Some give money
some give work
but if you give the person
brother, you're a jerk.
It didn't do me any good ... for ...
If you try to tell the truth
there's only you telling it.
2
It was a hell of a morning.
3
From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial.
You wouldn't be interested.
We'll go on, anyway.
What the hell else can a man do?
4
Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous.
The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway.
It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning--the creation
of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id,
meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental
palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All
these, and countless other "punishments"--which change with changing
social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and
differ from one home to another and one culture to another--set up
such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized
being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate
indignities.
Add to this the regimentations of school--the musts and must nots of
classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies
of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with
familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in
the passing years, fold in the Law--cop, truant officer, and prison
bars--sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed,
or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations),
and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the
adolescent, the adult.
Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence.
Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze--at
the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil
sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped.
Detach him, that is to say, from Nature--deprive him of its experiences
and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring
even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never
know a spring's taste.
Set him to work at earning a living without acquaintance of how the
whole of any living is made. On the contrary. Let his life's blood
derive from some capillary of the flow. Let him take charge--not of
house-building, or food-raising, or wood-gathering or fire-keeping,
not of cookery or childbirthing or the weaving of fabrics--but of the
twenty-eighth step in the manufacture of one size of ball bearings.
Call this earning a living.
Give him a town to defend against all other towns and cities, a county
to boast of, a state to regard as superior to forty-seven other states,
and a nation which anyone can see is the greatest on earth. Teach
him to hold such superiority as the supreme goal--to believe that no
more can be asked of him or of his fellows than that they maintain
the greatest nation--however low the rest may sink. Teach him never
to inquire if his superlatives are adequate for the conditions of his
age. Let him live to the full--by odious comparison. Let him say--I am
better than you, wherefore you--not I--need all the improvement.
Now. Set a few wars in his time, with their alarms, rigors,
restrictions, and dull regimentations. Load up his era with means for
bacteriological attack and with atomic bombs. Invent great secrets,
with attendant rumors. Frighten him all day long--and at night. Tell
him he is nevertheless a free man and that, above all else, he must
cherish and protect his liberty. Next, at every corner and edge of
freedom, hack, harass, chip, clip, steal, stain, bribe, sabotage, and
smudge each meaning and application of liberty, so that he no longer
gathers its fundamental sense and comes to imagine liberty is consonant
with security--which is all that remains for him to dwell upon, since
he has been deprived of every secure thing and every secure experience
in God's cosmos.
It makes you nervous, n'est-ce pas?
No one should be surprised that modern man shows signs of strain.
Nothing much in the world is sane.
Only the great instinct--the spaceless, timeless urge toward
consciousness--continues its thrust of sanity. Because of it, even the
maddest men are able to seize upon the illusion that they are sane by
interpreting their own, spotty awareness as if it were the entirety of
possible knowing. Because of instinct, however, all the mad men and
all the mad societies will be brushed like bugs from the earth's crust
and replaced by better, sensibler men or--if necessary--by silence. By
silence while Evolution is retooled and instinct tries again with a
new form--one which may not be so dazzled by its little consciousness
or so greedy for the immediate fruits thereof as to attempt, with all
the means and methods set down here, and ten million more, to deny
instinct, repudiate Nature, and insist its petty Reason is the shape of
truth entire.
So we three nervous wrecks sat down to lunch.
Marcia was a pretty girl, winsome, willowy, with eyes as blue as an
upland lake and light-brown hair which, where the sun fell through
undulant glass brick, turned opalescent, like duck feathers, and shone
every color, as if it were composed of quintillions of submicroscopic
prisms. She wore a light perfume--smelled like an April garden--and her
voice was limpid.
Poor Paul.
Gloves on her hands--white little things, knit of string. She was
nearly as tall as I am. A trembling came through the gloves. "So glad
to meet you, Phil. Paul talks about you incessantly. It's practically a
fixation."
Hot in the lobby, steamy; you could bake bread in the place. "Come in
the Knight's Bar," I said, "and cool off."
She bewitched me with her lakelike eyes a moment longer--and deep in
them I saw the shadow glide, the fear--the numb, dark carnivore that
had to eat, that looked up at me with a guilty but imploring gaze.
You see, I knew her.
I held the door. She went first, walking confidently in the face of
the strangers in the restaurant. Paul hesitated halfway through the
cold doorway--hesitated, and eyed me with a sort of regret. Regret--and
inquiry. I nodded my head to say she was lovely.
Jay saw her--gestured with a menu. We sat.
They ordered Manhattans and I a coke.
Music sprayed from its electrical hose--garbled a little, echoing
slightly, like music from a lawn sprinkler. This wash of counterpoint
in every public place is an attempt to assuage nerves that burn like
beds of coals. We do everything we can dream of to relax--except relax.
If we did that--we would lose the world that we own. And we are afraid
to find our souls.
"It broke the record today," Paul said. Our best prop.
"Just over a hundred." Marcia moved her long hair across her right
shoulder and kept gazing at me to see--not if I remembered her, for
we had already acknowledged that--but what the effect was to be. "You
ought to see Park Avenue! It's a parade--driving to the country!"
I tried to look like a man who had no memory--who regarded the earth
as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those
unbearable souls who likes it that way."
"Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy
about it--"
It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her--with
Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take
him fishing.
"A young lady left over from last night," he said.
Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed.
She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave
paid her and we went away.
He caught his first sailfish that day.
I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if
I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt
to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He
was sitting beside her and across from me--wondering, probably, how to
turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less
self-conscious, more profitable subject.
"Workin'?" he asked.
"Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul,
"Yeah."
"He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through,
they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work,
for him. A story about how some college football player married the
Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I
do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather--"
"--have its ego blown up than its cities."