what they did
when a billion starved
when four or five billions, produced in the uncontrolled birthorgies of
the devout and the innocent, over-horded this little globe
what they did when the metals ran thin--in a century or so
when idiotic breeding decayed the human line to a rabble incapable of
sustaining liberty or order or technology
when the last water under the earth dried up
when the sea thickened
when the moon approached.
Indeed, there is no limit to wishing one might assist at meeting
challenges old Toynbee may never have thought of--
inevitabilities that only man can avoid and that, as yet, he does not
even consider as Necessary Works. They are denied by _Time_ magazine.
Aortas of lightning and branched arteries of electric fire now
diagrammed the clouds. Across the roofs, thunder ricocheted; it rolled
like tumbrils in the avenues.
A steady press of air flapped the curtains and I moved my chair a
little to escape their nervous abrasion.
This fetid wind depressed me.
My thoughts settled in a muddy ooze and lived beneath the riffled
surface enviously, for that it seemed alive.
And in this separation I saw more views.
The intellectual, I deplore--scholar, economist, sociologist, big
literary man. The sorry lot have spent half the twentieth century
admiring the engines of their minds and not bothering to feed knowledge
into them or raw materials; now, with the gauges falling, they have
nothing to say excepting only to repeat their proud, intellectual
admission of obsolescence.
The critic, I deplore; he sits upon his flagpole with his radio, his
sandwiches and his displayed latrine, handing down opinions of what is
happening under the earth, from which he sees an occasional man emerge
whom he invariably deduces to be a Troglodyte or a Morlock.
The philosopher of modern times is my favorite joke; he stands at
the head of the Faculty--without faculties of his own; he sums up
the wisdom of the mind without appreciating he no longer understands
what his own mind is. Were he even as honest as the psychiatrist
he disdains, he would get his psyche analyzed before he undertook
to forward the discussion of awareness. But what philosopher ever
consented to an effort at learning something of himself before
pontificating upon the All of everybody else? That still, small science
of psychology, which he elbows behind his panoply of classic names, has
turned him into a quack--an astrologer among astronomers and the barker
for a medicine show at a convention of true physicians.
The preacher--dressed in the anonymous odds and ends of all the
instincts of the animal kingdom and holding this shoddy surplice to be
a white and spotless raiment--the one, true robe for Ascension--is my
jester, for being mad and comical and also for speaking so much wisdom
and for his good heart, when he has one.