Anthology

Collection of varied essays for personal reference

Why Gandalf Never Married A Defense of Rash Vows The Gradual Extinction of Softness The Garden of the Mind The Nine Billion Names of God Who Goes Nazi? How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours Cheese I Collect Cashflows Particularly Keen of Shepherding A Person Paper on Purity in Language In Praise of Idleness Death to Minimalism

Why Gandalf Never Married Terry Pratchet (1985) I want to talk about magic, how magic is portrayed in fantasy, how fantasy literature has in fact contributed to a very distinct image of magic, and perhaps most importantly how the Western world in general has come to accept a very precise and extremely suspect image of magic users. I’d better say at the start that I don’t actually believe in magic any more than I believe in astrology, because I’m a Taurean and we don’t go in for all that weirdo occult stuff. But a couple of years ago I wrote a book called The Colour of Magic. It had some boffo laughs. It was an attempt to do for the classical fantasy universe what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns. It was also my tribute to twenty-five years of fantasy reading, which started when I was thirteen and read Lord of the Rings in 25 hours. That damn book was a halfbrick in the path of the bicycle of my life. I started reading fantasy books at the kind of speed you can only manage in your early teens. I panted for the stuff. I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book. Then Tolkien changed all that. I went mad for fantasy. Comics, boring Norse sagas, even more boring Victorian fantasy … I’d better explain to younger listeners that in those days fantasy was not available in every toyshop and bookstall, it was really a bit like sex: you didn’t know where to get the really dirty books, so all you could do was paw hopefully through Amateur Photography magazines looking for artistic nudes. When I couldn’t get it – heroic fantasy, I mean, not sex – I hung around the children’s section in the public libraries, trying to lure books about dragons and elves to come home with me. I even bought and read all the Narnia books in one go, which was bit like a surfeit of Communion wafers. I didn’t care any more. Eventually the authorities caught up with me and kept me in a dark room with small doses of science fiction until I broke the habit and now I can walk past a book with a dragon on the cover and my hands hardly sweat at all. But a part of my mind remained plugged into what I might call the consensus fantasy universe. It does exist, and you all know it. It has been formed by folklore and Victorian romantics and Walt Disney, and E R Eddison and Jack Vance and Ursula Le Guin and Fritz Leiber – hasn’t it? In fact those writers and a handful of others have very closely defined it. There are now, to the delight of parasitical writers like me, what I might almost call “public domain” plot items. There are dragons, and magic users, and far horizons, and quests, and items of power, and weird cities. There’s the kind of scenery that we would have had on Earth if only God had had the money. To see the consensus fantasy universe in detail you need only look at the classical Dungeons and Dragon role-playing games. They are mosaics of every fantasy story you’ve ever read. Of course, the consensus fantasy universe is full of cliches, almost by definition. Elves are tall and fair and use bows, dwarves are small and dark and vote Labour. And magic works. That’s the difference between magic in the fantasy universe and magic here. In the fantasy universe a wizard points his fingers and all these sort of blue glittery lights come out and there’s a sort of explosion and some poor soul is turned into something horrible. Anyway, if you are in the market for easy laughs you learn that two well-tried ways are either to trip up a cliche or take things absolutely literally. So in the sequel to The Colour of Magic, which is being rushed into print with all the speed of continental drift, you’ll learn what happens, for example, if someone like me gets hold of the idea that megalithic stone circles are really complex computers. What you get is, you get druids walking around talking a sort of computer jargon and referring to Stonehenge as the miracle of the silicon chunk. While I was plundering the fantasy world for the next cliche to pulls a few laughs from, I found one which was so deeply ingrained that you hardly notice it is there at all. In fact it struck me so vividly that I actually began to look at it seriously. That’s the generally very clear division between magic done by women and magic done by men. Let’s talk about wizards and witches. There is a tendency to talk of them in one breath, as though they were simply different sexual labels for the same job. It isn’t true. In the fantasy world there is no such thing as a male witch. Warlocks, I hear you cry, but it’s true. Oh, I’ll accept you can postulate them for a particular story, but I’m talking here about the general tendency. There certainly isn’t such a thing as a female wizard. Sorceress? Just a better class of witch. Enchantress? Just a witch with good legs. The fantasy world. in fact, is overdue for a visit from the Equal Opportunities people because, in the fantasy world, magic done by women is usually of poor quality, third-rate, negative stuff, while the wizards are usually cerebral, clever, powerful, and wise. Strangely enough, that’s also the case in this world. You don’t have to believe in magic to notice that. Wizards get to do a better class of magic, while witches give you warts. The archetypal wizard is of course Merlin, advisor of kings, maker of the Round Table, and the only man who knew how to work the electromagnet that released the Sword from the Stone. He is not in fact a folklore hero, because much of what we know about him is based firmly on Geoffrey de Monmouth’s Life of Merlin, written in the Twelfth Century. Old Geoffrey was one of the world’s great writers of fantasy, nearly as good as Fritz Leiber but without that thing about cats. Had a lot of trouble with women, did Merlin. Morgan Le Fay – a witch – was his main enemy but he was finally trapped in his crystal cave or his enchanted forest, pick your own variation, by a female pupil. The message is clear, boys: that’s what happens to you if you let the real powerful magic get into the hands of women. In fact Merlin is almost being replaced as the number one wizard by Gandalf, whose magic is more suggested than apparent. I’d also like to bring in at this point a third wizard, of whom most of you must have heard – Ged, the wizard of Earthsea. I do this because Ursula Le Guin’s books give us a very well thought-out, and typical, magic world. I’d suggest that they worked because they plugged so neatly into our group image of how magic is ordered. They serve to point up some of the similarities in our wizards. They’re all bachelors, and sexually continent. In this fantasy is in agreement with some of the standard works on magic, which make it clear that a good wizard doesn’t get his end away. (Funny, because there’s no such prohibition on witches; they can be at it like knives the whole time and it doesn’t affect their magic at all.) Wizards tend to exist in Orders, or hierarchies, and certainly the Island of Gont reminds me of nothing so much as a medieval European university, or maybe a monastery. There don’t seem to be many women around the University, although I suppose someone cleans the lavatories. There are indeed some female practitioners of magic around Earthsea, but if they are not actually evil then they are either misguided or treated by Ged in the same way that a Harley Street obstetrician treats a local midwife. Can you imagine a girl trying to get a place at the University of Gont? Or I can put it another way – can you imagine a female Gandalf? Of course I hardly need mention the true fairytale witches, as malevolent a bunch of crones as you could imagine. It was probably living in those gingerbread cottages. No wonder witches were always portrayed as toothless – it was living in a 90,000 calorie house that did it. You’d hear a noise in the night and it’d be the local kids, eating the doorknob. According to my eight-year-old daughter’s book on Wizards, a nicely-illustrated little paperback available at any good bookshop, “wizards undid the harm caused by evil witches”. There it is again, the recurrent message: female magic is cheap and nasty. But why is all this? Is there anything in the real world that is reflected in fantasy? The curious thing is that the Western world at least has no very great magical tradition. You can look in vain for any genuine wizards, or for witches for that matter. I know a large number of people who think of themselves as witches, pagans or magicians, and the more realistic of them will admit that while they like to think that they are following a tradition laid down in the well-known Dawn of Time they really picked it all up from books and, yes, fantasy stories. I have come to believe that fantasy fiction in all its forms has no basis in anything in the real world. I believe that witches and witches get their ideas from their reading matter or, before that, from folklore. Fiction invents reality. In Western Europe, certainly, wizards are few and far between. I have been able to turn up a dozen or so, who with the 20-20 hindsight of history look like either conmen or conjurers. Druids almost fit the bill, but Druids were a few lines by Julius Caesar until they were reinvented a couple of hundred years ago. All this business with the white robes and the sickles and the oneness with nature is wishful thinking. It’s significant, though. Caesar portrayed them as vicious priests of a religion based on human sacrifice, and gory to the elbows. But the PR of history has nevertheless turned them into mystical shamans, unless I mean shamen; men of peace, brewers of magic potions. Despite the claim that nine million people were executed for witchcraft in Europe in the three centuries from 1400 – this turns up a lot in books of popular occultism and I can only say it is probably as reliable as everything else they contain – it is hard to find genuine evidence of a widespread witchcraft cult. I know a number of people who call themselves witches. No, they are witches – why should I disbelieve them? Their religion strikes me as woolly but well-meaning and at the very least harmless. Modern witchcraft is the Friends of the Earth at prayer. If it has any root at all they lie in the works of a former Colonial civil servant and pioneer naturist called Gerald Gardiner, but I suggest that its is really based in a mishmash of herbalism, Sixties undirected occultism, and The Lord of the Rings. But I must accept that people called witches have existed. In a sense they have been created by folklore, by what I call the Flying Saucer process – you know, someone sees something they can’t or won’t explain in the sky, is aware that there is a popular history of sightings of flying saucers, so decides that what he has seen is a flying saucer, and pretty soon that “sighting” adds another few flakes to the great snowball of saucerology. In the same way, the peasant knows that witches are ugly old women who live by themselves because the folklore says so, so the local crone must be a witch. Soon everyone locally KNOWS that there is a witch in the next valley, various tricks of fate are laid at her door, and so the great myth chugs on. One may look in vain for similar widespread evidence of wizards. In addition to the double handful of doubtful practitioners mentioned above, half of whom are more readily identifiable as alchemists or windbags, all I could come up with was some vaguely masonic cults, like the Horseman’s Word in East Anglia. Not much for Gandalf in there. Now you can take the view that of course this is the case, because if there is a dirty end of the stick then women will get it. Anything done by women is automatically downgraded. This is the view widely held – well, widely held by my wife every since she started going to consciousness-raising group meetings – who tells me it’s ridiculous to speculate on the topic because the answer is so obvious. Magic, according to this theory, is something that only men can be really good at, and therefore any attempt by women to trespass on the sacred turf must be rigorously stamped out. Women are regarded by men as the second sex, and their magic is therefore automatically inferior. There’s also a lot of stuff about man’s natural fear of a woman with power; witches were poor women seeking one of the few routes to power open to them, and men fought back with torture, fire and ridicule. I’d like to know that this is all it really is. But the fact is that the consensus fantasy universe has picked up the idea and maintains it. I incline to a different view, if only to keep the argument going, that the whole thing is a lot more metaphorical than that. The sex of the magic practitioner doesn’t really enter into it. The classical wizard, I suggest, represents the ideal of magic – everything that we hope we would be, if we had the power. The classical witch, on the other hand, with her often malevolent interest in the small beer of human affairs, is everything we fear only too well that we would in fact become. Oh well, it won’t win me a PhD. I suspect that via the insidious medium of picture books for children the wizards will continue to practice their high magic and the witches will perform their evil, bad-tempered spells. It’s going to be a long time before there’s room for equal rites.

A Defence of Rash Vows G.K. Chesterton (The Defendant)

If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill’s Liberty' seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed, was an artist in life.’ Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilization – by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there.

But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the `decadence.’ But the men who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that, if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.

The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend the feelings of a man about to be hanged.

`For he that lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.’

And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scare us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us – this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.

Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief of love, or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum aere perennius was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow.

The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words – `free-love’ – as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-favoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.

It is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterlizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern Jingoes practically say, Let us have the pleasure of conquerors without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.' Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say: Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapus.’ Thus in love the free-lovers say: `Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times.’

Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the aesthetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.

The Gradual Extinction of Softness Chantha Nguon with Kim Green November 8, 2021

The first time I cooked rice by myself, at five years old, I burned it to a tarry blackness. My mother saw how much I loved to “help” her in the kitchen, so she bought me a clay cookpot and a small sack of rice to play with. I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parents’ house in Battambang, Cambodia. We gathered branches and stones and built a fire in front of her house, constructed of bamboo and grass mixed with elephant dung. As the rice simmered, Yet and I sat on the rungs of the steep entry stairs and stoked the fire while we clapped our hands and sang. I left the rice on the fire for a long time, to be sure it was well done, then ran home and presented it to my mother — “Mae,” as I called her in Khmer. “This is tasty!” Mae exclaimed, smiling. “The best I’ve ever had!” The rice was inedible, but it hardly mattered: I had cooked something, and my mother had praised me. For the rest of the day, I floated above the ground. It amazes me to recall a time when we had so much rice to spare, we could afford to let a little girl blacken it just for fun. Even now that I have plenty to eat, I cannot bear to waste a single bite of food. The memory of hunger is a curse that never leaves you. ** In 1975, the Khmer Rouge informed the Cambodian people that we had no history, but we knew it was a lie. Cambodia has a rich past, a mosaic of flavors from near and far: South Indian traders gave us Buddhism and spicy curries; China brought rice noodles and astrology; and French colonizers passed on a love of strong coffee, flan, and a light, crusty baguette. We lifted the best tastes from everywhere and added our own: sour pickled fruits and vegetables, the famous Kampot peppercorn, and the most distinctive flavor (and aroma) of all: prahok, Cambodia’s (in)famous, stinking fermented fish paste. Even now, I can taste my own history, in shimmering sense-memories of my mother’s homemade fish sauce, the delicious soup noodles she rolled out in her hands, one by one, and my favorite of all—the pâté de foie she served to special guests. One occupying force tried to erase it all. ** Cambodians were a new generation, starting from “Year Zero” — that’s what Pol Pot told everyone as his soldiers emptied the cities of people and replaced Civilization with an Agrarian Paradise. He borrowed a garbage ideology and added his own genocidal flavor; his cadres freed us from the burdens of pâté de foie and hand-rolled soup noodles, and also education, medicine, cinema, books, money, cars, and Buddhism. In return, Cambodians won the right to dig canals and harvest rice, starve and be executed. By those and other methods, Angkar — Pol Pot’s “organization” — liberated nearly two million people from life itself.
I fled to Vietnam as a little girl of nine before the liberation began. The ideologues were busy there, too, setting everyone “free” and turning back the clocks. At political meetings, they cried into their megaphones about indulgences from the past that must be disavowed: Down with old French ballads; up with songs of blood and sacrifice. Down with pâté and pastries; up with watery rice mash, cut with cassava, sweet potato, and noodles. Everything mushed together in one pot. It tasted like a gray nothing. By the time I was a young woman of 24, I thought my past had been erased, too. My family was gone. My country had drowned in its own blood. All I had left were images and aromas: the smell of a charcoal fire in my mother’s open-air kitchen, the sweet perfume of my father’s pipe. Only smoke remained. ** I spent my first nine years in my mother’s airy kitchen. In my memory, the room was constructed of pure light. Two wide windows framed a bright tropical sky. Sunlight streamed into an open doorway, which led from a narrow staircase over my father’s auto repair shop. A smaller window served as a portal for chatting to neighbors and lowering leftovers to them by a string tied to the pot handles. My mother and oldest sister Chanthu always prepared extra for our neighbors, who lived in wood-stilt huts arranged around a clearing. We had plenty to eat; they did not.
Every day after school, I went straight to the kitchen to shadow Mae and Chanthu while they cooked, begging them to assign me a task or feed me something tasty. In the rare moments when the kitchen was empty of cooks, I hunted for some tasty morsel to devour on the sly: svay ktih, a crunchy green mango dessert ice-cold from the thermos, or dried lotus seeds from a tin box high on a shelf. In my dreams I’m back in that kitchen, chopping onions and garlic, running to fetch wood and water, and falling asleep in a hammock as Mae rocks me to sleep. But of course, that world is gone. My mother left me nothing but her songs and recipes, and aromatic memories to last the rest of my life. I always remembered the flavor of happiness. It tasted like Mae’s pâté de foie, encased in cracked pepper and smelling of garlic and cloves. It tasted like anticipation: the lullaby chick chick chick of the night train from Battambang to Phnom Penh rocking me to sleep, as I dreamed of the pâte à choux cream pastry we would buy upon our arrival, just by the station. The most perfect happiness of all tasted like the wind, when I stood on the front of my oldest brother’s Vespa as he raced around Phnom Penh, where he lived and studied. He told me to open my mouth wide and drink in the warm night air. “AHHHHHHH!” I cried as my brother laughed, zooming north along the riverside. It was my heaven, a snapshot of fleeting perfection. I will never forget the recipe for little-girl heaven. It is a simple one, but very difficult to replicate. Recipe: Little-Girl Heaven Ingredients: one older brother a moto a carefree girl, small enough to stand on the front a beautiful city night wind Combine one spoiled little girl, a shiny Vespa, and a worshipped older brother. Weave through the bustling streets of pre-war Phnom Penh at night. Grin like mad into the onrushing wind and drink the night air through your teeth. Savor this feeling, as all the ingredients will soon be extinguished, save the night wind. ** Pol Pot gave us Year Zero, but when did he imagine that Year One would begin? When the dead rose from the ashes? Was it his plan to erase the future along with the past? His henchmen murdered everyone whose job it was to consider tomorrow’s plans: doctors, engineers, teachers. The Khmer Rouge buried them all and ground the schools and hospitals to dust. They remade a civilization into a vast forced-labor camp and turned eight million Cambodians into six million starved inmates and beggars. Not even the eternal pagodas survived.
When I finally made it home to Cambodia at 33, after more than two decades a refugee, I found a country with no idea of tomorrow. During the Khmer Rouge regime (or, as we Khmer say, “During Pol Pot time”) and for years afterward, lives slipped away so easily — by torture, hunger, and disease; by land-mine blast; by guerrilla fighting that never seemed to end — people could scarcely imagine growing old. Every bowl of rice might be the last. The Cambodian people had learned a great deal about endings. They had forgotten everything else and learned only how to survive. I understand this mindset. When you are hungry, the past and future darken, until only the present hour is visible. Many nights I, too, dreamed only of rice. It focuses the mind but narrows hopes. It is the inverse of pâté de foie softness. ** I was not a child when my mother died; I was a young woman. But she was the only thing keeping me from the streets, the only treasure left in my life. And what had she left me? No gold at all, only a trove of recipes — useless to a girl with no money to procure the ingredients. I blamed her for keeping me too soft, for failing to prepare me for how hard our world had become. Maybe my kitchen education, and all those delicious memories, weren’t a strength at all. Maybe it was a weakness to begin life with every luxury, only to lose it all, one golden thing at a time. What if I’d been born hungry instead? What if I’d never tasted pâté de foie and did not know to crave it? Would I have been better prepared to survive on frogs and river greens that year, after the wars, when my husband and I lived in the jungle, digging for rubies? Would I have been more grateful for my daily rice-potato-cassava gruel in communist Saigon, or for the meager refugee-camp rations in Thailand? ** Pol Pot and his cadres made their position on “softness” very clear: They called educated city dwellers “New People” and targeted them for extinction. Uncalloused hands were useless in Angkar, the Khmer Rouge’s bold experiment with reinvigorating civilization through extermination, where the only industries were rice farming and rice-farming enforcement. The New People had little experience with these enterprises. This is what the Khmer Rouge had to say to the New People: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.” They saw no value in bourgeois tastes or book-learning. Having returned Cambodia to the Iron Age, they valued the following traits: a strong back, familiarity with the use of farming implements, and a body that could operate on minimal fuel. Please don’t misunderstand me. The “Old People” — rural Cambodians who had always lived on rice and river fish — suffered the same losses. They mourned their dead and dying, just as we did. But I’ll admit, with some shame, that once the communists of Southeast Asia had equalized us all into uniform states of poverty, I came to envy the farmers’ toughness. They did not cry over lost pâté de foie. They had never expected so much richness from life and were less inclined to feel disappointed by how little it delivered. I feel small and low when I speak of my refugee life, an inconvenience compared to what so many endured. In Saigon, the bullets rained, too. But our Vietnamese philosophers murdered more selectively. They weren’t quite as ambitious as the Angkar architects. They were too practical, or too lacking in resoluteness (as the Khmer Rouge might say), to exterminate the professional class of a country. But the Vietnamese communists offered their own lessons in toughness: “Turn your pain into strength,” they told us. And we learned to do just that. ** It would be tempting to affect a survivor’s bravado, as if I had achieved my continued existence through will and wit. But my chief survival advantage was being born to a family that could afford to fly to Saigon. We used our dwindling gold to flee to a place where wearing eyeglasses did not put our lives in immediate danger. I did not deserve my survival. I was a “New Person,” as soft and spoiled as any obedient Asian girl from a middle-class family. But I suspect that I can trust you with this information. After all, you’re reading an essay in a literary magazine right now. Which means you are, most likely, as soft as I was then. Softness is not immutable, but it does not disappear all at once; it slips away slowly. You might not even notice its disappearance at first. ** Let me tell you a story about tofu and shoes, sisters and mothers: When I was in high school in Saigon, my eldest sister Chanthu learned to make fresh tofu, and she and Mae started selling it in a suburban market. Our small tofu enterprise kept hunger further from our door. With the money Chanthu paid me to help with the tofu making, I could buy a new pair of stylish wood platform clogs every week. My mother shouted at me for spending money on a collection of useless clogs: “I should use those as firewood!” But the shoes were cheap, and they made me feel beautiful and rich, even as I ran to join the ration queues. Chanthu’s death was sudden — a tumor that ran its course in mere months. Losing her took the light from Mae’s eyes and brought the abyss ever closer. Chanthu had been a second mother to me. And with my resourceful sister gone and my mother often unwell, we could not keep the tofu business going. Mae urged me to learn a skill. A proper girl, she said, should know how to sew. “Don’t ever be a helpless housewife like me,” she said, her expression suggesting that she knew a secret. One day I came home from sewing class for lunch to find Mae weak and pale, and I took her to a hospital. Within a month, she, too, was gone. I was utterly alone, double-motherless, and terribly afraid. ** We have a saying in Khmer: “If a father dies, the children eat rice with fish. If a mother dies, the children sleep on a leaf.” When you lose your mother, you lose everything. She is the roof over your head and the rice in your bowl. I cursed myself for depending so completely on my mother and sister. I had no idea what to do next — Mae was not there to tell me. But something she’d said once floated into my head: “I can fill a fifty-kilo rice sack with your shoes and use them for cooking for a very long time!” She was right: The shiny wooden clogs filled the rice bag to the top. I didn’t need beautiful shoes anymore. I could use them to fuel a cooking fire and save the money I would have spent on wood. I didn’t have much to cook, anyway — just rice. For “flavor,” I poured on a bit of cheap fish sauce from the state store. The shoe-fuel lasted for a month. Every night, I lit a few shoes and cooked a small pot of rice over the fire. I felt nothing, not even hunger. I wanted nothing except to disappear. I was consumed with thoughts of death. But suicide was a sin. So I pushed away those dark dreams and willed myself to forget. ** Recipe: Rice Bowl of Forgetting Ingredients: 1 cup rice 2 cups water a 20-kilogram rice sack clay pot for cooking rice a large variety of cheap wooden clogs fake fish sauce from the state store Prepare: Fill a large rice sack with the dozens of pairs of the stupid clogs you bought to make yourself feel less poor. These will serve as excellent firewood, per your mother’s suggestion. You’ll have only rice for dinner from now on, to stretch what little savings are left. Season the rice with the very bad, cheap, fake fish sauce from the communist state store, the one that tastes like salt and MSG and unlike fish. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like. No more indulgences. Not for you, the delicious Thai fish sauce your mother always bought, one of her few splurges.
Combine water and rice in the clay pot, bring to a boil over the fire, then simmer. Feel free to overcook the rice. Burn it black around the edges, like you did as a tiny girl. Burn the shoes, burn the rice. Burn away the spoiled-girl softness. Burn the memory of your mother, who was worried about you, according to the nurse. Apparently, she was not worried enough: She didn’t forbid you to waste your money on shoes. She didn’t force you to learn a trade. She saw your softness and let you hold it close. It was the last remaining artifact of her Life Before. She could not bear to lose that, too. Burn everything. All the better, to forget the delicious things that came before. Now is the time of forgetting. Your rage makes the embers flare up, red and wild. A soft young girl with nothing at all will not survive the Saigon streets for long. You are not ready. Your mother knew it, and now you know it, too. ** That soft little Battambang girl vanished along with the low whistle of bygone trains, a peaceful Cambodia, and the rest of my family. The elders would say that the creature who replaced her is a very improper Cambodian woman. She does not adhere to the “Rules for Women” (Chbab Srey), didactic verses that girls study in school. My darling daughter, don’t ever forget: You must serve your husband Don’t make him unsatisfied… Remember that you are a woman Don’t say anything to suggest you are equal to him. A good Asian woman is supposed to shine dimly, like a moon, and reflect her husband’s sunlight. Her skirts must not rustle when she walks. She cannot show anger. Even her laugh should be quiet and demure. When I first met my future husband Chan, I tried to be his silvery moonlight woman. In our first years together — running from Saigon, then waiting for years in the refugee camps — I strove to follow the Chbab Srey. But I discovered that obedience could not be exchanged for rice and was therefore of little use. “You are not an Asian woman at all,” Chan told me once, smiling his half-joke smile. My parents must have wanted a moonlight life for me. Why else would they name me Chantha, “the light of the moon”? My family left the world before I could disappoint them. We have a saying in Cambodia: “Men are like gold; women are like cloth.” It means men are a treasure, and women can be thrown away very easily. But more than that, it means that when a man falls into the dirt, he can be polished clean, but a woman will be soiled forever. But I know this: I’m no longer pliant like fabric. I’ve become as hard as diamond. I had no choice. In Cambodia, who has time for being silver-soft? There is too much work to do. We cannot wait for a man’s permission to survive. We have to shine like suns and sparkle like diamonds. I’ve often wondered why, in a poor country where women work as hard as men to feed their children, feminine softness is so highly prized. As for me, I no longer consider it a valuable attribute.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t die any of the times I should have, or even the times I wanted to. Maybe Death couldn’t find me when Saigon fell, or in the jungle, when I screamed my malarial rage into a wall of rain. Maybe Death was searching for a woman named Chantha. I scarcely resembled her anymore, so I’m assuming that the bastard didn’t recognize me.
Besides which, back then in Indochina, he had his hands full with other clients. He kept himself very busy, escorting a quarter of the Cambodian population into mass graves, emptying the classrooms of young men in my Saigon high school, and picking off my family members, one by one. Death was a master chef and had many recipes for transfiguring soft and spoiled girls into tough gemstones. Here is the one I know best: It is a surefire alchemy and cannot fail (so long as ingredient one survives the violent mixing process without becoming denatured). Recipe: How to change cotton into diamond Ingredients: a pampered little girl 2 communist revolutions 2 civil wars 1 genocide Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy French-Catholic-school education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Separate her from home, country, and a reliable source of food. Slowly subtract small luxuries, life savings, and family members until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams until only subsistence remains. ** The first nine years of my life were beautiful, magical, a perfection. I hoard my delicious Battambang kitchen memories like a buried box of gold. Those images became my recipes for building a future. But maybe the years of loss were also gifts. They taught me this: Once you have learned how to lose everything, there is nothing left to fear. A poor woman’s heart grows stouter as her options narrow. She has no choice but to make bold moves, to take wild chances, to tempt fate. The recipe for a Chantha is very complicated and requires many steps. I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if my mother had lived for ten more years. Would I have ended up in refugee camps, or mined for rubies in the forest? Would I have created a women’s weaving center in Stung Treng, Cambodia? For so long, I was consumed by the idea that Mae had failed to toughen me for the world outside her kitchen. When I was 24 years old and newly alone (and dreaming of a sack of rice), I needed an Instant Noodles strength, a thief’s ingenuity that would feed me right away. Instead, my mother gave me a Slow Noodles recipe, with ingredients that would need years to simmer and meld. Today, as I squat over the grill in my tiny Phnom Penh courtyard, the charcoal smoke calls forth Mae’s lessons: not only how to prepare a perfect, clear soup stock and handmade banh canh noodles, but also why I should always make a bit extra to share. The past cannot be erased so easily. My own history carries forward, borne on the smoke from a long-gone mother’s remembered charcoal fire. *** A fortuneteller in Saigon told me that in my darkest hours of life, cooking and sewing would carry me. That prediction proved true in unexpected ways: I have worked as a cook for a brothel and a suture-nurse in a refugee camp, a tofu-maker and a silk-weaver. I have been through poverty and back out again. I know how to show other women how it’s done. And that has become my life’s work: creating a weaving center and social enterprise for women in Stung Treng, a rural province in northeastern Cambodia. Our tiny oasis of self-reliance is a small compound of open-air structures that Chan and I carved out of the lush greenery. There’s a faded sign by the entrance, hand-lettered in English and Khmer: “Stung Treng Women’s Development Centre.” On any ordinary day, a kindergarten teacher leads children in song, and in a breezy structure bathed in sunlight, women spin brilliant silk threads at wooden looms. From the weavers and spinners, according to their abilities; to them, according to their needs — that is my dream. I am no Communist; I learned in Saigon that there is no such thing as Utopia. But what’s wrong with creating a place of safety, where softness will not prove fatal? Where we Stung Treng women can turn our pain into strength? Where we can begin to build a new Cambodia on the ashes of the old? Together, we are learning that it’s better for a woman to cast her own golden light, like a sun. We are, I hope, a new kind of Cambodian woman — both strong and soft, and terribly improper. Just like Mae.

The Garden of the Mind

Like the love of music, books and pictures, the love of gardens comes with culture and leisure and with the ripening of the home life. The love of gardens, as of every other beautiful and refining thing, must increase to the end of time. More and more must the sympathies enlarge. There must be more points of contact with the world. Life ever becomes richer. Gardening is more than the growing of plants: it is the expression of desire.

Every family can have a garden. If there is not a foot of land, there are porches or windows. Wherever there is sunlight, plants may be made to grow; and one plant in a tin may be a more helpful and inspiring garden to some mind than a whole acre of lawn and flowers may be to another. The satisfaction of a garden does not depend upon the area, nor, happily, upon the cost or rarity of the plants. It depends upon the temper of the person. One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to cultivate that happy peace of mind which is satisfied with little. He will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary ideals, for gardeners are coquettish, particularly with the novice. If plants grow and thrive, he should be happy; and if the plants which thrive chance not to be the ones which he planted, they are plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them.

We are apt to covet the things which we cannot have; but we are happier when we love the things which grow because they must. A patch of lusty pigweed, growing and crowding in luxuriant abandon, may be a better and more worthy object of affection than a bed of coleuses in which every spark of life and spirit and individuality has been sheared out and suppressed. The man who worries morning and night about the dandelions in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions. Each blossom is worth more than a gold coin as it shimmers in the exuberant sunlight of the growing spring and attracts the bees to its bosom. Little children love the dandelions; why may not we? Love the things nearest at hand; and love intensely. If I were to write a motto over the gate of a garden, I should choose the remark which Socrates made as he saw the luxuries in the market: ‘How much there is in the world that I do not want! There are two parts to gardening,—the growing of the plants in the soil, and the garden in the mind. The desire to have a garden comes first; then comes the season of planning, the pleasant discussion of the kinds, the tools, the construction of hotbed and frame, and the layout worked over and over again until the area, the desired products, and the purse are all accommodated and made to fit; finally comes the putting of the plan into execution. I know persons who are musicians and yet have no musical instruments. Some of them can perform on instruments and some of them cannot. If they are performers, they miss the instruments more. Do not most of us, with high taste for music, secure our satisfaction in it from those more fortunate or more skillful than we?

I know poets who do not write poetry, artists who do not paint, architects who do not build. I know gardeners who do not garden.

It is not for me to depreciate the joy and value of a garden that one makes in the good earth with one’s own hand; yet the garden is an appreciation. It is an appreciation of activity, of color, of form, of ground smells, of wind and rain and sun, of the day and the night, of the things that grow. Good critics of gardens, good lovers of gardens, may yet not be good gardeners; and good growers may not be deep appreciators of gardens.

To the one who has no garden (my sympathy is his!) there still remains some of the essential joys of the garden,—the wonders of the catalogues, the invitation of the soil, the discriminating knowledge of the plants. A garden is only a piece of the world,—a piece that one picks out and arranges for one’s own exercise and pride. Beyond it are others’ gardens, also the open greensward of fields, and the abounding atmosphere. One may sit at another’s garden gate, and feel its beauty; one may wander afield in any afternoon of holiday; one may be open to the suggestion of garden and beauty as one travels back and forth, missing nothing.

The Nine Billion Names of God Arthur C. Clarke “This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your —ah—establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?” “Gladly,” replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions, “Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures.” “I don’t quite understand. . . .” “This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope youwill listen with an open mind while I explain it.” “Naturally.” “It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God.” “I beg your pardon?” “We have reason to believe,” continued the lama imperturbably, “that all such names can be written with not morethan nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.” “And you have been doing this for three centuries?” “Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task.” “Oh,” Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. “Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?” The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply. “Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on—they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are whatone may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.” “I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAA . . . and working up to ZZZZZZZZ. . .” “Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.” “Three? Surely you mean two.” ‘‘Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language.” “I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on.” “Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your Automatic Sequence Computer for this work, since once it has been programed properly it will pennute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days.”

Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right. . . “There’s no doubt,” replied the doctor, “that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I’m much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not going to be easy.” “We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air—that is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there.” “And you want to hire two of our engineers?” “Yes, for the three months that the project should occupy.” “I’ve no doubt that Personnel can manage that.” Dr. Wagner scribbled a note on his desk pad. “There are just two other points— Before he could finish the sentence the lama had produced a small slip of paper. “This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank.” “Thank you. It appears to be—ah—adequate. The secondmatter is so trivial that I hesitate to mention it—but it’s surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked. What source of electrical energy have you?” “A diesel generator providing fifty kilowatts at a hundred and ten volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It’s made life at the lamasery much more comfortable, but of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels.” “Of course,” echoed Dr. Wagner. “I should have thought of that.”

The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the two-thousand-foot swoop into the abyss, or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover. This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him. “Project Shangri-La,” some wit back at the labs had christened it. For weeks now the Mark V had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish. Patiently, inexorably, the computer had been rearranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting each class before going on to the next. As the sheets had emerged from the electromatic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into enormous books. In another week, heaven be praised, they would have finished. Just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn’t bother to go on to words of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn’t know. One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan, and that the high lama (whom they’d naturally called Sam Jaffe, though he didn’t look a bit like him) would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to approximately a.d. 2060. They were quite capable of it. George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out onto the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made him so popular with the monks—who, it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures of life. That was one thing in their favor: they might be crazy, but they weren’t bluenoses. Those frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance . . . “Listen, George,” said Chuck urgently. “I’ve learned something that means trouble.” “What’s wrong? Isn’t the machine behaving?” That was the worst contingency George could imagine. It might delay his return, and nothing could be more horrible. The way he felt now, even the sight of a TV commercial would seem like manna from heaven. At least it would be some link with home. “No—it’s nothing like that.” Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which was unusual because normally he was scared of the drop. “I’ve just found what all this is about.” “What d’ya mean? I thought we knew.” “Sure—we know what the monks are trying to do. But we didn’t know why. It’s the craziest thing— “Tell me something new,” growled George. ‘—but old Sam’s just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or at least as near as he’ll ever get to it. When I told him that we were on the last cycle he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I’d ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said, ‘Sure’ and he told me.” “Go on: I’ll buy it.” “Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.” “Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?” “There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up . . . bingo!” “Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.” Chuck gave a nervous little laugh. “That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said, ‘It’s nothing as trivial as that.’ “ George thought this over for a moment. “That’s what I call taking the Wide View,” he said presently. “But what d’you suppose we should do about it? I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference to us. After all, we already knew that they were crazy.” “Yes—but don’t you see what may happen? When the list’s complete and the Last Trump doesn’t blow—or whatever it is they expect we may get the blame. It’s our machine they’ve been using. I don’t like the situation one little bit.” “I see,” said George slowly. “You’ve got a point there. But this sort of thing’s happened before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana we had a crackpot preacher who once said the world was going to end next Sunday. Hundreds of people believed him—even sold their homes. Yet when nothing happened, they didn’t turn nasty, as you’d expect. They just decided that he’d made a mistake in his calculations and went right on believing. I guess some of them still do.” “Well, this isn’t Louisiana, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are just two of us and hundreds of these monks. I like them, and I’ll be sorry for old Sam when his lifework backfires on him. But all the same, I wish I was somewhere else.” “I’ve been wishing that for weeks. But there’s nothing we can do until the contract’s finished and the transport arrives to fly us out.” “Of course,” said Chuck thoughtfully, “we could always try a bit of sabotage.” “Like hell we could! That would make things worse,” “Not the way I meant. Look at it like this. The machine will finish its run four days from now, on the present twenty hours-a-day basis. The transport calls in a week. OK—then all we need to do is to find something that needs replacing during one of the overhaul periods—something that will hold up the works for a couple of days. We’ll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If we time matters properly, we can be down at the airfield when the last name pops out of the register. They won’t be able to catch us then.” “I don’t like it,” said George. “It will be the first time I ever walked out on a job. Besides, it would make them suspicious. No, I’ll sit tight and take what comes.” “I still don’t like it,” he said, seven days later, as the tough little mountain ponies carried them down the winding road. “And don’t you think I’m running away because I’m afraid. I’m just sorry for those poor old guys up there, and I don’t want to be around when they find what suckers they’ve been. Wonder how Sam will take it?” “It’s funny,” replied Chuck, “but when I said good-by I got the idea he knew we were walking out on him—and that he didn’t care because he knew the machine was running smoothly and that the job would soon be finished. After that —well, of course, for him there just isn’t any After That. . . .” George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamasery. The squat, angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset: here and there, lights gleamed like portholes in the side of an ocean liner. Electric lights, of course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark V. How much longer would they share it? wondered George. Would the monks smash up the computer in their rage and disappointment? Or would they just sit down quietly and begin their calculations all over again? He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment. The high lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and pasted them into the great volumes. No one would be saying anything. The only sound would be the incessant patter, the never-ending rainstorm of the keys hitting the paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. ‘Three months of this’, thought George, was enough to start anyone climbing up the wall. “There she is!” called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. “Ain’t she beautiful!” She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC Slay at the end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savoring like a fine liqueur. George let it roll round his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope. The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately, the road was very good, as roads went in that region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear, and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry. He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch. “Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought: “Wonder if the computer’s finished its run. It was due about now.” Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky. “Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

Who Goes Nazi? Dorothy Thompson It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis. It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.” Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected. At any rate, let us look round the room. The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry. He has never attracted any attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him. . . . Why not? Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why? . . . Why the one and not the other? Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions. Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would. The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner. He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity. Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him. There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll. I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others. Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women. On the other hand, Mrs. F would never go Nazi. She is the most popular woman in the room, handsome, gay, witty, and full of the warmest emotion. She was a popular actress ten years ago; married very happily; promptly had four children in a row; has a charming house, is not rich but has no money cares, has never cut herself off from her own happy-go-lucky profession, and is full of sound health and sound common sense. All men try to make love to her; she laughs at them all, and her husband is amused. She has stood on her own feet since she was a child, she has enormously helped her husband’s career (he is a lawyer), she would ornament any drawing-room in any capital, and she is as American as ice cream and cake. How about the butler who is passing the drinks? I look at James with amused eyes. James is safe. James has been butler to the ‘ighest aristocracy, considers all Nazis parvenus and communists, and has a very good sense for “people of quality.” He serves the quiet editor with that friendly air of equality which good servants always show toward those they consider good enough to serve, and he serves the horsy gent stiffly and coldly. Bill, the grandson of the chauffeur, is helping serve to-night. He is a product of a Bronx public school and high school, and works at night like this to help himself through City College, where he is studying engineering. He is a “proletarian,” though you’d never guess it if you saw him without that white coat. He plays a crack game of tennis—has been a tennis tutor in summer resorts—swims superbly, gets straight A’s in his classes, and thinks America is okay and don’t let anybody say it isn’t. He had a brief period of Youth Congress communism, but it was like the measles. He was not taken in the draft because his eyes are not good enough, but he wants to design airplanes, “like Sikorsky.” He thinks Lindbergh is “just another pilot with a build-up and a rich wife” and that he is “always talking down America, like how we couldn’t lick Hitler if we wanted to.” At this point Bill snorts. Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged. H is an historian and biographer. He is American of Dutch ancestry born and reared in the Middle West. He has been in love with America all his life. He can recite whole chapters of Thoreau and volumes of American poetry, from Emerson to Steve Benet. He knows Jefferson’s letters, Hamilton’s papers, Lincoln’s speeches. He is a collector of early American furniture, lives in New England, runs a farm for a hobby and doesn’t lose much money on it, and loathes parties like this one. He has a ribald and manly sense of humor, is unconventional and lost a college professorship because of a love affair. Afterward he married the lady and has lived happily ever afterward as the wages of sin. H has never doubted his own authentic Americanism for one instant. This is his country, and he knows it from Acadia to Zenith. His ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and in all the wars since. He is certainly an intellectual, but an intellectual smelling slightly of cow barns and damp tweeds. He is the most good-natured and genial man alive, but if anyone ever tries to make this country over into an imitation of Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, or Petain’s systems H will grab a gun and fight. Though H’s liberalism will not permit him to say it, it is his secret conviction that nobody whose ancestors have not been in this country since before the Civil War really understands America or would really fight for it against Nazism or any other foreign ism in a showdown. But H is wrong. There is one other person in the room who would fight alongside H and he is not even an American citizen. He is a young German emigre, whom I brought along to the party. The people in the room look at him rather askance because he is so Germanic, so very blond-haired, so very blue-eyed, so tanned that somehow you expect him to be wearing shorts. He looks like the model of a Nazi. His English is flawed—he learned it only five years ago. He comes from an old East Prussian family; he was a member of the post-war Youth Movement and afterward of the Republican “Reichsbanner.” All his German friends went Nazi—without exception. He hiked to Switzerland penniless, there pursued his studies in New Testament Greek, sat under the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, came to America through the assistance of an American friend whom he had met in a university, got a job teaching the classics in a fashionable private school; quit, and is working now in an airplane factory—working on the night shift to make planes to send to Britain to defeat Germany. He has devoured volumes of American history, knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans have ever really read the Federalist papers, believes in the United States of Europe, the Union of the English-speaking world, and the coming democratic revolution all over the earth. He believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free. The people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power. He talks about the workmen in the factory where he is employed. . . . He took the job “in order to understand the real America.” He thinks the men are wonderful. “Why don’t you American intellectuals ever get to them; talk to them?” I grin bitterly to myself, thinking that if we ever got into war with the Nazis he would probably be interned, while Mr. B and Mr. G and Mrs. E would be spreading defeatism at all such parties as this one. “Of course I don’t like Hitler but . . .” Mr. J over there is a Jew. Mr. J is a very important man. He is immensely rich—he has made a fortune through a dozen directorates in various companies, through a fabulous marriage, through a speculative flair, and through a native gift for money and a native love of power. He is intelligent and arrogant. He seldom associates with Jews. He deplores any mention of the “Jewish question.” He believes that Hitler “should not be judged from the standpoint of anti-Semitism.” He thinks that “the Jews should be reserved on all political questions.” He considers Roosevelt “an enemy of business.” He thinks “It was a serious blow to the Jews that Frankfurter should have been appointed to the Supreme Court.” The saturnine Mr. C—the real Nazi in the room—engages him in a flatteringly attentive conversation. Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly. Mr. J is definitely attracted by Mr. C. He goes out of his way to ask his name—they have never met before. “A very intelligent man.” Mr. K contemplates the scene with a sad humor in his expressive eyes. Mr. K is also a Jew. Mr. K is a Jew from the South. He speaks with a Southern drawl. He tells inimitable stories. Ten years ago he owned a very successful business that he had built up from scratch. He sold it for a handsome price, settled his indigent relatives in business, and now enjoys an income for himself of about fifty dollars a week. At forty he began to write articles about odd and out-of-the-way places in American life. A bachelor, and a sad man who makes everybody laugh, he travels continually, knows America from a thousand different facets, and loves it in a quiet, deep, unostentatious way. He is a great friend of H, the biographer. Like H, his ancestors have been in this country since long before the Civil War. He is attracted to the young German. By and by they are together in the drawing-room. The impeccable gentleman of New England, the country-man—intellectual of the Middle West, the happy woman whom the gods love, the young German, the quiet, poised Jew from the South. And over on the other side are the others. Mr. L has just come in. Mr. L is a lion these days. My hostess was all of a dither when she told me on the telephone, “ . . . and L is coming. You know it’s dreadfully hard to get him.” L is a very powerful labor leader. “My dear, he is a man of the people, but really fascinating.“ L is a man of the people and just exactly as fascinating as my horsy, bank vice-president, on-the-make acquaintance over there, and for the same reasons and in the same way. L makes speeches about the “third of the nation,” and L has made a darned good thing for himself out of championing the oppressed. He has the best car of anyone in this room; salary means nothing to him because he lives on an expense account. He agrees with the very largest and most powerful industrialists in the country that it is the business of the strong to boss the weak, and he has made collective bargaining into a legal compulsion to appoint him or his henchmen as “labor’s” agents, with the power to tax pay envelopes and do what they please with the money. L is the strongest natural-born Nazi in this room. Mr. B regards him with contempt tempered by hatred. Mr. B will use him. L is already parroting B’s speeches. He has the brains of Neanderthal man, but he has an infallible instinct for power. In private conversation he denounces the Jews as “parasites.” No one has ever asked him what are the creative functions of a highly paid agent, who takes a percentage off the labor of millions of men, and distributes it where and as it may add to his own political power.

It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities. Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis. Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day By Arnold Bennett I THE DAILY MIRACLE “Yes, he’s one of those men that don’t know how to manage. Good situation. Regular income. Quite enough for luxuries as well as needs. Not really extravagant. And yet the fellow’s always in difficulties. Somehow he gets nothing out of his money. Excellent flat—half empty! Always looks as if he’d had the brokers in. New suit—old hat! Magnificent necktie—baggy trousers! Asks you to dinner: cut glass—bad mutton, or Turkish coffee—cracked cup! He can’t understand it. Explanation simply is that he fritters his income away. Wish I had the half of it! I’d show him—” So we have most of us criticised, at one time or another, in our superior way. We are nearly all chancellors of the exchequer: it is the pride of the moment. Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence proves the interest they excite. Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged round the question whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on L85 a year. I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has. Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself! For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say:—”This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.

I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not? You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are not full of “How to live on a given income of time,” instead of “How to live on a given income of money”! Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in gross heaps. If one can’t contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a little more—or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn’t necessarily muddle one’s life because one can’t quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely. The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.

Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.” Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? Which of us is quite sure that his fine suit is not surmounted by a shameful hat, or that in attending to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the food? Which of us is not saying to himself—which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: “I shall alter that when I have a little more time”? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure. II THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE’S PROGRAMME “But,” someone may remark, with the English disregard of everything except the point, “what is he driving at with his twenty-four hours a day? I have no difficulty in living on twenty-four hours a day. I do all that I want to do, and still find time to go in for newspaper competitions. Surely it is a simple affair, knowing that one has only twenty-four hours a day, to content one’s self with twenty-four hours a day!” To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies. You are precisely the man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty years. Will you kindly send me your name and address, and state your charge for telling me how you do it? Instead of me talking to you, you ought to be talking to me. Please come forward. That you exist, I am convinced, and that I have not yet encountered you is my loss. Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue to chat with my companions in distress—that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order. If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last train, and while we are cooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it promenades its bones up and down by our side and inquires: “O man, what hast thou done with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?” You may urge that this feeling of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and inseparable from life itself. True! But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook’s, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves Brixton. It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from Cook’s the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day. If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us. And even when we realise that the task is beyond our skill, that our powers cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented if we gave to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to do. And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course of evolution have risen past a certain level. Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of the soul. That wish has been called by many names. It is one form of the universal desire for knowledge. And it is so strong that men whose whole lives have been given to the systematic acquirement of knowledge have been driven by it to overstep the limits of their programme in search of still more knowledge. Even Herbert Spencer, in my opinion the greatest mind that ever lived, was often forced by it into agreeable little backwaters of inquiry. I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the wish to live—that is to say, people who have intellectual curiosity—the aspiration to exceed formal programmes takes a literary shape. They would like to embark on a course of reading. Decidedly the British people are becoming more and more literary. But I would point out that literature by no means comprises the whole field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to improve one’s self—to increase one’s knowledge—may well be slaked quite apart from literature. With the various ways of slaking I shall deal later. Here I merely point out to those who have no natural sympathy with literature that literature is not the only well. III PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have “more time”; and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring, dazzling truth that you never will have “more time,” since you already have all the time there is—you expect me to let you into some wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the ideal of a perfect arrangement of the day, and by which, therefore, that haunting, unpleasant, daily disappointment of things left undone will be got rid of! I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to find it, nor do I expect that anyone else will ever find it. It is undiscovered. When you first began to gather my drift, perhaps there was a resurrection of hope in your breast. Perhaps you said to yourself, “This man will show me an easy, unfatiguing way of doing what I have so long in vain wished to do.” Alas, no! The fact is that there is no easy way, no royal road. The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony, and the worst of it is that you never quite get there after all. The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. I cannot too strongly insist on this. If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a time-table with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once. If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence. It is very sad, is it not, very depressing and sombre? And yet I think it is rather fine, too, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire. “Well,” you say, “assume that I am braced for the battle. Assume that I have carefully weighed and comprehended your ponderous remarks; how do I begin?” Dear sir, you simply begin. There is no magic method of beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, “How do I begin to jump?” you would merely reply, “Just jump. Take hold of your nerves, and jump.” As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Which fact is very gratifying and reassuring. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. Therefore no object is served in waiting till next week, or even until to-morrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer next week. It won’t. It will be colder. But before you begin, let me murmur a few words of warning in your private ear. Let me principally warn you against your own ardour. Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can’t satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn’t content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, “I’ve had enough of this.” Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own. A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence. But just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure. Most people who are ruined are ruined by attempting too much. Therefore, in setting out on the immense enterprise of living fully and comfortably within the narrow limits of twenty-four hours a day, let us avoid at any cost the risk of an early failure. I will not agree that, in this business at any rate, a glorious failure is better than a petty success. I am all for the petty success. A glorious failure leads to nothing; a petty success may lead to a success that is not petty. So let us begin to examine the budget of the day’s time. You say your day is already full to overflowing. How? You actually spend in earning your livelihood—how much? Seven hours, on the average? And in actual sleep, seven? I will add two hours, and be generous. And I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours. IV THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLES In order to come to grips at once with the question of time-expenditure in all its actuality, I must choose an individual case for examination. I can only deal with one case, and that case cannot be the average case, because there is no such case as the average case, just as there is no such man as the average man. Every man and every man’s case is special. But if I take the case of a Londoner who works in an office, whose office hours are from ten to six, and who spends fifty minutes morning and night in travelling between his house door and his office door, I shall have got as near to the average as facts permit. There are men who have to work longer for a living, but there are others who do not have to work so long. Fortunately the financial side of existence does not interest us here; for our present purpose the clerk at a pound a week is exactly as well off as the millionaire in Carlton House-terrace. Now the great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day is a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which vitiates and weakens two-thirds of his energies and interests. In the majority of instances he does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it. He begins his business functions with reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as he can. And his engines while he is engaged in his business are seldom at their full “h.p.” (I know that I shall be accused by angry readers of traducing the city worker; but I am pretty thoroughly acquainted with the City, and I stick to what I say.) Yet in spite of all this he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as “the day,” to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue. Such an attitude, unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in the odd sixteen hours, with the result that, even if he does not waste them, he does not count them; he regards them simply as margin. This general attitude is utterly illogical and unhealthy, since it formally gives the central prominence to a patch of time and a bunch of activities which the man’s one idea is to “get through” and have “done with.” If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot. If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his mind, arrange a day within a day. And this inner day, a Chinese box in a larger Chinese box, must begin at 6 p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a day of sixteen hours; and during all these sixteen hours he has nothing whatever to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men. During those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income. This must be his attitude. And his attitude is all important. His success in life (much more important than the amount of estate upon what his executors will have to pay estate duty) depends on it. What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep. I shall now examine the typical man’s current method of employing the sixteen hours that are entirely his, beginning with his uprising. I will merely indicate things which he does and which I think he ought not to do, postponing my suggestions for “planting” the times which I shall have cleared—as a settler clears spaces in a forest. In justice to him I must say that he wastes very little time before he leaves the house in the morning at 9:10. In too many houses he gets up at nine, breakfasts between 9:07 and 9:09.5, and then bolts. But immediately he bangs the front door his mental faculties, which are tireless, become idle. He walks to the station in a condition of mental coma. Arrived there, he usually has to wait for the train. On hundreds of suburban stations every morning you see men calmly strolling up and down platforms while railway companies unblushingly rob them of time, which is more than money. Hundreds of thousands of hours are thus lost every day simply because my typical man thinks so little of time that it has never occurred to him to take quite easy precautions against the risk of its loss. He has a solid coin of time to spend every day—call it a sovereign. He must get change for it, and in getting change he is content to lose heavily. Supposing that in selling him a ticket the company said, “We will change you a sovereign, but we shall charge you three halfpence for doing so,” what would my typical man exclaim? Yet that is the equivalent of what the company does when it robs him of five minutes twice a day. You say I am dealing with minutiae. I am. And later on I will justify myself. Now will you kindly buy your paper and step into the train? V TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours a day instead of twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents alone know how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one’s self in one’s self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already “put by” about three-quarters of an hour for use. Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six o’clock. I am aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour and a half) in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is given to eating. But I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your newspapers then. I meet you again as you emerge from your office. You are pale and tired. At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to understand that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the mighty suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud, particularly in winter. You don’t eat immediately on your arrival home. But in about an hour or so you feel as if you could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano…. By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day’s work. Six hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office—gone like a dream, gone like magic, unaccountably gone! That is a fair sample case. But you say: “It’s all very well for you to talk. A man is tired. A man must see his friends. He can’t always be on the stretch.” Just so. But when you arrange to go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the suburbs; you spare no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to town in another train; you keep yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not five; you take her home; you take yourself home. You don’t spend three-quarters of an hour in “thinking about” going to bed. You go. Friends and fatigue have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely long (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that time when you were persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and slaved two hours every other night for three months? Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy—the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day? What I suggest is that at six o’clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., “Time to be thinking about going to bed.” The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living. But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “…but I have to work.” This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul. VI REMEMBER HUMAN NATURE I have incidentally mentioned the vast expanse of forty-four hours between leaving business at 2 p.m. on Saturday and returning to business at 10 a.m. on Monday. And here I must touch on the point whether the week should consist of six days or of seven. For many years—in fact, until I was approaching forty—my own week consisted of seven days. I was constantly being informed by older and wiser people that more work, more genuine living, could be got out of six days than out of seven. And it is certainly true that now, with one day in seven in which I follow no programme and make no effort save what the caprice of the moment dictates, I appreciate intensely the moral value of a weekly rest. Nevertheless, had I my life to arrange over again, I would do again as I have done. Only those who have lived at the full stretch seven days a week for a long time can appreciate the full beauty of a regular recurring idleness. Moreover, I am ageing. And it is a question of age. In cases of abounding youth and exceptional energy and desire for effort I should say unhesitatingly: Keep going, day in, day out. But in the average case I should say: Confine your formal programme (super-programme, I mean) to six days a week. If you find yourself wishing to extend it, extend it, but only in proportion to your wish; and count the time extra as a windfall, not as regular income, so that you can return to a six-day programme without the sensation of being poorer, of being a backslider. Let us now see where we stand. So far we have marked for saving out of the waste of days, half an hour at least on six mornings a week, and one hour and a half on three evenings a week. Total, seven hours and a half a week. I propose to be content with that seven hours and a half for the present. “What?” you cry. “You pretend to show us how to live, and you only deal with seven hours and a half out of a hundred and sixty-eight! Are you going to perform a miracle with your seven hours and a half?” Well, not to mince the matter, I am—if you will kindly let me! That is to say, I am going to ask you to attempt an experience which, while perfectly natural and explicable, has all the air of a miracle. My contention is that the full use of those seven-and-a-half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal occupations. You practise physical exercises for a mere ten minutes morning and evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical health and strength are beneficially affected every hour of the day, and your whole physical outlook changed. Why should you be astonished that an average of over an hour a day given to the mind should permanently and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind? More time might assuredly be given to the cultivation of one’s self. And in proportion as the time was longer the results would be greater. But I prefer to begin with what looks like a trifling effort. It is not really a trifling effort, as those will discover who have yet to essay it. To “clear” even seven hours and a half from the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits. And habits are the very dickens to change! Further, any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live your old life, you are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition, will be necessary. And it is because I know the difficulty, it is because I know the almost disastrous effect of failure in such an enterprise, that I earnestly advise a very humble beginning. You must safeguard your self-respect. Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one’s self-respect. Hence I iterate and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously. When you have conscientiously given seven hours and a half a week to the cultivation of your vitality for three months—then you may begin to sing louder and tell yourself what wondrous things you are capable of doing. Before coming to the method of using the indicated hours, I have one final suggestion to make. That is, as regards the evenings, to allow much more than an hour and a half in which to do the work of an hour and a half. Remember the chance of accidents. Remember human nature. And give yourself, say, from 9 to 11:30 for your task of ninety minutes. VII CONTROLLING THE MIND People say: “One can’t help one’s thoughts.” But one can. The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. This idea is one of the oldest platitudes, but it is a platitude whose profound truth and urgency most people live and die without realising. People complain of the lack of power to concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power, if they choose. And without the power to concentrate—that is to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience—true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence. Hence, it seems to me, the first business of the day should be to put the mind through its paces. You look after your body, inside and out; you run grave danger in hacking hairs off your skin; you employ a whole army of individuals, from the milkman to the pig-killer, to enable you to bribe your stomach into decent behaviour. Why not devote a little attention to the far more delicate machinery of the mind, especially as you will require no extraneous aid? It is for this portion of the art and craft of living that I have reserved the time from the moment of quitting your door to the moment of arriving at your office. “What? I am to cultivate my mind in the street, on the platform, in the train, and in the crowded street again?” Precisely. Nothing simpler! No tools required! Not even a book. Nevertheless, the affair is not easy. When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not despair. Continue. Keep it up. You will succeed. You cannot by any chance fail if you persevere. It is idle to pretend that your mind is incapable of concentration. Do you not remember that morning when you received a disquieting letter which demanded a very carefully-worded answer? How you kept your mind steadily on the subject of the answer, without a second’s intermission, until you reached your office; whereupon you instantly sat down and wrote the answer? That was a case in which you were roused by circumstances to such a degree of vitality that you were able to dominate your mind like a tyrant. You would have no trifling. You insisted that its work should be done, and its work was done. By the regular practice of concentration (as to which there is no secret—save the secret of perseverance) you can tyrannise over your mind (which is not the highest part of you) every hour of the day, and in no matter what place. The exercise is a very convenient one. If you got into your morning train with a pair of dumb-bells for your muscles or an encyclopaedia in ten volumes for your learning, you would probably excite remark. But as you walk in the street, or sit in the corner of the compartment behind a pipe, or “strap-hang” on the Subterranean, who is to know that you are engaged in the most important of daily acts? What asinine boor can laugh at you? I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate. It is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts. But still, you may as well kill two birds with one stone, and concentrate on something useful. I suggest—it is only a suggestion—a little chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. Do not, I beg, shy at their names. For myself, I know nothing more “actual,” more bursting with plain common-sense, applicable to the daily life of plain persons like you and me (who hate airs, pose, and nonsense) than Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. Read a chapter—and so short they are, the chapters!—in the evening and concentrate on it the next morning. You will see. Yes, my friend, it is useless for you to try to disguise the fact. I can hear your brain like a telephone at my ear. You are saying to yourself: “This fellow was doing pretty well up to his seventh chapter. He had begun to interest me faintly. But what he says about thinking in trains, and concentration, and so on, is not for me. It may be well enough for some folks, but it isn’t in my line.” It is for you, I passionately repeat; it is for you. Indeed, you are the very man I am aiming at. Throw away the suggestion, and you throw away the most precious suggestion that was ever offered to you. It is not my suggestion. It is the suggestion of the most sensible, practical, hard-headed men who have walked the earth. I only give it you at second-hand. Try it. Get your mind in hand. And see how the process cures half the evils of life—especially worry, that miserable, avoidable, shameful disease—worry! VIII THE REFLECTIVE MOOD The exercise of concentrating the mind (to which at least half an hour a day should be given) is a mere preliminary, like scales on the piano. Having acquired power over that most unruly member of one’s complex organism, one has naturally to put it to the yoke. Useless to possess an obedient mind unless one profits to the furthest possible degree by its obedience. A prolonged primary course of study is indicated. Now as to what this course of study should be there cannot be any question; there never has been any question. All the sensible people of all ages are agreed upon it. And it is not literature, nor is it any other art, nor is it history, nor is it any science. It is the study of one’s self. Man, know thyself. These words are so hackneyed that verily I blush to write them. Yet they must be written, for they need to be written. (I take back my blush, being ashamed of it.) Man, know thyself. I say it out loud. The phrase is one of those phrases with which everyone is familiar, of which everyone acknowledges the value, and which only the most sagacious put into practice. I don’t know why. I am entirely convinced that what is more than anything else lacking in the life of the average well-intentioned man of to-day is the reflective mood. We do not reflect. I mean that we do not reflect upon genuinely important things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main direction in which we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon the share which reason has (or has not) in determining our actions, and upon the relation between our principles and our conduct. And yet you are in search of happiness, are you not? Have you discovered it? The chances are that you have not. The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realising that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles. I suppose that you will not have the audacity to deny this. And if you admit it, and still devote no part of your day to the deliberate consideration of your reason, principles, and conduct, you admit also that while striving for a certain thing you are regularly leaving undone the one act which is necessary to the attainment of that thing. Now, shall I blush, or will you? Do not fear that I mean to thrust certain principles upon your attention. I care not (in this place) what your principles are. Your principles may induce you to believe in the righteousness of burglary. I don’t mind. All I urge is that a life in which conduct does not fairly well accord with principles is a silly life; and that conduct can only be made to accord with principles by means of daily examination, reflection, and resolution. What leads to the permanent sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to burglary. If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree. As for reason (which makes conduct, and is not unconnected with the making of principles), it plays a far smaller part in our lives than we fancy. We are supposed to be reasonable but we are much more instinctive than reasonable. And the less we reflect, the less reasonable we shall be. The next time you get cross with the waiter because your steak is over-cooked, ask reason to step into the cabinet-room of your mind, and consult her. She will probably tell you that the waiter did not cook the steak, and had no control over the cooking of the steak; and that even if he alone was to blame, you accomplished nothing good by getting cross; you merely lost your dignity, looked a fool in the eyes of sensible men, and soured the waiter, while producing no effect whatever on the steak. The result of this consultation with reason (for which she makes no charge) will be that when once more your steak is over-cooked you will treat the waiter as a fellow-creature, remain quite calm in a kindly spirit, and politely insist on having a fresh steak. The gain will be obvious and solid. In the formation or modification of principles, and the practice of conduct, much help can be derived from printed books (issued at sixpence each and upwards). I mentioned in my last chapter Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Certain even more widely known works will occur at once to the memory. I may also mention Pascal, La Bruyere, and Emerson. For myself, you do not catch me travelling without my Marcus Aurelius. Yes, books are valuable. But not reading of books will take the place of a daily, candid, honest examination of what one has recently done, and what one is about to do—of a steady looking at one’s self in the face (disconcerting though the sight may be). When shall this important business be accomplished? The solitude of the evening journey home appears to me to be suitable for it. A reflective mood naturally follows the exertion of having earned the day’s living. Of course if, instead of attending to an elementary and profoundly important duty, you prefer to read the paper (which you might just as well read while waiting for your dinner) I have nothing to say. But attend to it at some time of the day you must. I now come to the evening hours. IX INTEREST IN THE ARTS Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of idleness in the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to idleness but the study of literature; and they do not happen to have a taste for literature. This is a great mistake. Of course it is impossible, or at any rate very difficult, properly to study anything whatever without the aid of printed books. But if you desire to understand the deeper depths of bridge or of boat-sailing you would not be deterred by your lack of interest in literature from reading the best books on bridge or boat-sailing. We must, therefore, distinguish between literature, and books treating of subjects not literary. I shall come to literature in due course. Let me now remark to those who have never read Meredith, and who are capable of being unmoved by a discussion as to whether Mr. Stephen Phillips is or is not a true poet, that they are perfectly within their rights. It is not a crime not to love literature. It is not a sign of imbecility. The mandarins of literature will order out to instant execution the unfortunate individual who does not comprehend, say, the influence of Wordsworth on Tennyson. But that is only their impudence. Where would they be, I wonder, if requested to explain the influences that went to make Tschaikowsky’s “Pathetic Symphony”? There are enormous fields of knowledge quite outside literature which will yield magnificent results to cultivators. For example (since I have just mentioned the most popular piece of high-class music in England to-day), I am reminded that the Promenade Concerts begin in August. You go to them. You smoke your cigar or cigarette (and I regret to say that you strike your matches during the soft bars of the “Lohengrin” overture), and you enjoy the music. But you say you cannot play the piano or the fiddle, or even the banjo; that you know nothing of music. What does that matter? That you have a genuine taste for music is proved by the fact that, in order to fill his hall with you and your peers, the conductor is obliged to provide programmes from which bad music is almost entirely excluded (a change from the old Covent Garden days!). Now surely your inability to perform “The Maiden’s Prayer” on a piano need not prevent you from making yourself familiar with the construction of the orchestra to which you listen a couple of nights a week during a couple of months! As things are, you probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details. If you were asked to name the instruments which play the great theme at the beginning of the C minor symphony you could not name them for your life’s sake. Yet you admire the C minor symphony. It has thrilled you. It will thrill you again. You have even talked about it, in an expansive mood, to that lady—you know whom I mean. And all you can positively state about the C minor symphony is that Beethoven composed it and that it is a “jolly fine thing.” Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Krehbiel’s “How to Listen to Music” (which can be got at any bookseller’s for less than the price of a stall at the Alhambra, and which contains photographs of all the orchestral instruments and plans of the arrangement of orchestras) you would next go to a promenade concert with an astonishing intensification of interest in it. Instead of a confused mass, the orchestra would appear to you as what it is—a marvellously balanced organism whose various groups of members each have a different and an indispensable function. You would spy out the instruments, and listen for their respective sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player of the hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is the more difficult instrument. You would live at a promenade concert, whereas previously you had merely existed there in a state of beatific coma, like a baby gazing at a bright object. The foundations of a genuine, systematic knowledge of music might be laid. You might specialise your inquiries either on a particular form of music (such as the symphony), or on the works of a particular composer. At the end of a year of forty-eight weeks of three brief evenings each, combined with a study of programmes and attendances at concerts chosen out of your increasing knowledge, you would really know something about music, even though you were as far off as ever from jangling “The Maiden’s Prayer” on the piano.

“But I hate music!” you say. My dear sir, I respect you. What applies to music applies to the other arts. I might mention Mr. Clermont Witt’s “How to Look at Pictures,” or Mr. Russell Sturgis’s “How to Judge Architecture,” as beginnings (merely beginnings) of systematic vitalising knowledge in other arts, the materials for whose study abound in London. “I hate all the arts!” you say. My dear sir, I respect you more and more. I will deal with your case next, before coming to literature. X NOTHING IN LIFE IS HUMDRUM Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect—in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe—in still other words, the perception of the course of evolution. When one has thoroughly got imbued into one’s head the leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted. It is hard to have one’s watch stolen, but one reflects that the thief of the watch became a thief from causes of heredity and environment which are as interesting as they are scientifically comprehensible; and one buys another watch, if not with joy, at any rate with a philosophy that makes bitterness impossible. One loses, in the study of cause and effect, that absurd air which so many people have of being always shocked and pained by the curiousness of life. Such people live amid human nature as if human nature were a foreign country full of awful foreign customs. But, having reached maturity, one ought surely to be ashamed of being a stranger in a strange land! The study of cause and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of life, adds to life’s picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is but a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he can witness in August for three shillings third-class return. The man who is imbued with the idea of development, of continuous cause and effect, perceives in the sea an element which in the day-before-yesterday of geology was vapour, which yesterday was boiling, and which to-morrow will inevitably be ice. He perceives that a liquid is merely something on its way to be solid, and he is penetrated by a sense of the tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life. Nothing will afford a more durable satisfaction than the constantly cultivated appreciation of this. It is the end of all science. Cause and effect are to be found everywhere. Rents went up in Shepherd’s Bush. It was painful and shocking that rents should go up in Shepherd’s Bush. But to a certain point we are all scientific students of cause and effect, and there was not a clerk lunching at a Lyons Restaurant who did not scientifically put two and two together and see in the (once) Two-penny Tube the cause of an excessive demand for wigwams in Shepherd’s Bush, and in the excessive demand for wigwams the cause of the increase in the price of wigwams. “Simple!” you say, disdainfully. Everything—the whole complex movement of the universe—is as simple as that—when you can sufficiently put two and two together. And, my dear sir, perhaps you happen to be an estate agent’s clerk, and you hate the arts, and you want to foster your immortal soul, and you can’t be interested in your business because it’s so humdrum. Nothing is humdrum. The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvellously shown in an estate agent’s office. What! There was a block of traffic in Oxford Street; to avoid the block people actually began to travel under the cellars and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in Shepherd’s Bush! And you say that isn’t picturesque! Suppose you were to study, in this spirit, the property question in London for an hour and a half every other evening. Would it not give zest to your business, and transform your whole life? You would arrive at more difficult problems. And you would be able to tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the longest straight street in London is about a yard and a half in length, while the longest absolutely straight street in Paris extends for miles. I think you will admit that in an estate agent’s clerk I have not chosen an example that specially favours my theories. You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless romance (disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot’s “Lombard Street”? Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed it up for ninety minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would be to you, and how much more clearly you would understand human nature. You are “penned in town,” but you love excursions to the country and the observation of wild life—certainly a heart-enlarging diversion. Why don’t you walk out of your house door, in your slippers, to the nearest gas lamp of a night with a butterfly net, and observe the wild life of common and rare moths that is beating about it, and co-ordinate the knowledge thus obtained and build a superstructure on it, and at last get to know something about something? You need not be devoted to the arts, not to literature, in order to live fully. The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to satisfy that curiosity which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an understanding heart. I promised to deal with your case, O man who hates art and literature, and I have dealt with it. I now come to the case of the person, happily very common, who does “like reading.”

XI SERIOUS READING Novels are excluded from “serious reading,” so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not serious—some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose fiction—the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read, and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. It is only the bad parts of Meredith’s novels that are difficult. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel. You do not set your teeth in order to read “Anna Karenina.” Therefore, though you should read novels, you should not read them in those ninety minutes. Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry. I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading “Paradise Lost” and going round Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything. If poetry is what is called “a sealed book” to you, begin by reading Hazlitt’s famous essay on the nature of “poetry in general.” It is the best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it can possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and kill at forty paces. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental state of the man who, after reading Hazlitt’s essay, is not urgently desirous of reading some poetry before his next meal. If the essay so inspires you I would suggest that you make a commencement with purely narrative poetry. There is an infinitely finer English novel, written by a woman, than anything by George Eliot or the Brontes, or even Jane Austen, which perhaps you have not read. Its title is “Aurora Leigh,” and its author E.B. Browning. It happens to be written in verse, and to contain a considerable amount of genuinely fine poetry. Decide to read that book through, even if you die for it. Forget that it is fine poetry. Read it simply for the story and the social ideas. And when you have done, ask yourself honestly whether you still dislike poetry. I have known more than one person to whom “Aurora Leigh” has been the means of proving that in assuming they hated poetry they were entirely mistaken. Of course, if, after Hazlitt, and such an experiment made in the light of Hazlitt, you are finally assured that there is something in you which is antagonistic to poetry, you must be content with history or philosophy. I shall regret it, yet not inconsolably. “The Decline and Fall” is not to be named in the same day with “Paradise Lost,” but it is a vastly pretty thing; and Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles” simply laughs at the claims of poetry and refuses to be accepted as aught but the most majestic product of any human mind. I do not suggest that either of these works is suitable for a tyro in mental strains. But I see no reason why any man of average intelligence should not, after a year of continuous reading, be fit to assault the supreme masterpieces of history or philosophy. The great convenience of masterpieces is that they are so astonishingly lucid. I suggest no particular work as a start. The attempt would be futile in the space of my command. But I have two general suggestions of a certain importance. The first is to define the direction and scope of your efforts. Choose a limited period, or a limited subject, or a single author. Say to yourself: “I will know something about the French Revolution, or the rise of railways, or the works of John Keats.” And during a given period, to be settled beforehand, confine yourself to your choice. There is much pleasure to be derived from being a specialist. The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow. Never mind. Forget the goal; think only of the surrounding country; and after a period, perhaps when you least expect it, you will suddenly find yourself in a lovely town on a hill. XII DANGERS TO AVOID I cannot terminate these hints, often, I fear, too didactic and abrupt, upon the full use of one’s time to the great end of living (as distinguished from vegetating) without briefly referring to certain dangers which lie in wait for the sincere aspirant towards life. The first is the terrible danger of becoming that most odious and least supportable of persons—a prig. Now a prig is a pert fellow who gives himself airs of superior wisdom. A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour. A prig is a tedious individual who, having made a discovery, is so impressed by his discovery that he is capable of being gravely displeased because the entire world is not also impressed by it. Unconsciously to become a prig is an easy and a fatal thing. Hence, when one sets forth on the enterprise of using all one’s time, it is just as well to remember that one’s own time, and not other people’s time, is the material with which one has to deal; that the earth rolled on pretty comfortably before one began to balance a budget of the hours, and that it will continue to roll on pretty comfortably whether or not one succeeds in one’s new role of chancellor of the exchequer of time. It is as well not to chatter too much about what one is doing, and not to betray a too-pained sadness at the spectacle of a whole world deliberately wasting so many hours out of every day, and therefore never really living. It will be found, ultimately, that in taking care of one’s self one has quite all one can do. Another danger is the danger of being tied to a programme like a slave to a chariot. One’s programme must not be allowed to run away with one. It must be respected, but it must not be worshipped as a fetish. A programme of daily employ is not a religion. This seems obvious. Yet I know men whose lives are a burden to themselves and a distressing burden to their relatives and friends simply because they have failed to appreciate the obvious. “Oh, no,” I have heard the martyred wife exclaim, “Arthur always takes the dog out for exercise at eight o’clock and he always begins to read at a quarter to nine. So it’s quite out of the question that we should…” etc., etc. And the note of absolute finality in that plaintive voice reveals the unsuspected and ridiculous tragedy of a career. On the other hand, a programme is a programme. And unless it is treated with deference it ceases to be anything but a poor joke. To treat one’s programme with exactly the right amount of deference, to live with not too much and not too little elasticity, is scarcely the simple affair it may appear to the inexperienced. And still another danger is the danger of developing a policy of rush, of being gradually more and more obsessed by what one has to do next. In this way one may come to exist as in a prison, and one’s life may cease to be one’s own. One may take the dog out for a walk at eight o’clock, and meditate the whole time on the fact that one must begin to read at a quarter to nine, and that one must not be late. And the occasional deliberate breaking of one’s programme will not help to mend matters. The evil springs not from persisting without elasticity in what one has attempted, but from originally attempting too much, from filling one’s programme till it runs over. The only cure is to reconstitute the programme, and to attempt less. But the appetite for knowledge grows by what it feeds on, and there are men who come to like a constant breathless hurry of endeavour. Of them it may be said that a constant breathless hurry is better than an eternal doze. In any case, if the programme exhibits a tendency to be oppressive, and yet one wishes not to modify it, an excellent palliative is to pass with exaggerated deliberation from one portion of it to another; for example, to spend five minutes in perfect mental quiescence between chaining up the St. Bernard and opening the book; in other words, to waste five minutes with the entire consciousness of wasting them.

The last, and chiefest danger which I would indicate, is one to which I have already referred—the risk of a failure at the commencement of the enterprise. I must insist on it. A failure at the commencement may easily kill outright the newborn impulse towards a complete vitality, and therefore every precaution should be observed to avoid it. The impulse must not be over-taxed. Let the pace of the first lap be even absurdly slow, but let it be as regular as possible. And, having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense. Finally, in choosing the first occupations of those evening hours, be guided by nothing whatever but your taste and natural inclination. It is a fine thing to be a walking encyclopaedia of philosophy, but if you happen to have no liking for philosophy, and to have a like for the natural history of street-cries, much better leave philosophy alone, and take to street-cries.

Cheese by G.K. Chesterton My forthcoming work in five volumes, The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,' is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful whether I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to springle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet that I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: If all the trees were bread and cheese’ - which is indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in an exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to breeze' and seas’ (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say Cheese it!' or even Quite the cheese.’ The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient - sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall. But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive days in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it. In each inn the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different. There was a noble Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that paltry and mechanical civilization that holds us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Both the good and the bad civilization cover us as with a canopy, and protect us from all that is outside. But a good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella - artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary and the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate. By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley. But if, let us say, we compare cheese to soap (that vastly inferior substance), we shall see that soap tends more and more to be merely Smith’s Soap or Brown’s Soap, sent automatically all over the world. If the Red Indians have soap it is Smith’s Soap. If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown’s Soap. There is nothing subtly and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly Tibetan, about his soap. I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he is not worthy), but if he does it is probably a local cheese, having some real relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches, tinned foods, patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are not produced all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead identity, never that soft play of variation which exists in things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese. When I had done my pilgrimage in the four wayside public-houses I reached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded, with great rapidity and complete inconsistency, to a large and elaborate restaurant, where I knew I could get a great many things besides bread and cheese. I could get that also, however; or at least I expected to get it; but I was sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon, and left England behind. The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits. Biscuits - to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits - to one who had proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.

I Collect Cashflows Joshua M Brown I collect shares of businesses. Been doing it since my late teens. Not always successfully. I use a certain type of non fungible token called a stock certificate for this. I never lay hands on the certificate, it’s in digital form, living somewhere in the multiverse. A company called DTC makes sure the shares I’ve bought are the shares I get. And then I hold them. Sometimes I will trade them for digital dollars that I also don’t ever see or touch, but then soon after I am trading those dollars for another pile of virtual stock certificates. People will say “You’re crazy, why would you want to buy a fraction of a company you will never touch and hold in your hands?” And I’m like “You just don’t understand.” My portfolio of virtual business ownership tokens also entitles me to actual business ownership in the not-online world. Like, for example, I own shares of a real estate investment trust, which is a type of NFT that owns land and property and is required to pay out 90% of the rental income all that land and property generates. They pay it out to me and the other people who have fractional ownership in the trust. And not only is it cool that I have the shares in the virtual realm, but it’s also kind of cool that I can go see the actual buildings we own in towns and cities all over America. If I want to, I can touch them. I can know that they are there, standing, operating, taking in cash and paying it out. The best part is that I don’t have to worry about whether or not this token will still be cool enough for someone else to want to buy it from me. I get the cashflows and distributions from it so long as I maintain my ownership of it. I bought some layer one protocols a long, long time ago that have appreciated substantially in value. These include tradeable, online-viewable certificates denoting my ownership in the projects known as Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan and Nvidia. These are protocols that began as corporations but eventually became platforms – the base layer upon which millions of other businesses have been built. From one day to the next, they go in and out of favor and can sometimes lose their cool factor for years on end. But they produce cashflows and I own certificates that entitle me to a piece of those cashflows, forever, for as long as these certificates continue to trade on the digital exchanges in which they are listed. Unfortunately, they don’t have cool kitty cat avatars or blurry jpegs of zombies associated with them. That’s okay, it’s my own private collection and I’m not displaying it on Twitter for strangers to like it anyway. It’s very hard to convince me to part with one of these base layer protocol ownership certificates given how important they are to the ecosystem everyone else is building upon. Now, you might be saying to yourself “Why would this idiot be wasting his money collecting ownership in digital stock certificates and the cashflows of businesses when he could be buying up the drawings of Ukrainian college students?” I acknowledge, there really aren’t any great answers for this. Perhaps I will catch on at some point, but I’m old school. Maybe I just have bad taste in collectibles. Some people like to collect baseball cards and others prefer comic books. There are collectors of stamps, rare automobiles, rock n’ roll memorabilia, antique furniture, old books, vintage jewelry, autographed jerseys and even pretty rocks pulled out of the ground and polished to a high shine. Lately, there are collectors of images that others have hand-drawn or generated via software. They have to compete to collect these images with speculators who are not sentimental and are only there to turn a small dollar amount into a large one by buying and selling. Some of the collectors became collectors because, as the values of their images rose, so too did their own self-regard. Some collectors have become so intertwined with the images they’ve purchased, that the images have become a part of their identity – “I’m the guy that bought this picture on the internet for a much lower price than I could sell it for today.” For some collectors, collecting isn’t enough. They need everyone around them – friends, family or strangers, it matters not – to be aware of their collection too. They must evangelize the beneficence of their having collected and admonish those who were not smart enough to have done so for themselves. “My work isn’t done here until everyone on earth acknowledges my sagacity in acquiring this monkey NFT at $36,000 before someone else acquired a similar monkey NFT for $91,000. You will bend the knee to me when next we meet on Virgin Twitter.” And that’s cool, I guess. Everyone has their own taste in things they enjoy collecting and their own way of expressing it. My mother-in-law loves porcelain and glass elephants. She isn’t talking about them day and night in a discord somewhere or changing the photo ID on her driver’s license to her prized elephant figurine. They just sit on a shelf and make her happy. I like to collect the cashflows of the best businesses in the world. I pile them up high in my accounts, adding to them when values fall, automatically buying more when dividends and distributions are paid out. My collection gets larger every year. I can’t touch it. I can’t hold it. It’s virtual, it’s digital, it lives in the online environment created by the brokerage firms and exchanges. There are many collections like it, but this one is mine. I count up the cashflows coming my way when I’m in a bad mood and that makes me happy again. I think everyone should collect the things that make them happy.

Jackalope Wives Ursula Vernon

The moon came up and the sun went down. The moonbeams went shattering down to the ground and the jackalope wives took off their skins and danced. They danced like young deer pawing the ground, they danced like devils let out of hell for the evening. They swung their hips and pranced and drank their fill of cactus–fruit wine.

They were shy creatures, the jackalope wives, though there was nothing shy about the way they danced. You could go your whole life and see no more of them than the flash of a tail vanishing around the backside of a boulder. If you were lucky, you might catch a whole line of them outlined against the sky, on the top of a bluff, the shadow of horns rising off their brows.

And on the half–moon, when new and full were balanced across the saguaro’s thorns, they’d come down to the desert and dance.

The young men used to get together and whisper, saying they were gonna catch them a jackalope wife. They’d lay belly down at the edge of the bluff and look down on the fire and the dancing shapes — and they’d go away aching, for all the good it did them. For the jackalope wives were shy of humans. Their lovers were jackrabbits and antelope bucks, not human men. You couldn’t even get too close or they’d take fright and run away. One minute you’d see them kicking their heels up and hear them laugh, then the music would freeze and they’d all look at you with their eyes wide and their ears upswept.

The next second, they’d snatch up their skins and there’d be nothing left but a dozen skinny she–rabbits running off in all directions, and a campfire left that wouldn’t burn out ’til morning.

It was uncanny, sure, but they never did anybody any harm. Grandma Harken, who lived down past the well, said that the jackalopes were the daughters of the rain and driving them off would bring on the drought. People said they didn’t believe a word of it, but when you live in a desert, you don’t take chances.

When the wild music came through town, a couple of notes skittering on the sand, then people knew the jackalope wives were out. They kept the dogs tied up and their brash sons occupied. The town got into the habit of having a dance that night, to keep the boys firmly fixed on human girls and to drown out the notes of the wild music.

§

Now, it happened there was a young man in town who had a touch of magic on him. It had come down to him on his mother’s side, as happens now and again, and it was worse than useless.

A little magic is worse than none, for it draws the wrong sort of attention. It gave this young man feverish eyes and made him sullen. His grandmother used to tell him that it was a miracle he hadn’t been drowned as a child, and for her he’d laugh, but not for anyone else.

He was tall and slim and had dark hair and young women found him fascinating. This sort of thing happens often enough, even with boys as mortal as dirt. There’s always one who learned how to brood early and often, and always girls who think they can heal him.

Eventually the girls learn better. Either the hurts are petty little things and they get tired of whining or the hurt’s so deep and wide that they drown in it. The smart ones heave themselves back to shore and the slower ones wake up married with a husband who lies around and suffers in their direction. It’s part of a dance as old as the jackalopes themselves.

But in this town at this time, the girls hadn’t learned and the boy hadn’t yet worn out his interest. At the dances, he leaned on the wall with his hands in his pockets and his eyes glittering. Other young men eyed him with dislike. He would slip away early, before the dance was ended, and never marked the eyes that followed him and wished that he would stay.

He himself had one thought and one thought only — to catch a jackalope wife. They were beautiful creatures, with their long brown legs and their bodies splashed orange by the firelight. They had faces like no mortal woman and they moved like quicksilver and they played music that got down into your bones and thrummed like a sickness.

And there was one — he’d seen her. She danced farther out from the others and her horns were short and sharp as sickles. She was the last one to put on her rabbit skin when the sun came up. Long after the music had stopped, she danced to the rhythm of her own long feet on the sand.

(And now you will ask me about the musicians that played for the jackalope wives. Well, if you can find a place where they’ve been dancing, you might see something like sidewinder tracks in the dust, and more than that I cannot tell you. The desert chews its secrets right down to the bone.)

So the young man with the touch of magic watched the jackalope wife dancing and you know as well as I do what young men dream about. We will be charitable. She danced a little apart from her fellows, as he walked a little apart from his.

Perhaps he thought she might understand him. Perhaps he found her as interesting as the girls found him.

Perhaps we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.

And the jackalope wife danced, out past the circle of the music and the firelight, in the light of the fierce desert stars.

§

Grandma Harken had settled in for the evening with a shawl on her shoulders and a cat on her lap when somebody started hammering on the door.

“Grandma! Grandma! Come quick — open the door — oh god, Grandma, you have to help me —”

She knew that voice just fine. It was her own grandson, her daughter Eva’s boy. Pretty and useless and charming when he set out to be.

She dumped the cat off her lap and stomped to the door. What trouble had the young fool gotten himself into?

“Sweet Saint Anthony,” she muttered, “let him not have gotten some fool girl in a family way. That’s just what we need.”

She flung the door open and there was Eva’s son and there was a girl and for a moment her worst fears were realized.

Then she saw what was huddled in the circle of her grandson’s arms, and her worst fears were stomped flat and replaced by far greater ones.

“Oh Mary,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Oh blessed Saint Anthony, you’ve caught a jackalope wife.”

Her first impulse was to slam the door and lock the sight away. Her grandson caught the edge of the door and hauled it open. His knuckles were raw and blistered. “Let me in,” he said. He’d been crying and there was dust on his face, stuck to the tracks of tears. “Let me in, let me in, oh god, Grandma, you have to help me, it’s all gone wrong —”

Grandma took two steps back, while he half–dragged the jackalope into the house. He dropped her down in front of the hearth and grabbed for his grandmother’s hands. “Grandma —”

She ignored him and dropped to her knees. The thing across her hearth was hardly human. “What have you done?” she said. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing!” he said, recoiling.

“Don’t look at that and tell me ‘Nothing!’ What in the name of our lord did you do to that girl?”

He stared down at his blistered hands. “Her skin,” he mumbled. “The rabbit skin. You know.”

“I do indeed,” she said grimly. “Oh yes, I do. What did you do, you damned young fool? Caught up her skin and hid it from her to keep her changing?”

The jackalope wife stirred on the hearth and made a sound between a whimper and a sob.

“She was waiting for me!” he said. “She knew I was there! I’d been — we’d — I watched her, and she knew I was out there, and she let me get up close — I thought we could talk —”

Grandma Harken clenched one hand into a fist and rested her forehead on it.

“I grabbed the skin — I mean — it was right there — she was watching — I thought she wanted me to have it —”

She turned and looked at him. He sank down in her chair, all his grace gone. “You have to burn it,” mumbled her grandson. He slid down a little further in her chair. “You’re supposed to burn it. Everybody knows. To keep them changing.”

“Yes,” said Grandma Harken, curling her lip. “Yes, that’s the way of it, right enough.”

She took the jackalope wife’s shoulders and turned her toward the lamp light. She was a horror. Her hands were human enough, but she had a jackrabbit’s feet and a jackrabbit’s eyes. They were set too wide apart in a human face, with a cleft lip and long rabbit ears. Her horns were short, sharp spikes on her brow.

The jackalope wife let out another sob and tried to curl back into a ball. There were burnt patches on her arms and legs, a long red weal down her face. The fur across her breasts and belly was singed. She stank of urine and burning hair.

“What did you do?”

“I threw it in the fire,” he said. “You’re supposed to. But she screamed — she wasn’t supposed to scream — nobody said they screamed — and I thought she was dying, and I didn’t want to hurt her — I pulled it back out —”

He looked up at her with his feverish eyes, that useless, beautiful boy, and said “I didn’t want to hurt her. I thought I was supposed to — I gave her the skin back, she put it on, but then she fell down — it wasn’t supposed to work like that!”

Grandma Harken sat back. She exhaled very slowly. She was calm. She was going to be calm, because otherwise she was going to pick up the fire poker and club her own flesh and blood over the head with it.

And even that might not knock some sense into him. Oh, Eva, Eva, my dear, what a useless son you’ve raised. Who would have thought he had so much ambition in him, to catch a jackalope wife?

“You goddamn stupid fool,” she said. Every word slammed like a shutter in the wind. “Oh, you goddamn stupid fool. If you’re going to catch a jackalope wife, you burn the hide down to ashes and never mind how she screams.”

“But it sounded like it was hurting her!” he shot back. “You weren’t there! She screamed like a dying rabbit!”

“Of course it hurts her!” yelled Grandma. “You think you can have your skin and your freedom burned away in front of you and not scream? Sweet mother Mary, boy, think about what you’re doing! Be cruel or be kind, but don’t be both, because now you’ve made a mess you can’t clean up in a hurry.”

She stood up, breathing hard, and looked down at the wreck on her hearth. She could see it now, as clear as if she’d been standing there. The fool boy had been so shocked he’d yanked the burning skin back out. And the jackalope wife had one thought only and pulled on the burning hide —

Oh yes, she could see it clear. Half gone, at least, if she was any judge. There couldn’t have been more than few scraps of fur left unburnt. He’d waited through at least one scream — or no, that was unkind. More likely he’d dithered and looked for a stick and didn’t want to grab for it with his bare hands. Though by the look of his hands, he’d done just that in the end. And the others were long gone by then and couldn’t stop her. There ought to have been one, at least, smart enough to know that you didn’t put on a half–burnt rabbit skin.

“Why does she look like that?” whispered her grandson, huddled into his chair.

“Because she’s trapped betwixt and between. You did that, with your goddamn pity. You should have let it burn. Or better yet, left her alone and never gone out in the desert at all.”

“She was beautiful,” he said. As if it were a reason.

As if it mattered. As if it had ever mattered.

“Get out,” said Grandma wearily. “Tell your mother to make up a poultice for your hands. You did right at the end, bringing her here, even if you made a mess of the rest, from first to last.”

He scrambled to his feet and ran for the door. On the threshold, he paused, and looked back. “You — you can fix her, right?”

Grandma let out a high bark, like a bitch–fox, barely a laugh at all. “No. No one can fix this, you stupid boy. This is broken past mending. All I can do is pick up the pieces.” He ran. The door slammed shut, and left her alone with the wreckage of the jackalope wife.

§

She treated the burns and they healed. But there was nothing to be done for the shape of the jackalope’s face, or the too–wide eyes, or the horns shaped like a sickle moon. At first, Grandma worried that the townspeople would see her, and lord knew what would happen then. But the jackalope wife was the color of dust and she still had a wild animal’s stillness. When somebody called, she lay flat in the garden, down among the beans, and nobody saw her at all.

The only person she didn’t hide from was Eva, Grandma’s daughter. There was no chance that she mistook them for each other — Eva was round and plump and comfortable, the way Grandma’s second husband, Eva’s father, had been round and plump and comfortable.

Maybe we smell alike, thought Grandma. It would make sense, I suppose. Eva’s son didn’t come around at all.

“He thinks you’re mad at him,” said Eva mildly. “He thinks correctly,” said Grandma.

She and Eva sat on the porch together, shelling beans, while the jackalope wife limped around the garden. The hairless places weren’t so obvious now, and the faint stripes across her legs might have been dust. If you didn’t look directly at her, she might almost have been human.

“She’s gotten good with the crutch,” said Eva. “I suppose she can’t walk?”

“Not well,” said Grandma. “Her feet weren’t made to stand up like that. She can do it, but it’s a terrible strain.”

“And talk?”

“No,” said Grandma shortly. The jackalope wife had tried, once, and the noises she’d made were so terrible that it had reduced them both to weeping. She hadn’t tried again. “She understands well enough, I suppose.”

The jackalope wife sat down, slowly, in the shadow of the scarlet runner beans. A hummingbird zipped inches from her head, dabbing its bill into the flowers, and the jackalope’s face turned, unsmiling, to follow it.

“He’s not a bad boy, you know,” said Eva, not looking at her mother. “He didn’t mean to do her harm.”

Grandma let out an explosive snort. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It doesn’t matter what he meant to do. He should have left well enough alone, and if he couldn’t do that, he should have finished what he started.” She scowled down at the beans. They were striped red and white and the pods came apart easily in her gnarled hands. “Better all the way human than this. Better he’d bashed her head in with a rock than this.”

“Better for her, or better for you?” asked Eva, who was only a fool about her son and knew her mother well.

Grandma snorted again. The hummingbird buzzed away. The jackalope wife lay still in the shadows, with only her thin ribs going up and down.

“You could have finished it, too,” said Eva softly. “I’ve seen you kill chickens. She’d probably lay her head on the chopping block if you asked.”

“She probably would,” said Grandma. She looked away from Eva’s weak, wise eyes. “But I’m a damn fool as well.”

Her daughter smiled. “Maybe it runs in families.”

§

Grandma Harken got up before dawn the next morning and went rummaging around the house.

“Well,” she said. She pulled a dead mouse out of a mousetrap and took a half–dozen cigarettes down from behind the clock. She filled three water bottles and strapped them around her waist. “Well. I suppose we’ve done as much as humans can do, and now it’s up to somebody else.”

She went out into the garden and found the jackalope wife asleep under the stairs. “Come on,” she said. “Wake up.”

The air was cool and gray. The jackalope wife looked at her with doe–dark eyes and didn’t move, and if she were a human, Grandma Harken would have itched to slap her. Pay attention! Get mad! Do something!

But she wasn’t human and rabbits freeze when they’re scared past running. So Grandma gritted her teeth and reached down a hand and pulled the jackalope wife up into the pre–dawn dark.

They moved slow, the two of them. Grandma was old and carrying water for two, and the girl was on a crutch. The sun came up and the cicadas burnt the air with their wings. A coyote watched them from up on the hillside. The jackalope wife looked up at him, recoiled, and Grandma laid a hand on her arm.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I ain’t got the patience for coyotes. They’d maybe fix you up but we’d both be stuck in a tale past telling, and I’m too old for that. Come on.”

They went a little further on, past a wash and a watering hole. There were palo verde trees spreading thin green shade over the water. A javelina looked up at them from the edge and stamped her hooved feet. Her children scraped their tusks together and grunted.

Grandma slid and slithered down the slope to the far side of the water and refilled the water bottles. “Not them either,” she said to the jackalope wife. “They’ll talk the legs off a wooden sheep. We’d both be dead of old age before they’d figured out what time to start.”

The javelina dropped their heads and ignored them as they left the wash behind. The sun was overhead and the sky turned turquoise, a color so hard you could bash your knuckles on it. A raven croaked overhead and another one snickered somewhere off to the east.

The jackalope wife paused, leaning on her crutch, and looked up at the wings with longing.

“Oh no,” said Grandma. “I’ve got no patience for riddle games, and in the end they always eat someone’s eyes. Relax, child. We’re nearly there.”

The last stretch was cruelly hard, up the side of a bluff. The sand was soft underfoot and miserably hard for a girl walking with a crutch. Grandma had to half–carry the jackalope wife at the end. She weighed no more than a child, but children are heavy and it took them both a long time.

At the top was a high fractured stone that cast a finger of shadow like the wedge of a sundial. Sand and sky and shadow and stone. Grandma Harken nodded, content. “It’ll do,” she said. “It’ll do.” She laid the jackalope wife down in the shadow and laid her tools out on the stone. Cigarettes and dead mouse and a scrap of burnt fur from the jackalope’s breast. “It’ll do.”

Then she sat down in the shadow herself and arranged her skirts.

She waited. The sun went overhead and the level in the water bottle went down. The sun started to sink and the wind hissed and the jackalope wife was asleep or dead.

The ravens croaked a conversation to each other, from the branches of a palo verde tree, and whatever one said made the other one laugh.

“Well,” said a voice behind Grandma’s right ear, “lookee what we have here.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

“Don’t see them out here often,” he said. “Not the right sort of place.” He considered. “Your Saint Anthony, now… him I think I’ve seen. He understood about deserts.”

Grandma’s lips twisted. “Father of Rabbits,” she said sourly. “Wasn’t trying to call you up.”

“Oh, I know.” The Father of Rabbits grinned. “But you know I’ve always had a soft spot for you, Maggie Harken.”

He sat down beside her on his heels. He looked like an old Mexican man, wearing a button–down shirt without any buttons. His hair was silver gray as a rabbit’s fur. Grandma wasn’t fooled for a minute.

“Get lonely down there in your town, Maggie?” he asked. “Did you come out here for a little wild company?”

Grandma Harken leaned over to the jackalope wife and smoothed one long ear back from her face. She looked up at them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

“Shit,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Never seen that before.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “What did you do to her, Maggie?”

“I didn’t do a damn thing, except not let her die when I should have.”

“There’s those would say that was more than enough.” He exhaled another lungful of smoke.

“She put on a half–burnt skin. Don’t suppose you can fix her up?” It cost Grandma a lot of pride to say that, and the Father of Rabbits tipped his chin in acknowledgment.

“Ha! No. If it was loose I could fix it up, maybe, but I couldn’t get it off her now with a knife.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “Now I see why you wanted one of the Patterned People.”

Grandma nodded stiffly.

The Father of Rabbits shook his head. “He might want a life, you know. Piddly little dead mouse might not be enough.”

“Then he can have mine.”

“Ah, Maggie, Maggie…You’d have made a fine rabbit, once. Too many stones in your belly now.” He shook his head regretfully. “Besides, it’s not your life he’s owed.”

“It’s my life he’d be getting. My kin did it, it’s up to me to put it right.” It occurred to her that she should have left Eva a note, telling her to send the fool boy back East, away from the desert.

Well. Too late now. Either she’d raised a fool for a daughter or not, and likely she wouldn’t be around to tell.

“Suppose we’ll find out,” said the Father of Rabbits, and nodded.

A man came around the edge of the standing stone. He moved quick then slow and his eyes didn’t blink. He was naked and his skin was covered in painted diamonds. Grandma Harken bowed to him, because the Patterned People can’t hear speech. He looked at her and the Father of Rabbits and the jackalope wife. He looked down at the stone in front of him.

The cigarettes he ignored. The mouse he scooped up in two fingers and dropped into his mouth.

Then he crouched there, for a long time. He was so still that it made Grandma’s eyes water, and she had to look away.

“Suppose he does it,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Suppose he sheds that skin right off her. Then what? You’ve got a human left over, not a jackalope wife.”

Grandma stared down at her bony hands. “It’s not so bad, being a human,” she said. “You make do. And it’s got to be better than that.”

She jerked her chin in the direction of the jackalope wife.

“Still meddling, Maggie?” said the Father of Rabbits.

“And what do you call what you’re doing?”

He grinned.

The Patterned Man stood up and nodded to the jackalope wife. She looked at Grandma, who met her too–wide eyes. “He’ll kill you,” the old woman said. “Or cure you. Or maybe both. You don’t have to do it. This is the bit where you get a choice. But when it’s over, you’ll be all the way something, even if it’s just all the way dead.”

The jackalope wife nodded. She left the crutch lying on the stones and stood up. Rabbit legs weren’t meant for it, but she walked three steps and the Patterned Man opened his arms and caught her. He bit her on the forearm, where the thick veins run, and sank his teeth in up to the gums. Grandma cursed.

“Easy now,” said the Father of Rabbits, putting a hand on her shoulder. “He’s one of the Patterned People, and they only know the one way.”

The jackalope wife’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she sagged down onto the stone. He set her down gently and picked up one of the cigarettes.

Grandma Harken stepped forward. She rolled both her sleeves up to the elbow and offered him her wrists.

The Patterned Man stared at her, unblinking. The ravens laughed to themselves at the bottom of the wash. Then he dipped his head and bowed to Grandma Harken and a rattlesnake as long as a man slithered away into the evening.

She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “He didn’t ask for a life.”

The Father of Rabbits grinned. “Ah, you know. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Maybe it was enough you made the offer.”

“Maybe I’m too old and stringy,” she said. “Could be that, too.”

The jackalope wife was breathing. Her pulse went fast then slow. Grandma sat down beside her and held her wrist between her own callused palms.

“How long you going to wait?” asked the Father of Rabbits.

“As long as it takes,” she snapped back.

The sun went down while they were waiting. The coyotes sang up the moon. It was half–full, half–new, halfway between one thing and the other.

“She doesn’t have to stay human, you know,” said the Father of Rabbits. He picked up the cigarettes that the Patterned Man had left behind and offered one to Grandma.

“She doesn’t have a jackalope skin anymore.”

He grinned. She could just see his teeth flash white in the dark. “Give her yours.”

“I burned it,” said Grandma Harken, sitting up ramrod straight. “I found where he hid it after he died and I burned it myself. Because I had a new husband and a little bitty baby girl and all I could think about was leaving them both behind and go dance.”

The Father of Rabbits exhaled slowly in the dark. “It was easier that way,” she said. “You get over what you can’t have faster that you get over what you could. And we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.”

They sat in silence at the top of the bluff. Between Grandma’s hands, the pulse beat steady and strong.

“I never did like your first husband much,” said the Father of Rabbits.

“Well,” she said. She lit her cigarette off his. “He taught me how to swear. And the second one was better.”

The jackalope wife stirred and stretched. Something flaked off her in long strands, like burnt scraps of paper, like a snake’s skin shedding away. The wind tugged at them and sent them spinning off the side of the bluff.

From down in the desert, they heard the first notes of a sudden wild music.

“It happens I might have a spare skin,” said the Father of Rabbits. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long gray roll of rabbit skin. The jackalope wife’s eyes went wide and her body shook with longing, but it was human longing and a human body shaking.

“Where’d you get that?” asked Grandma Harken, suspicious.

“Oh, well, you know.” He waved a hand. “Pulled it out of a fire once — must have been forty years ago now. Took some doing to fix it up again, but some people owed me favors. Suppose she might as well have it… Unless you want it?”

He held it out to Grandma Harken. She took it in her hands and stroked it. It was as soft as it had been fifty years ago. The small sickle horns were hard weights in her hands. “You were a hell of a dancer,” said the Father of Rabbits.

“Still am,” said Grandma Harken, and she flung the jackalope skin over the shoulders of the human jackalope wife.

It went on like it had been made for her, like it was her own. There was a jagged scar down one foreleg where the rattlesnake had bit her. She leapt up and darted away, circled back once and bumped Grandma’s hand with her nose — and then she was bounding down the path from the top of the bluff.

The Father of Rabbits let out a long sigh. “Still are,” he agreed.

“It’s different when you got a choice,” said Grandma Harken.

They shared another cigarette under the standing stone.

Down in the desert, the music played and the jackalope wives danced. And one scarred jackalope went leaping into the circle of firelight and danced like a demon, while the moon laid down across the saguaro’s thorns.

Particularly Keen on Sheparding Musonius Rufus was a philosopher of the Stoic school who taught at Rome during Nero’s reign and wrote in Greek. That he would find farming an ideal occupation for philosophers is consistent with the Stoics’ belief that philosophy is no respecter of persons but is open to all, as Musonius’ contemporary Seneca argues forcefully in his 44th Letter to Lucilius. Indeed, the Stoics could boast among their greatest sages not only a rich man of letters like Seneca but a Greek ditchdigger who began his career as a boxer (Cleanthes), an ex-slave from Phrygia (Epictetus—Musonius’ student), and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Musonius’ argument here that the manual labor required of farming poses no impediment to the deliberate pursuit and acquisition of virtue—the natural end toward which, according to the Stoics, human beings should strive—is a muted criticism of Aristotle, who felt that it did. —M.D. Usher

There’s yet another way to earn a living not inferior to this one. In fact, it could be considered a better way, and not without reason, at least for a man who has some bodily strength—namely, a livelihood gained from the land, whether one owns his own property or not. Indeed, many people who farm land that does not belong to them, be it public land or private, are able to provide not only for themselves but for their wives and children, too. Some even prosper to the point of having a surplus from farming if they are industrious and amenable to hard work. For the land repays the most just and beautiful returns to those who care for it, giving back many times more than it receives and offering an abundance of life’s necessities to the person who is willing to work. These are respectable undertakings; there’s no shame in them. It’s only someone delicate and soft who would say that farmwork is unsuited to an honest man. How could planting not be a noble endeavor? How not plowing, or pruning vines? Sowing, harvesting, threshing—are all these not tasks for the freeborn and appropriate for good men? Shepherding, too: Hesiod wasn’t ashamed of it; nor did it prevent him from being a poet, and dear to the gods. So neither would it hinder any other person. The most pleasing aspect of all farmwork is that it affords the mind more free time to think and to investigate matters that have a bearing on one’s moral development. Of course, work that exerts the body and exhausts it compels the mind to be also closely engaged with that work to the exclusion of all else, and to experience an exertion of its own along with the body. However, work that does not exert the body to excess does not keep the mind from pondering more important things and, upon such reflection, from becoming wiser than it was, which is the aim of every philosopher. For these reasons, I am particularly keen on shepherding. But regardless, if someone pursues philosophy and farming together, I would not compare any other way of life to this, nor would I prefer any other means of obtaining a livelihood. For how is it not more in accordance with Nature to be nourished by the Earth, our nurse and mother, than by some other source? How is it not more manly to live in the countryside than to be sedentary in the city like the sophists? How is it not healthier to spend your time outdoors than to be cooped up inside? How is it not more conducive to freedom to acquire one’s own necessities oneself rather than receive them from others? Clearly, as far as one’s own needs go, not to require things from someone else is much more dignified than to do so. Indeed, just how fine and happy and a mark of divine favor it is to live by farming—so long as good character is not neglected—is shown by Myson of Chenae, whom the god declared “wise,” and Aglaus of Psophis, whom he pronounced “happy.” Both lived by the work of their own hands in the countryside and kept away from city life. Is it not then worthwhile to emulate and imitate these men and embrace farming with enthusiasm? Someone might say, “Is it not unusual for an educated person with the power to put young people on the path of philosophy to work the land with physical labor just like a peasant?” Yes, it would be unusual, if in fact working the land prevented someone from being a philosopher or helping others pursue philosophy. But the fact is, it seems to me, that young people would be helped more not by associating with their teacher in the city, nor hearing him lecture at school, but by seeing him engaged in agricultural tasks whereby he demonstrates in practice exactly what reason instructs—namely, that one must toil and experience physical hardship rather than depend for sustenance on someone else. What’s to keep a student while he’s busy at work from listening to his teacher on the topics of, say, self-control, justice, or endurance? You do not need a lot of speeches to teach effectively if you are a philosopher. Young people certainly don’t need to master the throng of theorems we see the sophists puffing on about. There are enough of those to consume a person’s lifetime! It is possible to learn what is most essential and useful in addition to performing farmwork, especially if one is not laboring nonstop but can enjoy some breaks. Now I know full well that few will want to learn in this manner. Yet it is better for young people who declare their interest in philosophy not to go see a philosopher. I refer to those would-be students who are unsound and soft, because of whom philosophy has become replete with defilements. But among the true lovers of philosophy, there isn’t anyone who would not want to bide his time with an honest man in the countryside, even if the locale proved quite challenging, since he would reap great benefits from this way of life, associating with his teacher day and night, far away from the pitfalls of the city, which are an obstacle to the pursuit of philosophy. Moreover, that you can’t escape notice when you do something, whether it be done properly or poorly, is a tremendous advantage to those receiving instruction. To eat, drink, and sleep under the supervision of an honest man is also a great boon. The results that inevitably arise from time spent together in the country are praised by Theognis in these lines, where he says: Drink and eat among men whose power is great; sit in their midst; impress them.

That Theognis means honest men specifically have great power for the people’s benefit if someone joins them in eating, drinking, and sitting down together he has shown in the following lines: From noble men you will learn noble things; if you mingle with the base, you will lose even what sense you had. And so let no one say that farming is an obstacle to learning or teaching what one must, for that’s just not the case, especially in a situation where the learner lives in the closest proximity to the teacher and the teacher in turn has the student close to hand. When this kind of arrangement is in place, a livelihood gained from farming is clearly the most suitable for a philosopher.

A Person Paper on Purity in Language William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter) From Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books, 1985.

It’s high time someone blew the whistle on all the silly prattle about revamping our language to suit the purposes of certain political fanatics. You know what I’m talking about-those who accuse speakers of English of what they call “racism.” This awkward neologism, constructed by analogy with the well-established term “sexism,” does not sit well in the ears, if I may mix my metaphors. But let us grant that in our society there may be injustices here and there in the treatment of either race from time to time, and let us even grant these people their terms “racism” and “racist.” How valid, however, are the claims of the self-proclaimed “black libbers,” or “negrists”-those who would radically change our language in order to “liberate” us poor dupes from its supposed racist bias? Most of the clamor, as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun “white” and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupuwhiteship, straw white, whitehandle, and so on. The negrists claim that using the word “white,” either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute “person” everywhere where “white” now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as “All whites are created equal.” Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Independence well understood the poetry of our language. Think how ugly it would be to say “All persons are created equal,” or “All whites and blacks are created equal.” Besides, as any schoolwhitey can tell you, such phrases are redundant. In most contexts, it is self-evident when “white” is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the darker race just as much as fairskins. There is nothing denigrating to black people in being subsumed under the rubric “white”-no more than under the rubric “person.” After all, white is a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow, including black. Used inclusively, the word “white” has no connotations whatsoever of race. Yet many people are hung up on this point. A prime example is Abraham Moses, one of the more vocal spokeswhites for making such a shift. For years, Niss Moses, authoroon of the well-known negrist tracts A Handbook of Nonracist Writing and Words and Blacks, has had nothing better to do than go around the country making speeches advocating the downfall of “racist language” that ble objects to. But when you analyze bler objections, you find they all fall apart at the seams. Niss Moses says that words like “chairwhite” suggest to people-most especially impressionable young whiteys and blackeys-that all chairwhites belong to the white race. How absurd! It’s quite obvious, for instance, that the chairwhite of the League of Black Voters is going to be a black, not a white. Nobody need think twice about it. As a matter of fact, the suffix “white” is usually not pronounced with a long “i” as in the noun “white,” but like “wit,” as in the terms saleswhite, freshwhite, penwhiteship, first basewhite, and so on. It’s just a simple and useful component in building race-neutral words. But Niss Moses would have you sit up and start hollering “Racism!” In fact, Niss Moses sees evidence of racism under every stone. Ble has written a famous article, in which ble vehemently objects to the immortal and poetic words of the first white on the moon, Captain Nellie Strongarm. If you will recall, whis words were: “One small step for a white, a giant step for whitekind.” This noble sentiment is anything but racist; it is simply a celebration of a glorious moment in the history of White. Another of Niss Moses’ shrill objections is to the age-old differentiation of whites from blacks by the third-person pronouns “whe” and “ble.” Ble promotes an absurd notion: that what we really need in English is a single pronoun covering both races. Numerous suggestions have been made, such as “pe,” “tey,” and others, These are all repugnant to the nature of the English language, as the average white in the street will testify, even if whe has no linguistic training whatsoever. Then there are advocates of usages such as “whe or ble,” “whis or bler,” and so forth. This makes for monstrosities such as the sentence “When the next President takes office, whe or ble will have to choose whis or bler cabinet with great care, for whe or ble would not want to offend any minorities.” Contrast this with the spare elegance of the normal way of putting it, and there is no question which way we ought to speak. There are, of course, some yapping black libbers who advocate writing “bl/whe” everywhere, which, aside from looking terrible, has no reasonable pronunciation. Shall we say “blooey” all the time when we simply mean “whe”? Who wants to sound like a white with a chronic sneeze? One of the more hilarious suggestions made by the squawkers for this point of view is to abandon the natural distinction along racial lines, and to replace it with a highly unnatural one along sexual lines. One such suggestion-emanating, no doubt, from the mind of a madwhite-would have us say “he” for male whites (and blacks) and “she” for female whites (and blacks). Can you imagine the outrage with which sensible folk of either sex would greet this “modest proposal”? Another suggestion is that the plural pronoun “they” be used in place of the inclusive “whe.” This would turn the charming proverb “Whe who laughs last, laughs best” into the bizarre concoction “They who laughs last, laughs best.” As if anyone in whis right mind could have thought that the original proverb applied only to the white race! No, we don’t need a new pronoun to “liberate” our minds. That’s the lazy white’s way of solving the pseudoproblem of racism. In any case, it’s ungrammatical. The pronoun “they” is a plural pronoun, and it grates on the civilized ear to hear it used to denote only one person. Such a usage, if adopted, would merely promote illiteracy and accelerate the already scandalously rapid nosedive of the average intelligence level in our society. Niss Moses would have us totally revamp the English language to suit bler purposes. If, for instance, we are to substitute “person” for “white,” where are we to stop? If we were to follow Niss Moses’ ideas to their logical conclusion, we would have to conclude that ble would like to see small blackeys and whiteys playing the game of “Hangperson” and reading the story of “Snow Person and the Seven Dwarfs.” And would ble have us rewrite history to say, “Don’t shoot until you see the persons of their eyes”? Will pundits and politicians henceforth issue person papers? Will we now have egg yolks and egg persons? And pledge allegiance to the good old Red, Person, and Blue? Will we sing, “I’m dreaming of a person Christmas”? Say of a frightened white, “Whe’s person as a sheet!”? Lament the increase of person-collar crime? Thrill to the chirping of bobpersons in our gardens? Ask a friend to person the table while we go visit the persons’room? Come off it, Niss Moses-don’t personwash our language! What conceivable harm is there in such beloved phrases as “No white is an island,” “Dog is white’s best friend,” or “White’s inhumanity to white”? Who would revise such classic book titles as Bronob Jacowski’s The Ascent of White or Eric Steeple Bell’s Whites of Mathematics? Did the poet who wrote “The best-laid plans of mice and whites gang aft agley” believe that blacks’ plans gang ne’er agley? Surely not! Such phrases are simply metaphors: everyone can see beyond that. Whe who interprets them as reinforcing racism must have a perverse desire to feel oppressed. “Personhandling” the language is a habit that not only Niss Moses but quite a few others have taken up recently For instance, Nrs. Delilah Buford has urged that we drop the useful distinction between “Niss” and “Nrs.” (which, as everybody knows, is pronounced “Nissiz,” the reason for which nobody knows!). Bler argument is that there is no need for the public to know whether a black is employed or not. Need is, of course, not the point. Ble conveniently sidesteps the fact that there is a tradition in our society of calling unemployed blacks “Niss” and employed blacks “Nrs.” Most blacks-in fact, the vast ma jority-prefer it that way. They want the world to know what their employment status is, and for good reason. Unemployed blacks want prospective employers to know they are available, without having to ask embarrassing questions. Likewise, employed blacks are proud of having found a job, and wish to let the world know they are employed. This distinction provides a sense of security to all involved, in that everyone knows where ble fits into the scheme of things. But Nrs. Buford refuses to recognize this simple truth. Instead, ble shiftily turns the argument into one about whites, asking why it is that whites are universally addressed as “Master,” without any differentiation between employed and unemployed ones. The answer, of course, is that in America and other Northern societies, we set little store by the employment status of whites, Nrs. Buford can do little to change that reality, for it seems to be tied to innate biological differences between whites and blacks. Many white-years of research, in fact, have gone into trying to understand why it is that employment status matters so much to black, yet relatively little to whites. It is true that both races have a longer life expectancy if employed, but of course people often do not act so as to maximize their life expectancy. So far, it remains a mystery. In any case, whites and blacks clearly have different constitutional inclinations, and different goals in life. And so I say, Vive na différence! As for Nrs. Buford’s suggestion that both “Niss” and “Nrs.” be unified into the single form of address “Ns.” (supposed to rhyme with “fizz”), all I have to say is, it is arbitrary and clearly a thousand years ahead of its time. Mind you, this “Ns. “ is an abbreviation concocted out of thin air: it stands for absolutely nothing. Who ever heard of such toying with language? And while we’re on this subject, have you yet run across the recently founded Ns. magazine, dedicated to the concerns of the “liberated black”? It’s sure to attract the attention of a trendy band of black airheads for a little while, but serious blacks surely will see through its thin veneer of slick, glossy Madison Avenue approaches to life. Nrs. Buford also finds it insultingly asymmetric that when a black is employed by a white, ble changes bler firmly name to whis firmly name. But what’s so bad about that? Every firm’s core consists of a boss (whis job is to make sure long-term policies are well charted out) and a secretary (bler job is to keep corporate affairs running smoothly on a day-to-day basis). They are both equally important and vital to the firm’s success. No one disputes this. Beyond them there may of course be other firmly members. Now it’s quite obvious that all members of a given firm should bear the same firmly name-otherwise, what are you going to call the firm’s products? And since it would be nonsense for the boss to change whis name, it falls to the secretary to change bler name. Logic, not racism, dictates this simple convention. What puzzles me the most is when people cut off their nose to spite their faces. Such is the case with the time-honored colored suffixes “oon” and “roon,” found in familiar words such as ambassadroon, stewardoon, and sculptroon. Most blacks find it natural and sensible to add those suffixes onto nouns such as “aviator” or “waiter.” A black who flies an airplane may proudly proclaim, “I’m an aviatroon!” But it would sound silly, if not ridiculous, for a black to say of blerself, “I work as a waiter.” On the other hand, who could object to my saying that the lively Ticely Cyson is a great actroon, or that the hilarious Quill Bosby is a great comedioon? You guessed it-authoroons such as Niss Mildred Hempsley and Nrs. Charles White, both of whom angrily reject the appellation “authoroon,” deep though its roots are in our language. Nrs. White, perhaps one of the finest poetoons of our day, for some reason insists on being known as a “poet.” It leads on to wonder, is Nrs. White ashamed of being black, perhaps? I should hope not. White needs Black, and Black needs White, and neither race should feel ashamed. Some extreme negrists object to being treated with politeness and courtesy by whites. For example, they reject the traditional notion of “Negroes first,” preferring to open doors for themselves, claiming that having doors opened for them suggest implicitly that society considers them inferior. Well, would they have it the other way? Would these incorrigible grousers prefer to open doors for whites? What do blacks want? Another unlikely word has recently become a subject of controversy: “blackey.” This is, of course, the ordinary term for black children (including teenagers), and by affectionate extension it is often applied to older blacks. Yet, incredible though it seems, many blacks-even teen-age blackeys-now claim to have had their “consciousness raised,” and are voguishly skittish about being called “blackeys.” Yet it’s as old as the hills for blacks employed in the same office to refer to themselves as “the office blackeys,” And for their superior to call them “my blackeys” helps make the ambiance more relaxed and comfy for all. It’s hardly the mortal insult that libbers claim it to be. Fortunately, most blacks are sensible people and realize that mere words do not demean; they know it’s how they are used that counts. Most of the time, calling a black-especially an older black-a “blackey” is a thoughtful way of complimenting bler, making bler feel young, fresh, and hirable again. Lord knows, I certainly wouldn’t object if someone told me that I looked whiteyish these days! Many young blackeys go through a stage of wishing they had been born white. Perhaps this is due to popular television shows like Superwhite and Batwhite, but it doesn’t really matter. It is perfectly normal and healthy. Many of our most successful blacks were once tomwhiteys and feel no shame about it. Why should they? Frankly, I think tomwhiteys are often the cutest little blackeys-but that’s just my opinion. In any case, Niss Moses (once again) raises a ruckus on this score, asking why we don’t have a corresponding word for young whiteys who play blackeys’ games and generally manifest a desire to be black. Well, Niss Moses, if this were a common phenomenon, we most assuredly would have such a word, but it just happens not to be. Who can say why? But given that tomwhiteys are a dime a dozen, it’s nice to have a word for them. The lesson is that White must learn to fit language to reality; White cannot manipulate the world by manipulating mere words. An elementary lesson, to be sure, but for some reason Niss Moses and others of bler ilk resist learning it. Shifting from the ridiculous to the sublime, let us consider the Holy Bible. The Good Book is of course the source of some of the most beautiful language and profound imagery to be found anywhere. And who is the central character of the Bible? I am sure I need hardly remind you; it is God. As everyone knows, Whe is male and white, and that is an indisputable fact. But have you heard the latest joke promulgated by tasteless negrists? It is said that one of them died and went to Heaven and then returned. What did ble report? “I have seen God, and guess what? Ble’s female!” Can anyone say that this is not blasphemy of the highest order? It just goes to show that some people will stoop to any depths in order to shock. I have shared this “joke” with a number of friends of mine (including several blacks, by the way), and, to a white, they have agreed that it sickens them to the core to see Our Lord so shabbily mocked. Some things are just in bad taste, and there are no two ways about it. It is scum like this who are responsible for some of the great problems in our society today, I am sorry to say. Well, all of this is just another skirmish in the age-old Battle of the Races, I guess, and we shouldn’t take it too seriously. I am reminded of words spoken by the great British philosopher Alfred West Malehead in whis commencement address to my alma secretaria the University of North Virginia: “To enrich the language of whites is, certainly, to enlarge the range of their ideas.” I agree with this admirable sentiment wholeheartedly. I would merely point out to the overzealous that there are some extravagant notions about language that should be recognized for what they are: cheap attempts to let dogmatic, narrow minds enforce their views on the speakers lucky enough to have inherited the richest, most beautiful and flexible language on earth, a language whose traditions run back through the centuries to such deathless poets as Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Walt Whitwhite, and so many others… Our language owes an incalculable debt to these whites for their clarity of vision and expression, and if the shallow minds of bandwagon-jumping negrists succeed in destroying this precious heritage for all whites of good will, that will be, without any doubt, a truly female day in the history of Northern White.

In Praise of Idleness Bertrand Russell October 1, 1932 Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Every one knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. This traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the Y. M. C. A. will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain. Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the bread out of other people’s mouths, and is, therefore, wicked. If this argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income he puts just as much bread into people’s mouths in spending as he takes out of other people’s mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise. One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the expenditure of most civilized governments consists in payments for past wars and preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man’s economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it on drink or gambling.

But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed and produce something useful this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something which could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is, therefore, injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those on whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out to be not wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through the failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.

All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work. First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising. Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example. From the beginning of civilization until the industrial revolution a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by priests and warriors. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917, and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impression upon men’s thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery. It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less or consumed more. At first sheer force compelled them to produce and part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened, and the expenses were diminished. To this day ninety-nine per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was rendered possible only by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technic it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization. Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one. This was made obvious during the War. At that time all the men in the armed forces, all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or government offices connected with the War were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of physical well-being among wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance; borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The War showed conclusively that by the scientific organization of production it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If at the end of the War the scientific organization which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that, the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry. This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined? The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England in the early nineteenth century fifteen hours was the ordinary day’s work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busy-bodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say, “What do the poor want with holidays? they ought to work.” People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much economic confusion.

II.

Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes in the course of his life a certain amount of produce of human labor. Assuming, as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. To this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only. I shall not develop the fact that in all modern societies outside the U. S. S. R. many people escape even this minimum of work, namely all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve. If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are already well-off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners except as the grim punishment of unemployment, in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. The snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is under a plutocracy confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense. The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists. In the new creed which controls the government of Russia, while there is much that is very different from the traditional teaching of the West, there are some things that are quite unchanged. The attitude of the governing classes, and especially of those who control educational propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labor is almost exactly that which the governing classes of the world have always preached to what were called the “honest poor.” Industry, sobriety, willingness to work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority, all these reappear; moreover, authority still represents the will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name, Dialectical Materialism. The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages men had conceded the superior saintliness of women and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of “honest toil,” have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement. In Russia all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has been taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more honored than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are made to secure shock workers for special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young, and is the basis of all ethical teaching. For the present this is all to the good. A large country, full of natural resources, awaits development and has to be developed with very little use of credit. In these circumstances hard work is necessary and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours? In the West we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle because we can dispense with their labor by making others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of manual work must be the lot of the average man. In Russia, owing to economic justice and central control over production, the problem will have to be differently solved. The rational solution would be as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme virtue of hard work, it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity. I read recently of an ingenious scheme put forward by Russian engineers for making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm by putting a dam across the Kara Straits. An admirable plan, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean. This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.

III.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich for thousands of years to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say, “I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.” I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, as a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure hours that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy. It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours’ work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy because they are making money but when you enjoy the food they have provided you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good but keyholes are bad.

The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profitmaking is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer. When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried farther than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered “high-brow.” Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part. In the past there was a small leisure class and a large working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class mankind would never have emerged from barbarism. The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. It might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a byproduct. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in an academic milieu tend to be unaware of the pre-occupations of ordinary men and women; moreover, their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where every one outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits. In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity. Men who in their professional work have become interested in some phase of economics or government will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists lacking in reality. Medical men will have time to learn about the progress of medicine. Teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine things which they learned in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue. Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

Death to Minimalism Minimalism is the aesthetic language of gentrification. A friend of mine who lives in Los Angeles says he tracks the progress of the transformation not by how many white hipsterish people are in the neighborhood, but by how many houses have put up what he calls “the gentrification fence.” You’ve seen it, it looks like this:

Every time I go back to my parents’ neighborhood in Florida, another little old house from the 1920s-1950s has been flattened and replaced with one of these. It has been stunning watching the transformation of my hometown. You can see the same thing in Manhattan, of course, which has become the playground of the international super-rich. They build themselves sleek pencil-thin towers in which contact with other human beings is minimized to the greatest extent possible. (If some meddling redistributionist city government requires them to stick in a few “affordable” units, a “poor door” can ensure the rich never have to accidentally spend an uncomfortable elevator ride with a member of the proletariat.) Every day, New Yorkers wake up to see a little less of this…

…and a lot more of this:

Jeremiah Moss’s “Vanishing New York” blog, and the accompanying book, has tracked the city’s development from a messy, historic, romantic multicultural city full of punk rockers, cheap knishes, and dive bars to a glittering corporate monoculture home to little more than condo buildings, office towers, and wine bars. Moss suggests that there is a certain lack of “soul” that characterizes the new New York. I have the same sense, but I also find it kind of difficult to articulate what “soul” actually means. I think, however, that we can refine our sense of what it is by looking at a particular instance of change that recently occurred in the Bay Area. Here is a recent Twitter post about the renovation of an old house in the city:

If you thought the “before” photo was on the right, you’d be wrong. That’s the new and improved version, shorn of its color, its Victorian-era architectural details, its charming rounded windows, and all of the signs that the people living in it are human. People on social media were almost unanimous in their hatred of the change. It was an “architectural hate crime,” the house had been “Ikea-fied.” “So it went from eccentric to boring,” one person noted. They had “remove[d] all of the grit, character, and individuality just to leave it as bland and homogeneous as almost everything else.” “The first house has character, personality, looks like it’s lived in and has a story to tell. The second house looks like it needs a Xanax and to be put on suicide watch.” “The blue one looks fun. Like a home.” “It’s like a house-vampire came along, sucked all the life out of it and left a bloodless corpse behind.” What is it, though, that actually makes #2 so much worse than #1? Why does the word “soulless” spring so quickly to mind? All they did was paint it white, remove a few curlicues, tidy it up, add a wooden fence, and put in some more contemporary windows. Why does the change seem to “kill” the house? Perhaps it’s a commitment to historic preservation, but why does this particular bit of historic style seem worth preserving? What’s so special about a bit of scrollwork? Why should rounded window frames be better than rectangular ones? The turquoise paint, the “Beware of Dog” sign, the satellite dish, the unevenly placed planters—none of this was original. It seems as if the house has lost something that is greater than the sum of the actual changes, some kind of inner spirit. I don’t think it’s easy to actually put the change into words. A lot of commentators used words like “soul” and “life,” but is this just a kind of mysticism? I am sure there are those (probably including the house’s owner) who would deride the reaction as mere “nostalgia,” an irrational outmoded attachment to old things because they are old. I think there is more to it than that, though. Let me show you two pictures. Here is one I took today walking around my neighborhood:

And here is the parking lot of a Target:

One of these places strikes me as much more beautiful than the other. And by “beautiful,” I don’t mean some Platonic quality that exists in the ether. I mean something that gives you pleasure just from looking at it. Beauty is kind of “objective” in this sense, in that something either does or doesn’t give you pleasure. That doesn’t mean that everyone gets pleasure from the same things, but it does mean that there are some things that give a greater number of people pleasure than other things do. There are things you can think about while staring at a Target. It is not that there are no revelations to be found there. The processes necessary to build a Target are impressive. Cars are impressive. But for me, the experience of wandering through the French Quarter is simply very different from the experience of looking at a Target. That’s true for many other people, too, which is why we get a lot of tourists in New Orleans but you don’t get many taking pictures of big box stores. And I don’t think this is a matter of age: If you had told me that the building in the top photo was built in 2001, and the building below in 1998, it wouldn’t change my preference. What is actually going on here? I think in part it’s the absence of this quality we call “life” or “soul.” The architect Christopher Alexander, in The Timeless Way of Building, encourages us to take these terms seriously. Alexander describes what he calls “the quality without a name,” which is the way that one place can simply feel right in a way that another feels wrong, like the before and after of the Oakland house. We might also call this quality “whole” or “comfortable,” yet it’s difficult to precisely pin down. It is the sum total of what distinguishes this:

…from this:

Alexander says that the processes by which things are built are crucial, and that one of the differences we are seeing when we see places that seem “soulless” and places that seem soulful is the difference between the kind of life that goes on in a space. In Oakland’s “Before” house, we see people who are interesting, eccentric, who have a dog and probably a little vegetable patch behind the house. They sit on the stoop in the evenings, and the dog races around the front driveway. The “After” house contains fussy people. I do not necessarily think Marie Kondo is the Antichrist, but I do think clutter has its place. It can be a sign that a place is truly lived in and enjoyed, that it hasn’t been artificially cleansed of its most human qualities. For example, my 2nd-favorite bookstore in New Orleans looks like this inside:

Being inside it does not necessarily spark “joy.” The feeling it mostly sparks is “worrying that you’re going to topple one of the stacks and initiate a catastrophic domino effect.” But joy is not the only worthwhile emotion: Wonder and mystery and curiosity and apprehension are also the ingredients of a good life. I would much rather visit the New Orleans bookstore than, for example, this one: I just find that one so boring, so mechanically assembled, so lacking in the element of “discovery” that makes a bookstore good. One of the reasons I like Christopher Alexander’s writings is that he tells us we shouldn’t ignore these feelings. They’re important, and we should strive to build places that produce “life.” Which brings us to ornamentation. Most contemporary architecture is entirely without ornamentation, i.e., micro-level decorative features designed to please the eye and nothing more. Have a look at the gallery of buildings whose designers have won the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture. The tendency is toward monumental shapes. You will certainly not find any gargoyles or arabesques or lattice work on the prize-winners. Ever since Adolph Loos declared that “ornament is crime,” architects have generally treated it that way. The rule of contemporary architecture since World War Two has been that there are only two options: a sleek, futuristic minimalism that is thought to capture the Zeitgeist, or a postmodern pastiche of random elements from Greek and Italianate styles (this is the aesthetic language of the rightly-loathed McMansion). But why? What’s wonderful to me about well-placed ornamentation is that it gives viewers an endless number of things to look at. When I walk through the French Quarter, I am constantly noticing little things that I never saw before. A door knocker in the shape of an animal. A mysterious weather-beaten door with leafy lattice windows. A downspout that looks like a fish or dragon. My friend Oren and I, as we walk through New Orleans, sometimes play a game we call “spot the filigree,” in which we look for little decorative touches we hadn’t noticed before. A FILIGREE I JUST NOTICED IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD TODAY FOR THE FIRST TIME Ornamentation makes the world more interesting. It stimulates the imagination, it means that you can look at something twice, three times, four times, and still not notice things. I think the reason people find it beautiful is not because of some nostalgia for Victorianism but because it is delightful to have a world dotted with small visual easter eggs. Contemporary design deprives us of these wonderful, whimsical features, even as we have the capacity to build more of them than ever before. Why can’t you put gargoyles on a building anymore? I blame capitalism, with its relentless push for efficiency and technological progress, and its lack of interest in creating things that add unquantifiable value. Here I think it is worth returning to the manifesto once put out by the “New Maximalists.” The Congress On The New Maximalism (COTNM), before its final session in 1980, was a fierce and controversial riposte to those who had spent the last decades stripping art down to its bare geometric essentials. I shall quote two paragraphs from the manifesto’s full 860-page text. (“Brevity is crime” was the New Maximalist riposte to Loos.) We are told that capitalist society wishes to increase production, nothing but production. This is true. But is it production of more? No, it is the production of more of less. The ceaseless quest for profit means shaving a thing down to its bare essentials, asking the question “What is the minimum degree to which a Mexican restaurant must resemble a Mexican restaurant for people to accept that it is one?” This makes profit-seeking phenomenally efficient. It also means dullness, decrepitude, death. If a thing cannot justify itself economically, it must disappear. Wilderness, ornament—they cannot justify themselves economically, therefore they are to die. To resist, we must praise the useless, the inefficient, the unnecessary, the magically elaborate, the circuitous route and the impractical solution. Let there be mazes, overgrowth, prolixity. Life is a fractal, not a line. Every surface must be as the Persian ceiling—with layers of complexity sufficient that one can stare dazzled for a lifetime and never be bored. There must always be an infinity of pleasures to greet the viewer.* I don’t agree with everything they wrote, but I think there’s something to this. I see it on display in my own bathroom: THIS IS NOT ACTUALLY MY BATHROOM BUT MIGHT AS WELL BE, BECAUSE IT LOOKS QUITE SIMILAR. IN MINE, THE ENTIRE FLOOR IS WHITE TILE, NOT JUST THE SHOWER. I like my apartment a lot, but the bathroom is a bit strange. It’s entirely white, in keeping with the contemporary style. It’s very impressive-looking, actually, and many people would say it’s attractive. But it has the downside of being both rather dull and a bit inconvenient. There is a gigantic white wall on one side (the ceilings are very high in New Orleans). And I can’t help always thinking about how much more impressive that wall would be if it was painted with some panoramic scene. We are told that all-white paintings can actually have a lot of variety. But they can only have so much variety. My minimalist bathroom is not actually very convenient, either. Because it’s all white, it always looks dirty, and because the shower has no door, water sprays everywhere. It is, in other words, designed more for appearing in brochures than for being used by actual human beings. Baths are out of fashion these days, so my bathroom doesn’t have one even though I like taking baths. Minimalism pares down to the bare essentials, and sometimes even the essentials themselves (like a door on your shower) get pared down. I just want my spaces to have things to look at, to make my imagination wander. I’d like a clawfoot tub to have feet that look like actual animal feet, because that gives it character. I think a space without flowers is a space without life. Who doesn’t like flowers? Actually, a love of nature is very important to the critique of minimalism. When I showed the image of the balcony with flowerpots, one of the reasons it seemed to have life was because it did have actual life. Our spaces can appear most dead and miserable when they don’t have any plant or animal life, when we have literally killed every single living thing that once inhabited a patch of ground. I was at the airport the other day, and I suddenly felt incredibly pained and uncomfortable, like I couldn’t breathe. I had a strong sensation that I was in a dead place, a kind of hell where nothing lived. I could not see a single plant. Everything around me was gray, dismal. It was tarmac and hallways. It depressed the hell out of me, because I think gardens should be everywhere. (Imagine, if you will, airport hallways that were made of trellises covered in vines and flowers, a terminal that felt like a greenhouse. Perhaps some birds in the rafters, crapping on the occasional traveler to remind them that there are worse problems than a delayed flight. But no snakes, for obvious reasons.) Nature is capable of producing patterns far more impressive than anything we can come up with, which is why our best work comes when we adopt nature’s own design principles. Just look at William Morris’ patterns:

To me, these are amazing. They show the human creative spirit at its peak, they have warmth and life and vibrancy, and they pay tribute to nature without simply imitating it. They are complex and yet simple, every part of them is in harmony with every other part. It feels like listening to music. “Harmony” is very important in Christopher Alexander’s books, and in his The Battle For The Life And Beauty of the Earth he describes what it means to make a place where everything is in harmony. He recounts his experiences building the Eishin School in Japan, a high school with “lakes with ducks on them, shadowy arcades, secret gardens.” It was built in collaboration with the students and teachers, through a participatory process in which the design “unfolded” rather than being done ahead of time by a single visionary “starchitect.” Alexander believes that good design is about the life that inhabits a place, not abstract forms, and so the cat that inhabits the bookshop, or the feeling of delight you get at coming across a hidden courtyard, or the way the light hits your book as you sit in the window seat, these should all be of as much concern to architects as producing expressive shapes. Alexander’s rhetoric in the book is harsh—he literally believes that capitalist design process will destroy the beauty of the planet—but seeing the serene Eishin School, with its wooden footbridge and its alleyways and its majestic ceilings and its cozy alcoves, it’s difficult not to agree that he’s onto something. When I set foot in contemporary buildings, often they feel completely wrong: They don’t feel as if they have been designed with love and care, they feel as if the designer didn’t think much about the actual experiences of the people in the place. As a result, minimalism has been ruining restaurants: Stripping down to the bare essentials means making a place much louder, and a plush, cozy coffee shop is easier to have conversations in than a spare industrial one. BORING-ASS WINDOWS. NOBODY IS GOING TO DERIVE SUBLIME PLEASURE GAZING AT THEM. FUCKIN’ AWESOME WINDOWS. WHY NOT JUST HAVE THESE ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE? LOOKING AT THEM IS FUN. I want to finish by returning to New Orleans. It’s very much a “maximalist” city. We imbibe too much, we eat too much, we listen to too much music and celebrate Mardi Gras for too long. But that’s because we value the good life. And what a good life it is sometimes. On my block, there are always musicians. I can wake up to the sounds of a lone saxophonist on the corner, or to the Dauphin Street Stompers just starting up. One of my neighbors runs a bubble machine most days, filling the street with bubbles. There are flowers galore, people out on their balconies waving to each other. As I bike to work, I might pass Doreen Ketchens or Tuba Skinny or this guy. Today, I saw an incredible one-man band. He had a guitar, drum, and kazoo, and was doing Louis Armstrong style scat singing. I had never heard anything like it. (The man isn’t on YouTube, he didn’t have CDs, and yet he was playing the most astonishing music!) A neighborhood should be like that: full of life. The aesthetic of the buildings in New Orleans fits perfectly with the music and with Carnival. They are colorful, human scale, ornamented. They are decorated with little fountains, and have Mardi Gras beads dangling from the fenceposts. Cats sleep on the porches. It all fits together.

The above scene to me feels right. It feels like it has “the quality without a name.” The backdrop is correct for the musicians. On the other hand, we have this scene from the new New York City, in front of a Bank of America:

The musicians are just as alive. They are not minimalists (look at the stickers on the drums). Yet they are at war with their surroundings. They are surrounded by banks and condos, places without history, without stories to tell. These musicians are almost an anachronism—soon the police will surely be showing up to ask them to move along. I think it’s obvious to most people that the minimalist overhaul of the Oakland house ruined it. It sucked the character out, destroyed the magic. But what is character? What is magic? To me, these things are of the “you know it when you see it” variety, and you see it most in places that are intricate, leafy, hand-painted, and least in a Target parking lot. Minimalism is the stripping away of the untidy organic haphazardness that makes spaces their most human. It makes spaces that are impossible to really live in, places where the first thing you put on a table makes it look like a mess, where people are actually out of place. And it’s a dead end: Where do you go from there? How many times can you paint a plain white wall, once you’ve discarded all possibility of drawing from the rich patterns of nature and the history of art? Instead of futilely questing to turn ourselves into machines, to regulate and rationalize nature rather than letting it pursue its own ends, we should embrace the filigree of life. This is not to say that things that are spare and unadorned are inherently bad. Not everything needs to explode with a thousand colors. But what disturbs me is that minimalism is becoming the default, that it seems the future can only be minimalist, that elaborate decoration is associated with “the past” and New Orleans is a tiny obstinate holdout against an all-consuming trend. We need to move in many directions, not just one, lest the whole world become a Target parking lot.

Lablonamedadon “I don’t understand,” the creature said. “What are you asking, exactly?” Obadon paused to scratch his comb before answering. Anybody else, he reflected with a touch of bitterness, would have given up by now. Three weeks of frantic scrabbling battles between programmers, linguists, and supercomputers to make a working translator. Another full week giving a crash-course in Alliance history, politics, and culture to this new race’s ambassador. And he still found himself having to explain the most basic concepts. It wore him ragged. True, anyone else would have quit in disgust. But Obadon had been cursed with that most terrible affliction, a burning curiosity, which had driven him into an ambassadorship position at the edge of known space. Which meant that he was the closest representative on hand when the signal had been detected from the outermost planet under Alliance control. Which meant that he was now slogging along with this oompta ape who needed to be spoken to like a child. “I am asking if your race has achieved Lablonnamedadon, the, ah… Great Planetary Dispersal,” he said. “You do not know this term?” “Lablo… what? No, I don’t know what that means.” The, what was it, the human, seemed far more interested in the view out the port side window than their conversation as they began to finish docking with Sheltered Cove. It gazed wild-eyed at the stately drifting of tremendous vessels around the central hub. The creature had likely never seen a starport before. Obadon rattled air through his beak in exasperation. “Greater Planetary Dispersal,” he said, “is a concept developed by the storied philosopher Gadalin Mablotobinoidijang in the third century of the Alliance’s twelfth iteration, inspired upon observing the disruption of Updalon IV’s bureaucracy following famine induced by solar flares believed to you’re not even listening to me anymore, are you.” “No, no, keep going, I’m listening,” said the human, eyes still glued to the window. “Can you boil it down for me?” Obadon had to flick quickly through his translator device to determine the analogy. Boil it down- a cooking term. How quaint. “Very well,” he said, “the principle states that there is a minimum number of planets, spread out across many light-years, required for a space-faring species to survive any single natural disaster while still being close enough for feasible travel. Be it an impact event or solar flare, or even supernova, or gamma-ray burst, the Dispersal theory allows the other planets to at best provide immediate aid, and at worst prepare and evacuate. In essence, we spread ourselves far enough that we cannot be wiped out.” He scratched at his comb again. “Gadalin proposed that six planets, over a wide enough area, be enough to ensure survival. Since his death, adjusting for advancements in hyperdrive technology and the discovery of further galactic anomalies, it has been raised to eight. Four races of the Alliance have achieved Lablonnamedadon at great expense, while the other two are approaching. With your race’s admission into the Alliance, we will lend our aid and resources, that you may reach Lablonnamedadon within a thousand years.” That got the human’s attention. He pulled his gaze free from the massive docking arms finally latching onto their ship and turned to look intently at Obadon. “Hold on,” he said. “You’re telling me that each member of the alliance has eight populated planets?” Obadon sighed, but only half in frustration. He found that he actually quite enjoyed impressing the yokel with the Alliance’s achievements. “Not all,” he said. “As I said before, the two lesser members, the Glit’pan and Trepliket, have not yet reached the eight planets required for Lablonnamedadon.” Honestly, how had these creatures even managed to leave their system? The human’s brow furrowed. “Why not more?” Obadon sputtered for a moment. “More?” he said. “I don’t understand the question. This may be difficult for you to understand, but the terraformation and colonization of a planet is a tremendous undertaking, requiring most of a single civilization’s resources and spanning many centuries. With eight planets guaranteeing survival, what possible reason could we have for more?” The human seemed about to reply when the door slid open to reveal an honor guard of Trepliket soldiers, their armor glistening black in the artificial light. “Ah,” said Obadon. “It seems your escort has arrived. They’ll show you to the Council Chamber.” The creature rose from his seat, hesitated, turned for some parting comment, then clearly thought better of it. As he passed the Trepliket, they formed around him in a square, feet clicking with unnerving synchronization, and walked with him down the docking tube. Obadon watched him go. Despite the constant difficulties, he had enjoyed instructing the creature. He was almost sorry for how badly they were going to screw it over.

Heb’lik sat glumly in his chair. He glanced to his left, where the rest of the Council were seated in balconies of ascending height, a symbol of the hierarchy of their races. Immediately to his left were the Trepliket senators, an insect species, quiet and precise. As ever, only the subtle twitching of their antennae were markers for any form of emotion. Above them were the Maprok, great lumbering mammals, then the Prang, a sentient conglomeration of annelids. Highest of all were the Toglannidan, preening their jeweled quills, and the Zobafin, whip-thin reptilians peering imperiously over their railing. It was their original union that had created the Alliance that ruled today. The six balconies circled a small podium from on high. Whenever this human arrived, he would find himself standing at the bottom of a long narrow shaft, craning upwards while the Council could glare down at leisure. Like a specimen on a slide, to be examined and scrutinized through the barrel of a microscope. Heb’lik slouched a bit further. He should have been happy. Finally, his people could move up a rung in the Alliance. For the first time in almost a millennium, they would be able to reap the long-promised profits of their venture. But for all that, the emotions that continued to rule his mind were pity, and disgust, and fuming, helpless rage. A fanfare rang out through the chamber and he straightened up. More than twenty meters below, the great doors were opening to reveal the almost robotic Trepliket bodyguard and their human charge. As he came to the center of the floor, the guards pivoted, paused, and marched away in what could only be described as a dignified skitter. Heb’lik leaned close to the edge to look at the human. The creature seemed a crude chimeric mashing of each race of the Alliance. It was a mammal, like the Maprok, but lanky, like the Zobafin, with a bright shock of yellow fur at its crown, almost like the flamboyant fleshy combs bobbing on the Toglannidan representatives. It lacked the fur coat of the Maprok, instead having a smooth pink hide, much like Heb’lik’s own amphibious skin. The Council Chamber was specifically designed to excite a number of psychological reactions in an organism entering for the first time; primarily awe and fear. Heb’lik had looked forward to seeing these emotions in the human, that he could get a grasp on how they were expressed in an alien face. But in this he was disappointed. The creature’s visage, looking up to the Council in all its glory, was as blank and unchanging as that of a Trepliket stoic. It locked eyes with Heb’lik, then looked to each balcony in turn, with a serene calm. The only creature it did not resemble was the Prang senator. Then again, neither did anyone else.

The High Councilor, Xizin, rose to his feet and bellowed the formal address down to the human. Though his voice may not have reached him, it was carried down and blasted out of speakers at ground level, that he may feel the full impact of the address. “The Allied Council, delegates of the Six Races, convenes on this day to celebrate first contact with the Human Race, and to extend our greetings and welcome you into our fold!” He paused, arms splayed in a power stance on the railing. Many who find themselves at the bottom of the Council Chamber believe they need to shout to be heard, so far from their audience. Their foolish straining was a continual source of amusement for the pettier delegates. Heb’lik knew that more than a few senators were waiting eagerly to see if the freshly arrived creature would make the same mistake. In this, they too were disappointed. When the human spoke, it was in an even, deliberate pitch, trusting the hidden microphones to pick up his words. “I, Ambassador Iosef Baboian, hereby accept and reciprocate your greeting,” he said. “I hope that our meeting may work to foster happiness and prosperity between our races.” An odd choice of phrasing, but seemingly polite. The High Councilor, satisfied, drew back to stand fully upright. “Prosperous for your race, undoubtedly,” he boomed. “The combined resources and technological advancement of the Alliance will be a great boon to humanity. In time, you too will know the luxury and security we enjoy.” Now he leaned forward again. Here it comes, thought Heb’lik. The High Councilor’s voice softened to a sibilant hiss. “But I wonder, will we prosper from an alliance with you?” The human’s face remained dispassionate, but no doubt he wondered at the sudden breach in courtesy. “I think you would find it rewarding,” he said. “You have many marvelous technologies, but we do as well. Our sciences are likely to explore branches unknown to yours, and their sharing would benefit all members of the Alliance. Further, we have deep and storied cultures whose art and beliefs would bring spiritual enrichment to-” “No doubt, no doubt,” the High Chancellor cut in. “But our concern is more for rewards of a… rewarding nature. Raw materials, valuable minerals and elements, trained and untrained labor, that sort of thing. You must understand, we will be investing a great deal into the advancement of your race. We require certain… guarantees that these investments will pay off.” The human’s eyes narrowed, a reaction at last. Was it suspicion? Readying for an attack, or a gesture of submissiveness? Or was he merely squinting to see the High Chancellor better? “…such as?” he said.

Then the hammers came down, one after another. Outrageous taxes to the Alliance. Loans saddled with crushing compound interest on any and every form of foreign aid. Grossly unbalanced trade agreements. Unpaid human labor to be supplied to every corner of Alliance territories. Each species stepped forward in turn to put another weight around humanity’s neck. As his own species came up to deliver their terms, Heb’lik gripped the arms of his seat until the blood left his fingers. The Glit’pan had struggled under their virtual serfdom to the Alliance for almost a thousand years, yet here they were, ready to saddle another innocent species with the same debts. It was gunboat diplomacy. The whole human race, carved up into spheres of influence. At the same time, he marveled at the human’s self-control. According to the official records, his own people had raged furiously at the revelation. The Prang had proclaimed the blackest curses on the Alliance upon their initiation. Even the Trepliket had suffered nervous fits and begged for better terms when the facade of geniality had been stripped away. But in the end, all had realized the inevitability of their situation, and bent their necks to the collar. And yet the human stood there, unmoving, still wearing a placid expression. Heb’lik wondered if he even understood what was happening. Perhaps he was in shock. When the final terms had been delivered and the senators took their seats, after enduring almost an hour of alien creatures deciding his race’s fate for him, the human had only one question: “And if we refuse the terms?” The High Chancellor’s toothy maw spread in a smug grin that Heb’lik would have loved to put his fist through. “Then you will face the full might of the Alliance. The combined forces of forty-four planets will bear down, annihilate whatever pitiful military strength you have and claim your planet. Your species will be shattered, split apart and sent to every planet enslaved. We will find a use for humanity, one way or the other.”

The human stood in silence. He fiddled with the device strapped to his wrist for a moment, then looked back up to the Council. “You people… all of you people… are lucky.” he began. “In the past week I’ve learned as much as I could about the histories of your races, everything I could. It was my job, but more than that, I was eager, and curious. To learn about our new neighbors. “I’m sure you hid as much as you could, especially about how you seem to screw over every race you can find, but I learned enough. Enough to look at you all and say… lucky.” He began to pace the narrow reaches of the podium. Did he feel caged? Or was it merely a human custom when speaking? “Each of your species evolved, advanced, eventually tore free of the confines of their atmosphere,” he continued, “and found new species, waiting for them. Perhaps not the best neighbors,” Heb’lik snorted at the obscene understatement, “but you knew, so early on, that you were not alone. “Humanity has not been that lucky. We evolved in what seems to be a particularly empty region of space. When we broke free of our planet, there was no one waiting for us. You don’t know how long we have wondered if we were alone in this universe. “You have no idea how long it has taken to find you.” Heb’lik blinked both sets of eyelids, confused. What did it mean, ‘how long’? Hadn’t the Alliance been there to meet humanity as soon as it reached the stars? Hadn’t the creature come from an underdeveloped world, in a ship that could barely break orbit? How much did they actually know about the humans? He heard the muttering of the councilors beside him, the quiet discussion from the balconies above, and realized that he was not the first to ask this question. It was not a comforting thought. “And so,” the ambassador went on, “when we found the first, unmistakeable evidence of alien communication, I jumped at the chance to make first contact. I took the first ship I could lay my hands on, a clunker held together with spit and prayer, so eager was I to finally, finally, know that we were no longer alone. You know, I had two hours of air left in that heap before you picked me up.” He paused. There was no sound but the frantic whisper of fingers flicking across dataslates, as the councilors not currently sifting through the scarce data they had on humanity looked up ‘clunker’, ‘spit and prayer’, and ‘heap’. Heb’lik, on the other hand, could not free his eyes from the human. If it felt any pleasure at the consternation caused, it showed no sign. “We’ve wondered so much what you would be like. There have been uncountable stories told of how you would look, how you would speak… how you would think. So much, we wondered how you would think differently than us; your thoughts of good and evil, on individuality, even how you perceive time. We wondered what words you have that remain beyond translation, that require an alien mind to even comprehend. “Yet here I am,” the human said, “and I have to say, I’m disappointed. There is nothing new to learn from you. There is not one petty, banal cruelty you’ve laid upon me today, that humans have not committed against ourselves. We have words for every one. Imperialism. Exploitation. Zero-sum Mercantilism.” The human paused. “Bad manners.” He glanced at his wrist device again. “But there is one word we don’t have. A concept so alien that it defies comprehension. A word unthinkable to a species that has been so lonely for so long. “Lablonnamedadon.” Now he looked up, straight into Heb’lik’s eyes once more. Heb’like shivered. The human held his gaze a moment, then turned to meet the gazes of each balcony. “Even now,” he said, “I look at you and wonder how you could even think of such a term. The minimum needed to ensure survival? The maximum you are willing to sacrifice, to expand your horizons? I can find only one word that comes close to translating Lablonnamedadon.” Now he locked eyes with the High Councilor. “Complacency.” Heb’lik became aware of his aide, tugging frantically at his arm. He was pale, and held a dataslate in a trembling hand. “We received multiple transmissions almost as soon as the human started talking,” he said. “All video feeds.” Heb’lik took the slate cautiously. His first thought was that he was looking at a view through compound eyes, like the fractured feeds he’d seen of Trepliket media. Then he realized the slate was displaying hundreds of videos, each showing markedly similar images. He zoomed in closer. They were… humans. Each screen was a different transmission of groups of humans, some in groups of three or four, some in crowds almost too large to pick out individuals. Humans of wide variety in color, height and size, but all unmistakeably human. Quite unlike their stoic representative, these humans were clearly caught in the throes of some powerful emotion. Their faces were contorted in bizarre fashion, and their limbs were splayed or thrashed about. He zoomed closer. Many had some form of liquid flowing from their eyes. He skimmed through videos, too caught up to notice that the human had stopped speaking. That every other councilor had been given dataslates. That the Council Chamber had gone silent. Image after image after image. More humans, more diverse than he could believe. Each video held different humans. Different buildings. Different skies. Different… stars. He went cold with a sudden, terrifying suspicion. He grabbed at his aide. “Where are all of these coming from!?” “We mapped out a display of all the points of origin,” the aide said. He tapped the screen with quaking fingers. “Here it is.” Heb’lik looked at the spacial model. It took a second to orient himself. They were… here, and all the blue points were Alliance worlds, and all the red points… all the red points… were… He jerked to his feet, stared down wild-eyed at the human. He was not the first. Across the Council, members were arguing furiously amongst themselves, shouting down at the human, or merely sitting in shock. But the noise that gathered, rose, and mixed itself into an incoherent, frothy mess, was killed in an instant by the crisp sound of a cleared throat. The councilors turned, as Heb’lik had, to look down at the human. He held their attention as tightly as if they were rambunctious schoolchildren, waiting to find out just how much trouble they were in. “By now I’m sure you’ve all received the message,” he said, face still as expressionless as ever. “All of humanity is in undivided celebration, knowing that we are no longer alone. All of humanity.” He spread his arms wide. “The thirty-eight planets, twelve lunar colonies, fifteen asteroid settlements and twenty-three drifter fleets of the Terran Federation send their love. Hundreds of billions of humans are eagerly awaiting my return and the news that I bring. So the only question I have left for all of you is- “’What kind of neighbors do you want us to be?’”

EXCERPTS AND FRAGMENTS

There should be a Guy Max Lavergne There should be a guy who every morning rides his bicycle down to the main street and sets up a small glass case of beautiful cakes he has made. He should sell the cakes at a reasonable price to whoever comes. The cakes should be both beautiful and inspiring. They should be sumptuously iced and decorated with fruits and sugared flowers which are not only lovely to behold but genuinely delicious. He should sit on a low half wall and read a newspaper folded into quarters until the cakes are all sold. As soon as the last one is sold he should tie the glass case to the back of his bike and cycle to the market to buy fresh eggs and flour, chocolate, fruit, all the things he needs to make cakes for tomorrow. And then he should ride his bicycle home, where he should kiss the top of the low door frame leading into his widower’s cottage because it will always remind him of her. And then he makes the cakes for the next day. Now that’s what should happen. It should be happening already, in towns all over the country. Hell, all over the world. If it’s not then fuck it. Let the bombs fall. Let them turn the beaches to glass. Return us to hunter gatherers, cowering in caves. Miserable dirty people dying of cold when it rains for too long. Let us slowly work our way back up if we can’t get even that part right when it should be so obvious. See if the next crop are smarter. And if they aren’t then try again. As long as it takes. Let our distant descendants hide in the shadows of the brick walls we built. I don’t think that’s too extreme.

The Flash Italo Calvino It happened one day, at a crossroads, in the middle of a crowd, people coming and going. I stopped, blinked: suddently I understood nothing. Nothing, nothing about anything: I did not understand the reasons for things or for people, it was all senseless, absurd. I laughed. What I found strange at the time was that I had never realized before; that up until then I had accepted everything: traffic lights, cars, posters, uniforms, monuments, things completely detached from any sense of the world, accepted them as if there were some necessity, some chain of cause and effect that bound them together. Then my laugh died. I blushed, ashamed. I waved to get people’s attention. “Stop a moment!” I shouted, “there is something wrong! Everything is wrong! We are doing the absurdest things. This cannot be the right way. Where can it end?” People stopped around me, sized me up, curious. I stood there in the middle of them, waving my arms, desparate to explain myself, to have them share the flash of insight that had suddenly enlightened me: and I said nothing. I said nothing because the moment I had raised my arms and opened my mouth, my great revelation had been as it were swallowed up again and the words had come out any old how, on impulse. “So?” people asked, “what do you mean? Everything is in its place. All is as it should be. Everything is a result of something else. Everything fits in with everything else. We cannot see anything wrong or absurd.” I stood there, lost, because as I saw it now everything had fallen into place again and everything seemed normal, traffic lights, monuments, uniforms, towerblocks, tramlines, begggards, processions; yet this did not calm me, it tormented me. “I am sorry,” I said. “Perhaps it was I who was wrong. It seemed that way then. But everything is fine now. I am sorry.” And I made off amid their angry glares. Yet, even now, every time (and it is often) that I find I do not understand something, then, instincitively, I am filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp the other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.

Of Exactitude in Science Jorge Borges . . . In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that matched it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

• From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J.A. Suárez Miranda

Transformations Along a corridor I saw an arrow pointing the way. This inoffensive symbol was once a thing of iron, it occurred to me, a relentless, deadly missile that pierced the flesh of men and lions, blotted out the sun at Thermopylae, and gave six feet of English soil to Harald Sigurdarson for ever. Days later, someone showed me a photograph of a Magyar horseman; a coiled rope hung round the neck of his mount. That rope, which once hissed through the air to lasso grazing bulls, I knew was no more than a brash piece of Sunday riding regalia. In the Chacarita cemetery I saw a Celtic cross, carved in red marble; its curved arms widened out and were linked by a ring. This tight, constricted cross took its form from another, the cross with free arms, which in turn took its from the cross on which a god suffered, the ‘vile machine’ denounced by Lucian of Samosata. Arrow, coiled rope, and cross, our age-old implements, now reduced or elevated to symbols; why I wonder at them I don’t know, when there is nothing on earth oblivion will not erase or memory alter, and when no man knows into what images the future will transform him. [1954]

Paradise, XXXI: 108 Diodorus Siculus relates the story of a god who is torn to pieces and scattered abroad. Which of us, out for an evening stroll and trying to recall an event from our past, has not at times felt the loss of something infinite? Mankind has lost a face, an irrecoverable face, and everyone would like to be that pilgrim–dreamed in the highest heaven, secretly –who in Rome looks on Veronica’s handkerchief and murmurs, believing, ‘Christ Jesus, my lord, very God, was this then your likeness?’ Along a road in Jaén is a stone face bearing an inscription that reads, ‘The True Portrait of the Holy Face of God’. If we really knew what that face was like we would have a key to the parables and would know whether the carpenter’s son was also the Son of God. Paul saw the face as a light that struck him down; John, as the sun in all its splendour; Theresa of the Child Jesus, often saw it bathed in a soft glow, and she could never tell for sure the colour of the eyes. We have lost those features, just as a magic number made up of ordinary figures can be lost; just as an image in a kaleidoscope is lost for ever. We may come across the features and not know them. The profile of a Jew on an underground train may be that of Christ; the hands that give us our change over a counter may echo those that some soldiers once nailed to the cross. Perhaps some feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died and was erased so that God could be everyone. Perhaps tonight we shall see it in the labyrinths of sleep and tomorrow not recognize it.

Hell, I: 32 At the close of the thirteenth century, from the twilight of day to the twilight of night, a leopard gazed at wooden planks, vertical iron bars, men and women coming and going, a wall, and perhaps a stone gutter choked with dead leaves. The creature did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing into flesh and the scent of deer on the wind, but something in it smouldered and rebelled, and in a dream God spoke to the animal, saying, ‘You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may look on you a prescribed number of times and not forget you and put you and what you represent into a poem, which has its exact place in the tapestry of the universe. You suffer captivity but you will have given the poem a word.’ In the dream, God enlightened the animal’s savage state, and the leopard understood the reasoning and accepted this destiny, but when it awoke it felt only dark resignation, dauntless ignorance, because the mechanism of the world is somewhat complex for the simple nature of a wild beast. Years later, Dante lay dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God explained to him the secret purpose of his life and labours; Dante, awestruck, knew at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed his bitter fate. The story goes that, on wakening, he felt he had gained and lost something infinite, something he would never recover or glimpse again, because the mechanism of the world is somewhat complex for the simple nature of a man.

Parable of the Palace On that day, the Yellow Emperor showed off his palace to the poet. Behind them, in a long descent, they had just left the first western terraces, which–like the tiers of an almost unimaginable amphitheatre–slope down to a paradise, or garden, whose metal mirrors and interwoven juniper hedges gave a hint of the labyrinth. Lightheartedly, the two men lost themselves in it–at first as if they were entering into a game but later with a touch of unease, for the straight avenues of the maze suffered a slight but continous curve and secretly were circles. At about midnight, observation of the planets and the timely sacrifice of a tortoise allowed them to extricate themselves from that whole sector, which seemed enchanted, but not from the feeling of being lost, which stayed with them to the end. After that, they passed through antechambers and courtyards and libraries and a hexagonal hall with a water clock, and one morning they saw from a tower a stone man that was later lost to them for ever. In sandalwood boats, they crossed a number of glinting rivers or a single river many times over. As the imperial retinue went by, people prostrated themselves, but one day the procession reached an island where someone failed to bow down, since he had never before laid eyes on the Son of Heaven, and the executioner was obliged to behead him. Indifferently, their eyes passed over black tresses and black dances and bizarre golden masks; reality merged with dream or, rather, reality became one of the forms of dream. It seemed impossible that the earth could be anything but gardens, watercourses, architectural structures, and resplendent shapes. Every hundred paces a tower soared into the air; to the eye, each was the same colour, but so long was the series and so subtle were the hues that the first of them was yellow and the last scarlet. At the foot of the second last tower the poet, who seemed detached from all these spectacles–marvels to everyone else– recited the short work that today we link inseparably with his name and that, according to the most elegant historians, bestowed immortality and death on him. The text is lost. Some believe that it consisted of a single line of verse; others, of a single word. What is certain, what is incredible, is that in the poem was the whole enormous palace down to the last detail, with each illustrious porcelain piece and each drawing on each piece and the shadows and lights of every dawn and dusk and each moment, whether happy or unhappy, of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons that had dwelt in the place from time immemorial. Everyone fell silent, but the Emperor cried, ‘You have stolen my palace!’, and the executioner’s iron sword cut short the poet’s life. Others tell the story in a different way. In this world there cannot be two identical things; it was enough, we are told, for the poet merely to utter the poem for the palace to disappear, as if struck and razed to the ground by the last syllable. Clearly, such legends are no more than literary fiction. The poet was the emperor’s slave and died as such; his composition fell into oblivion because it deserved oblivion, and his descendents are still searching for–but will never find–the word for the universe.

Excerpt from “Preconquest Consciousness” E. Richard Sorenson In these preconquest regions of New Guinea names were rarely binding. What one was called varied according to time, place, mood, and setting. Names were improvised, not formally bestowed, and naming (much like local language flexibility) was often a kind of humorous exploratory play. New names could be quickly coined, often whimsically from events and situations, with a new one coming up at any time. One young boy running in a peculiar way was affectionately dubbed ‘Grasshopper’: It stuck. Another was called ‘Kaba’ (short for the prized embokaba beetle) because, during an episode of biting play, a friend proclaimed his skin was as delicious as that savory beetle’s flesh. One girl was called ‘Aidpost’ following her excitement about the first one in the region; another was called ‘Sleepgood’ by a new friend who liked sleeping with her. A boy from a distant hamlet in the south who tagged along when I went north to the new Australian Patrol Post fled into the jungle in crouched, zigzagging panic when an object he believed to be a metal house abruptly growled and moved. His name became ‘Land Rover’. Names were nicknames. They stuck for a while, then a new one came along. Only when the new (Australian) government began insisting that they use the same name for official dealings, especially in the annual census soon instituted, did formal names emerge.

Mr. Palomar Excerpt Italo Calvino Mr. Palomar does not underestimate the advantages that the condition of being alive can have over that of being dead: not as regards the future, where risks are always very great and benefits can be of short duration, but in the sense of the possibility of improving the form of one’s own past. (Unless one is already fully satisfied with one’s own past, a situation too uninteresting to make it worth investigating.) A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture. A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, “How could I have lived without having read it!,” and also, “What a pity I did not read it in my youth!” Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his whole life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. This is the most difficult step in learning how to be dead: to become convinced that your own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which you can add nothing and can alter none of the relationships among the various elements. Of course, those who go on living can, according to their shifting experience, intoduce changes in the lives of the dead, too, giving form to what had none or what seemed to have a different form: recognizing, for example, a just rebel in someone who had been vituperated for his lawless actions, celebrating a poet or a prophet in one who had felt doomed to neurosis or delirium. But these are changes that matter mostly to the living. It is unlikely that they, the dead, will profit by them. Each individual is made up of what he has lived and the way he lived it, and no one can take this away from him. Anyone who has lived in suffering is always made of that suffering; if they try to take it away from him, he is no longer himself.

The Human Use of Human Beings Norbert Wiener I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions…The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.

Shirky Principle - “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”

Kondiaronk on Money (c. 1649–1701), a Huron chief noted for being a brilliant orator and statesman (“it was the general opinion that no Indian had ever possessed greater merit, a finer mind, more valor, prudence or discernment in understanding those with whom he had to deal”)

“I have spent 6 years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that is not inhuman and I generally think this can only be the case as long as you stick to your distinctions of “mine” and “thine.” I affirm that what you call “money” is the devil of devils, the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils, the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity—of all the world’s worst behavior. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false—and all because of money. In light of all of this, tell me that we Wendat [Huron] are not right in refusing to touch or so much as look at silver.”

Excerpt from The Varieties of Religious Experiences William James (1902) Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the “spirit” of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up to-day—so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles—in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline? Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them. War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of power. The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility.

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Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuous life,” without the need of crushing weaker peoples? Poverty indeed is the strenuous life,—without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “the transformation of military courage,” and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of. Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would [pg 369] give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

“The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter. By contrast, Amerindians incorporated into European society by adoption or marriage, including those who enjoyed considerable wealth and schooling, almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or—having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed—returning to indigenous society to live out their last days. Among the most eloquent commentaries on this whole phenomenon is to be found in a private letter written by Benjamin Franklin to a friend: “When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” — David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)

“If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestionably progressing. Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die and we should be savages again…the heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo’s, for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire’s, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemination. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it. History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.” —Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History “Is Progress Real?”

Kevin Kelly defines a heresy as “something you believe that the people you most admire and respect don’t believe and reject out of hand.”

“What You Can’t Say”. “Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It’s so simple. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist… Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It’s like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.”

The Varieties of Religious Experiences: “One of the great consolations of the monastic life,” says a Jesuit authority, “is the assurance we have that in obeying we can commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you to do this thing or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed what orders you received, and if you can furnish a clear account in that respect, you are absolved entirely. Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether there were not something better that might have been done, these are questions not asked of you, but rather of your Superior. The moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome well exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, ‘Oh, sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one becomes almost impeccable!’