"But I don't suppose anybody--including yourself--ever thought you'd
rip out magazine serials like logs going through a circular saw. Get to
be a popular writer. And then set people on their ears by writing about
psychology. We all thought you were destined for the garret--a lot of
reputation, maybe--but not Florida houses and--fifty thousand dollars'
worth of insurance--"
"No."
"Did you?"
"Yeah."
"You did!"
"No harm in daydreaming, was there? Back then?"
Tom meditated on those distant high school years. "You realized the
daydream."
"A person like me has a good many daydreams. When one comes true--he
automatically starts on the next."
"Do you consider yourself happy?"
"Enormously, Tom."
"So do I. _Why?_ How come? When you spend about ninety per cent of your
time considering the unhappiness of the world?"
"Somebody has to collect the garbage or we'd all die of plague. And a
born garbage collector loves his job."
"There's more to it than that."
"Yeah. It's not garbage. It's what we discard, ignore, repress. The
green fertilizer of the next crop. The yin to the coming yang. My
contemplation of what you call the unhappy aspects of life is really
the substance of what I find to be hope."
"Jung changed you a lot, Phil."
"I dunno. I got thinking--some years back--of a poem I wrote when I was
twenty-one. Threw it away--lost it--haven't any idea what happened to
it. But in that poem was the fundamental Jungian idea--the idea that
instinct directs human affairs--and that it's a force in action which
always has equal and opposite reactions--"
"Still--Archie--"
I thought of Archie--the psychiatrist to whom Tom had sent me
for analysis. "Archie taught me psychology--Freudian, Jungian,
Adlerian--and let me work out my own problems, aloud. He was a great
teacher."
"He died of cancer," Tom mused.
"'--too'?"
He looked at me and grinned gently. "Masochism takes funny forms in
you."
"In us all." I went back a little way in the discussion. "When I was
a young guy, I formed the habit of listening to, and looking at,
everything that happened in my mind. Ruling out nothing. Trying to
relate everything to everything else. That's a good habit. That's the
natural mind. There are too God-damned many prohibitions and taboos
in the life of a Presbyterian minister's son to keep track of. So I
started--as a game--ignoring all of them, in my head. Plenty of people
do. I arrived--in that poem--at a pretty complete formulation of
instinct and the laws of instinct--as Jung sees it working. As Toynbee
sees it working collectively, on civilizations. As Northrop glimpses
it. As Jesus tried to define it. As Aristotle didn't even guess it."
"So you think you really never underwent a philosophical change?"
"No. I lost sight of what I'd felt--when I was a dizzy, drunk Hollywood
writer. But when Archie taught me Freud and Jung--I got back the
insight--in contemporary terms and scientific formulations. That's all.
And it isn't very much."
"Are you ever frightened?"
"I'm protoplasm, for God's sake!"
He chuckled. "That's a relief! I've wondered what are you scared of.
Sometimes--you seem haunted. Most of the time, I could swear you were
afraid of nothing."
"The shadow of the ego--the black streak behind it that it never looks
around to see."
"And what does that mean?"
"What I'm scared of. Inhumanity. Cruelty. To man--to me, also, I
guess.''
"People get more humane."
"Like hell!"
"If you lived a thousand years ago--or ten thousand you'd believe it.
The trouble is, you're supersensitive."