When and if you survive you can start setting yourself straight."
"But, To As Raison Aussi, this is important. And what's the rush? There are important questions here. There's the whole question of my real and not superficial business as a man."
"Oh, now, really. What makes you think you can handle theso things by yourself?"
"With whom can I start but myself?"
"Nah, foolishness!"
"No, but the questions have to be answered."
"Aren't you fired of this room?"
"Weary of it."
"Wouldn't you rather be in motion, outside, somewhere?"
"Sometimes I think nothing could be better."
"Do you really think you can handle all your own questions?"
"I'm not always sure."
"Then your position is weak indeed."
"Look, there are moments when I feel it would be wisest to go to my draft board and ask to have my number called at once."
"Well?"
"I would be denying my inmost feelings if I said I wanted to be by-passed and spared from knowing what the rest of my generation is undergoing. I don't want to be humped protectively over my life. I am neither so corrupt nor so hard-boiled that I can savor my life only when it is in danger of extinction. But, on the other hand, its value here in this room is decreasing day by day. Soon it may become distasteful to me."
"There, you see it yourself."
"Wait, I'm collecting all my feelings and my misgivings. I am somewhat afraid of the vanity of thinking that I can make my own way toward clarity.
But it is oven more important to know whether I can claim the right to preserve myself in this flood of death that has carried off so many like me, muffling them and bearing them down and down, minds untried and sinews useless-coms much debris. It is appropriate to ask whether I have any business withholding myself from the same fate."
"And the answer?"
"I recall Spinoza's having written that no virtue could be considered greater than that of trying to preserve oneself."
"At all costs, oneself?"
"You don't get it. Oneself. He didn't say one's life. He said oneself. You see the difference?"
No."
"He knew that everyone must die. He does not instruct us to graft new glands or to eat carp's intestine in order to live three hundred years. We cannot make ourselves immortal. we can decide only what is for us to decide. The rest is beyond our power. In short, he did not mean preset. vation of the animal."
"He was speaking of the soul, the spirit?"
"The mind. Anyway, the self that we must govern.
Chance must not govern it, incident must not govern it. It is our humanity that we are responsible for it, our dignity, our freedom. Now, in a case like mine, I can't ask to be immune from the war. I have to take my risks for survival as I did, formerly, against childhood diseases and all the dangers and accidents through which I nevertheless managed to become Joseph. Do you follow that?"
"It's impossible, every bit of it."
"We are afraid to govern ourselves. Of course.
It is so hard. We soon want to give up our freedom. It is not even real freedom, because it is not accompanied by comprehension. x is only a preliminary condition of freedom. But we hate it. And soon we run out, we choose a master, roll over on our backs and ask for the leash."
"Ah," said To Is Raisonst. lussi.
"That's what happens. It isn't love that gives us weari. ness of life. It's our inability to be free."
"And you're afraid it may happen to you?"
"I am."
"Ideally, how would you like to regard the war, then?"
"I would like to see it as an incident."
"Only an incident?"
"A very important one; perhaps the most important that has ever occurred. But, still, an incident. Is the real nature of the world changed by it?
1 %. Will it decide, ultimately, the major issues of existence? No. Will it rescue us spiritually? Still no. Will it set us free in the crudest sense, that is, merely to be allowed to breathe and eat?
I hope so, but I can't be sure that it will. In no essential way is it crucial if you accept my meaning of essential. Suppose I had a complete vision of life. I would not then be affected essentially. The war can destroy me physically. That it can do. But so can bacteria. I must be concerned with them, naturally. I must take account of them. They can obliterate me. But as long as I am alive, I must follow my destiny in spite of them."
"Then only one question remains."
"What?"
"Whether you have a separate destiny. Oh, you're a shrewd wiggler," said Tu. st. ls Raison zlussi. "But I've been waiting for you to cross my corner. Well, what do you say?"
I think I must have grown pale.
"I'm not ready to answer. I have nothing to say to that now."
"How seriously you take this," cried To 4s Raison Aussi. "It's only a discussion. The boy's teeth are chattering. Do you have a chill?" He ran to get a blanket from the bed.
I said faintly, "I'm all right." He tucked the blanket round me and, in great concern, wiped my forehead and sat by me until nightfall.
March 17
WASHSD and shaved and rode downtown to meet Ira. I walked from Van Buren to Randolph Street on the park side of Michigan Boulevard, past the Art Institute lions and the types enjoying cigarettes in the watery sunlight and the shimmering exhaust gas, after a long winter in the interior. The leached grass is beginning to take on a weak yellow in some spots, and there are a few green stubs of iris showing, nearly provoking me into saying: "Go back, you don't know what you're getting into."
March 18
No MAIL in the box. Except for the paper that lies scrambled over the bed and the passing of an occasional soldier or military truck in the street, we are insulated here from the war. If we chose, we could pull the blinds and fling the paper into the hall for Marie to gather up, casting it out utterly.
NEVERTTREr. ESS, spring begins on
Sunday. I always experiencea rush of feeling on the twenty-first of March. "Thank heavens, I've made it again!"
March 22
I CARRIED Out my threat and walked in the park in my spring coat, and suffered for it. It was a slaty, windy day with specks of snow sliding through the trees.
I stopped at a tavern on the way back and treated myself to a glass of rye.
Because of Mrs. Kiefer, we could not listen to the Philharmonicin the afternoon, so, after lolling on the bed eating oranges and reading the magazines and the Sunday features, we set out at four o'clock for the movies.
As we stood buttoning our coats in the hall, in came Yanaker in his bowler and polka-dot muffler, carrying a bag in which bottles rattled.
"Sacre du Istin Temps," I smiled.
We had a late dinner and turned in at eleven.
Vanaker coughed boozily all through the night and awakened me near dawn, banging doors and making his customary splash.
March 23
Mrt. RI'RERTOLM moved out last week.
His room has been rented by a Chinese girl. Her trunk came from Internal70 tional House this morning. I read the tag-Miss Olive Ling.
March 24
A PICTURE postcard of Times Square from
Steidler on the hall table this morning, with the message: "I am thinking of stopping here indefinitely." Probably he has already run through his brother's money.
Mrs. Bartlett was beckoning to me as I was going upstairs; she asked if I would help her carry up a cot from the storeroom. She was going to sleep downstairs with Mrs. Kiefer henceforward.
I descended with her. She had already pulled the folding bed from the musty wood closet across half the length of the cellar. In the hot light of the furnace grating, her face, the face of an overgrown country girl, with large, slightly protruding front teeth that lent it a kind of innocence, was rather prepossessing. I was glad she had asked me to help her. "Take it from the bottom, that's it.