He poured himself a whisky, smiling, measuring the quantity idly by the deepening of the color in the green glass, held it, looking at the picture of Michelangelo, and walked to and fro slowly, before the hearth, as if for the pleasure of repeating, or re-enacting, a lost attitude. Here’s to you, Mike, old boy. The insufferable vanity of the human being, who identifies himself with everything that’s greater than himself! I identified myself with Michelangelo. With Shakespeare. With Melville. I was their grandchild. And why not, after all. I inherit them. They produced me, I couldn’t escape them. They taught me how to suffer. They taught me how to know, how to realize, gave me the words by which I could speak my pain. They gave me the pain by giving me the words. Gave my pain its precise shape, as they gave me their consciousness. As I shall give my pain, my consciousness, to others. Did I say this to Bill.
He drank the whisky at a gulp, shuddered, set down the glass. The warmth in his belly crawled slowly about, like a crimson rambler and he smiled, putting a cool hand against his forehead. It had been a good show, it had been funny; and it was strange, it was disconcerting, to think that an agony could take such a shape — it made one distrust the nature of agony — was it possible, as this suggested, that all sincerities, even the sincerity of agony, were only sincerities of the moment? Only true in the instant? Relative? And for the rest insincere and unreal? Had it all been a fake? And had Bill seen through it? Absurd. In that case, the present calm was just as unreal, just as insincere, just as much an affair of the precise point in the sequence of cause and effect. How do you know your calmness is real, old crab. Do you really dare to think back, to feel back, into the yesterday which has now made itself into today? Are you really calm, or is it a mask which you have put on in your sleep. Have you changed — have you, have you, have you. Shall we look at the face in the mirror again, to see if it is calm. Look at the hand, to see if it shakes. Take the Binet test, to see if you are intelligent. Could you cry, now, although you think you feel like laughing. And how much part in all this has been played by alcohol. At what point in your spirited dramatization of yourself did the drama become drama for the sake of drama, and cease to be even so justifiable as a dramatic “projection” can be? Ah — ah — and is it true — can it possibly be true — that sudden and terrible idea—
He returned to the window, to gaze downward at the dark wetness of Massachusetts Avenue; emphasized, by the arc lights, between the piled snow; and found himself staring at the idea. Could it be true — and if it was, what a relief! what an escape! — that consciousness itself was a kind of dishonesty? A false simplification of animal existence? A voluntary-involuntary distortion, precisely analogous to the falsification that occurs when consciousness, in turn, tries to express itself in speech? As the animate, then, must be a natural distortion of the inanimate. Each step a new kind of dishonesty; a dishonesty inherent in evolution. Each translation involving a shedding, a partial shedding or abandonment, and an invention of a something new which was only disguisedly true to its origins, only obviously true to itself. But in that case, what was truth. Was truth the suffering, or the calm that succeeds the suffering. Or the comprehensive awareness of both, the embracing concept. Was suffering, as it were, merely an unsuccessful attempt at translation, in this progress from one state to another? An inability to feel what one is, to say what one feels, to do what one wills? A failure, simply, to know? A failure of the historical sense?
He lost himself in the succession of half-thoughts, a genial dissipation of ideas, of which he troubled only to feel the weights and vague directions; feeling that he could, had he wished, have followed each divergent and vanishing fin gleam or tail gleam to its psychological or physiological or metaphysical covert; but that to do so would add nothing to what already he deeply and animally and usefully knew. Bores me, the sum. If it was a fake, all that dramatized and projected agony, it was a genuine fake: suffering, even if it is only a transition, is genuine. Speech, even if it must be only incompletely loyal to its subject, incapable of saying all, is genuine. The fluidity of life, as long as it is life, can never have the immobile integrity of the rock from which it came. It will only be honest rock again when it is dead. And in the meantime, if it suffers, if it is aware that it suffers, if it says that it is aware that it suffers, and if it is aware that it cannot say completely why it suffers, or in severance from what, that’s all you can ask of it. In sum — idiot! — it is only unhappy because it is no longer, for the moment, rock.
He put his hand out of the window to feel the soft rain, as if in demonstration of the smaller uses of feeling; the minor advantages of the temporary emancipation from rock; the pleasures of dishonesty, or treason, to which evolution has led us. Item: rock suffering rain. Rock enduring infidelity. Rock conceiving a philosophical synthesis which explains, if it does not actually diminish, the pain involved in being not-rock. And assures the not-rock that it has, in a sense, a kind of reality. Andrew Cather has really suffered, but his suffering has no importance, except to himself, and only to himself insofar as he fails to realize — what? That rock, sundered from rock, does not cry.
The clock on the mantel struck the half hour, with a single surprising stroke, and he was interested to notice that the clock itself went on ticking, as if in no astonishment at that sudden comment on division of time. Half past seven! The clock was fast. The concert would be at eight. If a little walk, to the river and back, perhaps along Memorial Drive, and then a newspaper and quick supper at the Waldorf, the stock market and sports column surveyed over the fried eggs — if this interval, in which to accept more rationally what in fact he had already accepted, the idea of meeting Bertha at the concert — and perhaps Tom as well — the idea which had been fully formed as soon as he had seen the pink ticket on the table, and so exactly as Bill had foreseen—
And the little key. Duxbury. Had Bill foreseen that too.
When he emerged into the street, and drew a long breath of rain-soft air, abruptly throwing back his shoulders in the gesture he had learned from Tom, he stared at the dull piles of snow and said aloud — Duxbury. Of course. What could be simpler. All that wild magnificent farrago of nonsense had been leading back to Duxbury — or had it been Bill who had been leading back to it. And all the drunken fantasies and fandangos — it was too absurd. It was too obvious. All this mother-fixation business, as if everything in the soul could be charted like a sea! No, Andy, no. Be honest, on this rainy night in February. Walk honestly down Linden Street. Cross Mount Auburn Street honestly; and proceed as honestly toward the Charles River as you would proceed to death. It is not Bill who has given you this idea — not Bill, not Tom, not Bertha, nor any combination of these, nor any disaster to you, any accident; it is yourself; it is your own little worm-curve; the twist that is your own life; the small spiral of light that answers to the name of Andrew Cather; the little rock-pain which chooses this particular fashion of saying that it is tired of being not-rock and would like again to be rock. Touch your hand against the wet wall beside you, the dripping icicle on the wall, which breaks away so softly and falls soundlessly into the snow — feel the wet coldness, the moist surface which will again soon be glazed with ice — know these things, as you know the wet and slippery bricks beneath your feet — the river toward which you walk — they are not more real, more solid, more permanent, than the past Andrew Cather, who has now suddenly and painfully told the present Andrew that there is also a future Andrew. Murder him, if you like, but he is yours.