Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

Just as you could say man has a natural tendency towards evil, you could also say man has a natural tendency towards good, an irresistible urge to be good which can sometimes land him in ridiculous situations. I, Lucas Egmont, have naturally had to face up to both what they call good and evil within me. Once I’d been out fishing, and had to catch the last train home, or else be faced with several miles’ walk: I was late, and I could hear the train chugging down the valley. Then I came across some little children looking for some house or other, I could hear them as I ran past on the road, but I was in such a hurry I couldn’t possibly think of stopping; but as I approached the station, my pangs of conscience rose up like swelling lumps in my chest and when I got to the platform just as the train was steaming in, my stupid sense of kindness forced me to retrace my steps and help them to find their way, but just as we were about to say goodbye, the boy said something innocent which made me see red and I boxed his ears and his nose started bleeding and he screamed as if he’d been stabbed, but I really enjoyed it because I’d managed to make up for my paradoxical kindness via my paradoxical wickedness. I don’t want to go along with the distinction between good and evil actions or even that between right and wrong actions, but just that between controlled and uncontrolled actions, conscious and unconscious actions; and since the most important thing is to maintain the direction aiming at the final goal, or indeed the more or less invisible goal, that is in fact the main distinction between controlled and uncontrolled actions.

As we’re not alone in the world, or at least, not as alone as we’d like to be, we have an obligation to keep our explosions under control, to let our unavoidable explosions of paradoxical wickedness or paradoxical goodness proceed in the approximate direction of the approximate goal. As far as the goal is concerned, it may not be so desperately important so pin it down with the same sadistic precision as the one with which the world order and pure chance form a fascinating partnership and pin down the human condition in time and space. Of course, we have to fight about both those concepts, and since the most important thing is the right direction aimed at the possibly false goal, we need to sharpen our awareness until it becomes as sharp as a sword-blade, and sharp as an arrow-head supplemented by the brutal strength of a drill. Then our conscience operates in our consciousness, which is after all just an idyllic description of our fear, for our fear reminds us constantly of the right direction, and if we stifle our fear, we also lose the opportunity of directing our thoughts in a particular direction and we give vent to a series of stupid private explosions, first here and then there, which give rise to the greatest possible damage and the least possible result. That’s why we must keep our fear alive within us, like an ice-free harbour which can always help us to survive the winter. The bubbling undercurrent beneath the winter floods.

Until I found my direction, I was living like an irresponsible freelance dynamiter who could feel guilt but had no idea how to expiate it. I was like a live bomb which could go off at any time, and not even I understood how it worked or when it would explode, I was just floating around like a fleck of soot in a gutter. I embezzled money from the bank in a completely meaningless fashion, I landed on that boat at Ronton just as pointlessly, and I emptied our communal water supply driven by the ridiculous straw of the freelance dynamiter: being faithful to your little distress.

But it was only when we’d discovered the white rock and the struggle over the lion began that my real life started. Only then did I acquire a direction towards a goal that was incontestably attainable, but in the end it didn’t matter because it’s the struggle that counts and not the goal, and because it’s the joy of the struggle and not the joy of the goal that prevents you from going under, for there is a ‘going under’, even if it’s not something concrete: going under is to live unawares and die happy without having struggled to achieve a meaningless goal, going under is to die calmly and peacefully without having put up meaningless resistance to the great meaninglessness of the world, going under is to spread your explosions over the enormous firing range of chance, going under is to shout like Lucas Egmont did then: I shall be faithful to my thirst, but unfaithful to everything else; or like somebody else: I shall be faithful to my hunger, but unfaithful to everything else; or like a third person: I shall be faithful to my sex, but unfaithful to everything else; or like some other person: I shall be faithful to my obedience, but unfaithful to everything else; or like this one: I shall be faithful to my paralysis, but unfaithful to everything else; or that: I shall be faithful to my longing but unfaithful to everything else; or again: I shall be faithful to my grief, but unfaithful to everything else; or finally: I shall be faithful to my fear, but unfaithful to everything else.

No, the only possibility is to say: I shall be faithful to my direction and faithful to everything within it: my fear, my hunger, my thirst, my despair, my grief, my longing, my paralysis, my sex, my hatred, my death. Oh yes, within my direction I shall be so faithful to my death that without so much as a shudder, but in grateful diffidence towards the fact that I’ve been allowed to live, I shall be able to walk down the beach, wade slowly out into the water, and there -

17

And he walks down the beach and the sand is soft and warm and so far his toes wallow in it, full of longing, but now he’s come to the firm, wet sand which cools his burning, naked soles like a drink. And he continues slowly into the water and feels its cool softness rising over his feet, burying his feet, burying his ankles, slowly rising like a cool and merciful breeze up his legs, his kneecaps hover on the surface before sinking and the water licks his loins like a soft, rough tongue, the soft, rough tongue of death. And the water rises over all his memories of all his cool moments and all his hot moments, over all the burning words whispered just at the moment when. . And the water ripples gently up his stomach and moistens the thirsty little mouth of his navel and his rib cage, rising and falling, suddenly finds itself enclosed in a much bigger, a much softer cage, and the tiny tips of his nipples suck at the surface, then comes his neck with its elegant little hollow as if made for water to trickle into, and his Adam’s apple which he doesn’t need any more because all his screams have already been screamed gives in without protest to the desires of the lagoon, and already a little wave is lapping against his chin, it comes out of the darkness and rolls on into the darkness behind him, and his chin sinks and his mouth kisses the water and they are just as delightfully cool, it and his mouth, and suddenly he’s swimming. His legs and his trunk and his shoulders and his head rise gently from the darkness of the bottom to the darkness of the surface and his arms become wings and his body glides silently like a boat with raised oars through the gentle water and his ear which is resting on the water line suddenly hears the slight splashing sound from the bottom far beneath him and his eye which is leaning out over the blind surface of the lagoon fancies it can see the rapid change from green light to black light down below and he glides forward a few more inches before it’s all over, before he’s ceased to exist, ceased to exist for everyone and everything apart from the water for a short while, but a memory lives on a little longer at a certain bank, among a few pale counter clerks, in a man he used to buy illegal cigarettes from, a girl with sweaty armpits but healthy teeth who used to come up to his room on Wednesdays and share his bed, among a few iguanas he had come across on an island, and perhaps as the sharpest memory of all in the sword of the fish whose tigerish shadow is just now roaring up towards him — and then: finis.