Philosophy drifted back. "Bishop Berkeley, eh?"
"You know him, then? The philosopher of Idealism--no?--the one who
argues that we do not see, feel, hear, taste the object, but that we
have only the sensation of seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting."
"I--sort of recall it."
"Hah! But sensations are _mental_ phenomena. They exist in our minds.
How, then, do we know that the objects themselves do not exist only in
our minds?" He waved again at the light-flecked buildings. "You do not
see that wall of masonry; you perceive only a _sensation_, a feeling of
sight. The rest you interpret."
"You see the same thing," retorted Dan.
"How do you know I do? Even if you knew that what I call red would not
be green could you see through my eyes--even if you knew that, how do
you know that I too am not a dream of yours?"
Dan laughed. "Of course nobody _knows_ anything. You just get what
information you can through the windows of your five senses, and then
make your guesses. When they're wrong, you pay the penalty." His mind
was clear now save for a mild headache. "Listen," he said suddenly. "You
can argue a reality away to an illusion; that's easy. But if your friend
Berkeley is right, why can't you take a dream and make it real? If it
works one way, it must work the other."
The beard waggled; elf-bright eyes glittered queerly at him. "All
artists do that," said the old man softly. Dan felt that something more
quivered on the verge of utterance.
"That's an evasion," he grunted. "Anybody can tell the difference
between a picture and the real thing, or between a movie and life."
"But," whispered the other, "the realer the better, no? And if one could
make a--a movie--_very_ real indeed, what would you say then?"
"Nobody can, though."