Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“Hate is old wrath, fire built to correct the inclemency of air, a monodeism of total aversion coupled with hopelessly settled detestation — and the luxury of knowing whom or what one hates is to experience one of the greatest feelings of elation on earth. It is, in fact, a faith, an intuitive certainty beyond the plane of discourse enforcing an experimental right, one which cannot be extended to the common run of mortals without danger, that seeks to renounce in fury what was once expected from others in kindness and locating entirely what, delivered of, alone is cleansed. One hates in order to rob from another a life stolen from himself, for hate not only hates what it lacks, but lacks what it loved, and in its grip — an oxbrake in which you’re completely shod of mercy by the very creature you’d swiftly gore to pieces if but freed — the only possible pleasure attains to its secret illusions and intentions of vengeance . The formula of rupture takes place. Every former excellence of your victim becomes every conceivable fault, every promise an impervestigable lie, and every memory of her a viper eating through the bowels of your benefits, all to set in motion such a fell and deadly hate that through a sea of sins you’d wade to your revenge to drive a rivet in her sconce and hang her up for a sign, reading: ‘ Obit anus, abit onus !’

“Hate, like jetsam, sinks. It is proposition, not proposal. It lurks below the rounds of habit wherethrough in any age men canvass and toil, and yet while everywhere the average man when finished will reckon up results, the hater, if no closer to his retribution for his work, feels nothing accomplished, still labors in mind, and with implacable consistency refuses to acknowledge of process completed what is nullified in thought not. How little is achieved by him though other problems be solved! Nothingness is immanent in hatred. Its horrors defy the words of mouth or pen to set it down. Your craw bugles. You become a thermidor of pure pain. Your feet turn to roots, your heart to lead, and yet, while the imagination sprouts more goblins to molest it than the witchlight of night itself, the creative evil at the fountainhead of hate is a lonely and terrible thing, a passion of the individual soul living low and solitary as a bucket in a well, for whereas the lover endeavors to obtain something which he does not have, the man who hates paradoxically tries to recover by an act of supreme alienation and anger that which has been taken from him — and which, constantly fleering, mowing, and ridiculing by the very nature of its existence, mocks the mind to murder! Haters vote in the rain.

“The smoldering aspect of hatred, often, is in direct proportion to the degree in which the person’s right to exist as a human being has been taken away. And more. It is impossible for a human being to give up his freedom, or be robbed of it, without something coming in to restore the inner balance — something arising from inner freedom when outer freedom has been denied. Now, in conventional circles, in the eyes of the benign, self-contented, ever-poised, well-adjusted bourgeoisie, one is not supposed to admit one’s hatred, just as, for instance, for decades past even the admission of one’s sexual impulses was considered unseemly. But a few men there are who must remain true to a single extreme character, and for such men, disgusted to insult at the thought of a stinking and cowed swallowing of resentment or any like repression, there abides a paramount truth at the core of all hatred— the re-establishing of one’s freedom! A man isn’t rich unless he’s making money while he sleeps. The profoundest urge of mankind is to fly.

“Hatred is that extreme fixation — not, like love, an emotion from those rude and simple times when tall bonnets were in fashion but one predating Cain in the blackness it shares with original chaos — which liquidates the reality of both victim and executioner, for in an absurd irony of contagion the negative qualities it effects in the self become proof positive of the cause; to make your victim undergo the sort of thing which troubles and overwhelms your existence so cruelly is to have to sustain your own hurt. Respirit domino pro tempore : the prosecutor becomes star witness for the defense!

“Hate wakens to the actual. You may be accepted for what you are only until what you are is what you shouldn’t be, becoming then, in what you shouldn’t, what the lover-as-hanging-judge tells you you can’t. Provocation — who will deny it? — creates what it provokes! The Law of Talion cries out to its cognate, ‘Retaliate!’ Enslaved from the start, however, by his very own laws — the pawn of their very enactment — the hater will always be the first among its casualties unless he finds release, and since the only way of ridding himself of the passion can no longer consist in verifying, in experiencing once again, its intolerable character, in spite of the affective presence of what is physically absent, it falls to the purest and most ancient compensation therefore to rectify the wrong, for, as in exorcism, one can never cast out anything but what was first cast in. The best — the only —way is to hate.

“Hate! Say the word: how the mouth, shaped to sarcasm, fakes in an adventitious bark what, exhaled, becomes a râle of shuddering repugnance swiftly cut in two by the rapiered T that snaps the entire face shut without one movement of the lips. It blasphemes in a single brief gasp, a respiration incessant and increasing. It is the best verbal equivalent of human ache, thrippling just too high in the throat for a scream and becoming almost a stutter in awe of what can’t be spoken, bleaching the heart, darkening the shafts of the sun, and removing the fragrance from flowers.

“The man who hates has lost in the extreme the whole concept of the ideal — or, to put it another way, he has not so much lost an ideal as he has transferred the whole concept of one ideal to the furthest extreme of another — and yet, in either case, exalting, as he must, the necessity of injustice existing in a brutal God, he proceeds to write in his own bitter soul not just a complaint but an entire destructive theology! No man loves, says Aristotle, but he that is first delighted with comeliness and beauty. Now, forbear and listen. As this fair object varies, so does love. There’s of course no determining law to love what is beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself to humans with any imperative to respond to it. Beauty, however, appeals — and yet all forms of beauty which appeal to man, by reason of the aesthetic function, are at bottom attempts on his part to realize the ideal ! Now, follow whither my finger points: beauty is created by love. It will not and will never have any meaning for you other than the meaning you give to it, a pretext for the expansion of consciousness to beguile the despair you have without it. Sleep is only the bogus we use for dreams, with repose our intention, Eleutheropolis our goal. Man struggles to realize his own ideal, to sound out the highest possible self. Who doubts it? He projects his ideal of an absolute worship-worthy existence — the ideal that he is unable to isolate within himself — and with it crowns another human being, the loss of whom, if and when it happens, becomes of necessity the loss of the ideal, but there is your aspiration as long as there is your ideal and the struggle for it counts for nothing. Mecca is situated in the midst of barren and stony country.

“The ideal! Doesn’t it write itself into our weak and insufficient hearts in the wittiest of fictions? Who can say what imp ghosts it, what telchin is its genius? Quisquis amat ranam, ranam putat esse Dianam : the blindness of love is precisely the vision of the ideal! O pretty, pretty, pretty but how, you ask, for there grunts Parmeno’s sow! The huge hairy smellfungus named Polyphemus won the admiration and love of beautiful Galatea, whiter than the white withy-wind! Venus herself pursued Vulcan, fascinated in the limp of the filthy smith. I could cite the Egyptian salinaries who couched with cadavers, draw parables in the lust for decaying cheese, the poverty of misers, and the gods who are worshipped in silly glyphs. And, tell me then, what strange algebra lurks in the proud father’s mind who flashes for approval that snapshot of, what — a vegetable? a wombat? a puffpile of insipid dough? — no, rather his own two-week-old baby, a little puckfisted nobblyblat with forty assorted leaks, soiled buns, and a face like a stump pudding! Love, unlike hate, makes all distinctions void. Every book is about its own author. Beauty, simply, is an emanation of the requirements of love, and hate refuses them. I would give you a wealth of italics here.