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

which it leads. Every creature born of sex is absolutely new and unique. Our thinking, on the other hand, is often amoebic, born only of itself. If it is to be continually renewed, it needs new seed. If we think only the thoughts that are customary to us, and listen only to the words of those who are “of our mind,” we are little likely to find refreshment and renewal in our minds, and thus all too likely to suppose that we have come to the end of all deliberations that we have to make.

Although it often seems that some people live entirely by accident or at whim, following now this influence or that appetite, it is simply not possible to live a random or disorderly life any more than water can run downhill by any but the shortest path. That random, “blindly floundering” life out of which Prometheus led us is simply the life of unknowing animals. Now that we are minded animals, our floundering has a different quality. There is always some order, some principle at work in all human deeds, and some new seed of thought being sown in us whether we know it or not. Should the governing principle of one’s life be the satisfaction of desire, or the service of some belief, the result is the same - a governed life, to be sure, but a life whose governor does not live in the kingdom he governs. Anybody at all can engender thought in me by whetting my appetite, and arousing not only my habitual desires, but also novel desires, and all the more alluring for their novelty.

Many can bring me into or out of this or that belief. Like everyone else - I might better say, like every other child - I know what I want, and I believe what I believe. What I do not always know is whether I should want what I want, and whether what I believe makes sense. And into that condition I must fall unless I have some understanding of what I might mean by my “knowing.” If I am stuck in that condition, not even knowing that I am stuck in that condition, then my fervent partisanship in any company of belief whatsoever is not, as I might well pronounce it, a Great Affirmation of Meaning and Purpose. It is no less an accident of history than my blood type, and has no more meaning or purpose than my social security number. Thus, in the search for new seed, Christians should listen for a while to Marx or Hume, and Marxists should spend some time with Thomas a Kempis or Marcus Aurelius.

But Petronilla, who is my child and me at the same time, is not, and should not be, either a Christian or a Marxist, or any other kind of -ist. She is a child. To be an -ist of any sort may be suitable to a mind that has already taken the grasp of itself and reached the determinations of Reason possible to such a mind, but I suspect that such a mind is not likely to find an acceptable -ism. Jesus himself, in the story of the would-be stone-throwers, led those men both to lead and to follow not an -ism, but themselves. He called forth in them the willing of grown-ups, not the willingness of a child.

His words were to them the seed of a new birth of thought, and the parent of any child is put by nature in the role that Jesus plays in that story. I do not mean to suggest by that, or depend on, any religious belief, but only nature. Parent is parent, and child is child. They are given to each other in a perfectly natural process, and that perfectly natural process has an analog in a larger but equally natural process, the provision of the seed of thought.

This is the great value of literacy, that by its power our parents long dead can speak to us, and we can listen to them. And if they do not seem to answer when we ask, it may be only because we have not turned the page. And this is the great value of a thoughtful parent, or any other true teacher in any other guise - that he has turned many pages.

When my Petronilla, or the Petronilla in me, is truly oppressed, truly the victim of a person’s ill will, I will at least be able to offer to her consideration, if I have turned the pages and listened, what some of my many parents have offered to mine. How better could I begin, for instance, than by telling her, in whatever terms best suit her condition, what Marcus Aurelius had to say? “When anyone does you a wrong, set yourself at once to consider what was the point of view, good or bad, that led him wrong. As soon as you perceive it, you will be sorry for him, not surprised or angry.”

If I had leaned out the window and shouted obscenities at the woman in the tollbooth line, which of us would surely have already been made a worse person, and which would still have some chance of avoiding that badness? Which of us is pitiable? Which of us stands in greater need of some help, of some wise parent, of some occasion of education? Such questions are not at all too hard for a child to consider. Of that, too, I have incontrovertible proof, the hard evidence of experience, for I am the child in the tollbooth line who now considers them.

How to Live (I Think)

I have habitually imagined - “guessed” might be the more honest word - that Reason is high, very high, a lofty and distant realm where “matters of the greatest import” dwell, and where mighty minds move among them. And accordingly, I have supposed Unreason, a complete irrationality, as low as Reason is high, the very pit, the abyss, the frozen floor of hell. I tend to populate the two realms, therefore, with the extremest of cases, Socrates and Jesus above, and Hitler and Jack the Ripper below. Thus, while intending to distinguish the former from the latter, I end up making them all alike in one supremely important respect. I set Socrates and Hitler both beyond my grasp, far, far away from me, and console myself for being unable to sit with the former by supposing that I am, and by virtue of the same limitations, in no danger of joining the ranks of the latter. It is all bunk. I can easily do either. Or both. That I seldom realize that is testimony to the fact that I have habitually mistaken schooling for education. The idea that careful and attentive rationality can be achieved only by those who have taken the right courses is profitable for schools.

No mind can be more rational, or more irrational, than another. One mind can be more or less often more rational, or irrational than another. In my occasional lucid moments, I have as much light as Socrates, and in Unreason, I am as benighted as Hitler. In certain moments, it is only by humanity’s good luck that I am not empowered to direct the destinies of nations, and in others, that may be a pity. And the same is true of you, and of each of us. Reason and Unreason are never far away from any mind. They are neither far above us nor far beneath us. It is one and the same thing to be rational in considering the beginning and the end of all things, and to be rational in telling yourself how to behave in the supermarket checkout line, which might even be the more difficult task, the more likely to be influenced by strong feelings and desires. There is surely a difference between a man who would slaughter millions for the sake of his appetites and beliefs, and a man who turns, however briefly, into a monster of rage when a woman driver turns out not to have exact change in the exact change lane, but it is not a difference in degrees of rationality.

The clearest and most honest assessment of my own life that I have been able to make seems to suggest that I am not called to undertake the great consideration of the beginning and end of all things, the one consideration by which, in the opinion of Aquinas, a person might be accounted truly wise. It is not for me. On the other hand, I am not so situated in this life that I will have to prevent myself, by a scrupulous and rational examination of my appetites and beliefs, from bringing about the slaughter of millions in an evil cause that I can not understand as evil.

But that same assessment makes it pretty clear that I am called to rear Petronilla, and any child that is mine, inwardly or outwardly. And I am so situated in this life that I will have to prevent myself, by that same scrupulous and rational examination of my appetites and beliefs, from bringing about the slaughter of a human being in the exact change line, leaving in his place only a monster of Unreason. Slaughter is slaughter. In a purely material sense, of course, my act of slaughter is different from Hitler’s or Jack the Ripper’s, for it leaves no corpses, and the victim may - this time - live again in reasonable self-government. But in principle, it is the same act: the destruction of a person in obedience to desire unchecked by Reason. Against that charge, I would make what seems a lame and ludicrous defense by pointing out that, after all, I have refrained from the slaughter of millions. If I have, it may be just by luck, and proves no special virtue or restraint in me. Whatever other punishment my deed might merit, it would surely be enough for any sane and thoughtful judge to pronounce me an unfit parent of any Petronilla, and one who could not possibly provide her a true education.

Here is another definition of education that we might choose to adopt. I have to take, again, a little page from Epictetus, who was convinced that any human being has what it takes to distinguish the better from the worse, and needs only some instruction in using what it takes. One of the ways in which he used to make the case for that opinion was in saying something like this:

Look around you, near and far, and find someone whom you can praise, and that without any consideration of self-interest or the profit that you might take from your praising. Whom do you find to praise? The just or the unjust? The patient or the impatient? The courageous or the cowardly? Those who are owned and operated by their appetites, or those who can govern themselves and their appetites? And ask yourself, Whom do I know, or know of, who is a better person than I? And not just a better surgeon or mechanic or cook, than I, but a better person ? What makes that one the better? What is it in me, or what lack, therefore, that makes me the worse? Is the better one the more temperate or the less temperate? More moderate, or less? More, or less, given to thoughtful consideration, and to quietly asking and answering in turn?

I have elaborated outrageously on what Epictetus actually said, but I think he would not accuse me of falsifying his intent. And his intent was simply to demonstrate a perfectly natural propensity to distinguish between the better and the worse, a propensity that works in us even when we do not take thought consciously and deliberately to make that distinction. But he was not a childish dreamer. While he did take that propensity to be nothing