CHAPTER
NINE
Martin Osbourne glanced
down at his wristwatch and noted it was
"Yes, I didn't think Anthony would come somehow,"
admitted Wilder, briefly turning his head in deferential acknowledgement of his
senior colleague. "He didn't seem
particularly enthusiastic about the idea, when I put it to him this
morning. It's as though he thinks we're
all secretly against him."
"I suppose he feels too ashamed of himself for getting the
sack," conjectured Osbourne, smiling vaguely. "I don't think Webb has fired more than
a handful of people in his entire managerial career, at least not among the
'Arts Monthly' correspondents. Thus Tony
is the latest victim of a fairly tolerant regime."
"But the first to leave for other than purely professional
reasons," declared Wilder, before taking a further sip of the sherry he
was in the habit of drinking on Thursday evenings - usually, though not
invariably, compliments of his magnanimous host.
"I should think that must be something of an embarrassment
to him," Osbourne suggested.
"All the same, he didn't give old Webb much alternative, did
he? I mean, what would you have done in
Webbo's position?"
Wilder gently shrugged his shoulders and emitted a faint sigh of
exasperation. "I guess we ought to
be thankful that we didn't get the push as well," he said. "After all, we lied to him too, didn't
we?"
Osbourne had to smile.
"Yeah, but not to the same extent as Tony, since we merely told
small lies," he averred, before finishing off the wine in his glass and smacking
his lips in moderate appreciation of its vinegary tang, which was quite to his
taste. "And my lie was smaller than
yours," he added, with a gentle laugh.
"Not a lot smaller," retorted Wilder, recalling to
mind his unnerving experiences of Monday morning, when he denied having gone to
Hampstead when Webb had asked him, point-blank, whether he'd been there the
previous Friday. A stupid denial, of
course, since Webb wouldn't have asked him had he not already known something
to the contrary! Nevertheless, a denial
which shame and fear had forced upon him on the spur-of-the-moment. And when the editor went on to mention a
telephone call from Mr Tonks, giving information about an unexpected visitor by
name of Neil Wilder, how that shame and fear had increased! It was obvious to Neil, from then on, that
lying wouldn't do him any good, in consequence of which he felt obliged to
reveal everything he knew about the matter, including, to Osbourne's detriment,
the meeting he had conducted with Keating at the senior sub-editor's Kensington
flat on the Thursday evening. Not that
Osbourne was threatened with dismissal on his account. It was just rather embarrassing for him to
subsequently learn that Webb knew he had been lying about Wilder's whereabouts
at the time.
There was a short pause while Wilder sipped some more sherry and
then, by way of elaborating on his last utterance, said: "Though I still
regret not having lied to Webb about my presence at your flat. It might have been more to your advantage had
I done so."
"Yes," conceded Osbourne, offering his colleague a wry
smile. "It might at least have
spared me the guilty feelings I had each time circumstances obliged me to enter
Webb's bloody office. But, seriously,
the only thing that would have got you the sack would've been a phone call to
Tony after Webb had expressly forbidden you to contact him."
Wilder nodded his journalistic head in sage agreement. "Yeah, I know that only too well!"
he admitted. "Though, entre nous, I was almost on the
verge of disobeying orders, once or twice on Monday evening, and committing
professional suicide, so to speak.
Frankly, I still regret not having warned Tony of Webb's intentions,
since we were quite close as colleagues go.
But, there again, I suppose that even if I had phoned him and advised
him not to lie about anything on Tuesday morning, he would still have got the
sack for all the trouble he caused Tonks, not to mention his behaviour with the
composer's delectable daughter."
"Without a doubt!" confirmed Osbourne, lighting
himself a slender cigar with the aid of a small match. "Not to mention his endeavour to enlist
you into his clandestine services. So
it's just as well you did what Webb wanted.
Otherwise there would have been two sackings instead of one. And a rather wasteful sacking in your
case!"
Wilder sagely nodded in professional agreement, before
declaring: "Well, I'll be relieved, in a way, to see the back of Tony
tomorrow, insofar as his presence at work makes me feel somewhat guilty about
what happened."
"Has he given you any indication of what he intends doing
after he leaves?" asked Osbourne, extinguishing his match.
"Only that he hopes to take a short trip abroad somewhere
and continue with his latest novel," declared Wilder, smiling ruefully. "But I suspect he'll take up freelance
journalism when he returns. That seems
the most plausible supposition, anyway."
"Yes, I suppose so," agreed Osbourne. "By the way, David, you wouldn't be
interested in joining the illustrious staff of 'Arts Monthly' as a junior
correspondent, by any chance?"
The tall figure of David Turner had just crossed the room and
was now standing in front of the two seated men. Having grown weary of a conversation he had
been holding with Andrew Hunt on the subject of UFOs and their relationship
with the spirit world, about which, in any case, he was less well-informed, the
journalist had excused himself on the pretext of needing to take a leak and,
following his return from the toilet, had decided to pay the other two 'Arts
Monthly' representatives a brief visit.
Meanwhile Hunt had barged his way into a conversation between
Michael Haslam, the artist, and Stuart Harvey, the photographer, on the nature
of God, and was doing his best to impress upon them the necessity of knowing
how to differentiate true divinity from strong divinity, the immanent deity
from the so-called transcendent deity which
was presumed to exist independently of man, as 'Creator of the Universe'
and other such variations on a Cosmic theme.
He proceeded, from a higher mystical angle, to explain how atheism was
nothing less than loss of faith in the deity that had traditionally served as
God for the masses in what might be termed lower, or primitive, religion. The fact, however, that true divinity was
immanent meant that, from the vantage-point of higher, or advanced, religion,
atheism was irrelevant, since immanent deity never died but continued to exist
within the upper, or superconscious, part of the psyche for ever. As Schopenhauer had contended, there was a
religion for the Many and a religion for the Few, though the latter wasn't so
much academic philosophy as loyalty to true divinity. Academic philosophy was all very well, but it
could soon prove an obstacle on the path of personal salvation if pursued too
ardently. For the truth of God-within
had nothing to do with the many secular truths in which academic philosophy
ordinarily specialized, and could be obliterated by them if the desire to gain
power by use of such rational truths became too obsessive. "Take Nietzsche, for instance,"
Hunt went on, warming to the challenge of his convictions, "could anyone
have been further removed from the inner deity than him? And yet he was as ardent a truth-seeker as
ever lived. But a truth-seeker, alas,
who ignored the one essential truth in the fixity of his fight against
Christianity. Had he turned, once in a
while, to God-within, he might not have taken the traditional deity quite so
seriously! Alas, he seems not to have
been aware that the deity he spent so much time proclaiming the death of was a
grave obstacle on the path of his discovering the truth which ultimately
mattered!"
"That may be," conceded Haslam with ill-disguised
impatience, "but your fixity on inner deity is just as much an obstacle to
your discovering the whole of God as Nietzsche's obsession with popular
religion was an obstacle to his discovering a part of Him. For God, if one must use such an outmoded and
ambiguous term, is manifested as much in the natural world as in the supernatural
one, and cannot be considered in His entirety in either context. A spiritual divinity is no closer to being
the whole God than a material one. If
you acknowledge the spiritual manifestation of God you're merely acknowledging
half of Him, and your concept of divinity is accordingly apt to be
lopsided. And the same is true of the
material manifestation of God in nature.
From what you've told me in the past about Nicholas Webb's predilection
for Elementalism, it would seem that he's no closer to acknowledging God in His
entirety than you, since he recognizes only what John Cowper Powys has
philosophically taught him to recognize and is all-too-ready, in consequence,
to equate God with nature by indulging in a modern version of pantheism. Now you, with your Eastern-inspired Aldous
Huxley scholarship, are only too ready to equate God with the Clear Light of
the Void and overlook His body altogether!
But the truth would seem to lie midway between Powys and Huxley, so that
God can be regarded, in His entirety, as possessing both body and
spirit, like Christ. After all, the
fundamental nature of life is dualistic, and what applies to life must surely
apply to God. It would be a fine thing
if, instead of acknowledging man for the mind-body relationship he is, we chose
to view him as a creature either all mind or, worse still, all body, and then
proceeded to treat him in accordance with our lopsided assessment, so that, in
the one case, he wasn't accredited with an ability to walk and, in the other case,
he wasn't accredited with an ability to think.
You can be pretty sure that, in a very short space of time, he would
entirely cease to exist! And yet, what applies to man surely applies no less to
God, so that if you persist in regarding Him simply as a mind or simply as a
body, you not only misrepresent Him but endanger His very existence, since too
much attention to the one aspect of His being tends to diminish the other and,
eventually, may even do away with it altogether. In short, one must learn how to modulate
between Powys and Huxley, not take either of them for the whole truth! For, in the final analysis, God-without is
just as entitled to our acknowledgement as God-within, and shouldn't be treated
as something having merely a secular existence.
After you've died you might well, as mystics generally believe, find
yourself experiencing the Clear Light.
But, whilst you're alive on this earth, you would be well advised to
make the most of God-without, and not try to live too exclusively in the other
world - one which would seem to lie beyond nature altogether."
"That sounds all very well on a theoretical plane,"
rejoined Hunt swiftly, his oval countenance betraying a degree of embarrassment
at, not to say impatience with, the artist's conventionally dualistic
viewpoint, which seemed to him somewhat too Christian and even bourgeois in its insistence on a God-without,
"but when you live in a big city, as I do, then the temptation to turn to
God-within on a more or less exclusive basis is all-too-real, in view of the
comparative lack of God-without. Can you
be surprised that I should acknowledge only the spirit of God when there is so
little of His body, so little nature, in evidence there; when, on the contrary,
one is confronted every day by so many thousands if not millions of cars,
taxis, buses, lorries, shops, houses, factories, offices, streets, etc. - in
short, by things that weren't fashioned by God but by man?"
"No, I can't be surprised," Haslam admitted, grimacing
painfully. "For the predominance of
man over nature in any big city does indeed make it difficult to give
sufficient attention to God-without. But
that's no reason for you to suppose that God-within is the whole of God, any
more than it would be a reason for you to imagine that nature, in all its
incredible diversity, was the whole of Him if you lived in the country, where
the inventions of man are comparatively scarce.
Now the fact that city life is a predominantly man-made or artificial thing
is no reason, either, for you to suppose it's exclusively so. For there are always manifestations of nature
to be found in it, including the great expanse of sky over our heads and the
air, polluted though it be, which we habitually breathe. Thus whilst I can sympathize with the fact
that city life may induce you to concentrate on your mystical self-realization,
I can't see that you should thereby be led to ignore or belittle
God-without. You may be at a
disadvantage compared with someone who lives in the country, but, even so, you
can always find a park or a woods or even a garden where it's still possible to
establish some contact with nature and thus, implicitly, with God-without, the
creator of nature."
Andrew Hunt laughed derisively.
The small park near where he lived was almost invariably overcrowded
with dogs, kids, and expletive-prone adults when the weather encouraged one to
visit it, which frankly wasn't all that often, and had an effect of depressing
rather than impressing or cheering one.
Had it been a bit bigger, things might have been otherwise. Unfortunately, the city hemmed it in on all
sides, was visible from all sides and, no less depressingly, was all too
audible. Walking about on grass which
had been walked about on too often, looking at flowers which had absorbed a
little too much traffic pollution and were, in consequence, somewhat atrophied
and virtually devoid of scent, sitting on pigeon-stained benches which
threatened to collapse under one, leaning against tree trunks which bore the
marks of malicious penknives - all this and so much more had long ago
disillusioned him with the cult of nature-worship, and induced him to turn
within instead.
"I have a theory, actually, for the decline of faith in God
conceived from a traditional angle," declared Harvey, feeling it was about
time he chimed-in at the expense of Andrew Hunt who, though less bigoted
than Haslam in some respects, was no
less irksome to him overall.
"Pray, tell us," quipped Haslam, his lips glistening
with the sherry he had just imbibed.
"I'm always interested in your theories - good, bad, or plain
indifferent!"
"Well, I cannot believe, for instance, that the growth of
atheism, this century, is simply attributable to the ongoing influence of men
like Voltaire, Diderot, Nietzsche, Marx, or anyone else of a similar
unbelieving stamp," opined the photographer, drawing himself up to his
full height, which was still a good way short of both Haslam and Hunt, and
probably didn't have anything like the effect desired. "No, the chief cause of contemporary atheism,
to my mind, was the Industrial Revolution, back in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, and its subsequent transformation of society into the
predominantly urbanized affair we see around us. For any genuine religious attitude to life is
founded upon gratitude to God, if you like, for the beauty and splendour of the
natural world, a Thoreauesque or Whitmanesque gratitude for the privilege of
being born into such a magnificent world as manifested by almighty nature. Admittedly, one has to cultivate this world
to some extent, to keep it within certain bounds. Even so, most of its beauty is intrinsic, not
man-made. Now in a large modern city, on
the other hand, there are all too many things which are anything but beautiful
and which engender, in consequence of their plainness or ugliness or
dangerousness or whatever, not gratitude but defiance, despair, dejection,
rejection - call it what you like. In
the city one encounters so much traffic, traffic noise, pollution, congestion,
negative attitudes, together with so many road signs, advertisements,
monuments, walls, etc., that gratitude to God for His creations, which are
natural, is hardly the most logical response.
On the contrary, one is made predominantly conscious of man's creations,
in consequence of which a society develops around man instead of God or nature
or whatever else you'd like to call that which proceeds from a non-human source
- a society, in short, which is largely and effectively atheistic in its
humanistic materialism.
Michael Haslam's blue eyes shone with what appeared to be
unprecedented admiration for the photographer's theory, which was by no means
as ridiculous as he had half-expected, even though it tended to belittle the
works of man and only confirmed what Hunt had been saying. "The danger here," he ventured to
retort, drawing himself up to his full height, as though in sympathetic
response to his intellectual antagonist, "is that one becomes only too
ready to equate the works of man with the Devil - with ugliness instead of
beauty. Yet man is just as capable of
producing beauty as God, as can be verified by a majority of the paintings in
the National Gallery, with their mostly Catholic associations. Surely you realize that?"
"Of course!" replied the stocky Scot, more than a wee
bit peeved at Haslam's arrogant assumption.
"I didn't for one moment suggest that everything in the city was
ugly or evil. But you can't deny that a
lot of things there are such, or that the world of man doesn't predominate over
nature. And this is precisely why we get
humanism instead of Christianity, concern with the here and now rather than
with the Beyond. Indeed, I'd go so far
as to say that, even these days, rural-dwellers are generally less humanistic
and correspondingly more religious, in their overall attitude to life, than a
majority of urban-dwellers who, of necessity, live under the dominion of
man. It isn't for nothing that the
Labour movement has always failed to make real headway with agricultural
labourers, who have never thought too highly of socialism, the proletarian
counterpart to the bourgeoisie's liberal humanism. But let's not criticize either side for an
attitude which is, after all, virtually inevitable, under the influence of
their respective environments. It isn't
for us to expect the impossible, to expect a majority of human beings who
grew-up under nature's influence to be intrinsically atheistic or, conversely,
a majority of those who grew-up in the city to be intrinsically theistic. But, these days, urban-dwellers constitute by
far the larger percentage of the total population, and thereby condition what
has come to be regarded as the attitude of the age, with its social/liberal Zeitgeist. So let's not deceive ourselves that the fall
of God isn't directly attributable to the rise of man. For all your Nietzsches and Bertrand Russells
are merely a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, a symptom of the modern
age, and not a disembodied voice 'crying in the wilderness'."
Andrew Hunt raised his brows in sceptical incredulity. If what the photographer said was true, why
had he managed to find God in spite of the obstacles man had chosen to put in
his way? Wasn't the Clear Light more
important than any transcendent deity who followed from a closeness to nature
and tended to induce worship and, as Harvey had said, gratitude rather than
self-realization? Wasn't his mystical
affiliation with immanent deity of a higher and altogether truer order than the
worshipful enslavements of traditional religion, with their subservience to
autocratic power, as personified by the hideous concept of 'the Almighty' - an
anthropomorphic extrapolation, in all monotheistic probability, from the most
prominent star in the Galaxy, an all-powerful star about which millions of smaller
and weaker stars, including the sun, permanently revolved? Surely neither of the two men in front of him
would be able to deny that?
"From the individual's point of view, the mystical
experience may well be of more intrinsic value," conceded Harvey, turning
a relatively gentle pair of eyes on the junior sub-editor of 'Arts
Monthly'. "But where the broad
masses are concerned, the traditional concept of a transcendent deity was
inescapable, given their comparative backwardness and traditional dependence on
autocratic power, their worship of strength.
Thus while you, as a more evolved individual, may prefer the latter,
there is no justification for assuming the former to be either irrelevant or
misguided. Au contraire, you
should realize that without the traditional concept of God, there would be no
mystical experience at all, since the latter evolved, through Christ and
such-like avatars, out of the former.
Now while Christ appertains to humanism, and thus effectively to the
worship of man by man, He doesn't signify a complete mystical break with the
Creator so much as an extrapolation from and attenuation of outer divinity
which, these days, is broadly compatible with liberal democratic criteria. Naturally, the Holy Spirit of inner divinity
is still there to be realized. But if
you think that Christians should desert their rightful place in life and
take-up with Transcendental Meditation instead, then I can only conclude you to
be very much mistaken! They have a
prayerful duty to wait upon the Second Coming and the possibility of a more
complete salvation than has hitherto obtained, not convert to Buddhism or
Hinduism or some other Oriental religion, in pursuit of short-term gain."
Frankly, Andrew Hunt was quite staggered by this opinion! He hadn't expected such a lecture from Stuart
Harvey, who always struck him as being both heathen and secular in his attitude
to life, and not at all disposed to taking Christianity, or its prayerful
waiting, particularly seriously. Before
he could launch himself into a defence of meditation at the expense of prayer,
however, Haslam had returned to his earlier theme about the Clear Light being
only half of God, and then went on to suggest that mystics who lived in more
rural times must have possessed a distinct spiritual advantage over those of us
who now spent most of our lives cooped-up in the city and refused or were
unable, in consequence, to acknowledge God in nature. "And the same doubtless applies to those
of your contemporaries," he continued, "who live in the country and
aren't entirely pantheistic. Granted the
requisite enlightenment, they should be able to alternate between God-without
and God-within without undue difficulty."
He congratulated himself, with the aid of a gruff laugh, for his verbal
acrobatics, and then proceeded to expatiate on what he took to be the
imbecility of those who made it a policy to preach universal meditation as a
means by which contemporary society could rejuvenate and redirect itself to
more fruitful goals.
At this point Andrew Hunt, who always drank less than everyone
else and was accordingly in a less inebriated state-of-mind, vehemently
protested that such a policy was by no means imbecile, even granted the fact
that a majority of people weren't destined to realize the Godhead, at present,
but would have to settle for something less.
"After all, even a few minutes' meditation a day is better than
none at all," he asseverated, addressing himself exclusively to the
artist, "and would almost certainly result, if everyone could be induced
to practice it, in the world becoming a saner, wiser, healthier, and more
peaceful place. Admittedly, I'm not,
through force of professional and social circumstances, a full-blown bona fide
mystic. But I do know, from personal
experience, that such meditation as I have managed every day has
made me a better person than I would otherwise be. And the same, I suspect, would apply to
anyone else."
Michael Haslam shook his head in unabashed disapproval of an
attitude he had heard so many times in life that it was now virtually anathema
to him. If only more people could be got
to do this, if only more people could be got to do that, everything would be
all right with the world. All that was
needed, apparently, was a crusade for universal meditation, enlightenment,
salvation, peace, etc., according to the presumed requirements of the
moment. If we could all be induced to
act the same way, human diversity would be stamped out and there would be no
cause for anyone to worry about what anyone else was doing. It was the perennial solution, the one
solution which never seemed to desert the world's stage. And yet, how fatuous and unspeakably naive! How lacking in proper insight into human
beings! Could one really pretend that
this universal remedy, this perennial panacea, should be applied to everyone
without distinction, without regard, that is to say, to their temperamental or
physiological dispositions? Really, how
ignorant people could sometimes be!
"I suppose you aren't particularly familiar with W.H.
Sheldon's Varieties
of Human Physique or Varieties of Temperament" he murmured, after a
short but anguished pause.
"No, I'm not actually," confessed Hunt in a tone of
voice designed to emphasize the irrelevance of Haslam's supposition.
"Neither am I for that matter," admitted Harvey, with
an uncharacteristically apologetic smile.
"Well, I don't intend to convey the entire contents of
these two seminal works of twentieth-century psychology to you," Haslam
somewhat pompously declared. "But I
do think it expedient to draw your attention to the fact that what may suit one
temperament and physique may be quite unsuitable, not to say detrimental, to
another, so that any regimen based on the fatuous supposition that all men are
the same and have identical or similar wants can only be doomed to
failure. Sheldon distinguishes, you may
be interested to learn, between three basic physiological types of human being,
viz. the fat, the muscular, and the thin, to use non-technical language, and
these three basic types are equated with corresponding temperamental or
psychological predilections. One is what
one is, in short, because one's build necessitates it, because one is subject
to a given pattern of physiological influence that, to varying extents, determines
one's psychology. Now, I ask you, how
can someone who, on account of his build, isn't cut-out for a given
philosophical or moral attitude to life, say quietism, possibly be expected to
indulge it to the same extent and with similar success as someone whose build is
compatible with such an attitude? How,
for instance, can a medium-built muscular person, with a correspondingly
aggressive temperament, be expected to regularly indulge in the lifestyle of
someone with a predominantly cerebral temperament derived from a thin
physique? Similarly, how can a fat, gut
person, with a correspondingly genial or ingratiating temperament, be expected
to emulate either of the other two types, and thus discard or overcome himself?"
"I really don't see what you're driving at," protested
Hunt peevishly, an expression of bewilderment animating his pallid countenance
in the face of what seemed to him like a dangerously deterministic - and
therefore materialistic - philosophy.
"Precisely the crass imbecility of anyone who imagines that
these physiological and temperamental differences between people are irrelevant
to an understanding of the world as it is and must, of necessity, continue to
be!" Haslam fairly bellowed from a throat specifically designed to
accommodate a muscular physique.
"If you imagine you can turn a Napoleon Bonaparte into a Thomas
Traherne simply by getting him to meditate every day, then you're grossly
mistaken! And, by a similar token, you'd
be no less mistaken to imagine that a Thomas Traherne or a William Law could be
turned into a Napoleon Bonaparte or, for that matter, an Oliver Cromwell with
the requisite training in the martial arts!
The fact that some people meditate and discover God in themselves doesn't
mean that everyone else is wrong to do what they do instead."
"Not wrong?" thundered Hunt, his eyebrows severely
arched in radical disbelief. "Do
you mean to tell me that Napoleon Bonaparte and his ilk were right to engage
France and half of Europe in battle after bloody battle of revolutionary
war?"
"From the viewpoint of type, I most certainly do,"
Haslam firmly replied, "insofar as Bonaparte acted in a way one might
expect such a man to act. If anyone is
wrong it's you for expecting people like that to behave in a manner more suited
to someone like yourself, for expecting them to transcend their physiological
and temperamental coercions."
"But that's preposterous!" the junior sub-editor of
'Arts Monthly' vigorously objected.
"How can you possibly condone war and violence, greed and hate? Of course they were wrong!"
"Only to the extent that they indulged in evil in a world
where it's part of the overall set-up of things and can't be entirely
eradicated," Haslam countered philosophically. "If you wish to dream of a time when,
through the efforts of the spiritual masters alone, the earth will be populated
with people who know only good and never indulge in war or violence or greed or
hate or anything else unequivocally evil, that's your affair.
But if you decide to equate such a dream with reality and sincerely
believe it can actually come about, then you aren't merely mistaken; you
immediately take your place alongside the greatest idiosyncratic idiots of the
age! For in a world where good thrives
upon evil and vice versa, it stands to reason that a one-sided concept of life
is fundamentally perverse. Even your
tendency to equate God with the Clear Light of the Void, instead of seeing that
as simply a part of Him, is indicative of a singularly partial
perspective. Now if it suits you,
fine! Probably your thin build has
something to do with it. But that's no
reason for you to assume it should suit everyone else as well! There's certainly no one path for everyone to
follow, and the philosophy of resignation from life propounded by Schopenhauer
is, objectively considered, no closer to being the right path for everyone than
Nietzsche's amor
fati."
"No closer to being the right path?" echoed Hunt in
stunned amazement. "Are you
mad?"
Michael Haslam smiled dismissively. "Perhaps I should have said it's
probably the right path for those of a similar temperamental and physiological
disposition to Schopenhauer," he remarked, reminding them of his
Sheldonian classifications. "A
path, clearly, for which Nietzsche wasn't intended, and not solely on
biological grounds, but doubtless on societal and circumstantial grounds as
well. Now what applies to them applies
no less to the dissimilarity of outlook between, say, Aldous Huxley and Oswald
Spengler, where the physiological differences are paralleled by appropriately
antithetical temperamental ones. To a
fair extent Huxley was a spiritual continuation of Schopenhauer, and Spengler a
spiritual continuation of Nietzsche.
Now, so far as you're concerned, it might be apposite to see God in the
one camp and the Devil in the other. But
insofar as one can be objectively impartial about such matters, one has to
conclude that both sides were correct within the limited boundary of their
respective types. Where they'd be
mistaken would have been in assuming that what's right for them, their
particular type, was right for the other type as well. But a philosophy suited to an intelligent
ectomorph, or thin man, is no closer to being the right philosophy for an intelligent
mesamorph, or medium-built man, than it necessarily would be for an intelligent
endomorph, or fat man. You have to bear
in mind the physiological and corresponding temperamental differences between
people, before jumping to conclusions about what they should or shouldn't be
doing.... Which is something that you, apparently, haven't always done,
Andy."
Andrew Hunt shook his head in stubborn disagreement and stared
ruefully at the dark-green carpet upon which they were all standing. He couldn't bear to hear that what he had
taken to be The Way was simply relative to himself, his type. True, he had long ago come to realize that
not everyone was qualified to experience the Godhead, that 'Many were called
but few chosen', etc. But he had never
before equated the Few with any one type, preferring, instead, to believe it
was a completely open matter - one decided by individual choice rather than
biological coercion. And yet, if what
Haslam had said was true, how could one avoid equating individual choice with
biological coercion? How could one avoid
attributing the former to the latter?
Evidently, it wasn't as open a matter as he had once thought! "But aren't you over-generalizing when
you attribute a specific lifestyle to a given type of person?" he finally
retorted. "After all, not everyone
who meditates is thin, any more than everyone who starts and wages war is
muscular. Take Hitler, for
instance. Wasn't he fundamentally a thin
man? And yet he caused even more trouble
in the world than Bonaparte. More
trouble, I dare say, than both Mussolini and Stalin put together."
"Yes, I suppose that can't be too far off the mark,"
conceded Haslam offhandedly, as he allowed a faintly ironic smile to play about
his lips. "Though I think you'd
have to admit that Hitler was the exception to the rule - as is borne out, in
some measure, by a comparison with the others you mentioned. The rule for dictators and tyrants would
appear to be mesamorphy, the Spenglerian muscular ideal. But occasionally one finds an ectomorph or an
endomorph in the dictatorial driving-seat and they, being exceptions, are apt
to be worse, if anything, than the rule!
Naturally, there are cases where the Sheldonian classifications have to
be taken cum
grano salis, even with a considerable pinch of proverbial salt. For there are always exceptions to
anything. But if you mean to tell me
that such classifications aren't generally applicable to the nature of their
subjects, then you're certainly deceiving yourself - just as you're deceiving
yourself when you contend that everyone should follow the same path, and that
Nietzsche's and Spengler's dynamic attitudes to life are of an inferior nature,
per se, to the passive stance advocated by Schopenhauer and Huxley. Inferior they may seem to you and your
type. But as for those to whom they
apply - that I very much doubt!"
There then ensued a short but strained silence before Harvey
good-naturedly remarked: "Yes, I take your point, Mike." And, turning to the principal recipient of
the artist's lecture, he added: "Being a lean man, Andrew, you tend to
forget or conveniently ignore the fact that there are men in this world who
rejoice in their bodily strength and use every opportunity they can find to
show it off."
"That's not quite true," protested Hunt, offering the
stocky photographer a thin smile.
"One is rarely given an opportunity to ignore that fact!"
"Well, perhaps not," conceded Harvey. "But you are loathe, all the same, to
admit that they're perfectly justified in behaving the way they do."
"Yes, you'd certainly like to convert us to your way of
thinking if you could," Haslam declared, "and make us sacrifice our
...” here he flexed the muscles of his right arm and bellowed "...
mesamorphic potentialities!" - an outburst which paved the way for an explosion
of derisory laughter from both Hunt and Harvey, who were rather more
ectomorphic and endomorphic respectively.
Across the far side of the room, a rather bewildered and
intoxicated version of Martin Osbourne glanced-up from the middle pages of the
September edition of 'Arts Monthly' and mumbled something to Wilder about the
strange and pretentious nature of proceedings between the other group.
"But they're always a little weird, aren't they?"
David Turner elected to reply, deputizing for the somnolent correspondent who,
due to the large quantity of sherry imbibed, was hardly in a fit state-of-mind
to form a rational or objective judgement.
"How differently booze affects different people," he
meditatively added.
"Quite so!" agreed Osbourne, scarcely able to focus
his own vision on the trio in question.
"One ought perhaps to ration it more in future."
"Preferably after we've drunk our fill of it,"
suggested Turner, leaning forwards over the back of the settee and staring down
at the magazine in Osbourne's hands.
"Quite!" confirmed Wilder, whose personal and moral
detestation of Michael Haslam prevented him from saying anything positive about
the other group, considering he was of the opinion that the painter was an
incorrigible idolater who would always oppose moves towards the sort of decent
society which Andrew Hunt and, to a lesser extent, Stuart Harvey wanted to see
come about from their respective standpoints -
the one informally and on an individual basis, the other formally and
within the collective context of society in general or, at any rate, with
reference to those whose 'prayerful waiting' placed them within the Christian
mainstream of theocratic tradition in the West.
