After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (14 page)

“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. Nor 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 inquiringly; 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-personality, timelessness and peace are what it means. Now let's consider the feeling that Pete has 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 is
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 over-eat, 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 a strictly human level, the level of time and craving, 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 on 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-storey 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 and with those magnified projections of 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. Propter 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 is always trying to resume 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 guard; 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.”