We hurried through the meal, then piled into their car. A good-looking car, it seemed to me. On the way to the hall they told me of Dubois’ activities since I had last heard of him. He had assumed an educational post in the South, a world not too congenial for one of his temperament and upbringing. He had grown somewhat bitter, they thought, and more caustic in his speech. Impulsively I told them that he reminded me, in some strange, indefinable way, of Rabindranath Tagore whom I also had heard years ago. What I was thinking of probably was that neither of these men minced words when it came to telling the truth.

By the time we reached the hall I was in the midst of a long drawn-out rhapsody about another Negro, my quondam idol, Hubert Harrison. I was telling them of all I had learned standing at the foot of his soapbox in Madison Square in the days when one could discuss anything freely and publicly. There was no one in those days, I told them candidly, who could hold a candle to Hubert Harrison. With a few well-directed words he had the ability to demolish any opponent. He did it neatly and smoothly too, with kid gloves, so to speak. I described the wonderful way he smiled, his easy assurance, the great sculptured head which he carried on his shoulders like a lion. I wondered aloud if he had not come of royal blood, if he had not been the descendant of some great African monarch. Yes, he was a man who electrified one by his mere presence. Beside him the other speakers, the white ones, looked like pygmies, not only physically but culturally, spiritually. Some of them, the ones who were paid to foment trouble, carried on like epileptics, always wrapped in the stars and stripes, to be sure. Hubert Harrison, on the other hand, no matter what the provocation, always retained his self-possession, his dignity. He had a way of placing the back of his hand on his hip, his trunk tilted forward, his ears cocked to catch every last word the questioner, or the heckler, put to him. Well he knew how to bide his time! When the tumult had subsided there would come that broad smile of his, a broad, good-natured grin, and he would answer his man—always to the point, always fair and square, always full on, like a broadside. Soon everyone would be laughing, everyone but the poor imbecile who had dared to put the question…

I was rattling on in this vein as we entered the hall. The place was crowded; this time the audience was mainly Negro. As every white man who’s not prejudiced can testify, it’s a privilege to be with a crowd of Negroes. The atmosphere is always supercharged. At intervals there are hearty guffaws, weird ejaculations, genuine peals of laughter such as you never hear from the throats of white people. White people lack spontaneity. When they laugh it seldom comes from the guts. Usually it’s a mocking sort of laughter. The black man’s laugh comes to him as easily as breathing.

It was quite a time before Dubois appeared on the platform. When he did it was with the air of a sovereign mounting his throne. The very majesty of the man silenced any would-be demonstration. There was nothing of the rabble-rouser in this leonine figure—such tactics were beneath him. His words, however, were like cold dynamite. Had he wanted to, he could have set off an explosion that would rock the world. But it was obvious that he had no intention of rocking the world—not yet, at any rate. As I listened to his speech I pictured him addressing a body of scientists in much this same way. I could imagine him unleashing the most devastating truths, but in such a manner that one would be left stunned rather than moved to action.

What a pity, I thought, that a man of his ability, his powers, should be obliged to narrow his range. Because of his blood he was doomed to segregate himself, to restrict his horizon, his activities. He could have remained in Europe, were he was freely accepted and honored; he could have made a bigger place for himself there. But he had elected to remain with his own kinsmen, to raise them up, and, if possible, to make a better world for them to live in. He must have known from the beginning that it was a hopeless task, that nothing of any importance could be accomplished for his brethren in the space of one short life-time. He was too intelligent a man to have any illusions on the subject. I didn’t know whether to admire or deplore his vain, courageous, stubborn persistence. Involuntarily I was making comparisons in my mind between him and John Brown. One had intelligence, the other blind faith. John Brown, in his passionate hatred of injustice and intolerance, had not hesitated to set himself up against the holy government of these United States. Had there been just a few hundred souls like himself in this big broad land, I doubt not but that he would have overthrown the existent government of these United States. When John Brown was executed a commotion pervaded this country which has never truly subsided. It is possible that John Brown may have set back the cause of the Negro in America. The fiasco at Harper’s Ferry may have made it forever impossible for the Negro to obtain his just rights by direct action. The amazing deeds of the great Liberator may have made any form of insurrection unthinkable—in the minds of later generations. (Just as the memory of the French Revolution makes a Frenchman quake.) Since John Brown’s day it seems to be silently agreed that the only way to permit a Negro to take his place in our world is through a long and dolorous education. That this is only a pretext for delaying the true event no one wishes to face. Imagine Jesus the Christ advocating such a policy!

The blessing of freedom! Are we to wait forever until we are fit for it before we receive it? Or is freedom something to be wrested from those who tyrannically withhold it? Is there anyone great enough, wise enough, to say how long a man should remain a slave? Dubois was no rabble-rouser. No, but to a man like myself it was all too obvious that what his words implied were—Assume the spirit of liberty and you will be free! Education? As I saw and felt it, he was saying almost bluntly: I am telling you that it is your own fear and ignorance which keep you in slavery. There is only one kind of education, that which leads you to assert and maintain your own freedom. What other purpose could he have had, in citing all the marvelous examples of African culture, before the white man’s intrusion, than to indicate the Negroes’ own self-sufficiency? What need had the Negro of the white man? None. What difference was there between the two races, what real, fundamental, vital difference? None. The paramount fact, the only fact worth consideration, was that the white man, despite all his grand words, all his tortuous principles, was still holding the Negro in subjection … I am not quoting his words. I am recording my reactions, my interpretation of his speech. First get off our backs! that’s what I could hear him screaming—though he scarcely raised his voice, though he made no dramatic gestures, though he never said anything of the kind. I’m telling you tonight about the glories of the past, of your past, of our common past, as Negroes. What of the future? Are you going to wait until the white man has sucked your blood dry? Will you wait meekly until he has filled our veins with his own poisonous blood? Already you are nothing but half-baked imitations of the white man. You ridicule him and you mimick him, at the same time. With every day that passes you are losing your own precious heritage. You are forfeiting it to your keepers who have not the least intention of granting you equality. Educate yourselves, if you wish. Improve your lot, if you can. But remember this—until you stand free and equal with your white neighbors nothing will avail.

Don’t delude yourselves that the white man is your superior in any way. He isn’t. His skin may be white, but his heart is black. He is guilty before God and before his fellowman. He is bringing the world down about his ears in his pride and arrogance. The day is coming when he will rule no more. He has sown hatred throughout the world. He has pitted brother against brother. He has denied his own God. No, this miserable specimen of humanity is not the superior of the black man. This breed of man is doomed. Awake, my brothers! Awake and sing! Shout the white man down! Shut him out of your sight! Seal his lips, bind his limbs, bury him where he belongs—on the dung heap!

I repeat, nothing of the sort passed Dubois’ lips. He would undoubtedly have held me in contempt had I voiced such an interpretation of his speech. But words mean little. What’s back of them—that’s what counts. I almost felt ashamed of Dubois for using other words than the ones I heard in my mind. Had his words created a bloody insurrection he would have been the most bewildered man in the whole Negro community. And yet I persisted in believing that in his heart the message I have just given was recorded, recorded in blood and tears. If he were truly a whit less ardent he would not, could not, be the noble figure he was. I blushed to think that a man of such gifts, such powers, such insight, should be obliged to muffle his voice, to throttle his own true feelings. I admired him for all that he had done, for all that he was, and it was indeed much—but if only he possessed a spark of that passionate spirit of John Brown! If only he had a touch of the fanatic! To speak of injustice and to remain cool—only a sage can act thus. (It must be granted, however, that where the ordinary man sees injustice the sage perhaps detects another kind of justice.) The just man is hard, merciless, inhuman. The just man will set fire to the world, will destroy it with his own hands, if he can, rather than see injustice perpetuated. John Brown was that sort of man. History has forgotten him. Lesser men have come forward, have upset the world, thrown it into a panic—and for nothing even approaching that which we call justice … Give him a little more time and the white man will destroy himself and the pernicious world he has created. He has no solutions for the ills he has foisted upon the world. None whatever. He is empty, disillusioned, without a grain of hope. He pines for his own miserable end.

Will the white man drag the Negro down with him? I doubt it. All those whom he has persecuted and enslaved, degenerated and emasculated, all whom he has vampirized will, I believe, rise up against him on the fateful day of judgment. There will be no succor for him, not one friendly alien hand raised to avert his doom. Neither will he be mourned. Instead there will come from all corners of the earth, like the gathering of a whirlwind, a cry of exultation. White man, your day is over! Perish like the worm! And may the memory of your stay on earth be effaced!

Curiously enough, it was only quite recently that I discovered that Dubois had written a book on John Brown in which he predicted much that has already befallen the white race and much that has yet to come to pass. Strange that, knowing nothing of his passion and admiration for the great Liberator, I should have linked their names…

The next morning, as I was having breakfast in a coffee shop on Pineapple Street, I felt a hand on my shoulder. A voice from behind was quietly asking if I was not Henry Miller. I looked up to find Claude at my elbow. Not a possible doubt that it could be anyone else.

I was told you usually took breakfast here, he said. Too bad you didn’t come last night; I had a friend with me whom you would have enjoyed meeting. He was from Teheran.

I offered apologies and urged him to have a second breakfast with me. It was nothing for Claude to eat two or three breakfasts in a row.

He was like a camel—he tanked up whenever he had the chance.

You are a Capricorn, aren’t you? he asked. December 26 th, is that right? About noon?

I nodded.

I don’t know too much about astrology, he continued. It’s simply a point of departure for me. I’m like Joseph in the Bible—I have dreams. Prophetic dreams, sometimes.

I smiled indulgently.

You’re going to travel soon—perhaps in a year or two. An important voyage. Your life will be radically altered. He paused a moment to gaze out of the window, as if trying to concentrate. But that’s not important now. I wanted to see you for another reason. He paused again. You’ll have a harrowing time of it, this next year or so. I mean, before you begin your journey. It will take all your courage to survive. If I didn’t know you so well I would say there was a danger of your going mad…

Excuse me, I interrupted, but how do you happen to know me so well?

It was Claude’s turn to smile. Then, without the slightest hesitation, he answered:—

I’ve known you for a long while—in my dreams. Yon come back again and again. Of course I didn’t know it was you until I met Mona. Then I realized it could be no other.

Strange, I murmured.

Not so very, said Claude. Many men have had the same experience. Once, when I was in a little village in China, a man met me on the street and, taking me by the arm, he said: ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come. You arrived exactly on time.’ He was a magician. He practised the black arts.

Are you a magician too? I asked jokingly.

Hardly, said Claude. And in the same tone he added: I practise divination. It’s a gift I was born with.

But it doesn’t help you much, does it?

True, he replied, but it permits me to help others. That is, if they wish to be helped.

And you want to help me?

If I can.

Before you go any further, said I, supposing you tell me a little about yourself. Mona has told me something of your life, but it all sounds rather confusing. Tell me this, if you don’t mind—do you know where you were born and who your father and mother were?

Claude looked straight into my eyes. That’s what I’m trying to find out, he said. Perhaps you can be of help. You wouldn’t have appeared in my dreams so often if you weren’t of importance in my life.

Your dreams? Tell me, how do I appear to you in dream?

In various roles, said Claude promptly. Sometimes as a father, sometimes as a devil, and sometimes as a ministering angel. Whenever you appear it’s to the strain of music. Celestial music, I would say.

I was at a loss what to say to this.

You are aware, of course, Claude continued, that you have power over others. Great power. You seldom employ it, however. When you do you usually misuse it. You’re ashamed of your better self, if I may put it that way. You’d rather be thought wicked than good. And you are wicked at times—wicked and cruel—especially to those who are fond of you. That’s what you’ve got to work out … But you’ll soon be put to the test!

There’s something eerie about you, Claude. I begin to suspect that you do have second sight, or whatever you choose to call it.

To this Claude replied: You’re essentially a man of faith. A man of great faith. The skeptic in you is a transitory phenomenon, a heritage from the past, from some other life. You’ve got to throw off your doubts—self doubts, above all—they’re suffocating you. A being like yourself has only to throw himself on the world and he will float like a cork. Nothing truly evil will ever touch you or affect you. You were made to walk through the fires. But if you shun your true role, and you alone know what that is, you will be burned to a cinder. That’s the clearest thing I know about you. I admitted quite frankly that what he had just said was neither vague nor unfamiliar to me. I’ve had inklings of such things a number of times. At the moment, however, nothing is altogether clear to me. Go on, if you will, I’m all ears.

What’s brought us together, said Claude, is that we are both seeking our true parents. You asked me where I was born. I was a foundling; my parents left me on stoop somewhere in the Bronx. I have a suspicion that my parents, whoever they were, came from Asia. Mongolia perhaps. When I look into your eyes I am almost convinced of it. You have Mongol blood, beyond a doubt. Has no one ever remarked it before?

I now took a deep look at the young man who was telling me all this. I took him in as you would a tall drink of water when you’re very thirsty. Mongol blood! Of course I had heard it before! And always from the same sort of people. Whenever the word Mongol came up it registered on me like a pass-word. We’re on to you! is what it usually conveyed. Whether I admitted or denied it, I was one of them.

The Mongol business was, of course, more symbolical than genealogical. The Mongols were the bearers of secret tidings. At some remote period in the past, when the world wag one and when its real rulers kept their identity hidden, we Mongols were there, (Strange language? Mongols talk only this way.) There was something physical, or physiological, or physiognomical at least, which characterized all who belonged to this strange clan. What distinguished them from the rest of humanity was the expression about the eyes. It was neither the color, shape or look of the eye: it was the way the eyes were set off, or set in, the way they swam in their mysterious sockets. Veiled ordinarily, in talk these veils peeled off, one after another, until one had the impression of peering into a deep black hole.

Studying Claude, my gaze came to rest on the two black holes in the center of his eyes. They were fathomless. For a full minute or two not another word was exchanged. Neither of us felt embarrassed or uncomfortable. We simply stared at each other like two lizards. The Mongol look of mutual recognition.

It was I who broke the spell. I told him that he reminded me slightly of Deerslayer—of Deerslayer and Daniel Boone combined. With just a touch of Nebuchadnezzar!

He laughed. I’ve passed for many things, he said. The Navajos thought I had Indian blood in my veins. Maybe I have too…

I’m sure you have a drop of Jewish blood, said I. Not because of the Bronx! I added.

I was raised by Jews, said Claude. Until I was eight years of age I heard nothing but Russian and Yiddish. At ten I ran away from home.

Where was that—what you call home?

A little village in the Crimea, not far from Sevastopol. I had been transplanted there when I was six months old. He paused a moment. He started to say something about memory, then dropped it. When I first heard English, he resumed, I recognized it as a familiar tongue, though I had heard it only during the first six months of my life. I learned English almost instinctively, in less than no time. As you notice, I speak it without trace of accent. Chinese also came easy to me, though I really never became proficient in it…

Excuse me, I interrupted, but how many languages do you speak, would you mind telling me? He hesitated a moment, as if making a quick calculation. Frankly, he replied, I can’t tell. I know at least a dozen, certainly. It’s nothing to be proud of; I have a natural flair for language. Besides, when you knock about the world you can’t help but pick up languages.

But Hungarian! I exclaimed. Surely that didn’t come easy to you!

He gave me an indulgent smile. I don’t know why people think Hungarian is so difficult. There are Indian tongues right here in North America which are far more difficult—from the standpoint of pure linguistics, I mean. But no language is difficult if you’re living it. To know Turkish, Hungarian, Arabic or the Navajo tongue you have to become as one of them, that’s all.

But you’re so young! How could you have had time to … ?

Age means nothing, he interrupted. It isn’t age which makes us wise. Nor even experience, as people pretend. It’s the quickness of the spirit. The quick and the dead … You, of all people, should know what I mean. There are only two classes in this world—and in every world—the quick and the dead. For those who cultivate the spirit nothing is impossible. For the others, everything is impossible, or incredible, or futile. When you live day after day with the impossible you begin to wonder what the word means. Or rather, how it ever came to mean what it does. There’s a world of light, in which everything is clear and manifest, and there’s a world of confusion, where all is murky and obscure. The two worlds are really one. Those in the world of darkness get a glimpse now and then of the realm of light, but those in the world of light know nothing of darkness. The men of light Cast no shadow. Evil is unknown to them. Nor do they harbor resentment. They move without chains or fetters. Until I returned to this country I associated only with such men. In some ways my life is stranger than you think. Why did I go among the Navajos? To find peace and understanding. If I had been born in another time I might have been a Christ or a Buddha. Here I’m a bit of a freak. Even you have difficulty not to think that way about me.

Here he gave me a mysterious smile. For a full moment I felt as though my heart had stopped.

Did you feel something strange then? said Claude, his smile now transformed into a more human one.

I did indeed, said I, unconsciously placing a hand over my heart.

Your heart stopped beating for a moment, that was all, said Claude. Imagine, if you can, what it would be like if your heart began to beat with a cosmic rhythm. Most people’s hearts don’t even beat with a human rhythm … There will come a time when man will no longer distinguish between man and god. When the human being is raised to his full powers he will be divine—his human consciousness will have fallen away. What is called death will have disappeared. Everything will be altered, permanently altered. There will be no further need for change. Man will be free, that’s what I mean. Once he becomes the god which he is, he will have realized his destiny—which is freedom. Freedom includes everything. Freedom converts everything to its basic nature, which is perfection. Don’t think I am talking religion or philosophy. I disclaim them both, utterly. They are not even stepping stones, as people like to think. They must be hurdled, at one jump. If you put something outside you, or above you, you become victimized. There is only the one thing, spirit. It’s all, everything, and when you realize it you’re it. You’re all there is, there is nothing more … do you understand what I’m saying?

I nodded my head affirmatively. I was a little dazed.

You understand, said Claude, but the reality of it escapes you. Understanding is nothing. The eyes must be kept open, constantly. To open your eyes you must relax, not strain. Don’t be afraid of falling backwards into a bottomless pit. There is nothing to fall into. You’re in it and of it, and one day, if you persist, you will be it. I don’t say you will have it, please notice, because there’s nothing to possess. Neither are you to be possessed, remember that! You are to liberate yourself. There are no exercises, physical or spiritual, to practise. All such things are like incense—they awaken a feeling of holiness. We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole … complete. That’s being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare and a delusion…

Excuse me for talking to you this way, said Claude, hastily swallowing another mouthful of coffee, but I have the feeling that time is short. The next time we meet it will most likely be in some remote part of the world. Your restlessness may lead you to the most unexpected places. My movements are more determined; I know the pattern set down for me. He paused to take another tack. Since I’ve gone thus far let me add a few more words. He leaned forward, and his face took on a most earnest expression. Right now, Henry Miller, nobody in this country knows anything about you. Nobody—and I mean it literally—knows your true identity. At this moment I know more about you than I shall probably ever know again. What I know, however, is only of importance for me. This is what I wanted to tell you—that you should think of me when you are in distress. Not that I can help you, don’t think that! Nobody can. Nobody will, probably. You—(and here he spaced his words)—you will have to solve your own problems. But at least you will know, when thinking of me, that there is one person in this world who knows you and believes in you. That always helps. The secret, however, lies in not caring whether anyone, not even the Almighty, has confidence in you. You must come to realize, and you will undoubtedly, that you need no protection. Nor should you hunger after salvation, for salvation is only a myth. What is there to be saved? Ask yourself that! And if saved, saved from what? Have you thought of these things? Do! There is no need for redemption, because what men call sin and guilt have no ultimate meaning. The quick and the dead!—just remember that! When you reach to the quick of things you will find neither acceleration nor retardation, neither birth nor death. There is and you are—that’s it in a nutshell. Don’t break your skull over it, because to the mind it makes no sense. Accept it and forget it—or it will drive you mad…

When I walked away I was floating in the clouds. I had my briefcase with me, as usual, but all thought of calling on prospects was gone. I got into the subway automatically and out again automatically—at Times Square. Whenever I had no set destination I would get out automatically at Times Square. There I always came upon the rambla, the Nevsky Prospekt, the souks and bazaars of the damned.

The thoughts and emotions which possessed me were almost frighteningly familiar. They were the same which I experienced when I first heard my old friend Roy Hamilton talk, when first I listened to Benjamin Fay Mills, the Evangelist, when first I glanced at that strange book, Esoteric Buddhism, when I read at one gulp the Too Teh Ch’ing, or—whenever I picked up The Possessed, The Idiot, or The Brothers Karamazov. The cows-bells which I carried under my ribs began clanking wildly; in the belfry above it was as if all the stars in the heavens had come together to make a celestial bonfire. There was no weight to my body, none whatever. I was at the six extremes simultaneously.

There was a language which never failed to set me off—and it was always the same language. Boiled to the size of a lentil, its whole scope and purport could be expressed in two words: Know thyself! Alone with myself, and not only alone but disconnected, discalibrated, I ran up and down the harmonica, talking the one and only language, breathing only the pure ineffable spirit, looking upon everything with new eyes and in an absolutely new way. No birth, no death? Of course not! What more, what else, could there be than was at . this moment? Who said that everything was fucked up? Where? When? On the seventh day God rested from his labors. And He saw that all was good. D’accord. How could it have been otherwise? Why should it be otherwise? According to reason, that fat wingless slug, humanity was slowly, slowly evolving from the primordial slime. A million years hence we would begin faintly to resemble the angels. What rot! Is the mind encysted, then, in the ass-hole of creation? When Roy Hamilton spoke, though he possessed not a shred of learning, he spoke with the sweet authority of the angels. He was all instantaneity. The wheel flashed and you were immediately at the hub, in the center of that empty space without which not even the constellations can wheel and flash their secret codes. Ditto for Benjamin Fay Mills, who was not an Evangelist but a hero who had abandoned Christianity in order to be a Christ. And Nirvana? Not tomorrow but now, forever and eternally now…

This language was ever bright and clear to me. The language of reason, which is not even the language of common sense, spelled gibberish. When God lets go the arm that holds the pen the author no longer knows what he is writing. Jacob Boehme used a language all his own, a language direct from the Maker. Scholars read it one way, men of God another. The poet speaks only to the poet. Spirit answereth spirit. The rest is hog-wash.

A hundred voices are speaking at once. I am still on the Nevsky Prospekt, still toting the brief-case. I could as well be in limbo. I am most assuredly there, wherever that may be, and nothing can derail me. Possessed, yes. But by the great Manitou this time.

Now I’ve gotten below the rambla. I’m approaching the old Haymarket. Suddenly a name juts out from a billboard, cuts my eye-ball just as clean as a razor-blade. I have just passed a theatre which I thought had been torn down long ago. Nothing remains in the retina but a name, her name, an utterly new name: MIMI AGUGLIA. This is the important thing, her name. Not that she is Italian, not that the play is an immortal tragedy. Just her name: MIMI AGUGLIA. Though I keep walking steadily ahead, and then round and about, though I keep scudding through the clouds like a three-quarter moon, her name will draw me back punctually at 2.15 P.M.

From the celestial realm I slide to a comfortable seat in the third row orchestra. I am about to witness the greatest performance I shall probably ever witness. And in a language of which I know not a word.

The theatre is packed—and with Italians exclusively. An awesome hush precedes the rising of the curtain. The stage is semi-dark. For a full minute not a word is spoken. Then a voice is heard: the voice of Mimi Aguglia.

Only a few moments ago my head was seething with thought; now all is still, the great swarm gathered in a honey-comb at the base of the skull. Not even a buzz issues from the hive. My senses, sharpened to a diamond point, are fully concentrated on the strange creature with the oracular voice. Even were she to speak a language I know, I doubt that I could follow her. It is the sounds she makes, the immense gamut of sound, which enthralls me. Her throat is like an ancient lyre. So very, very ancient. It has the ring of man before he ate of the tree of knowledge. Her gestures and movements are mere accompaniments to the voice. The features, monolithic in repose, express the most subtle modulations with her ceaseless changes of mood. When she throws her head back, the oracular music from her throat plays over her features like lightning playing over a bed of mica. She seems to express with ease emotions which we can only stimulate in dream. All is primordial, effulgent, annihilating. A moment ago she was sitting in a chair. It is no longer a chair; it has become a thing, an animated thing. Wherever she moves, whatever she touches, things become altered. Now she stands before a tall mirror, ostensibly to catch her own reflection. Illusion! She is standing before a gap in the cosmos, answering the Titan’s yawn with an inhuman shriek. Her heart, suspended in a crevice of ice, suddenly glows—until her whole being shoots forth flames of ruby and sapphire. Another instant and the monolithic head turns to jade. The serpent confronting chaos. Marble returning in horror to the void. Nothingness…

She is pacing back and forth, back and forth, and in her wake a phosphorescent glow. The very atmosphere thickens, impregnated by the impending horror. She is unveiling now, but as if in warm oil, as if still drugged by the fumes of the sacrificial altar. A phrase gurgles from her tortured lips, a strangled phrase which causes the man beside me to groan. Blood oozes from a burst vein in her temple. Petrified, I am unable to make a sound, though I am screaming at the top of my lungs. It is no longer theatre, it is the nightmare. The walls close in, twisting and twining like the dread labyrinth. The Minotaur is breathing upon us with hot and evil breath. At precisely this moment, and as if a thousand chandeliers had been shattered at once, her mad, fiendish laugh splits the ear. She is no longer recognizable. One sees only a human wreck, a tangle of arms and limbs, a mass of twisted hair, a gory mouth, and this, this thing, gropes, staggers, grapples blindly, suddenly, towards the wings-Hysteria sweeps the audience. Men with jaws locked are hanging limp in their seats. Women, scream, faint, or tear their hair convulsively. The whole auditorium has become like the bottom of the sea—and pandemonium struggling like a crazed gorilla to remove the heavy liquid stone of fright. The ushers gesticulate like puppets, their shouts smothered in the screeching roar which gradually swells like a typhoon. And all this in total darkness, because something has gone wrong with the lights. Finally from the pit comes the sound of music, a blare and a blast, which is met by an angry roar of protest. The music fades out, silenced as if by a hammer. The curtain rises slowly to reveal a stage still in darkness. Suddenly she comes forth from the wings, a lighted taper in her hand, bowing, bowing, bowing. She is mute, absolutely mute. From the boxes, from the balconies, from the pit itself flowers rain down upon the stage. She is standing in a sea of flowers, the taper burning brightly. Suddenly the theatre is flooded with light. The crowd is screaming her name—MIMI … MIMI … MIMI AGUGLIA. In the midst of the uproar she calmly blows the taper out and walks swiftly back to the wings…

With the brief-case still under my arm I start ploughing through the rambla again. I feel as if I had come down form Mt. Sinai by parachute. All about me are my brothers, humanity, as they say, still marching on all fours. I have an overpowering desire to kick out in all directions, speed the poor buggers into Paradise. Just at this precise chronological moment when I’m fizzing like champagne, a man tugs at my sleeve and shoves a dirty post-card under my nose. I keep walking straight ahead with him clinging to me, and as we move on, trancelike, he keeps changing the cards and muttering under his breath: A honey, what! Dirt cheap. Take the whole pack—for two bits. Suddenly I stop dead in my tracks; I begin to laugh, a frightening laugh which grows louder and louder. I let the cards slide from my fingers, like snow-flakes. A crowd begins to gather, the peddler takes to his heels. People are beginning to pick up the cards; they keep crowding in on me, closer and closer, curious to know what made me laugh so. In the distance I spy a cop approaching. Pivoting round abruptly, I yell: He’s gone in there. Get him! Pointing to a shop near the corner I push forward eagerly with the crowd; as they press forward and ahead of me I turn quickly and walk as fast as my legs will carry me in the opposite direction. At the corner I swing round, moving like a kangaroo now, until I come to a gin-mill.

At the bar two men are in the midst of a violent dispute. I order a beer and make myself as inconspicuous as possible.

I tell you he’s off his nut!

You’d be too if you had had your balls cut out.

He’ll make you look like a horse’s ass.

The Pope’s ass he will!

Look, who made the world? Who made the stars, the sun, the rain drops? Answer me that!

You. answer it, since you’re so bloody learned. You tell me who made the world, the rainbows, the piss-pots and all the other cocksucking devices.

You’d like to know, lad? Well, let me say this—it wasn’t made in a cheese factory. And it wasn’t evolution made it either.

Oh no? What was it then?

It was the Almighty Jehowah himself, Lord of Creation, Begetter of the Blessed Mary, and Redeemer of lost souls. That’s a fair answer for you. Now what have you to say?

I still say he’s nuts.

You’re a dirty infidel, that’s what. You’re a pagan.

I’m not neither. I’m Irish through and through. And what’s more, I’m a Mason … yeah, a bloody Mason. Like George Abraham Washington and the Marquis of Queensbury…

And Oliver Cromwell and Bloody Bonesapart. Sure, I know your breed. It was a black snake that borned you and it’s his black venom you’ve been spreading ever since.

We’ll never take orders from the Pope. Put that in your pipe and light it!

And this for you! You’ve made a Bible out of Darwin’s crazy preachings. You make a monkey of yourself and you call it evolution.

I still say he’s nuts.

Can I ask you a simple question? Can I now?

That you can. Fire away! I’ll answer anything that has sense to it.

Perfect! … Now what makes worms crawl and birds to fly? What makes the spider spin his crazy web? What makes the kangaroo … ?

Hold it, man! One question at a time. Now which is it—the bird, the worm, the spider or the kangaroo?

Why do two and two make four? Maybe you can answer that! I don’t ask you to be an anthroposophagist, or whatever the devil they’re called. Plain arithmetic … two plus two equals four. WHY? Answer that and I’ll say you’re an honest Roman. Go on, now, give it to me!

Bugger the Romans! I’d rather be a monkey with Darwin, b’Jasus! Arithmetic! Bah! Why don’t you ask me if red-eyed Mars ever wobbled in her funicular orbit?

The Bible answered that long ago. So did Parnell!

In the pig’s ass he did!

There isn’t a question but was answered once and for all—by somebody or other.

You mean the Pope!

Man, I’ve told you a hundred times—the Pope is but a Pontifical interlocutor. His Holiness never asserted that he was the risen Christ.

Lucky for him, because I’d deny it to his treacherous face. We’ve had enough of Inquisitions. What the sad, weary world needs is a bit of common sense. You can rave all you like about spiders and kangaroos, but who’s going to pay the rent? Ask your friend that!

I told you that he joined the Dominicans.

And I said that he was nuts. At this point the bartender, thinking to quiet them, was about to offer drinks on the house when who walks in but a blind man playing a harp. He sang in a tremulous falsetto which was woefully false. He wore dark hlue glasses and over his left arm was slung a white cane.

Come give us a bawdy song! cried one of the disputants.

And none of your shenanigans! … cried the other.

The blind man removed his glasses, slung the harp and cane over a peg in the wall, and shuffled to the bar with an alacrity that was amazing.

Just a wee drop to wet the palate, he whined.

Give him a drop of Irish whiskey, said the one.

And a bit of brandy, said the other. To the men of Dublin and County Kerry, said the blind man, raising both glasses at once. Down with all Orangemen! He looked around, bright as a bob-o-link, and took a swallow from each of the tumblers.

When will you get any shame in you? said the one.

He’s wallowing in gold, said the other. It’s loike this, said the blind man, brushing his lips with his sleeve, when me owld mother died I promised her I’d never do another stroke of work. I’ve kept to me bargain, and so has she. Every time I pluck the strings she calls to me softly: ‘Patrick, are you there? It’s grand, me boy, it’s grand’. Before I can ask her a question she’s gone again. The fair grounds, I call it. She’s been there for thirty years now—and she’s kept to her bargain.

You’re dotty, man. What bargain?

It’s long to explain and my throat’s parched…

Another brandy and whiskey for the scoundrel!

You’re kind, the two of you. Gentlemen, that’s what you are! Again he raises both glasses. To the Blessed Mary and her prodigal son!

Did you hear that now? That’s blasphemy or I’ll eat me hat.

It’s not either. Tush tush!

The Blessed Mary had only one son—and by the holy Patrick he was no prodigal! He was the Prince of Paupers, that’s what he was. I’ll take an oath on it.

This is no court. Easy with your oaths! Go on, man, tell us of your bargain!

The blind man pulled his nose meditatively. Again he looked about—bright and merry, chipper as could be. Like an oily sardine.

It’s loike this … he began.

Don’t soy that, man! On with yer! Out with it!

It’s a long, long story. And me throat’s still dry, if yer don’t mind me saying so.

Get on with it, man, or we’ll be fleecing your bottom!

The blind man cleared his throat, then rubbed his eyes.

It’s loike I wuz sayin’ … Me owld mother had the gift of sight. She could see through a door, her gimlicks were that strong. Wanst, when the dadda was late for supper…

Your dadda be damned! You’re a creepy old counterfeiter!

I am that too, screeched the blind man. I’ve every little weakness.

And a, throat that’s always parched.

And a pocketful of gold, eh, you rascal! Suddenly the blind man became terrified. His face blenched.

No, no! he screamed, not me pockets. You wouldn’t do that to me? You wouldn’t do that…

The two cronies began to laugh uproariously. Pinning his arms to his sides, they went through his pockets—pants, coat and vest. Dumping the money on the bar, they piled it neatly in bills and coins of every denomination, putting the bad money to one side. It was a stunt they had evidently rehearsed more than once.

Another brandy! called the one.

Another Irish whiskey—the best! called the other.

They dished out some coins from the pile, and then a few more, to make a generous tip for the barman.

And is your throat still parched? they asked solicitously.

And what will you have? says the one.

And you? says the other.

My throat’s getting dryer and dryer.

Aye, and so is mine.

And did you ever hear about the bargain Patrick made with his owld mother?

It’s a long story, says the other, but I’ve a mind to hear it to the end. Would you tell it now, while I down a goblet to your health and virility?

The other, raising his goblet: I could tell it till the Day of Judgment, it’s that good. A corkin’ yarn. But let me wet me throat first.

They’re a bunch of thieves, the three of ‘em. said the barkeep, as he filled my glass. Would you believe it, one of ‘em was a priest once. He’s the biggest faker of the lot. Can’t put ‘em out—they own the building. See what I mean?

He busied himself with the empty glasses, rinsed them, wiped them, polished them, lit himself a cigarette. Then he ambled over to me again.

All shandy-gaff, he mumbled confidentially. They can talk sense, if they want to. They’re as smart as steel traps. Like to put on an act, that’s all. Beats me why they pick this place to do it in. He leaned backward to spit a gob in the spittoon beside his feet. Ireland! They never saw Ireland, none of them. They were born and raised a block away from here. They love to put it on … You’d never think it, would you, but the blind fellow was a great little fighter once. Until he got knocked cold by Terry McGovern. He’s got the eyes of an eagle, that bird. Comes in here to count his money every day. It burns him up to get wooden money. You know what he does with the bad coins? Passes them off on real blind men. Ain’t that nice?

He left me a moment to beg them to quiet down. The champagne was beginning to have its effect.

Know what the big news is now? They’re planning to hire a hansom and take a ride through Central Park. Time to feed the pigeons, they say. How’s that for you? He leaned backwards again to use the cuspidor. That’s another one of their acts—feeding the pigeons. They throw out some crumbs or peanuts, and when they’ve collected a crowd they begin throwing away the wooden money. Gives them a great kick. After that Blind Ben does a little number and they pass the hat around. As if they hadn’t a cent in the world! I’d like to be there sometime and put a nice lump of shit in the kitty…

He looked around to eye them disdainfully. Turns back to me again and starts spouting.

Maybe you thought they were really arguing about something? I’ve listened time and again to find out how it begins—but I never can. Before you know it they’re in the thick of it. They say any old thing—to get wound up. It’s gab they like. The argumentation is just dirt in the eye. The Pope, Darwin, kangaroos—you heard it all. It never makes sense, no matter what they’re talking about. Yesterday it was hydraulic engineering and how to cure constipation. The day before it was the Easter Rebellion. All mixed up with a lot of horse shit—the bubonic plague, the Sepoy mutiny, Roman aqueducts and horse feathers. Words, words … It drives me nuts sometimes. Every night I’m arguin’ in my sleep. The hell of it is I don’t know what I’m arguin’ about. Just like them. Even my day off is ruined. I keep wondering if they’re goin’ to show up somewheres … Some people think they’re funny. I’ve seen guys split their sides laughing at ‘em. It ain’t funny to me, no sir! By the time I finish here I’m standing on my head … Listen—I did a stretch once—for six months—and a colored guy had the cell next to mine … Can I freshen it up for you.? … He sang all day long, and nights too. Got me so mad I wanted to throttle him. Funny, hah? Shows you how sensitive you can get … Brother, if I ever get out of this racket I’m headin’ for the Sierra Nevadas. What I need is peace and quiet. I don’t even want to look at a cow. It might go MOO-ooo-ooo—see what I mean? Trouble was, when I got back my wife was gone. Yeah! Ran out on me—and with my best friend, of course. Just the same, I can’t forget that month of peace and quiet. It was worth everything that happened afterwards … You get sensitive, working like a slave all day long. I was cut out for somethin’ else. Never could find out what. I’ve been off beat for a long time … Can I freshen it up for you? It’s on the house, what the hell! You see … now I’m talkin’ a blue streak. That’s what happens to you. You see a sympathetic puss and you spill the beans … I haven’t told you anything yet. He reached up and took down a bottle of gin. Poured himself a thimbleful, a good one. Here’s how! And let’s hope they get the hell out of here soon. Where was I? Yeah, the bad news … What do you think my parents wanted me to be? An insurance agent. Can you beat that? They thought it was refined like. The old man was a hod-carrier, you see. From the old country, sure enough. A brogue as thick as mulligatawney. Yeah, the insurance racket. Can you picture me goin’ through a routine like that? So I joins the Marines. After that the horses. Lost everything. Then I take up plumbing. No go. Too clumsy. Besides, I hate filth, believe it or not. So what? Well, I bummed around a bit, got wise to myself and borrowed a little from the old man so as I could open a hash joint. Then I make the mistake of gettin’ hitched up. A battle royal from the day we were spliced. Except for that vacation I was telling you about. So help me God, one experience wasn’t enough. Before you know it, I’m hooked up with another one—a cute little bitch too. Then the real agony starts. She was a screw-ball, this last one. She got me so bitched up I didn’t now whether I was goin’ or comin’. That’s how I landed in the clink. When I came out I was that low I was ready for religion. Yes sir, those six months in the clink put the fear of Christ in me. I was ready to toe the line … He poured himself another thimbleful of gin, spat again, and resumed where he had left off. Listen, I was that careful you. could have offered me a gold ingot and I wouldn’t touch it. That’s how I got inter this business. I asked for somethin’ to keep me busy. It was the old man who got met he job. He leaned over to whisper the words: He coughed up five hundred clam to get me this break! That’s kindness. what!

Here I begged off to take a leak.

When I came out the bar was full.

The trio had disappeared, I noticed. I shook myself like a dog and headed back for the Gay White Way. Everything had fallen back into its normal aspect. It was Broadway once again, not the rambla, not the Nevsky Prospekt. A typical New York throng, no different from what it was in the year One. I bought a paper at Times Square and ducked into the subway. The workers were wending their weary way homeward. Not a spark of life in the whole train. Only the switchboard in the motorman’s compartment was alive, crackling with electricity. You could add up all the thoughts that were being thought, put a decimal in front of them, and add twenty-six digits to make it even less than nothing.

On the seventh day God rested from His labor and saw that all was good. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

I wondered vaguely about the pigeons. And from that to the Sepoy Mutiny. Then I dozed off. I fell into such a stupor that I never woke up till we got to Coney Island. The brief case was gone. So was my wallet. Even the newspaper was gone … Nothing to do but stay in the train and ride back again.

I felt hungry. Voraciously hungry. And in excellent spirits. I decided I might as well eat at The Iron Cauldron. It seemed as if I hadn’t seen my wife for ages.

Fine! Giddy-ap, horsey! To the Village!

16

The Iron Cauldron was one of the landmarks of the Village. Its clientele was drawn from far and near. Among the many interesting, characters who frequented the place were the inevitable freaks and eccentrics who made the Village notorious.

To believe Mona, it would seem that all the nuts congregated at her tables. Almost every day I heard of some new figure, each one, of course, more extravagant than the last.

The latest was Anastasia. She had blown in from the Coast and was having a time of it to keep going. She had had a few hundred dollars with her on arriving in New York but it had vanished like smoke. What she hadn’t given away had been stolen. According to Mona, she was an extraordinary looking person. She had long black hair which she wore like a mane, violet blue eyes, beautiful strong hands and large sturdy feet. She called herself Anastasia simply. Her last name, Annapolis, she had invented. Apparently she had wandered into The Iron Cauldron in search of work. Mona had overheard her talking to the proprietor and had come to her rescue. Wouldn’t hear of her washing dishes or even waiting on tables. She had divined at once that this was an unusual person, had invited her to sit down and eat, and after a long conversation had loaned her some money.

Imagine, she was walking around in overalls. She had no stockings and her shoes were worn through. People were making fun of her.

Describe her again, will you?

I really can’t, said Mona, whereupon she launched into an extravagant description of her friend. The way she said my friend gave me a queer feeling. I had never heard her refer to any of her other acquaintances in quite this way. There was a fervor to her words which suggested veneration, adoration and other undefinable things. She had made of this meeting with her new-found friend an event of the first magnitude.

How old is she? I ventured to ask.

How old? I don’t know. Maybe twenty-two or three. She has no age. You don’t think of such things when you look at her. She’s the most extraordinary being I’ve ever met—outside of yourself, Val.

An artist, I suppose?

She’s everything. She can do anything.

Does she paint?

Of course! She paints, scuplts, makes puppets, writes poetry, dances—and with it all she’s a clown. But a sad clown, like you.

You don’t think she’s nuts?

I should say not! She does queer things, but only because she’s unusual. She’s about as free a person as I’ve ever seen, and tragic to boot. She’s really unfathomable.

Like Claude, I suppose.

She smiled. In a way, she said. Funny you mentioned him. You ought to see the two of them together. They look as if they hailed from another planet.

So they know each other?

I introduced them to one another. They get along splendidly, too. They talk their own private language. And do you know, they even resemble one another physically.

I suppose she’s a bit on the mannish side, this Anapopoulos or whatever it is?

Not really, said Mona, her eyes glistening. She prefers to dress in men’s clothes because she feels more comfortable that way. She’s more than a mere female, you see. If she were a man, I’d speak the same way. There’s some added quality in her which is beyond sexual distinction. Sometimes she reminds me of an angel, except that there’s nothing ethereal or remote about her. No, she’s very earthy, almost coarse at times … The only way to explain it to you, Val, is to say that she’s a superior being. You know how you felt about Claude? Well … Anastasia is a tragic buffoon. She doesn’t belong in this world at all. I don’t know where she belongs, but certainly not here. The very tone of her voice will tell you that. It’s an extraordinary voice, more like a bird’s than a human being’s. But when she gets angry it becomes frightening.

Why, does she fly into rages frequently?

Only when people insult her or make fun of her.

Why do they do that?

I told you—because she’s different. Even her walk is unique. She can’t help it, it’s her nature. But it makes me furious to see the way she’s treated. There never was a more generous, reckless soul. Of course she has no sense of reality. That’s what I love about her.

What do you mean by that exactly?

Just what I said. If someone came along who needed a shirt she’d take hers off—right in the street—and give it to the person. She’d never think about the fact that she was indecently exposed. She’d take her pants off too, if necessary.

You don’t call that mad?

No, Val, I don’t. For her it’s the natural, sane thing to do. She never stops to think of consequences; she doesn’t care what people think of her. She’s genuine through and through. And she’s as sensitive and delicate as a flower.

She must have had a strange bringing up. Did she tell you anything about her parents, anything about her childhood?

A little.

I could see that she knew more than she cared to reveal. o

She was an orphan, I believe. She said the people who adopted her were very kind to her. She had everything she wanted.

Well, let’s get to bed, what do you say?

She went to the bathroom to go through the usual interminable routine. I got in bed and waited patiently. The door to the bathroom was open.

By the way, I said, thinking to divert her mind, how is Claude these days? Anything new?

He’s leaving town in a day of two.

Where to?

He wouldn’t say. I have a notion he’s heading for Africa.

Africa? Why would he be going there?

Search me! It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if he said he were going to the moon. You know Claude…

You’ve said that several times now, and always the same way. No, I don’t know Claude, not like you mean. I know only what he chooses to tell, nothing more. He’s an absolute conundrum to me.

I heard her chuckling to herself.

What’s so funny about that? I asked.

I thought you understood one another perfectly.

No one will ever get to understand Claude, said I. He’s an enigma, and he’ll remain an enigma.

That’s just the way I feel about my friend.

Your friend, said I a little testily. You hardly know her and you speak of her as if she were a life-long friend.

Don’t be silly. She is my friend—the only friend I’ve ever had.

You sound as if you were infatuated…

I am! She appeared at the right moment.

Now what does that mean?

That I was desperate, lonely, miserable. That I needed someone I could call a friend.

What’s come over you anyway? Since when have you needed a friend? I’m your friend. Isn’t that enough for you? I said it mockingly, but I was half in earnest.

To my astonishment she replied: No, Val, you’re not my friend any more. You’re my husband, and I love you … I couldn’t live without you, but…

But what?

I had to have a friend, a woman friend. Someone I can confide in, someone who understands me.

Well I’ll be damned! So that’s it? And you mean you can’t confide in me?

Not like I can in a woman. There are some things you just can’t tell a man, even if you love him. Oh, they’re not big things, don’t worry. Sometimes little things are more important than big things, you know that. Besides, look at you … you’ve got loads of friends. And when you’re with your friends you’re a different person entirely. I used to envy you sometimes. Maybe I was jealous of your friends. Once I thought that I could be everything to you. But I see I was wrong. Anyway, now I have a friend—and I’m going to keep her.

Half teasingly, half seriously, I said: Now you want to make me jealous, is that it?

She came out of the bathroom, knelt beside the bed and put her head in my arms. Val, she murmur-ad, you know that isn’t true. But this friendship is something very dear and very precious to me. I don’t want to share her with anyone, not even with you. Not for a while, at least.

All right, I said. I get it. My voice sounded a trifle husky, I noticed.

Gratefully she burbled: I knew you’d understand.

But what is there to understand? I asked. I said it softly and gently.

That’s it, she answered, nothing, nothing. It’s only natural. She bent forward and kissed me affectionately on the lips.

As she got to her feet to put out the lights I said impulsively: You poor girl! Wanting a friend all this time and I never knew it, never suspected it. I guess I must be a dumb, insensitive bugger.

She switched off the lights and crawled into bed. There were twin beds but we used only one.

Hold me tight, she whispered. Val, I love you more than ever. Do you hear me?

I said nothing, just held her tight.

Claude said to me the other day—are you listening?—that you were one of the few.

One of the elect, is that it? I said jokingly.

The only man in the world for me.

But not a friend…

She put her hand over my mouth.

Every night it was the same theme song—My friend ‘Stasia. Varied, of course, to add a little spice, with tall tales of the annoying attentions lavished upon her by an incongruous quartette. One of them—she didn’t even know his name—owned a string of book stores; another was the wrestler, Jim Driscoll; the third was a millionaire, a notorious pervert, whose name—it sounded incredible—was Tinkelfels; the fourth was a mad individual who was also somewhat of a saint. Ricardo, this last-named, appealed to me warmly, assuming that her description of him tallied with reality. A quiet, sober individual who spoke with a strong Spanish accent, had a wife and three children whom he loved dearly, was extremely poor but made lavish gifts, was kind and gentle—tender as a lamb—wrote metaphysical treatises which were unpublishable, gave lectures to audiences of ten or twelve, et patati et patata. What I liked about him was this—each time he accompanied her to the subway, each time he said good-night, he would clutch her hands and murmur solemnly: If I can’t have you, nobody will. I will kill you.

She came back to Ricardo again and again, saying how much he thought of Anastasia, how beautifully he treated her, and so forth. And each time she brought up his name she would repeat his threat, laughing over it as if it were a great joke. Her attitude began to annoy me.

How do you know he won’t keep his word some day? I said one night.

She laughed even harder at this.

You think it’s so impossible, do you?

You don’t know him, said she. He’s one of the gentlest creatures on earth.

That’s precisely why I think he’s capable of doing it. He’s serious. You’d better watch yourself with him.

Oh, nonsense! He wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Maybe not. But he sounds passionate enough to kill the woman he loves.

How can he be in love with me? It’s silly. I don’t show him any affection. I hardly listen to him, in fact. He talks to Anastasia more than to me.

You don’t have to do anything, you only need to be. He’s got a fixation. He isn’t mad. Unless it’s madness to fall in love with an image You’re the physical image of his ideal, that’s obvious. He doesn’t need to plumb you, or even to get a response from you. He wants to gaze at you eternally—because you’ve incarnated the woman of his dreams.

That’s just the way he talks, said Mona, somewhat taken aback by my words. You two would get on wonderfully together. You speak the same language. I know he’s a sensitive creature, and a most intelligent one, too. I like him enormously, but he gets in my hair. He has no sense of humor, none whatever. When he smiles he looks even sadder than usual. He’s a lonely soul.

It’s a pity I don’t know him, I said. I like him more than anyone you’ve talked about. He sounds like a real human being. Besides, I like Spaniards. They’re men…

He’s not a Spaniard—he’s Cuban.

Same thing.

Not, it isn’t, Val. Ricardo told me so himself. He despises the Cubans.

Well, no matter. I’d like him even if he were a Turk.

Maybe I could introduce him to you, said Mona suddenly. Why not?

I reflected a moment before answering.

I don’t think you’d better, said I. You couldn’t fool a man like that. He’s not a Cromwell. Besides, even Cromwell isn’t the fool you take him to be.

I never said he was a fool!

But you tried to make me believe so, you can’t deny that.

Well, you know why. She gave me one of her faun-like smiles.

Listen, sister, I know so much more about you and your wiles than you’d ever give me credit for that it hurts to even mention the subject.

You have a great imagination, Val. That’s the reason why I sometimes tell you so little. I know how you build things up.

But you must admit I build on a firm foundation!

Again the faun-like smile.

Then she busied herself with something, in order to hide her face.

A pleasant sort of pause intervened. Then, out of a clear sky I suddenly remarked—I suppose women are obliged to lie … it’s in their nature. Men lie too, of course, but so differently. Women seem to have an unholy fear of the truth. You know, if you could stop lying, if you could stop playing this foolish, unnecessary game with me, I think…

I noticed that she had halted whatever it was she was pretending to be doing. Maybe she’ll really listen. I thought to myself. I could see only the side of her face. The expression was one of intense alertness. Of wariness too. Like an animal.

I think I would do anything you asked of me. I think I would even surrender you to another man, if that was what you wished.

These unexpected words of mine gave her intense relief, or so it seemed. What it was she had imagined I would say I don’t know. A weight had fallen off her shoulders. She came over to me—I was sitting on the edge of the bed—and sat beside me. She put a hand on mine. The look which stole into her eyes was one of utter sincerity and devotion.

Val, she began, you know I would never make such a demand of you. How could you say such a thing? Maybe I do tell you fibs now and then, but not lies. I couldn’t keep anything vital from you—it would give me too much pain. These little things … these fibs … I make them up because I don’t want to hurt you. There are situations sometimes which are so sordid that, even to relate them to you, I feel would soil you. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. I’m made of coarser fibre. I know what the world is like. You don’t. You’re a dreamer. And an idealist. You don’t know, nor will you ever suspect, much less believe, how wicked people are. You see only the good side of everyone. You’re pure, that’s what. And that’s what Claude meant when he said you were one of the few. Ricardo is another pure soul. People like you and Ricardo should never be involved in ugly things. I get involved now and then—because I’m not afraid of contamination. I’m of the world. With you I behave like another being. I want to be what you’d like me to be. But I’ll never be like you, never.

I wonder now, said I, what people would think—people like Kronski, O’Mara, Ulric, for example—if they heard you talking this way.

It doesn’t matter what other people think, Val. I know you. I know you better than any of your friends, no matter, how long they’ve known you. I know how sensitive you are. You’re the tenderest creature alive.

I’m beginning to feel frail and delicate, with all this.

You’re not delicate, said she feelingly. You’re tough—like all artists. But when it comes to the world, I mean dealing with the world, you’re just an infant. The world is vicious through and through. You’re in it, all right, but you’re not of it. You lead a charmed life. If you meet with a sordid experience you convert it into something beautiful.

You talk as if you knew me like a book.

I’m telling you the truth, am I not? Can you deny it?

She put her arm around me lovingly and brushed her cheek against mine.

Oh Val, maybe I’m not the woman you deserve, but I do know you. And the more I know you the better I love you. I’ve missed you so much lately. That’s why it means so much to me to have a friend. I was really getting desperate—without you.

O.K. But we were beginning to behave like two spoiled children, do you realize that? We expected everything to be handed to us on a platter.

I didn’t! she exclaimed. But I wanted you to have the things you craved. I wanted you to have a good life—so that you could do all the things you dream about. You can’t be spoiled! You take only what you need, no more.

That’s true, I said, moved by this unexpected observation. Not many people realize that. I remember how angry my folks got when I came home from Church one Sunday morning and told them enthusiastically that I was a Christian Socialist. I had heard a coal miner speak from the pulpit that morning and his words had struck home. He called himself a Christian Socialist. I immediately became one too. Anyway, it ended up with the usual nonsense … the folks saying that Socialists were concerned only with giving away other people’s money. ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ I demanded. The answer was: ‘Wait till you’ve earned your own money, then talk!’ That seemed to me a silly argument. What did it matter, I asked myself, whether I earned money or didn’t earn money? The point was that the good things of life were unjustly distributed. I was quite willing to eat less, to have less of everything, if those who had little might be better off. Then and there it occurred to me how little one really needs. If you’re content you don’t need material treasures … Well, I don’t know why I got off on that! Oh yes! About taking only what I need … I admit, my desires are great. But I also can do without. Though I talk a lot about food, as you know, I really don’t require much. I want just enough to be able to forget about food, that’s what I mean. That’s normal, don’t you think?

Of course, of course!

And that’s why I don’t want all the things you seem to think would make me happy, or make me work better. We don’t need to live the way we were. I gave in to please you. It was wonderful while it lasted, sure. So is Christmas. What I dislike more than anything is this perpetual borrowing and begging, this using people for suckers. You don’t enjoy it either, I’m sure of it. Why should we deceive each other about it, then? Why not put an end to it?

But I have!

You stopped doing it for me, but now you’re doing it for your friend Anastasia. Don’t lie to me, I know what I’m saying.

It’s different in her case, Val. She doesn’t know how to earn money. She’s even more of a child than you.

But you’re only helping her to remain a child—by aiding her the way you do. I don’t say that she’s a leech. I say this—you’re robbing her of something. Why doesn’t she sell her puppets, or her paintings, or her sculpture?

Why? She laughed outright at this. For the same reason that you can’t sell your stories. She’s too good an artist, that’s why.

But she doesn’t have to sell her work to art dealers—let her sell direct to individuals. Sell them for a song! Anything to keep afloat. It would do her good. She’d really feel better for it.

There you go again! Shows how little you know the world. Val, you couldn’t even give her work away, that’s how things are. If you ever get a book published you’ll have to beg people to accept copies gratis. People don’t want what’s good, I tell you. People like you and Anastasia—or Ricardo—you have to be protected.

To hell with writing, if that’s how it is … But I can’t believe it! I’m no writer yet, I’m nothing but a tyro. I may be better than editors think I am, but I’ve a long way to go yet. When I really know how to express myself people will read me. I don’t care how bad the world is. They will, I tell you. They won’t be able to ignore me.

And until then?

Until then I’ll find some other way of making a living.

Selling encyclopaedias? Is that a way?

Not much of a one, I admit, but it’s better than begging and borrowing. Better than having your wife prostitute herself.

Every penny I make I earn, said Mona heatedly. Waiting on tables is no cinch.

All the more reason why I should do my share. You don’t like to see me selling books. I don’t like to see you waiting on tables. If we had more sense we’d be doing other things. Surely there must be some kind of work that isn’t degrading.

Not for us! We weren’t cut out to do the work of the world.

Then we ought to learn. I was getting carried away with my own righteous attitude.

Val, this is all talk. You know you’ll never hold down an honest-to-God job. Never. And I don’t want you to. I’d rather see you dead.

All right, you win. But Jesus, isn’t there something a man like me can do without feeling like a fool or a dolt? Here a thought which was forming itself on my lips caused me to laugh. I laughed good and hard before I got it out. Listen, I managed to say, do you know what I was just thinking? I was thinking that I might make a wonderful diplomat. I ought to be an ambassador to a foreign country—how does that strike you? No, seriously. Why not? I’ve got brains, and I know how to deal with people. What I don’t know I’d make up for with my imagination. Can you see me as ambassador to China?

Oddly, she didn’t think the idea so absurd. Not in the abstract, at any rate.

Certainly you would make a good ambassador, Val. Why not, as you say? But you’ll never get the chance. There are certain doors that will never be opened to you. If men like you were directing the world’s affairs we wouldn’t be worrying about the next meal—or how to get stories published. That’s why I say you don’t know the world!

Damn it, I do know the world. I know it only too well. But I refuse to make terms with it.

It’s the same thing.

No it isn’t! It’s the difference between ignorance—or blindness—and aloofness. Something like that. If I didn’t know the world how could I be a writer?

A writer has his own world.

I’ll be damned! I never expected you to say that! Now you’ve got me stumped … I was silenced for a moment.

It’s dead true what you say, I continued. But it doesn’t obviate what I just said. Maybe I can’t explain it to you, but I know I’m right. To have your own world, and to live in it, doesn’t mean that you are necessarily blind to the real world, so-called. If a writer weren’t familiar with the every-day world, if he hadn’t been so steeped in it that he revolted against it, he wouldn’t have what you call his own world. An artist carries all worlds within him. An he’s just as vital a part of this world as anyone else. In fact, he’s more thoroughly of it and in it than other people for the simple reason that he’s creative. The world is his medium. Other men are content with their little corner of the world—their own little job, their own little tribe, their own little philosophy, and so on. Damn it, the reason why I’m not a great writer, if you want to know, is because I haven’t taken the whole wide world unto me yet. It isn’t that I don’t know about evil. It isn’t that I’m blind to people’s viciousness, as you seem to think. It’s something other than that. What it is I don’t know myself. But I will know, eventually. And then I’ll become a torch. I’ll light up the world. I’ll expose it down to its very marrow … But I won’t condemn it! I won’t because I know too well that I am part and parcel of it, a significant cog in the machinery. I paused. We haven’t touched bottom yet, you know. What we’ve suffered is nothing. Flea-bites, that’s all. There are worse things to endure than lack of food and such things. I suffered much more when I was sixteen, when I was only reading about life. Or else I’m deceiving myself.

No, I know what you mean. She nodded thoughtfully.

You do? Good. Then you realize that, without participating in life, you can suffer the pangs of the martyrs … To suffer for others—that’s’ a wonderful kind of suffering. When you suffer because of your own ego, because of lack or because of misdeeds, you experience a kind of humiliation. I loathe that sort of suffering. To suffer with others, or for others, to be all in the same boat, that’s different. Then one feels enriched. What I dislike about our way of life is that it’s so restricted. We ought to be up and about, getting bruised and battered for reasons that matter.

I went on and on in this vein, sliding from one subject to another, often contradicting myself, uttering the most extravagant statements, then brushing them aside, struggling to get back to terra firma.

It was beginning to happen more and more frequently now, these monologues, these harangues. Perhaps it was because I was no longer writing. Perhaps because I was alone most of the day. Perhaps, too, because I had a feeling that she was slipping out of my hands. There was something desperate about these explosions. I was reaching out for something, something which I could never pin down in words. Though I seemed to be censuring her I was really upbraiding myself. The worst of it was that I could never come to any concrete resolution. I saw clearly what we ought not to do, but I could not see what we should do. Secretly, I relished the thought of being protected. Secretly I had to admit that she, was right—I would never fit in, never make’ the groove. And so I let it out in talk. I rambled backwards and forwards, rehearsing the glorious days of childhood, the miserable days of adolescence, the clownish adventures of youth. It was all fascinating, every iota. If only that man McFarland had been present, with his stenographer! What a story for his magazine! (Later it occurred to me how strange it was that I could talk my life out but could never get it down on paper. The moment I sat down before the machine I became self-conscious. It hadn’t occurred to me at that time to use the pronoun I. Why, I wonder? What inhibited me? Perhaps I hadn’t yet become the I of my I.)

I not only intoxicated her with these talks, I intoxicated myself. It would be almost dawn before we would fall asleep. Dozing off I had the feeling that I had accomplished something. I had gotten it off my chest. It! What was that it? I couldn’t say myself. I knew only this, and from it I seemed to derive an unholy satisfaction: I had assumed my true role.

Perhaps, too, these scenes were just to prove that I could be as exciting and different as that Anastasia whom I was getting tired of hearing about. Perhaps. Possibly I was a wee bit jealous already. Though she had known Anastasia only a few days, you might say, the room was already full of her friend’s things. All the latter needed to do now was to move in. Over the beds were two stunning Japanese prints, a Utamaro and a Hiroshige. On the trunk was a puppet which Anastasia had made expressly for Mona. On the chiffonier was a Russian ikon, another gift from Anastasia. To say nothing of the barbaric bracelets, the amulets, the embroidered moccasins, and so on. Even the perfume she was using—a most pungent one!—Anastasia had given her. (Probably out of Mona’s own money.) With Anastasia you never could tell what was what. While Mona was worrying about the clothes her friend needed, the cigarettes, the art materials, et cetera, Anastasia was getting money from home and doling it out to her hangers on. Mona saw nothing incongruous in this. Whatever her friend did was right and natural, even if she stole from her purse. Anastasia did steal now and then. Why not? She stole not for herself but to aid those in distress. She had no scruples or compunctions about such matters. She wasn’t a bourgeoise, oh no! This word bourgeois began to pop up frequently now that Anastasia was on the scene. Whatever was no good was bourgeois. Even caca could be bourgeois, according to Anastasia’s way of looking at things. She had such a wonderful sense of humor, when you got to know her. Of course, some people couldn’t see it. Some people are just devoid of humor. To wear two different shoes, which Anastasia sometimes did absent-mindedly—or did she do it absent-mindedly?—that was screamingly funny. Or to carry a douche-bag through the streets. Why wrap such things up? Besides, Anastasia never used one herself—it was always for a friend who was in trouble.

The books that were lying around … all loaned her by Anastasia. One of them was called Down There—by some decadent French writer. It was one of Anastasia’s favorites, not because it was decadent but because it told of that extraordinary figure in French history—Gilles de Rais. He had been a follower of Jeanne d’Arc. He had murdered more children—he had depopulated whole villages, in fact. One of the most enigmatic figures in French history. She begged me to glance at it sometime. Anastasia had read it in the original. She could read not only French and Italian but German, Portuguese and Russian. Yes, in the convent school she had also learned to play the piano divinely. And the harp.

Can she blow the trumpet? I asked derisively.

She gave me the horse laugh. Then followed this revelation:

She can play the drums, too. But she has to be a little high first.

You mean drunk?

No, hopped up. Marijuana. There’s no harm in it. It’s not habit forming.

Whenever this subject came up—drugs—I was sure to get an earful. In Mona’s opinion (probably Anastasia’s) everyone ought to become acquainted with the effects of different drugs. Drugs weren’t half as dangerous as liquor. And the effects were more interest ing. Yes, she was going to try them someday. There were lots of people in the Village—respectable people, too—who used drugs. She couldn’t see why people were so afraid of drugs. There was that Mexican drug which exalted the sense of color, for example. Perfectly harmless. We ought to try it sometime. She’d see if she couldn’t get some from that phoney poet what’s-his-name. She loathed him, he was filthy, and so on, but Anastasia maintained that he was a good poet. And Anastasia ought to know…

I’m going to borrow one of her poems one day and read it aloud to you. You’ve never heard anything like it, Val.

O.K. I said, but if it stinks I’m going to tell you so:

Don’t worry! She couldn’t write a bad poem if she tried.

I know—she’s a genius.

She is indeed, and I’m not joking. She’s a real genius.

I couldn’t resist remarking that it was too bad geniuses always had to be freaks.

There you go! Now you’re talking just like everyone else. I’ve explained to you again and again that she’s not like the other freaks’ in the Village.

No, she’s a genuine freak!

She’s made maybe, but like Strindberg, like Dostoievsky, like Blake…

That’s putting her rather high, isn’t it?

I didn’t say she had their talent. All I mean is that if she’s queer she’s queer in the same way they were. She’s not insane—and she’s not a fraud. Whatever she is, it’s real. I’ll stake my life on it.

The only thing I have against her, I blurted out, is that she needs so damned much looking after.

That’s cruel!

Is it? Look … she got along all right until you came along, didn’t she?

I told you what a condition she was in when I met her.

I know you did, but that doesn’t impress me. Maybe if you hadn’t nursed her along she would have picked herself up and stood on her own two legs.

We’re back where we started. How many times must I explain to you that she simply doesn’t know how to take care of herself?

Then let her learn!

How about yourself? Have you learned yet?

I was getting along all right until you came along. I not only took care of myself, I took care of a wife and child.

That’s unfair of you. Maybe you did take care of them, but at what a price! You wouldn’t want to live that way forever, would you?

Of course not! But I’d have found a way out—eventually.

Eventually! Val, you haven’t got too much time! You’re in your thirties now—and you have yet to make a name for yourself. Anastasia’s just a girl, but see what she’s accomplished already.

I know. But then she’s a genius…

Oh, stop it! We won’t get anywhere talking this way. Why don’t you quit thinking about her? She doesn’t interfere with your life—why should you interfere with hers? Can’t I have one friend? Why must you be jealous of her? Be just, won’t you?

All right, let’s drop it. But stop talking about her, will you? Then I won’t say anything to hurt you.

Though she hadn’t explicitly asked me not to visit The Iron Cauldron I kept away out of consideration for her wishes. I suspected that Anastasia spent much of her time there daily, that during Mona’s swings the two were always together somewhere. In roundabout ways I would hear of their visits to the museums and art galleries, to the studios of Village artists, of their expeditions to the waterfront, where Anastasia made sketches of boats and sky-line, of the hours they spent at the library doing research. In a way the change was good for Mona. Gave her something new to think about. She had little knowledge of painting, and Anastasia apparently was delighted to act as her mentor. There were veiled references occasionally to the portrait Anastasia intended to make of Mona.

She had never done a realistic portrait of anyone, it seems, and she was especially reluctant to do a resemblance of Mona.

There were days when Anastasia was incapable of doing a thing, when she was prostrate and had to be nursed like an infant. Any trifling event could bring them on, these fits of malaise. Sometimes they occurred because Mona had spoken foolishly or irreverently of one of Anastasia’s beloved idols. Modigliani and El Greco, for example, were painters about whom she would allow no one, not even Mona, to say the wrong thing. She was very fond of Utrillo, too, but she did not venerate him. He was a lost soul, like herself: still on the human level. Whereas Giotto, Grunewald, the Chinese and the Japanese masters, these were on a different level, represented a higher order. (Not so bad, her taste!) She had no respect whatever for American artists, I gathered. Except for John Marin, whom she described as limited but profound. What almost endeared her to me was the discovery that she always carried with her Alice in Wonderland and the Too Teh Ching. Later she was to include a volume of Rimbaud. But of that later…

I was still making the rounds, or going through the motions. Now and then I sold a set of books without trying. I worked at it only four or five hours a day, always ready to knock off when dinner time came. Usually I would look over the cards and choose a prospect who lived a good distance away, in some run-down suburb, some bleak and barren hole in New Jersey or out on Long Island. I did this partly to kill time and partly to get completely off the track. Always, when heading for some dingy spot (which only a dotty book salesman would think of visiting!), I found that I would be assailed by the most unexpected memories of dear, beloved places I had known as a boy. It was a sort of inverse law of association at work. The more drab and commonplace the milieu, the more bizarre and wonderful were these unbidden associations. I could almost wager that if I headed of a morning for Hackensack or Canarsie, or some rabbit hole on Staten Island, by evening I would find myself at Sheepshead Bay, or Bluepoint, or Lake Pocotopaug. If I didn’t have the carfare to make a long haul I would hitch hike, trusting to luck that I would run into someone—some friendly face—who would stake me to a meal and the fare back. I rode with the tide. It didn’t matter where I ended up nor when I got home, because Mona would be sure to arrive after me. I was writing things down in my head again, not feverishly as before but calmly, evenly, like a reporter or correspondent who had oodles of time and a generous expense account. It was wonderful to let things happen as they would. Now and then sailing along on even keel, I would blow into some outlandish town, pick a shop at random—plumber or undertaker, it made no difference—and launch into my sales talk. I hadn’t the least thought of making a sale, nor even of keeping my hand in, as they say. No, I was merely curious to see the effect my words would have on a complete nobody. I had the feeling that I was a man descended from another planet. If the poor victim felt disinclined to discuss the merits of our loose-leaf encyclopaedia I would talk his language, whatever it was, even if it were nothing but cold corpses. Like that I often found myself lunching with a congenial soul with whom I hadn’t a thing in common. The farther away from myself I got the more certain I was to have an inspiration. Suddenly, perhaps in the midst of a sentence, the decision would be made and off I’d scoot. Off searching for that spot which I had known in the past, a very definite, a very marvelous past. The trick was to get back to that precious spot and see if I could reconstitute the being I once was. A queer game—and full of surprises. Sometimes I returned to our room as a little boy dressed in men’s clothes. Yes, sometimes I was. little Henry through and through, thinking like him, feeling like him, acting like him.

Often, talking to utter strangers out there on the fringe of the world, there would suddenly leap to mind an image of the two of them, Mona and ‘Stasia, parading through the Village or swinging through the revolving door of a museum with those crazy puppets in their arms. And then I would say a curious thing to myself—sotto voce, of course. I would say, and smile wanly as I did so: And where do I come, in? Moving around on the bleak periphery, among zombies and dodoes, I had gotten the idea that I was cut off. Always, in closing a door, I had the impression that the door was locked behind me, that I would have to find another way to get back. Get back where?

There was something ridiculous and grotesque about this double image which obtruded at the most unexpected moments. I saw the two of them garbed in outlandish fashion—’Stasia in her overalls and hobnailed boots and Lady Precious Stream in her fluttering cape, her hair streaming loose like a mane. They were always talking simultaneously, and about utterly different things; they made strange grimaces and wild gesticulations; they walked with o two utterly different rhythms, one like an auk, the other like a panther.

Whenever I went deep enough into my childhood I was no longer outside, on the fringe, but snugly inside, like a pit in the fleshy heart of a ripe piece of fruit. I might be standing in front of Annie Meinken’s candy shop, in the old 14th Ward, my nose pressed against the window-pane, by eyes a-glitter at the sight of some chocolate-covered soldiers. That abstract noun, the world, hadn’t yet penetrated my consciousness. Everything was real, concrete, individuated, but neither fully named nor wholly delineated. I was and things were-. Space was limitless, time was not yet. Annie Meinken was a person who always leaned far over the counter to put things in my hand, who patted me on the head, who smiled at me, who said I was such a good little fellow, and sometimes ran out into the street to kiss me good-bye, though we lived only a few doors away.

I honestly think that at times, out there on the fringe, when I got very quiet and still, I half expected someone to behave towards me exactly as Annie Meinken used to. Maybe I was running off to those far-away places of my childhood just to receive again that piece of candy, that smile, that embarrassing parting kiss. I was indeed an idealist. An incurable one. (An idealist is one who wants to turn the wheels back. He remembers too well what was given him; he doesn’t think of what he himself might give. The world sours imperceptibly, but the process begins virtually from the moment one thinks in terms of the world.)

Strange thoughts, strange meanderings—for a book salesman. In my portfolio was locked the key to all human knowledge. Presumably. And wisdom, like Winchester, only forty miles away. Nothing in all the world so dead as this compendium of knowledge. To spiel it off about the foramenifera, about the infrared rays, about the bacteria that lie bedded in every cell—what a baboon I must have been! Naturally a Picodiribibi would have done far better! So might a dead jackass with a phonograph in its guts. To read in the subway, or on an open trolley, about Prust the founder of Prussia—what a profitless pastime! Far better, if one had to read, to listen to that madman who said: How sweet it is to hate one’s native land and eargerly await its annihilation.

Yes, in addition to the dummies, the bindings, and all the other paraphernalia which crammed my brief-case, I usually carried a book with me, a book so removed from the tenor of my daily life that it was more like a tattoo mark on the sole of a convict’s left foot. WE HAVE NOT YET DECIDED THE QUESTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD AND YOU WANT TO EAT! A sentence like this jumping out of a book in the dreary waste-land could decide the whole course of my day. I can see myself all over again slamming the book shut, jumping up like a startled buck, and exclaiming aloud: Where in hell are we? And then bolting. It might have been the edge of a swamp where they had let me off, it might have been the beginning of one of those interminable rows of all-look-alike suburban homes or the very portals of an insane asylum. No matter—on, on, head down, jaws;’ working feverishly, grunts, squeals of delight, ruminations, discoveries, illuminations. Because of that blitz phrase. Especially the and you want to eat! part of it. It was ages before I discovered who had originated this marvelous exclamation. All I knew then, all that mattered; was that I was back in Russia, that I was with kindred spirits, that I was completely possessed by such an esoteric proposition as the debatable existence of God.

Years later, did I say? Why yes—only yesterday, so to speak, I found out who the author was. At the same time I learned that another man, a contemporary, had written thus of his nation, the great Russian nation:

We belong to the number of those nations which, so to speak, do not enter into the structure of mankind but exist only in order to teach the world an important lesson of some sort.

But I am not going to speak of yesterday or the day before yesterday. I am going to speak of a time which has no beginning nor end, a time moreover which with all the other kinds of time that filled the empty spaces of my days…

The way of ships, and of men in general, is the zigzag path. The drunkard moves in curves, like the planets. But the man who has no destination moves in a time and space continuum which is uniquely his own and in which God is ever present. For the time being—inscrutable phrase!—he is always there. There with the grand Cosmocrator, so to speak. Clear? Very well, it is Monday, let us say. And you want to eat? Instanter the stars begin to chime, the reindeer paw the turf; their blue icicles sparkle in the noonday sun. Whooshing it through the Nevsky Prospekt, I make my way to the inner circle, the brief-case under my arm. In my hand is a little bag of candy, a gift from Annie Meinken. A solemn question has just been propounded:

We have not yet decided the question of the existence of God…

It is at this point I always enter. I’m on my own time now. God’s time, in other words. Which is always for the time being. To hear me you would think I were a member of the Holy Synod—the Holy Philharmonic Synod. It isn’t necessary for me to tune in: I’ve been in tune since the dawn of time. Utter clarity is what marks my performance. I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.

The comrades are relaxed and at ease. No bomb will go off until I give the order. On my right is Dostoievsky; on my left the Emperor Anathema.

Every member of the group has distinguished himself in some spectacular manner. I am the only one without portfolio. I am the Uitlander; I hail from the fringe, that is to say, from the trouble-bubble cauldron.

Comrades, it is said that a problem confronts us … (I always begin with this stock phrase.) I look about me. calm, self-possessed, before launching into my plaidoyer. Comrades, let us rivet our most concentrated attention for a moment on that wholly ecumenical question—

Which is? barks the Emperor Anathema.

Which is nothing less than this: If there were no God, would we be here?

Above the cries of Rot! and Rubbish! I follow with ease the sound of my own voice intoning the sacred texts buried in my heart. I am at ease because I have nothing to prove. I have only to recite what I learned by rote in off moments. That we are together and privileged to discuss the existence of God, this in itself is conclusive evidence for me that we are basking in the sunshine of His presence. I do not speak as if He were present, I speak because He is present. I am back in that eternal sanctuary where the word food always comes up. I am back because of that.

And you want to eat?

I address the comrades passionately now. Why not? I begin. Do we insult our Maker by eating what He has provided for us? Do you think He will vanish because we fill our bellies? Eat, I beg you. Eat heartily! The Lord our God has all time in which to reveal Himself. You pretend that you wish to decide the matter of His existence. Useless, dear comrades, it was decided long ago, before there even was a world. Reason alone informs us that if there be a problem there must be something real which brings it to birth. It is not for us to decide whether or not God exists, it is for God to say whether or not we exist (Dog! Have you anything to say? I shouted in the Emperor Anathema’s ear.) Whether to eat or not before deciding the issue, is that, I ask you, a metaphysical question? Does a hungry man debate whether he is to eat or not? We are all famished: we hunger and thirst for that which gave us life, else we would not be assembled here. To imagine that by giving a mere Yes or No the grand problem will be settled for eternity is sheer madness. We have not … (I paused and turned to the one on my right. And you, Fyodor Mihailovich, have you nothing to say?) We have not come together to settle an absurd problem. We are here, comrades, because outside this room, in the world, as they call it, there is no place in which to mention the Holy Name. We are the chosen ones, and we are united ecumenically. Does God wish to see children suffer? Such a question may be asked here. Is evil necessary? That too may be asked. It may also be asked whether we have the right to expect a Paradise here and now, or whether eternality is preferable to immortality. We may even debate whether Our Lord Jesus Christ is of one divine nature only or of two consubstantially harmonious natures, human and divine. We have all suffered more than is usual for mortal beings to endure. We have all achieved an appreciable degree of emancipation. Some of you have revealed the depths of the human soul in a manner and to a degree never before heard of. We are all living outside our time, the forerunners of a new era, of a new order of mankind. We know that nothing is to be hoped for on the present world level. The end of historical man is upon us. The future will be in terms of eternity, and of freedom, and of love. The resurrection of man will be ushered in with our aid; the dead will rise from their graves clothed in radiant flesh and sinew, and we shall have communion, real everlasting communion, with all who once were: with those who made history and with those who had no history. Instead of myth and fable we shall have everlasting reality. All that now passes for science will fall away; there will be no need to search for the clue to reality because all will be real and durable, naked to the eye of the soul, transparent as the waters of Shiloh. Eat, I beg you, and drink to your heart’s content. Taboos are not of God’s making. Nor murder and lust. Nor jealousy and envy. Though we are assembled here as men, we are bound through the divine spirit. When we take leave of one another we shall return to the world of chaos, to the realm of space which no amount of activity can exhaust. We are not of this world, nor are we yet of the world to come, except in thought and spirit. Our place is on the threshold of eternity; our function is that of prime movers. It is our privilege to be crucified in the name of freedom. We shall water our graves with our own blood. No task can be too great for us to assume. We are the true revolutionaries since we do not baptize with the blood of others but with our own blood, freely shed. We shall create no new covenants, impose no new laws, establish no new government. We shall permit the dead to bury the dead. The quick and the dead will soon be separated. Life eternal is rushing back to fill the empty cup of sorrow. Man will rise from his bed of ignorance and suffering with a song on his lips. He will stand forth in all the radiance of his godhood. Murder in every form will disappear forever. For the time being…

The moment this inscrutable phrase rose to my lips the inner music, the concordance, ceased. I was back in double rhythm again, aware of what I was doing, analyzing my thoughts, my motives, my deeds. I could hear Dostoievsky speaking, but I was no longer there with him, I was getting only the overtones. What’s more, I could shut him off whenever I pleased. I was no longer running in that parallel timeless time. Now the world was indeed empty? drab, woebegone. Chaos and cruelty ran hand in hand. I was as grotesque and ridiculous now as those two lost sisters who were presumably running through the Village with puppets in their arms.

By the time night falls, and I start to trek it back, an overpowering loneliness has gripped me. It does not surprise me in the least to find, on returning to the room, a telephone message from Mona saying that her dear friend is ill and that she must stay with her the night. Tomorrow it will be another story, and the day after another.

Everything is happening to ‘Stasia at once. One day she is ordered to move because she talks too loudly in her sleep; another day, in another room, she is visited by a ghost and forced to flee in the night. On another occasion a drunkard attempts to rape her. Or else she is grilled by a plain clothes man at three in the morning. It is inevitable that she should think of herself as a marked woman. She takes to sleeping in the daytime and roaming the streets by night; she passes long hours at the cafeteria which never closes, writing her poems on the marble-topped table, a sandwich in her hand and a plate of untouched food beside her. Some days she is the Slav, speaking with a genuine Slavic accent: other days she is the boy-girl from Montana’s snowy peaks, the nymph who must straddle a horse, even if only in Central Park. Her talk becomes more and more incoherent, and she knows it, but in Russian, as she always says it, nothing matters. At times she refuses to use the toilet—insists on doing her little jobs in the chamber pot, which of course she forgets to empty. As for the portrait of Mona which she had. begun, it now resembles the work of a maniac. (It is Mona herself who confesses this.) She is almost beside herself, Mona. Her friend is deteriorating under her own eyes. But it will pass. All will be well again, provided she stands by her faithfully, nurses her, soothes her tortured spirit, wipes her ass, if need be. But she must never allow her to feel that she is deserted. What matter, she asks, if she has to remain three or four nights a week with her friend? Is not Anastasia the all in all?

You trust me, don’t you, Val?

I nod a silent assent. (It’s not an ecumenical question.)

When the tune switches, when I learn from her own lips that it was not Anastasia she spent the night with but her own mother—mothers too get ill—I know what any idiot would have known long before, viz., that there’s something rotten in Denmark.

What harm, I ask myself, would there be in talking to her mother—over the telephone? None whatever. The truth is always enlightening.

So, impersonating the lumber king, I pick up the receiver and, amazed that it is a mother speaking to me, I inquire in the most casual tone of voice if Mona is there, if so, I would like to talk to her.

She is not there. Very definitely not.

Have you seen her lately? (Still the noncommittal gentleman inquiring after the lady fair.)

Not a sign of her in months. The poor woman sounds distressed. She forgets herself to the extent of asking me, a perfect stranger, if her daughter could possibly be dead. She virtually implores me to inform her should I by chance get wind of her daughter’s whereabouts.

But why don’t you write to her husband?

Her husband?

There follows a prolonged silence in which nothing registers except the ocean’s deep hum. Then, in a weak, toneless voice, as if addressing blank space, comes this: So she really did get married?

Why certainly she’s married. I know her husband well…

Excuse me, comes the far off voice, followed by the click of the receiver being hung up.

I allow several nights to pass before broaching the subject to the guilty one. I wait until we are in bed, the lights out. Then I nudge her gently.

What is it? What are you poking me for?

I was talking to your mother yesterday.

No answer.

Yes, and we had quite a long conversation…

Still no answer.

The funny thing is, she says she hasn’t seen you for ages. She thinks maybe you’re dead.

How much longer can she hold out? I wonder. Just as I am about to let out another mouthful I feel her spring to a sitting position. Then comes one of those drawn-out, uncontrollable fits of laughter, the sort that makes me shudder inwardly. Between spasms she blurts out: My mother! Ho ho! You were talking to my mother! Hah, hah, hah! It’s too good, just too good for words. Hee, hee, hee! Val, you poor sap, my mother is dead. I have no mother. Ho ho ho!

Calm yourself! I beg her.

But she can’t stop laughing. It’s the funniest, the craziest thing she’s ever heard.

Listen, didn’t you tell me you stayed with her the other night, that she was very ill? Was it your mother or wasn’t it?

Peals of laughter.

Maybe it was your step-mother then?

You mean my aunt.

Your aunt then, if that’s who your mother is.

More laughter.

It couldn’t have been my aunt because she knows I’m married to you. It was probably a neighbor. Or my sister maybe. It would be like her to talk that way.

But why would they want to deceive me?

Because you were a stranger. If you had said you were my husband, instead of impersonating someone else, they might have told you the truth.

It didn’t sound to me as if your aunt—or your sister, as you say—were putting it on. It sounded thoroughly genuine.

You don’t know them.

Damn it all, then maybe it’s time I got acquainted with them.

Suddenly she looked serious, very serious.

Yes, I continued, I’ve a good notion to run over there one evening and introduce myself.

She was angry now. If you ever do a thing like that, Val, I’ll never speak to you again. I’ll run away, that’s what I’ll do.

You mean that you don’t ever want me to meet your folks?

Exactly. Never!

But that’s childish and unreasonable. Even if you did tell me a few lies about your family…

I’ve never admitted anything of the kind, she broke in.

Come, come, don’t talk like that. You know damned well that that’s the only reason why you don’t want me to meet them. I allowed a significant pause to intervene, then said: Or maybe you fear that I

will find your real mother…

She was angrier than ever now but the word mother got her to laughing again.

You won’t believe me, will you? Very well, one day I’ll take you there myself. I promise you.

That wouldn’t do any good. I know you too damned well. The stage would be all set for me. No sir, if there’s any going I go alone.

Val, I warn you … if you dare do that…

I interrupted her. If I ever do it you won’t know about it.

So much the worse, she answered. You could never do that without my hearing about it sooner or later.

She was packing up and down now, puffing nervously at the cigarette which dangled from her lips. She was growing frantic, it seemed to me.

Look here, I said finally, forget about it. I’ll…

Val, promise me you won’t do it; Promise me!

I was silent a few moments.

She got down on her knees beside me, looked up at me imploringly.

All right, I said, as if reluctantly, I promise. I hadn’t the slightest intention, of course, of keeping my word. In fact, I was more than ever determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. However, there was no need to hurry. I had the feeling that when the right moment came I would find myself face to face with her mother—and it would be her real mother.

17

And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty, and if I were asked to find a formula for my relation to the latter I should say that I had made of his outlook (Ausblick) an overlook (Uberblick). But Goethe was, without knowing it, a disciple of Leibnitz in his whole mode of thought. And, therefore, that which has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a German philosophy. (Blankenburg am Harz, December 1922.)

These lines from the preface to The Decline of the West are-to haunt me for many a year. It happens that I have taken to reading the book during the lonely vigils which have begun. Every evening after dinner I return to the room, make myself snug and cosy, then settle down to gnaw at this immense tome in which the panorama of human destiny is unrolled. I am fully aware that the study of this great work represents another momentous event in my life. For me it is not a philosophy of history nor a morphological creation, but a world-poem. Slowly, attentively, savouring each morsel as I chew it, I burrow deeper and deeper. I drown myself in it. Often I break the siege by pacing to and fro, to and fro. Sometimes I find myself sitting on the bed, staring at the wall. I look right through the wall: I look deep into a past which is alive and fathomless. Occasionally a line or phrase comes with such impact that I am forced out of the nest, flung headlong into the street, where I wander like a somnambulist. Now and then I find myself in Joe’s restaurant at Borough Hall, ordering a big meal; with each mouthful I seem to be swallowing another mighty epoch of the past. Unconsciously I stoke the furnace in order to gird myself for another wrestling bout with the omnivorous one. That I am of the borough of Brooklyn, one of the natives, seems preposterous. How can a mere Brooklyn boy ingest all this? Where is his passport to the distant realms of science, philosophy, history et cetera? All that this Brooklyn boy knows has been acquired through osmosis. I am the lad who hated to study. I am the charming fellow who consistently rejected all systems of thought. Like a cork tossed about on an angry sea I follow in the wake of this morphological monster. It mystifies me that I should be able to follow him even distantly. Am I following or am I being sucked under by a vortex? What is it that enables me to read with understanding and delight? Whence the training, the discipline, the percipience which this monster demands? His thought is music to my ears; I recognize all the hidden melodies. Though I am reading him in English, it is as if I were reading the language he wrote in. His vehicle is the German language, which I thought I had forgotten. But I see I have forgotten nothing, not even the curricula I once planned to follow but never did.

From Nietzsche the questioning faculty! That little phrase sets me dancing…

Nothing is so inspiring to one who is trying to write as to come upon a thinker, a thinker who is also a poet, a thinker who looks for the soul which animates things. I see myself again as a mere youth, asking the librarian, or the minister sometimes, to lend me certain profound works—deep I called them then. I see the astonished look on their faces when I mention the titles of these formidable books. And then the inevitable—But why do you want those books? to which I always rejoined: And why shouldn’t I want those books? That I was too young, that I hadn’t read enough to cope with such works, meant nothing to me. It was my privilege to read what I wanted when I wanted. Was I not a born American, a free citizen? What did age matter? Later, however, I had to secretly admit that I did not understand what these deep works were about. Or rather, I understood that I did not want the abscesses which accompanied the knowledge they secreted. How I yearned to grapple with the mysteries! I wanted all that had soul in it and meaning. But I also demanded that the author’s style match the mystery he was illuminating. How many books possess this quality? I met my Waterloo at the very threshold of life. I retained my ignorance, dreaming that it was bliss.

The questioning faculty! That I never abandoned. As is known, the habit of questioning everything leads one to become either a sage or a sceptic. It also leads to madness. Its real virtue, however, consists in this, that it makes one think for himself, makes one return to the source.

Was it so strange that in reading Spengler I began to appreciate all over again what truly wonderful thinkers we were as boys? Considering our age and our limited experience of life, we nevertheless managed to propound to one another the most profound and vital questions. We tackled them manfully, too, with our whole being. Years of schooling destroyed the art. Like chimpanzees, we learned to ask only the right questions—the ones the teachers could answer. It is on this sort of chicanery that the whole social structure is reared. The university of life! Only the desperate ones choose this curriculum. Even the artist is apt to go astray, because he too is obliged, sooner or later, to observe on which side his bread is buttered.

The Decline of the West! I can never forget the thrill which ran up my spine when I first heard this title. It was like Ivan Karamazov saying—I want to go to Europe. Maybe I know that I shall go only to a cemetery, but it will be to the dearest of cemeteries.

For many a year I had been aware that I was participating in a general decline. We all knew it, all felt it, only some succeeded in forgetting about it more quickly than others. What we hadn’t understood so clearly, most of us, was that we were part of this very West, that the West included not only Europe but North America. To us America had always been a chancy place—one day hot, one day cold, one day barren, one day fertile. In short, according to how you struck it, it was either all myrrh and frankincense or plain undiluted horse manure. It was not our way to think in terms of historical destiny. Our history had begun only a few years back—and what there was of it was dull and boring. When I say we I mean we boys, we youths, we young men who were trying to sprout long pants under our skirts. Mamma’s boys, all of us, and if we had a destiny it was to become cracker-jack salesmen, cigar store clerks or chain store managers. The wild ones joined the Army or Navy. The incorrigible ones got themselves safely stowed away in Dannemora or Sing Sing. No one pictured himself as a plodding engineer, plumber, mason, carpenter, farmer, lumberman. One could be a trolley car conductor one day and an insurance agent the next day. And tomorrow or the day after one might wake up and find himself an alderman. Order, discipline, purpose, goal, destiny? Unknown terms. America was a free country, and nothing one did could ruin it—ever. That was our world outlook. As for an Uberblick, that led to the bughouse. ‘What are you reading, Henry? If I showed the book to my questioner he was sure to say: You’ll go nuts reading that sort of junk. This junk, incidentally, was usually the world’s choice literature. No matter. To them or us such books were of prehistoric vintage.

No, no one was thinking consciously and deliberately in term of a world decline. The decline was none the less real, and it was hollowing us out. It revealed itself in unsuspected ways. For example, nothing was worth getting excited about. Nothing. Or, one job was as good as another, one man the equal of another. And so on. All boloney, naturally.

Nietzsche, my first great love, hadn’t seemed very German to me. He didn’t even seem Polish. He was like a fresh-minted coin. But Spengler immediately impressed me as being German to the core. The more abstruse and recondite his language, the easier I followed him. A pre-natal language, his. A lullaby. What is erroneously called his pessimism struck me as nothing more than cold Teutonic realism. The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death. Let us be honest. In the whole metaphysic of Europe has there ever been any truth but this sad German truth which, of course, is a lie? Suddenly, thanks to this historical maestro, we glean that the truth of death need not be sad, particularly when, as happens, the whole civilized world is already part of it. Suddenly we are asked to look into the depths of the tomb with the same zeal and joy with which we first greeted life.

Alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.

Try as I might, I could never finish a chapter without succumbing to the temptation to glance at the succeeding chapters. The headings of these chapters obsessed me. They were enchanting. They belonged to a grimoire rather than to a philosophy of history. The Magian World: Act and Portrait: On the Form of the Soul: Physiognomic and Systematic: Historic Pseudo-morphoses … And the last chapter of all, what else could it be but MONEY? Had anyone ever written of Money in this fascinating language? The modern mystery: MONEY.

From The Meaning of Numbers to Money—a thousand large, dense pages, all written out in three years. A bomb that failed to go off because another bomb (World War One) had blown the fuse.

And what footnotes! To be sure, the Germans love footnotes. Was it not about the same time that Otto Rank, one of the twelve disciples of Freud, was busy appending his fascinating footnotes to his studies of the Incest Motif, Don Juan, Art and Artist?

Anyway, from the footnotes to the index in the back of the book—like a journey from Mecca to Lhassa, on foot. Or from Delphi to Timbuctoo, and back again. Who but Spengler, moreover, would have grouped such figures as Pythagoras, Mohammed and Cromwell? Who other than this man would have looked for homologies in Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism? Who had dared to speak of the glorious Renaissance as a contretemps?

Walking the streets, my head spinning with all the dazzling references, I get to thinking of similar periods, periods in the distant past, it now seems, when I was completely absorbed in books. One period especially comes back to me vividly. It is the period when I first got to know Maxie Schnadig. There he is, dressing the show window of a haberdashery store not far from Kosciusko Street, where he lived. Hello Dostoievsky! Hoorah! Back and forth through the winter snows—with Dostoievsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Andreyev, Chekov, Artzibashev … And Oblomov! A new calendar of time for me. New friends, new perspectives, new sorrows. One of these new friends proves to be none other than Maxie’s cousin. He is a man much older than us, a physician from Novgorod. That is to say a Russian Jew, but a Russian just the same. And because he is bored with family life he suggests to us that we form a little study group, the three of us, to while the evenings away. And what do we choose to study? The sociology of Lester F. Ward. But Lester F. Ward is only a spring-board for the good doctor. He literally bounces into those subjects which represent the missing links in our lamentable scheme of knowledge—magic, symbols, herbology, crystalline forms, the prophets of the old Testament, Karl Marx, the technique of revolution, and so on. A samovar always on the boil, tasty sandwiches, smoked herring, caviar, fine teas. A skeleton dangling from the chandelier. He is happy that we are acquainted with the Russian dramatists and novelists, delighted that we have read Kropotkin and Bakunin, but—do we know the real Slavic philosophers and thinkers? He reels off a string of names which are utterly unknown to us. We are given to understand that in all Europe there never were such daring thinkers as the Russians. According to him, they were all visionaries and Utopists. Men who questioned everything. Revolutionaries all of them, even the reactionary ones. Some had been fathers of the Church, some peasants, some criminals, some veritable saints. But they had all endeavored to formulate a new world, usher in a new way of life. And il you consult the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I recall him saying, you will discover nothing about them. They are not even mentioned. What these Russians were striving for, he emphasized, was not the creation of a rich cultural life but the perfect life. He would discourse at length about the great wealth of the Russian language, how superior it was even to the language of the Elizabethans. He would read Pushkin aloud to us in his own tongue, then throw the book down with a sigh and exclaim: What’s the use? We’re in America now. A kindergarten. He was bored, supremely bored with the American scene. His patients were nearly all Jewish, but American Jews, and he had little in common with them. To him America meant apathy. He missed the talk of revolution. To be truthful, I think he also missed the horrors of the pogrom. He felt that he was rotting away in the hollow tomb of democracy. Sometime you must ask me about Fedorov, he remarked once. But we never got that far. We got bogged down in Lester F. Ward’s sociology. It was too much for Maxie Schandig. Poor Maxie was already poisoned by the American virus. He wanted to go ice-skating, wanted to play hand-ball, tennis, golf. And so, after a few months the study group dissolved. Never once since have I heard mention of Lester F. Ward. Nor have I ever again seen a copy of this great work. As compensation, perhaps, I took to reading Herbert Spencer. More sociology! Then one day I fell upon his Autobiography, and I devoured it. There was indeed a mind. A lame one, but it served its purpose. A mind dwelling alone on an arid plateau. Not a hint of Russia, of revolution, of the Marquis de Sade, of love. Not a hint of anything but problems. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates.

As soon as Life is fatigued. says Spengler, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem.

There are phrases, sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs from The Decline of the West which seem to be engraved in my brain-pan. The first reading went deep. Since then I have read and re-read, copied and re-copied the passages which obsess me. Here are a few at random, as inexpugnable as the letters of the alphabet…

To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millenium of organic culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost spirituality—such is the aim.

Only the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of experiencing in dates the symbols of that which happened, and so of elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny (like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.

To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Aeschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s.

The classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future, but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen … every great man has linked his life to an eternal morning. Alexander’s life was a wondrous paroxysm, a dream which conjured up the Homeric ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life was an immense toil, not for himself nor for France, but for the Future.

From the high and distant standpoint it matters very little what ‘truths’ thinkers have managed to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements. Infinitely more important than the answers are the questions—the choice of them, the inner form of them…

With the Name comes a new world-outlook … The Name grazes the meaning of consciousness and the source of fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in it … Man names that which is enigmatic. It is the beast that knows no enigmas … With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man. It was the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul.

A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned a priori by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean … And this ignorabimus is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxima of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers—who are personalities—and not systems, which are mutable, that have taken effect upon life.

For the sake of the machine, human life becomes precious. Work becomes the great word of ethical thinking: in the 18th Century ‘it loses its derogatory implication in all languages. The machine words and forces the man to co-operate. The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it … And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric-Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience, is set in motion, silent and irresistible…

A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history … Ever in History it is life and life only—race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power—and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favor of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life—decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its rights would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture—that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities—closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-encircling cosmic flow…

For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development—the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarium that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step—our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing…

What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is ‘in condition’, well-nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so … It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently—this is the time when the banal assertion that hunger and love are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of ‘happiness of the greatest number’, of comfort and ease, of ‘panem et circenses’; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself….

I could go on and on, do as I have done time and again—quote and quote until a veritable handbook accumulates. Almost twenty-five years since I made the first reading! And the magic is still there. For those who pride themselves on being always in the van, all that I have quoted, as well as all that lies between the quotes, is now old hat. What matter? For me Oswald Spengler is still alive and kicking. He enriched and uplifted me. As did Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, Elie Faure.

Perhaps I am somewhat of a juggler, since I am able to balance such incongruous ponderables as The Decline of the West and the Too Teh Ching. The one is made of granite or porphyry and weighs a ton; the other is light as a feather and runs through my fingers like water. In eternity, where they meet and have their being, they cancel one another out. An exile like Hermann Hesse understands this sort of juggling perfectly. In the book called Siddhartha he presents two Buddhas, the known and the unknown. Each perfect in his way. They are opposites—in the sense of Systematic and Physiognomic. They do not destroy one another. They meet and part. Buddha is one of those names which grazes the meaning of consciousness. The real Buddhas are without name. In short, the known and the unknown balance perfectly. Jugglers understand … When I think of it now, how remarkably this Untergang music corresponded with my underground life! Strange, too, that virtually the only person with whom I could then speak of Spengler was Osiecki. It must have been in Joe’s restaurant, during one of my promenades nocturnes, that we met again. He had not lost that weird gnomic grin—the teeth all loose and rattling louder than ever. As far as actualities went he was still off the beam. But he could take in the Spenglerian music with the same ease and understanding as he did the music of Dohnanyi for whom he had conceived a passion. To while away the long, weary nights he had taken to reading in bed. All that related to number, engineering, architecture (in Spengler) he had swallowed like pre-digested food. And money, I should add. Of this subject he had an uncanny knowledge. Strange to what ends the unfit develop their faculties! Listening to Osiecki, I used to think how sweet it would be to be locked up in the bug-house with him—and Oswald Spengler. What marvelous discussions we would have held! Out in the cold world all this grand music went to waste. If critics and scholars were interested in the Spenglerian view of things it was not at all in the way we were. For them it was but another bone to gnaw at. A juicer bone than usual, perhaps, but a bone nevertheless. To us it was life, the elixir of life. We got drunk on it every time we met. And of course we developed our own mutual morphological sign language. With each other we could cover huge tracts of thought in jig time, because of this code language. As soon as a stranger entered the discussion we got bogged down. To him our talk was not only unintelligible, it was sheer nonsense.

With Mona I developed another kind of language. By dint of listening to my monologues she soon picked up the glittering tag ends, all the (to her) fantastic terminology—definitions, meanings, and, so to speak, morphological excreta. She often read a page or two while sitting on the stool. Just sufficient to emerge with a mouthful of phrases and outlandish references. In short, she had learned to bounce the ball back to me, which was pleasant and (for me) stimulating. All I ever required of a listener, when wound up, was a semblance of understanding. Long practice had developed in me the art of instructing my listener in the fundamentals, of giving him just enough of a stance to permit me to wash over him like a fountain. Thus at one and the same time I instructed or informed him—and mystified him. When I sensed that he felt himself on firm ground I would sweep the ground away from him. (Does not the Zen master endeavor to rob his disciple of every foothold he has ever had—in order to supply him with one that is really no foothold?)

With Mona this was infuriating. Naturally. But then I would have the delicious opportunity of reconciling my contradictory statements; this meant expansion, elaboration, distillation, condensation. In this wise I stumbled on some remarkable conclusions, not only about Spengier’s dicta but about thought in general, about the thought process itself. Only the Chinese, it seemed to me, had understood and appreciated the game of thought. Passionate as I was about Spengler, the truth of his utterances never seemed so important to me as the wonderful play of his thought … Today I think what a pity it is that, as a frontispiece to this phenomenal work, there is not reproduced the horoscope of the author. A clue of this sort is absolutely requisite to an understanding of the character and nature of this intellectual giant. When one thinks of the significance with which Spengler weights the phrase—man as intellectual nomad—one begins to realize that, in pursuing his high task, he came close to being a modern Moses. How much more frightful is this wilderness in which our intellectual nomad is forced to dwell! No Promised Land in sight. Nothing on the horizon but empty symbols.

That gulf between the dawn man, who participated mystically, and contemporary man, who is unable to communicate except through sterile intellect, can only be bridged by a new type of man, the man with a cosmic consciousness. The sage, the prophet, the visionary, they all spoke in Apocalyptic terms. From earliest times the few have been attempting to break through. Some undoubtedly have broken through—and will remain forever outside the rat trap.

A morphology of history, valid, exciting, inspiring though it may be, is still a death science. Spengler was not concerned with what lies beyond history. I am. Others are. Even if Nirvana be only a word, it is a pregnant word, it contains a promise. That secret which lies at the heart of the world may yet be dragged into the open. Even ages ago it was pronounced to be an Open secret.

If the solution to life is the living of it, then let us live, live more abundantly! The masters of life are not found in books. They are not historical figures. They are situated in eternity, and they beseech us unceasingly to join them, in eternity.

At my elbow, as I write these lines, is a photograph torn from a book, a photograph of an unknown Chinese sage who is living today. Either the photographer did not know who he was or he withheld his name. We know only that he is from Peking: that is all the information which is vouchsafed. When I turn my head to look at him, it is as though he were right here in my room. He is more alive—even in a photograph—than anyone I know. He is not simply a man of spirit—he is all spirit. He is Spirit itself, I might say. All this is concentrated in his expression. The look which he gives forth is completely joyous and luminous. It says without equivocation: Life is bliss!

Do you, suppose that, from the eminence on which he is poised—serene, light as a bird, with a wisdom all-embracing—a morphology of history would mean anything to him? No question here of exchanging the perspective of the frog for that of the bird. Here we have the perspective of a god. He is there and his position is unalterable. Instead of perspective he has compassion. He does not preach wisdom—he sheds light.

Do you suppose that he is unique? Not I. I believe that all over the world, and in the most unsuspected places (naturally), there are men—or gods—like this radiant being. They are not enigmatic, they are transparent. There is no mystery about them whatever: they are out in the open, perpetually on view. If we are removed from them it is only because we cannot accept their divine simplicity. Illumined being, we say, yet never ask with what it is they are illumined. To be aflame with spirit (which is life), to radiate unending joy, to be serene above the chaos of the world and still be part of the world, human, divinely human, closer than any brother—how is it we do not yearn to be thus? Is there a role which is better, deeper, richer, more compelling? Then shout it from the roof-tops! We want to know. And we want to know immediately.

I do not need to wait for your response. I see the answer all about me. It is not really an answer—it is an evasion. The illustrious one at my elbow looks straight at me: he fears not to gaze upon the face of the world. He has neither rejected the world nor renounced it: he is part of it, just as stone, tree, beast, flower and star are part of it. In his being he is the world, all there can ever be of it … When I look at those around me I see only the profiles of averted faces. They are trying not to look at life—it is too terrible or too horrible, too this or too that. They see only the awesome dragon of life, and they are impotent before the monster. If only they had the courage to look straight into the dragon’s jaws!

In many ways what is called history seems to me nothing more than a manifestation of this same fearsome attitude towards life. It is possible that what we call the historical would cease to be, would be erased from consciousness, once we performed that simple soldierly movement of Eyes Front! What is worse than a backward glance at the world is an oblique one.

When we speak of men making history we mean to say that they Lave in some measure altered the course of life. But the man at my elbow is beyond such silly dreams. He knows that man alters nothing—not even his own self. He knows that man can do one thing only, and that that is his sole aim in life—open the eyes of the soul! Yes, man has this choice—to let in the light or to keep the shutters closed. In making the choice man acts. This is his part vis-a-vis creation.

Open the eyes wide and the stir must die down. And when the stir dies down then commences the real music.

The dragon snorting fire and smoke from his nostril is only expelling his fears. The dragon does not stand guard at the heart of the world—he stands at the entrance to the cave of wisdom. The dragon has reality only in the phantasmal world of superstition.

The homeless, homesick man of the big cities. What heart-rending pages Spengler devotes to the plight of the intellectual nomad! Rootless, sterile, sceptical, soulless—and homeless and homesick to boot. Primitive folk can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die upon the pavement than go ‘back’ to the land.

Let me say it unequivocally—after a reading nothing in the world of actualities had meaning or importance for me. The daily news was about as remote as the dog star. I was in the very center of the transformative process. All was death and transfiguration.

There was only one headline which still had power to excite me, and that was—THE END OF THE WORLD IS IN SIGHT! In that imaginary phrase I never sensed a menace to my own world, only to the world. I was closer to Augustine than to Jerome. But I had not yet found my Africa. My point of repair was a stuffy little furnished room. Alone in it I experienced a strange sort of peace. It was not the peace that passeth understanding. Ah no! It was an intermittent sort, the augur of a greater, a more enduring peace. It was the peace of a man who was able to reconcile himself with the condition of the world in thought.

Still, it was a step. The cultured individual seldom gets beyond this stage.

Eternal life is not life beyond the grave, but the true spiritual life, said a philosopher. What a time it has taken me to realize the full import of such a statement! … A whole century of Russian thought (the 19th) was preoccupied with this question of the end, of the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God. But in North America it was as if that century, those thinkers and searchers after the true reality of life, had never existed. True, now and then a rocket exploded in our midst. Now and then we did receive a message from some distant shore. Such events were regarded not only as mysterious, bizarre, outlandish, but as occult. This last label meant that they were no longer serviceable Or applicable to daily life.

Reading Spengler was not precisely a balm. It was more of a spiritual exercise. The critique of Western thought underlying his cyclical pattern had the same effect upon me as the Koans have for the Zen disciple. Again and again I arrived at my own peculiar Western state of Satori. Time and again I experienced those lightning flashes of illumination which herald the break-through. There came excruciating moments when, as if the universe were an accordion, I could view it as an infinitesimal speck or expand it infinitely, so that only the eye of God could encompass it. Gazing at a star outside my window, I could magnify it ten thousand times; I could roam from star to star, like an angel, endeavoring all the while to grasp the unverse in these super-telescopic proportions. I would then return to my chair, look at my finger-nail, or rather at an almost invisible spot on the nail, and see into it the universe which the physicist endeavors to create out of the atomic web of nothingness. That man could ever conceive of nothingness always astounded me.

For so long now the conceptual world has been man’s whole world. To name, to define, to explain … Result: unceasing anguish. Expand or contract the universe ad injinitum—a parlor game. Playing the god instead of trying to be as God. Godding, godding—and at the same time believing in nothing. Bragging of the miracles of science, yet looking upon the world about as so much shit. Frightening ambivalence! Electing for systems, never for man. Denying the miracle men through the systems erected in their names.

On lonely nights, pondering the problem—only one ever!—I could see so very clearly the world as it is, see what it is and why it is the way it is. I could reconcile grace with evil, divine order with rampant ugliness, imperishable creation with utter sterility. I could make myself so finely attuned that a mere zephyr would blow me to dust. Instant annihilation or enduring life—it was one and the same to me. I was at balance, both sides so evenly poised that a molecule of air would tip the scales.

Suddenly a most hilarious thought would shatter the whole set-up. An idea such as this: However deep one’s knowledge of abstruse philosophy, it is like a piece of hair flying in the vastness of space. A Japanese thought, this. With it came a return to a more ordinary sort of equilibrium. Back to that frailest of all footholds—solid earth. That solid earth which we now accept as being as empty as space.

In Europe it was I, and I alone with my yearning for Russia, who was free, said Dostoievsky somewhere. From Europe, like a true Evangel, he spread the glad tidings. A hundred, two hundred years hence, the full import of this utterance may be realized. What is to be done meanwhile? A question I propounded to myself over and over.

In the early pages of the chapter called Problems of the Arabian Culture, Spengler dwells at some length upon the eschatological aspect of Jesus’ utterances. The whole section called Historic Pseudomorphoses is a paean to the Apocalyptic. It opens with a tender, sympathetic portrait of Jesus of Nazareth vis-a-vis the world of his day. The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. So begins this section. In Jesus’ utterances, he points out, there were no sociological observations, problems, debatings.

No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order…

Then follows this: Religion is metaphysic and nothing else—’Credo quia absurdum’—and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic—that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is … His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly filled: the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the Last Judgment, a new heaven and a new earth. Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history … ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them.

It is at this point that Spengler voices his scorn for Tolstoy who elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. It is here he makes a pointed allusion to Dostoievsky who never thought about social ameliorations. (Of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul to abolish property?)

Dostoievsky and his freedom…

Was it not in that same time of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky that another Russian asked—Why is it stupid to believe in the Kingdom of Heaven but intelligent to believe in an earthly Utopia?

Perhaps the answer to this conundrum was inadvertently given by Belinsky when he said: The fate of the subject, of the individual, of the person is more important than the fate of the whole world and the well-being of the Chinese Emperor.

At any rate, it was definitely Fedorov who quietly remarked: Each person is answerable for the whole world and for all men,

A strange and exciting period in the land of holy miracles nineteen centuries after the birth and death of Jesus the Christ! One man writes The Apology of a Madman; another writes a Revolutionary Catechism; another The Metaphysics of Sex. Each one is a revolution in himself. Of one figure I learn that he was a conservative, a mystic, an anarchist, an orthodox, an occultist, a patriot, a Communist—and ended his life in Rome as a Catholic and a Fascist. Is this a period of historic pseudomorphosis? Certainly it is an Apocalyptic one.

My misfortune, metaphysically speaking, is that I was born neither in the time of Jesus nor in holy Russia of the nineteenth century. I was born in the megalopolis at the tail-end of a great planetary conjunction. But even in the suburb of Brooklyn, by the time I had come of age, one could be stirred by the repercussions of that Slavic ferment. One World War had been fought and won. Sic! The second one was in the making. In that same Russia I speak of Spengler had a precursor whom you will scarcely find mention of even today. Even Nietzsche had a Russian precursor!

Was it not Spengler who said that Dostoievsky’s Russia would eventually triumph? Did he not predict that from this ripe soil a new religion would spring? Who believes this today?

The Second World War has also been fought and won (!!!) and still the Day of Judgment seems remote. Great autobiographies, masquerading in one form or another, reveal the life of an epoch, of a whole people, aye, of a civilization. It is almost as if our heroic figures had built their own tombs, described them intimately, then buried themselves in their mortuary creations. The heraldic landscape has vanished. The air belongs to the giant birds of destruction. The waters will soon be ploughed by Leviathans more fearful to behold than those described in the good book. The tension increases, increases, increases. Even in villages the inhabitants become more and more, in feeling and spirit, like the bombs they are obliged to manufacture.

But history will not end even when the grand explosion occurs. The historical life of man has still a long span. It doesn’t take a metaphysician to arrive at such a conclusion. Sitting in that little hole in the wall back in Brooklyn twenty-five years or so ago I could feel the pulse of history throbbing as late as the 32nd Dynasty of Our Lord.

Nevertheless, I am immensely grateful to Oswald Spengler for having performed this strange feat of skill—describing to a nicety the unholy atmosphere of arterio-sclerosis which is ours, and at the same time shattering the whole rigid thought-world which envelops us, thus liberating us—at least in thought. On every page, virtually, there is an assault upon the dogmas, conventions, superstitions and mode of thinking which have characterized the last few hundred years of modernity. Theories and systems are battered about like nine-pins. The whole conceptual landscape of modern man is devastated. What emerges are not the scholarly ruins of the past but freshly recreated worlds in which one may participate with one’s ancestors, live again the Spring, the Fall, the Summer, even the Winter, of man’s history. Instead of stumbling through glacial deposits one is carried along on a tide of sap and blood. Even the firmament gets reshuffled. This is Spengler’s triumph—to have made Past and Future live in the Present. One is again at the center of the universe, warmed by solar fires, and not at the periphery fighting off vertigo, fighting off fear of the unspeakable abyss.

Does it matter so much that we are men of the tail end and not of the beginning? Not if we realize that we are part of something in eternal process, in eternal ebullition. Undoubtedly there is something far more comforting for us to apprehend, if we persist in searching. But even here, on the threshold, the shifting landscape acquires a more pregnant beauty. We glimpse a pattern which is not a mould. We learn all over again that the death process has to do with men-in-life and not with corpses in varying stages of decomposition. Death is a counter-symbol. Life is the all, even in the end periods. Nowhere is there any hint of life coming to a stand-still.

Yes, I was a fortunate man to have found Oswald Spengler at that particular moment in time. In every crucial period of my life I seem to have stumbled upon the very author needed to sustain me. Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, Elie Faure, Spengler: what a quartet! There were others, naturally, who were also important at certain moments, but they never possessed quite the amplitude, quite the grandeur, of these four. The four horsemen of my own private Apocalypse! Each one expressing to the full his own unique quality: Nietzsche the iconoclast; Dostoievsky the grand inquisitor; Faure the magician; Spengler the pattern-maker. What a foundation!

In the days to come, when it will seem as if I were entombed, when the very firmament threatens to come crashing down upon my head, I shall be forced to abandon everything except what these spirits implanted in me. I shall be crushed, debased, humiliated. I shall be frustrated in every fibre of my being. I shall even take to howling like a dog. But I shall not be utterly lost! Eventually a day is to dawn when, glancing over my own life as though it were a story or history, I can detect in it a form, a pattern, a meaning. From then on the word defeat becomes meaningless. It will be impossible ever to relapse.

For on that day I become and I remain one with my creation.

On another day, in a foreign land, there will appear before me a young man who, aware of the change which has come over me, will dub me The Happy Rock. That is the monniker I shall tender when the great Cosmocrator demands—Who art thou?

Yes, beyond a doubt I shall answer: The Happy Rock!

And if it be asked—Didst thon enjoy thy stay on earth?—I shall reply: My life was one long rosy crucifixion.

As to the meaning of this, if it is not already clear, it shall be elucidated. If I fail then am I but a dog in the manger.

Once I thought that I had been wounded as no man ever had. Because I felt thus I vowed to write this book. But long before I began the book the wound had healed. Since I had sworn to fulfill my task I reopened the horrible wound.

Let me put it another way … Perhaps in opening the wound, my own wound, I closed other wounds, other people’s wounds. Something dies, something blossoms. To suffer in ignorance is horrible. To suffer deliberately, in order to understand the nature of suffering and abolish it forever, is quite another matter. The Buddha had one fixed thought in mind all his life, as we know. It was to eliminate human suffering.

Suffering is unnecessary. But one has to suffer before he is able to realize that this is so. It is only then, moreover, that the true significance of human suffering becomes clear. At the last desperate moment—when one can suffer no more!—something happens which is in the nature of a miracle. The great open wound which was draining the blood of life closes up, the organism blossoms like a rose. One is free at last, and not with a yearning for Russia, but with a yearning for ever more freedom, ever more bliss. The tree of life is kept alive not by tears but the knowledge that freedom is real and everlasting.

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