He took a drink of ice water from the jug beside the bed.
All this probably strikes you as fantastic. Don’t try to come to a decision immediately. Think it over I Look at it from every angle. I wouldn’t want you to accept and then get cold feet in a month or two. But let me call your attention to something. If you continue in the same groove much longer you’ll never have the courage to make the break. You have no excuse for prolonging your present way of life. You’re obeying the law of inertia, nothing more.
He cleared his throat, as if embarrassed by his own remarks. Then clearly and swiftly he proceeded.
I’m not the ideal companion for you, agreed. I have every fault imaginable and I’m thoroughly self-centered, as I’ve said many times. But I’m not envious or jealous, or even ambitious, in the usual sense. Aside from working hours—and I don’t intend to run myself into the ground—you’d be alone most of the time, free to do as you please. With me you’d be alone, even if we shared the same room. I don’t care where we live, so long as it’s in a foreign land. From now on it’s the moon for me. I’m divorcing myself from my fellow-man. Nothing could possibly tempt me to participate in the game. Nothing of value, in my eyes at least, can possibly be accomplished at present. I may not accomplish anything either, to be truthful. But at least I’ll have the satisfaction of doing what I believe in … Look, maybe I haven’t expressed too clearly what I mean by this Dostoievsky business. It’s worth going into a little further, if you can bear with me. As I see it, with Dostoievsky’s death the world entered upon a complete new phase of existence. Dostoievsky summed up the modern age much as Dante did the Middle Ages. The modern age—a misnomer, by the way—was just a transition period, a breathing spell, in which man could adjust himself to the death of the soul. Already we’re leading a sort of grotesque lunar life. The beliefs, hopes, principles, convictions that sustained our civilization are gone. And they won’t be resuscitated. Take that on faith for the time being. No, henceforth and for a long time to come we’re going to live in the mind. That means destruction … self-destruction. If you ask why I can only say—because man was not made to live by mind alone. Man was meant to live with his whole being. But the nature of this being is lost, forgotten, buried. The purpose of life on earth is to discover one’s true being—and to live up to it! But we won’t go into that. That’s for the distant future. The problem is—meanwhile. And that’s where I come in. Let me put it to you as briefly as possible … All that we have stifled, you, me, all of us, ever since civilization began, has got to be lived out. We’ve got to recognize ourselves for what we are. And what are we but the end product of a tree that is no longer capable of bearing fruit. We’ve got to go underground, therefore, like seed, so that something new, something different, may come forth. It isn’t time that’s required, it’s a new way of looking at things. A new appetite for life, in other words. As it is, we have but a semblance of life. We’re alive only in dream. It’s the mind in us that refuses to be killed off. The mind is tough—and far more mysterious than the wildest dreams of theologians. It may well be that there is nothing but mind … not the little mind we know, to be sure, but the great Mind in which we swim, the Mind which permeates the whole universe. Dostoievsky, let me remind you, had amazing insight not only into the soul of man but into the mind and spirit of the universe. That’s why it’s impossible to shake him off, even though, as I said, what he represents is done for.
Here I had to interrupt. Excuse me, I said, but what did Dostoievsky represent, in your opinion?
I can’t answer that in a few words. Nobody can. He gave us a revelation, and it’s up to each one of us to make what he can of it. Some lose themselves in Christ. One can lose himself in Dostoievsky too. He takes you to the end of the road … Does that mean anything to you?
Yes and no.
To me, said Stymer, it means that there are no possibilities to-day such as men imagine. It means that we are thoroughly deluded—about everything. Dostoievsky explored the field in advance, and he found the road blocked at every turn. He was a frontier man, in the profound sense of the word. He took up one position after another, at every dangerous, promising point, and he found that there was no issue for us, such as we are. He took refuge finally in the Supreme Being.
That doesn’t sound exactly like the Dostoievsky I know, said I. It has a hopeless ring to it.
No, it’s not hopeless at all. It’s realistic—in a superhuman sense. The last thing Dostoievsky could possibly have believed in is a hereafter such as the clergy give us.
All religions give us a sugar-coated pill to swallow. They want us to swallow what we never can or will swallow—death. Man will never accept the idea of death, never reconcile himself to it … But I’m getting off the track. You speak of man’s fate. Better than any one, Dostoievsky understood that man will never accept life un-questioningly until he is threatened with extinction. It was his belief, his deep conviction, I would say, that man may have everlasting life if he desires it with his whole heart and being. There is no reason to die, none whatever. We die because we lack faith in life, because we refuse to surrender to life completely … And that brings me to the present, to life as we know it to-day. Isn’t it obvious that our whole way of life is a dedication to death? In our desperate efforts to preserve ourselves, preserve what we have created, we bring about our own death. We do not surrender to life, we struggle to avoid dying. Which means not that we have lost faith in God but that we have lost faith in life itself. To live dangerously, as Nietzsche put it, is to live naked and unashamed. It means putting one’s trust in the life force and ceasing to battle with a phantom called death, a phantom called disease, a phantom called sin, a phantom called fear, and so on. The phantom world! That’s the world which we have created for ourselves. Think of the military, with their perpetual talk of the enemy. Think of the clergy, with their perpetual talk of sin and damnation. Think of the legal fraternity, with their perpetual talk of fine and imprisonment. Think of the medical profession, with their perpetual talk of disease and death. And our educators, the greatest fools ever, with their parrot-like rote and their innate inability to accept any idea unless it be a hundred or a thousand years old. As for those who govern the world, there you have the most dishonest, the most hypocritical, the most deluded and the most unimaginative beings imaginable. You pretend to be concerned about man’s fate. The miracle is that man has sustained even the illusion of freedom.
No, the road is blocked, whichever way you turn. Every wall, every barrier, every obstacle that hems us in is our own doing. No need to drag in God, the Devil or Chance. The Lord of all Creation is taking a cat nap while we work out the puzzle. He’s permitted us to deprive ourselves of everything but mind. It’s in the mind that the life force has taken refuge. Everything has been analyzed to the point of nullity. Perhaps now the very emptiness of life will take on meaning, will provide the clue.
He came to a dead stop, remained absolutely immobile for a space, then raised himself on one elbow.
The criminal aspect of the mind! I don’t know how or where I got hold of that phrase, but it enthralls me absolutely. It might well be the over all title for the books I have in mind to write. The very word criminal shakes me to the foundations. It’s such a meaningless word today, yet it’s the most—what shall I say?—the most serious word in man’s vocabulary. The very notion of crime is an awesome one. It has such deep, tangled roots. Once the great word, for me, was rebel. When I say criminal, however, I find myself utterly baffled. Sometimes, I confess, I don’t know what the word means. Or, if I think I do, then I am forced to look upon the whole human race as one indescribable hydro-headed monster whose name is CRIMINAL. I sometimes put it another way to myself—man his own criminal. Which is almost meaningless. What I’m trying to say,
