Edgar Doctorow - Drinks Before Dinner

JOEL Only our friend Edgar could seriously suggest the world is coming to an end because we watch TV.

EDGAR It is funny that a machine is everywhere transfixing people by the billions. Inside the machine, momentous events are played out, the drama proceeds inexorably to its end. To be followed by another momentous event, another drama. To be followed endlessly by mindlessly momentous events and endless drama. And where we are, outside the machine looking in, there is no drama. There is no drama in our lives because our lives no longer lead to anything. Our crises prove nothing. Our conflicts simply repeat themselves and lead to themselves repeating. Anger is simply anger. Conflict is simply conflict. We are not elevated by it, nor do we learn from it, nor can we avoid repeating it. If our relationships break down, we renew them with others. There are no momentous events. We don’t marry our true loves, we don’t know who they are. If a person dies, he dies. If he dies heroically, who can care? If he dies needlessly, we feel no less sorry. People die needlessly in the thousands and millions. Nothing is done about that. We don’t punish their killers. We don’t assign responsibility for their deaths. That would be drama. People commit great crimes and we have them to dinner. Everything goes on as before.

ALAN Except tonight, apparently.

JOAN Yes, Edgar can be understood, I think, as a person always trying to regain the state of drama. He is really very old-fashioned, my Edgar.

ALAN I wish, however, I did not have to be punished twice for the same thing. I wish your old-fashioned Edgar, if he is going to kill me, would do so without lecturing me first.

EDGAR Are you not comfortable, Mr. Secretary? The idea of this is not to inflict physical abuse. It is a symbolic act in intention. The abuse is of your power and eminence. Since, in fact, it is your person tied to the chair, you may suffer some confusion.

ALAN That must be it.

EDGAR This apartment has been hijacked. It is by the rights conveyed from piracy an area of space no longer part of the nation. This apartment is a new territory, a region of light in which the truth of our situation is acknowledged. That is revolutionary!

(EDGAR goes out on the balcony and looks down at the street )

CLAUDETTE Oh, Alan, I am so sorry. I am so terribly terribly sorry.

ALAN Please, Claudette, you must not reproach yourself.

GRACE I had been looking forward to meeting you, sir, under more civilized circumstances.

JOEL I’m going to make a run for the phone.

MICHAEL Don’t do it.

(EDGAR returns )

EDGAR The moon is out. The moon is lighting the lake in Central Park, and at the entrance to this building I can see it reflected in the shiny tops of two black cars. Why do you need two cars, Mr. Secretary?

ALAN The second car carries my security.

CLAUDETTE Oh, Alan—

ALAN They wanted to come up here to look around, but I told them it wasn’t necessary. The joke’s on me. Actually, I’ve always been embarrassed by them. I sometimes have the impression I exist for their sake, and that rather than doing me a service they derive tremendous and enviable satisfaction from a sense of the necessity of guarding me. I feel I am their illusion, and that I must pretend to be important and valuable to sustain it. That is why it is interesting to find a fellow like you echoing my most private feelings. You are obsessed with numbers: Consider someone in my position for whom the smallest comprehensible unit of concern is the nation. How do you think I feel? How can one maintain one’s sense of self making decisions presumably on behalf of two hundred and fifty-odd million people? I have always felt my own character to be a fictional creation. It is quite arbitrary that I am who I am, doing what I do. I derive no personal satisfaction at all. What amazes me about finding myself sitting tied up in this chair and facing your handgun is why it has taken this long to happen. I regard it as a kindness of fate that I’m permitted to undergo this experience among dear old friends. It is people like Joel and Claudette who are my real security. They recall to me who I was when we all believed in our selfhood. I come back to them like a patient for an injection.

EDGAR What a charming and sympathetic man. How dangerous. You hear behind his charming and sympathetic voice the computer clicks of missiles calculating their trajectory.

ALAN The system you describe by which we accommodate our perception of the world’s end is, however, an imperfect system. Look at the other side of the world to be destroyed. Have you ever been to China? There are eight hundred million people in China. The peasants march in step to their work in the fields. No one in China is alone. No one in China has ever been alone. One doesn’t live alone, or travel alone, or think of oneself alone or think of oneself as an individual competing with others, or present oneself to others to the disadvantage of others. None of that is done. The children’s blocks in China are made too heavy for one child. The self in China is too heavy for one person. The person in China can only be lifted by China. I should say they are much further along in their preparation for the end of the world than we are. They march in step painlessly to the end. Over here we’re still protesting. We’re still in the thrall of our expectations. We have these stray romantics and malcontents like yourself, stubbornly clinging to the pitiful ideals of humanism and doing foolish things.

EDGAR Ahh. You do believe the world is ending. I thought you might.

ALAN Well, after all, it’s the only reasonable position to take.

( Pause )

MICHAEL Just a moment, Mr. Secretary. I wonder if you appreciate how disturbing it is to hear that view from someone in your position.

ALAN Oh, I quite appreciate it. I’m used to having people give weight to what I say. But why should this surprise you? If you’re beginning to perceive the truth, hearing it from children, surely you must realize I would have known it for some time. Of course this is all off the record.

ANDREA I feel a chill. As Edgar proposed the world’s end I thought I had the courage to meet it. Now I’m not sure. Why is that?

ALAN Perhaps the idea had a certain chic? Perhaps that has worn off.

ANDREA I beg your pardon, Mr. Secretary, but that’s not it. Somehow your words are ruining the end of the world for me! I supposed the idea of ending the world contained the idea of replacing it with something better. But I don’t get that feeling from you. I get the feeling of the dead end from you. I hope you will forgive my saying so.

ALAN You give me too much credit. I didn’t make the world. I’m merely of it — like you, like everyone in this room. As individuals we are pitiful, as groups we’re inhuman. That is our anguish, our cross. Nobody can do anything about that.

MICHAEL Sir, I don’t wish to appear rude or contentious, given the position you’re in. But please reconsider what you’re saying. If as individuals we’re pitiful and as groups we’re inhuman, if our mind can’t find a place for itself — neither as something separate in each of us, nor something altogether in all of us — why, that truly portends the end of the world and we were finished before we began!

ALAN So it appears.

MICHAEL But can you say that? I mean, Edgar here sustains hope! All his despair for the way things are assumes there is something more. Everything he says expresses a longing for something more. Don’t you, in your position, have the responsibility to want more — more than anyone?

ALAN I’m sorry to disappoint you. If it is possible to save the world from ending in nuclear disaster, which I doubt, or from any of the ice-age things we may be bringing about, it will end some other way. It is inevitable. It will end by simply going on as it is and irresolutely turning past the point when it can be what it is and still continue. Our destructiveness is not specific. We are suicidal in the fullness of our being. The world will therefore end from the fullness of our creation of it. It is already ending in every possible way in which it can end. It is ending in all directions. Whatever we do inevitably brings it closer to its ending because everything around us which we have made for ourselves express the idea of its ending. It will end of the failure of the human mind to locate itself in any category it can imagine. It will end of the failure of human beings to be sufficiently human. If your friend has reason to find hope from that, then he is a fool.