Why didn't you study it sooner?
You copied into your literature whatever you saw on washroom walls--and
little else--while brighter boys copied Bohr's equations from
blackboards.
Both were true.
Both were real.
One was old.
The other new.
And where are you tomorrow?
Anyway, as I was suggesting, I write for money, usually.
I enjoy it--the writing and the dough. If writing isn't fun, I give it
up. And I spend the money.
Here today and marlin fishing tomorrow.
Here today and at the couturiers with Ricky tomorrow.
Night club today and novelette tomorrow.
Serial today, book, movie, play.
Sarcophagous tomorrow.
I am at least one two-billion-three-hundred-millionth responsible for
the contemporary world and bear the burden gamely. Why not take up my
burden and follow me as I, too, follow? The burden of Light.
Or why not take up, better than I have, the same burden and improve
upon my shambling progress?
I am the occasionally somewhat rich man who finds the Kingdom of Heaven
at hand this day--and the next, discovers in his private concerns
and small affluence that the door has narrowed down and his camel is
balked by its load. The little acre I have dedicated stays where it
is but wants, sometimes, for cultivation. I have sinned; that is why
I understand sin. Men have made enough things for me to last fifty
lifetimes; I have given them away for newer, more expedient things.
Enough substance has been dug out of the earth and grown upon it and
sold to me to support a tenementful of more intent philosophers. And I
cannot compare myself favorably with other men: perhaps they lacked my
environmental opportunities--a Princeton education, for instance--or
a youth's experience of Montclair, New Jersey. (What grim lessons!).
If, furthermore, my assigns perish with the yuts and their barbarous
impedimenta, they will have no reason to remember me kindly.
But these are my problems.
And these are your problems, too.
Do you repent at all?
Or ever act?
Or merely join another lunch club and boost your voice loose? What
fagins brought _you_ up?
Old Bob Durfree, editor of the magazine for which I'd written so many
yarns about Cynthia Davis and Cynthia's silly mother and Cynthia's
patient pop would welcome this one. My short stories, my serials,
were a branded feature of Bob's magazine. Struggling years! A hundred
serials--froth composed of my blood and sweat and tears--were written
for nothing. And then, at last, Success. Chimes in the mercantile
establishments! Fiesta for salesmen! Orgasms in banks! The Cynthia
stories belonged more to Bob Durfree's magazine than to me--and nearly
as much to the taste of millions as to my taste, although I sometimes
put spices in the meringue that offended the flaccid palate of Mrs.
America and the lovely abscess she rears as a daughter.
At any rate, I poured it out on Bob Durfree's yarn because of the
dignities I have referred to--and in light scorn of those critics who
can never tell if silver is alloyed in gold since they do not know what
gold is. They will follow their wrong guesses into oblivion. Every time
they cried Eureka another true prophet went flat on his face.
It was about five o'clock when my phone rang.