“This little light of yours has been around a long time, in literature. Tolstoy says something about ‘the light shining through the darkness… ’”
“Wrong, Dacha. the Apostle John said it before him, and he can’t have been the first… I’m going off the rails into metaphysics and mysticism, aren’t I? Go on, say it, your eyes are laughing at me… We committed a mortal error, materially mortal I mean, leading to countless heads blown apart by executioners’ bullets, when we forgot that only this form of conscience can accomplish the reconciliation of man with himself and with others, and keep a watch on the old beast that’s ever ready to be reborn, equipped with the latest political machinery… Our language has separate words to denote objective consciousness and moral conscience — as though the one could subsist without the other! I’ve boned up on the relevant literature. Some scholarly authors define such phenomena as a superego that precedes the individual. Let’s not be afraid of psychological definitions, anymore than we are of ghosts. We successfully blasted the social superego with the existing artillery; empire, property, money, dogma, oppression, all were blown away. It should have meant the release of what is best in man, but that got smashed along with everything else, I fear. And we’ve become the captives of a new prison, more rationally conceived in appearance but more crushing in reality, because its foundations are firmer… Empire, dogmas, and all the rest were soon reconstructed on planned machinery, while conscience died out… I’m getting out. I’m escaping. You must escape too.”
“Be still for a moment, I beg you,” Daria whispered, “people are looking.”
D was speaking this way for the first time in his life, and it helped him to see more clearly; he felt new strength surging through him. But anxiety transmits itself in subtle ways, and he was as quickly overtaken by despondency. “What are we escaping to? I’m talking as though one could escape into space. The whole edifice is collapsing, and the only certainty is the coming war which will be continental, intercontinental, chemical, satanic. We’ll be left to ruminate sullenly in our corner, isolated, unknown, and useless, muzzled by what cannot be told, as the catastrophes move closer…”
Daria said, “I’m sorry. You’re right, and it makes me indignant to hear you. You talk like a symbolist poet:
“And there’s another poet, a Frenchman who betrayed every one of his promises, who wrote:
“He was onto something there. I wonder if literature notwithstanding, we don’t deserve to be ostracized or shot as much as anyone. Are you sure the Master doesn’t have good reason for the killing, some higher reason we don’t know of?”
He watched her twist her gloved fingers as though twisting her own arm. His answer was blunt.
“You’re ten years younger than I am, Dacha, and so the Master means more to you. We of the old guard, we were trained to depend upon ourselves, we had no use for masters, except those anointed by trust… But to the snot-nose brats of the next generation, intoxicated by the loudspeakers, no doubt he seemed a kind of god. Those youngsters will only sober up inside the grave he’s digging for them, or on the very edge of it, like us for that matter… I met him twenty years ago. There was no genius about him, there was no more to him than to any of us — something less, in fact. This deficiency served him well, as scruples and high-flown ideas can only interfere with the practice of tyranny, while a sense of the ridiculous might have prevented him from deifying himself. Remember how he rose to the top: it wasn’t particularly forceful or successful, and, above all, not even all that cunning. Historians fabricate greatness, as they call it, because they are mediocrities with lame imaginations who can only plod along the beaten track, and they’re cowed by the cudgel and their own mediocrity into shoring up the cult of established power… Power has the same hold over the tyrant as over anybody, because he has seized the levers of power just like a burglar making off with the Grand Seal of State. The burglar must lie low, the tyrant must defend himself even before he’s attacked, because he feels the reproof… Oh, the Master has his reasons all right — the worst!”
Behind Daria’s chilly hostility her panic was discernible, much like Nadine’s. (Women are more damaged than we are. This world is crueler to women…)
“How profoundly you’ve detached yourself,” she said slowly. “You speak like the enemy.”
“Whose enemy, Dacha? The enemy of all that we longed for, that we built, that we served? Of everything I still want? Of everything we were? Of the Party? But what has the Party turned into?
“The worst of reasons can never completely escape reason… I’ll suggest several. Treachery, ensconced somewhere among us at the top of the structure. You see, I’m quite capable of reasoning like him, because I share his concern. But I’ll discard that hypothesis as too far-fetched. What remains is a kind of madness of suspicion and fear, born of the sense of a crushing mission that is too heavy for those unexceptional shoulders… There is some of that within us too, a vast psychosis of the threat that has hung over us ever since we began to exist… A psychosis that battened on the stifling atmosphere of dictatorship… Salvation lay in opening the windows and letting in the air. Lastly, a reasonable reason, by which I mean an intelligible one, as in certain straightforward cases of insanity: war. This well-fed Europe, smugly wallowing in its pleasures, is so astoundingly mindless that the only people who have half a notion of what they are doing — and half is enough in the circumstances — are a handful of methodical lunatics like the addled visionary Hitler, or the fat beribboned Göring. And what they’re doing is driving their machinery over the brink. For me, the war never ended, I’m a soldier of the invisible war, the war of transition; I see the sappers’ tunnels ramifying with my own eyes, I see them packed with explosives while parliaments babble on above in blissful ignorance; give me my statistics sheets and a pencil and I’ll tell you how long we’ve got before the fireworks begin. Because mines are designed to blow up, and the fuses have been lit. There’s no other way out for this aberrant world. The Master knows it better than anyone. All the cards of the fiendish poker game are on the table, and they rear up, huge, in colors of fire, to taunt him in dreams every night. And he’s losing his head. We’ll be dragged into the war whatever we do, we’ll be stormed, grabbed by the throat, stabbed. So he wants to stand alone over the abyss; he can’t tolerate the presence of more talented rivals, because they too might lose their heads (less than him, mind you)… He doesn’t want to feel another precipice behind him, the little personal abyss into which he would assuredly be pushed by greater men… His true madness is to believe in his mission.”