Edgar Doctorow - Drinks Before Dinner

ANDREA The idea of the end of the world seems logical to me. It is a perfectly reasonable possibility that the world will soon end. I think I am more frightened of the thought of my own death in the ordinary way while everyone else goes on living than that I will die because the world ends. I find I am even curious to know how it will happen.

EDGAR Perhaps it’s already begun. Perhaps that is what I feel, the already-begun ending. Perhaps I can feel it with some trace in my being of the instinct that allows animals in a forest to anticipate a storm or sense a fire before it can be sensed. Is something wrong with me, Mr. Secretary, or is something happening that I am only responding to with some awakened perception? There may be nothing the matter with me except that I feel this. We have lived past what we used to be and still think we are, and anticipate with the laid-back ears of an animal some terrible holocaust of the world. Perhaps we are running in perception, perhaps we are becoming new beings in this perception.

ALAN There is nothing new about pistols. People have been running around and firing them for a long time.

EDGAR That’s true. But if the world were really coming to an end, I mean if that is truly the situation we are in, then surely the carrying of this pistol is as unprecedented as that. The world has never ended before. Whatever we do, then, becomes as new as the ending of the world. The power, the terrible might or power released by the ending of the world, releases in us first a perception of its end, an anticipation of its end first in the most sensitive of us, the children, and then, in disguised ways, in the rest of us, who run or who find themselves with pistols in their hands. It is up to us to understand through the actions of our bodies the announcements that are being made. Just as we attempt to understand the disguised announcements of our dreams.

ALAN How peculiar to hear that idea expressed. I will tell you of a dream of mine. I have this dream on a regular basis. There is some state of war. There is some sort of revolution and I hear the drumming of feet. It is night — the sky is lit by fire. Shadows of men run among the trees. Wrecked helicopters lie like giant insects on suburban lawns. I don’t know if I’m with the state or with the revolution. A priest comes to my home and gives me for safekeeping a parcel wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine. He is on the run. I take him through the backyards, through the woods, to a bluff overlooking the highway leading to the city. The highway is filled with tanks and military trucks with their headlights on. They are not moving. Their engines make the ground tremble. I point the way for the priest and we say farewell. I race back home. And when I open the parcel I find he has given me for safekeeping Adolf Hitler’s dinner jacket.

MICHAEL Why, that could be an end of the world, all right.

CLAUDETTE Michael, have you gone mad? Alan, this man has forced us to tie you to a chair and you tell him your dreams? The world is not ending! Nothing is happening except that he is holding a gun and terrifying us all and threatening our lives. Nothing is happening except that he has frightened my children to such a degree that they are in fear of the end of the world. How do you condone this? How do you speak to him; why do you listen to him? Why are we allowing ourselves to be humiliated this way? It is the utmost form of humiliation to begin thinking like him.

ALAN Please, Claudette. I am not unaware of the position I’m in. Think of this as a negotiation.

EDGAR But what is it we’re negotiating? The end of the world? How can that be negotiated? What single human is so stupidly arrogant to put himself in that role?

ALAN All revolutionaries want to end the world as they know it.

EDGAR You think I’m a revolutionary?

ALAN If you are not a revolutionary, then you are a criminal psychopath. One can be both, of course, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.

EDGAR Things happen so fast. Determinations are made so fast. In the back of my mind I have not ruled out the possibility that we may yet sit down to dinner.

ALAN I would give up that idea if I were you. You are holding a roomful of people at gunpoint. Including several women and two children. They are not likely to agree happily to sit down to dinner with you. You are not only holding a gun but constructing a dangerous rationale for holding it. You are saying that if the world is coming to an end, then the carrying of a pistol is somehow appropriate, although you do not yet know in what way. Do I represent your position correctly?

EDGAR It is unprecedented for me to be carrying this gun. My buying it was a mysterious act. A child sold it to me. Another child perceives the ending of the world. We must learn what it is the children know.

ALAN The danger in your thinking, of course, is that any action can be justified, no matter how mad or destructive it is, if the world is presumed to be ending. Even if, granting for a moment, the world is ending, there is no guarantee that each and every person’s anticipation or perception is worthy or appropriate. If you and I act differently or in opposite ways, who is to say which of our actions is appropriate. The true response to the anticipated end of the world might be to get down on our knees together and pray. Besides which, the world may not be ending. And I may be doing more for the world and all its revolutionary possibilities in deciding it is not going to end than you are in deciding that it is.

JOEL Yes, and let me remind you that this man, our oldest dearest friend, whom you have so brutally abused, is a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

EDGAR ( To ALAN) Yes, your argument could have validity if not for that. I might seriously consider it if you were not someone apart from the rest of us. But you’re famous. Your hosts invited you here not only for their own honor but altruistically to give you a quiet evening away from your public life. You have a public life. You have received the Nobel Prize for peace and you dream of inheriting Hitler’s dinner jacket. You are one of those whom society appoints to embody its values for the rest of us. How, then, can you judge what is appropriate or inappropriate? You no longer know what it means to be human. You are disqualified.

GRACE That is an outrage.

EDGAR But I mean nothing personal. It is precisely the point that none of us any longer can mean anything personal. Let us assume we are all beginning to realize the world is coming to an end. Andrea, for instance, is quite ready to have the world end. She contemplates the oblivion of us all with a degree of curiosity. So do I. Is there some connection between that feeling and everything we know? Everything being done, all our institutions, all our customs, should be announcing something. And if not just Andrea and I but the masses of people have this crucial perception, and the children with the clearest, most crucial perception of all have this perception, then obviously the way we are living begins to make sense. For what other reason would we all permit ourselves to live and to feel as we live and feel except that we perceive our end? What other reason could we have for giving ourselves over to the industrialization of our being? Why else would we dispose of our community like an idiot smearing his own shit over cars and furniture and fashion clothing and art? I am no longer a person. I am no longer distinguishable from anyone else, nor is anyone distinguishable from me. My acquaintances are arbitrary. I can move as easily among strangers as among friends. I can just as easily know the people I don’t know as the people I do know. I can go anywhere in the country and call people I don’t know by their first names. My most personal tastes and preferences are predicted in market studies that compute my age and color and education and income. I am a function of other things. This is what it means today to be human. And we know that. As we fade in the conviction that we exist and our lives are important, as personhood begins to be given up by men in anticipation of their own oblivion, human character, like a precious resource, is allocated to fewer and fewer individuals. These are political figures and wealthy beautiful people, film stars and TV talk personalities. They hold the proxies for our humanity. The people in the gossip columns and magazines are the appointed human beings for the rest of us. They are designated people with a capital P . Is that not preparing very well for the end? At the same time we relinquish our value to ourselves, we can believe everything is as it has been and everything we have believed is still worth believing. In this way we move painlessly to the end. Celebrities become our trusted kin. They live in our television sets. They are more familiar to us than our own families. We are industrialized, like our refrigerators and our cars. We are indistinguishable in our affections from those in the next house. And in this manner we are led painlessly on to the end.