CHAPTER XIII
Made my second speech
yesterday night. Without serious
nervousness. It's easy enough,
once you've made up your mind that it doesn't matter if you make a fool of
yourself. But it's depressing. There's a sense in which five hundred people
in a hall aren't concrete. One's talking
to a collective noun, an abstraction, not to a set of individuals. Only those already partially or completely
convinced of what you're saying even want to understand you. The rest are invincibly ignorant. In private conversation, you could be certain
of getting your man to make at least a grudging effort to understand you. The fact that there's an audience confirms
the not-understander in his incomprehension. Particularly if he can ask
questions after the address. Some
of the reasons for this are obvious.
Just getting up and being looked at is a pleasure – in many cases,
piercing to the point of pain. Excruciating orgasms of self-assertion. Pleasure is heightened if the question is
hostile. Hostility is a declaration of
personal independence. Makes it clear at the same time that it's only an accident that the
questioner isn't on the platform himself – accident or else, of course,
deliberate plot on the part of ruffians who want to keep him down. Interruptions and questions are generally of
course quite irrelevant. Hecklers (like
the rest of us) live in their own private world, make
no effort to enter other people's worlds.
Most arguments in public are at cross-purposes and in different
languages – without interpreters.
Mark
was at the meeting, and afterwards, in my rooms, took pleasure in intensifying
my depression.
'Might
as well go and talk to cows in a field.'
The temptation to agree with him was strong. All my old habits of thinking, living,
feeling impel me towards agreement. A
senseless world, where nothing whatever can be done – how satisfactory! One can go off and (seeing that there's
nothing else to do) compile one's treatise on sociology – the science of human
senselessness. With Mark last nigh I
caught myself taking intense pleasure in commenting on the imbecility of my
audience and human beings at large.
Caught and checked myself. Reflecting that seeds had been sown, that if only one were to germinate,
it would have been worthwhile to hold the meeting. Worthwhile even if none were to germinate –
for my own sake, as an exercise, a training for doing
better next time.
I
didn't say all this. Merely stopped
talking and, I suppose, changed my expression.
Mark, who notices everything, began to laugh. Foresaw the time when I'd preface every
mention of a person or a group with the adjective 'dear.' 'The dear Communists,' 'the
dear armament makers,' 'dear General Goering.'
I
laughed – for he was comic in his best savage manner. But, after all, if you had enough love and
goodness, you could be sure of evoking some measure of answering love and
goodness from almost everyone you came in contact with – whoever he or she
might be. And in that case almost
everyone would really be 'dear.' At
present, most people seem more or less imbecile or odious; the fault is at
least as much in oneself as in them.
Put in four hours this morning at working
up my notes. Extraordinary
pleasure! How easily one could slip back
into uninterrupted scholarship and idea-mongering! In that 'higher Life' which is simply death
without tears. Peace, irresponsibility –
all the delights of death here and now.
In the past, you had to go into a monastery to find them. You paid for the pleasures of death with
obedience, poverty, chastity. Now you
can have them gratis and in the ordinary world.
Death completely without tears. Death with smiles, with
nobody to bully you. Scholars,
philosophers, men of science – conventionally supposed to be unpractical. But what other class of men has succeeded in
getting the world to accept it and (more astonishing) go on accepting it as its
own valuation? Kings have lost their
divine right, plutocrats look as though they were going to lose theirs. But Higher Lifers continue to be labelled as superior.
It's the fruit of persistence.
Persistently paying compliments to themselves,
persistently disparaging other people. Year in, year out, for the last sixty centuries. We're High, you're
Low; we're of the Spirit, you're of the World.
Again and again, like Pears Soap.
It's been accepted, now, as an axiom.
But, in fact, the Higher Life is merely the better
death-substitute. A
more complete escape from the responsibilities of living with alcohol or morphia or addiction to sex or property. Booze and dope destroy health. Sooner or later sex addicts get involved in
responsibilities. Property addicts can
never get all the stamps, Chinese vases, houses, varieties of lilies or whatever
it may be, that they want. Their escape
is a torment of Tantalus. Whereas the
Higher lifer escapes into a world where there's no risk to health and the
minimum of responsibilities and tortures.
A world, what's more, that tradition regards as actually superior to the
world of responsible living – higher.
The Higher Shirker can fairly wallow in his good conscience. For how easy to find in the life of
scholarship and research equivalents for all the moral virtues! Some, of course, are not equivalent, but
identical: perseverance, patience, self-forgetfulness and the like. Goods means to ends that
may be bad. You can work hard and
whole-heartedly at anything – from atomic physics to forgery and
white-slaving. The rest are ethical
virtues transposed into the mental key. Chastity of artistic and mathematical form. Purity of scientific
research. Courageousness
of thought. Intellectual
humility before the facts.
All the cardinal virtues in fancy dress. The Higher Lifers come to think of themselves
as saints – saints of art and science and scholarship. A purely figurative and
metaphorical sanctity taken au pied de la lettre.
'Blessed
are the poor in spirit.' The Higher
Lifer even has equivalents for spiritual poverty. As a man of science, he tries to keep himself
unbiased by his interests and prejudices.
But that's not all. Ethical
poverty of spirit entails taking no thought for the morrow, letting the dead
bury their dead, losing one's life to gain it.
The Higher Life can make parodies of these renunciations. I know; for I made them and actually took
credit to myself for having made them.
You live continuously and responsibly only in the other, Higher world. In
this, you detach yourself from your past; you refuse to commit yourself in the
future; you have no convictions, but live moment by moment; you renounce your
own identity, except as a Higher Lifer, and become just the succession of your
states. A more than
Franciscan destitution. Which can
be combined, however, with more than Napoleonic
exultations in imperialism. I used to
think I had no will to power. Now I
perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown
province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come
apart. Bullying
recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a
dictator without any risks and responsibilities.