第68章 CHAPTER XXXVI(1)

Back to personal experiences and the effects in the past of John Barleycorn's White Logic on me.On my lovely ranch in the Valley of the Moon,brain-soaked with many months of alcohol,I am oppressed by the cosmic sadness that has always been the heritage of man.In vain do I ask myself why I should be sad.My nights are warm.My roof does not leak.I have food galore for all the caprices of appetite.Every creature comfort is mine.In my body are no aches nor pains.The good old flesh-machine is running smoothly on.Neither brain nor muscle is overworked.I have land,money,power,recognition from the world,a consciousness that I do my meed of good in serving others,a mate whom I love,children that are of my own fond flesh.I have done,and am doing,what a good citizen of the world should do.I have built houses,many houses,and tilled many a hundred acres.And as for trees,have I not planted a hundred thousand?Everywhere,from any window of my house,I can gaze forth upon these trees of my planting,standing valiantly erect and aspiring toward the sun.

My life has indeed fallen in pleasant places.Not a hundred men in a million have been so lucky as I.Yet,with all this vast good fortune,am I sad.And I am sad because John Barleycorn is with me.And John Barleycorn is with me because I was born in what future ages will call the dark ages before the ages of rational civilisation.John Barleycorn is with me because in all the unwitting days of my youth John Barleycorn was accessible,calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on every street between the corners.The pseudo-civilisation into which I was born permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul-poison.The system of life was so organised that I (and millions like me)was lured and drawn and driven to the poison shops.

Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which one is plunged by John Barleycorn.I ride out over my beautiful ranch.Between my legs is a beautiful horse.The air is wine.The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame.Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing.The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky.I have everything to make me glad I am alive.I am filled with dreams and mysteries.I am all sun and air and sparkle.I am vitalised,organic.I move,I have the power of movement,I command movement of the live thing I bestride.I am possessed with the pomps of being,and know proud passions and inspirations.I have ten thousand august connotations.I am a king in the kingdom of sense,and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust.

And yet,with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me,and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure Icut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me.I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to me.As if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable!

These men passed.I,too,shall pass.These men toiled,and cleared,and planted,gazed with aching eyes,while they rested their labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets,at the autumn glory of the grape,and at the fog-wisps stealing across the mountain.And they are gone.And I know that I,too,shall some day,and soon,be gone.

Gone?I am going now.In my jaw are cunning artifices of the dentists which replace the parts of me already gone.Never again will I have the thumbs of my youth.Old fights and wrestlings have injured them irreparably.That punch on the head of a man whose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and for ever.A slip-grip at catch-as-catch-can did for the other.My lean runner's stomach has passed into the limbo of memory.The joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were,when,in wild nights and days of toil and frolic,Istrained and snapped and ruptured them.Never again can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a single rope-clutch in the driving blackness of storm.Never again can Irun with the sled-dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail.

I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton,that under the rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony,noseless death's head.

All of which does not shudder me.To be afraid is to be healthy.

Fear of death makes for life.But the curse of the White Logic is that it does not make one afraid.The world-sickness of the White Logic makes one grin jocosely into the face of the Noseless One and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living.

I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and infinite waste of natural selection.The White Logic insists upon opening the long-closed books,and by paragraph and chapter states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust.About me is murmur and hum,and I know it for the gnat-swarm of the living,piping for a little space its thin plaint of troubled air.

I return across the ranch.Twilight is on,and the hunting animals are out.I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life.Here is no morality.Only in man is morality,and man created it--a code of action that makes toward living and that is of the lesser order of truth.Yet all this I knew before,in the weary days of my long sickness.These were the greater truths that I so successfully schooled myself to forget;the truths that were so serious that I refused to take them seriously,and played with gently,oh!so gently,as sleeping dogs at the back of consciousness which I did not care to waken.I did but stir them,and let them lie.I was too wise,too wicked wise,to wake them.

But now White Logic willy-nilly wakes them for me,for White Logic,most valiant,is unafraid of all the monsters of the earthly dream.

"Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me,"White Logic whispers as I ride along."What of it?I am truth.You know it.