Dear Fellow Compulsives:
To insist you know God when you do not know logic or science is
hideous. Those who say they know God and yet reject truth, however
selectively, are playing at _being_ God. And those men who play they
are God, perforce use men as toys. When will you end this dreadful
game? Sincerely.
A time will come, I thought, when man's chief passion will be to
observe and to learn dispassionately--his passions.
But you won't be there, Mac.
For this reason, I sent a telepathic message to the School for Advanced
Study at Princeton, New Jersey, where--at long last--the professors are
assembled to try to find out something to teach:
Persons:
Cease trying to rectify the Bhagavad-Gita by means of the Uncertainty
Principle. Try algebra--since you are so much simpler than you think.
Query: When will you exchange truths evenly with the Believers? So long.
As I say, I nonwired this missive. I got no answer.
The oscilloscope of my mind rippled sadly. Its little line ran
straight, then finally shot up with further inquiry:
Who sees that day is the augury of coming night? And who--looking at
the darkened sky--sees it to be the daylight of a trillion suns? Who
further sees the great initial in the stars themselves--the F for
Freedom that I dreamed of in a dream? Whose brain will abide it all?
Who will continue our Quest?
And next, I felt my solitude.
If any man is more alone than I in this society I would know it, for I
would have met him in the spaces I inhabit.
True, I've seen a few in my distances. And Ricky goes there with me
sometimes--as she must.
In another sense, indeed, the whole company of my contemporaries is
with me and I am alone only in knowing it.
For the dignity and purpose we dreamed of in the youth of this century
has gone. We do our work. We mind our manners. But our young hope has
been dimmed by the predictabilities. Hence we all know how temporary
we are, how brief our routines, how probably it is futile to quarry or
to breed, to build or to wish, to sell or to instruct, to make these
civilized exertions.
Camus' plague is on us; it has been here a long while. We call it
materialism.
Progress that excludes Man.
We have no peace of mind.
And here is the question of it that the theologists and the scientists
have not yet hit upon:
So long as one man suffers unjustly from his fellows, be he yellow or
black or white, there shall be no peace of mind for anybody.
And here is the demonstration:
Whatever Man does that he should not, and knows he should not, and
whatever man does not, that he knows he should, becomes the substance
of the fear of every man, lest it happen to him in his turn.
Integrity of man to man is not a paltering "ideal"; it is man's most
essential ingredient, for it measures his potential for continuum in
the sufficient space and patient time of God.
Whoever thinks to have peace of mind, these days, is therefore the
figment of his own imagination; whoever wants it for himself without
thought to others is a criminal.
Only the man-concerned ever knows that fragmented trifle of
tranquillity permitted by our noxious times and customs. The rest are
dead already in their souls--of science, of religion, of egoistic lust,
of a deliberate return to childishness, of every fatal evidence of our
plague.
Now a man--the Englishman--opened a newspaper noisily at his table
across from me.
This is what I read:
Soon, fifteen million Americans would be organized (voluntarily, they
call it) for Civil Defense.
A tenth of us regimented--willingly--for Civil Defense.
(Yet everyone who knows, proclaims there is no defense!)
The men without imagination have spoken.
We shall be ready to police and put out fires, to evacuate and rope off
radioactive areas, to deal with gas, bacterial clouds, falling fungi
and shots caromed off the moon.
In the name of courage, fifteen million of us will be, if possible,
meticulously imbued with the latter-day alarms.
Who says now that we are even a little sane?
For a moment, my mind was blacked out by despair.
But again and still its show went on.
We, who did not have knowledge enough of ourselves to fight, when
the time came, for liberty at its source--for freedom of knowledge
itself--are day by day losing the rest of our freedom.
It is a working of the great law.
And in what noble names the old tyrant takes us over!
Perhaps, I thought, we may understand in time, or be lucky, and get
back a brighter version of the lost principle of freedom. And if not,
the quicker we are slaves the better--for the necessity of freedom
shall become plain that much the sooner.
I could see the exultant marching of the fifteen million defenders of
the indefensible. The burial squads of the Atomic Age are forming. Soon
it will be fashionable for women to knit Geiger counters. Two-minute
speakers, hastily instructed at the Y.M.C.A. will explain the need
for volunteers and tell us what must be done when it is too late to
do anything. Boy Scouts will learn to decontaminate the same, old,
innocent surfaces. And the prizes at ladies' bridge will have the shape
of guided missiles.