That was the feeling Phædrus got from this city. He was like a moth in danger of drifting in circles into some kind of celebrity orbit. Maybe at some prehistoric time, before celebrity became important, people could trust their natural desires to keep them going in a straight-forward direction. But once the artificial sun of celebrity was invented they started going in circles. Brains were capable of handling physical and biological patterns in prehistoric times but are brains Dynamic enough to handle modern social patterns? Maybe that scientific explanation didn’t weaken the Victorian metaphor. Maybe it fitted in with it.
It was strange the way the talk with Redford had suddenly converged on Blake school. When Phædrus said he’d gone to that school Redford had looked up with surprise. He’d looked as though he expected Phædrus to supply something he’d wanted to know for a long time.
Small world, Phædrus had said, and Redford agreed. Phædrus was going to tell him something more but they didn’t get into it. What was it?
Oh yes, what he was going to tell him was that there was more than just money involved, despite all the Packards and Minnetonka mansions and all the other capitalist symbols. The graciousness that he’d talked about was a left-over from Victorian days.
Those Victorians seemed to light Redford up too. He’d made a lot of films about that era. Something about them probably interested him as it does many other people. The Victorians represented the last really static social pattern we’ve had. And maybe someone who feels his life is too chaotic, too fluid, might look back at them enviously. Something about their rigid convictions about what was right and what was wrong might appeal to anyone brought up in laid-back Southern California of the forties and fifties. Redford seemed to be a rather Victorian person himself: restrained, well mannered, gracious. Maybe that’s why he lives here in New York. He likes the Victorian graciousness that still exists here in places.
It was too much to get into but Phædrus could have told Redford about the fifth grade school play called The Miser’s Dream in which he had played the miser who learns generosity through various events. For Blake school it was well chosen. That tiny stage was loaded with little future millionaires. Afterward a bald-headed old Victorian had come down to the locker room and shaken his hand and congratulated him and talked for a long time with a kind of gracious interest, and one of the teachers asked later, Do you know who that was? and of course Phædrus didn’t. But twenty years later when he was reading a magazine article about General Mills, the world’s largest flour milling company, he suddenly recognized the face of this little old bald-headed man. He was the founder of General Mills.
The face stuck in his mind as one of those fragments of memory that don’t fit. Here was one of the great giants of the evil greed-ridden Victorian capitalist tradition, but the direct primary impression was of a kind and friendly and gracious man.
Phædrus didn’t know what Blake was like today but back then it was grounded in Victorian traditions and values. The headmaster sermonized in chapel each morning on Victorian moral themes with the dedication and vigor of Theodore Roosevelt. He was so intense that after all these years Phædrus would be able to recognize his face instantly if he saw it in a crowd.
There was never any hesitation in the headmaster’s mind as to what quality was. Quality was the manner and spirit that a man of good breeding exemplified. The masters understood it and the boys did not. If the boys studied hard and played hard and showed that they were in earnest about their lives there was a good chance they would some day become worthy people. But there was no sign in the masters' eyes they had any confidence this would occur soon. The masters were always so sure of what was good and what was right. You knew that no matter how hard you tried you would never measure up to their standards. It was like Calvinistic Grace. There was a chance for you. That was all. They were offering you a chance.
Grace and morals were always external. They were not something you embodied. They were only something you could aspire to. You did bad things because you were bad and when you got whacked for doing something wrong it was an attempt to mold bad old you into something better. That word mold was important. The stuff they were trying to mold was inherently unchangeably bad, but the masters thought that by trying to shape it like modeling clay, through whacks and detentions and obloquy, they could mold it into something that gave it the appearance of goodness even though everyone understood it was still the same old rotten stuff underneath.
Truth, knowledge, beauty, all the ideals of mankind, are external objects, passed on from generation to generation like a flaming torch. The headmaster said each generation must hold them up high and protect them with their very lives lest that torch go out.
That torch. That was the symbol of the whole school. It was part of the school emblem. It should be passed on from one generation to another to light the way for mankind by those who understood its meaning and were strong enough and pure enough to hold to its ideals. What would happen if that torch went out was never stated, but Phædrus had guessed it would be like the end of the world. All of man’s progress out of the darkness would be ended. No one doubted that the headmaster’s only purpose in being there was to pass that torch to us. Were we worthy enough to receive it? It was a question everyone was expected to take seriously. And Phædrus did.
In some diluted and converted sense, he thought, that’s what he was still doing. That’s what this Metaphysics of Quality was, a ridiculous torch no Victorian would accept that he wanted to use to light a way through the darkness for mankind.
What a cornball image. Just awful. Yet there it was, burned into him from childhood.
Twenty and thirty years later he still dreamed of following the path that led between brown-leaved oaks up the hill to the Blake School buildings. But the buildings were all locked and deserted and he couldn’t get in. He tried every door but none were open. He looked in the library window, cupping his hand so that the reflection would not prevent him from seeing inside. There he could see a grandfather clock with a pendulum swinging back and forth, but there was nobody in the room. The only movement was the pendulum. Then the dream ended.
That moth was buzzing again by the lamp.
Maybe he should open the huge glass door to the balcony and shoo it out into the night…
Would that be moral?…
He really didn’t know enough about moths to know whether it was or not.
It would probably just find another light somewhere, a searchlight probably, and really get zapped.
But suppose it flew up from the balcony so high it got free of the lights of the city and saw the moon and began to fly straight. Would that make releasing it moral? What does the Metaphysics of Quality say to that?
Better not to interfere. Maybe that moth had its own patterns to fulfill, and he had his, whatever they were. This Metaphysics of Quality, maybe. Certainly not running around like some Victorian romantic, shooing moths outdoors.