While the young mechanic was delivering this lecture, the girl continued looking at the tablecloth. But when he had done, she touched his hand, and said, "Thank you for that. I knew I was right really; but I lost my balance. You saved me from my own squeamishness."

  Unpleasantly I saw myself through the eyes of these two young enthusiasts as a pitiable but noxious creature, dominated unwittingly by fear of the revolution. Gloomily I wondered if they were right. I entertained this possibility, intellectually; but I felt, and with conviction, that these generous-hearted young people, through loyalty to the truth of Marx and Lenin, had blinded themselves to the deeper truth of Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu and all the saints.

  How could I answer my friends' well-reasoned challenge? It seemed important that an answer should be made. It seemed to me at the time that the very integrity of the cosmos somehow depended on my answer, even though I knew intellectually that such a thought was farcical. Suddenly I was surprised by a ludicrous but startling fantasy. I felt that, crowding around us in that cramped little cafe, were all the great prophets and saints of every age and country, and even of worlds unknown to man; and they were commanding me to reveal the truth to this admirable though deluded boy and girl. I protested that for them, the believing saints, it was easy to answer from their belief; but for me difficult, from my unbelief. But they replied, "You in your unbelief have claimed, nevertheless, a certainty. Answer from your certainty."

  Then, most irrationally, I prayed. I prayed in the hollow of my own heart, mutely. I prayed to the unknown for light.

  At last I embarked on a halting affirmation such as you have heard from me a thousand times. And never yet have the words wrung wholly true, for either of us.

  The young revolutionaries sat eating their apple tart in silence. Sometimes they watched me coldly, as a judge might scrutinize a prisoner who confutes himself unwittingly. But presently their eyes grew milder, not with credence, no, but at least with kindness.

  I began by uneasily admitting that in some very rare circumstances even torture might perhaps be the right course. But I declared that, if social utility alone were taken as the sole criterion of good and evil, torture and every kind of harshness would be far too tempting to those who, whether as rulers or rebels, believed themselves to be custodians of social utility. Little by little, but inevitably, society would be brutalized through and through. "That way," I said, "lies the degradation of man to insect." I declared, with a conviction that surprised even myself, that the taboo against torture must be felt to spring from something truly sacred. (Here the girl grimaced, the man sighed.) This something more than man, I freely granted, must not be thought of as a personal God, nor even as some principle fundamental to the cosmos; for such things, I insisted, were utterly beyond the reach of our understanding. As well might a worm explain humanity as a man expound the foundations of the cosmos. At this the young man nodded cautious approval.

  Then, uncertainly, I bore witness to my certainty. I said my piece that you have heard so often, my piece about the spirit. Familiar as it is to you (oh, too familiar), I find I must now say it all over again, because under the scrutiny of those young earnest eyes I found myself phrasing it in a subtly different idiom or with a new accent.

  "This something," I said, "this all-important thing, is at once in us, and yet not just ourselves. It is something in a way distinct from us that we see inwardly. It is something in relation to which (when we really, really see it) the whole human species seems not an end but a means; an instrument for realizing this something, this glorious possibility. Oneself, and others, and the whole species come to seem unimportant save insofar as they succeed in embodying or expressing this possibility, this ideal, this, yes, this spirit, in concrete human living. And yet, if we are honest, we are forced to recognize that the human mind cannot possibly understand what the status of this thing is, in the universe as a whole. We know it only in ourselves and each other, and in our loving each other; and of course in all the forms of our conscious and creative behaviour. But love is the very tissue of it. The tissue, I mean, of the vision that we have of it. For it confronts us as a vision. What gives us the vision we cannot know. It is a vision that simply emerges out of the relation between a conscious being and an objective universe containing other conscious beings. So this 'something,' this spirit, presents itself as a vision of a way of behaving in relation to the objective universe; an ideal way of life. It is the way of sensitive and intelligent awareness of everything that comes up against one in the business of living. It is the way of love for all lovely things; and of at least sympathetic understanding for all unlovely things; yes, and even of love for them in an odd sort of style. But above all it is the way of creative action in relation to the real world of minds and things; action not just for action's sake, or to make a big noise or a big mark on the universe, but action to make more loveliness and more loving, I mean more sensitive and intelligent loving; in fact, it is essentially the way of action to fulfil and express the, well, the spiritual potentiality of--of?--well, of the objective universe itself in its impact on subjective beings."

  I paused to think of the next thing to say. The eyes of the couple were upon me, interested, a little troubled, fundamentally aloof. "Go on!" the young man said.

  This ideal," I declared, "this spirit, has gradually revealed itself throughout the ages to the most sensitive human minds. And we ourselves, in our clearest state, cannot but recognize its claims on us. Moreover, though we know so little about the universe, we can be quite sure (in virtue of our experience of spirit) that all personal beings throughout the whole cosmos of space and time must joyfully worship this thing, whenever they are properly awake and not misled by obsessions over trivial irrelevant cravings. And this vision of the spirit, this recognition of 'fittingness,' 'appropriateness,' in personal behaviour, is the true sanction of right and wrong. Killing and torture are in themselves always evil just because they are a flagrant violation of the spirit. No doubt, in our sick-adolescent world, killing is sometimes necessary (and many other evils, too), but only in defence of the spirit. And only those who have a deep and spiritual loathing of killing (not a mere sickly squeamishness) are to be trusted to kill (or sanction killing) only when loyalty to the spirit itself demands it. And it is the same with torture, but with a difference; for even in our barbaric society we can be sure that in practice there are no situations in which it is justified. For no immediate goal can compensate for the hideous degradation that it causes, in the torturer and in society."

  I could say no more. The cloud of unseen witnesses that had seemed to press in upon me faded from the room, withdrawing (it seemed to me) with a sigh, whether of fulfilment or of disappointment I could not determine.

  The three of us sat in silence. Then the young man said, sadly, "Ideas like those have power, but it is a hypnotic power, appealing to the infantile need for something great and imposing, like the father, and later the leader. Be careful, comrade, lest you trick yourself into some sort of fascism. Because, you know, fascists can support their brutal values by arguments like yours, based on feeling instead of intelligence."

  I answered desperately, "They can, of course, but falsely. Their values are opposed fundamentally to the whole great spiritual tradition of mankind; and also to our own individual intuition when we are most clearly conscious, most fully ourselves, not distracted by some irrelevant craving, like the craving for power. And think! In personal relations most of us know quite well the difference between two kinds of relation that are both called love, but one of them quite falsely. We know the difference between using a girl as a mere means to one's own satisfaction, and really loving her." The two glanced at each other. I continued. "Of course, if you have never really loved you cannot know what that difference is. And in the same way, if you have never really experienced the spirit you cannot possibly see the difference between it and the counterfeit of it that Marxism and Freudianism so glibly explain."

  Suddenly I noted that my guests were already smoking, and that a cigarette had been put down for me on the table. The young man was expelling from his lungs a great cloud of smoke. He dispersed it with his hand, as though brushing aside my fog of words. He said, "Well, at least you have made me see how seductive the old ideas can be, especially if one needs a smoke screen." Suddenly, the wink once more violently assailed him; and he said, surprisingly, "Something deep down in me makes me wish you were right. If I didn't wish it so much, I shouldn't need to be so much on my guard." The girl, who had been dreamily watching me, turned to her lover with a sudden look of perplexity.

  Then again she gazed at me, holding her lip-stained cigarette in a poised hand, while from her nostrils smoke wreaths caressed her face. Still studying me, she murmured to him, "He really believes it." Then after a draught of smoke, she said, "He's earnest about it. Suppose he really has got hold of some truth he can't properly tell. In a way I can sort of feel it." But in a harder voice she declared, "But today it's not what we need. It's an irrelevance and dangerous. Gentleness, and all that, is dangerous. We must keep it locked tight in our hearts. We must be made of steel. For today, the struggle."

  Evidently this amazon had tasted poetry, at least the modern poetry of the revolution.

  "Comrade," she said, and she could not prevent the imprisoned gentleness from looking out from her eyes, "I shall be sorry if in the end we have to liquidate you." She smiled. It was the smile that I had intruded upon when first we met. I duly laughed.

  Turning to her lover, she hauled up his watch from his breast pocket, and glancing at it she cried, "Half-past already! And we have to arrange the hall for the meeting."

  The two rose hurriedly, and I secured my bill. As we shook hands for parting, the mechanic said quietly, "I'm glad you had that breakdown."

  Created with Writer2ePub

  by Luca Calcinai

  Table of Contents

  First Encounter: A CHRISTIAN

  Second Encounter: A SCIENTIST

  Third Encounter: A MYSTIC

  Fourth Encounter: A REVOLUTIONARY

 

 

  Olaf Stapledon, Four Encounters

 

 

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