Booklog - 2007

The Party knows that the conflict between true Christianity and the Revolution is fundamental. The Revolution aims at the highest goal the human species has ever set for itself on earth, the end of "man's exploitation of man." To do this, it must replace man's desire for profit with a feeling of collective responsibility as a motive for action. This is a distant and honorable goal. Probably it will not be reached quickly; and probably, too, for a long period it will be necessary to maintain a constant terror in order to instill that feeling of responsibility by force. But Christianity contains a dual set of values; it recognizes man to be a "child of God" and also a member of society. As a member of society, he must submit to the established order so long as that order does not hinder him in his prime task of saving his soul. Only by effacing this dualism, i.e. raising man as a purely social creature, can the Party release the forces of hatred in him that are necessary to the realization of the new world.

The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures. The erosion of religious beliefs is also taking place in Central and Eastern Europe. There, the core of the problem is to avoid galvanizing the forces of Christianity by some careless misstep. It would be an act of unforgivable carelessness, for example, to close the churches suddenly and prohibit all religious practice. Instead, one should try to split the Church in two. Part of the clergy must be compromised as reactionaries and "foreign agents"—a rather easy task, given the utterly conservative mentality of many priests. The other part must be bound to the state as closely as the Orthodox Church is in Russia, so that it becomes a tool of the government. A completely submissive Church—one that may on occasion collaborate with the security police—loses authority in the eyes of the pious. Such a Church can be preserved for decades, until the moment when it dies a natural death due to a lack of adherents.

I woke twice more before dawn, first to a cobalt sky and moonbeams lapping the bushes, heavy with moisture. In the moonlight the roots of the mapou where white, motionless, and seemingly cold. By the next time the stars had faded and light cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. A gray cloud crossed over its path, and when it was gone so was the planet. I stared and stared until I couldn't even see the sky. But it was hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn't have been. Astronomers know the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. And but a few hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilization navigated by it, following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered why.

Though we frequently speak of the potential of the brain, in practice our mental capacity seems to be limited. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for reasons that have always intrigued anthropologists different peoples develop it in different ways, and the distinctions, in effect, amount to unconscious cultural choices. There is a small isolated group of seminomadic Indians in the northwest Amazon whose technology is so rudimentary that until quite recently they used stone axes. Yes these same people possess a knowledge of the tropical forest that puts almost any biologist to shame. As children they learn to recognize such complex phenomena as floral pollination and fruit dispersal, to understand and accurately predict animal behavior, to anticipate the fruiting cycle of hundreds of forest trees. As adults their awareness is refined to an uncanny degree; at forty paces, for example, their hunters can smell animal urine and distinguish on the basis of scent alone which out of dozens of possible species left it. Such sensitivity is not an innate attribute of these people, any more than technological prowess is something inevitably and uniquely ours. Both are consequences of adaptive choices that resulted in the development of highly specialized but different mental skills, at the obvious expense of others. Within a culture, change also means choice. In our society, for example, we now think nothing about driving at high speeds down expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious sensory responses and decisions which, to say the least, would have intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity, we have forfeited other skills like the ability to see Venus, to smell animals, to hear the weather change.

Perhaps our biggest choice came four centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. This was not something our ancestors aimed for. It was a result of historical circumstances that produced a particular way of thinking that was not necessarily better than what had come before, only different. Every society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for unity; a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of course, science. What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of traditional and, as it often turns out, nonliterate cultures is the tendency of the latter to seek the shortest possible means to achieve total understanding of their world. The vodoun society, for example, spins a web of belief that is all-inclusive, that generates an illusion of total comprehension. No matter how an outsider might view it, for the individual member of that society the illusion holds, not because of coercive force, but simply because for him there is no other way. And what's more, the belief system works; it gives meaning to the universe.

Scientific thinking is quite the opposite. We explicitly deny such comprehensive visions, and instead deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding according to the rules of our logic. We set things apart from each other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms. For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coincidence, and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless but which conveniently leave the issue open. For the vodounist, each detail in that progression of events would have a total, immediate, and satisfactory explanation within the parameters of his belief system.

For us to doubt the conclusions of the vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one, their system works, at least for them. What's more, for most of us our basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is no more solid or objective than that of the vodounist who accepts the metaphysical theology of the houngan. Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition. Yet we scientists work under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow we shall be able to divide the universe into enough infinitesimally small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful conclusions about the totality. Perhaps most dangerously, we assume that in doing this, in making this kind of choice, we sacrifice nothing. But we do. I can no longer see Venus.

Here I am in the locker room with my friend David, who has been a Hollywood bachelor for two decades, who has gone out with so many models and actresses that he's good friends with the people who run the model agencies—here's David, suave man of the world, telling me that men are the romantics, and not women.

"No, no, no, David," I protested. "Women are romantic. Women want flowers and candy and all that stuff."

"No, they don't," David Said. "Women want the respect and admiration of a man, and they know flowers are a sign of respect from a man. But they don't care about the flowers; they don't moon and ooh and ahh and sigh, except for our benefit. They don't have any of those romantic feelings men think they do. Men have the romantic feelings. Women're much colder and more practical."

I disagreed.

"Okay," David said. "We're sitting in the locker room, right?"

"Right."

"Have you ever had a locker-room conversation about women—you know, the way women think we do, talking in explicit detail about what we did with our dates the night before?"

"No," I said. "I never have."

"Neither have I," David said. "But you've been accused of having such conversations by a woman?"

"Yes, sure." I couldn't count the number of times a woman had said she didn't want me talking to her about my male friends.

"You know why women think we have these explicit conversations? Because they do, that's why. Women talk about everything."

I knew this was true. I had long ago learned of the frankness of women among themselves, and of their tendency to assume that men were equally frank, when, as far as I could tell, men were actually quite discreet.

"You see," David said, "each sex assumes the opposite sex is just the way they are. So women think men are explicit, and men think women are romantic. Eventually that becomes a stereotype that nobody questions. But it's not accurate at all."

David insisted on his view: women were stronger, tougher, more pragmatic, more interested in money and security, more focused on the underlying realities of any situation. Men were weaker, more romantic, more interested in the symbols than the reality—in short, living out a fantasy.

"I'm telling you," David said.

"What about the idea of the nurturing female?" I said.

"Only for children," he said. "Not for men." He shook his head sadly. "Did you ever wish a woman would send you flowers?"

The question caught me off guard. A woman send me flowers?

"Sure. Send you flowers, a nice note, thanks for a lovely evening, he whole bit."

It seemed such a strange idea. But as I considered it, it seemed as if it would be terrific.

"I'm telling you," David said, "we're the romantics. Work it out."

To the stand-bys above, add this one: always to define whatever it is we perceive—to trace its outline—so we can see what it really is: its substance. Stripped bare. As a whole. Unmodified. And to call it by its name—the thing itself and its components, to which it will eventually return. Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as this capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us. To look at it in such a way that we understand what need it fulfills, and in what kind of world. And its value to that world as a whole and to man in particular—as a citizen of that higher city, of which all other cities are mere households.

What is it—this thing that now forces itself on my notice? What is is made up of? How long was it designed to last? And what qualities do I need to bring to bear on it—tranquility, courage, honesty, trustworthiness, straightforwardness, independence or what?

So in each case you need to say: "This is due to God." Or: "This is due to the interweavings and intertwinings of fate, to coincidence or chance." Or: "This is due to a human being. Someone of the same race, the same birth, the same society, but who doesn't know what nature requires of him. But I do. And so I'll treat them as the law that binds us—the law of nature—requires. With kindness and with justice.

And in inconsequential things? I'll do my best to treat them as they deserve."

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth and its movements? No, Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'—of importance only within four walls. A tame animal—in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.

The overtones are lost, and what is left are conversations which, in their poverty, cannot hide the lack of real contact. We glide past each other. But why? Why—?

We reach out towards the other. In vain—because we have never dared to give ourselves.

An upright carriage, a symptom of health, is something very different from the hard carapace inside which, in our vacillation, we seek shelter.

A modest wish: that our doings and dealings may be of a little more significance to life than a man's dinner-jacket is to his digestion. Yet not a little of what we describe as our achievement is, in fact, no more than a garment in which, on festive occasions, we seek to hide our nakedness.

You find it hard to forgive those who, early in life, have come to enjoy the advantages which go with maturity. Aside from any other consideration, why don't you put into the balance the long spring enjoyed by a youth who matured late.

Having breathed an atmosphere filled with the products of his own spiritual combustion, he remembers reading somewhere that, in the neighbourhood of a sulphur works, even a sparse vegetation can only survive if it is sheltered from the wind. —'When did this happen?', he asks himself—'and through how many generations will the effects still be traceable?'

At any rate, your contempt for your fellow human beings does not prevent you, with a well-guarded self-respect, from trying to win their respect.

Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines.

I liked the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downward. There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal level beneath which he could not fall. It was a satisfaction on which to rest. The force of things, years and an artificial dignity, denied it me more and more; but there endured the after-taste of liberty from one youthful submerged fortnight in Port Said, coaling steamers by day with other outcasts of three continents and curling up by night to sleep on the breakwater by De Lesseps, where the sea surged past.

True there lurked always that Will uneasily waiting to burst out. My brain was sudden and silent as a wild cat, my senses like mud clogging its feet, and my self (conscious always of itself and its shyness) telling the beast it was bad form to spring and vulgar to feed upon the kill. So meshed in nerves and hesitation, it could not be a thing to be afraid of; yet it was a real beast, and this book its mangy skin, dried, stuffed and set up squarely for men to stare at.

I quickly outgrew ideas. So I distrusted experts, who were often intelligences confined within high walls, knowing indeed every paving-stone of their prison courts: while I might know from what quarry the stones were hewn and what wages the mason earned. I gainsaid them out of carelessness, for I had found materials always apt to serve a purpose, and Will a sure guide to some one of the many roads leading from purpose to achievement. There was no flesh.

Many things I had picked up, dallied with, regarded, and laid down; for the conviction of doing was not in me. Fiction seemed more solid than activity. Self-seeking ambitions visited me, but not to stay, since my critical self would make me fastidiously reject their fruits. Always I grew to dominate those things into which I had drifted, but in none of them did I voluntarily engage. Indeed, I saw myself a danger to ordinary men, with such capacity yawing rudderless at their disposal.

I followed and did not institute; indeed, had no desire even to follow. It was only weakness which delayed me from mind-suicide, some slow task to choke at length this furnace in my brain. I had developed ideas of other men, and helped them, but had never created a thing of my own, since I could not approve creation. When other men created, I would serve and patch to make it as good as might be; for, if it were sinful to create, it must be sin and shame added to have created one-eyed or halt.

Always in working I had tried to serve, for the scrutiny of leading was too prominent. Subjection to order achieved economy of thought, the painful, and was a cold-storage for character and Will, leading painlessly to the oblivion of activity. It was a part of my failure never to have found a chief to use me. All of them, through incapacity or timidity or liking, allowed me too free a hand; as if they could not see that voluntary slavery was the deep pride of a morbid spirit, and vicarious pain its gladdest decoration. Instead of this, they gave me licence, which I abused in insipid indulgence. Every orchard fit to rob must have a guardian, dogs, a high wall, barbed wire. Out upon joyless impunity!

Instead of worrying about whether you're a tourist or a traveler, the secret to "seeing" your surroundings on the road is simply to keep things real.

On the surface, this seems like a simple enough proposition. "Wherever you go, there you are" says a silly adage—and simply being there shouldn't be a very tough task. The thing is, few of us ever "are" where we are: Instead of experiencing the reality of a moment or a day, our minds and souls are elsewhere—obsessing on the past or the future, fretting and fantasizing about other situation. At home, this is one way of dealing with day-to-day doldrums; on the road, it's a sure way to miss out on the very experiences that stand to teach you something.

This is why vagabonding is not to be confused with a mere vacation, where the only goal is to escape. With escape in mind, vacationers tend to approach their holiday with a grim resolve, determined to make their experience live up to their expectations; on the vagabonding road, you prepare for the long haul knowing that the predictable and the unpredictable, the pleasant and the unpleasant are not separate but part of the same ongoing reality. You can try to make vagabonding conform to your fantasies, of course, but this strategy has a way of making travel irrelevant. Indeed, vagabonding is—at its best—a rediscovery of reality itself.

Of all social, moral, and spiritual problems that of power is the most chronically urgent and the most difficult of solution. Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust. Growing with every successive satisfaction, the appetite for power can manifest itself indefinitely, without interruption by bodily fatigue or sickness. Moreover the nature of society is such that fatigue or sickness. Moreover, the nature of society is such that the higher a man climbs in the political, economic or religious hierarchy, the greater are his opportunities and resources for exercising power. But climbing the hierarchical ladder is ordinarily a slow process, and the ambitious rarely reach the top till they are well advanced in life. The older he grows, the more chances does the power lover have for indulging his besetting sin, the more continuously is he subjected to temptations and the more glamorous do those temptations become. In this respect his situation is profoundly different from that of the debauchee. The latter may never voluntarily leave his vices, but at least, as he advances in years, he finds his vices leaving him; the former neither leaves his vices nor is left by them. Instead of bringing to the power lover a merciful respite from his addictions, old age is apt to intensify them by making it easier for him to satisfy his cravings on a larger scale and in a more spectacular way. That is why, in Acton's words, "all great men are bad." Can we therefore be surprised if political action, undertaken, in all too many cases, not for the public good, but solely or at least primarily to gratify the power lusts of bad men, should prove so often either self-stultifying or downright disastrous?

"L'état c'est moi," says the tyrant; and this is true, of course, not only of the autocrat at the apex of the pyramid, but of all the members of the ruling minority through whom he governs and who are, in fact, the real rulers of the nation. Moreover, so long as the policy which gratifies the power lusts of the ruling class is successful, and so long as the prize of success is not too high, even the masses of the ruled will feel that the state is themselves—a avast and splendid projection of the individual's intrinsically insignificant ego. The little man can satisfy his lust for power vicariously through the activities of the imperialist state, just as the big man does; the difference between them is one of degree, not of kind.

No infallible method for controlling the political manifestations of the lust for power has ever been devised. Since power is of its very essence indefinitely expansive, it cannot be checked except by colliding with another power. Hence, any society that values liberty, in the sense of government by law rather than by class interest or personal decree, must see to it that the power of its rulers is divided.

I had asked Silvana to send students in Grades 4 or 5, but the girl who sat down at my table looked older. When I asked what she had learned about fractions at school, she said, "Nothing." I said she wold find them very easy, but first I needed to know if there were any times tables she had trouble remembering. She looked at me with a blank expression. She had no idea what multiplication meant. Even the concept of counting by a number other than one was foreign to her: she was not able to count by twos. Silvana had assumed, when I asked for children who were struggling in math, that I'd wanted students in remedial classes. Lisa was in Grade 6, but knew less mathematics than a typical child in Grade 1. She was terrified by my questions and kept saying, when I mentioned the simplest concepts, "I don't understand." She also had trouble reading and told me she had never read a chapter book in her life.

I had promised a lesson in fractions, and as I had no idea what else to do, I began counting slowly on my fingers by twos, asking Lisa if she could do the same. I wasn't certain she would ever understand the concept of fractions but wanted at least to see if she could carry out basic operations, changing the denominators of simple fractions by multiplying on her fingers. Lisa made several attempts to count to 10 by twos but couldn't remember the correct sequence of numbers. As she was clearly growing more nervous with each failure, I told her she was brilliant, even though she could only repeat the sequence up to six. The encouragement helped her focus, and by the end of the lesson she had made more progress than I expected. The next day, her mother told me Lisa had a nightmare that she wouldn't be allowed to return to tutorials. I was the first teacher who had ever told her she was smart.

Lisa has been in JUMP for three years now. I find it hard to believe that she ever had trouble mastering simple mathematics. Her rate of learning seems to double by the week: lately she has even started teaching herself new material from a textbook when I'm not available to answer her questions. Lisa recently moved from a remedial class (where she was still being taught the most basic math) into a regular Grade 9 academic class. Several weeks ago I also found out that she'd enrolled, of her own volition, in Grade 10 math for the next semester. Soon Lisa will be a year ahead of her grade level.

Eat fewer calories.

I can best explain what happens when artists drink deep of the Pierian spring by describing a kind of Arts and Crafts exhibition which I happened to see, a summer or two since, in Munich. It was a huge affair. Furniture, jewellery, ceramics, textiles—every kind of applied art was copiously represented. And al the exhibits were German. All German—and yet these pots and pans, these chairs and tables, these weavings, paintings, carvings, forgings spoke a hundred languages besides the native Teuton. Aryan, Mongolian, Semitic, Bantu, Polynesian, Maya—the stocks and stones of Munich were fluent in all the tongues. Here, for example, stood a Mexican pot, decorated with Moorish arabesques; here a statuette that was sixth-century Greek, subtly mingled with Benin. Here was a Black Forest peasant's table standing on Egyptian legs; here a crucifix that might have been carved by a T'ang artist who happened to have spent a year in Italy as the pupil of Bernini. Goat, woman, lion, and gryphon—here were chimaeras and empusas at every turn. And none of them (that was the real horror, for success justifies everything) none of them were good.

Germany, it is true, is the country where the dangers of too much learning have made themselves most apparent. It is the country that has drunk the most deeply of the Pierian spring. For the last fifty years German publishers have brought out six illustrated monographs to every one produced in France, and a dozen at least to every one that we have published in England. With untiring industry and an enthusiasm which nothing—not the War, not even the Peace—has been able to damp, the Germans have photographed the artistic remains of every people that has ever flourished on the face of the earth. And they have published these photographs, with learned prefaces, in little books, which they sold, once upon a time, for a mark apiece, and which even now do not cost more than, shall we say, fifteen or twenty thousand millions. The Germans know more about the artistic styles of the past than any other people in the world—and their own art, to-day, is about as hopelessly dreary as any national art could well be. Its badness is, in mathematical terms, a function of its learnedness.

What has happened in Germany has happened, though to a slightly less marked degree, in every country of the world. We all know too much, and our knowledge prevents us—unless we happen to be artists of exceptional independence and talent—from doing good work.

The greatest single impression which Greece made upon me is that it is a man-sized world. Now it is true that France also conveys this impression, and yet there is a difference, a difference which is profound. Greece is the home of the gods; they may have died but their presence still makes itself felt. The gods were of human proportion: they were created out of the human spirit. In France, as elsewhere in the Western world, this link between the human and the divine is broken. The scepticism and paralysis produced by this schism in the very nature of man provides the clue to the inevitable destruction of our present civilization. If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. Much has been said about a new order of life destined to arise on this American continent. It should be borne in mind, however, that not even a beginning has been visioned for at least a thousand years to come. The present way of life, which is America's, is doomed as surely as is that of Europe. No nation on earth can possibly give birth to a new order of life until a world view is established. We have learned through bitter mistakes that all the peoples of the earth are vitally connected, but we have not made use of that knowledge in an intelligent way. We have seen two world wars and we shall undoubtedly see a third and a fourth, possibly more. There will be no hope of peace until the old order is shattered. The world must become small again as the old Greek world was—small enough to include everybody. Until the very last man is included there will be no real human society. My intelligence tells me that such a condition of life will be a long time in coming, but my intelligence also tells me that nothing short of that will ever satisfy man. Until he has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision. We say erroneously that the Greeks humanized the gods. It is just the contrary. The gods humanized the Greeks. There was a moment when it seemed as if the real significance of life had been grasped, a breathless moment when the destiny of the whole human race was in jeopardy. The moment was lost in the blaze of power which engulfed the intoxicated Greeks. They made mythology of a reality which was too great for their human comprehension. We forget, in our enchantment with the myth, that it is born of reality and is fundamentally no different from any other form of creation, except that it has to do with the very quick of life. We too are creating myths, though we are perhaps not aware of it. But in our myths there is no place for the gods. We are building an abstract, dehumanized world out of the ashes of an illusory materialism. We are proving to ourselves that the universe is empty, a task which is justified by our own empty logic. We are determined to conquer and conquer we shall, but the conquest is death.

When urban property is gathered into too few hands and when the division between owners and suers becomes therefore too great, a sort of vengeance is exacted upon urban property: people litter their streets and destroy their dwellings. When rural property is gathered into too few hands, even when, as in farming, the owners may still be the users, there is an inevitable shift of emphasis from maintenance to production, and the land deteriorates. People displaced from farming have been replaced by machines, chemicals, and other technological "labor-savers" that, of themselves, contribute to production, but do not, of themselves, contribute to maintenance, and often, of themselves, contribute to the degradation both of the land and of human care for it. Thus, our extremely serious problems of soil erosion and of pollution by agricultural chemicals are both attributable to the displacement of people from agriculture. The technologies of "agri-business" are enabling less than 3 percent of our people to keep the land in production (for the time being), but they do not and cannot enable them to take care of it.

Increasing the number of property owners is not in itself, of course, a guarantee of better use. People who do not know how to care for a property cannot care for it, no matter how willing they may be to do so. But good care is potential in the presence of people, no matter how ignorant; there is no hope of it at all in their absence. The question bearing ever more heavily upon us is how this potential for good care in people may be developed and put to use. The honest answer, at present, seems to be that we do not know how. Perhaps we will have to begin by answering the question negatively. For example, most people who move from place to place every few years will never learn to care well for any place, nor will most people who are long alienated from all responsibility for usable property. Such people, moreover, cannot be taught good care by books or classroom instruction, nor can it be forced upon them by law. A people as a whole can learn good care only by long experience of living and working, learning and remembering, in the same places generation after generation, experiencing and correcting the results of bad care, and enjoying the benefits of good care.

Returned it before I could copy out a quote. Whoops.

We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outline of the foam raised by an oar in the Río Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising.

These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: "I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world." And again: "My dreams are like you people's waking hours." And again, toward dawn: "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge—all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. I don't know how many stars he could see in the sky.

Question: Are you happy when you get to "Philadelphia"?

Answer: I only know two chairs. No chair is unhappy: here it is happy, and that other chair is also happy. Man can always look for a better chair. When he begins looking for a better one, it always means that he is disillusioned, because if he is satisfied, he does not look for another one. Sometimes his chair is so bad that he cannot sit on it any longer and decided that as it is so bad where he is, he will look for something else.

Question: What happens after "Philadelphia"?

Answer: A very small thing. At present it is very bad for the carriage that there are only passengers, all giving orders as they please—no permanent master. After "Philadelphia" there is a master in charge, who thinks for all, arranges everything and sees that things are right. I am sure it is clear that it is better for all to have a master.

Question: You advised sincerity. I have discovered that I would rather be a happy fool than an unhappy philosopher.

Answer: You believe you are not satisfied with yourself. I push you. You are quite mechanical, you cannot do anything, you are hallucinated. When you look with one center you are entirely under hallucination; when with two you are half-free; but if you look with three centers you cannot be under hallucination at all. You must begin by collecting material. You can have no bread without baking; knowledge is water, body is flour, and emotion—suffering—is fire.

GRANT: [...] It's interesting to remember that both Pierre Trudeau and I contributed essays to the volume that was published at the time the NDP was founded. Mine was just on what is proper about equality in a society. But I swore to myself that I would never have anything more to do with the NDP when they agreed with the Liberals and voted Diefenbaker out of office, after he had done a fundamental thing. He had attempted in his wild and crazy and strange way to do something fundamental about Canadian independence over nuclear arms. So when the NDP voted with the Liberals against people like Howard Green, I never wanted to have any more to do with them. I recognized, and i think this is very true about French Canada, too, that North America is a society that is altogether going to be run at the local level by the bourgeois, and I found more nationalism in the bourgeois, in the nationalistic bourgeois, than I did in the NDP, who were so full of ideology. But politics are very tricky, aren't they? For example, I really admired Lévesque for putting up Monsieur Duplessis's statue. Politics are not quite as easy in the modern corporate, capitalist state as the NDP seems to think.

We need not linger over other differences with Marx. Schumpeter may not have an exact measure of his opponent, but it is clear that he has outlined a formidable intellect, who must be met and bested on his own ground. And that is precisely what he sets out to do. For we turn the page after the chapter on Marx the Teacher to read: "Can capitalism survive?" Now the answer comes with a double shock: "No. I do not think it can."

But if capitalism is doomed, it cannot be for the reasons Marx sets forth. And so we embark on a tour de force description of what Schumpeter calls "plausible capitalism." What is plausible capitalism? It is much like a carefully reasoned scenario of the very prospect that Keynes has already laid before us, a scenario of the possibilities for a century of growth. Here is Schumpeter at his absolute best. The fears of the stagnationists as to vanishing investment opportunities are set aside with an airy wave: the conquest of the air, he said, will be as great as that of India. The worries of other economists about the sclerosis of spreading monopolization are similarly sent flying with a description of capitalist innovation as a "perennial gale of a creative destruction" in which the agents for innovatory change are the "monopolies" themselves. The stage is thus set for what appears to be a direct refutation of Marx. Plausible capitalism is a reasoned model of an economic system that is caught up in a process of continuous self-renewing growth.

But now comes the Schumpeterian contradiction: capitalism may be an economic success, but it is not a sociological success. This is because, as we have already seen, the economic base of capitalism creates its ideological superstructure—rational rather than romantic, critical rather than heroic, designed for men in lounge suits, not armor. In the end it is this capitalist frame of mind, this capitalist mentality, that brings down the system:

"Capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values."

There are five faults or problems which prevent us from gaining a calmly abiding mind. These are counteracted by eight antidotes. Having created conducive conditions for the cultivation of a calmly abiding mind, you may be reluctant to begin the practive. This is the first fault and the effect of laziness, the ultimate antidote to which is complete mental and physical pliancy. But pliancy cannot be achieved without enthusiastic perseverance. Enthusiasm won't arise unless there is an aspiration to develop a calmly abiding mind, yet this will only be present if you fully appreciate the benefits a calmly abiding mind will bring. The main advantage is that is forms the basis for developing special insight into the nature of reality through which the root of our suffering can be cut. Of course, such a benefit is only meaningful to those intent on ridding themselves of suffering!

Calm abiding enables you to direct your mind where you wish and to maintain your attention on a particular focal object for as long as you desire. Such intense attention brings impressive results. Two sticks rubbed together make fire, but only when they are rubbed together continuously in the same place. Even if you are unable to develop such a high degree of mental control, greater mental stability would significantly enhance your well-being and happiness.

[...] Many different disturbing emotions affect us, but identifying and countering your predominant disturbing emotion is important, otherwise it will repeatedly interfere with your practice. You can tell if you have had much familiarity with a disturbing emotion in the past and not regarded it as a fault if a slight stimulus triggers intense emotion that lasts for a long time. When moderate stimulus is needed and the emotion does not last long, you can infer that you did not habitually experience this emotion, but neither did you regard it as faulty. If the emotion arises weakly in the presence of a strong stimulus and is short-lived, you can conclude that you had very little familiarity with it in past lives and considered it detrimental.

Booklog - 2006

We had even discovered that Abraham Lincoln, as a trial lawyer in Illinois, reputedly used a tactic not so different from ours. Francis Wellman, in his classic treatise on The Art of Cross-Examination, gives the following "instructive example of cross-examination": A man named Grayson was charged with murder, and his mother engaged young Abraham Lincoln to defend him. Lincoln asked an alleged eyewitness how he had observed the crime. "By moonlight," he answered. Lincoln then removed an almanac from his pocket and read that there was no moon on the night in question. Believing himself trapped by the almanac, the witness broke down and confessed to being the killer. Wellman then recounts the rumor "frequently stated by members on the Illinois circuit to this day ... that Lincoln played a trick ... by substituting an old calendar for the one of the year of the murder."

Despite their perennial complaining, the banks have done very well indeed. In 1999, Canada's chartered banks racked up their sixth straight year of record profits, $9.1 billion for the year. The following year, profits totalled $10.1 billion and in 2001, despite huge losses on their foreign loans and investments, the profits for the big six banks totalled $10.13 billion.

In 1999, the same banks closed over 300 branches and cut 7,000 jobs in Canada.

In his February 2000 budget, Paul Martin reduced bank taxes by over $500 million. (The previous year, over 3.4 million poor Canadians were forced to pay total income taxes of over $1.5 billion).

As their profits surged, ever anxious for more of the same, the banks quickly expanded outside of Canada. Probably more than any other industry, they campaigned for the FTA and NAFTA to ensure reduced barriers to their growing investments in the U.S. and Mexico.

By the end of the third quarter of 2001, Canadian banks had loans to non-residents outside of Canada amounting to $183.3 billion. Bear in mind, this represents only their loans outside Canada. As indicated earlier, we have no idea how much they have lent to foreign corporations inside Canada, but without question it amounts to many, many tens of billions of dollars. Most of these loans have been for the takeover of Canadian businesses.

Compared to the $183.3 billion in loans outside of Canada to non-residents, total bank business loans in Canada amounted to only $127 billion. Isn't that just great!

So we know that, for example, the Bank of Montreal helped out with the $3.7 billion Union Pacific Resources (of Fort Worth, Texas) takeover of Calgary-based Norcen Energy Resources. And a thousand other takeovers are financed by Canadian banks without us ever hearing about it.

It was mid-June. I got up from a nap and thought, "I need some cigarettes." My mind went dead then. I couldn't recall or retrieve that one simple thought.

My brain hit blank walls. I couldn't say the thought or visualize it or come up with words to express it. I spent something like an hour trying to form that one simple thought.

I couldn't say my own name. I couldn't think my own name. I couldn't form that one simple thought or any thoughts. My mind was dead. My brain circuits had disconnected. I was brain-dead insane.

I screamed. I put my hands over my ears, shut my eyes and screamed myself hoarse. I kept fighting for that one simple thought.

Lloyd ran up to the landing. I recognized him. I couldn't come up with his name or my name or that simple thought from an hour ago.

Lloyd carried me downstairs and called an ambulance. Paramedics arrived and strapped me to a gurney.

They drove me to the County Hospital and left me in a crowded hallway. I started hearing voices. Nurses walked by and yelled at me telepathically. I coughed and bucked against my restraints. Somebody stuck a needle in my arm—

The storm which swept me into a hospital in December began as a cloud no bigger than a wine goblet the previous June. And the cloud—the manifest crisis—involved alcohol, a substance I had been abusing for forty years. Like a great many American writers, whose sometimes lethal addiction to alcohol has become so legendary as to provide in itself a stream of studies and books, I used alcohol as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria, and to the enhancement of the imagination. There is no need to either rue or apologize for my use of this soothing, often sublime agent, which had contributed greatly to my writing; although I never set down a line while under its influence, I did use it—often in conjunction with music—as a means to let my mind conceive visions that the unaltered, sober brain has no access to. Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of my intellect, besides being a friend whose ministrations I sought daily—sought also, I now see, as a means to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeons of my spirit.

"Genuine communion," said Demian, "is a beautiful thing. But what we see flourishing everywhere is nothing of the kind. The real spirit will come from the knowledge that separate individuals have of one another and for a time it will transform the world. The community spirit at present is only a manifestation of the herd instinct. Men fly into each other's arms because they are afraid of each other—the owners are for themselves! And why are they afraid? You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them! They all sense that the rules they live by are no longer valid, that they live according to archaic laws—neither their religion nor their morality is in any way suited to the needs of the present? For a hundred years or more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill a man but they don't know how to pray to God, they don't even know how to be happy for a single contented hour. Just take a look at a student dive! Or a resort where the rich congregate. It's hopeless. Dear Sinclair, nothing good can come of all this. These people who huddle together in fear are filled with dread and malice, no one trusts the other. They hanker after ideals that are ideals no longer but they will hound the man to death who sets up a new one. I can feel the approaching conflict. It's coming, believe me, and soon. Of course it will not 'improve' the world. Whether the workers kill the manufacturers or whether Germany makes war on Russia will merely mean a change of ownership. But it won't have been entirely in vain. It will reveal the bankruptcy of present-day ideals, there will be a sweeping away of Stone Age gods. The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish—and it will."

"And what will happen to us during this conflict?"

"To us? Oh, perhaps we'll perish in it. Our kind can be shot, too. Only we aren't done away with as easily as all that. Around what remains of us, around those of us who survive, the will of the future will still gather. The will of humanity, which our Europe has shouted down for a time with its frenzy of technology, will come to the fore again. And then it will become clear that the will of humanity is nowhere—and never was—identical with the will of present-day societies, states and peoples, clubs and churches. No, what Nature wants of man stands indelibly written in the individual, in you, in me. It stood written in Jesus, it stood written in Nietzsche. These tendencies—which are the only important ones and which, of course, can assume different forms every day—will have room to breathe once the present societies have collapsed."

[...] while language may not divide us, others—the public, the press—whose experience is different, who themselves are divided by language and who find tension and rivalry by language in their workplace, understand us and explain in their way, and in doing so, sometimes cause division. That will not change. For if the team is no longer truly of the society of which it is part, it remains its most visible symbol. It has been, and continue to be, used by both sides as they play out their tensions.

My wife and I have lived in Montreal since our marriage. We bought our first house here, our two children were born here. It has been a time of extraordinary excitement and change, for the city, for the province, for us. When we first came to Montreal, we left in the summers and travelled, just as we would have done if we had lived somewhere else. Now, with children, except for the trips to visit family we cannot visit the rest of the year, we stay here in summer, as we would if we lived somewhere else. I grew up in Toronto, but it has been many years since Toronto has been home. At time, Montreal has felt like home, but it has never really been home. For beyond the team, beyond the celebrity culture we inhabit, we have few roots here. With a house, with a family and friends, roots can develop, but in Montreal, real roots come only with language. There is no more interesting place to be than Montreal only if you can be a part of what makes Montreal interesting and special, only if you can live in one culture and partake fully of the other. If you cannot—and now even language is irrelevant if the issue is cultural separation—then Montreal is a relatively small English city, spectator to a much larger and more exciting one. Montreal/Montréal, where the Canadian dream of French and English living and working side by side has had its best chance; Montreal, a city just close enough to be a frustrating reminder of what I am not.

Living in Montreal now, I feel like I do when I lose my glasses. I know that there is much going on around me, but I can't see what it is. And when I can't see something, I get afraid of what I can't see, so I go off by myself until I can. But then, feeling more and more isolated, I begin to feel different; and the more different I feel, the more I begin to feel that it is they who are different. And I don't like that feeling.

"It was very easy to catch me for I was brought up in the conditions in which amorous young people are forced like cucumbers in a hot-bed. You see our stimulating abundance of food, together with complete physical idleness, is nothing but a systematic excitement of desire. Whether this astonishes you or not, it is so. Why, till quite recently I did not see anything of this myself, but now I have seen it. That is why it torments me that nobody knows this, and people talk such nonsense as that lady did.

"Yes, last spring some peasants were working in our neighbourhood on a railway embankmen. The usual food of a young peasant is rye-breat, kvas, and onions; he keeps alive and is vigorous and healthy; his work is light agricultural work. When he goes to railway-work his rations are buckwheat porridge and a pound of meat a day. But he works off that pound of meat during his sixteen hours' work wheeling barrow-loads of half-a-ton weight, so it is just enough for him. But we who every day consume two pounds of meat, and game, and fish, and all sorts of heating foods and drinks—where does that go to? Into excesses of sensuality. And if it goes there and the safety valve is open, all is well; but try and close the safety-valve, as I closed it temporarily, and at once a stimulus arises which, passing through the prism of our artificial life, expresses itself in utter infatuation, sometimes even platonic. And I fell in love as the all do.

"Everything was there to hand: raptures, tenderness, and poetry. In reality that love of mine was the result, and on the other of the super-abundance of food consumed by me while living an idle life. If on the one hand there had been no boating, no dressmaker with her waists and so forth, and had my wife been sitting at home in a shapeless dressing-gown, and had I on the other hand been in circumstances normal to man—consuming just enough food to suffice for the work I did, and had the safety-valve been open—it happened to be closed at the time—I should not have fallen in love and nothing of all this would have happened."

One of the most intriguing aspects of both hysterical and psychosomatic disorders is that they tend to spread through the population in epidemic fashion, almost as if they were bacterial in nature, which they are not. Edward Shorter, a medical historian, concluded from his study of the medical literature that the incidence of a psychogenic disorder grows to epidemic proportions when the disorder is in vogue. Strange as it may seem, people with an unconscious psychological need for symptoms tend to develop a disorder that is well known, like back pain, hay fever or eczema. This is not a conscious decision.

A second cause of such epidemics often results when a psychosomatic disorder is misread by the medical profession and is attributed to a structural abnormality, such as a bone spur, herniated disc, etc.

A 1996 study in Norway suggests there is a third condition that fuels such eppidemics: the simple fact that medical treatment may be readily available. A paper published in the journal Lancet in 1996 described an epidemic in Norway of what is called "whiplash syndrome." People involved in rear-end collisions, though not seriously injured, were developing pain in the neck and shoulders following the incident. Norwegian doctors were puzzled by the epidemic and decided to investigate. They went to Lithuania, a country with no medical insurance, and on the basis of a controlled study determined that the whiplash syndrome simply did not exist in that country. It turned out that the prevalence of whiplash in Norway had less o do with the severity of rear-end collisions than with the fact that it was in vogue; doctors couldn't explain the epidemic and the ready availability of good medical insurance for treatment!

"Sex as it has been practiced and experienced until now, by half-human beasts, has been only a frantic Dionysian effort to break through the boundaries of skin by a violent merging of two separate bodies. It cannot work, of course: it is like beating two bricks together in an attempt to make them one brick—in the end they both crack and crumble. Therefore sex has always been the supremely frustrating experience for human beings, as witness the age-old saying, Post coitum trisrea. Of course man is always sad after coitus. For man is essentially an animal, and animals cannot merge with one another—they are forever trapped in their own tormented mounds of flesh."

"Freud put it much more simply and less ominously," Martine said. "He suggested that there is simply something in the nature of the sex drive itself which precludes full satisfaction."

"Quite so, but he could not say what that something is. We have isolated this mysterious X-quantify and thus solved the conundrum of the ages. It is the hunger of the animal for the oceanic."

"Other remarks of Freud suggest that this X-quantity may be something less spectacular. Ambivalence, to be specific. More than once he speculated that sex and aggression, the two original drives in the id, are closely linked, and that the one constantly glides over into the other. A provocative idea, that. As an existentialist writer pointed out long ago, the rhetoric of love is remarkably like the rhetoric of war, the lover has a soldier's ardor, he talks of his phallus as though it were a firearm, when he ejaculates he 'discharges,' he speaks of his erotic campaigns in terms of attack, assault, siege, capitulation, victory. What's more, the lobotomists, I'm told, have found that whenever they dig the aggression out of a human brain the eroticism goes too. Very well—then couldn't we say that, because there's an aggressive tinge to even the purest sex act, the guilt which results is the reason for the touch of melancholy at the end? And wouldn't this mixture of embracing and alienating motives be what you mean by the tension between Agape and Eros? But let's not argue about that, there's another point I want to make. You insist that all movement is war. O.K., but sex is the quintessence of movement. Ergo, on your own premises, sex is war."

"It is indeed—for animals, which are engines of war. But once the two partners genuinely become one, in the great oceanic melting of orgasm, how can it be war? It takes two to make war. The solution to the war problem is also the solution to the sex problem: to blend the oppositess and thus eliminate the spirital gaps across which hostilities are carried on."

"What!" Martine exclaimed. "You mean—according to your school of thought, we drop bombs on each other simply because we don't have real orgasms?"

"Is it such a suprising idea? If in your animal state you cannot conceive of the selfish and the outgoing strands of personality melting together and sex becoming the ultimate in human transcendence, I can only assure you that it happens. Under such circumstances, if a man were to drop bombs it could only be on himself."

Le soir, Marie est venue me chercher et m'a demandé si je voulais me marier avec elle. J'ai dit que cela m'était égal et que nous pourrions le faire si elle le voulait. Elle a voulu savoir alors si je l'aimais. J'ai répondu comme je l'avais déjà fait une fois, que cela ne signifiait rien mais que sans doute je ne l'aimais pas. « Pourquoi m'épouser alors? » a-t-elle dit. Je lui ai expliqué que cela n'avait aucune importance et que si elle le désirait, nous pouvions nous marier. D'ailleurs, c'était elle qui le demandait et moi je me contentais de dire oui. Elle a observé alors que le mariage était une chose grave. J'ai répondu: « Non. » Elle s'est tue un moment et elle m'a regardé en silence. Puis elle a parlé. Elle voulait simplement savoir si j'aurais accepté la même proposition venant d'une autre femme, à qui je serais attaché de la mê façon. J'ai dit: « Naturellement. » Elle s'est demandé alors si elle m'aimait et moi je ne pouvais rien savoir sur ce point. Après un autre moment de silence, elle a murmuré que j'étais bizarre, qu'elle m'aimait sans doute à cause de cela mais que peut-être un jour je la dégoûterais pour les mêmes raisons. Comme je me taisais, n'ayant rien à ajouter, elle m'a pris le bras en souriant et elle a déclaré qu'elle voulait se marier avec moi. J'ai répondu que nous le ferions dès qu'elle le voudrait. Je lui ai parlé alors de la alors de la proposition du patron et Marie m'a dit qu'elle aimerait connaître Paris. Je lui ai appris que j'y avais vécu dans un temps et elle m'a demandé comment c'était. Je lui ai dit: « C'est sale. Il y a des pigeons et des cours noirs. Le gens ont la peau blanche. »

They were a strange lot, these moneyed, influential friends of Boy's, but they were obviously interesting to each other. They talked a lot of what they called "politics," though there was not much plan or policy in it, and they were worried about the average man, or as they called him "the ordinary fellow." This ordinary fellow had two great faults: he could not think straight and he wanted to reap where he had not sown. I never saw much evidence of straight thinking amongst these ca-pittle-ists, but I came to the conclusion that they were reaping where they had not sown, and that what they had sown was not, as they believed, hard work and a great personal sacrifice but talent—a rather rare talent, a talent that nobody, even its possessors, likes to recognize as a talent and therefore not available to everybody who cares to sweat for it—the talent for manipulating money.

How happy they might have been if they had recognized and gloried in their talent, confronting the world as gifted egotists, comparable to painters, musicians, or sculptors! But that was not their style. They insisted on degrading their talent to the level of mere acquired knowledge and industry. They wanted to be thought of as wise in the ways of the world and astute in politics; they wanted to demonstrate in themselves what the ordinary fellow might be if he would learn to think straight and be content to reap only where he had sown. They and their wives (women who looked like parrots or bulldogs, most of them) were so humourless and, except when they were drunk, so cross that I thought the ordinary fellow was lucky not to be like them.

It seemed to me they knew less about the ordinary fellow than I did, for I had fought in the war as an ordinary fellow myself, and most of these men had been officers. I had seen the ordinary fellow's heroism and also his villainy, his tenderness and also his unthinking cruelty, but I had never seen in him much capacity to devise or carry out a coherent, thoughtful, long-range plan; he was just as much the victim of his emotions as were these rich wiseacres. Where shall wisdom be found, and what is the place of understanding? Not among Boy Staunton's ca-pittle-ists, nor among the penniless scheme-spinners in the school Common Room, nor yet at the Socialist-Communist meetings in the city, which were sometimes broken up by the police. I seemed to be the only person I knew without a plan that would put the world on its feet and wipe the tear from every eye. No wonder I felt like a stranger in my own land.

There is a strange duality about the meaning of a piece of music: on the one hand, it seems to be spread around, by virtue of its relation to many other things in the world—and yet, on the other hand, the meaning of a piece of music is obviously derived from the music itself, so it must be localized somewhere inside the music.

The resolution of this dilemma comes from thinking about the interpreter—the mechanism which does the pulling-out of meaning. (By "interpreter" in this context I mean not the performer of the piece, but the mental mechanism in the listener which derives meaning when the piece is played.) The interpreter may discover many important aspects of a piece's meaning while hearing it for the first time; this seems to confirm the notion that the meaning is housed in the piece itself, and is simply being read off. But that is only part of the story. The music interpreter works by setting up a multidimensional cognitive structure—a mental representation of the piece—which it tries to integrate with pre-existent information by finding links to other multidimensional mental structures which encode previous experiences. As this process takes place, the full meaning gradually unfolds. In fact, years may pass before someone comes to feel that he has penetrated to the core meaning of a piece. This seems to support the opposite view: that musical meaning is spread around, the interpreter's role being to assemble it gradually.

The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in between: meanings—both musical and linguistic—are to some extent localizable, to some extent spread around. In the terminology of Chapter VI, we can say that musical pieces and pieces of text are partly triggers, and partly carriers of explicit meaning. A vivid illustration of this dualism of meaning is provided by the example of a tablet with an ancient inscription: the meaning is partially stored in the libraries and the brains of scholars around the world, and yet it is obviously implicit in the tablet itself.

Thus, another way of characterizing the difference between "syntactic" and "semantic" properties (in the just-proposed sense) is that the syntactic ones reside unambiguously inside the object under consideration, whereas semantic properties depend on its relations with a potentially infinite class of other objects, and therefore are not completely localizable. There is nothing cryptic or hidden, in principle, in syntactic properties, whereas hiddenness is of the essence in semantic properties.

"Have you any money?"

"Yes."

"Loan me fifty lire."

I dried my hands and took out my pocket-book from the inside of my tunic hanging on the wall. Rinaldi took the note, folded it without rising from the bed and slid it in his breeches pocket. He smiled, "I must make on Miss Barkley the impression of a man of sufficient wealth. You are my great and good friend and financial protector."

"Go to hell," I said.

That night at the mess I sat next to the priest and he was disappointed and suddenly hurt that I had not gone to the Abruzzi. He had written to his father that I was coming and they had made preparations. I myself felt as badly as he did and could not understand why I had not gone. It was what I had wanted to do and I tried to explain how one thing had led to another and finally he saw it and understood that I had really wanted to go and it was almost all right. I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

We two were talking while the others argued. I had wanted to go to Abruzzi. I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

Research has established that, left to our natural inclinations, we believe we are good at what we care about and that we control our destinies. We will discount information to the contrary until we find ourselves failing in ways that we can no longer ignore. This is why our self-images tend to be overly positive.

Most of us do not suffer a lack of confidence; we suffer from unstable, ill-founded confidence. The tenativeness, fear, and frustration that most advisers claim confidence should conquer are, in fact, most often the result of unstable confidence. These feelings arise from situations in which we have reason to believe we cannot perform as we imagine we ought. As we anticipate a discrepancy between our positive images of our ability and what we really have reason to think we may do, we recognize the high probability of embarrassment, of being forced to accept painful truths that falsify our good feelings about our abilities. When we go ahead and "confidently" undertake something beyond our ability, we fail, and our confidence plummets. We try to save our good feelings by making excuses, but nonetheless find that our beliefs about our abilities don't correctly predict our performance. This does not promote further confidence.

The only aspect of self-image that seems to have much effect on performance is our concept of how we will be perceived by others—not how we think of ourselves, but how we think others will see us. This issue is dependent on the specific conditions under which we find ourselves undergoing scrutiny—who is evaluating us and why.

Of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice, and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer to the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about him. It was remarked however, that some of those who had been most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him. Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered the room.

Yet these whispered scandals only increased, in the eyes of many, his strange and dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certain element of security. Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of higher importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrées, as Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject; and there is possibly a good deal to be said for this view. For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

Forthcoming.

Lying darkly in his crib, washed, powdered, and fed, he thought quietly of many things before he dropped off to sleep—the interminable sleep that obliterated time for him, and that gave him a sense of having missed forever a day of sparkling life. At these moments, he was heartsick with weary horror as he thought of the discomfort, weakness, dumbness, the infinite misunderstanding he would have to endure before he gained even physical freedom. He grew sick as he thought of the weary distance before him, the lack of co-ordination of the centres of control, the undisciplined and rowdy bladder, the helpless exhibition he was forced to give in the company of his sniggering, pawing brothers and sisters, dried, cleaned, revolved before them.

He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in symbols: his mind was caught in a net because he had no words to work with. He had not even names for the objects around him: he probably defined them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some mangling of the speech that roared about him, to which he listened intently day after day, realizing that his first escape must come through language. He indicated as quickly as he could his ravenous hunger for pictures and print: sometimes they brought him great books profusely illustrated, and he bribed them desperately by cooing, shrieking with delight, making extravagant faces, and doing all the other things they understood in him. He wondered savagely how they would feel if they knew what he really thought: at other times he had to laugh at them and at their whole preposterous comedy of errors as they pranced around for his amusement, waggled their heads at him, tickled him roughly, making him squeal violently against his will. The situation was at once profoundly annoying and comic: as he sat in the middle of the floor and watched them enter, seeing the face of each transformed by a foolish leer, and hearing their voices become absurd and sentimental whenever they addressed him, speaking to him words which he did not yet understand, but which he saw they were mangling in the preposterous hope of rendering intelligible that which has been previously mutilated, he had to laugh at the fools, in spite of his vexation.

And left alne to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes to really know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in the insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.

He saw the great figures that came and went about him, the huge leering heads that bent hideously into his crib, the great voices that rolled incoherently above him, had for one another not much greater understanding than they had for him: that even their speech, their entire fluidity and ease of movement were but meagre communicants of their thought or feeling, and served often not to promote understanding but to deepen and widen strife, bitterness, and prejudice.

Do not require too much of the universe; there are other demands made upon it which may conflict with yours. You are a part of a whole, and every other part will expect you to remember it. Ask too much and it shall not be given you; knock too loudly and it shall not be opened unto you; seek impatiently and you shall not find. Do not call the world names because it has other designs than yours; perhaps if you could see the entirety you would perceive, like Job, that the order of the planets is more important than your sores. Say to yourself what the old Aztec priests said to every infant at its birth: "You are born into a world of suffering; suffer, then, and hold your peace." If we do not make our own woe very audible, after a while we shall not hear it ourselves.

Cultivate your garden. Do not place your happiness in distant lands or in grandly-imagined tasks; do well what you can do, until you can do greater things as well. Happiness is not geographical; if you are unhappy do not think that you will find happiness in travel, unless you can leave yourself at home. The modern soul seems never happy where it is, nor in what it is doing; unknown places always seem lovelier, and unknown tasks must surely be easier! It is a romantic dream, from whose waking we shall pass into unreasoning bitterness. For pessimism is only the obverse of romanticism, the morning after imagination.

In older language, there are gross appetites and interests. People can resist them, fail to do so or wilfully indulge them. Which they do is relevant to moral character, just as whether people's thoughts about others are charitable or uncharitable, contemptuous or sympathetic, are morally relevant facts even if their outward treatment does not specifically reflect these attitudes. Indeed, it can be the case that someone disguises their contempt or loathing for the sake of personal advantage, in which case their moral fault is compounded by deception. Those who deny these claims about moral relevance and focus exclusively on causing harm (or doing good) to others as the sole criterion of moral rectitude seem to me to fly in the face of obvious fact. They are also committed to discounting entirely as moral the themes which countless poets, playwrights and novelists have explored with great subtlety and imagination.

There is a case for saying, then, that pornography matters morally whether or not it leads to the social harms that many allege. People resist this conclusion sometimes because they fear that it implies intrusion into the private lives of others. If people want to engage in orgiastic fantasies of a perverted kind in the privacy of their own minds, what is that to me and who am I to interfere?

Such a response, as it seems to me, indicates another important presupposition of contemporary thinking—that the moral is relevant only in so far as it implies some course of conduct. But why should this be so? There are many vices—hypocrisy, meanness, narrow-mindedness—which we may all see too clearly in others and about which there is nothing to be done. That there is nothing to be done about them, however, does not mean that they do not exist or are of no moral significance. To suppose that it does, is to assume an action-directed conception of morality which, if common in the contemporary discussion of these issues, is both a distortion and an aberration peculiar to the modern period. Conversely, there are virtues which we see in others—generosity, tolerance, the ability to forgive— about which there is nothing to do, except admire and hope to find them reflected in ourselves.

What is true is that these virtues and vices do not spring up out of the blue any more than other meritorious attributes do. For example, the ability to write English with both lucidity and style is a gift which many, however hard they try, will never emulate and can only admire. But it is not purely innate: it is made possible only within the context of a long tradition of language and literature. Good writing promotes good writing—not invariably and inevitably it is true, but the connection is nonetheless clear for all that. So too with moral virtues. These are not 'in-born' in the way that blue eyes or brown hair are. The arise within a social and historical context, and their possibility is handed on by means of moral traditions. Such traditions can undergo corruption and collapse, and it is the possibility of corruption and the fear of collapse that sustain the view elaborated in the last chapter that there is some reason to regard the Internet as an instrument of moral anarchy. If, as I have now been arguing, an important part of morality is concerned more with judgement than with action—what to think rather than what to do—this leaves us with a question about whether the moral anarchy of the Internet calls for any practical programme of action and, if so, what.

Nietzsche himself, we can say without unfairness, lacked the elements of a Superman; or at all events, let us say, he lacked the initial power of self-discipline to overcome these emotions aroused by human stupidity. So, of course, did Van Gogh and [T.E.] Lawrence and [Vaslav] Nijinsky, and the heroes of Sartre and Barbusse and Camus. Hemingway's heroes escaped the stupidity by going in for high excitement: big game hunting and bullfighting and war. That solved no problems. It all comes back (to borrow a phrase from Shaw) to the 'appetite for fruitful activity and a high quality of life'. It is the problem of our second chapter, the World Without Values. For the Outsider, the world into which he has been born is always a world without values. Copared to his own appetite for a purpose and a direction, the way most men live is not living at all; it is drifting. This is the Outsider's wretchedness, for all men have a herd instinct that leads them to believe that what the majority does must be right. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may well as well throw himself under a bus, for he will always be an outcast and a misfit.

But once this purpose is found, the difficulties are half over. Let the Outsider accept without further hesitation: I am different from other men because I have been destined for something greater; let him see himself in the role of predestined poet, predestined prophet or world-betterer, and a half of the Outsider's problems have been solved. What he is saying is, in effect, this: In most men, the instinct of brotherhood with other men is stronger—the herd instinct; in me, a sense of brotherhood with something other than man is strongest, and demands priority. When the Outsider comes to look at other men closely and sympathetically, the hard and fast distinctions break down; he cannot say: I am a poet and they are not, for he soon comes to recognize that no one is entirely a business-man, just as no poet is entirely a poet. He can only say: the sense of purpose that makes me a poet is stronger than theirs. His needle swings to magnetic pole without hesitation; theirs wavers around all the points of the compass and only points north when they come particularly close to the pole, when under the influence of drink or patriotism or sentimentality. I speak of these last three conditions without disparagement; all forms of stimulation of man's sense of purpose are equally valid and, if applied for long enough, would have the effect of making a man into an Outsider. 'If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,' Blake wrote.

The game will get heavy sometimes. You don't want to go around putting the squeeze on people unless you're absolutely clean. No skeletons in the closet: no secret vices... because if your vote is important and your price is high, the Fixer-Man will have checked you out by the time he offers to buy you a drink. If you bribed a traffic-court clerk two years ago to bury a drunk driving charge, the Fixer might suddenly confront you with a photostat of the citation you thought had been burned.

When that happens, you're fucked. Your price just went down to zero, and you are no longer an Uncommitted delegate.

There are several other versions of the Reverse-Squeeze: the fake hit-and-run; glassine bags found in your hotel room by a maid; grabbed off the street by phony cops for statutory rape of a teenage girl you never saw before...

Every once in a while you might hit on something with real style, like this one: On Monday afternoon, the first day of the convention, you—the ambitious young lawyer from St. Louis with no skeletons in the closet and no secret vices worth worrying about—are spending the afternoon by the pool at the Playboy Plaza, soaking up the sun and gin/tonics when you hear somebody calling your name. You look up and see a smiling, rotund chap about thirty-five years old coming at you, ready to shake hands.

"Hi there, Virgil," he says. "My name's J.D. Squane. I work for Senator Bilbo and we'd sure like to count on your vote. How about it?"

You smile, but say nothing—waiting for Squane to continue. He will want to know your price.

But Squane is staring out to sea, squinting at something on the horizon... then he suddenly turns back to you and starts talking very fast about how he always wanted to be a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, but politics got in the way.... "And now, goddammit, we must get these last few votes...."

You smile again, itching to get serious. But Squane suddenly yells at somebody across the pool, then turns back to you and says: "Jesus, Virgil, I'm really sorry about this, but I have to run. That guy over there is delivering my new Jensen Interceptor." He grins and extends his hand again. Then: "Say, maybe we can talk later on, eh? What room are you in?"

"1909."

He nods. "How about seven, for dinner? Are you free?"

"Sure."

"Wonderful," he replies. "We can take my new Jensen for a run up to Palm Beach... It's one of my favorite towns."

"Mine too," you say. "I've heard a lot about it."

He nods. "I spent some time there last February... but we had a bad act, dropped about twenty-five grand."

Jesus! Jensen Interceptor; twenty-five grand... Squane is definitely big time.

"See you at seven," he says, moving away.

The knock comes at 7:02—but instead of Squane it's a beautiful silver-haired young girl who says J.D. sent her to pick you up. "He's having a business dinner with the Senator and he'll join us later at the Crab house."

"Wonderful, wonderful—shall we have a drink?"

She nods. "Sure, but not here. We'll drive over to North Miami and pick up my girlfriend... but let's smoke this before we go."

"Jesus! That looks like a cigar!"

"It is!" she laughs. "And it'll make us both crazy."

[...] after 1940 it was not in the interests of the economically powerful to be nationalists. Most of them made more money by being the representatives of American capitalism and setting up the branch plants. No class in Canada more welcomed the American managers than the established wealthy of Montreal and Toronto, who had once seen themselves the pillars of Canada. Nor should this be surprising. Capitalism is, after all, a way of life based on the principle that the most important activity is profit-making. That activity led the wealthy in the direction of continentalism. They lost nothing essential to the principle of their lives in losing their country. It is this very fact that has made capitalism the great solvent of all tradition in the modern era. When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country. This is why liberalism is the perfect ideology for capitalism. It demolishes those taboos that restrain expansion. Even the finest talk about internationalism opens markets for the powerful.

If there had been an influential group that seriously desired the continuance of the country after 1940, it would have needed the animation of some political creed that differed from the capitalist liberalism of the United States. Only then could they have acted with sufficient decision to build an alternative nation on this continent. De Gaulle has been able to count on a deeply felt nationalism. This is based on a tradition that pre-dates the age of progress and yet is held by men who can handle the modern world. But no such tradition existed among any of the important decision-makers in Canada. The only Canadians who had a profoundly different tradition from capitalist liberalism were the French Canadians, and they were not generally taken into decision making unless they had foregone these traditions. Their very Catholicism did not lead the best of them to be interested in the managerial, financial, and technical skills of the age of progress.

The only possible basis for a Gaullist élite would have been the senior civil servants working closely with politicians who knew what they were doing. Such a union of civil servants and politicians could have used the power of Ottawa to control the representatives of continentalism in Toronto in Montreal. In fact, the Liberal politicians and their civil servants saw themselves in pleasant co-operation with the tycoons of the real capitals. I must repeat again Mackenzie King's great discovery: If his government was the friend of business, the Liberal party could stay in office almost indefinitely.

It seemed to me that there were two quite different meanings of failure. The mind knows when it is blocked and when it has found a solution. A child trying to solve a maze knows when he fails and when he succeeds; no adult need tell him. A child building a house of blocks knows when the collapse of the house means failure (he wanted to build it higher) and when it means success (he wanted it to fall). Success and failure mean simply the satisfaction and frustration of desire. It is real; it is important; the child doesn't have to be rewarded or punished by society in order to prefer success to failure.

The second meaning of failure is also simple: failure is failure to please an adult; success is pleasing an adult. Money, fame, winning a baseball game, looking pretty, having good clothes, car, house are all types of success which primarily revolve around pleasing the adult world. There is nothing intrinsic to the human soul in any of these fears of failure.

Becoming the dice man was difficult because it involved a continual risking of failure in the eyes of the adult world. As dice man I 'failed' (in the second sense) again and again. I was rejected by Lil, by the children, by my esteemed colleagues, by my patients, by strangers, by the image of society's values branded into me by thirty years of living. In the second sense of failure I was continually failing and suffering, but in the first sense I never failed. Every time I followed the dictates of the die I was successfully building a house or purposely knocking one down. My mazes were always being solved. I was continually opening myself to new problems and enjoying solving them.

At the end of the office, one of the monks came solemnly out and extinguished the sanctuary light, and the sudden impression froze all hearts with darkness and foreboding. The day went on solemnly, the Little Hours being chanted in a strange, mighty, and tremendously sorrowful tone, plain as its three monotonously recurring notes could possibly make it be, a lament that was as rough and clean as stone. After the Gloria in Excelsis of the Conventual Mass, the organ was at last altogether silent: and the silence only served to bring out the simplicity and strength of the music chanted by the choir. After the general Communion, distributed to the long slow line of all the priests and monks and brothers and guests, and the procession of the Blessed Sacrament to the altar of repose—slow and sad, with lights and the Pange Lingua—came the Maundy, the Mandatum, when, in the cloister, the monks washed the feet of some seventy or eighty poor men, and kissed their feet and pressed money into their hands.

And through all this, especially in the Mandatum, when I saw them at close range, I was amazed at the way these monks, who were evidently just plain young Americans from the factories and colleges and farms and high-schools of the various states, were nevertheless absorbed and transformed in the liturgy. The thing that was most impressive was their absolute simplicity. They were concerned with one thing only: doing the things they had to do, singing what they had to sing, bowing and kneeling and so on when it was prescribed, and doing it as well as they could, without fuss or flourish or display. It was all utterly simple and unvarnished and straightforward, and I don't think I had ever seen anything, anywhere, so unaffected, so unself-conscious as these monks. There was not a shadow of anything that could be called parade or display. They did not seem to realize that they were being watched—and, as a matter of fact, I can say from experience that they did not know it at all. In choir, it is very rare that you even realize that there are any, or many, or few seculars in the house: and if you do realize it, it makes no difference. The presence of other people becomes something that has absolutely no significance to the monk when he is at prayer. It is something null, neutral, like the air, like the atmosphere, like the weather. All these external things recede into the distance. Remotely, you are aware of it all, but you do not advert to it, you are not conscious of it, any more than the eye registers, with awareness, the things on which it is not focussed, although they may be within its range of vision.

Certainly one thing the monk does not, or cannot, realize is the effect which these liturgical functions, performed by a group as such, have upon those who see them. The lessons, the truths, the incidents and values portrayed are simply overwhelming. For this effect to be achieved, it is necessary that each monk as an individual performer be absolutely lost, ignored, overlooked.

And yet, what a strange admission! To say that men were admirable, worthy of honor, perfect, in proportion as they disappeared into a crowd and made themselves unnoticed, by even ceasing to be aware of their own existence and their own acts. Excellence, here, was in proportion to obscurity: the one who was best was the one who was least observed, least distinguished. Only faults and mistakes drew attention to the individual.

The logic of the Cistercian life was, then, the complete opposite to the logic of the world, in which men put themselves forward, so that the most excellent is the one who stands out, the one who is eminent above the rest, who attracts attention.

But what was the answer to this paradox? Simply that the monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order, of union with God, the principle of all perfection. Omnis gloria ejus filiae regis ab intus.

After some brief civilities at the wake at his mother's house, jammed with friends and relatives, Nordstrom went to the funeral home and saw death itself. He stood at the open casket, the other visitors keeping distant to let the only son express his grief. He kissed his father's cool forehead and tears flushed out of him and his body shook. He was convulsed with loss and the unthinkable fact of death. He was a boy again and it was beyond his comprehension and he whispered "Daddy" over and over until there were no more tears left in his body and he walked out of the funeral home and down the street to the edge of town where he walked down past a lake rimmed with cottages to a log road that led into the forest. He walked up this log road for a mile or so until finally the sun came through the disappearing clouds and he took off his trench coat. Now it was suddenly Indian summer in the forest and the hardwoods were a brilliant deep yellow and red, shifting away in the haze to umbrous hills with splotches of white birch and green pine. He walked until his feet became sore and then he spread his trench coat on a stump and sat on it. He thought about his father, even felt envy for those Depression days when he had traversed the country to "look things over." Starting from nothing, everything was fine to his father beyond a subsistence level. He made money because he was competent, had wit, and could not help making money. It was simply another world, Nordstrom thought. His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day. He seemed to see time shimmering and moving up above him and through the leaves and down around his feet and through his middle. Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else. There was no still point. For an instant he floated above himself and smiled at the immaculately tailored man sitting on the stump and in a sunny glade back in the forest. He got up and pressed against a poplar sapling swinging back and forth to a harmony he didn't understand. He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn't mind because he knew he had never been found.

...Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an insult, and she tried to rake up other reasons to separate herself from him. He was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a woman, avaricious too, and cowardly.

Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had, no doubt, calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers.

They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, naïve resources of a waning passion striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then she confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding snake. She went on tiptoe, barefooted, to see once more that the door was closed, then, pale, serious, and, without speaking, with one movement, she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder.

Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those quivering lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms, something vague and dreary that seemed to Léon to glide between the subtly as if to separate them.

He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides, he rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked, by her personality. He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like drunkards at the sight of strong drinks.

Regardless of which bureaucracy, ideology, or publicity crisis the babble bubbles up from, the words are out there because someone believes they sell. And when they sell, it's not because the words are sexy. Quite the opposite: these monkish words forswear any desire or selfish motive whatsoever. They seem to stand above the fray of the personal—an effect they achieve by the mechanism of making the public private. Many of these words and phrases once had a social, public meaning, but they're increasingly used to suggest a collective emotion from which an individual, an interest group, or a company can benefit. Using them implies your goals are actually those of a principled, rather altruistic multitude, which you just happen to represent.

One of the best examples of such artificially sweet speech is provided by an artificial sweetener. In 1996, the PR executive Pat Farrell told a Public Relations Society of America conference about how, as a former brand manager for Monsanto's NutraSweet, he altered the brand's image with a few language nips and tucks. "After many years of defending the ingredients using hard scientific facts," the company grew "frustrated by its inability to change the conversation," he said (and I quote from the journal PR Watch, which reported on Farrell's speech):

The company had for years described Nutrasweet as "an artificial sweetener." But artificial, said Farrell, "conjures up cancer, headaches, rat studies, laboratories, dueling scientists, allergies, epilepsy, you name it, none of which are very appetizing."

...Armed with this knowledge, Nutrasweet created "sweetspeak." Said Farrell, "Words such as 'substitute,' 'artificial,' 'chemical,' 'laboratory,' 'scientist' were removed forever from our lexicon and replaced with words such as 'discovered,' 'choice,' 'variety,' unique,' 'different,' 'new taste.'"

Using sweetspeak, Farrell gave an example of how Nutrasweet responds to the question: How do you know aspartame is safe?

The answer: "Aspartame was discovered nearly 30 years ago. Since that time, hundreds of people in our company and elsewhere around the world—people with families like yours and mine—have devoted themselves to making sure consumers can be confident of their choice when they choose the taste of Nutrasweet. People have looked at our ingredient in every which way possible and we encourage that because we want consumers to be comfortable when they choose Nutrasweet. That has been our commitment for nearly three decades, and it will always be our commitment. You can feel confident choosing products that contain our ingredient, but if you don't, you have other choices." [italics of the author]

Booklog - 2005

All right, so the obvious point: Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination. For me, though, the important question is why this is always so bitterly disappointing. And why I keep buying these sports memoirs with expectations that my own experience with the genre should have long ago modified...and why I nearly always feel thwarted and pissed when I finish them. One sort of answer, of course, is that commercial autobiographies like these promise something they cannot deliver: personal and verbal access to an intrinsically public and performative kind of genius. The problem with this answer is that I and the rest of the US book market aren't that stupid—if impossible promises were all there was to it, we'd catch on after a while, and it would stop being so profitable for publishers to churn these memoirs out.

Maybe what keeps us buying in the face of constant disappointment is some deep compulsion both to experience genius in the concrete and universalize genius in the abstract. Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true techne so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it's just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn't really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant's glass jaw or Eliot's inability to hit the curve.

For my part, though, I think there's something deeper, and scarier, that keeps my hope one step ahead of past experience as I make my way to the bookstore's register. It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of [former tennis star Tracy] Austin's narrative mind, on the one hand, with the extraordinary mental powers that are required by world-class tennis, on the other. Anyone who buys the idea that great athetes are dim should have a close look at an NFL playbook, or at a basketball coach's diagram of a 3-2 zone trap . . . or at an archival film of Ms. Tracy Austin repeatedly putting a ball in a court's corner at high speed from seventy-eight feet away, with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching her do it. Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching? ...worse, with a crowd of spectators maybe all vocally hoping you fail so that their favourite will beat you? In my own comparatively low-level junior matches, before audiences that rarely hit three digits, it used to be all I could do to manage my sphincter. I would drive myself crazy: "...but what if I double-fault here and go down a break with all these folks watching? ...don't think about it ...yeah but except if I'm consciously not thinking about it then doesn't part of me have to think about it in order for me to remember what I'm not supposed to think about? ...shut up, quit thinking about it and serve the goddamn ball ...except how can I even be talking to myself about not thinking about it unless I'm still aware of what it is I'm talking about not thinking about?" and so on. I'd get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Freeze up, choke. Lose our focus. Become self-conscious. Cease to be wholly present in our wills and choices and movements.

It is not an accident that great athletes are often called "naturals," because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. Great athletes can do this even—and, for the truly great ones like Borg and Bird and Nicklaus and Jordan and Austin, especially—under wilting pressure and scrutiny. They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

The real secret behind top athletes' genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as "One ball at a time" or "Gotta concentrate here," and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it's because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that's all there is to it.

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, "I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it," the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there's nothing she can do about something bad and so she'd better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? Or is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened?

For him who is obliged to dream with eyes wide open all movement is in reverse, all action broken into kaleidoscopic fragments. I believe, as I walk through the horror of the present, that only those who have the courage to close their eyes, only those whose permanent absence from the condition known as reality can affect our fate. I believe, confronted with this lucid wide-awake horror, that all the resources of our civilization will prove inadequate to discover the tiny grain of sand necessary to upset the stale, stultifying balance of our world. I believe that only a dreamer who has fear neither of life nor death will discover this infinitesimal iota of force which will hurtle the cosmos into whack—instantaneously. Not for one moment do I believe in the slow and painful, the glorious and logical, ingloriously illogical evolution of things. I believe that the whole world—not the earth alone and the beings which compose it, nor the universe whose elements we have charted, including the island universes beyond our sight and instruments—but the whole world, known and unknown, is out of kilter, screaming in pain and madness. I believe that if tomorrow the means were discovered whereby we might fly to the most remote star, to one of those worlds whose light according to our weird calculus will not reach us until our earth itself be extinguished, I believe that if tomorrow we were transported there in a time which has not yet begun we would find an identical horror, an identical misery, an identical insanity. I believe that if we are so attuned to the rhythm of the stars about us as to escape the miracle of collision that we are also attuned to the fate which is being worked out simultanously here, there, beyond, and everywhere, and that there will be no escape from this universal fate unless simultaneously here, there, beyond, and everywhere each and every one, man, beast, plant, mineral, rock, river, tree and mountain wills it.

From the beginnings of Western philosophy, thinkers have conceived of two main ways of fulfilling human potentials. The first involved the vita activa, or the expression of one's being through action in the public arena—paying attention to what goes on in the social environment, making decisions, engaging in politics, arguing for one's convictions, taking a stand even at the cost of one's comfort and reputation. This is what some of the most influential Greek philosophers saw as the ultimate fulfillment of one's essence. Later, under the influence of Christian philosophy, the vita contemplativa gained ascendancy as the best way to spend one's life. It was through solitary reflection, prayer, communion with the supreme being, that one was thought to achieve the most complete fulfillment. And these two strategies were usually seen as mutually exclusive—one could not be a doer and a thinker at the same time.

This dichotomy still pervades our understanding of human behavior. Carl Jung introduced the concepts of extroversion versus introversion as the fundamental and opposite traits of the psyche. The sociologist David Riesman described a historical change from inner-directed to outer-directed personalities. In current psychological research, extroversin and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Usually each of us tends to be one or the other, either loving to interact with people but feeling lost when alone, or finding delight in solitude but unable to relate to people. Which one of these types is the most likely to get the best out of life.

Current studies provide consistent evidence that outgoing, extroverted people are happier, more cheerful, less stressed, more serene, more at peace with themselves than introverts. The conclusion seems to be that extroverts—who are thought to be born, not made—get a better deal in life all around. In this case, however, I have some reservations about how the data have been interpreted. One of the manifestations of extroversion is to put a positive spin on things, while introverts are more prone to be reserved in describing their inner states. So the quality of experience might be similar in both groups, and only the reporting differs.

"I had always done well in English, but I remember realizing one day that I couldn't 'comprehend' what I was reading in one of the lessons well enough to be able to answer any of the questions. I remember going over and over the same bit and not having it stick any better the fifth time than the first. So, for really the only time in my life, I cheated and found the answer sheet... I can now recall the feeling of complete confusion I felt with the assignments. I have continued to feel that way at various other times in my life. Even now I have an inordinately hard time reading, especially for someone who makes his living absorbing written documents. I have had my glasses and contact lens prescriptions changed at least three times apiece in the last three years in an attempt to "fix" my reading problem, which essentially involves starting to read a page, getting through about three lines with comprehension, then all of a sudden finding myself at the bottom of the page not recalling any of the words I just read.

"At the end of my junior year in high school, having never really attended study hall or anything of the sort, and following my third straight year of A+ grades, I made a conscious decision that 'if they thought that was good, getting my grades, wait until I really turn on the after burners in my senior year.' I decided to attend study halls and really apply myself in order to insure my acceptance into Harvard. I really did work harder that year than I ever had before, but I got, for example, a 50 percent on my midyear exam in math, having never got less than a 90 percent in my life. I also completely blew history and couldn't remember anything from any of my lessons, and essentially screwed up the entire year in every course except creative writing. Even now I have dreams which involve finding myself in prep school, and all of a sudden realizing I hadn't graduated because I had blown all those courses so badly.

"I had a similar experience in graduate school in music, where I wrote a lot of music for other students and dedicated the pieces to them. I was asked by a French horn player if I could write a piece for her recital in seven or eight months' time. In all previous cases I did it on my own time, and invariably got the thing done in less than a month. But in this case the pressure associated with her comission totally froze me. I was never able even to begin to write the piece, much less finish it.

"These examples of what I would term 'random failure' were incredibly unnerving to me and contributed to a sense I had of myself (and probably still do have) that every success I had prior to that moment was proven, by that moment, to have been a sham, and a fake, and a hoax on everyone including me, which led me to the inevitable question, 'Why don't you just admit that you are of limited intelligence, even less vision, and give up?' For some reason, I didn't.

"I have had any number of subsequent occurrences where, under some sort of pressure, I have, for varying periods of time, lost the ability to concentrate completely, and fallen into fairly significant depressions whose main characteristic is this self-flagellation. My wife, Melanie, finds this behavior the toughest of all my 'foibles' to deal with because there is essentially no answer she has been able to find to get me out. I always feel as if describing how I feel and think about myself is too complicated; it's as if I can hear the whole conversation in advance and know all of the twists and turns it will take before they happen, so why bother? The effort just isn't worth it. So, when Melanie asks me in these moods if there is anything she can say or do, she is met with an impatient "Thanks, but no thanks." As a consequence, she has felt totally disconnected from me for sustained periods of time. I will, in those periods, come home and sit down in front of the TV and watch the news or listen to music late into the night, unable to speak more than monosyllabically with anyone in my family. I always thought my attention to that TV was the result of my intense interest in current events, but it's pretty clear to me now that when I was feeling overwhelmed, going to sit in my favorite chair in my habitual spot in our living room had a salutary effect on my state of mind—it helped break the state of negative hyperfocus I'd fallen into—regardless of the content of the news that night."

Excessive management compensation, whether it is in the form of salary or options, is a major-league turnoff. It is a signal that management might not necessarily have the shareholders' interests in mind since, at the end of the day, their enormous stipends come out of shareholders' pockets. [...]

A few examples add depth to this argument. John Roth's take of $135 million or so in 2000 at Nortel is rather fat by our standards. Frank Stronach at Magna always seems to bank way more than he is worth. Jozef Straus grabbing a tidy $137 million by selling shares in August 2000 at $117 a pop "probably" had a long-term impact on JDS Uniphase's stock price. Fat-cat salaries at Rite Aid to Robert Miller, Mary Sammons, and John Standley discouraged us from purchasing that firm. And in toyland, Mattel makes a habit of giving underperforming CEOs golden kiss-offs and hiring replacements at ludicrous price levels. When their CEO, Jill Barad, departed she received $26.4 million in cash, forgiveness of $7.2 million in loans, payment of $3.3 million in state and federal assessments associated with the loans, plus retirement benefits of $709,000 a year for life. Justifying this seems difficult given that in her three years at the helm of Mattel Inc., the stock price dropped to less than $12 a share from $27.75. If she had been successful, one can only try to conjecture what her package might have been.

Forthcoming.

But then on Wednesday, November 4, we broke the Gang of Eight. Time was growing short. Lévesque had announced that he would leave the conference at noon that day, and it was obvious from the discussions up to that moment that neither side was prepared to bend. I decided it was a good time to try a fallback position that I had had in mind for quite a different purpose. I had been thinking that if it became necessary to go to London unilaterally and the British showed any reluctance to cooperate, I might say to them: "Just give us simple patriation of the constitution as it is. You can't refuse me that. And then we'll have up to two more years of negotiation in Canada on an amending formula and a charter of rights. If we still can't reach agreement within that time, we'll let the Canadian people decide on both these issues in a referendum." So now I decided to try out this idea on the premiers instead.

I turned to Lévesque after the coffee break, referred to his threat to leave the conference in an hour, and said: "Rather than break up in disarray and continue our fight on the doorstep of the British Parliament, why don't we get patriation first—nobody can object to that—then give ourselves two years to solve our problems over the amending formula and the charter, and, failing that, consult the people in a referendum? Surely a great democrat like yourself won't be against a referendum?"

Lévesque rose to the bait. I think he answered instinctively, without remembering that he was in the Gang of Eight, and said: "Well, I can buy that." I think he had in mind that this would be his chance to avenge his loss in the 1980 referendum, because I remember him saying, "I would like to fight the charter." I suppose he thought that he could win this one in Quebec. But I was confident, too, that I could win a fight over rights, including language rights. Lévesque was pleased enough with this new deal to announce that he would now delay his departure.

I seized the moment and said to the other premiers, particularly the rest of the Gang of Eight: "This is a triumph. There is suddenly a Quebec-Ottawa alliance. You are all surprised, gentlemen. Too bad for you." The cat was now among the pigeons! I adjourned for lunch. On the way out, I told the press about the new Quebec-Ottawa alliance as well, and went off to lunch rather happy.

The other seven premiers in the Gang of Eight were, of course, absolutely furious with Lévesque. He had constantly been making the others promise that they would never break the united front, insisting that it was the only way to stop Trudeau from getting his "substantial number" of premiers. And now Lévesque himself had been the first to break it. He soon became aware of his mistake; indeed, in his memoirs, he writes that my "manoeuvre served to drive a last nail in the coffin of the late common front." The other premiers were hopping mad, because my scheme meant that the only way for them to stop me would be to campaign with Lévesque against a charter of rights. Many of them had charters in their own provinces, and it also would have meant campaigning against Ottawa alongside a premier who believed in an independent Quebec. I don't think they relished the idea of such a referendum very much. Seeing the reaction of the other premiers and his own officials, Lévesque realized that he had fallen into a trap. After lunch, he began trying to extricate himself. He said he hadn't fully understood what was being proposed and was no longer in agreement with me on the referendum.

When Quebec backtracked after lunch, I thought the negotiating game was over. I expected that with Lévesque coming back into line, the eight premiers would present a solid front again, and we would never have a substantial number of provinces. What I didn't realize was that Lévesque (who, according to his memoirs, was already deeply suspicious of allies like [Saskatchewan Premier Allan] Blakeney and Bill Bennett of British Columbia) had completely destroyed his credibility with his seven colleagues. It was already too late for him to undo the damage. The solidarity of the Gang of Eight was broken. The premiers finally sensed that here was a man who would never negotiate seriously because his only aim was to destroy the country—and who would late write critically of them that they were "still attached to the notion of 'national unity' which, in the last analysis, an Anglo-Canadian puts before provincial autonomy."

In attempting this psychological presentation and a psychopathical explanation of the typical characteristics of a concentration camp inmate, I may give the impression that the human being is completely and unavoidably influenced by his surroundings. (In this case the surroundings being the unique structure of camp life, which forced the prisoner to conform his conduct to a certain set pattern.) But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors—be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners' reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?

We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food, and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

You need only ask yourself, What is the problem in the Middle East, or South Africa, or Northern Ireland? Is it lack of information that keeps these conflicts at fever pitch? Is it lack of information about how to grow food that keeps millions at starvation levels? Is it lack of information that brings soaring crime rates and physical decay to our cities? Is it lack of information that leads to high divorce rates and keeps the beds of mental institutions filled to overflowing?

The fact is, ther are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who complains that the food he is being served in a restaurant is inedible and also that the portions are too small. But, of course, what we are dealing with here is no joke. Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before. To the question "What problem does the information solve?" the answer is usually "How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before." This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to "access" information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences.

Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr or agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility.

Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism. But in the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened 'Temperance', it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotalers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion. Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, eiher because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as 'intemperate' as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.

"You ungrateful little shit! You're the next best thing to unconscious, aren't you? You selfish little turd! You haven't heard a single goddamned word I've been saying to you, have you? I've been wasting all these pearls of wisdom on the desert air, haven't I? Hello? Hello? Anyone in there? Peter? YOUR FATHER IS TALKING YO YOU.

"Nothing, eh?

"The motor's run down, has it?

"Ahh, well...

"I suppose it makes a change, though. Your not answering back. I ought to be grateful, really. You've got a mouth on you like a barrackroom lawyer. Always arguing the toss, aren't you? Black, white. Day, night. Left is right and vice versa. I ought to be grateful for brief mercies. I've daydreamed sometimes of having myself surgicaly deafened.

"You're always bleating about social justice and revolution—and look at you! Purple hair and vintage puke-slobbered clothing. Let me tell you, my little chickadee, that any self-respecting revolutionary would shoot you on sight. Thus displaying both acumen and taste.

"Some revolution you'd run. You and Munchy and Bunchy and Drippy and Droopy. What would you do after you'd liberated Baskin-Robbins?

"That's a nice touch. Doing your face purple as well. Suits you."

"Neat but not gaudy.

"And to revert for a moment to the subject of music. You, my dear boy, and your fellow-members of The Virgin Exterminators, are about as much musicians as is my left bojangle. You'd be hard put to find middle C under a searchlight. Musically speaking, blood of my blood and bone of my bone, you couldn't distinguish shit from shinola.

"Hello?

"Yoo-hoo!

"Anyone at home?

"You're an offensive little heap! What are you? 'I'm an offensive little heap, Daddy.' Yes, you are! And you're also idle, soft, and spoiled. And in addition to that, you've spewed on my shoe."

He broke the rules. Everything he did seemed wrong by traditional standards. He crouvhed seven inches too low beneath the keyboard, sitting cross-legged on a sawed-off kitchen chair, humming loudly and occasionally making wild conducting motions with his left hand. He did not practise heavily, and he seldom played scales. Any music teacher would despair of him, for everything was quite obviously out of kilter—everything except the music; and the music seemed to have been made in heaven.

The Columbia executives were startled and a little dismayed when Gould, deaf to all objection, insisted on choosing for his first recording Bach's difficult and rarely played Goldberg Variations. They were just as surprised when he arrived at the recording session with an armload of paraphernalia: his personal chair, which allowed him to sit just fourteen inches off the floor, his collection of sweaters and scarves (this was, after all, a steamy June in New York), five small bottles of multi-coloured pills, a batch of towels, and two large bottles of spring water because the pianist couldn't abide what came out of Manhattan's taps.

Gould proceeded to boil water on a hot plate until it was scalding and then immersed his hands in it. "This relaxes me," he explained. Before he commenced the session, a small Oriental rug was placed under the pedals because Gould did not like to rest his feet on bare wood. In spite of the mild weather, an electric heater was set up to keep him warm. He began to play but suddenly flung his arms up. "I can't," he said. "I can't. There is a draft. I feel it. A strong draft." A covey of workmen was dispatched to track down the offending draft and at last the session got underway.

What emerged after a week was, in Otto Friedrich's opinion, one of the greatest recordings ever made. "Here we learned," he wrote, "...that Gould could play the piano like nobody else in the world." Friedrich, who wrote the best biography of Gould, explained that "we who had not been present at the Town Hall...now had our first chance to discover Glenn Gould. Here, we learned for the first time that Bach's Variations (and, by implication, all of Bach) was not a cerebral construction to be respected from a respectful distance, but rather a creation of passionate intensity and immense beauty." It is rare that any performer can establish his reputation on the basis of a single recording, but Gould did it. His version of the Goldberg Variations remains his masterpiece.

Aesculapius murmured, "Flirtation always has something good about it. When you're my age, you won't flirt anymore."

Today I am certain that he knew absolutely nothing about flirtation. I am fifty-seven, and I'm sure that if I don't stop smoking or psychoanalysis doesn't cure me, my last glance from my deathbed will express my desire for my nurse, provided she is not my wife and provided my wife has allowed the nurse to be beautiful!

I spoke sincerely, as in Confession: a woman never appeals to me as a whole, but rather . . . in pieces! In all women I loved feet, if well shod: in many others, a slender neck but also a thick one, and the bosom, if not too heavy. I went on listing female anatomical parts, but the doctor interrupted me.

"These parts add up to a whole woman."

I then uttered an important statement: "Healthy love is the love that embraces a single, whole woman, including her character and intelligence.

At that time I surely hadn't known such a love; and when I did encounter it, it was unable to give me health; but it's important for me to remember that I identified disease where man of science found health, and that later my diagnosis proved true.

The men and women who dominate the opinion-shaping classes are working too, just like everyone else—but they're working especially hard, they're working like caffiene-fueled gerbils, twelve-hour days, chained to their cell phones and e-mails every waking minute, frantically stuffing more than twice as much productivity into plutocratic pockets for less than half as much in return. And not only that: they're supposed to like it!

And not only that: they do like it!

That's the neatest trick of all. This is another case of the Justin's Helmet Principle. People may be stressed to the gills but, by and large, they're all for it. Recently there have been some signs of retreat, of people letting up—simplicity movements, more women opting out of careers, couples sharing the same job, Gen X parents giving more time to their kids—but, on the whole, the beat goes on.

That's why bosses onstage at the Orlando Hyatt employee-bonding retreats sound like directors giving notes to the cast after the final dress rehearsal. "Let's have fun with it!" they say, and clap their hands as the team breaks from the huddle (metaphor switch alert), hoping that they've become the beloved coaches they learned to want to be at their retreat, the one in June where the execs got three days on leadership by the author of a best-selling management excellence book.

The point being that you (if you are of a certain class) aren't supposed to just work for a living anymore. Work is supposed to be fun and fulfilling. Work nurtures you, helps you grow; work appreciates you and, in exchange, you do a whole lot more of it.

So what is it with all these career hounds? We will see shortly, but for now just focus on how splendidly the macho cult of multitasking, bring-it-on busyness serves the powers that be. From interns to associates, the expectation of dedication is higher than anything the man in the gray flannel suit ever dreamed of. Those nine-to-fivers in the old economy were napping their way up the corporate ladder by comparison. Of course, those old-time employees signed up with Acme for a lifetime, while today's go-getter on her new job is polishing her resume before she finds out where the restroom is, but that's part of it too—part of a specific form of ambition nurtured by the culture of mediation, the one captured by career advice titles like Me, the Brand.

So much of our sense of isolation is based upon affirmations of it by those who wish it to be so. This is not a question of politics or language. It is much the same on all sides of the political debate, which cannot be termed a debate since the intellectual alternatives offered by all sides—anglophone, francophone, East, West—are psychotic pessimism and infantile boosterism. Our own sense of self-loathing governms both positions, and, as Margaret Atwood pointed out in Survival two decades ago, it seems to require failure. This remains unchanged because it is the part of our mental makeup which we avoid examining.

Psychotic pessimism and infantile boosterism—is this unfair? We look around and find on all sides political leaders competing for the mantle to protect our culture or some aspect of it. This negative vocabulary—'protect'—suggests that they do not understand culture as a living force. Only a dead culture requires protection. Live culture requires a constant and aggressive strengthening of the structures which make creation and the production and delivery of creation a reasonable practicality. Culture is not heritage. The whole concept of heritage has grown over the last few years because it treats culture as something in the past—dead and boxable. Heritage is something which ideologies can use for appropriate purposes. It is controllable, non-threatening and malleable for those interested in isolating one culture from another. Culture may contain some heritage, but above all it is alive and that heritage is tied to an uncontrollable continuity which is relevant to all aspects of society. And yet, when was the last time that a prime minister of Canada, or a premier of Quebec or Ontario or any other province, showed any sign of knowing what the culture was—the one they are so eager to protect? I haven't heard a prime minister since Trudeau cite an author or heard of one going to a theatre for other than official reasons. There hasn't been a national minister responsible for culture since Gérard Pelletier who seemed to read. The ministers of culture of the two largest provinces have been acultural at best. I repeat: at best. In many provinces the job is tacked onto the tourism or sports and recreation portfolio.

The only provincial minister of culture—from any province over a forty-year period—who comes to mind as a man or woman of culture was Georges-émile Lapalme. I apologize if I've missed someone. Lapalme created the job in Quebec in the early sixties. He also invented much of the Quiet Revolution. He was quickly squeezed out of his job. There is no place in these governments for actual culture. What is required is culture as a manageable political slogan. Bob Rae is the one premier who actually dared show a sense of the culture of the society. But he named inept nonentities to the Cabinet position. (I won't even mention the Harris government.) As for those who declare that their mission is to save and protect culture—the Parti Québécois—their record during eight years of office was among the worst. And I have yet to hear the current premier mention a single Quebec writer. He is too busy telling us he has read Proust. On his office wall is the complete Pléiade—the 'great books' of the metropole, defined by Paris and published on onion-skin in very small type. It is the sort of gesture you would expect from an insecure nineteenth-century colonial politician.

Never has the word culture been so regularly evoked. Never has there been so little evocation of culture as a reality at the centre of what we do. Why? In part because the politicization and bureaucratization of the concept has made those who wield power fear culture that is anything more than a slogan or budget. Power, after all, is about control and enforced isolation. Culture is an uncontrollable, indefinable sea in which all of us swim.

I could quote ad infinitum from this rather astonishing book, but here are three:

We and our leaders have been surviving for a while now in societies which do not have any escape routes through belief from anxiety. This may be one of the explanations for the childish hysteria of the last few decades over economic management theories such as nationalization, privatization, and free markets. The death of God was supposed to release mankind from absolute obsessions, so that we could give ourselves to rational analysis. Instead the new structures have simply taken the old absolute obsessions which were tied to the soul and applied them to our economic lives. For example, the free market may be a good, bad, or insufficient idea, but, in any case, it is just a crude commercial code. Now it is regularly equated with or given credit for or even precedence over the freedom of man. But the freedom of man is a moral statement on the human condition, both in the practical and in the humanist sense. To equate it with a school of business is to betray a certain confusion. An unconscious unease.

We have, in effect, replace beliefs with systems, and this has created a new kind of calming device which proposes eternity on earth. The web of Western rational society offers the individual a fixed place as an expert in a self-fulfilling and apparently eternal structure. The very lack of clarity, the lack of clear goals and conclusions, the very ease with which the structure weaves endlessly about us is what makes it resemble the eternal bed of nirvana. While many complain that they feel trapped in the maze of modern civilization, their complaints rise out of the emotional comfort of that stability.

The leader is the one static element in society. He is the one who, whatever the civilization, must deal with his personal insecurity through interplay with the people he leads. If there is any difference between running our society and running another, it is precisely the formlessness of ours. The maze may offer the reassurance of the eternal, but unlike our earlier societies, rational structures make it almost impossible to give a sustained direction to the civilization. Seen as a whole, Western society is profoundly inefficient. Those who lead it cannot help feeling that it lacks an inner tension. They want to push it about. To reorganize. To make it respond to needs. They wish to lead, and to do so they feel they must put tension into the organism.

The leader carries all of our confusion with him as he attempts to climb above society in search of a clear view which would indicate the right direction. There, on his imaginary mountain, he stands alone, suffering the personal anxiety of freedom. He watches us dancing aimlessly below, half struggling with mortality in our comforting maze. He can see we have a certain reassurance, lost in our earthly eternity. But how is he to get his own reassurance if he cannot make all of us and the structure itself respond to his efforts?

The main category of service industries, in which most job creation takes place, is that which creates and satisfies artificial needs. This consumer industry explosion has generally been described as the inevitable product of a successful, rich, and comfortable society, which already had all it needed. The next step was to create things it didn't need and to create actual services whose very attraction was that they were not necessary. These services and service objects, divorced as they are from utility, were free to grow, multiply, and build upon each other, creating their own self-contained justifications for existence. They could seize upon the minutest detail of clothing, hair, skin, sound, sight, housing, sport, food, transport, and build it up into a baroque cathedral of elements, style, complexity, and apparent need.

There would be nothing particularly wrong with this if Western civilization, particularly that of the modern era, had self-indulgence as its goal. A glance at our history indicates the opposite. A glance at our contemporary situation indicates that while the area of greatest economic expansion is in the services of self-indulgence, growing percentages of the population are slipping back into pre-twentieth-century poverty.

And there lies the real paradox of modern capitalism. It is masterful at producing services people don't need and in large part probably don't want. But it has difficulty turning itself to the production of those services which people really do need. Not only that, it often spends an enormous amount of time and effort convincing people that those services are either unrealistic, marginal, or counterproductive. Never have our skills of organization been so developed, never have our desires for the accumulation of objects and comforts been so realizable, and never have events seemed so difficult to control. In other words, a rational economic structure finds it very difficult to give people what they really want because real human demand does not follow a fixed pattern. Giving people what they want is inefficient because it is irrational. On the other hand, it is efficient to give people what they do not want, because an artificial sales structure can ensure some rational buying patterns.

During working hours a man's obligations to his employment function force him to restrain his views on this, his area of expertise. He is also silent on other people's areas of expertise. After all, the aim of structure is smooth functioning, not public criticism. And the expert's desire not to be criticized by those outside his box restrains him in turn from criticizing them. When he leaves his office/function at the end of the day, he is theoretically free. In reality, were he to engage independent public comment on his area of expertise, while on his own time, he would find himself in serious trouble with the system that employs him. Such comment would be considered a form of treason. In many cases, his contractual employment conditions specifically prevent him from off-hours independent involvement in his area of expertise. His employer has the exclusive use of his knowledge. In effect, the employed expert has no individual rights over his own competence, except that of changing employers. This could hardly be considered an important right, particularly since any attempts to speak out as an individual expert will saddle him with a reputation as a difficult individual, making it virtually impossible to find employment elsewhere.

What we have, then, is an educated, reasonably propserous, responsibility employed middle class that is virtually censored or self-censored when it comes to most of the responsibilities of the individual citizen. The obvious exception to this is the right to cast a secret ballot. On the other hand, the breakdown of society's traditional limitations—including most integrated religious and social beliefs—leaves all the members of this enormous middle class at liberty to use their free time however they wish, providing they don't interfere with the functioning of the system. They are also absolutely free to spend their money on whatever they want, providing they do not challenge structures.

The obvious solution for the middle classes has been to deal with the terrible frustrations of their silent, controlled, boxed-up real lives by spending their spare time and money as steam-release devices—that is, to compensate for a relative straitjacked with irrelevant freedoms. This is what we now call individualism—an immersion in the imaginary waters of self-gratification.

To love Oriental art. Who does not? But which Orient, the near or the far? I loved them all. Maybe I loved this art so very different from our own because, in the words of Elie Faure, "man is no longer at the center of life." Perhaps it was this leveling (and raising) or man, this promiscuity with all life, this infinitely small and infinitely great at one and the same time, which produced such exaltation when confronted with their work. Or, to put it another way, because nature was (with them) something other, something more, than a mere backdrop. Because man, though divine, was no more divine than that from which he sprang. Also, perhaps, because they did not confound the welter and tumult of life with the welter and tumult of the intellect. Because mind—or spirit or soul—shone through everything, creating a divine irradiation. Thus, though humbled and chastened, man was never flattened, nullified, obliterated or degraded. Never made to cringe before the sublime, but incorporated in it. If there was a key to the mysteries which enveloped him, pervaded him, and sustained him, it was a simple key, available to all. There was nothing arcane about it.

Yes, I loved this immense, staggering world of the Indian which, who knows, I might one day see with my own eyes. I loved it not because it was alien and remote, for it was really closer to me than the art of the West; I loved the love from which it was born, a love which was shared by the multitude, a love which could never have come to expression had it not been of, by and for the multitude. I loved the anonymous aspect of their staggering creations. How comforting and sustaining to be a humble, unknown worker—an artisan and not a genius!—one among thousands, sharing in the creation of that which belonged to all. To have been nothing more than a water carrier—that had more meaning for me than to become a Picasso, a Rodin, a Michaelangelo or a da Vinci. Surveying the panorama of European art, it is the name of the artist which usually sticks out like a sore thumb. And usually, associated with the great names, goes a story of woe, of affliction, of cruel misunderstanding. With us of the West the word genius has something of the monstrous about it. Genius, or the one who does not adapt; genius, he who gets slapped; genius, he who is persecuted and tormented; genius, he who dies in the gutter, or in exile, or at the stake.

It is true, I had a way of infuriating my bosom friends when extolling the virtues of other peoples. They asserted that I did it for effect, that I only pretended to appreciate and esteem the works of alien artists, that it was my way of castigating our own people, our own creators. They were never convinced that I could take to the alien, the exotic, or the outlandish in art immediately, that it demanded no preparation, no initiation, no knowledge of their history or their evolution. "What does it mean? What are they trying to say?" Thus they jeered and mocked. As if explanations mean anything. As if I cared what "they" meant.

I will continue calmly about people with strong nerves, who do not understand certain refinements of pleasure. Although these gentry may on certain occasions, let us say, bellow like oxen at the top of their lungs, and although this is perhaps greatly to their honor, yet, as I have said before, they instantly give up in the face of impossibility. Is impossibility, then, a stone wall? What kind of a stone wall? Well, of course—the laws of nature, the conclusions of the natural sciences, mathematics. If people prove to you, for example, that you're descended from an ape, there is no point in making a sour face about it; accept it as it is. If they will prove to you that, when you come down to it, one drop of your own fat is bound to be more precious to you than the lives of a hundred thousand fellow humans, and that this will in the end determine all the so-called virtues and duties and all the rest of that rot and nonsense, you have no choice but to accept it—there's nothing to be done about it, because two times two is mathematics. Try and object to that.

"For goodness sake," they'll cry, "you cannot argue against it—two times two is four! Nature doesn't consult you; it doesn't give a damn for your wishes or whether its laws please or do not please you. You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall. . ." And so on and so forth. good God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don't like these laws, including the "two times two is four"? Of course, I cannot break through this wall with my head if I don't have the strength to break through it, but neither will I accept it simply because I face a stone wall and am not strong enough.

As though such a stone wall were indeed a soothing element and really contained within itself even the slightest reason for making peace with it, solely because it means that two times two is four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! But how preferable is it to understand everything, to be aware of everything, of all impossibilities and stone walls, and yet refuse to reconcile yourself to a single one of those impossibilities and walls if it sickens you to submit to them; how preferable to reach, by the most irrefutable logical combinations, the most revolting conclusions on the eternal subject that you are somehow to blame even for the stone wall, although, again, it is entirely obvious that you are not to blame at all; and, in consequence of all that, to sink into voluptuous inertia, silently and impotently gritting your teeth and wallowing in the idea that, as it turns out, you don't even have anyone to rail at; that you can't find any object of blame and may never find onel that all this is some sort of sleight of hand, a sharper's trick, a swindle, a plain mess in which it is impossible to tell who's who or what's what. And yet, despite all the uncertainties and confusions, you are still in pain, and the more uncertainty, the more pain!

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 steppingstones, 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.

In France the old men, especially if of peasant stock, are a joy and an inspiration to behold. They are like great trees which no storm can dislodge; they radiate peace, serenity and wisdom. In America the old men are as a rule a sorry sight, particularly the successful ones who have prolonged their existence far beyond the natural term by means of artifical respiration, so to speak. They are horrible living examples of the embalmer's art, walking cadavers manipulated by a retinue of handsomely paid hirelings who are a disgrace to their profession.

The exceptions to the rule—and the contrast is abysmal—are the artists, and by artists I mean the creators, regardless of their field of operation. Most of them began to develop, to reveal their individuality, after passing the age of forty-five, the age which most industrial corporations in this country have fixed as the dead line. It must be admitted in passing, of course, that the average worker who has functioned from adolescence as a robot is about ready for the scrap-heap at that age. And what is true of the ordinary robot is largely true of the master robot, the so-called captain if industry. Only his wealth permits him to nourish and sustain the feeble, flickering flame. So far as true vitality goes, beyond forty-five we are a nation of derelicts.

But there is a class of hardy men, old-fashioned enough to have remained rugged individuals, openly contemptuous of the trend, passionately devoted to their work, impossible to bribe or seduce, working long hours, often without reward or fame, who are motivated by a common impulse—the joy of doing what they please. At some point along the way they separated from the others. The men I speak of can be detected at a glance: their countenance registers something far more vital, far more effective, than the lust for power. They do not seek to dominate, but to realize themselves. They operate from a center which is at rest. They evolve, they grow, they give nourishment just by being what they are.

This subject, the relationship between wisdom and vitality, interests me because, contrary to the general opinion, I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen. The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it. The prodigal is soon spent, a victim of the very forces he has so foolishly and recklessly toyed with. Even machines have to be handled skilfully in order to obtain from them the maximum results. Unless, as in the case in America, we produce them in such quantities that we can afford to scrap them before they have grown old and worthless. But when it comes to scrapping human beings it is another story. Human beings can not be turned out like machines. There is a curious correlation between fecundity and the scrap-heap. The desire to procreate seems to die when the period of usefulness is fixed at the early age of forty-five.

Few are those who can escape the tread-mill. Merely to survive, in spite of the set-up, confers no distinction. Animals and insects survive when higher types are threatene with extinction. To live beyond the pale, to work for the pleasure of working, to grow old gracefully while retaining one's faculties, one's enthusiasms, one's self-respect, one has to establish other values than those endorsed by the mob. It takes an artist to make this breach in the wall. An artist is primarily one who has faith in himself. He does not respond to the normal stimuli: he is neither a drudge nor a parasite. He lives to express himself and in doing so enriches the world.

In Africa the dance is impersonal, sacred and obscene. When the phallus becomes erect and is handled like a banana it is not a "personal hard-on" we see but a tribal erection. It is a "religious hard-on", directed not towards a woman but towards every female member of the tribe. Group souls staging a group fuck. Man lifting himself out of the animal world through a ritual of his own invention. By his mimickry he demonstrates that he has made himself superior to the mere act of intercourse.

The hoochie-koochie dancer of the big city dances alone—a fact of staggering significance. The law forbids response, forbids participation. Nothing is left of the primitive rite but the "suggestive" movements of the body. What they suggest varies with the individual observer. For the majority, probably nothing more than an extraordinary fuck in the dark. A dream fuck, more exactly.

But what law is it that keeps the spectator rigid in his seat, as though shackled and manacled? The silent law of common consent which has made of sex a furtive, nasty act to be indulged in only with the sanction of the Church.

Observing Cleo, the image of that Viennese torso in the side show reverts to mind. Was Cleo not as thoroughly excommunicated from human society as that seductive freak who was born without legs? No one dares to pounce upon Cleo, any more than one would dare to paw the legless beauty at Coney Island. Though every movement of her body is based on the manual of earthly intercourse no one even thinks of responding to the invitation. To approach Cleo in the midst of her dance would be as heinous a crime as to rape the helpless freak of the side show.

 

Booklog - 2004

Why are we unable to focus consciously on our own history? Why is the largest and best-educated elite in that history so insistent on handing the power—which we won and entrusted to them—over to an abstract, self-destructive ideology?

One possibility is that we are blocked by a combination of technocratic management and technocratic speculation. The technocratic management, produced mainly by business schools and departments of economics, is most comfortable functioning in large management structures.

Today the most obvious vessel in which to release their desires is the transnational or the very large national corporation. Their training and these structures have very little to do with capitalism or risk. They are reincarnations of the seventeenth-century royal monopolies. They are, if you like, a modern version of mercantilism. All statistics show that these big joint stock companies, managed rather than owned in any meaningful way, are poor long-term investors and poor investors in research and development. Creativity frightens the administrative mind and so they have a negative influence on innovation. And because they respond to the abstract theories of employment, they are poor job creators.

As for the speculative markets, we are distracted from their innate rationality by the disorder they create. Reason here lies in the methods and skills of application. From the technocrat's point of view, the disorder of the speculative markets is the problem of others. From within they see the purest application of abstract theory, extremely complex, requiring specialist skills. Best of all, they see a world separated from any hint of reality. The finest technical minds seemed to be attracted precisely by this separation from the real. Even public officials are seduced by the intricate interior logic represented by the burgeoning financial speculative markets.

When genetics and hormones play havoc with sensitive follicles, a once bushy coif dwindles and frizzy gents either closely crop what's left or sport a friar's tonsure cut and become a bread baker at the local monastery. Similarly, upon engagement and thereafter, there is a great Rolodex thinning as some friends fall out of favor. Tightening the circle is natural: some chums drop out of sight when you move in with a serious love, and a few more fade as you graduate from faithful attendance at nickel-beer night to a leisurely microbrew-of-the-month personality.

Sadly, part of tightening the gentleman's circle also includes distancing himself from wild fillies, the ones more likely to be invited to the bachelor party than the wedding. Sociability is no longer defined by the byte size of your address book, and at this point, it's best to either deprogram these phone numbers or downgrade relations to daylight hours. If the two of you shared more than just platonic coffeehouse chat about Rimbaud, presume that this second-string fling will never be lover-approved. Sigh longingly and acknowledge that there was nothing holding up such booty-call relationships but the sturdy kickstand of your cock.

"I know the sound of one hand clapping," I said. "I have finally discovered the answer."

Several other Buddhists in the room laughed out loud, at this point. I knew they wanted to humiliate me, and now they had me trapped—because there is no answer to that question. These saffron bastards have been teasing us with it forever. They are amused at our failure to grasp it.

Ho ho. I went into a drastic crouch and hung my left hand low, behind my knee. "Lean closer," I said to him. "I want to answer your high and unanswerable question."

Although Gregor told himself over and over again that nothing special was happening, only a few pieces of furniture were being moved, he soon had to admit that this coming and going of the women, their little calls to each other, the scraping of the furniture along the floor had the effect on him of a great turmoil swelling on all sides, and as much as he tucked in his head and his legs and shrank until his belly touched the floor, he was forced to admit that he would not be able to stand it much longer. They were clearing out his room; depriving him of everything that he loved; they had already carried away the chest of drawers, in which he kept the fretsaw and other tools; were not budging the desk firmly embedded in the floor, the desk he had done his homework on when he was a student at business college, in high school, yes, even in public school—now he really had no more time to examine the good intentions of the two women, whose existence, besides, he had almost forgotten, for they were so exhausted that they were working in silence, and one could hear only the heavy shuffling of their feet.

Forthcoming.

A professional's work has style; it is distinctively his own. But he doesn't let his signature grandstand for him. His style serves the material. He does not impose it as a means of drawing attention to himself.

This doesn't mean that the professional doesn't throw down a 360 tomahawk jam from time to time, just to let the boys know he's still in business.

As Canada teeters on the verge of fracturing, I am sometimes subject to fits of sentiment about this cockeyed country I grew up in and still call home. Impatient with our two founding races, I wonder why, instead of constantly picking at the scabs of their differences, they couldn't learn to celebrate what binds them together. On that necessarily short list I would unhesitatingly place as the number-one adhesive, the true common denominator, bad taste.

André Laurendeau, traveling with the B&B Commission in the spring of 1964, sentenced to a short stay in a hotel in Winnipeg, wrote in his diary, "I wish I were somewhere else. From my window I see a discordant urban landscape, with absolutely no beauty: a few modern buildings, some flat roofs, a tiny badly fenced patch of green."

Canadians, blessed with a natural landscape of incredible beauty and variety, have managed to entrench ugliness just about everywhere they have built. Our cities tend to be functional but nondescript, anchored against the wind, with nothing to please the eye. Quebec City is an exception and so was Montreal, until Mayor Jean Drapeau, hungering for a larger tax base, untroubled by any appreciation for aesthetics, turned the vandals loose. In their indecent haste to make money out of parking lots, they were allowed, noted Luc d'Iberville-Moreau in Lost Montreal, to destroy one old building after another, some of the demolitions positively criminal.

"Bilgewater, kin I trust you?" says the old man, still sort of sobbing.

"To the bitter death!" He took the old man by the hand and squeezed it, and says, "The secret of your being: speak!

"Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!

You bet you Jim and me stared, this time. Then the duke says:

"You are what?"

"Yes, my friend, it is too true — your eyes is lookin' at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette."

"You! At your age! No! You mean you're the late Charlemagne; you must be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least."

"Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it, trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude. Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin', exiled, trampled-on and sufferin' rightful King of France."

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, "No, I like it well enough." It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the homemade Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other.

And yet I am always aware that the central problem is the problem of my body, my stupid, intractable body. My body is my despair. How can I achieve the kind of things I want when my body is so unutterably stupid? I am like a carpenter who is asked to build a house of rotten, worm-eaten wood, or like a dressmaker who is asked to design clothes for a queen out of dyed sugar-sacks.

There have been so many occasions when I have felt that the time wasted in sleep is an indignity, and have tried to keep myself awake half the night. My eyelids close against my will, and I lie down with a sense of defeat, realizing that it is barely twelve hours since I got out of this same bed. And yet there are other times, when I've had little sleep, when a book or idea interests me; suddenly I notice that it is four o'clock in the morning, and I am still not tired. My body responds badly to bullying, and yet allows excitement to charm it into obedience. If only I had the secret of charming at will. It happens unexpectedly, or takes twelve hours of continuous mental struggle to produce a few hours of serenity. But in these hours of serenity, the body is at last working with decent efficiency, and I understand what life would be like if I knew the secret. Is life bound to be a losing battle with the body, a struggle against its sheer insensitivity, in which our artificial allies—alcohol, drugs—only lend their aid at ruinous rates of interest?

He put his hand on my knee with an odd protective gesture, as though he were the older man. "Take her home," he said. "That is better than a pipe."

"How do you know she would come?"

"I have slept with her myself, and Lieutenant Perrin. Five hundred piastres."

"Expensive."

"I expect she would go for three hundred, but under the circumstances one does not care to bargain."

But his advice did not prove sound. A man's body is limited in the acts which it can perform and mine was frozen by memory. What my hands touched that night might be more beautiful than I was used to, but we are not trapped only by beauty. She used the same perfume, and suddenly at the moment of entry the ghost of what I'd lost proved more powerful than the body stretched at my disposal. I moved away and lay on my back and desire drained out of me.

"I am sorry," I said, and lied, "I don't know what is the matter with me."

She said with great sweetness and misunderstanding, "Don't worry. It often happens that way. It is the opium."

"Yes," I said, "the opium." And I wished to heaven that it had been.

All universities possess their own subcultures, and so do departments within universities, varying to the point of being indifferent or even antagonistic to one another, so a generalization cannot describe all accurately. But it is safe to say that credentialing as primary business of institutions of higher learning had gotten under way in the 1960s. Students were the first to notice the change. In the unrest and turbulence of that decade, one thread of complaint came from students who claimed they were shortchanged in education. They had expected more presonal rapport with teachers who had become only remote figures in large, impersonal lecture halls. The students were protesting attempts to transmit culture that omitted acquaintance with personal examples and failed to place them on speaking terms with wisdom. In another decade, however, students dropped that cause, apparently taking it for granted that credentialing is the normal primary business of institutions of higher learning and that its cost is an unavoidable initiation fee into acceptable adulthood. If a student takes out a loan to meet the expense, he or she may reach early middle age by the time the loan is paid off. The guarantee behind the loan is the valuable credential itself.

The pipe organ pounds with stirring diminished sevenths as amnesia ensues from downed fifths. A soundtrack staple for scores of B-movie villains named Igor or Renfield, Bach's composition has a secondary meaning for a man with vices. In psychology, the fugue is a state of deep forgetfulness in which large periods of time and life completely vanish. Lapses of memory aren't always spontaneous, as anyone who's awakened from a Wild Turkey binge can attest. The term "on the wagon" is bandied about with rampant frivolity in this age of light promises and even lighter, tastier Promise margarine. Wagoneers, despite the rhetoric, are akin to teenage break-ups—inevitably they're back for one more round. Soon after the valiant declaration, booze enthusiasts return to the mahogany bar to ponder the tartness of a Salty Dog.

Like the fashionable refrain of "I want a divorce," declaring oneself "on the water cart" should denote a permanent dry-out; it is not a sabbatical or Lenten break from alcohol, but a tattoo of abstinence. Therefore, the capricious teetotaler with a bloated liver should instead proclaim a "cutback," merely a cruise control of moderation, a corporate restructuring—no Sunday bends, lip-cringing shots, or excessive excessiveness for at least a month.