Front matter (continued 2)

"And a pretty complete, exhaustive inquiry, too."

"Is it? Is it even a scientific inquiry? The atomic bomb will never go to war by itself. Men will drop, toss, or convey it."

"Sure. And the Bulletin has taken up every known means by which people can be told what atomic energy is, and why it must be controlled, and how to do that. Every step of the debate in the House and the Senate—and the debates in the United Nations—has been followed. Every idea my fellow physicists could hit on has been aired—"

"With no result."

"No result, my eye! If we hadn't ganged up to make Congress see that atomic energy was more than a military matter—soldiers would control the whole business right now."

"Grant that. You did get the AEC appointed. The brass doesn't run the whole domestic show. But the world show is run entirely from the viewpoint of possible war."

"Do you expect the physicists to be able to do anything about Russia and the Iron Curtain—when all the statesmen of all the nations can't drive a pinhole in it?"

"Look. There are too many places where you lads aren't really scientific at all. You run a magazine to investigate ways for avoiding atomic war. Men make war. But never in your Bulletin did I once see an article about human motivations. An article by a top-notch psychologist. A digest, even, of the existing science of human personality—and how that might apply to war, to atomic bombs, to international relations."

"Psychology isn't our business. We're specialists."

I slightly sneered at him. "Son, when you are trying to stop wars, psychology is the only business you're in! You're in the business of trying to answer the questions about what makes men tick—including the tick they make these days that sounds so much like an infernal machine. But you think that's still the reason—business."

"A lot of big shots," Paul answered, "have called on the psychologists to contribute. Asked them to speed the work on their science and the science of sociology—so we'll have a solid technical basis for establishing peace."

"Yeah. They have. And not one God-damned super-brain in the barrel has stopped to note for a moment—so far as I'm aware—that the psychologists are 'way ahead of them. The science of personality—of behavior—of consciousness and instinct—is well along. The psychologists could tell them why men fight. They could tell them why—so far as present evidence indicates—men are going to go right ahead having wars—atomic bombs, germs, and all—into the far, foreseeable future."

"Why?" he asked mildly.

"Oh—because they exploit individualism and never take any responsibility for it. Their hostilities and aggressions, frustrations and fears—add up, inside their groups, and burst out, since they're never even noticed, let alone dealt with, on the personal and private level, where they originate."

"So you have written," he grinned. "So what? Should we pure scientists simply say that peace is hopeless? Quit cold? Or try for peace with what we do know?"

"You and your pure science! Pure is a word that should be forbidden all of you. What's pure in a science that deals exclusively with the object and rules out the subject doing the dealing?"

"Just," Paul answered, "the result. If we hadn't ruled man out of man's investigations, we'd still believe the earth was flat, the sky was a cup, and the stars were holes in it. We'd still be premedieval—"

"Yet—when you did establish the objective facts to a considerable degree—set up physics and chemistry and biology—did you boys then turn that knowledge and that method upon yourselves?"

"You claim," Paul answered airily, "that the psychologists have done so."

"Yes. And you needn't pretend I have no right to make the claim. You scientists, self-styled, let a few doctors—ridiculed by the public and unassisted by you—do the investigating of the consciousness you were applying to electrons and protons. They used your method—the empirical method. They have announced their results steadily for the past half century. You never even looked them over. So now what are you? Big cheeses in the high-tension labs. Mere mice, around the psychological clinics. Hunting in your Bulletin for a way to stop war when, really, you haven't a good kindergarten knowledge of what war is and how it comes about."

"If there were enough psychiatrists, then—we wouldn't have to worry?"

"Be sarcastic!" I said. "All you birds need a good psychiatrist." He winced at that, rather sharply, I thought. But I didn't let up on him. "Guys like you are aware enough to see that perhaps Hitler could have used a psychoanalysis. You are not aware enough to see that any president of any big engineering school could use it, too. Why? Because you think pretty much as he thinks. And neither of you can see that your thinking is largely emotion and only somewhat logic. The great blunder of science was to imagine that science could be indefinitely developed for the physical benefit of man and never concurrently applied to his subjective needs, states, motives."

"It was hard enough for the early scientists to get across the simple truth about objects. If they'd tampered with man's beliefs—they'd all have been burned to death."

"What about you later scientists, then? Would anybody burn old Johann Brink to death, today, say for studying Freud?"

Paul chuckled. "The picture is beyond imagining."

"Yeah. And I'm sick of it. All your eminent predecessors rushed ahead investigating stars and bugs and drugs and air currents and left any inquiry into man himself to philosophers—who were usually ignorant even of physical science—or to James and Wundt and a few trying, solitary people. You didn't ever really apply science. Not all science to all reality. You just promulgated pure science along exactly half of its possible lines—and called it a job. Looking forever at the light outside—and never at the interior dark. Justifiable in a sense. But not bright. And not really scientific at all."

"Hear, hear!"

"If the Greeks had worked out math and aerodynamics and built flyable air frames—without bothering to study the problem of engines, we would regard them as remarkably skillful imbeciles. They would have littered old Attica with the fusilages of Piper Cubs and maybe B-29's that couldn't get off the ground. In a sense, that's what they did do: they pushed knowledge ahead along certain lines a certain distance—and never followed through. You goons are still doing the same half-baked job."

"You want us to quit studying physics and start picking up stuff about the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry?"

"It's too late. That's the assignment for the next civilization."

He just looked at me.

After a while, I went on. "You birds say that knowledge is power—yet all your knowledge turns into impotence when you want it used for human harmony and peace. What is the power, then?"

"Let me guess. Instinct. You see—as an old Wylie reader—"

I heaved a cushion at him and enjoyed a little of my second cup of coffee. "Instinct. You dumb bastards! If you were really dedicated to science, as you say, the last war would never have happened. And the next one wouldn't be forever imminent. You say you believe that scientific knowledge should be free to all. Freedom of knowledge, you say, to put it backwards, is essential to science. But every time the nations get miffed at each other—you lice lock yourselves up in the national labs and go to war against each other as much as any soldier. The old herd instinct. The old ego. Intellectual fealty to scientific principles? You have none!"

"I kind of resent that," Paul said slowly.

"You resent the accusation. We who are about to die of the fact resent your behavior. Or should. If you pure scientists were pure guys purely devoted to science, Hitler could never have hired a dozen of the lot of you in Germany, or Stalin coerced six. If you had insisted on keeping science free—the Wehrmacht could never have been armed. If you had been scientific men, not men practicing science—even granting you felt it necessary to wipe out the Axis—when the deed was done, you could simply have published all the atomic facts and be damned to the politicians and the so-called patriots. Left mankind to work out its destinies in a climate where knowledge was still free. As it is—Russia knows enough to wipe up America in a few more years—the patriots and politicians are living in a fool's paradise—your Bulletin sweats monthly to explain that sinister fact—and all you gained by assenting to the current lockup of freedom of knowledge is a bureaucratic sweatbox to do your work in—and a terrible endless case of jitters. You don't understand behavior well enough to predict the results of your own. Others do. And by far the most probable result of the failure of pure scientists to behave purely toward science will be the end of the possibility of further top-level scientific investigation for a century or two."

"You think I should sit down and write out all the atomic secrets I know and print them and scatter them from a plane?"

"I do not. I think you should sit down and face the fact that science is precisely as hypocritical as religion—essentially no different from it—hamstrung in the opposite tendon by the same egotistical means. Sinful—call it. Guilty. The scientist can see the lack of logic in religion—so he rules it out. He doesn't see the import of its universal existence. The religious man can see that physical science offers precisely nothing of value to his inner sensibilities—but fails to see the meaning of logic. So he neglects to learn science and applies logic only when it flushes his toilet or eradicates his foes. You're both apes."

Paul swallowed the last of his ice. For a moment he sat without speaking, the reflected sunlight softening his sharp features. Then he said, "I hate to think anybody understands anything I don't. And I strongly suspect you do."

"I strongly know I damned well do."

There was another pause. Paul pulled his nose. He drew a breath to speak—and gave up the impulse. His eyes turned inward. Little by little, his limbs sagged. An expression of the utmost melancholy passed like a shadow over his face and was followed by lines of resolution—lines I did not like because, visible in them, was conflict—unacknowledged discontent mixed with unknown resolve.

"I'm in a terrible mess, Phil."

"Aren't we—and so forth?"

"I want to quit."

"The Lab?"

He nodded. "There is something positively bestial—in the worst sense—about going any further with schemes to turn physical theory into mere implements of death."

"Instinct coming to your rescue. I thought you liked the work?"

"I did. As long as it was a series of problems. Now—it's getting to be a cold choice of means for engineering murder. That's no fun. It's like spending all your time figuring out how to destroy your own home—after you've already hit on half a dozen nifty ways."

"Why not quit, then?"

"Brink—for one. I like the old guy. I'm indispensable to him—I at least pretend. And I feel loyal."

"Talk it over with him."

"No use. He's got the idea that he's engaged in some sort of holy mission—a personal war against all tyranny, right or left. That he, and we, and guys like us, must keep out in front—from the weapons standpoint—until every tyrant's done for."

"Tyranny, Paul, isn't a gent. It's something inside everybody."

He drew a long, sighing breath and abandoned the subject. Soon, he grinned at me. "Phil, I came as near praying you'd be in town today as I get to prayer. When the telephone operator put me through—I like to fainted with gratitude."

"How much," I asked caustically, "do you want to borrow?" Then I wondered if I ought to lend anybody more money.

He laughed. "Money, a guy like me can always use. Someday, though, I'll take time out and invent a quicker way to make ice cubes, or a better zipper, and get rich and pay you back. I keep a record of the debt on a letter I got from Fermi—a cherished possession."

He would, too, I thought. Get rich and pay back—Ricky. "Hundred bucks?"

"That wasn't why I wanted to see you. But thanks." He fumbled in his mind for some sort of beginning. "Oh, hell," he finally said. "What I want to say can be put in two sentences. And they're the hardest two I ever had to speak. I haven't tried them on anybody yet. But I've got to—with someone. Meaning you. It goes like this." For a full minute he sat there saying nothing. Then he pushed back his rather long chestnut hair and looked at me squarely—with an expression in his eyes that I would remember for a long time, if I had a long time to remember in. "I'm in love. And the girl's a whore." He turned away from me, after that, and looked toward the window, toward afternoon blue sky into which the sun still pointed. His chin was shaking.

I thought of several responses and picked one carefully. "All right. It's said—the whole thing. It leaves me fairly undisturbed, Paul."

"I guess you don't understand—don't believe me. I mean it. The girl actually was—a professional tart. A call girl. What they hold to be a high-class one."

"So I gathered. I've known several cases."

"It—" He swallowed hard a time or two. "Mind if I have another Scotch?"

I shook my head.

He ordered and began once again. "I didn't know it—like a dope—for a long time. I can't even tell whether or not knowing it right off—would have made a difference. I suppose it would. I suppose I'd just have been bitter—because I couldn't afford her. The name's Marcia."

"Nice name."

"Yeah. Look, Phil. It was last winter—after I got back from Eniwetok. Some of the directors of a big corporation where I'd been called in for a conference asked me to a party. Marcia was there. I suppose that the other girls were the same." He looked at his knuckles. "Scratch that. I know they were—now. Nobody said anything about it. Just—big corporation hospitality for people like me, whose advice might make them a few more millions. I sat around drinking cocktails and having a swell time and thinking that the girls had got prettier while I was in the Pacific, working. I didn't know they were to take home—like candy—compliments of the management. And Marcia didn't mention the fact when I asked her if she'd care to ditch the binge and have supper just with me."

"No."

"She merely went. She went—and was charming. You see—she caught onto my naïve assumptions, and she was being paid, and it amused her to be thought of as just an ordinary girl—a debutante, or the like—for whom a smart young physicist was falling like a ton of bricks." He looked at me again. His explanation was coming more easily. "Do you get the picture?"

"She must be bright. As well as attractive."

He nodded. "She has a sense of drama. All I did—feeling suffused that evening with love—was to take her to her apartment and bid her a pleasant good night. She asked me in—sure. Even tried to argue me in. But I was thinking in terms of the long and sentimental pursuit. Or—at least—decorum. Not-the-first-night, baby. That's me. Gentleman of the old school. I extracted her phone number—it wasn't difficult—and escorted her home, and went out to Brooklyn to my flat—and dreamed into my pipesmoke. Happy me."

He was silent for so long that I said, "And then?"

"I called her up the next afternoon. She was busy." A muscle shaped itself in his temple, twitched, vanished. "So I made a date for another evening. We had dinner and danced around—at the Stork. On dough you lent me. And that evening I accepted the invitation to go into her apartment with her. You see—she wasn't merely diverted by a dope—but she felt she owed me something. Something that corporation had paid for. Only—"

"It was different for her."

He seemed surprised. "How'd you know?"

"I'm thinking of the difference that would understandably exist between a guy who was paying—and a guy in love with you."

"It upset her."

"So she tried to duck you."

He was still more surprised. "She told me she'd be out of town for a couple of weeks."

"And you waited—"

"—the all-time eager beaver. And phoned. She sounded—odd. She asked me if I'd like to come up to her place for dinner—said she didn't feel like going out. She cooked. I know now that she had planned to tell me—that night. Instead—well, she didn't. She said she worked some as a model—which she had done. She said she had an income—not said, just hinted. I asked her to marry me—around three A.M."

"Just what did she do about that?"

"She cried. Quietly. Told me that she'd taken a fall out of marriage—which was also true. Didn't want to risk it again—not without being sure of the guy. And said there weren't any such guys as—she needed."

"Pretty close to being pretty nice."

Paul answered the door, took the drink, and put his own dollar on Karl's tray. "It went that way for about two months. Then she told me." His ice clinked without his volition. "The whole story—straight out—beginning at dinner one evening in the Waldorf. The guy she married—a smug, sadistic twirp. Getting divorced. Coming to New York. Scrimping along on modeling jobs. Running into Hattie Blaine. Ever heard of her?"

Who hadn't? Hattie was madam to Manhattan's upper set. I gave a nod.

"Hattie sold her on the idea—after quite a campaign. Marcia went to work. That was about three years ago. I took her home that night—placidly enough—and went for the walk that lasts till they put out the sidewalks again. Then I phoned Johann I was sick—and got sick, drinking. For a month or so more, I tried the old Presbyterian anodyne: work. No use."

"Not when you're young."

"Later?"

"It comes with time. Go ahead."

"When I had all but burned out my main bearings, I phoned her. Maybe you won't believe it—but Marcia was going to phone me that evening. We talked it over. She moved to my flat and got a job."

"So?"

"We might get married."

"She want to?"

"She refuses—now. I'm not always certain I want to, myself." He stuck his forefinger into his shoe and tugged at the counter. "And I don't know why. Why I want to marry her. Why I'm uncertain."

"How do your—?" I broke that off.

But he got it. "My friends think she's swell. You gathered she was good-looking. She's a tall, slender gal with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Quiet. You'd never think—! But I went into that, didn't I? She attended college, in Iowa, for a year—and she likes to read. By that I mean—"

"Nobody else—?"

"Christ, no. They think she's a working gal—which she is, now: a nice friend of mine."

"Someday—" I stopped there—again.

"Yes." His face whitened. "A putty-chinned, overweight lodge brother from Keokuk, just tight enough to miss the stony stare and come up with the big hello. It's happened."

"I see."

"She went home and had hysterics."

"Bring her over."

Paul looked at me thoughtfully. "You are upset."

"Sure. Now. You are. So bring her over. Not tonight—or tomorrow night. I'm busy."

"What about lunch tomorrow? She's not working and I can slide out."

"Lunch, then. Come around one."

The family's very fond of Paul and a good many of us have tried to spoil him. He was one of those irresistible kids—the kind that wears glasses, has braces on his teeth, raises bizarre pets, looks up everything in the encyclopedia, and is always engaged in a project about five years ahead of his current age—so that he is always in deep water and needs help. Everybody helped Paul. When he grew up—through one of the most gangling and precocious adolescences in the history of youth—the aunts, sisters, and female cousins used to argue constantly about his looks. Was he genuinely handsome, did he merely have character in his face, or was he plain ugly but friendly-looking? The argument was never decided. But, at least, he looked better when his eyesight was corrected, the spectacles were abandoned, and the braces had come off his teeth.

I walked Paul to the door and pulled out my bill-clip. There were a couple of fifties in it and I gave them to him. Not much else—so—when he'd gone, I wrote a check to cash and phoned for Bill the bellman. He came up and took my check and brought the money back in a few minutes. I gave him fifty cents—knowing it was too much—knowing I had always tipped too much—knowing that I had never cared because I'd been brought up amidst nickel pinchers and because I like to please the people around me—and realizing all of a sudden that I would go right on being extravagant till the day I died which, luckily for my estate, probably wouldn't be far off.

In this connection, one trifle should be mentioned which on looking over these minutes, I see I haven't got to.

It crossed my mind at this point, as it had earlier in the day.

I walked over and sat on the arm of a wing chair, staring out at the hot evening. New York often has a marine sky to which, being a seaport, it is entitled. That night the clouds were low and small—evenly spaced and of a size. When the sun hit them, it turned them several different colors—a dappled effect, like a peacock's tail in which orange, not iridescent blue-green, was the predominating tinge. It was getting on toward seven.

I thought about my dollar-strewing habits and the fact that I probably wouldn't much reduce what funds I'd stored up myself and reluctantly but methodically amassed in the coffers of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company.

Tom-the-doctor had said the damned excrescence in my craw, if mortal, wouldn't be operable. That meant I wouldn't be lying around in some hospital, like so many of them, at umpteen bucks a day, while they slowly took out my neck. It meant, so far as I was concerned, that a day would come along when I would make up my mind the books no longer balanced. A day, that is, when pain or mechanical difficulties made it impossible to proceed with the prose. When I couldn't write any more.

That day, I would have completed my best effort to get my affairs in order. I'd have seen the people I loved—and seen them before it was an ordeal for them to see me. I do not have a horror—but a kind of intellectual rage—over meaningless, agonizing, nonproductive, lingering existence. In my life, I've seen a great deal of it. I have seen people who were a stinking nursing problem twenty-four hours a day—who were afflicted with fantastic agony besides—and who implored their relatives, friends, and physicians to put them out of their misery—but who lived in that state for a couple of years.

By taking a reasonable amount of thought, and through a certain amount of luck, I have avoided several of the pitfalls into which man persistently topples. Into others, I've all but pitched myself. But this was one I intended to skip. In the kit I carry for boat trips is a hypodermic syringe and a thin little bottle of morphine tablets. I've never had to use them on the broken leg, the gasoline burn, the leader-wire cut, for which they are always ready. But, when the day came which, in my judgment, would turn the balance of life, I knew precisely what I would do. I had always known, even before I had owned such gentle means.

You dissolve all the tablets—five grains—and fill the barrel of the hypo. You jab yourself and push.

Simple.

The reader of these notes may therefore spare himself—as I spared myself—as all human beings should be spared—the anticipation of death dragged out excruciatingly by the miracles of science.

That is one of the items on the gigantic ledger in which are gathered those details that prove modern man is mad.

Too many people, for one thing, when they get to dying, want to top Jesus. Wanting that, inevitably, they want to kill as many others as possible by Christlike torture— forgetting that even He had his legs broken as a method of mercy killing.

My apologies, then, for not entering this note sooner.

I sat at the window and I could have pulled out my own hair, or wept, (or roared with laughter) on account of Paul.

I knew Paul pretty well, and loved him.

And I did not believe he was enough of a realist or a humorist to marry a harlot and prosper in his soul.

Whoever she was, she would eat him away altogether, or eat away years of him. When he found himself out—that he could not accept himself with her—it might be too late. He was stubborn. The ordeal would continue—brave front and eroding guts. What should a man do?

I am not my brother's keeper.

How often that wretched phrase has been used as the alibi for vicious neglect!

How rarely has it served in the intended sense. It is but a warning to Peeping Toms, to Meddlesome Matties and Interfering In-Laws, Overweening Do-gooders, Paul Prys, the Rabble of the Self-righteous.

Would God the Peepul understood the Words of Jesus had one meaning, always, and often the opposite of the convenient, accepted interpretation; that their Christ appreciated how nothing can be truly said of the Father that does not make a suitable apothegm for Beelzebub!

Who asked them to interpret, anyway?

He told them to act.

I am not my brother's keeper.

The Holy Writ that John Sumner never comprehended, or Anthony Comstock, old Cotton Mather, and a dozen billion more.

What man, seeing even a pig caught under a fence, does not pull it out, although it might be the Sabbath?

Which is germane to the circumstance?

What of the Good Samaritan?

I left the sunset hanging over the gray composite of the roofs—the willow trees in penthouse gardens, the chimneypots that twirled with supper cooking, and the fly-eyed walls, the thousand-lenses, the bloodshot windows staring at New Jersey—staring from the square sides of skyscrapers that towered around me in stiff, unplanned attention, waiting for night, waiting with God knew what stony thoughts and brickish resignation—doubtless for Soviet rockets.

I pushed down my shorts, kicked them onto a bed as Paul had kicked his jacket, and turned on the water in the tub.

I lay down there, donning the warm garment gradually, the wet, the clean, the only other that fits as perfectly as the grave. I turned off the tap with my foot. I looked at my skin, which was still fairly smooth, for all the long time I'd worn it, weathered it, and given it unnatural chores of excretion.

Good-bye to All That. Good-bye Mr. Chips. And Miss Chippies.

Yak-yak. This is the cup. And take this cup from me. Nyanh-nyanh. I soaped the person. The phone rang. It does.

You get out of the bathtub. You wrap a towel around your midriff and make footprints on your rug. You sit and drip.

The operator says, "One moment, please. Rushford calling."

If her boy friend had too many beers on the night before, she hurts your ear.

This mug must have been rolling.

"Hello, dear."

Rickey's voice was as clear as heaven's door-chimes.

I could feel my heart jumping around inside me, trying to straighten things up in a hurry.

"Hello, Tud." It rhymes with "good" and doesn't mean anything to anybody but us.

"How are you—you sound—worried?"

My banging heart must have left a chair out of place somewhere. I took a good breath and pushed whatever it was back into the regular design. "Naw. Maybe tired. Been working. Paul was here. I'm worried about him—if that's what you mean."

"I guess so. I called up because I thought maybe you were planning to call me this evening."

"Was."

"Mother and I are going up to Brookses to play bridge. So we'd have been out, if you'd have called. What about Paul?"

"He's living in sin with a dame he's nuts about—and he found out after he went overboard that she's an old understudy from Hattie Blaine's finishing school for young ladies."

"Oh, dear." Rickey can put all her compassion into two syllables—and it's compassion enough for a saint.

"I was dawdling around here cogitating ways and means—"

She giggled. "In the tub, I bet."

"Think what Socrates accomplished in a tub. Not to mention Archimedes."

"The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker," she replied amiably. "Then there was that show-girl who bathed in champagne. Her tub landed her in jail. Any number of people have opened their arteries in tubs. They put tubs under guillotines—north end. A tub cuts both ways, dear—"

"What should I do, then? Maybe you take dust baths. Maybe that makes people brighter. The genius is a quaking mass of emotional mincemeat. Hasn't told a soul but me. Dumped it in my lap. Regarded it as an Act of God that I happened to be here when the confessional mood came over him. Typical physicist—solve any equation but the human."

Rickey said, "Did you see her?"

"Tomorrow. Lunch."

"It just won't work—for him."

"Yeah."

"Is he—terribly—?"

"The works. Head-over-heels."

"Oh, dear! Has it been long?"

"Six-seven months."

"Then—it could take him six or seven years to—"

"Some kind of female arithmetic. But probably solid."

"You could call up Hattie and talk to her and find out—"

"I've considered that. What do I ask Hattie? Is Marcia sincere—like sincere in a Freddie Wakeman character?"

"Marcia?"

"M'm'm'm."

"If it was only Dolores! Or Fern or Pearl!"

"More woman-palaver. And it's Marcia. And she was in college for a while. She reads books."

"You could ask if she's sweet. You know what to ask, dope."

"I will pull a low-brimmed hat over my eyes, slip a roscoe into my pocket, print up a few dozen private-eye calling cards, and fare forth—"

"It would help to know something more about her than Paul's feelings. Then call me up. How's the work?"

"Oh—a needle in every haystack."

"You ought to have a little fun."

"I'm enjoying every paragraph."

"Why don't you call up Murray's and take some more lessons? Maybe if you put in enough roadwork and a few more thousand dollars—you could finally learn to tango."

"Damn your pretty eyes! Why don't you study how to follow?"

Ricky laughed. "No fooling! You work too much. If you don't play some, you'll burn yourself out in another forty-six years. You've been getting stale around here."

"Tell me about the birds and the flowers and Popcorn."

Popcorn is one of the cocker pups—all white. Quite a dog. Popcorn had got into the garbage pit and trapped himself for two hours. There had been a squall. The wind had blown over the delphiniums. The 2-4-D I'd sprayed around was already wilting weeds that had defied generations of her forebears. She was going to dig up and separate the crocuses in the rock garden. She had decided I wouldn't finish building the water lily pool for another year and she was planning to use the excavation for composting. There were two young downy woodpeckers and an oriole at the bird feeding station that afternoon.

"Don't work too hard," she repeated. "And have some fun."

"I'm weary and I'm bored and I'm lonely." God knew I was lonely, anyhow.

"It's good for you."

"I hope you starve emotionally."

"It is a big bridge party and I am going to sit beside Mr. Teel."

Mr. Teel is an aging squire who lives in the lush Genesee bottom land and can't keep his hands off. I was laughing. I was also biting back the desire to tell her to drive to Buffalo and grab the night plane.

"The trouble," I said, "with ladies and Mr. Teel is that they fidget and flush, squirm and put up with it. Personally, I think they like it."

"Should I scream?"

"Lord, no. Worst possible technique. When you bid six spades and start playing it and you notice something on your knee of about the weight of a man's hand, there are three good possibilities. Relax and enjoy it. This is what I recommend. However, you can also idly lower the tip of your cigarette and apply it. The third, very good, move is to lean forward as if staring myopically at the dummy—reach under the table yourself—and grab back in a way Mr. Teel will never forget."

"You know everything, don't you?"

"Need you ask?"

"Except that we're wasting a lot of money on Long Distance. Are you sure you're all right?"

Women's ears! "Yeah."

"Then good night."

"Night, darling."

What dripped now was not eau de Croton Reservoir. It came from Wylie's pores.

Almost—I called her back about the plane.

She had sounded fine—thank God!

It was not always so.

We had been married, Ricky and I, for two years (was it three?) and built a candy-box house on an island in Biscayne Bay (before the sixty sewers of Greater Miami belched the water sludge-thick) when she fell sick. Brucellosis, they called it, or undulant fever. In cattle, Bang's disease. The cows abort. They told us it was common everywhere in our fair land and caught from unpasteurized milk, or cheese, ice cream, or meat improperly inspected. The pasteurization laws in those days, they said, were altogether inadequate; inspection was bad; and cattle owners—they said further—were loath to lose their stricken animals. For a small bribe, we were told, they might be warned of impending inspection. Thereupon, they could drive the afflicted members of their herds into hiding while the government agent went by. They were in business (after all) and a buck is sacred; so are American sacred cattle sacred; let the public look after itself. Some of the cowmen don't believe the germ theory, anyhow; they think hygiene is one more racket like their own. And some, of course, like a certain proportion of the men in every business, would sell you leper's dung (neatly packaged—nationally advertised) if there were money in it.

They sold the milk.

We drank it.

Some get brucellosis—some not. Some hundreds of thousands of free American citizens. It is one of the marvels of our Age.

Some die.

Some heal themselves, in due time.

Others, like my Ricky, drag out the years in pain, debility, and sorrow. Fits of fever seize them. They take to their beds for days, for weeks, for months—racked and suffering and exhausted, sick at their stomachs, sick in their heads. The gram-negative bacterium is (they say) neurotoxic. It inflames the ganglia of the brain. The patient may expect not merely fever and pains, but constant anxiety, causeless fears, a collapse of the calmest temper, hysterias, heebie-jeebies, screaming meemies, spasms, and incomprehensible alarms.

You must try to ignore it, Mrs. Wylie. Personality changes occur owing merely to the nature of your disease. Devote your (changed) self to a consideration of the change as physical phenomenology. You are lucky to get your trouble diagnosed. Hundreds of thousands of undulant fever sufferers spend their lives running from one doctor to another without avail. They're told they have tuberculosis, intestinal poisoning, brain tumor, neurasthenia, and bad dispositions. Medicine is—though the fact's not medicine's fault—very laggard about recognizing this common malady. Consider yourself lucky.

Ricky threw into the tormented years her fortitude. She said she was fortunate. They knew the name of her ailment and they were doing all they could.

Hospitals and clinics, X rays and tests, sulfas and antibiotics, vaccines and sterile sores—a little improvement, a red-hot localization and the hospital again. Coming fine! Another year or two and you should feel—pretty much your old self. Patience. Courage.

Well. She had plenty.

The doctors—the dozens, the scores, mauled and mangled and encouraged.

We have great hope for this new immunizing serum.

She took it.

Stubborn case, Mrs. Wylie. You seem to be especially sensitive to brucella.

Streptomycin holds out hope.

We find it, in a chronic case like yours—ineffectual.

Some new mold is what we are searching for.

The years—two—three—five—continued with their hopes and horror.

It may be, Mrs. Wylie, that brucella sterilizes women in the same way it causes cattle to abort. Not all the sufferers—but a percentage. Of course, we aren't sure. But I wouldn't set my heart on having children, now. You're not in condition now, anyway; and when you've recovered, you may find it is impossible.

She is a game girl, Ricky.

Two years ago, she began to get well.

We have had our fingers crossed—

crossed—and held tightly in the clamp of one more hope.

I thought about her.

These things—and how she was still that same calm girl.

And how could I tell her, that perhaps it was my turn?

Gradually I got myself into the tub again.

I shaved, then.

We are all afraid of Five O'clock Shadow. Such fears, indeed, have become paramount for most of us.

Yuts.

What was Paul's idiom?

Cipher-faces—standing around waiting for somebody to put a minus one in front of them. Hitler, Stalin, or Huey Long. Zero-pusses, he called them. Zed-mugs. Neck-heads. Neonightmares. Two-legged negatives.

I shaved, thinking I was positive, anyhow. Wait till they focused their bright peepers on that biopsy!

I wished I had a little music to cheer up the joint. All I could hear was passing cargo on Madison Avenue, the elevator ruminating in its shaft, and some dame in the bathroom above me talking to a little kid with the motherly tones of a cement mixer. The sweet child was answering in words I could not distinguish, but it knew how to mix concrete, too.

Ricky and I haven't owned a radio for years—except one that sneaked into the house in a record-player and we didn't even notice we had that, for eight months. A man in this world encounters more than he can bear of the sort of thing that radio purveys; it is Heaven's own mercy if he can avoid a part of it. The printed ads and the billboards get you willy-nilly; and second-class mail is always fooling you. You are eternally exposed to entertainment by chumps in the flesh.

But when I want a cerebral clyster I want something that won't wash my brain out. And while I can eat with my mouth I propose to get along without the nutrient enema. Every orifice to its rightful function, I say.

But now I wanted music.

So I called Bill-the-bellman again. To think (as you are beginning to see) is to act, with me. Sometimes. And the Astolat doesn't have what is correctly called piped radio in its rooms. Bill brought up a machine with knobs like the eyes of dead fish and an illuminated grin for a dial—such a grin as may be seen on any alligator lamp.

I spun through about eighteen of my fellow citizens who were uniformly engaged in lying to the public and finally hit a girl with too much rosin on her voice, which was what I wanted.

"When a Broadway baby goes to bed It's early in the morning—"

I did a feather and a few more Peabody steps and a couple of advance left turns.

The dame put a mute on the bridge of her nose.

Broadway dreamed off to her lullaby.

She began, "Say it with music—"

I thought of Palmer Gymnasium on the Princeton Campus in about 1922—the June, the quiet trees, the cigarettes like cherry-colored fireflies, the flappers, a cicada competing with strings and woodwinds, and me outside because I didn't have the spondulix and the tux. My throat thickened with something sharper than carcinoma.

If only I had known then what I know now.

And suddenly I remembered that I had known.

In that musky dark, in the dark of a thousand other disappointed evenings, in the beam and blister of every day, I had been tightening the spring for the run. The anticipated journey—the slatting of my choo-choo train around its silver track.

I knew then because I was doing it.

And I knew now, but differently, because it was done.

That poignancy was not this.

Beneath the fragrant maples and beyond the envious desuetude had burned the gathering assurance.

The response to challenge.

Spondulix, tux, and young girls' tongues, and stingers, too.

Incidents.

Repressions, Mr. Wylie. Inferiority, Phil.

What had kept me so steadfast despite my passions of despair? Despite all music—despite the Weltschmerz of underprivileged sophomores?

I looked at my old friend, The Typewriter.

"Somehow they'd rather be kissed To the strains of Chopin or Liszt—"

The more we succeed the more we fail.

When I am gone, who'll write on you and say the same things better?

Plenty of them, Philip.

You never put the bar up where even you could jump.

Who ever did?

It was damned near eight o'clock.

I got dressed fast.

PART TWO

Tarantella

1

The desk clerk told me that Mrs. Prentiss had Room 1603—the apartment, not only next to mine but accessible from mine by a set of doors—now partly locked: I'd turned the key in the door on my side and tried the other, when I'd arrived.

"I thought," I said, "that she was a few floors down—"

"She moved this afternoon, Mr. Wylie. To get out of the heat, where there was more air."

Or more something.

I hung up and looked at the doors.

The promise not to make a pass at her naturally crossed my mind. It was, evidently, a one-sided commitment. At this season there weren't many guests in the hotel so she'd had no difficulty in moving near me. I wondered whether she would admit it or pretend it was a coincidence; and bet the latter way. Honi soit qui mal n'y pense pas.

I checked myself in the mirror. Then I knocked on her door. The proper hall one.

She wore the gardenias in her hair—a white dress with a gold border stenciled around the hem—and her shoes and pocketbook were gold, too. The big diamond had evidently been sent down to the safe-deposit boxes, or left on her bureau—depending on which sort of person she was. Her hair was done up—with the curls among the flowers. She looked as attractive as she intended. Cool, too.

"Am I stunning?"

I nodded. "But not ravishing. If the Hindus had untouchables at the top of the caste system—white priestesses, say—you'd qualify."

"You obviously don't know much about priestesses."

I rang for the elevator.

"That," I pointed, "is my demesne, abode, diggings—"

"I know. I asked. And moved."

"Why, exactly?"

I suppose she wanted her eyes to be interesting. They were just—disturbed. "To tease you."

"Tease whom?"

She blushed the peach tinge I'd noticed before. "Me." Then she shook her head at herself. "Because I'm lonely, maybe. Because I have a kind of phobia about hotels. I don't know."

I took her to the Crépuscule—the steps down and the moonlit air conditioning—the blue leather benches—the violin, cello, and piano accordion—the little dance floor in the corner with mirrors on two sides—and the French cuisine. The trio there has rhythm and the cellist plays maracas when he feels like it, so you can rumba.

She had a dry Martini and I had tomato juice. Then I asked her and we danced a couple of fox trots. She was a little bit nervous for a minute or so and presently she wasn't. I asked the trio for a bolero; the two other couples quit; and we danced alone. Afterward we danced to a piece called "Cu-Gu-Tu-Ru" which is also known as "Jack-Jack." She understood, technically, about dancing the rumba and she gave some indication of feelings for the part that is more instinctive than planned. Once or twice she tried to lead me—without being aware of it.

If you know a good deal about dancing, you can tell a good deal about girls that you'd be a long time in learning by any other means. People are animals—and dancing among animals is several hundred million years older than the species that calls itself Homo sapiens. There was rhythm on the planet long before there were ballrooms. So you can expect vestiges, at least, in woman-the-animal, of impulses which belong to the skeleton, muscles, and nerves and not to society—vestiges specifically interpreted, disciplined or repressed by the individual in your arms. The woman's dancing says, This is what the world has done to me—or hasn't. And it is the same for men—which is why women, who live closer to their instincts, like to dance.

This circumstance, alas, has for so long been repudiated by our forebears that the dancing of most American males is rude and boorish and clumsy, at once self-assertive and self-conscious, unimaginative, disrhythmic, unsubtle—paranoid. It is what the world has done to them.

You can talk to a woman all night and persuade her of nothing.

You can hold her hand and a chemical change will take place in her.

You can kiss her in certain ways and the Old Memories will do what rhetoric cannot.

And you can dance with her.

If you can dance.

You can dance by fox trot, the American way, the integration of surfaces. We know the same steps, the same skills, the same beat. We look well together. We make a matched pair. The thresholds of our sentiments mesh, dovetail, tongue-and-groove. We are, indeed, in the groove.

You can use the dance of conquest and gradual assent, the tango.

Or the rumba.

Which is African. Studied teleology, stylized candor, libido embedded in the music, suspended in cadences, arrested, sustained—beyond intellect, this side of ecstasy. It is a sophistication that northern countries never knew of—a primitive deliberation, a hot-blooded coolness. For not knowing, they are punished by going without—and in other, obscure fashions. Very few northern women and fewer men, excepting among the young, are able to discover the essence.

They rumba—they say.

They wave their tails like pennants, the oscillating flesh corrupt in Christian purity.

Yvonne was one of the few.

She came honestly by the name, I thought.

"Huguenots," she said when we sat down. "On mother's side."

How can the Americans ever cleanse themselves?

I ordered our dinner.

Again, she tried to lead—to change her mind—to demur—to say she wasn't hungry—then to consider the cold roast beef.

"You'll like it," I said. If she had insisted, I'd have let her order for herself. But she didn't want anything in particular to eat. She wanted to see what happened to her slight, vain whims. So I ignored them.

"You can have another Martini."

"I guess I must?"

"Sure. Must. Dinner will take a few minutes and we won't dance again till after."

"You're terribly positive."

"Nonsense," I said. "You're used to men who have been beaten to death by women before you got hold of them."

Her eyes fixed on me, dilated, and she laughed. "Rol."

"Among all the others. Maleness has just about disappeared in your native land, sister. The boys are all brought up by women, and taught by women in school, and then they go to work to support women by manufacturing and distributing the things women think they want. It's called civilization—and actually it's only the highest form barbarism has yet reached. Trinket-and-gadget society. Domestic convenience society. A society that holds a handkerchief to one end and sets the other on a flush toilet—a society that aims to make the linen germicidal and the toilet silent, colored, and perfumed."

"And men? What do they do? Use fingers and squat?"

"You're learning too fast. Live outdoors, avoid neurosis, and so escape the common cold. I think they could stand for the flush toilet—but they would be more concerned in getting the nitrogen back to the topsoil than they would in the orchid rims. First things first and a conscious sense of responsibility for the future—that's us boys."

"Phooie!"

"Who do you like—to go on from lunch? Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Gregory Peck, or some of the new boy friends of the bobby-soxers I'm too old to remember the names of?"

"None of them. And I never saw Valentino in a picture."

"Meaning him."

"At least—he acted as if he had manners."

"On the contrary. He did, in a mannerly way, several things banned by the book of etiquette."

"Isn't that the same?"

"From the woman's viewpoint."

"Don't you ever get tired finding imaginary inferiorities in women?"

"Did I say it was inferior? It isn't. More realistic, in fact. Don't you, on the other hand, prefer to be appreciated for differences—rather than to worry over the need of proving identities?"

"Modern Woman—the Lost Sex. You got it out of the book."

"It's a pretty good book."

Yvonne watched the waiter exchange a filled glass for the empty one. She seemed to want to defer talking while she caught up with something in her mind. She sipped, and stared at the people eating dinner in the azure haze the place calls light, and sipped again. She had a good-sized mouth with a pretty shape: the lipstick went where the lips were, and nowhere else.

"I wanted to talk to you. I was ready to pester you. That's why I moved next door. I was going to let you find it out when we came back this evening. I was going to ask you in. I'm not afraid of you."

"Smallest achievement in the history of courage."

"I want to figure out what to do about Rol. You see—I'm still crazy about him."

"Send him to a good psychiatrist."

She exhaled with gentle violence. "Try it!"

"You said he was very upset—promised you anything. That was your chance to make him promise psychiatry. You seem to have read books about it—"

She shook her head. "Not many, really. You don't understand. Rol wasn't in the least bit upset because of what he'd done. He was upset about my attitude over it. He said it was a 'trivial incident'—and told me he loved me—and said I was frigid and what did I expect. He said he didn't consider he'd been unfaithful to me—and talked on and on about being 'human.' Imagine!"

"Are you?"

The blush came again. She spoke in a low voice, "Mostly."

"People," I said, "don't want to know about people, nowadays."

"Did they ever?"

"Here and there—by fits and starts. They had a short spell of wanting to find out about themselves through reason—a couple of centuries ago. Innumerable spells of trying to figure themselves out through religions."

"But not now?" She was sarcastic. "Nobody knows anything now?"

"The average college graduate doesn't even know where he is in relation to other objects. Couldn't point to the ecliptic. Or explain the changing seasons. Couldn't point toward the sun, at night. Friends of mine, well-known writers, belong to a society that believes the earth is flat. There's another buddyship of boobs who think the earth is hollow and we live inside. Till the government began financing research for war, America spent twice as much on astrology as on scientific investigation. The folks would rather, by twice, be fooled than find out the truth."

"We've made a lot of progress."

"Individuals have learned a lot. The people ignore it. They are interested in the applications of science—appalled by the implications. Our civilization is just one more swarm of low cheats. It won't last because cheats can't. Only inertia sustains the current shape of it, and that momentum is encountering more friction every day. A republic of crooked dumbbells can't safely use the instruments of clever men. People not only don't know how to behave, they don't even know they are ignorant. Yet in the main, people are thoroughly satisfied with themselves. In view of sure catastrophes that loom on every margin toward which they hurry—the very self-satisfaction of people is the statistical guarantor of their doom. Hence that crack about pride going before a fall."

"I think people behave rather well, on the whole."

"Sure. They'll even be decent about doomsday. Blame somebody else as they perish, like flies, but perish heroically. A pity."

"You can't depress me!"

I laughed. "Bear in mind that you brought up that word 'depress.' I'm not depressed. I've had to learn how to get along in the certainty that all I was taught to live for is either rubbish or a dream of a future that lies ages beyond the public expectation. People don't know—won't know—can't know, in their present frame of mind. Take your little problem, for example."

Her face changed. Interest replaced antagonism. "So all right. Take my problem. Kick that around awhile!"

"You believe in evolution?"

"A person can still believe in evolution—and in God!"

"Certainly. Something exists in men which they've given the name of all their gods. That's fact. And evolution is a fact, too—a simple reality. A minority of the educated people in our land have accepted the fact that man's body evolved from the bodies of other animals. A still smaller per cent realize that man's mind—personality—spirit—also must have evolved from animals and the animal equivalent: instinct. The question is, How? Most of such people believe that it is the supreme function of the conscious human mind to repress instinct. That's their answer."

"But not yours!"

"I believe it's the function of consciousness to rediscover instinct, understand it, and pursue it—in the ways that it has to go. That it does go—people by the billions to the contrary notwithstanding. So far, people have made only blind efforts in that direction. Unconscious efforts. Their religions—according to the soundest hypothesis I've encountered—are the results of such attempts: expressions of animal instinct, as it appears in men—and in men wholly unaware of what they are expressing."

"Is that Freud?"

"It's Jung. Freud never got that far. He merely demonstrated that instinct exists in man. The id—he called it. The raw cravings of the infant. To Freud—the id was pretty much what sin is to a preacher. A disgraceful bunch of bestial lusts and impulses. Society—through the parents, mostly—disciplined the id by disciplining the infant and the child; this produced the superego—or conscience, according to Freud. As far as Freud could see, man would always live amidst conflicts set up between his id and whatever superego, or culture, had been hammered around it—plus his own common sense, if any. Dismal view."

"And Jung?"

"Well—Freud showed that instinct exists as a basic motivation of mankind. Not that anybody but a few psychiatrists have ever paid attention to the discovery. But there it was—the beginning of a science of psychological evolution of people. Jung asked what instinct was and how it worked. Jung found out several things Freud only began to realize. For instance, Jung looked at animals and perceived that their instincts unfold in them, individually, as they mature."

"You mean, new-born beavers don't start building dams immediately?"

"Exactly. So the id of infancy is only part of instinct. More instinct appears as the person ages—which is in line with the nature of instinct in all other living beings. Next, Jung noticed that instinct in animals, and in primitive people who hardly ever use reason and logic abstractedly, takes care of the whole life cycle of every species. So it cannot be viewed as mere lawless, infantile lust. If it were only that, animals, and primitive men, would tear up each other and themselves; all life would commit suicide. From the animal viewpoint—instinct includes whatever animals do that men would call 'good,' 'virtuous,' 'unselfish,' 'self-sacrificing,' and so on. Do you follow?"

"I think so."

"There are—so to speak—checks and balances—compensations—counterinstincts. That's the idea embodied in Chinese philosophy. In Taoism, for example. That's the concept symbolized by the yin and the yang. It's the idea embodied in Toynbee's theory of history, too—right up till the present, when his own ego confuses its own description of instinct with history. At that point, Toynbee decided that the Church of England—his personal patternization of instinct—might salvage civilization. Which, of course, is pathetic. But let's drag this bundle a little bit further before we drop it and go back to you. If all animals have a proper pattern of instinct—man has. But man is to some extent conscious—and therefore to some degree able to separate out a personal identity of himself—an ego—from the older, more powerful compulsions and countercompulsions of his instinct. And he has used his consciousness—largely—not to maintain and enhance the liaison between his ego and the forces that drive him statistically forever—but to swell up his ego and to conceal from it those fundamental forces."

"I don't understand that."

"Well—man tries to deny he's an animal. Or to hide the fact. To call everything that is animal subhuman. To call every success he makes his own achievement. To call every disaster no fault of his own. Because he is conscious—he has slowly learned to extend the physical capacities of every kind of animal—for his own, immediate benefits. He has telescope-microscope-X-ray eyes. He has atomic energy muscles. Brighter light at night than the fireflies. He can fly faster than any bird—speed through the water faster than any fish—store food for decades when a ruminant or a pelican can store it only for days. He has even developed quite a few techniques that have no good animal correlative, though most of man's inventions were made ages before even apes appeared on the planet. Man has merely learned. But he tells himself he discovered and invented. It gives him a preposterous arrogance. And that's largely what he has used consciousness to swell up."

"We just skip his ideals—and philosophies—?"

"No. But we note that, to extend his physical capacities, he has used logic and reason. He has sometimes tried to employ them on his consciousness; but never—except intuitively, till recently—has it dawned on him that he is usually unconscious of his own real motives. That his cultures represent guesses—or trial and error. You take a creature that is governed by instinct—and doesn't realize it—one who confuses instinct with deity and identifies deity with himself—a creature who has made logic work in every dimension of the objective world and is extremely smug about himself in view of the results—and you have an animal cut off from its own nature and hence from Nature itself. Modern men can't tell whether anything they think or say or do is suitable to them, or merely the result of a tradition—as the semanticists claim—or whether, perhaps, their motives rise in a desire to hide instinct, to deny the animal, to inflate ego, or what not."

"I'm confused again."

"Put anybody through psychoanalysis—all the way, not just far enough to scare the wits out of him, and so make him hide his fear from himself by turning upon and ridiculing psychoanalysis—and that person will discover there is more instinct in him that he didn't know about than there is ego that he knew. Awful shock. Then put the same person through an analysis by a Jungian, and he will get numberless clues about the images and dreams and the feelings we have which are intended, by Nature, to make us conscious of the whole of human instinct as a pattern."

Yvonne shook her head. "Let's talk about me."

I wanted—I always want—to continue that line of explanation. It seems logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a consciousness of instinct—and to find, in that recovered awareness, not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body, as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both—looking backward and looking forward. Having at long last followed Jung's inquiry into this process, having grasped his techniques and repeated, through idioms of my own personality, the same empirical experiences which Jung has demonstrated in hundreds of other human beings as well as in societies seen as wholes—I have been afflicted with an urge to bring the steps to wider attention and understanding.

And I suppose I shall try to do so, sporadically, all my life. But I realize now the futility of the effort as a "cause."

I am the man who wanted, from childhood's earliest dreams, to know what men would think in the future. And now that I believe I know I find that—save for individuals—present men cannot even reach toward such ideas and concepts. Could they, the better world would be at hand, and not a mere ignorant wish. It is a simple irony—an operation of the very law I learned—the law that I imagine all men will finally discover. And, while it supplies me with hope for my species, it condemns me to general incomprehensibility.

If you wished for the future—and were given it—you couldn't use it today. Because it is the future.

Physicists feel this way—and rightly—concerning their urgent, brilliant, all-but-fruitless efforts to explain ideas in comparatively familiar and acceptable fields—ideas such as Relativity or the Quantum Theory. How much more, then, will psychologists feel it! The wide world of their awareness has as yet not even a basic glossary among people; they do not yet even use the arithmetic of that science in their daily lives.

Indeed, the psychiatrist, the practitioner of certain known principles of human psychology, the physician, is still prone to dodge the central fact of his science. "Psychology," he says, dogmatically identifying his opinion with the science, "does not conflict or interfere with religion. There are areas in which the minister or priest is better equipped to deal than the psychologist. Psychiatry does not attempt to change a man's beliefs. And it is not 'all sex'—as is so often claimed. It is not concerned with sex morals, or any moral law."

So, in his time, the churches made old Galileo lie, too. Made him lie to live at all.

And so the same churches in our day cause comparably enlightened men to lie concerning their knowledge—in order that any people may benefit by it at all. In order, truly, to go on living. It is one more expedient dishonor of scientists.

For psychology—though a thousand Presbyterian and Roman Catholic practitioners of its minor branches may not admit it—and though ten thousand better psychologists lie their faces black—has already put a period to orthodox religion. The old astronomers did away with the old cosmology for all the churches. The new investigators of awareness have done away with the ancient theologies and "moral" systems as completely—whether it takes the people a generation or a thousand years to find it out. Psychology is the scientific investigation of what man calls awareness and of what prompts him that he is unaware of. As such, it inevitably must analyze and resolve all man's beliefs, religions, faiths and the mechanisms of them, as well as his politics, his economics, the motives of his arts, his morals, ethics and sex manners. Why should anybody be surprised that science, turned finally upon man's inner self, should disclose different shapes from those held real by Stone Age man, barbarians, and a few later millenniums of men who decree that they are Christian but act more viciously than any beast?

The disavowing psychiatrists, opportunist weaselers or men who do not see that their science has set philosophy aside, will be historically remembered. Their acts will prove the shocking superstitiousness of the twentieth century and—in some cases—represent the public persecutions, the subjective witchburnings, which show this era to be a continuum of the Dark Ages.

As I said earlier, a smug people cannot even find the motive for asking if a science of psychology exists, let alone what it has learned. And we Americans are probably the most self-satisfied people who ever appeared. The whole world starves, brawls, perishes around us. Our own philosophy of progress is leading us to swift, continental exhaustion—to the resourcelessness of our own progeny. Yet we believe we are doing right and thinking rightly—a great, good, wonderful, near-perfect nation.

It will take generations of disaster to crack the hull of such preposterous self-satisfaction. Only through despair and amidst ruins, in all likelihood, will men discover that humility which may lead to the honest assessment of man's vanities, his insane traditions, pompous faiths, patriotisms, and excesses. But there is not much use talking about it or trying to explain. Knowledge cannot fend where the people refuse to know.

"Did you ever raise dogs?" I asked Yvonne.

She had been quietly eating lobster bisque—glancing at me from time to time while I reflected and while I ate, too. She nodded. "Several."

"Then you've noticed that pups behave in every single way that would, in people, be called sinful, immoral, and perverse."

"That's the nastiest thing I ever heard in my life! How could animals be perverted!"

"Did I say they were? I merely said—or tried to—that dogs exhibit all the same curious activities your Professor Kinsey found abundant in human behavior."

"They do not!"

I grinned. "Perhaps yours didn't. Perhaps—whenever you saw in your pups a symptom of any sort of sex activity—you yelled at them. Pulled them apart. Swatted them with a switch—"

"I never used a thing but rolled newspapers!"

I laughed until she saw why. She flushed. I went on. "You imposed, by force, your sex manners—Episcopalian?—I thought so—on your dogs. If you left them alone—as I do mine—you'd see that pups are every bit as 'perverted' as people. Grown dogs, too, sometimes. So are wild animals. Put a bunch of male monkeys together—without females—"

"I detest monkeys!"

"They won't mind. Anyhow—segregate the males and they'll turn homosexual. My caustic acquaintance, Dr. Hooton, the anthropologist, has reported it. He says it is 'disgusting'—a curiously unscientific term. The monkeys weren't disgusted, after all. Just having fun, getting relief, being excited."

"What are you trying to prove now?"

I shrugged. "That mammalian sexual behavior has a pattern and men belong in it."

"What nonsense! Men know what they are doing! Animals don't!"

"Then why was Kinsey able to show that men do just exactly what the dogs and monkeys and all the other mammals do—in spite of church, law, state, parents, culture, schools, society, and every other restraint they can dream up, consciously?"

"Some men—maybe."

"All I have been trying to point out, Yvonne, is that people who don't know where they are in space—people as ignorant of simple, cultural fact as the average American college graduate—obviously cannot know anything much about their real sex natures, since these have been honestly examined only recently and only by a few men, and since sexual enlightenment is the great taboo in this era. To that I merely add that men do behave sexually like mammals, which has been shown, and mammals do not behave in any fashion resembling the sex mores of this age."

Her gray eyes were bitter. "You think, then, that it would be perfectly acceptable, if you felt like it, to attack me right here and right now?"

"Yvonne. Even if I didn't have vestiges of your Episcopalian superego, or its equivalent, and ideas of my own besides—all the other people here do have your attitude. And I'm not a lunatic."

"You think, though"—her eyes went burningly around the room in search of effective illustration—"it would be perfectly all right for me to get a yen for the cashier, and show it, and let the cashier see it, too! Nobody should mind that—?"

She spoke with such emotion that I leaned forward to see why she'd selected the cashier. The cashier was a dark-haired girl, a pretty girl, leaning into the rays of a desk lamp to add up a dinner check.

I said, "Charming."

"You're an evil person."

"Did I pick out the cashier—or did you?"

She considered anger—and settled for laughter. "At least, you have one virtue. A person around you doesn't have to censor what he says."

"And the devil is shocked by virtue, too—is that right? How perfectly the closed mind bats them back! It must be marvelous never to be able to wonder what goes on outside your own head. The enviable situation of nearly everybody! And the everlasting chute-the-chutes to hell-on-earth. Here comes our next course, Miss Morals."

"Can I have pêches flambeau?" she asked, somewhat later.

"I'll join you."

"I thought you didn't drink?"

"I don't. A brandied bonbon? Peaches with the alcohol mostly burned away? Sherry in the soup? I'm not absolutist, Yvonne—not stuck with it, quite. I don't accidentally swallow the port in my fruit cocktail and then go out and get roaring drunk—excusing myself with the accident of the port. Maybe the sniff of alcohol will fold up the resolution of some reformed drunkards. My own problem—in that case—was different."

"What was it, then?"

"It's a long and sordid story that I am not going to tell you now."

"Do you really understand all these things you're talking about?"

I thought that one over. "Mostly," I said, "my mental activity relates to errors in the concepts of other people. Let's say—I've come to understand a good deal—by searching for blunder, by hunting for the sense of what brighter guys have learned. By relating them all."

"If God came in here now, what would you ask Him?"

It was quite a question and I looked at her with surprise. Her face saddened. "Rol said that to me, once. But what?"

What would I ask?

I realized, with a strange feeling, that I wouldn't ask anything. No questions. No further privileges. No favors. No additional enlightenment. That last impulse had stayed in my mind for a moment and I had then thought, if you want more enlightenment, the data is there, son. Enlighten yourself. Don't ask, when there's a chance of finding out on your own.

Superego?

Had my father told me that?

Or was that how I felt about life and the world?

I felt that way.

My father had his faith.

So it was not superego.

I would say hello to God.

What I did not know, what I knew that I did not express, others would learn, others would say.

There was a little instant of silence and remoteness around me as I underwent the experience that goes with such realization.

A calm.

The Crépuscule was a long way off—the sound and sight and smell of a dim restaurant.

The trio was playing "Ja-da," I finally realized.

Yvonne snapped her fingers in my face and laughed. "If you must daydream, put me in the act."

"What part do you want?"

"I'm a woman," she said. "And, according to you, I can play only one part. I'll be the sins of your mind. Do your evil for you. Kiss the cashiers and encourage little children to undress each other. Throw stones at cathedral windows—"

"It's your life. And your sin-list. Go ahead."

"Your list."

"You're sticking to acts. And mighty compulsive ones, too. All I've done is to give such matters subjective consideration."

"The thought is father to the deed."

"Then for God's sake be more attentive to what you think!"

"Jesuit!"

"I'm the nemesis of that whole philosophy."

"At least—you're sincere. I didn't believe so, when I read your books. I thought you were just fond of shocking people."

"I could never shock them a millionth part of the amount they've shocked me."

"But you did your best?"

I laughed at that. "Sometimes." A sad confession.

"Don't you love burning brandy?"

We watched the peaches flame.

2

I took her over to the Amigo.

They had a rumba band there that would give sloe-eyed fantasies to a Norseman.

And it wasn't crowded.

I haven't said—was it necessary?—that I intended to make Mrs. Prentiss eat one or two of those gardenias. That is, I proposed in my mind to bring her to the point of withdrawing the order that I was to behave toward her in all chaste chivalry. As to what I would do beyond that, I had no idea. It could not possibly be important if I followed up a moral (or immoral) victory with what would then be an ethical (or unethical) act.

Mrs. Prentiss was a remarkably handsome young woman. She was somewhat educated and she had a fair degree of intellectual sensitivity. In telling me she had not understood what I was saying she had implied a considerable degree of comprehension and a reluctance to deal with whatever it was that she had gathered from my words. She was "mostly" frigid (an intriguing expression) in many different ways.

In any sexual encounter she would undoubtedly barricade herself from biological design with common artifact—and half the Pharmacopoeia, besides. She was avid and did not know it. I could see—as the reader has seen with me, no doubt—that her domestic debacle was the result of a projection of her own guilt-sense. She was a nubile dancer. But she used her dancing rather meanly—as a sly and enjoyable confession to herself which, she thought, was the most that society would permit of dancing. She was somewhat spoiled and very selfish—extremely prissy in the real, felt sense of the word: a bitch. Nobody, that is to say, existed for her excepting in that they existed for her desires.

She had moved to a room beside me. She had tried to lead me—at first—on the dance floor. She had thrust the eyes and lips of her psyche into the brunette cashier's hair without caring in the least for the brunette or for any woman or for what happened to others. She had attributed the libidinous gesture to my imagination, when I had brought it to light. She had failed to add anything but frustration to the life of a man about whom I had heard, so far, what I regarded as almost nothing but good.

She had bought her world and was willing to pay in cash to keep it the way she wanted it—but not willing to pay in a dime's worth of herself. She needed a lesson. For there were nice things about her.

The expression on her face when she talked about Rol was descriptive, to me, of many good qualities—of loyalty to emotions she did not understand, of untapped vehemences, of tenderness—of human characteristics she was unable to embody. She had been taught not to embody them—she had been taught such attributes were weaknesses—or she had been taught nothing concerning them at all. Her greedy mother. The cocksure extravert—her father—a man who, even from her brief account, plainly believed he knew all there was worth knowing on all topics, one who had reached final conclusions about Everything. Reached them—or was able to jump to them by a process requiring neither thought nor the machinery for evaluation. Reached them or jumped to them because his opinions were peeled like decalcomania from Precedents set up by businessmen who have graduated from good universities.

I knew the type. Sometimes I feel there is hardly any other. Yvonne's dad—successful real estate man—Ivy League—New Yorker—daughter-adored. He had no reason to doubt his excellence. He was rich, which proved it. He had graduated from a superior university, which guaranteed his intelligence, knowledge and culture. And his success had been achieved in a tough game in the biggest city on the earth. Moreover, he was, apparently, a churchman. Hence not only the tradition of America, as a whole, and the judgment of upper-class America, but God Himself, attested to his superiority. On top of all that, he was, no doubt, a good guy. A good guy who had loved his elder daughter a little more (how?) than Yvonne.

It was not remarkable that Yvonne exhibited the characteristics and the reactions she'd sketched for me—or those I'd witnessed. She had been packaged in the best fashion of the richest and most powerful culture of the twentieth century by people who knew and felt less of the significance of life than any other group which has arisen in the species during its past ten or twenty parasitical millenniums. In representing the highest peak of what is called civilization she presented the least sensitive arrangement of what is human.

A nice bitch, then, with a father complex.

When we began dancing, I was still fiddling in my mind with fragments of the dinner monologue. A couple of things should be said about it.

As the reader has perceived, it represented in its way a conscious effort at self-assessment. It was a partial statement of philosophy—my own—urged upon me at that time because, under my circumstances, some review of philosophy was inevitable. When the Ghoul appears, one thinks about one's thoughts.

For a while, we scarcely talked at all.

American women, as a rule, will rarely listen to a monologue by a man; when they do, it is usually because they want something from the man. Men have, generally, the better faculty for speech; in America they are not trained to use it. And they are, moreover, so accustomed to female authority in their formative years that they submit, all their lives, to the clamor of it. An aggregation of American people is thus conventionally dominated by the tongues of women and sounds like the continuous breaking of dishes.

Yvonne had listened through part of a lunch and all of a dinner and now we set our communication in a more definite language—one that followed the tempo of maracas and made use of the whole body.

"Rol," she said once, during an Afro-Cuban number, "needs lessons."

"Who doesn't?"

"Did you take a lot?"

"Hundreds."

She danced quietly for a while. "Did they teach you—?"

I held her a little closer. The gardenias smelled like nights in Florida. "It's not in the book, Yvonne. But there's nothing in the book, either, that says you shouldn't go to Havana and find out what the steps mean—when you've learned how to do them."

She said, "I think I better sit down."

We went to our table and she ordered another Planter's Punch. Her face was a damp, darker color now than peach; perspiration had curled small ends of her hair so that they were like the tendrils on vines. She was panting—and trying to disguise it—but I could hear the breath in her throat and see the dilation of her nostrils. We had been dancing hard. We both needed the long, slow drink of air—though the air here was warm, full of smoke, and had garish light in it that made too plain the grimed plaster on the walls. Too plain, that is, for the music and its mood.

"You do things to me," she said.

"You do them to yourself. In sex, men respond to the subject, women to the object. I'm your object—but you're the response."

"I could be annoyed with that."

"More of what you'd call antifeminist propaganda?"

She shook her head. "Annoyed on the grounds that you apparently never let yourself go."

"On the contrary. I always let myself go. But I always let my brain go along, too."

She thought about that. "Annoyed—then—on the grounds that there's nothing reciprocal about the dance we had."

"But you'd be wrong. After all—I asked you to dinner."

"Because you were curious." She spoke petulantly. "Because you like to find out what makes people tick. Because you're full of half-baked missionary impulses."

"Because you're a damned good-looking dame."

"You think so?"

"Don't fish."

"I'm not! Plenty of people think that I'm a spoiled brat with merely superficial good looks."

"Girls that troll in my waters catch whatever is swimming by that's hungry. Of course you're a spoiled brat—and all good looks are superficial. So I was in a mood. I came down to lunch. I saw a blonde with a book—odd enough, in itself, to be interesting. A hell of a good-looking blonde. And I sat down beside her and she told me the story of her life."

She saw that she was not going to be appeased beyond that deliberately meager degree. She sighed and picked up the tall glass as soon as the waiter deposited it and drank perhaps a third of it, thirstily. Afterward, she tittered. "I'm going to get tight, if I do that again."

"And if you get tight, I'll take you home."

"And if you take me home, I'll pound on your door."

"And if you pound on the door, I'll put you under a cold shower."

"And I'll call the manager."

"You won't need to. He'll be helping me with the shower."

"I thought you were maybe hoping I'd get a little tight."

"Why?"

"Don't men?"

"Not me."

"It's supposed," she said with a flirtatious glance, "to make it easier."

"Make what easier?"

"Oh—being with girls."

"I never found it difficult—except when they were tight. Then my impulse is to run."

"There we go again! Women mustn't drink. But you—being a man—don't care if the boys get blind."

"Did I say so? Having been a drunk—and quit—I detest drunks. A common example of the law of opposites in operation. I force myself to associate with them, sometimes, because I owe drunkenness a good deal of quid pro quo—"

"Like an Alcoholic Anonymous?"

"Like that—without the self-canonization. An American man—with a few drinks in his blood stream—is able to become a shade more human. To shed the posture of men demanded by his era and its women. To show he has feelings, to be introverted—unless he gets out of hand—and even to think a little bit. To cherish and fear, to appreciate and revile, to show some evidence of the democracy and human brotherhood he is always talking about—and always doing his best to defeat by getting to the top in nefarious ways. I don't mind guys being slightly tight. Excepting for the danger that they'll go beyond that stage—which they so generally do."

"But women! Dear, dear!"

"The average American female with three or four cocktails in her becomes a living exhibit of the frustrations inherent in the feminist myth of these days. Together with the compulsions."

"Yes, Mr. Wylie?"

I grinned at her. "She sets out to prove the myth she has not been able to live up to, sober—that women are superior to men and also the exact equals of men. She does this by turning into a bad imitation of a man. She argues. She imagines her arguments are brilliant and crushing—when they are non sequiturs and ad hominems. She directs. She orders. She demands. She judges—she is a little tin magistrate hurling charges to unseen juries and handing out sentences on her enemies or auditors. She is both the defending and the prosecuting attorney. She is everything but a lady and everybody but the prisoner. Which shows, of course, that she feels imprisoned when sober, and also envious of males when she goes around in her sober mind trying to convince herself and everybody she is their equal and also their superior."

Her voice suddenly became flat and cold. "I am beginning to get very tired of you, Mr. Wylie."

I looked at her.

You have only to apologize, to crawl about for a moment, to resume flattery or a suggestion thereof, to dance again, to put your hand gently on her—in such a way that she would remove it firmly. Then everything will be stardust again. She will be a beautiful young woman enjoying, with world sanction, the company of a suitable guy. Toying, perhaps, with the thought of an affaire. Toying would be her word and toy, her inept function.

And what had I been doing?

I looked for the waiter. If he had been visible in the smoke-spun, light-pulsing, low altitude of the big room, I would have asked for the check and taken her straight to her door and to hell with her. This was my night to howl, maybe. It was turning into my night to die. I had the right—or intended to make the right—to howl and die as I pleased and with whom I chose.

But while I was looking, she sensed my intention. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to be rude! You hurt my feelings."

So I dissembled. "I was hunting for our waiter. Let's go someplace else."

We walked down the staircase of a Latin spot off Eighth Avenue called the Cuban Paradise. A spot with a still lower ceiling, and no air conditioning or ventilation. Two small rumba bands alternate, so the music is constant, and nine-tenths of the customers are Cubans or Puerto Ricans or South Americans. The orchestras are not pretentious, but such as may be heard on a hundred side streets in Havana.

We took a little table at the wall. New Yorkers spend a good deal of their lives with their backs to walls, looking at things, eating things, drinking. We ordered coffee and the waiter dutifully told us there was a small minimum. It was Cuban coffee—thick and sweet—and we listened to rhythms musically naïve but emotionally more sophisticated than those of the big, smooth, uptown bands. Music is like accent in speech, and very few foreigners learn the language of another nation so well as to lose all traces of their own tongue—to talk like natives. At the Cuban Paradise, the Latins danced as they were supposed to and wanted to. Working people having fun. Immigrants remembering tropical nights—and sounds never heard in Manhattan—trees never seen on its streets—flowers never sold in its markets.

There were pairs of girls dancing together—hopefully—and when I saw them, executing the slow, insidious steps of a bolero—I glanced at Yvonne. She was watching them, too—watching them so intently that my glance became a stare. She noticed and swept from her face its look of participation.

Again, I felt terribly sorry for her. Sorry as one feels sorry for a bird that has failed to migrate and sits on its branch in the dreary rain of autumn, knowing the world is wrong, feebly sensing a lost, warmer climate, but unable to resolve the quandary of the dream and the pain of its present. A bird can be a sharp thing with a reptile's appetite—a bright bundle of vanity and vengeance. She smiled, though.

"Those two girls—the redhead and the one with blue-black hair—are very good, aren't they?"

"The dark one's beautiful—like an Indian."

"Probably is part Indian—and also probably a Dodger fan who chews bubble gum and works in Macy's stockroom."

"I wish I could lead—the way she does!"

"That's the boy's department." I laughed. "Sorry! Maybe you're right. Maybe I am prejudiced. Though I regard it as merely the extreme and necessary product of my constant effort to keep track of prerogatives which are defiled and trampled every few seconds in this fair land!" I then added, "If you really want to learn dancing, you have to learn both parts. Yours—the girl's."

She was easily mollified. And she was—not tight—but less cautious about herself. "I never thought of that! It would be interesting!" She looked at me thoughtfully. "Did you ever dance with a man?"

"Of course."

Her gray eyes kept looking. "Was it exciting?"

"Sailors," I said, "dance together on battleships and have fun. That's why sailors are good dancers. I was never a sailor, however. The dancing I've done with guys was when my teacher despaired of being able to show me a step—and called in one of the boys to demonstrate—and to lead it."

"Oh."

She was disappointed. She had fled in revulsion from her husband's act; she had no similar scruples about me.

On the contrary.

I thought that if she possessed even a little insight into that single pair of facts she might be a happier girl. And I also thought that any attempt to supply the insight by pointing out the two inconsistent attitudes would only tighten the hold of her small, personal dilemma. She would deny the very suggestion; she would use all her energy to authenticate the denial—immediately—and in the weeks, months, years to come—use it to kid herself. Not to investigate herself.

So I said, "It's a good way to learn. Lots of gals get women teachers in dancing school. Men embarrass them."

"Really?"

"Sure."

"You mean—if I went and enrolled and asked for a girl teacher—nobody would think I was—queer?"

"Thousands do."

"I never knew it." She said that almost to herself—and hurried on, as if to expunge it. "We had a man teacher that came to the house—and I was always afraid to go to a school—for fear I'd get some slimy gigolo—"

"More likely a GI working his way through college."

"Don't you want to dance with me again?"

It was after one o'clock when we climbed back up on the humid street and the doorman flagged a cab. She said the night was young—and I said, but I was old. I said I had to get up early and work. I told the driver to go by way of Central Park and Seventy-second Street and while we hummed between the lamplit green leaf walls she moved over to be kissed, so I kissed her, but not much. And after that I spoiled my breast-pocket handkerchief wiping off the lipstick, which is another convention. We went through the empty lobby. The night clerk was a tall, handsome gent and his eyes glimmered at me when I rang the elevator bell. Harry brought a car down, let out a policeman (who had been on God alone could imagine what errand) and hoisted us to Sixteen.

She took her key from the golden handbag and unlocked 1603. She turned up her face slightly. "It's been a lovely evening."

I tossed the key of 1601 and caught it. "Me, too."

"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.