"It's a pity a girl can't ask you in for a nightcap. But you'd only be
able to have Coca-Cola."
"Gotta sleep. I'll give you a buzz in the morning, Yvonne."
"Will you?"
"Bet."
She gave me a musical good night and opened her door slowly. I walked
down the red carpet--and her door closed with a bang.
3
There was nothing for me in my own apartment.
The books--even Vogt's _Road to Survival_, which I had almost
finished--looked nervous. The many magazines--through all of which I
had coursed while bathing, eating, sitting on the toilet, riding in
the plane, idling--were like partly-consumed meals: there were bits
here and there I still wanted to taste, to digest--but not now. I was,
of course, neither sleepy nor intending to go to bed. I can get along
for days, for weeks, on four or five hours of sleep, even without
throat cancer. Often, when I am writing a long story, I begin with the
sunrise, go to sleep at two or three the next morning, get up with
dawn again--and so continue until the job is done.
My body ad-libs its life. When its brain is electrified, when the
aurora of thought and imagination and sensation ascends there as a
means to work, to dream, to worry, to engage in reasoning or wild
speculation, the thing that calls itself "I" follows after, like a
boy after a rainbow--and I have found as many pots of gold as a bank
president. And when my body has nothing to say or do or think about, I
sleep. I lie on the ground. I hoe potatoes and corn, dig garbage pits,
make tables and bookshelves, fix gadgets. I sit on a beach and stare at
the accumulation of hydrogen cunningly mixed with oxygen. When my body
is sick, the I runs to doctors, takes pills, eases itself--and pushes
at pain only if it must, like a man wheeling a heavy barrow up a hill.
I do not have the illusion of fortitude that makes sadists of, say,
Englishmen. I suffer. And when my I is grayed with its own weather, or
the bad chemistry of the body that owns it, I suffer, too--jittering
and jizzling, mourning and dreading, a repelled, repellent object--a
man with blues.
The construction of society does not permit such practices by most.
They have the 8:02 to catch, the Monday wash, and their two weeks in
July. The church bell rings not when the preacher feels he is close to
God, but at eleven, on the Seventh Day. He who is weak with the length
of winter cannot escape it; who faints in the summer must faint again
upon recovering consciousness--or else employ his I to whip his body so
that it will face summer without further protest.
No other animal would do itself such violences.
This is an age of schedules. The people of it have long since foundered
in time. Time is a sea that presses them to its bottom--a sea that
waterlogs their tissues--a sea that prevents them from the experience
of its own medium as other than a weight and an absolute dimension.
Living is drowning with the first lesson at the clock and being drowned
forever after that.
My body and my I had endeavored, with some success, to ignore the
obsessional meridians. Others may travel them like a baby that has
learned to walk and become so enamored of the skill as to proceed,
steadily, for the rest of its days, in one straight line on time's sea
bottom. We have stopped--separately and together--somewhat explored
time's other dimensions--gone to the surface and seen the sun, for
example--bought time, stolen it, ignored it, zigzagged, looked back
through it, and seen the straight line of the compulsive infant for the
circle it really is.
As Dr. E. has shown, time's a human invention--a convenient illusion.
As the body knows, it has no more significance, alone, than width,
by itself. But the I has taken time, in most cases, for a universal
measurement, notched it in hours and minutes, and set the whole world
to counting time. Its mere recognition is subjective. Yet, how few
subjects realize that if the subject be a baseball player, and if his
subjectivity and objectivity live fifty years--then the subjectivity of
Wordsworth, or Emerson, may have lasted for several hundred thousand?
So, in this frame of reference--this truer attitude--even I, compared
with some of my timeserving fellow men, may be older than Methuselah.
The body is potentially immortal: it can reproduce itself. And so the I
would be immortal in its self-sensation if it were oriented, like the
lives of animals, toward that which it could reproduce--all men toward
all men yet to be--rather than toward its wretched self-awareness, its
greedy, permanent stoppage of time for narcissistic attitudinizing.
The I is a mirror. It can see itself forever and any now as this
now--if only it looks at the reflection to observe all those behind
and all beyond, of which it is an integral. But if it ignores those
behind--rules out even the next-lowest author of its instincts--and if
it eschews the requirements of those to come which are the integral
function of itself--if, that is, the I concentrates upon its one
embodied reflection, rejecting the panoply of life and repudiating
past and present for its little now--then, truly that I is mortal. It
is a suicide for that it is an assassin.
Such are all persons but a very few, these days.
So are they taught.
So inspired: unpunctuality and unproductivity are un-American.
So do they urgently maintain themselves--egoists without the sense of
individuation.
And that is why the earth is perishing for man.
In the hatred people have for people.
And the absolute hatred of posterity that rises from the absolute
rejection of our real ancestry.
There are moments when the circumstance is unutterably clear to me--and
in these, I _know_--without respect to the immediate employment of my
body or the thing called I.
There are moments when the time-easements I have bought grow clouded.
And then the knowledge escapes arms, legs, cranium, and I.
What man, reared as I was, domiciled in this earth's insanity, has even
the intimations, let alone the occasional assurance? And who, attached
to his clocks, trains, bells, and the earth's turned shadow, keeps a
continual hold upon the vital principle? Very few.
Say it was late.
Say I did not want to sleep.
Say, if you will, I did not want to face my circumstances. It is not
so. The space during which I sat on the green sofa smoking my cigarette
was what you call ten minutes--an infinity that could not be shortened,
made painful, or even touched at any point by measurement.