All right. The problem is that there is no new problem. It must
awaken from the sleep of being part of some other, old problem, and by that
time its new problematical existence will have already begun, carrying it
forward into situations with which it cannot cope, since no one recognizes it
and it does not even recognize itself yet, or know what it is. It is like the
beginning of a beautiful day, with all the birds singing in the trees, reading
their joy and excitement into its record as it progresses, and yet the progress
of any day, good or bad, brings with it all kinds of difficulties that should
have been foreseen but never are, so that it finally seems as though they are
what stifles it, in the majesty of a sunset or merely in gradual dullness that
gets dimmer and dimmer until it finally sinks into flat, sour darkness. Why is
this? Because not one-tenth or even one one-hundredth of the ravishing
possibilities the birds sing about at dawn could ever be realized in the course
of a single day, no matter how crammed with fortunate events it might turn out
to be. And this brings on inevitable reproaches, unmerited of course, for we
are all like children sulking because they cannot have the moon; and very soon
the unreasonableness of these demands is forgotten and overwhelmed in a wave of
melancholy of which it is the sole cause. Finally we know only that we are
unhappy but we cannot tell why. We forget that it is our own childishness that
is to blame.
That
this is true is of course beyond argument. But we ought to look into the nature
of that childishness a little more, try to figure out where it came from and
how, if at all, we can uproot it. And when we first start to examine it, biased
as we are, it seems as though we are not entirely to blame. We have all or most
of us had unhappy childhoods; later on we tried to patch things up and as we
entered the years of adulthood it was a relief, for a while, that everything
was succeeding: we had finally left that long suffocating tunnel and emerged
into an open place. We could not yet see very well due to the abrupt change
from darkness to daylight, but we were beginning to make out things. We
embarked on a series of adult relationships from which the sting and malignancy
of childhood were absent, or so it seemed: no more hiding behind bushes to get
a secret glimpse of the others; no more unspeakable rages of jealousy or the
suffocation of unrequited and unrealizable love. Or at least these things
retreated into their proper perspective as new things advanced into the foreground:
new feelings as yet too complex to be named or closely inspected, but in which
the breathless urgency of those black-and-white situations of childhood happily
played no part. It became a delight to enumerate all the things in the new
world our maturity had opened up for us, as inexhaustible in pleasures and
fertile pursuits as some more down-to-earth Eden, from which the Utopian joys
as well as the torments of that older fantasy-world had been banished by a more
reasonable deity.
But as
the days and years sped by it became apparent that the naming of all the new
things we now possessed had become our chief occupation; that very little time
for the mere tasting and having of them was left over, and that even these
simple, tangible experiences were themselves subject to description and
enumeration, or else they too became fleeting and transient as the song of a
bird that is uttered only once and disappears into the backlog of vague
memories where it becomes as a dried, pressed flower, a wistful parody of
itself. Meanwhile all our energies are being absorbed by the task of trying to
revive those memories, make them real, as if to live again were the only
reality; and the overwhelming variety of the situations we have to deal with
begins to submerge our efforts. It becomes plain that we cannot interpret
everything, we must be selective, and so the tale we are telling begins little
by little to leave reality behind. It is no longer so much our description of
the way things happen to us as our private song, sung in the wilderness, nor
can we leave off singing, for that would be to retreat to the death of
childhood, to the mere acceptance and dull living of all that is thrust upon
us, a living death in a word; we must register our appraisal of the moving
world that is around us, but our song is leading us on now, farther and farther
into that wilderness and away from the shrouded but familiar forms that were
its first inspiration. On and on into the gathering darkness—is there no remedy
for this? It is as though a day which had begun brilliantly in the blaze of a
new sunrise had become transfixed as a certain subtle change in the light can
cast a chill over your heart, or the sight of a distant thin ribbon of cirrus
ebbing into space can alter everything you have been feeling, dropping you back
years and years into another world in which its fragile reminder of inexorable
change was also the law, as it is here today. You know now the sorrow of
continually doing something that you cannot name, of producing automatically as
an apple tree produces apples this thing there is no name for. And you continue
to hum as you move forward, but your heart is pounding.
All
right. Then this new problem is the same one, and that is the problem: that our
apathy can always renew itself, drawing energy from the circumstances that fill
our lives, but emotional happiness blooms only once, like an annual, leaving
not even roots or foliage behind when its flower withers and dies. We are
forced to recognize that we are still living in the same old state of affairs
and that it never really went away even when it seemed to. Well, but what can
we do about it? Because even though the hydra-headed monster of apathy can grow
a new head each day to slash back at us with, more fearsome than the one we
just succeeded in cutting off, so too nothing says that we aren't to fight back
at it, using the sword that our condition of reasoning beings has placed in our
hands. Although the task seems hopeless and there is no end to the heads in
sight, we are within our rights in fighting back, the weapon is ours to wield,
and it is possible that by dint of continually doing so we might at length gain
a slight foothold or edge, for the enemy's powers though superhuman are not inexhaustible:
we are basically certain that nothing is except the capacity for struggle that
unites us, foe to foe, on the vast plain of life. We are like sparrows
fluttering and jabbering around a seemingly indifferent prowling cat; we know
that the cat is stronger and therefore we forget that we have wings, and too
often we fall in with the cat's plans for us, afraid and therefore unable to
use the wings that could have saved us by bearing us aloft if only for a little
distance, not the boundless leagues we had been hoping for and insisting on,
but enough to make a crucial difference, the difference between life and death.
"It
almost seems—" How often this locution has been forced on us when we were
merely trying to find words for a more human expression of our difficulty,
something closer to home. And with this formula our effort flies off again,
having found no place to land. As though there were something criminal in
trying to understand a little this uneasiness that is undermining our health,
causing us to think crazy thoughts and behave erratically. We can no longer
live our lives properly. Every good impulse is distorted into something like
its opposite; the people we see are like parodies of reasonable human beings.
There is no spiritual model for our aspirations; no vademécum beckons in
the light around us. There is only the urge to get on with it all. It is like
the difference between someone who is in love and someone who is merely
"good in bed": there is no vital remnant which would transform one's
entire effort into an image somewhat resembling oneself. Meanwhile everything
conspires to protect the business-as-usual attitude of the diurnal scenery—no
leaf or brick must be found out of place, no timbre ring false lest the
sickening fakery of the whole wormy apparatus, the dry rot behind the correct
facade suddenly become glaringly and universally apparent, its shame at last
real for all to see. Appearances must be kept up at whatever cost until the Day
of Judgment and afterward if possible.
We are
trying with mortal hands to paint a landscape which would be a faithful
reproduction of the exquisite and terrible scene that stretches around us. No
longer is there any question of adjusting a better light on things, to show
them ideally as they may never have existed, of taking them out from under the
sun to place them in the clean light that meditation surrounds them with. Youth
and happiness, the glory of first love—all are viewed naturally now, with all
their blemishes and imperfections. Even the wonderful poetry of growing a
little older and realizing the important role fantasy played in the Sturm
und Drang of our earlier maturity is placed in its proper perspective, so
as not to exaggerate the importance in the general pattern of living of the
disabused intellect, whose nature it is to travel from illusion to reality and
on to some seemingly superior vision, it being the quality of this ebbing and
flowing motion rather than the relevance of any of its isolated component
moments that infuses a life with its special character. Until, accustomed to
disappointments, it seemed as though we had triumphed over the limitations of
logic and blindfold passion alike; the masterpiece we were on the point of
achieving was classic in the sense of the Greeks and simultaneously informed by
a Romantic ardor minus the eccentricity, and this all-but-terminated work was
the reflection of the ideal shape of ourselves, as we might have lived had we
been gifted with foreknowledge and also the ability to go back and retrace our
steps. And so, pleased with it and with ourselves, we stepped back a few paces
to get the proper focus.
Any
reckoning of the sum total of the things we are is of course doomed to failure
from the start, that is if it intends to present a true, wholly objective picture
from which both artifice and artfulness are banished: no art can exist without
at least traces of these, and there was never any question but that this
rendering was to be made in strict conformity with the rules of art—only in
this way could it approximate most closely the thing it was intended to reflect
and illuminate and which was its inspiration, by achieving the rounded feeling
almost of the forms of flesh and the light of nature, and being thus equipped
for the maximum number of contingencies which, in its capacity as an aid and
tool for understanding, it must know how to deal with. Perhaps this was where
we made our mistake. Perhaps no art, however gifted and well-intentioned, can
supply what we were demanding of it: not only the figured representation of our
days but the justification of them, the reckoning and its application, so close
to the reality being lived that it vanishes suddenly in a thunderclap, with a
loud cry.
The
days fly by; they do not cease. By night rain pelted the dark planet; in the
morning all was wreathed in false smiles and admiration, but the daylight had
gone out of the day and it knew it. All the pine trees seemed to be dying of a
mysterious blight. There was no one to care. The sky was still that
nauseatingly cloying shade of blue, with the thin ribbon of cirrus about to
disappear and materialize over other, alien lands, far from here. If only, one
thought, one had begun by having the courage of one's convictions instead of
finishing this way, but "once burned, twice shy"; one
proceeds along one's path murmuring idiotic formulas like this to give oneself
courage, noticing too late that the landscape isn't making sense any more; it
is not merely that you have misapplied certain precepts not meant for the situation
in which you find yourself, which is always a new one that cannot be decoded
with reference to an existing corpus of moral principles, but there is even a
doubt as to our own existence. Why, after all, were we not destroyed in the
conflagration of the moment our real and imaginary lives coincided, unless it
was because we never had a separate existence beyond that of those two static
and highly artificial concepts whose fusion was nevertheless the cause of death
and destruction not only for ourselves but in the world around us? But perhaps
the explanation lies precisely here: what we were witnessing was merely the
reverse side of an event of cosmic beatitude for all except us, who were blind
to it because it took place inside us. Meanwhile the shape of life has changed
definitively for the better for everyone on the outside. They are bathed in the
light of this tremendous surprise as in the light of a new sun from which only
healing and not corrosive rays emanate; they comment on the miraculous change
as people comment on the dazzling beauty of a day in early autumn, forgetting
that for the blind man in their midst it is a day like any other, so that its
beauty cannot be said to have universal validity but must remain fundamentally
in doubt.
This
single source of so much pleasure and pain is therefore a thing that one can
never cease wondering upon. On the one hand, such boundless happiness for so
many; on the other so much pain concentrated in the heart of one. And it is
true that each of us is this multitude as well as that isolated individual; we
experience the energy and beauty of the others as a miraculous manna from
heaven; at the same time our eyes are turned inward to the darkness and
emptiness within. All records of how we came here have been effaced, so there
is no chance of working backward to some more primitive human level: the
spiritual dichotomy exists once and for all time, like the mind of creation,
which has neither beginning nor end. And the proof of this is that we cannot
even imagine another way of being. We are stuck here for eternity and we are
not even aware that we are stuck, so natural and even normal does our quandary
seem. The situation of Prometheus, bound to the crags for endless ages and
visited daily by an eagle, must have seemed so to him. We were surprised once,
long ago; and now we can never be surprised again.
What
is it for you then, the insistent now that baffles and surrounds you in its
loose-knit embrace that always seems to be falling away and yet remains behind,
stubbornly drawing you, the unwilling spectator who had thought to stop only
just for a moment, into the sphere of its solemn and suddenly utterly vast
activities, on a new scale as it were, that you have neither the time nor the
wish to unravel? It always presents itself as the turning point, the bridge
leading from prudence to "a timorous capacity," in Wordsworth's
phrase, but the bridge is a Bridge of Sighs the next moment, leading back into
the tired regions from whence it sprang. It seems as though every day is arranged
this way. The movement is the majestic plodding one of a boat crossing a
harbor, certain of its goal and upheld by its own dignity on the waves, a
symbol of patient, fruitful activity, but the voyage always ends in a new key,
although at the appointed place; a note has been added that destroys the whole
fabric and the sense of the old as it was intended. The day ends in the
darkness of sleep.
Therefore
since today, a day that is really quite cool despite the deceptive appearance
of the sunlight on things, is to really be the point when everything changes
for better or for worse, it might be good to examine it, see how far it goes,
since the far reaches of sleep are to be delayed indefinitely. It is not even a
question of them any more. What matters is how you are going to figure your way
out of this new problem which has again come home to roost. Will the answer be
another delay, prolonged beyond the end of time, and disguised once again as an
active life intelligently pursued? Or is it to be a definite break with the
past—either the no of death shutting you up in a small cell-like space or a yes
whose vibrations you cannot even begin to qualify or imagine?
As I
thought about these things dusk began to invade my room. Soon the outlines of
things began to grow blurred and I continued to think along well-rehearsed
lines like something out of the past. Was there really nothing new under the
sun? Or was this novelty—the ability to take up these tattered enigmas again
and play with them until something like a solution emerged from them, only to
grow dim at once and fade like an ignis fatuus, a specter mocking the very
reality it had so convincingly assumed? No, but this time something real did
seem to be left over— some more solid remnant of the light as the shadows
continued to pile up. At first it seemed to be made merely of bits and pieces
of the old, haggard situations, rearranged perhaps to give a wan impersonation
of modernity and fecundity. Then it became apparent that certain new elements
had been incorporated, though perhaps not enough of them to change matters very
much. Finally—these proportions remaining the same—something like a different
light began to dawn, to make itself felt: just as the first glimmers of day are
often mistaken for a "false dawn," and one waits a long time to see
whether they will go away before gradually becoming convinced of their
authority, even after it has been obvious for some time, so these tremors
slowly took on the solidity, the robustness of an object. And by that time
everything else had gone away, or retreated so far into the sidelines that one
was no longer conscious of those ephemera that had once seemed the very
structure, the beams and girders defining the limits of the ambiguous situation
one had come to know and even to tolerate, if not to love.
The
point was the synthesis of very simple elements in a new and strong, as opposed
to old and weak, relation to one another. Why hadn't this been possible in the
earlier days of experimentation, of bleak, barren living that didn't seem to be
leading anywhere and it couldn't have mattered less? Probably because not
enough of what made it up had taken on that look of worn familiarity, like
pebbles polished over and over again by the sea, that made it possible for the
old to blend inconspicuously with the new in a union too subtle to cause any
comment that would have shattered its purpose forever. But already it was hard
to distinguish the new elements from the old, so calculated and easygoing was
the fusion, the partnership that was the only element now, and which was even
now fading rapidly from memory, so perfect was its assimilation by the
bystanders and decor that in other times would have filled up the view, and
that now were becoming as transparent as the substance that was giving them
back to life.
A vast
wetness as of sea and air combined, a single smooth, anonymous matrix without
surface or depth was the product of these new changes. It no longer mattered
very much whether prayers were answered with concrete events or the oracle gave
a convincing reply, for there was no longer anyone to care in the old sense of
caring. There were new people watching and waiting, conjugating in this way the
distance and emptiness, transforming the scarcely noticeable bleakness into something
both intimate and noble. The performance had ended, the audience streamed out;
the applause still echoed in the empty hall. But the idea of the spectacle as
something to be acted out and absorbed still hung in the air long after the
last spectator had gone home to sleep.
