Hesse on Happiness

 OT 

1949 

Man, the way God planned him and the way the poetry and wisdom of the people have understood him for many thousands of years, was created with a capacity for enjoying things even if they are not useful to him, with a sense for beauty. Mind and senses have always played an equal part in the joy man feels in beauty. As long as men are capable, in the midst of the distresses and dangers of their lives, of rejoicing in such things as these: the play of colors in nature or in a painting, an appeal in the voices of storm and sea, or in man-made music, as long as beneath its surface interests and necessities the world can be seen or felt as a whole, consisting as it does of interrelationships, from the curve of a young cat's neck to the variations of a sonata, from the touching eyes of a dog to the tragedy of a poet, an interconnection of a thousandfold riches of relationship, correspondences, analogies, and reflections, out of whose eternally flowing language their hearers derive joy and wisdom, entertainment and emotion—just so long will man again and again triumph over his ambiguities and be able to ascribe meaning to his existence. For “meaning” is precisely that unity of the multitudinous, or at least that ability of the spirit to perceive the chaotic confusion of the world as unity and harmony. For the true man, healthy, whole, unimpaired, the world justifies itself, God justifies Himself unceasingly through such marvels as these: with the coming of the cool of evening and the ending of the worker's day, there is also the reddening of the evening sky, and the magic, flowing transitions from rose into violet; or there is such a thing as the transformations of a human face when in a thousand nuances like the evening sky it is touched by the miracle of a smile. And there are such things as the spaces and windows of a cathedral, and the order of the stamens in a blossom. There are such things as a violin constructed from little boards, and the musical scale. So incomprehensible and delicate a thing, born from nature and mind, rational and at the same time suprarational and childish, as speech. Its beauties and surprises, its puzzles, its apparent immortality that nevertheless does not remove or protect it from the accidents, sicknesses, dangers to which all things mortal are exposed, these make it for us, its servants and pupils, one of the most mysterious and sacred phenomena on earth. 

Color and vampires on roller skates

 Indeed, when the ancients wrote about color, from Homer and Parmenides to Plato and Aristotle, their terminology often seems decidedly foreign. Was the wine-dark sea really the color of a fine Chateauneuf-du-Pape, or did that refer to something about luster or sheen or some other visual quality? Nietzsche was convinced that the ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue or green and lived in a world of black, white, red and yellow.

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Because Lugosi never learned to drive, he got around Hollywood on rollerskates.

Vampira, in which she describes her first meeting with him: “I was a young girl window-shopping on Hollywood Boulevard. I was bending low to see the detail of some shoes and someone whizzed around the corner on rollerskates, almost bumped my fanny and crashed into me. ‘Pardon me,’ said he, and ‘Pardon me,’ said I. He was wearing an Ascot cravat and a beret. It was Bela Lugosi on rollerskates. He was on his way to a cigar store.”

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Stuart Hampshire on H James

Lewis is particularly authoritative and successful in placing the James family on their exalted social pinnacle against the more variegated and tumultuous background of ordinary American life. He is much less interested in Henry’s later life in England, and in his high standing among the distinguished and famous there. Originally Irish immigrants, the family became immensely rich through the real estate operations of Henry and William’s grandfather, Willam James Senior. His fortune in the 1830s was considered to be second only to that of 3.3. Astor in New York State, and “William James of Albany” was certainly one of the richest men in the country at that time. In Henry’s wonderful words, which Mr. Lewis quotes, most of the heirs of this tycoon were an “extravagant, unregulated cluster...handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all bust and curls.” 

Henry’s gift of inspired vagueness, as in “lurid uncles;” tells with wit all that needs to be told of most of the first William’s less enterprising descendants. Then with Henry James Senior’s dedication to the life of an Emersonian intellectual, to a spiritual quest, mere wealth was converted into another, and characteristically Amercan, kind of gentility: the gentility of old New York houses, of repeated cul__ tural journeys to Europe, of an intensely sustained literacy, of a turning away from the taint of commerce and of speculation, and of a controlled distaste for the social effects of more recent immigration, which would dilute the original stock. = 

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On Buster Keaton

 Is it a matter of geometric abstraction, of heroic physical feats accomplished without bravado, of a sublime and unsentimental hilarity shot through, in James Agee’s words, with “a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia”? Keaton has been likened to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Franz Kafka. At the end of his life, finally showered with artistic recognition, he confided to his wife his wariness of “that genius bullshit.” 

—he incarnated a superior but detached intelligence, making his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of earthly existence in ways baffling to the terrestrials among whom he found himself. He operated with the clear-eyed genius of avery serious child discerning formal likenesses between dissimilar entities and inventing new and undreamt-of uses for common objects. For all his fertility in superbly improbable inventions, what counted for Keaton was a sense of realness, an avoidance of the “ridiculous,” an adjective by which he indicated the disconnected gimmicks and anarchically unleashed aggression typical of Mack Sennett and Keaton’s own cinematic mentor, the ill-fated Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.” He insisted on gags that evolved logically, story lines “that one could imagine happening to real people”—imagine being the appropriate verb, and the logic in question being of a peculiar sort unique to Keaton. The predicaments of his heroes were made to seem not only plausible but inevitable, even when they involved being chased over hills and valleys by a mob of women in wedding gowns.

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This, of course, is not to say that fiction should be tidy and straightforward, or provide a means of escapism, or shy away from current events. It is simply to echo Henry James’s famous dictum: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” 

In most rapid-response novels, that circle is never drawn. There is simply a quick-fire accretion of harrowing data, together with the breathless, telegraphic commentary it inspires. For all its surface agitation, such fiction is actually founded on a complacent premise: that all that’s needed to achieve profundity is to write down what happens. How this material is shaped and ordered, by what geometry it is finessed into meaning, remains, at best, a secondary concern. 

Because of its formal fragmentation and ultra-contemporary subject matter, the rapid-response novel carries an aura of modernist innovation. Life itself has grown more manic and fractured (the implicit argument of these books seems to run), and novels ought to reflect this. Looked at another way, however, the genre could be seen as a capitulation. Working from the premise that readers today, conditioned by social media, have trouble focusing on anything for longer than thirty seconds at a time, the rapidresponse novelist decides to cater to their ravaged attention spans by writing brief, topical books comprised of tweet-like fragments generously set off by quantities of white space. 

Frank Kermode

 From Pieces of my Mind

The publishers describe this book by Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (2001) as ‘lean’, which may be taken to refer to its style, though it also serves as a euphemism for ‘very short, especially considering the price’. Its immediate predecessor was Underworld, at least seven times as long (or as fat). That book, as nearly everybody must know, begins with a chapter about a famous baseball game and a boy who retrieves the ball with which the decisive home run was scored. The Body Artist is about as long as the Underworld ball game. 

DeLillo is a serious and various writer, and we have to take these extremes as deliberately chosen to reflect different aspects of his talent. Underworld belongs to the category of the Great American Novel, to which all the really big writers aspire. Structurally it has some tesemblance to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and that thought prompts the reflection that Pynchon also wrote an exceptionally fine novella, The Crying of Lot 49. If there are two traditions of great American writing it is proper to show up in both of them. One of them may be said to originate with Hawthorne, the other with Melville, one lean and self-absorbed, the other heavy, expansive, determined to Contain a world. On the whole the heavyweights have prevailed in recent years; one no longer hears much talk of, say, Glenway Westcott, a lean writer of whom Gertrude Stein remarked that ‘he has a certain syrup but it does not pour’. This memory came to me as I read The Body Artist. But here the syrup does, slowly, pour. 

Anthony Powell

 A Question of Upbringing 

About the house he was more noticeable than in the open air, because his voice was pitched high and he articulated poorly: as if tongue were too big for his mouth. 

This delivery made his words always appear to protest, a manner of speaking almost predictable from his face. In addition to that distinctly noisy manner of utterance, thick rubber reinforcements on soles and heels caused his boot~ he wore boots more often than what Stringham used to call ‘Widmerpool’s good sensible shoes’—to squeal incessantly: their shrill rhythmic bursts of sound, limited in compass like the notes of a barbaric orchestra, giving warning of his approach along the linoleum of distant passages; their sullen whining dirge seeming designed to express in musical terms the mysteries of an existence of toil and abnegation lived apart from the daily life of the tribe. Perhaps he sounds a grotesque and conspicuous figure. In excess, Widmerpool was neither. He had his being, like many others, in obscurity. The gap in age caused most of my knowledge of him to have come second-hand; and, in spite of this abrupt realisation of him as a person that took place on that winter evening, he would have remained a dim outline to me if he had not at an earlier date, and before my own arrival, made himself already memorable, as a new boy, by wearing the wrong kind of overcoat. 

At this distance of time I cannot remember precisely what sort of an overcoat Widmerpool was said to have worn in the first instance. Stories about it had grown into legend: so much so that even five or six years later you might still occasionally hear an obtrusive or inappropriate garment referred to as ‘a Widmerpool’; and Templer, for example, would sometimes say: ‘I am afraid I’m wearing rather Widmerpool socks today’, or, ‘I’ve bought a wonderfully Widmerpool tie to go home in’. My impression is that the overcoat’s initial deviation from normal was slight, depending on the existence or absence of a belt at the back, the fact that the cut was singleor double-breasted, or, again, irregularity may have had something to do with the collar; perhaps the cloth, even, was of the wrong colour or texture. 

As a matter of fact the overcoat was only remarkable in itself as a vehicle for the comment it aroused, insomuch that an element in Widmerpool himself had proved indigestible to the community. An overcoat (which never achieved the smallest notoriety) belonging to a boy called Offord whose parents lived in Madeira, where they had possibly purchase the garment, was indeed once pointed out to me as ‘very lik, Widmerpool’s’. There was on no occasion the slightes question of Widmerpool being bullied, or even seriously ragged about the matter. On the contrary, his deviation seems scarcely to have been mentioned to him, except by cruder spirits: the coat becoming recognised almog immediately as a traditionally ludicrous aspect of every. day life. Years later, if you questioned his contemporaries on the subject, they were vague in their answers, and would only laugh and say that he wore the coat for a couple of terms; and then, by the time winter came round again, he was found to possess an overcoat of a more conventional Sort. . 

This overcoat gave Widmerpool a lasting notoriety which his otherwise unscintillating career at school could never wholly dispel. How fully he was aware of this reputation it was hard to say. His behaviour certainly indicated that he hoped for more substantial credit with other people than to be known solely on account of a few months gives over to out-of-the-way dress. If such was his aim, he was unsuccessful; 

Buyer's Market

Accumulations of unrelated objects brought together for auction acquire, in their haphazard manner, a certain dignity of their own: items not to be tolerated in any inhabited dwelling finding each its own level in these expansive, anonymous caverns, where, making no claim to individual merit, odds and ends harmonise quietly with each other, and with the general sobriety of background. 

Such precincts have something of museums about them, the roving crowd on the whole examining the assembled relics with an expert, unselfconscious intensity, not entirely commercial or acquisitive. 

On these particular premises almost every man-mad thing seemed represented. Comparatively new mowing machines: scabbardless and rusty cavalry sabres: ebony fragments of African fetish: a nineteenth-century type writer, poised uncertainly on metal stilts in the midst of a tea-set in Liverpool ware, the black-and-white landscapes of its design irreparably chipped. Several pillows and bolsters covered with the Union Jack gave a disturbing hint that, somewhere beneath, a corpse awaited burial with military honours. Farther off, high rolls of linoleum, coloured blue, green and pink, were ranged against the wall like pillars, a Minoan colonnade from which wicker arm-chairs and much-used pieces of luggage formed a semicircle. Within this open space, placed rather like an emblem arranged for worship, stood the washstand round which the pictures were grouped. On its marble top rested an empty bird-cage, two men-at-arms in lead, probably German, and a dogeared pile of waltz music. In front of a strip of Axminster carpet, displayed like faded tapestry from the side of a nearby wardrobe in pitch pine, a fourth painting stood upside down. 

&

 He was a great believer in insisting absolutely upon the minute observance by others of his own wishes.

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Finally, we were all left standing in the centre of the court beside Monsieur Orn, who had limited himself throughout the commotion almost entirely to monosyllables. He now began to speak in a deep, strident voice, which after a minute or two showed signs of shaking with emotion. At first Widmerpool and I were unable to grasp the root of the trouble, partly because Monsieur Lundquist’s lobbing technique was sufhciently common for none of the rest of us specially to have noticed it that afternoon: partly because at that age I was not yet old enough to be aware of the immense rage that can be secreted in the human heart by cumulative minor irritation.

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But suddenly as I hung up the receiver—think ing that perhaps I had left Short rather ruthlessly in the lurch so far as his evening was concerned—I found myself wondering whether I was still in love. Barbara’s voice had sounded so peremptory, and it was clear that someone else had failed her at the last moment. In that there was, of course, nothing to be taken reasonably amiss. Obviously I could not expect to sit next to her at dinner every night of our lives—unless I married her; perhaps not even then. And yet my heart seemed a shade lighter. Was the fever passing? I was myself still barely conscious of its declension. I had not at that time met Barnby, nor had opportunity to digest one of his favourite maxims: ‘A woman always overplays her hand.’ 

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As I have already said of Mrs. Andriadis’s party, such latitudes are entered by a door through which there is rarely if ever a return; and, in rather the same manner, that night at Mr. Deacon’s certain matters seemed to crystallise. Perhaps this crystallisation had something to do with the presence there of Members and Quiggin, though they themselves were in agreement as to the displeasure they both felt in the company assembled. 

‘You must admit,’ said Members, looking round the room, ‘it all looks rather like that picture in the Tate, of the Sea giving up the Dead that were in It. I can’t think why Mona insisted on coming.’ 

Quiggin concurred in finding Mr. Deacon’s guests altogether unacceptable, at the same time paying suitable commendation to the aptness of the pictorial allusion.

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While I was making some temporising answer to these reassurances on Mrs. Widmerpool’s part regarding her inclination towards literature, Miss Walpole-Wilson was announced, who excused her lateness on the grounds of the chronic irregularity of the bus service from Chelsea, where her flat was situated. She was wearing a mackintosh, of which, for some reason, she had refused to divest herself in the hall; exemplifying in this manner a curious rai common to some persons of wilful nature, whose egotism seems often to make them unwilling, even incapable, of shedding anything of themselves until they can feel that they have safely reached their goal. She now removed this waterproof, folding and establishing it upon a chair—an act watched by her hostess with a fixed smile that might have signihed disapproval—revealing that she, too, was wearing a richly-coloured coat. It was made of orange, black, and gold silk: a mandarin’s coat, so she explained, that Sir Gavin had given her years before. 

The Acceptance World

Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things. Certainly the chief attraction of the projected visit would be absence of all previous plan. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be. 

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I intend no cheap cynicism,’ Barnby said. ‘It is merely that in print the truth is not credible for those who have not thought deeply of the matter.’ 

‘That is true of almost everything.’ 

‘To some extent. But painting, for example—where women are concerned—is quite different from writing. In painting you can state everything there is to be said on the subject. In other words, the thing is treated purely gsthetically, almost scientifically. Writers always seem to defer to the wishes of the women themselves.’ 

‘So do painters. What about Reynolds or Boucher?’ 

‘Of course, of course,’ said Barnby, whose capacity for disregarding points made against him would have supplied the foundation for a dazzling career at the Bar. ‘But in writing—perhaps, as you say, chiefly writing in this country —there is no equivalent, say, of Renoir’s painting. Renoir did not think that all women’s flesh was Jiterally a material like pink satin. He used that colour and texture as a convention to express in a simple manner certain pictorial ideas of his own about women. In fact he did so in order to get on with the job in other aspects of his picture. I never find anything like that in a novel.’ 

‘You find plenty of women with flesh like that sitting in the Ritz.’ 

‘Maybe. And I can paint them. But can you write about them ?? 

No real tradition of how women behave exists in English Writing. In France there is at least a good rough and ready Convention, perhaps not always correct—riddled with every form of romanticism—but at least a pattern to which a Writer can work. A French novelist may conform with the convention, or depart from it. His readers know, more of less, which he is doing. Here, every female character ha to be treated empirically.’ 

‘Well, after all, so does every woman,’ said Barnby another of whose dialectical habits was suddenly to switch round and argue against himself. ‘One of the troubles, | think, is that there are too many novelists like St. John Clarke,’ 

‘But novelists of the first rank have not always been attracted to women physically.’ 

If of the first rank,’ said Barnby, ‘they may rise above tt If anything less, abnormal novelists are, I believe, largel responsible for some of the extraordinary ideas that get disseminated about women and their behaviour. 

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The meal passed off, therefore, with more success than might have been expected from such oddly assorted company. I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary. This party’s singular composition was undoubtedly enhanced by the commonplace nature of its surroundings. At the same time it was evident that the Templers themselves saw nothing in the least out-of-the-way about the guests collected round their table for Sunday luncheon 

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But now everything is “bourgeois ~ Liberalism, I have no doubt, most of all. As a matter of fact, his politics were the only liberal thing about him.’ 

‘And it began as soon as he met Quiggin?’ 

I first noticed the change when he persuaded me to join in what he called “collective action on the part of writers and artists’*—going to meetings to protest against Manchuria and so on. I agreed, first of all, simply to humour him. It was just as well I did, as a matter of fact, because it led indirectly to another job when he turned his back on me. You know, what St. J. really wants is a son. He wants to be a father without having a wife.’ 

‘I thought everyone always tried to avoid that.’ 

‘In the Freudian sense,’ said Members, impatiently, ‘his nature requires a father-son relationship. Unfortunately, the situation becomes a little too life-like, and one is faced with a kind of artificially constructed Oedipus situation.’ 

‘Can’t you re-convert him from Marxism to psychoanalysis?’ 

Members looked at me fixedly. 

‘St. J. has always pooh-poohed the subconscious,’ he said. 

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When you are in love with someone, their life, past, “ present and future, becomes in a curious way part of your life; and yet, at the same time, since two separate human entities in fact remain, you merely carry your own prejudices into another person’s imagined existence; not even into their ‘real’ existence, because only they themselves can estimate what their ‘real’ existence has been. Indeed, the situation might be compared with that to be experienced in due course in the army where an officer is responsible for the conduct of troops stationed at a post too distant from him for the exercise of any effective control. 

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‘But not in the future,’ he said, breathing inward hard. ‘{’m changing my trade. 

‘<j heard rumours.’ 

‘Of what?’ 

‘That you were joining the Acceptance World.’ 

‘That’s one way of putting it.’ 

Widmerpool sniggered. 

‘And you?’ he asked. 

‘Nothing much.’ 

‘Still producing your art books? It was art books, wasn’t ? 

. ‘Yes—and I wrote a book myself.’ 

‘Indeed, Nicholas. What sort of a book?’ 

‘A novel, Kenneth.’ 

‘Has it been published?’ 

‘A few months ago.’ 

‘Oh.’ 

His ignorance of novels and what happened about them was evidently profound. That was, after all, reasonable enough. Perhaps it was just lack of interest on his part. Whatever the reason, he looked not altogether approving, and did not enquire the name of the book. However, probably feeling a moment later that his reply may have sounded a shade flat, he added: ‘Good ... good, rather in the manner of Le Bas himself, when faced with an activity of which he was uninformed and suspicious, though at the same time unjustified in categorically forbidding. 

‘As a matter of fact I am making some notes for a book myself,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Quite a different sort of book from yours, of course. So we may be authors together. Do you always come to these dinners? 

Boredom from Bellow

 From Humboldts Gift

I had a lively time in the vast jurors’ hall going over boredom notes. I saw that I had stayed away from problems of definition. Good for me. I didn’t want to get mixed up with theological questions about accidia and tedium vitae. I found it necessary to say only that from the beginning mankind experienced states of boredom but that no one had ever approached the matter front and center as a subject in its own right. In modern times the question had been dealt with under the name of anomie or Alienation, as an effect of capitalist conditions of labor, as a result of leveling in Mass Society, as a consequence of the dwindling of religious faith or the gradual using up of charismatic or prophetic elements, or the neglect of Unconscious powers, or the increase of Rationalization in a technological society, or the growth of bureaucracy. It seemed to me, however, that one might begin with this belief of the modern world—either you burn or you rot. This I connected with the finding of old Binet the psychologist that hysterical people had fifty times the energy, the endurance, the power of performance, the keenness of faculties, the creativity in their hysterical fits as they had in their quiet periods. Or as William James put it, human beings really lived when they lived at the top of their energies. Something like the Wille zur Macht. Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities. (I try to guard against falling into the social-science style on these mental occasions.) Nothing actual ever suits pure expectation and such purity of expectation is a great source of tedium. People rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and in invention—all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled nailed up in chicken coops. Imagination has even tried to surmount the problems by forcing boredom itself to yield interest. This insight I owe to Von Humboldt Fleisher who showed me how it was done by James Joyce, but anyone who reads books can easily find it out for himself. Modern French literature is especially preoccupied with the theme of boredom. Stendhal mentioned it on every page, Flaubert: devoted books to it, and Baudelaire was its” chief poet. What is the reason for this peculiar French sensitivity? Can it be because the ancien régime, fearing another Fronde, created a court that emptied the provinces of talent? Outside the center, where art philosophy science manners conversation thrived, there was nothing. Under Louis XIV, the upper classes enjoyed a refined society, and, whatever else, people didn’t need to be alone. Cranks like Rousseau made solitude glamorous, but sensible people agreed that it was really terrible. Then in the eighteenth century being in prison began to acquire its modern significance. Think how often Manon and Des Grieux were in jail. And Mirabeau and my own buddy Von Trenck and of course the Marquis de Sade. The intellectual future of Europe was determined by people impregnated with boredom, by the writings of prisoners. Then, in 1789, it was young men from the sticks, provincial lawyers scribblers and orators, who assaulted and captured the center of interest. Boredom has more to do with modern political revolution than justice has. In 1917, that boring Lenin who wrote so many boring pamphlets and letters on organizational questions was, briefly, all passion, all radiant interest. The Russian revolution promised mankind a permanently interesting life. When Trotsky spoke of permanent revolution he really meant permanent interest. In the early days the revolution was a work of inspiration. Workers peasants soldiers were in 4 state of excitement and poetry. When this short brilliant phase ended, what came next? The most boring society in history. Dowdiness shabbiness dullness dull goods boring buildings boring discomfort boring supervision a dull press dull education boring bureaucracy forced labor perpetual police presence penal presence, boring party congresses, et cetera. What was permanent was the defeat of interest. 

What could be more boring than the long dinners Stalin gave, as Djilas describes them? Even I, a person seasoned in boredom by my years in Chicago, marinated, mithridated by the USA, was horrified by Djilas’s account of those twelvecourse all-night banquets. The guests drank and ate, and ate and drank, and then at 2 a.m. they had to sit down to watch an American Western. Their bottoms ached. There was dread in their hearts. Stalin, as he chatted and joked, was mentally picking those who were going to get it in the neck and while they chewed and snorted and guzzled they knew this, they expected shortly to be shot. 

What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. 

There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza. tion, of the realiration of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense, The human being, more and more op. pressed by the peculiar terms of hist existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistencet Foy people who crave continual interest and diversity, Of how boy. ing death will bel To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful! 

Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technologicalbureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever—by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,”’ of ““Denmark’s a prison.” 

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” I must tell you that I enjoyed Szathmar in this vein. As he was giving me the works like this his eyes kept turning to the left, where no one stood. If someone were standing there, some objective witness, he would support indignant Szathmar. Szathmar’s dear mother had this same trait. She too summoned justice from empty space in this outraged way, laying both hands on her bosom. 

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 And she and her client, the big potent-looking lady in the polka-dot poplin, said, ‘Ciao, so long.”” And there was the handsome russet and glass skyscraper, and there was the insignificant Picasso sculpture with its struts and its sheet metal, no wings, no victory, only a token, a reminder, only the idea of a work of art. Very similar, I thought, to the other ideas or reminders by which we lived—no more apples but the idea, the pomologist’s reconstruction of what an apple once was, no more ice cream but the idea, the recollection of something delicious made of substitutes, of starch, glucose, and other chemicals, no more sex but the idea or reminiscence of that, and so with love, belief, thought, and so on. On this theme I rose in an elevator 

&

He hammered them with this, he said they should be proud to have a client like me so of course they detested me sight unseen. The quintessence of their prejudice was once expressed by Szathmar himself when he lost his temper and shouted, “You’re nothing but a prick with a pen!” He was so sore that he surpassed himself and yelled even louder, “With or without a pen you're a prick!” But I wasn’t offended. I thought this was a whopping epithet and I laughed. If you o1 put it right you could say what you liked to me. Howeveff knew exactly how I made Tomchek and Srole feel. From their side they inspired me with an unusual thought. This was that History had created something new in the USA, namely crookedness with self-respect or duplicity with honor. America had always been very upright and moral, a model to the entire world, so it had put to death the very idea of hypocrisy and was forcing itself to live with this new imperative of sincerity, and it was doing an impressive job. 

&

 “The quenching of my thirst is not something that begins in my mouth. It begins with the water, and the water is out there, in the external world. So with truth. Truth is something we all share. Two plus two for me is two plus two for everyone else and has nothing to do with my ego. That I understand. Also the answer to Spinoza’s argument that if the dislodged stone had consciousness it could think, ‘I am flying through the air,’ as if it were freely doing it. But if it were conscious, it would not be a mere stone. It could also originate movement. Thinking, the power to think and to know, is a source of freedom. Thinking will make it obvious that spirit exists. The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit’s ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything. Every perception causes a certain amount of death in us, and this darkening is a necessity. The clairvoyant can actually see that when he learns how to obtain the inward view. To do this, he must get out of himself and stand far off.” 

“All this is in the texts,’ says Dr. Scheldt, “I can’t be sure that you have grasped it all, but you’re fairly accurate.” 

“Well, I understand in part, I think. When our understanding wants it, divine wisdom will flow toward us.” 

Then Dr. Scheldt begins to speak on the text, I am the light of the world. To him that light is understood also as the sun itself. Then he speaks of the gospel of Saint John as drawing upon the wisdom-filled Cherubim, while the gospel of Saint Luke draws upon the fiery love the Seraphim—Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones being the three highest spiritual hierarchy. I am not at all certain that I am following. “I have no experience of any of this advanced stuff, Dr. Scheldt, but I still find it peculiarly good and comforting to hear it all said. I don't at all know where I’m at. One of these days when life is quieter I’m going to buckle down to the training course and do it in earnest.” 

“When will life be quieter?” 

“I don’t know. But I suppose people have told you before this how much stronger the soul feels after such a conversation.” 

“You shouldn’t wait for things to become quieter. You must decide to make them quieter.” 

He saw that I was fairly skeptical still. I couldn’t make my peace with things like the Moon Evolution, the fire spirits, the Sons of Life, with Atlantis, with the lotus-flower organs of spiritual perception or the strange mingling of Abraham with Zarathustra, or the coming together of Jesus and the Buddha. It was all too much for me. Still, whenever the doctrine dealt with what I suspected or hoped or knew of the self, or of sleep, or of death, it always rang true. 

Moreover, there were the dead to think of. Unless I had utterly lost interest in them, unless I were satisfied to feel only a secular melancholy about my mother and my father or Demmie Vonghel or Von Humboldt Fleisher, I was obliged to investigate, to satisfy myself that death was final, that the dead were dead. Either I conceded the finality of death and refused to have any further intimations, condemned my childish sentimentality and hankering, or I conducted a full and proper investigation. Because I simply didn’t see how I could refuse to investigate. Yes, I could force myself to think of it all as the irretrievable loss of shipmates to the devouring Cyclops. I could think of the human scene as a battlefield. The fallen are put into holes in the ground or burned to ash. After this, you are not supposed to inquire after the man who gave you life, the woman who bore you, after a Demmie whom you had last seen getting into a plane at Idlewild with her big blond legs and her make-up and her earrings, or after the brilliant golden master of conversation Von Humboldt Fleisher, whom you had last beheld eating a pretzel in the West Forties. You could simply assume that they had been forever wiped out, as you too would one day be. So if the daily papers told of murders committed in the streets before crowds of neutral witnesses, there was nothing illogical about such neutrality. On the metaphysical assumptions about death everyone in the world had apparently reached, everyone would be snatched, ravished by death, throttled, smothered. This terror and this murdering were the most natural things in the world. And these Same conclusions were incorporated into the life of society and present in all its institutions, in politics, education, banking, justice. Convinced of this, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t go to Dr. Scheldt to talk about Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones and Dominions and Exousiai and Archai and Angels and Spirits, 

I said to Dr. Scheldt at our last meeting, “Sir, I have studied the pamphlet called The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History, and it contains a fascinating passage about sleep. It seems to say that mankind doesn’t know how to sleep any more. That something should be happening during sleep that simply isn’t happening and that this is why we wake up feeling so stale and unrested, sterile, bitter, and all the rest of it. So let me see if I’ve got it right. The physical body sleeps, and the etheric body sleeps, but the soul goes off.” 

“Yes,” said Professor Scheldt. ““The soul, when you sleep, enters the supersensible world, or at least one of its regions. To simplify, it enters its own element.” 

“T’d like to think that.” 

“Why shouldn’t you?” 

“Well, I will, just to see if I understand it. In the supersensible world the soul meets the invisible forces which were known by initiates in the ancient world in their Mysteries. Not all the beings of the hierarchy are accessible to the living, only some of them, but these are indispensable. Now, as we sleep, the pamphlet says, the words that we have spoken all day long are vibrating and echoing about us.” 

“Not literally, the words,” Dr. Scheldt corrected. 

“No, but the feeling-tones, the joy or pain, the purpose of the words. Through the vibrations and echoes of what we have thought and felt and said we commune as we sleep with the beings of the hierarchy. But now, our daily monkeyshines are such, our preoccupations are so low, language has become so debased, the words so blunted and damaged, we've said such stupid and dull things, that the higher beings hear only babbling and grunting and TV commercials—the dog-food level of things. This says nothing to them. What pleasure can these higher beings take in this kind of materialism, devoid of higher thought or poetry? As a result, all that we can hear in sleep is matter creaking and hissing and washing, the rustling of plants, and the air conditioning. So we are incomprehensible to the higher beings. They can’t influence us and they themselves suffer a corresponding privation, Have I got it right?” “Yes, by and large.” 

&

“Good old Henry James, of whom Mrs. Henry Adams said that he chewed more than he bit off, tells us that the creative mind is better off with hints than with extensive knowledge. I have never suffered from a knowledge handicap. The donnée for this treatment comes from the gossip columns, which I have always read faithfully. Verbum saptentiae—I think that’s the dative. The original is apparently true.