The Gift of Fire - Richard Mitchell (free e novels txt) 📗

that utters them, but in that mind that can test them. Nor is the rational consideration of questions of goodness and badness dependent in any way upon feelings, except insofar as such a consideration may be impossible in the presence of certain feelings, as my self-government at the tollbooth is impossible because of what is not only a feeling, but equally a desire to have that feeling - a not uncommon perversity.

That perversity seems to me one of the great mysteries of human behavior. Why is it that I can so often discover, in looking carefully at what I have done, that I have clearly wanted to be irrational? Especially in anger or desperation, I can see, by stepping back only a little way from the “front” of myself, the public display, that I have found in deeds and events exactly the excuse I was looking for to put on a display of anger or desperation. Evidence, both the evidence of the daily world, and, even more conclusively, the evidence of thoughtful literature, suggests that this perversity is not unique to me. It is, indeed, general. That fact has often been taken to support the convenient belief that “man” is, deep down where it really counts, an irrational creature, whose momentary outbursts of rationality are aberrations from the normal. It is another face of the belief that Socrates is a freak, a marvelous and admirable freak, but a freak nevertheless. Those who take that view, whether through serious thought of their own or merely because they have often heard it said, are naturally scornful of those who believe, or seem to believe, in the “perfectibility of man.” Between the two parties, there is incessant disagreement, and their quarrel certainly has about it the look of either/or, so that those who have joined neither party are nagged by the thought that they will eventually, if they want to understand how it is with us, have to take one side or the other. That is bunk. It is a quarrel, on both sides, made entirely of worthless statements in the World of We All.

There is no such reality as “how it is with us, ” any more than there is some reality in which “we” have given up slavery. Must I conclude, fuming in the tollbooth line, whether man - or, in this case, woman - is truly a rational creature, who might someday reach the perfection of a truly rational life? “Man” is just a tricky way of saying we. It is not my job either to make man perfectly rational or to figure out whether that can ever be done. It is my job to be rational, and I have no doubt at all that I have that power - sometimes. I am not appointed to decide, for now and for always, whether the omniscience of God, if there is such a thing, is an absolute impediment to the free will of man, if there is such a thing. If I set aside the task of my own self-government until that happy day when “man” shall have learned it, I will continue to do harm for quite a long time. I will also continue to imagine that the world is a place in which bad things, great and small, befall good and innocent people - especially me.

The sense of persecution, or of just plain bad luck, that many people carry through life is really a twisted testimony to their inklings of rationality. He who supposes that the deck is stacked, must begin by supposing that there is a deck, an order of things, and one that can actually be either a right order or a wrong order. By “wrong” and “right,” to be sure, he means wrong or right for him, by which he also means, usually, wrong or right for the fulfillment of his desires or the alleviation of his fears.

Nevertheless, he is right in principle. There is a deck, and it is stacked. But decks don’t stack themselves. It takes a cheater to do that, and there is no cheater in the natural order of things, a fact that is demonstrated not merely by the findings of science but simply by the possibility of science, which could not exist at all if someone were able to fool around with Mother Nature. If the complainer’s deck is stacked, some person has stacked it. It is because I have stacked my own deck, making trumps of all my desires, that I do not notice the irrationality of my expectation that the tollbooth lanes will open at my coming. Like just about anyone else, I want my road open. When I find it closed, whether by a woman without exact change, or by sickness and the threat of death itself, what I find is perfectly natural, and neither bad nor good. It is what I do to myself in such adversities that can be either bad or good.

There is another, and better, way to think about what I have called the World of No One at All. It was also known, in earlier times, as Necessity. Ancient thinkers did indeed mean by that term some of what we mean, all that is summed up in our recognition of the fact that we do have to eat and sleep. But they seem to have meant something more, the fact that the world does have to be the world that it is, that all things are subject to principles, by which they are what they are, and by which they also become, inevitably, what they become. In that understanding, there is no possibility of escape from Necessity, of course, but, even more important, there is no good to be taken or supposed in the escape from Necessity. Far from it, for the dream of escape from Necessity, of special dispensation from the order of the world, is a lie about the world. When I fume in the tollbooth line, I am not a good person to whom a bad thing is happening. I am a liar who is getting what he deserves.

Many pages ago, I made a dismal list of many, but surely not all, of the “bad” things that will surely happen to Petronilla, and, given only enough life, to any child. It was not out of some especially gloomy cast of mind that I chose those disasters, but only out of common knowledge. And out of the same, I could equally have made a very cheerful list of “good” things that will befall, given only enough life, the child whose rearing has fallen to me, and any child. While chance may share them out in varying measures, all of those conditions are, like eating and sleeping, nothing but Necessity. They are not exactly “what happens” in the world, for the world knows neither joy nor grief, but they are what happens in persons because of what happens in the world.

I do not have the power to see to it that no harm or unhappiness befalls Petronilla. Neither do I have, as Saint Peter is said to have had, the power to put her to sleep. She will have to live in the world, and take what comes. In misery, what will she do to herself? Will she add to her misery the injury of making herself bitter or vindictive? Will she compound disappointment and loss with vain imaginings, supposing the world her foe, and mistaking her desires and appetites for the justice which has been denied her? Or will she - and this is the true alternative to all those unhappy possibilities - learn to make sense?

Sense can be made. Indeed, it must be made, and made by a person, for it does not simply appear in the world. With the making of sense in mind, it may be that one of the most important powers that I can nourish in any Petronilla is the power of language, and the habit of thoughtful attention to language. Consider my wily passive at the tollbooth. It is a way of speaking that allows me to think what I want to think. Another way of speaking would show me that I am thinking nonsense. If I had used an active verb, saying that somebody is doing harm, I would have seen at once the need for identifying that somebody. And I would have been led to myself. That habitual passive now seems remarkably convenient for those times in which I prefer not to understand.

There are also many words that we customarily use for that very purpose - the prevention of understanding. If I think myself the victim of persecution, I have made an invisible passive. Any sensible person would ask me, Just who is it who persecutes you? Where there is persecution, which argues the existence of intention and will, there must be a persecutor. Where there is oppression or deprivation, there must be an oppressor or a depriver. Where such agents are not to be found, there it must be the case that I am not persecuted, oppressed, or deprived, but something else. What is that something else? Is it mere Necessity? Is it something that I myself am doing, all unwittingly?

But, while such thinking might prevent me from being a fool, it does not have to make me a simpleton. I have, and I think everyone has, incontrovertible evidence that some persons do sometimes persecute, deprive, and oppress. Where is such evidence found? While I may have my suspicions of other persons, of course, simple reasoning requires me to admit that I can not know the wills and intentions of others, but only speculate about them. They are not in my experience, as my own will and intention would be, if only I would consider them carefully. The incontrovertible evidence that I do have, therefore, comes from my knowledge that I sometimes persecute, deprive, and oppress, combined with what seems a fairly safe belief that I can hardly be the only person on the face of Earth who does such things. Some others may do likewise. But who, exactly? And why?

I don’t mean to answer those questions. They can be answered only in particular cases. But if Petronilla had the inclination and power to ask those questions in particular cases, the answers might be very useful both for the health of her mind and the alleviation of needless misery. And should the questions prove unanswerable, that fact itself brings some new realization into her mind. When she can not answer them, she can say - privately, thank goodness - Maybe I am not making sense when I talk to myself.

Thinking is talking to oneself. I can not think outside of my mind, or in anything other than my mind. The mind’s work in thinking is a continual conversation, an asking and answering, which is why it is a good idea to talk to yourself as much as possible. If you’d rather not do it aloud, you might at least try to move your lips. The same is true of reading. There is no advantage to be taken from reading or thinking quickly, and often much harm. We are, after all, bodies, and it is, in spite of some suggestions in Plato, not easy to conclude that we can ever know anything that didn’t first come to us in the flesh, in experience. Words and statements have a puzzling double life; they must live in the mouth before they can live in the mind. Thus it is that our own thinking has a puzzling double life.

There is in thinking a quality that I do not mean to call “sexual,” but which nevertheless seems very like the process of sexual reproduction. From the point of view of the species, if a species could have a point of view, the great advantage of sexual reproduction is the endless variety of possibilities to