“How fortunate one is not to belong to an ancient family!” said Mr. Propter. “All those inherited loyalties to bricks and mortar, all those obligations to tombstones and bits of paper and painted canvases!” He shook his head. “What a dismal form of compulsory idolatry.”
Jeremy, meanwhile, had crossed the room, opened a drawer and returned with a file of papers which he handed to Mr. Propter. “Look at these.”
Mr. Propter looked. “From Molinos!” he said in surprise.
“I thought that would be your cup of tea,” said Jeremy, deriving a sly pleasure from talking about mysticism in the most absurdly inappropriate language.
Mr. Propter smiled. “My cup of tea,” he repeated. “But not my favourite blend. There was something not quite right about poor Molinos. A strain of—how shall I put it?—of negative sensuality. He enjoyed suffering. Mental suffering, the dark night of the soul—he really wallowed in it.
No doubt, poor fellow, he sincerely believed he was destroying self-will; but without his being aware of it, he was always turning the process of destruction into another affirmation of self-will. Which was a pity,” Mr. Propter added, taking the letters to the light, to look at them more closely, “because he certainly did have some first-hand experience of reality. Which only shows that you’re never certain of getting there, even when you’ve come near enough to see what sort of thing you’re going to. Here’s a fine sentence,” he put in parenthetically. “ ‘Ame a Dios,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘como es en si y no como se lo dice y forma su imagination.’ ”
Jeremy almost laughed. The coincidence that Mr. Propter should have picked on the same passage as had caught Dr. Obispo’s eye that morning gave him a peculiar satisfaction. “Pity he couldn’t have read a little Kant,” he said. “Dios en si seems to be much the same as Ding an sich. Unknowable by the human mind.”
“Unknowable by the personal human mind,” Mr. Propter agreed, “because personality is self-will, and self-will is the negation of reality, the denial of God. So far as the ordinary human personality is concerned, Kant is perfectly right in saying that the thing in itself is unknowable. Dios en si can’t be comprehended by a consciousness dominated by an ego. But now suppose there were some way of eliminating the ego from consciousness. If you could do this, you’d get close to reality, you’d be in a position to comprehend Dios en si. Now, the interesting thing is that, as a matter of brute fact, this can be done, has been done again and again. Kant’s blind alley is for people who choose to remain on the human level. If you choose to climb on to the level of eternity, the impasse no longer exists.”
There was a silence. Mr. Propter turned over the sheets, pausing every now and then to decipher a line or two of the fine caligraphy. “ ‘Tres maneras hay de silencio,’ ” he read aloud after a moment. “ ‘El primero es de palabras, el segundo de deseos y el tercero de pensamientos.’ He writes nicely, don’t you think? Probably that had a lot to do with his extraordinary success. How disastrous when a man knows how to say the wrong things in the right way! Incidentally,” he added, looking up with a smile into Jeremy’s face, “how few great stylists have ever said any of the right things. That’s one of the troubles about education in the humanities. The best that has been thought and said. Very nice. But best in which way? Alas, only in form. The content is generally deplorable.” He turned back to the letters.
After a moment, another passage caught his attention. “ ‘Oirá y leerd el hombre racional estas espirituales materias, pero no llegerá, dice San Pablo, a comprenderlas: Animalis homo non percipit ea quae sunt spiritus.’ And not merely animalis homo,” Mr. Propter commented. “Also humanus homo. Indeed, above all humanus homo. And you might even add that humanus homo non percipit ea quae sunt animalis. Insofar as we think as strictly human beings, we fail to understand what is below us no less than what is above. And then there’s a further trouble. Suppose we stop thinking in a strictly human fashion; suppose we make it possible for ourselves to have direct intuitions of the non-human realities in which, so to speak, we’re imbedded. Well and good. But what happens when we try to pass on the knowledge so acquired?
We’re floored. The only vocabulary at our disposal is a vocabulary primarily intended for thinking strictly human thoughts about strictly human concerns. But the things we want to talk about are non-human realities and non-human ways of thinking. Hence the radical inadequacy of all statements about our animal nature and, even more, of all statements about God or spirit, or eternity.”
Jeremy uttered a little cough. “I can think of some pretty adequate statements about . . .” he paused, beamed, caressed his polished scalp; . . . “well, about the more intime aspects of our animal nature,” he concluded demurely. His face suddenly clouded; he had remembered his treasure trove and Dr. Obispo’s impudent theft.
“But what does their adequacy depend on?” Mr. Propter asked. “Not so much on the writer’s skill as the reader’s response. The direct, animal intuitions aren’t rendered by words; the words merely remind you of your memories of similar experiences. Notus color is what Virgil says when he’s talking about the sensations experienced by Vulcan in the embraces of Venus. Familiar heat. No attempt at description or analysis; no effort to get any kind of verbal equivalence to the facts. Just a reminder. But that reminder is enough to make the passage one of the most voluptuous affairs in Latin poetry. Virgil left the work to his readers. And, by and large, that’s what most erotic writers are content to do. The few who try to do the work themselves have to flounder about with metaphors and similes and analogies. You know the sort of stuff: fire, whirlwinds, heaven, darts.”
“ ‘The vale of lilies,’ ” Jeremy quoted, “ ‘And the bower of bliss.’ ”
“Not to mention the expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” said Mr. Propter; “and all the other figures of speech. An endless variety, with only one feature in common—they’re all composed of words which don’t connote any aspect of the subject they’re supposed to describe.”
“Saying one thing in order to mean another,” Jeremy put in. “Isn’t that one of the possible definitions of imaginative literature?”
“Maybe,” Mr. Propter answered. “But what chiefly interests me at the moment is the fact that our immediate animal intuitions have never been given any but the most summary and inadequate labels. We say ‘red,’ for example, or ‘pleasant,’ and just leave it at that without trying to find verbal equivalents for the various aspects of perceiving redness or experiencing pleasure.”
“Well, isn’t that because you can’t go beyond ‘red’ or ‘pleasant’?” said Pete. “They’re just facts, ultimate facts.”
“Like giraffes,” Jeremy added. “ ‘There ain’t no such animal,’ is what the rationalist says, when he’s shown its portrait. And then in it walks, neck and all!”
“You’re right,” said Mr. Propter. “A giraffe is an ultimate fact. You’ve got to accept it, whether you like it or not. But accepting the giraffe doesn’t prevent you from studying and describing it. And the same applies to redness or pleasure or notus calor. They can be analysed, and the results of the analysis can be described by means of suitable words. But as a matter of historical fact, this hasn’t been done.”
Pete nodded slowly. “Why do you figure that should be?” he asked.
“Well,” said Mr. Propter, “I should say it’s because men have always been more interested in doing and feeling than in understanding. Always too busy making good and having thrills and doing what’s ‘done’ and worshipping the local idols—too busy with all this even to feel any desire to have an adequate verbal instrument for elucidating their experiences. Look at the languages we’ve inherited—incomparably effective in rousing violent and exciting emotions; an ever-present help for those who want to get on in the world; worse than useless for any one who aspires to disinterested understanding. Hence, even on the strictly human level, the need for special impersonal languages like mathematics and technical vocabularies of the various sciences. Wherever men have felt the wish to understand, they’ve given up the traditional language and substituted for it another special language, more precise and, above all, less contaminated with self-interest.
“Now, here’s a very significant fact. Imaginative literature deals mainly with the everyday life of men and women; and the everyday life of men and women consists, to a large extent, of immediate animal experiences. But the makers of imaginative literature have never forged an impersonal, uncontaminated language for the elucidation of immediate experiences. They’re content to use the bare, unanalysed names of experiences as mere aids to their own and their reader’s memory. Every direct intuition is notus calor, with the connotation of the words left open, so to speak, for each individual reader to supply according to the nature of his or her particular experiences in the past. Simple, but not exactly scientific. But then people don’t read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of
