Sometimes one pulls oneself up short, and asks: “What am I doing this for?” One writes novels, stories, essays: and then suddenly: “What on earth am I doing it for?”
What indeed?
For the sake of humanity?
Pfui! The very words human, humanity, humanism make one sick. For the sake of humanity as such, I wouldn’t lift a little finger, much less write a story.
For the sake of the Spirit?
Tampoco! — But what do we mean by the Spirit? Let us be careful. Do we mean that One Universal Intelligence of which every man has his modicum? Or further, that one Cosmic Soul, or Spirit, of which every individual is a broken fragment, and towards which every individual strives back, to escape the raw edges of his own fragmentariness, and to experience once more the sense of wholeness?
The sense of wholeness! Does one write books in order to give one’s fellow-men a sense of wholeness: first, a oneness with all men, then a oneness with all things, then a oneness with our cosmos, and finally a oneness with the vast invisible universe? Is that it? Is that our achievement and our peace?
Anyhow, it would be a great achievement. And this has been the aim of the great ones. It was the aim of Whitman, for example.
Now it is the aim of the little ones, since the big ones are all gone. Thomas Hardy, a last big one, rings the knell of our Oneness. Virtually, he says; Once you achieve the great identification with the One, whether it be the One Spirit, or the Oversoul, or God, or whatever name you like to give it, you find that this God, this One, this Cosmic Spirit isn’t human at all, hasn’t any human feelings, doesn’t concern itself for a second with the individual, and is, all told, a gigantic cold monster. It is a machine. The moment you attain that sense of Oneness and Wholeness, you become cold, dehumanized, mechanical, and monstrous. The greatest of all illusions is the Infinite of the Spirit.
Whitman really rang the same knell. (I don’t expect anyone to agree with me.)
The sense of wnoleness is a most terrible let-down. The big ones have already decided it. But the little ones, sneakingly too selfish to care, go on sentimentally tinkling away at it.
This we may be sure of: all talk of brotherhood, universal love, sacrifice, and so on, is a sentimental pose for us. We reached the top of Pisgah, and looking down, saw the graveyard of humanity. Those meagre spirits who could never get to the top, and are careful never to try, because it costs too much sweat and a bleeding at the nose, they sit below and still snivellingly invent Pisgah-sights. But strictly, it is all over. The game is up.
The little ones, of course, are writing at so many cents a word — or a line — according to their success. They may say I do the same. Yes, I demand my cents, a Shylock. Nevertheless, if I wrote for cents I should write differently, and with far more “success.”
What, then, does one write for? There must be some imperative.
Probably it is the sense of adventure, to start with. Life is no fun for a man, without an adventure.
The Pisgah-top of spiritual oneness looks down upon a hopeless squalor of industrialism, the huge cemetery of human hopes. This is our Promised Land. “There’s a good time coming, boys, a good time coming.” Well, we’ve rung the bell, and here it is.
Shall we climb hurriedly down from Pisgah, and keep the secret? Mum’s the word!
This is what our pioneers are boldly doing. We used, as boys, to sing parodies of most of the Sunday-school hymns.
They climbed the steep ascent of heaven
Through peril, toil, and pain:
O God, to us may grace be given
To scramble down again.
This is the grand hymn of the little ones. But it’s harder getting down a height, very often, than getting up. It’s a predicament. Here we are, cowering on the brinks of precipices half-way up, or down, Pisgah. The Pisgah of Oneness, the Oneness of Mankind, the Oneness of Spirit.
Hie, boys, over we go! Pisgah’s a fraud, and the Promised Land is Pittsburgh, the Chosen Few, there are billions of ‘em, and Canaan smells of kerosene. Let’s break our necks if we must, but let’s get down, and look over the brink of some other horizon. We’re like the girl who took the wrong turning: thought it was the right one.
It’s an adventure. And there’s only one left, the venture of consciousness. Curse these ancients, they have said everything for us. Curse these moderns, they have done everything for us. The aeroplane descends and lays her egg-shells of empty tin cans on the top of Everest, in the Ultimate Thule, and all over the North Pole; not to speak of tractors waddling across the inviolate Sahara and over the jags of Arabia Petraea, laying the same addled eggs of our civilization, tin cans, in every camp-nest.
Well then, they can have the round earth. They’ve got it anyhow. And they can have the firmament: they’ve got that too. The moon is a cold egg in the astronomical nest. Heigho! for the world well lost!
That’s the known World, the world of the One Intelligence. That is the Human World! I’m getting out of it. Homo sum. Omnis a me humanum alienum puto.
Of the thing we call human, I’ve had enough. And enough is as good as a feast.
Inside of me, there’s a little demon — maybe he’s a big demon — that says Basta! Basta! to all my oneness. “Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness.” In short, come off the perch, Polly, and look what a mountain of droppings you’ve crouched upon.
Are you human, and do you want me to sympathize with you for that? Let me hand you a roll of toilet-paper.
After looking down from the Pisgah-top on to the oneness of all mankind safely settled these several years in Canaan, I admit myself dehumanized.
Fair waved the golden corn
In Canaan’s pleasant land.
The factory smoke waves much higher. And in the sweet smoke of industry I don’t care a button who loves whom, nor what babies are born. The sight of all of it en masse was a little too much for my human spirit, it dehumanized me. Here I am, without a human sympathy left. Looking down on Human Oneness was too much for my human stomach, so I vomited it away.
Remains a demon which says Ha ha! So you’ve conquered the earth, have you, oh man? Now swallow the pill.
For if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of a conquest is in digesting it. Humanity is an ostrich. But even the ostrich thinks twice before it bolts a rolled hedgehog. The earth is conquered as the hedgehog is conquered when he rolls himself up into a ball, and the dog spins him with his paw.
But that is not the point, at least for anyone except the Great Dog of Humanity. The point for us is, What then?
“Whither, oh splendid ship, thy white sails bending?” To have her white sails dismantled and a gasolene engine fitted into her guts. That is whither, oh Poet!
When you’ve got to the bottom of Pisgah once more, where are you? Sitting on a sore posterior, murmuring: Oneness is all bunk. There is no Oneness, till you invented it and killed your goose to get it out of her belly. It takes millions of little people to lay the egg of the Universal Spirit, and then it’s an addled omelet, and stinks in our nostrils. And all the millions of little people have overreached themselves, trying to lay the mundane egg of oneness. They’re all damaged inside, and they can’t face the addled omelet they’ve laid. What a mess!
What then?
Heighol Whither, oh patched canoe, your kinked keel thrusting?
We’ve been over the rapids, and the creature that crawls out of the whirlpool feels that most things human are foreign to him. Homo sum! means a vastly different thing to him, from what it meant to his father.
Homo sum! a demon who knows nothing of oneness or of perfection. Homo sum! a demon who knows nothing of any First Creator who created the universe from his own perfection. Homo sum! a man who knows that all creation lives like some great demon inhabiting space, and pulsing with a dual desire, a desire to give himself forth into creation, and a desire to take himself back, in death.
Child of the great inscrutable demon, Homo sum! Adventurer from the first Adventurer, Homo sum! Son of the blazing-hearted father who wishes beauty and harmony and perfection, Homo sum! Child of the raging-hearted demon-father who fights that nothing shall surpass this crude and demonish rage, Homo sum!
Whirling in the midst of Chaos, the demon of the beginning who is for ever willing and unwilling to surpass the Status Quo. Like a bird he spreads wings to surpass himself. Then like a serpent he coils to strike at that which would surpass him. And the bird of the first desire must either soar quickly, or strike back with his talons at the snake, if there is to be any surpassing of the thing that was, the Status Quo.
It is the joy for ever, the agony for ever, and above all, the fight for ever. For all the universe is alive, and whirling in the same fight, the same joy and anguish. The vast demon of life has made himself habits which, except in the whitest heat of desire and rage, he will never break. And these habits are the laws of our scientific universe. But all the laws of physics, dynamics, kinetics, statics, all are but the settled habits of a vast living incomprehensibility, and they can all be broken, superseded, in a moment of great extremity.
Homo sum! child of the demon. Homo sum! willing and unwilling. Homo sum! giving and taking. Homo sum! hot and cold. Homo sum! loving and loveless. Homo sum! the Adventurer.
This we see, this we know as we crawl down the dark side of Pisgah, or slip down on a sore posterior. Homo sum! has changed its meaning for us.
That is, if we are young men. Old men and elderly will sit tight on heavy posteriors in some crevice upon Pisgah, babbling about “all for love, and the world well saved.” Young men with hearts still for the life adventure will rise up with their trouser-seats scraped away, after the long slither from the heights down the well- nigh bottomless pit, having changed their minds. They will change their minds and change their pants. Wisdom is sometimes in a sore bottom, and the new pants will no longer be neutral.
Young men will change their minds and their pants, having done with Oneness and neutrality. Even the stork meditates on an orange leg, and the bold drake pushes the water behind him with a red foot. Young men are the adventurers.
Let us scramble out of this ash-hole at the foot of Pisgah. The universe isn’t a machine after all. It’s alive and kicking. And in spite of the fact that man with his cleverness has discovered some of the habits of our old earth, and so lured him into a trap; in spite of the fact that man has trapped the great forces, and they go round and round at his bidding like a donkey in a gin, the old demon isn’t quite nabbed. We didn’t quite catch him napping. He’ll turn round on us with bare fangs, before long. He’ll turn into a python, coiling, coiling, coiling till we’re nicely mashed. Then he’ll bolt us.
Let’s get out of the vicious circle. Put on new bright pants to show that we’re meditative fowl who have thought the thing out and decided to migrate. To assert that our legs are not grey machine- sections, but live and limber members who know what it is to have their rear well scraped and punished, in the slither down Pisgah, and are not going to be diddled any more into mechanical service of mountain-climbing up to the great summit of Wholeness and Bunk.