I need not emphasize that this life, our life, was different in every way from my friend's life. Although there was a brief, and for my development decisive, period in our youth when, like him and his girlfriend Maja, we also caught the fever of counter-espionage. Prém and I called it reconnaissance. We had to penetrate enemy territory, then clear out unnoticed. We invariably chose apartments and houses whose occupants we didn't know. We thought it more honest this way. Friends whose houses we may have entered we wouldn't have been able to face afterward. We'd reconnoiter the garden, pick out the deserted room, find the window accidentally left ajar or the shutter that could be forced open, the door that just had to be pushed in, and then select the object to be removed. One of us did the job while the other covered him.
We never kept anything. The objects we took as evidence of our ability were later slipped back. At worst, we'd throw them back, or place them by the door or on the windowsill. Documents, clocks, paperweights, pens, pillboxes, seals, cigarette cases, the oddest knickknacks went through our hands this way. I remember a lacquered Chinese music box and a very pornographic statuette with movable joints. There isn't a jealously guarded secret of my love life that I can recall more vividly than I can these objects. We violated the defenseless lives of strangers — and exposed, unsuspecting, silent apartments. This was the point at which our community of two passed the boundaries of the permissible. At the very thought of an operation our stomachs would tighten, our eyes glaze over, our hands and feet shake, our insides rumble shamelessly, and in our nervous agitation, not once, we moved our bowels in plain sight of each other.
I believe that the moral value of an act can he physically measured in one's body. Such measurements are taken by everyone and in every moment. And the unit of measurement is nothing but the peculiar ratio between urges and inhibitions. For action results not only from urges attributable to instincts but from the relationship of inhibitions, attributable to upbringing, to these urges. Character makeup, social attitude, inherited aptitude, and family origins all look for their proportional share in any action we take. To repeated denial of such proportional sharing, the body reacts with fear, perspiration, anxiety, in more serious cases with fainting, vomiting, or diarrhea, in the most serious cases with actual organic dysfunction.
Theoretically, society should hold as ideal the person who feels the urge to do only what is not forbidden. And as most dangerous the one who feels the urge to do only what is not permitted. But this seemingly logical principle, like that referring to the asymmetry of beauty and ugliness, does not really follow the laws of logic. There is no person in the world in whose action there would be no tension between urges and inhibitions, just as there is no one who wants to do only what is forbidden. The ideals of social harmony and a well-adjusted life are predicated on the masses of people who manage to keep this tension in themselves to a minimum, yet it wouldn't occur to anyone to call them wise, good, or perfect. They are not the monks, nuns, revolutionaries, inventors among us, and not the madmen, prophets, or criminals either. At best, they are useful in maintaining social tranquillity. But the greatest usefulness can measure itself only in an environment of the greatest uselessness.
If before, in thinking about beauty and ugliness, I contended that when made to choose between two near-perfect forms we invariably pick the near-perfectly-proportionate form over the near-perfectly-disproportionate one, then now, reflecting on good and evil, I must conclude that in setting the moral standards for our actions, we never choose what is necessarily good or beneficial, never the boringly average, but the disturbing, provocative exceptions, life's necessary evils. Which also implies that for our senses the highest degree of perfection is the standard, while for our consciousness the standard is always the highest degree of imperfection.
On one page of his manuscript my dead friend claims that I sometimes asked Prém to take off his clothes. I remember no such thing. But I don't wish to cast doubt on his claim. Perhaps I did ask Prém to do that. But if I did, I must have done it for reasons other than those my friend had assumed.
There's no doubt that boys are greatly interested in the size of their own and others' sexual organs. One of our favorite games was to compare them in either words or deeds. Most men don't get over the effects of such games even in adulthood. Their unalterable physical endowments forever remind them of psychic injuries sustained in childhood. Depending on whether their organs are small or large in these games of comparison, the injury may take two different forms. If it's large, they must feel privileged, even though this privileged status later provides no advantage in their love life. And if it is small, then they must suffer the psychic consequences of feeling inferior, even if in their sexual life no disadvantage results from it. In this matter, everyday experience and scientific evidence are at odds with cultural tradition. I don't know how other cultures deal with the disparities between emotional and mental experiences, but our own barbaric civilization, in awe of the act of creation, does not respect creation at all. I'm sure of this. A childhood hurt does not develop into an emotional scar because of physiological factors but because of the contradiction between individual and cultural perception: an individual, geared to procreation, perceives his endowments as natural and unique, but his culture, disrespectful of creation, uses a different set of criteria — disregarding the limits given and defined by nature — to evaluate individual endowments. And so the individual wants to squeeze more out of what is already a lot, or suffers because what he has, which is not little, cannot be more.
It is clear to everyone that the quality of one's sex life depends on happiness, however fragile that happiness may be. Although it's true that sexual happiness cannot be separated from the sex organs, it would be foolish to relate it to the size of these organs, if only because the vagina by its very nature is capable of expanding to the size required by the penis. Its expansion is governed exclusively by emotion, as is the erection of the penis. But the cultural tradition of an achievement-oriented consumer society obsessed with the accumulation, use, and distribution of wealth cares not one whit about this mundane, albeit scientifically verifiable sense experience. It suggests to both men and women that something is good only if it's bigger and there's more of it. If you have less than the next person, something's wrong with you. And something is also wrong if you can't squeeze more pleasure out of what you have plenty of. And if there's something really wrong with you, you can either accept it or try to change your whole life. You sow envy and reap pity. That is how a culture bent on self-definition and self-propagation is forced to acknowledge the limits set by creation. All clever revolutionaries eager to change the existing conditions of life are as foolish in practice as the dull conformist is wise in accepting life as it is. When dealing with this delicate question, which touches on all aspects of our lives, we act exactly like those primitive tribes who make no connection between conception and the function of their organs causing sexual pleasure. Our own supposedly highly developed civilization posits a direct relationship between sexual organs and sexual contentment that nature cannot confirm. A precondition of procreation is the regular functioning of the sexual organs, which may result in conception, but sexual happiness is merely a potential gift of nature. Hence the fragility of this happiness.
After expounding on these ideas, it would be risky for me to claim that I'm neither scarred nor warped in this respect. From my earliest childhood, circumstances have forced me to satisfy not my cultural longings but my natural inclinations. And for this reason I can honestly say that I find the culturally inspired masochism of resignation and the sadism of forced change equally abhorrent. Unlike my poor friend, who ventured into the realm of human desires and turned his body into the object of his emotional experiments, I turned my body into an instrument, a means to an end, and thus my desires have become only the stern supervisors of my natural inclinations. Because my origins were so problematic, I viewed with great hostility anyone who tried to convince me there was something wrong with me, or anyone who considered me exceptional because of my physical attributes. I couldn't accept these judgments. Life for me was not something to accept as inevitable or something that had to be changed; what I wanted was to find, in the only life that was mine, the possibilities congenial to my character. And in pursuing these possibilities I have been, if not passionate, definitely obsessive.