Сол Беллоу - Dangling Man

I don't know what prevented me from saying yes.

"I'll try to find time for it," I said.

"No, then you aren't going to. I'll take it back."

"I want to keep it."

"You can have your nickel. Here it is back."

I refused it. She shook her lowered head as a child might, sorrowing.

"I'm going to read this," I said. I thrust the pamphlet into my coat.

"You mustn't be proud," she said. She misunderstood my smile. At that moment she looked very grimly sick; though her eyes retained their hard brown centers, the whites had lost their moisture and, in each, a dry streak of vein had appeared.

"I give you my word, I'll read it."

She had held out her hand with a stiff movement of her arm to receive the pamphlet back. Now her hand went back to her side. For a while, as I watched her face with its small chin and large, marred forehead, I thought she had lost all sense of her whereabouts. But she soon picked up her bag and walked away.

March 10

RAIN, yesterday, that turned hire snow overnight" Cold again.

March 12

RECEIVED a note from Kitty, asking why I hadn't stopped by lately. I tore it up before Iva could see it. I haven't thought about Kitty lately. I can't be missing her much.

SUND," was warm, hinting at spring. We visited the Almstadts. In the evening I walked in Humboldt Park, around the lagoon, across the bridge to the boathouse where we used to discuss Man and Superman and where, even earlier, with John Pearl, I pelted the lovers on the benches below the balcony with crab apples. The air had a brackish smell of wet twigs and moldering brown seed pods, but it was soft, and through it rose, with indistinct but thrilling reality, meadows and masses of trees, blue and rufous stone and reflecting puddles. After dark, as I was return. ing, a warm, thick rain began falling with no more warn. ing than a gasp. I ran.

March 16 g. nother Talk with the Spirit of Alternatives.

"I can't tell you how much I appreciate your coming back."

"Yes?"

"And I'd like to apologize.88That's not necessary.88And explain."

"I'm used to abuse. It's in the line of duty."

"But I want to say-I'm a chopped and shredded man."

"Easily exasperated."

"You know how it is. I'm harried, pushed, badgered, worried, nagged, heckled @?

"By what? Conscience?"

"Well, it's a kind of conscience. I don't respect it as I do my own. It's the public part of me. It goes dee. It's the world, internalized, in short.", What does it want?

"It wants me to stop living this way. It's prodding me to the point where I thall no longer care what happens to "When you will give up?"

"Yes, that's it."

"Well, why don't you do that? Here you are preparing yourself for further life '@.

"And you think I should quit."

"The vastest experience of your time doesn't have much to do with living. Have you thought of preparing yourself for that?"

"Dying? You're angry because I threw the orange peel."

"I mean it."

"What's there to prepare for? You can't prepare for anything but living. You don't have to know anything to be dead. You have merely to learn that you will one day be dead.

I learned that long ago.. No, we're both joking. I know you didn't mean that."

"Whatever I mean, you get it twisted up."

"No. But I'm half-serious. You want me to worship the anti-life. I'm saying that there are no values outside life.

There is nothing outside life."

"We're not going to argue about that. But you have impossible aims. Everybody else is dangling, too.

When and if you survive you can start setting yourself straight."

"But, To As Raison Aussi, this is important. And what's the rush? There are important questions here. There's the whole question of my real and not superficial business as a man."

"Oh, now, really. What makes you think you can handle theso things by yourself?"

"With whom can I start but myself?"

"Nah, foolishness!"

"No, but the questions have to be answered."

"Aren't you fired of this room?"

"Weary of it."

"Wouldn't you rather be in motion, outside, somewhere?"

"Sometimes I think nothing could be better."

"Do you really think you can handle all your own questions?"

"I'm not always sure."

"Then your position is weak indeed."

"Look, there are moments when I feel it would be wisest to go to my draft board and ask to have my number called at once."

"Well?"

"I would be denying my inmost feelings if I said I wanted to be by-passed and spared from knowing what the rest of my generation is undergoing. I don't want to be humped protectively over my life. I am neither so corrupt nor so hard-boiled that I can savor my life only when it is in danger of extinction. But, on the other hand, its value here in this room is decreasing day by day. Soon it may become distasteful to me."

"There, you see it yourself."

"Wait, I'm collecting all my feelings and my misgivings. I am somewhat afraid of the vanity of thinking that I can make my own way toward clarity.

But it is oven more important to know whether I can claim the right to preserve myself in this flood of death that has carried off so many like me, muffling them and bearing them down and down, minds untried and sinews useless-coms much debris. It is appropriate to ask whether I have any business withholding myself from the same fate."

"And the answer?"

"I recall Spinoza's having written that no virtue could be considered greater than that of trying to preserve oneself."

"At all costs, oneself?"

"You don't get it. Oneself. He didn't say one's life. He said oneself. You see the difference?"

No."

"He knew that everyone must die. He does not instruct us to graft new glands or to eat carp's intestine in order to live three hundred years. We cannot make ourselves immortal. we can decide only what is for us to decide. The rest is beyond our power. In short, he did not mean preset. vation of the animal."

"He was speaking of the soul, the spirit?"

"The mind. Anyway, the self that we must govern.

Chance must not govern it, incident must not govern it. It is our humanity that we are responsible for it, our dignity, our freedom. Now, in a case like mine, I can't ask to be immune from the war. I have to take my risks for survival as I did, formerly, against childhood diseases and all the dangers and accidents through which I nevertheless managed to become Joseph. Do you follow that?"

"It's impossible, every bit of it."

"We are afraid to govern ourselves. Of course.

It is so hard. We soon want to give up our freedom. It is not even real freedom, because it is not accompanied by comprehension. x is only a preliminary condition of freedom. But we hate it. And soon we run out, we choose a master, roll over on our backs and ask for the leash."

"Ah," said To Is Raisonst. lussi.

"That's what happens. It isn't love that gives us weari. ness of life. It's our inability to be free."

"And you're afraid it may happen to you?"

"I am."

"Ideally, how would you like to regard the war, then?"

"I would like to see it as an incident."

"Only an incident?"

"A very important one; perhaps the most important that has ever occurred. But, still, an incident. Is the real nature of the world changed by it?

1 %. Will it decide, ultimately, the major issues of existence? No. Will it rescue us spiritually? Still no. Will it set us free in the crudest sense, that is, merely to be allowed to breathe and eat?

I hope so, but I can't be sure that it will. In no essential way is it crucial if you accept my meaning of essential. Suppose I had a complete vision of life. I would not then be affected essentially. The war can destroy me physically. That it can do. But so can bacteria. I must be concerned with them, naturally. I must take account of them. They can obliterate me. But as long as I am alive, I must follow my destiny in spite of them."