CHAPTER NINE

'Time and craving,' said Mr Propter, 'craving and time - two aspects of the same thing; and that thing is the raw material of evil. So you see, Pete,' he added in another tone, 'you see what a queer sort of present you'll be making us, if you're successful in your work. Another century or so of time and craving. A couple of extra lifetimes of potential evil.'

'And potential good,' the young man insisted with a note of protest in his voice.

'And potential good,' Mr Propter agreed. 'But only at a far remove from that extra time you're giving us.'

'Why do you say that?' Pete asked.

'Because potential evil is in time; potential good isn't. The longer you live, the more evil you automatically come into contact with. Nobody comes automatically into contact with good. Men don't find more good by merely existing longer. It's curious,' he went on reflectively, 'that people should always have concentrated on the problem of evil. Exclusively. As though the nature of good were something self-evident. But it isn't self-evident. There's a problem of good at least as difficult as the problem of evil.'

'And what's the solution?' Pete asked.

'The solution is very simple and profoundly unacceptable. Actual good is outside time.'

'Outside time? But then how ...?'

'I told you it was unacceptable,' said Mr Propter.

'But if it's outside time, then ...'

'... then nothing within time can be actual good. Time is potential evil, and craving converts the potentiality into actual evil. Whereas a temporal act can never be more than potentially good, with a potentiality, what's more, that can't be actualized except out of time.'

'But inside time, here - you know, just doing the ordinary things - hell! we do sometimes do right. What acts are good?'

'Strictly speaking, none,' Mr Propter answered. 'But, in practice, I think one's justified in applying the word to certain acts. Any act that contributes towards the liberation of those concerned in it - I'd call it a good act.'

'Liberation?' the young man repeated dubiously. The words, in his mind, carried only economic and revolutionary connotations. But it was evident that Mr Propter wasn't talking about the necessity for getting rid of capitalism. 'Liberation from what?'

Mr Propter hesitated before replying. Should he go on with this? he wondered. The Englishman was hostile; the time short; the boy himself entirely ignorant. But it was an ignorance evidently mitigated by good-will and a touching nostalgia for perfection. He decided to take a chance and go on.'

'Liberation from time,' he said. 'Liberation from craving and revulsions. Liberation from personality.'

'But heck,' said Pete, 'you're always talking about democracy. Doesn't that mean respecting personality?'

'Of course,' Mr Propter agreed. 'Respecting it in order that it may be able to transcend itself. Slavery and fanaticism intensify the obsession with time and evil and the self. Hence the value of democratic institutions and a sceptical attitude of mind. The more you respect a personality, the better its chance of discovering that all personality is a prison. Potential good is anything that helps you to get out of prison. Actualized good lies outside the prison, in timelessness, in the state of pure, disinterested consciousness.'

'I'm not much good at abstractions,' said the young man. 'Let's take some concrete examples. What about science, for instance? Is that good?'

'Good, bad and indifferent, according to how it's pursued and what it's used for. Good, bad and indifferent, first of all, for the scientists themselves - just as art and scholarship may be good, bad or indifferent for artists and scholars. Good if it facilitates liberation; indifferent if it neither helps nor hinders; bad if it makes liberation more difficult by intensifying the obsession with personality. And, remember, the apparent selflessness of the scientist, or the artist, is not necessarily a genuine freedom from the bondage of personality. Scientists and artists are men devoted to what we vaguely call an ideal. But what is an ideal? An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.'

'Say that again,' Pete requested, while even Jeremy so far forgot his pose of superior detachment to lend his most careful attention.

Mr Propter said it again. 'And that's true,' he went on, 'of every ideal except the highest, which is the ideal of liberation - liberation from personality, liberation from time and craving, liberation into union with God, if you don't object to the word, Mr Pordage. Many people do,' he added. 'It's one of the words that the Mrs Grundys of the intellect find peculiarly shocking. I always try to spare their sensibilities, if I can. Well, to return to our idealist,' he continued, glad to see that Jeremy had been constrained, in spite of himself, to smile. 'If he serves any ideal except the highest - whether it's the artist's ideal of beauty, or the scientist's ideal of truth, or the humanitarian's ideal of what currently passes for goodness - he's not serving God; he's serving a magnified aspect of himself. He may be completely devoted; but in the last analysis his devotion turns out to be directed towards an aspect of his own personality. His apparent selflessness is really not a liberation from his ego, but merely another form of bondage. This means that science may be bad for scientists, even when it appears to be a deliverer. And the same holds good of art, of scholarship, of humanitarianism.'

Jeremy thought nostalgically of his library at The Araucarias. Why couldn't this old madman be content to take things as they came?

'And what about other people?' Pete was saying. 'People who aren't scientists. Hasn't it helped to set them free?'

Mr Propter nodded. 'And it has also helped to tie them more closely to themselves. And what's more, I should guess that it has increased bondage more than it has diminished it - and will tend to go on increasing it, progressively.'

'How do you figure that out?'

'Through its applications,' Mr Propter answered. 'Applications to warfare, first of all. Better planes, better explosives, better guns and gases - every improvement increases the sum of fear and hatred, widens the incidence of nationalistic hysteria. In other words, every improvement in armaments makes it more difficult to forget those horrible projections of themselves they call their ideals of patriotism, heroism, glory and all the rest. And even the less destructive applications of science aren't really much more satisfactory. For what do such applications result in? The multiplication of possessable objects; the invention of new instruments of stimulation; the disseminations of new wants through propaganda aimed at equating possession with well-being and incessant stimulation with happiness.

'But incessant stimulation from without is a source of bondage; and so is the preoccupation with possessions. And now you're threatening to prolong our lives, so that we can go on being stimulated, go on desiring possessions, go on waving flags and hating our enemies and being afraid of air attack - go on and on, generation after generation, sinking deeper and deeper into the stinking slough of our personality.' He shook his head. 'No, I can't quite share your optimism about science.'

There was a silence while Pete debated with himself whether to ask Mr Propter about love. In the end he decided he wouldn't. Virginia was too sacred. (But why, why had she turned back at the Grotto? What could he have said or done to offend her?) As much to prevent himself from brooding over these problems as because he wanted to know the old man's opinions on the last of the three things that seemed to him supremely valuable, he looked up at Mr Propter and asked, 'What about social justice? I mean, take the French Revolution. Or Russia. And what about this Spanish business - fighting for liberty and democracy against fascist aggression?' He had tried to remain perfectly calm and scientific about the whole thing; but his voice trembled a little as he spoke the last words. In spite of their familiarity (perhaps because of their familiarity), phrases like 'fascist aggression' still had power to move him to the depths.

'Napoleon came out of the French Revolution,' said Mr Propter, after a moment's silence. 'German nationalism came out of Napoleon. The war of 1870 came out of German nationalism. The war of 1914 came out of the war of 1870. Hitler came out of the war of 1914. Those are the bad results of the French Revolution. The good results were the enfranchisement of the French peasants and the spread of political democracy. Put the good results in one scale of your balance and the bad ones in the other, and try which set is the heavier. Then perform the same operation with Russia. Put the abolition of tsardom and capitalism in one scale; and in the other put Stalin, put the secret police, put the famines, put twenty years of hardship for a hundred and fifty million people, put the liquidation of intellectuals and kulaks and old bolsheviks, put the hordes of slaves in prison camps; put the military conscription of everybody, male and female, from childhood to old age, put the revolutionary propaganda which spurred the bourgeoisie to invent fascism.' Mr Propter shook his head. 'Or take the fight for democracy in Spain,' he went on. 'There was a fight for democracy all over Europe not so long ago. Rational prognosis can only be based on past experience. Look at the results of 1914 and then ask yourself what chance the loyalists ever had of establishing a liberal régime at the end of a long war. The others are winning; so we shall never have the opportunity of seeing what circumstances and their own passions would have driven those well-intentioned liberals to become.'

'But, hell!' Pete broke out, 'what do you expect people to do when they're attacked by the fascists? Sit down and let their throats be cut?'

'Of course not,' said Mr Propter. 'I expect them to fight. And the expectation is based on my previous knowledge of human behaviour. But the fact that people generally do react to that kind of situation in that kind of way doesn't prove that it's the best way of reacting. Experience makes me expect that they'll behave like that. But experience also makes me expect that, if they do behave like that, the results will be disastrous.'

'Well, how do you want us to act? Do you want us to sit still and do nothing?'

'Not nothing,' said Mr Propter. 'Merely something appropriate.'

'But what is appropriate?'

'Not war, anyhow. Not violent revolution. Nor yet politics, to any considerable extent, I should guess.'

'Then what?'

'That's what we've got to discover. The main lines are clear enough. But there's still a lot of work to be done on the practical details.'

Pete was not listening. His mind had gone back to that time in Aragon when life had seemed supremely significant. 'But those boys, back there in Spain,' he burst out. 'You didn't know them, Mr Propter. They were wonderful, really they were. Never mean to you, and brave, and loyal and ... and everything.' He wrestled with the inadequacies of his vocabulary, with the fear of making an exhibition of himself by talking big, like a highbrow. 'They weren't living for themselves, I can tell you that, Mr Propter.' He looked into the old man's face almost supplicatingly, as though imploring him to believe. 'They were living for something much bigger than themselves - like what you were talking about just now; you know, something more than just personal.'

'And what about Hitler's boys?' Mr Propter asked. 'What about Mussolini's boys? What about Stalin's boys? Do you suppose they're not just as brave, just as kind to one another, just as loyal to their cause and just as firmly convinced that it's the cause of justice, truth, freedom, right and honour?' He looked at Pete enquiringly; but Pete said nothing. 'The fact that people have a lot of virtues,' Mr Propter went on, 'doesn't prove anything about the goodness of their actions. You can have all the virtues - that's to say, all except the two that really matter, understanding and compassion - you can have all the others, I say, and be a thoroughly bad man. Indeed, you can't be really bad unless you do have most of the virtues. Look at Milton's Satan for example. Brave, strong, generous, loyal, prudent, temperate, self-sacrificing. And let's give the dictators the credit that's due to them; some of them are nearly as virtuous as Satan. Not quite, I admit, but nearly. That's why they can achieve so much evil.'

His elbows on his knees, Pete sat in silence, frowning. 'But that feeling,' he said at last. 'That feeling there was between us. You know - the friendship; only it was more than just ordinary friendship. And the feeling of being there all together - fighting for the same thing - and the thing being worth while - and then the danger, and the rain, and that awful cold at nights, and the heat in summer, and being thirsty, and even those lice and the dirt - share and share alike in everything bad or good - and knowing that tomorrow it might be your turn, or one of the other boys - your turn for the field hospital (and the chances were they wouldn't have enough anaesthetics, except maybe for an amputation or something like that), or your turn for the burial-party. All those feelings, Mr Propter - I just can't believe they didn't mean something.'

'They meant themselves,' said Mr Propter.

Jeremy saw the opportunity for a counter-attack and, with a promptitude unusual in him, immediately took it. 'Doesn't the same thing apply to your feelings about eternity, or whatever it is?' he asked.

'Of course it does,' said Mr Propter.

'Well, in that case, how can you claim any validity for it? The feeling means itself, and that's all there is to it.'

'It means itself,' Mr Propter agreed. 'But what precisely is this "itself"? In other words, what is the nature of the feeling?'

'Don't ask me,' said Jeremy with a shake of the head and a comically puzzled lift of the eyebrows. 'I really don't know.'

Mr Propter smiled. 'I know you don't want to know,' he said. 'And I won't ask you. I'll just state the facts. The feeling in question is a non-personal experience of timeless peace. Accordingly, non-personal, timelessness and peace are what it means. Now let's consider the feeling that Pete had been talking about. These are all personal feelings, evoked by temporal situations, and characterized by a sense of excitement. Intensification of the ego within the world of time and craving - that's what these feelings meant.'

'But you can't call self-sacrifice an intensification of the ego,' said Pete.

'I can and I do,' Mr Propter insisted. 'For the good reason that it generally is. Self-sacrifice to any but the highest cause is sacrifice to an ideal, which is simply a projection of the ego. What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part, one set of personal feelings and passions for another set - as when the feelings connected with money or sex are sacrificed in order that the ego may have the feelings of superiority, solidarity and hatred which are associated with patriotism, or any kind of political or religious fanaticism.'

Pete shook his head. 'Sometimes,' he said, with a smile of rueful perplexity, 'sometimes you almost talk like Dr Obispo. You know - cynically.'

Mr Propter laughed. 'It's good to be cynical,' he said. 'That is, if you know when to stop. Most of the things that we're all taught to respect and reverence - they don't deserve anything but cynicism. Take your own case. You've been taught to worship ideals like patriotism, social justice, science, romantic love. You've been told that such virtues as loyalty, temperance, courage and prudence are good in themselves, in any circumstances. You've been assured that self-sacrifice is always splendid and fine feelings invariably good. And it's all nonsense, all a pack of lies that people have made up in order to justify themselves in continuing to deny God and wallow in their own egotism. Unless you're steadily and unflaggingly cynical about the solemn twaddle that's talked by bishops and bankers and professors and politicians and all the rest of them, you're lost. Utterly lost. Doomed to perpetual imprisonment in your ego - doomed to be a personality in a world of personalities; and a world of personalities in this world, the world of greed and fear and hatred, of war and capitalism and dictatorship and slavery. Yes, you've got to be cynical, Pete. Specially cynical about all the actions and feelings you've been taught to suppose were good. Most of them are not good. They're merely evils which happen to be regarded as creditable. But, unfortunately, creditable evil is just as bad as discreditable evil. Scribes and Pharisees aren't any better, in the last analysis, than publicans and sinners. Indeed, they're often much worse. For several reasons. Being well thought of by others, they think well of themselves; and nothing so confirms an egotism as thinking well of oneself. In the next place, publicans and sinners are generally just human animals, without enough energy or self-control to do much harm. Whereas the Scribes and Pharisees have all the virtues, except the only two which count, and enough intelligence to understand everything except the real nature of the world. Publicans and sinners merely fornicate and overeat, and get drunk. The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word - these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.'

'So what it all boils down to,' Pete concluded in a tone of angry despair, 'is that there just isn't anything you can do. Is that it?'

'Yes and no,' said Mr Propter, in his quiet judicial way. 'On the strictly human level, the level of time and cravings, I should say that it's quite true: in the last resort, there isn't anything you can do.'

'But that's just defeatism!' Pete protested.

'Why is it defeatism to be realistic?'

'There must be something to do!'

'I see no "must" about it.'

'Then what about the reformers and all those people? If you're right, they're just wasting their time.'

'It depends what they think they're doing,' said Mr Propter. 'If they think they're just temporarily palliating particular distresses, if they see themselves as people engaged in laboriously deflecting evil from old channels into new and slightly different channels, then they can justifiably claim to be successful. But if they think they're making good appear where evil was before, why, then, all history clearly shows that they are wasting their time.'

'But why can't they make good appear where evil was before?'

'Why do we fall when we jump out of a tenth-story window? Because the nature of things happens to be such that we do fall. And the nature of things is such that, on the strictly human level of time and craving, you can't achieve anything but evil. If you choose to work exclusively on that level, and exclusively for the ideals and causes that are characteristic of it, then you're insane if you expect to transform evil into good. You're insane because experience should have shown you that, on that level, there doesn't happen to be any good. There are only different degrees and different kinds of evil.'

'Then what do you want people to do?'

'Don't talk as though it were all my fault,' said Mr Propter. 'I didn't invent the universe.'

'What ought they to do, then?'

'Well, if they want fresh varieties of evil, let them go on with what they're doing now. But if they want good, they'll have to change their tactics. And the encouraging thing,' Mr Propter added in another tone, 'the encouraging thing is that there are tactics which will produce good. We've seen that there's nothing to be done on the strictly human level - or rather there are millions of things to be done, only none of them will achieve any good. But there is something effective to be done on the levels where good actually exists. So you see, Pete, I'm not a defeatist. I'm a strategist. I believe that if a battle is to be fought, it had better be fought under conditions in which there's at least some chance of winning. I believe that, if you want the golden fleece, it's more sensible to go to the place where it exists than to rush round performing prodigies of valour in a country where all the fleeces happen to be coal-black.'

'Then where ought we to fight for good?'

'Where good is.'

'But where is it?'

'On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level ... well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don't object, of God; the level of the spirit - only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestation of good on the other two levels. For, insofar as we're human, we're obsessed with time, we're passionately concerned with our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood-pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.' Mr Proper waved his hand comprehensively. 'Craving even prevents us from seeing properly,' he went on. 'The harder we try to see, the graver our error of accommodation. And it's the same with bodily posture: the more we worry about doing the thing immediately ahead of us in time, the more we interfere with our correct body posture and the worse, in consequence, becomes the functioning of the entire organism. In a word, insofar as we're human beings, we prevent ourselves from realizing the physiological and instinctive good that we're capable of as animals. And, mutatis mutandis, the same thing is true in regard to the sphere above. Insofar as we're human beings, we prevent ourselves from realizing the spiritual and timeless good that we're capable of as potential inhabitants of eternity, as potential enjoyers of the beatific vision. We worry and crave ourselves out of the very possibility of transcending personality and knowing, intellectually at first and then by direct experience, the true nature of the world.'

Mr Propter was silent for a moment; then, with a sudden smile, 'Luckily,' he went on, 'most of us don't manage to behave like human beings all the time. We forget our wretched little egos and those horrible great projections of our egos in the ideal world - forget them and relapse for a while into harmless animality. The organism gets a chance to function according to its own laws; in other words, it gets a chance to realize such good as it's capable of. That's why we're as healthy and sane as we are. Even in great cities, as many as four persons out of five manage to go through life without having to be treated in a lunatic asylum. If we were consistently human, the percentage of mental cases would rise from twenty to a hundred. But fortunately most of us are incapable of consistency - the animal always resuming its rights. And to some people fairly frequently, perhaps occasionally to all, there come little flashes of illumination - momentary glimpses into the nature of the world as it is for a consciousness liberated from appetite and time, of the world as it might be if we didn't choose to deny God by being our personal selves. Those flashes come to us when we're off our guards; then craving and worry come rushing back and the light is eclipsed once more by our personality and its lunatic ideals, its criminal policies and plans.'

There was silence. The sun had gone. Behind the mountains to the west, a pale yellow light faded through green into a blue that deepened as it climbed. At the zenith, it was all night.

Pete sat quite still, staring into the dark, but still transparent sky above the northern peaks. That voice, so calm at first and then at the end so powerfully resonant, those words, now mercilessly critical of all the things to which he had given his allegiance, now charged with the half-comprehended promise of things incommensurably worthier of loyalty, had left him profoundly moved and at the same time perplexed and at a loss. Everything, he saw, would have to be thought out again, from the beginning - science, politics, perhaps even love, even Virginia. He was appalled by the prospect and yet, in another part of his being, attracted; he felt resentful at the thought of Mr Propter, but at the same time loved the disquieting old man; loved him for what he did and, above all, for what he so admirably and, in Pete's own experience, uniquely was - disinterestedly friendly, at once serene and powerful, gentle and strong, self-effacing and yet intensely there, more present, so to speak, radiating more life than anyone else.

Jeremy Pordage had also found himself taking an interest in what the old man said, had even, like Pete, experienced the stirrings of a certain disquiet - a disquiet none the less disquieting for having stirred in him before. The substance of what Mr Propter had said was familiar to him. For, of course, he had read all the significant books on the subject - would have thought himself barbarously uneducated if he hadn't - had read Sankara and Eckhart, the Pali texts and John of the Cross, Charles de Condran and the Bardo, the Patanjali and the Pseudo-Dionysius. He had read them and been moved by them into wondering whether he oughtn't to do something about them; and, because he had been moved in this way, he had taken the most elaborate pains to make fun of them, not only to other people, but also and above all to himself. 'You've never bought your ticket to Athens,' the man had said - damn his eyes! Why did he want to go putting these things over on one? All one asked was to be left in peace, to take things as they came. Things as they came - one's books, one's little articles, and Lady Fredegond's ear-trumpet, and Palestrina, and steak-and-kidney pudding at the Reform, and Mae and Doris. Which reminded him that today was Friday; if he were in England it would be his afternoon at the flat in Maida Vale. Deliberately he turned his attention away from Mr Propter and thought instead of those alternate Friday afternoons; of the pink lampshades; the smell of talcum powder and perspiration; the Trojan women, as he called them because they worked so hard, in their kimonos from Marks and Spencer's; the framed reproductions of pictures by Poynter and Alma Tadema (delicious irony, that works which the Victorians had regarded as art should have come to serve, a generation later, as pornography in a trollop's bedroom!); and, finally, the erotic routine, so matter-of-factly sordid, so conscientiously and professionally low, with a lowness and a sordidness that constituted, for Jeremy, their greatest charm, that he prized more highly than any amount of moonlight and romance, any number of lyrics and Liebestods. Infinite squalor in a little room! It was the apotheosis of refinement, the logical conclusion of good taste.