The ancient taxicab listed to the left. D found himself rocking along inside a grimy, leather-lined compartment. He rolled down both windows so as to breathe in the rain… The Bois was gingery gray, ash-mauve in its feathery depths, strewn with dead leaves. A spectacle of decline, perfect for today. The tar paths, the clearings between the groves of trees, the smooth surface of the lakes like a blend of sky and mud rolled past in a stately neglect that was neither truly alive nor truly lifeless. “Slower, please, driver…”
D rested. A future resembling these paths. Wanting nothing, expecting nothing, fearing nothing. Belonging to nothing, not even to oneself. No longer holding fast to anything. No longer to be that thinking molecule within a formidable, relentless, clear-sighted collectivity, held taut by so much willpower that it no longer knew what it was doing. Am I that discouraged? I’m turning into a character out of a novel for intellectuals… Everything is falling away from me, everything: the commanding ideas, the Party, the State, the new world under construction, the hard struggles of men and women caught (much as in this chilly wood) like soldiers on the front lines under fire, taking shelter in the trenches, stubborn and exhausted, at war despite themselves for the sake of hope. And the hope betrayed! The streets of the one true capital of the world churning beneath scaffoldings and gridded blocks of broad glass panes, each cell of the concrete hive housing undernourished beings imprisoned by a prodigious destiny (and forty percent parasitic paper-shuffling). Capital of torture! The microphotography labs, the special training schools, the dungeons of the secret prison vibrating with the subway trains, the cryptography departments, the central Power. The place of execution, a solidly reinforced cellar no doubt, thoroughly hosed down, rationalized, into which so many men have descended, suddenly realizing the annihilation of everything: faith, reason, life’s work, life… The red flags… The red flags, the first raw shoots of socialist humanism that no amount of dust, filth, and blood could besmirch entirely… The charm of Western cities, so resistant to analysis, the sensation of a heedless world that knows nothing of hunger, terror, overwork, or the icy, ascetic exhilaration that alone lends meaning to the everyday round; the benign live-and-let-live attitude of that meanly commonsensical, pleasantly hedonistic world, sliding day by day toward apocalypse… The bitter joy of hand-to-hand combat with catastrophes ready to spring out of invisibility into tomorrow’s headlines, that gigantic intrigue snaring countries — pastel-colored on childhood maps — in its net of information and disinformation, ignoble acts and heroic achievements, statistics, petroleum, metals, messages… The conviction that we remain — however wretched — the most farsighted, the most humane beneath our armor of scientific inhumanity, and for that reason the most endangered, the most trusting in the future of the world — and unhinged by suspicion! Ah! With all of that falling away from me, what will be left for me, what will be left of me? This nearly old man, so wisely rational, being rattled along by an ailing taxi through a pointless landscape… Wouldn’t he be better off going home? “Shoot me, comrades, as you shot the rest!” At least such an end would follow the logic of History (since we have offered our lives to History… Carrying out our task to the end. If the sun must be extinguished, then we will extinguish it! “Necessity,” magic formula…). That would be easy; but what about complicity? What if there were no necessity? What if the great machine were running off the rails, what if its mental cogs were perverted, its social cogs corrupted? How did the Old Man put it — “Our hands have lost control, we have lost control of ourselves…” Here thought begins to founder, History being perhaps rather harder to penetrate than we’d imagined, with our three dozen trusty materialist axioms. They will probably kill me quickly. There are three good reasons for them to do so: 1. I am full of corrosive ideas (a Japanese cop would say “dangerous ideas”). 2. They are continuing the work. 3. I’m finished… But what work are they continuing, plunging headlong into what abyss?
His days, his nights turned over disjointedly in his mind. He thought of the faces of the persecuted — studied on photographs, for they were under constant surveillance, zealous spies were planted among them, their little apartments were entered unseen, the papers in their drawers rifled, their letters photographed — and they never suspected, they soldiered on at their microscopic activities, mimeographing newsletters, scraping together the contributions for a leaflet, expounding theories — sometimes correct ones — before an audience of thirty people (including three secret agents) upstairs at the Café Voltaire… Should I join them? Would they believe in me, when I don’t believe in them? I can believe in nothing now but power. Truth, stripped of its metaphysical poetry, exists only in the brain. Destroy a few brains, quickly done! Then, goodbye truth. Power is against them, against me, there’s nothing we can do about it. The torrent is washing us away.
D had been expecting to feel, if not the deep joy of deliverance, then at least the relief at the end of a migraine headache. Contrary to all prudence, he talked to himself aloud: “But I’m right, dammit!” The taxi driver half turned: “What was that, sir?”
“Nothing. Keep going. I’m ahead of schedule.”
Ahead of nothing. Only negation remains. No, no, no, and no. No to power. I, a nonentity, refuse my consent. I preserve my reason when you are losing yours. I assert that the destruction of the finest is the ultimate crime, the ultimate folly. If power turns against itself and starts savagely destroying itself, then I am right to be against it. But it will survive and I will perish, therefore it is right to be against me… Can it survive if it devours itself, if it suffers from so unprecedented an alienation? And surviving this, what if power betrays itself, changes its face and its aims? Then I am the faithful one by betraying it, but that is pure idealism, not practical sense.
He knew so many of the victims — tortured, executed — by their names, their faces, their weaknesses, their eccentricities, their talents, their journeys, their service records, their bookshelves, their greatness, that he had to stop himself remembering them for fear of being overcome by a demoralizing fatigue. Repressed, they massed within him to form the anonymous “cohort,” the dark “Number.” We fancied ourselves as the “iron cohort,” the elite of the elect, that was us! Our hubris has been properly punctured. The dark Number was arrived at by means of scrupulous cross-checks, and varied with the degree of bitterness, rebellion, or pity felt at the moment; in any case, it ran to five figures. So many victims.
What is “conscience”? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today’s mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don’t even know what it is. I feel an ineffectual protest surging up from a deep and unknown part of me to challenge destructive expediency, power, the whole of material reality, and in the name of what? Inner enlightenment? I’m behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther’s words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, “God help me!” What will come to help me?
The big newspapers don’t have a conscience (he had bribed them often enough, through savvy intermediaries, to know that) and the little ones don’t count. The big writers wouldn’t believe me. Those who might, wouldn’t understand me, and it is not me that must be understood, it’s the nightmare of a sick power and the demise of a whole category of thinking men. Writers prefer other subjects anyway, less compromising, more commercial… I won’t say anything, not a word. If six months from now finds me quietly in Paraguay or California, I’ll order piles of psychology books and settle down to a study of conscience, the superego, the ego, and suspicion, the obsessiveness of suspicion, the sudden urge to liquidate the finest as though to become their equals by replacing them… My notions of all that are probably out-of-date. And there’s no such thing yet as social psychology. A day will come when people feel unable to live without such knowledge — more important than the knowledge required to build a machine. Catastrophes don’t need it. A psychology based on drilling men into obedience is quite sufficient for the Education Authority, the Psychiatric Service of the Public Health Secretariat, the Military Morale Office, the Politburo, or the Longevity Institute, devoted to the preservation of State cadres (whom the same State is destroying). Meanwhile these institutions, viewed as a whole, are working to prepare the catastrophes: the circle is closed.