tell you. I’ve not been a criminal lawyer for nothing. As for you, you haven’t read Dostoevski and all those other mad Russians for nothing either. Do you begin to get the drift? Look, Dostoevski is dead, finished with. And that’s where we start. From Dostoevski. He dealt with the soul; we’ll deal with the mind.”
He was about to pause again. “Go on,” I said, “it sounds interesting.”
“Well,” he resumed, “whether you know it or not, there is no longer anything left in the world that might be called soul. Which partly explains why you find it so hard to get started, as a writer. How can one write about people who have no souls? I can, however. I’ve been living with just such people, working for them, studying them, analyzing them. I don’t mean my clients alone. It’s easy enough to look upon criminals as soulless. But what if I tell you that there are nothing but criminals everywhere, no matter where you look? One doesn’t have to be guilty of a crime to be a criminal. But anyway, here’s what I had in mind . . . I know you can write. Furthermore, I don’t mind in the least if someone else writes my books. For you to come by the material that I’ve accumulated would take several lifetimes. Why waste more time? Oh yes, there’s something I forgot to mention . . . it may frighten you off. It’s this . . . whether the books are ever published or not is all one to me. I want to get them out of my system, nothing more. Ideas are universal: I don’t consider them my property. . . .”
He took a drink of ice water from the jug beside the bed.
“All this probably strikes you as fantastic. Don’t try to come to a decision immediately. Think it over! Look at it from every angle. I wouldn’t want you to accept and then get cold feet in a month or two. But let me call your attention to something. If you continue in the same groove much longer you’ll never have the courage to make the break. You have no excuse for prolonging your present way of life. You’re obeying the law of inertia, nothing more.”
He cleared his throat, as if embarrassed by his own remarks. Then clearly and swiftly he proceeded.
“I’m not the ideal companion for you, agreed. I have every fault imaginable and I’m thoroughly self-centered, as I’ve said many times. But I’m not envious or jealous, or even ambitious, in the usual sense. Aside from working hours—and I don’t intend to run myself into the ground—you’d be alone most of the time, free to do as you please. With me you’d be alone, even if we shared the same room. I don’t care where we live, so long as it’s in a foreign land. From now on it’s the moon for me. I’m divorcing myself from my fellow man. Nothing could possibly tempt me to participate in the game. Nothing of value, in my eyes at least, can possibly be accomplished at present. I may not accomplish anything either, to be truthful. But at least I’ll have the satisfaction of doing what I believe in. . . . Look, maybe I haven’t expressed too clearly what I mean by this Dostoevski business. It’s worth going into a little farther, if you can bear with me. As I see it, with Dostoevski’s death the world entered upon a complete new phase of existence. Dostoevski summed up the modern age much as Dante did the Middle Ages. The modern age—a misnomer, by the way—was just a transition period, a breathing spell, in which man could adjust himself to the death of the soul. Already we’re leading a sort of grotesque lunar life. The beliefs, hopes, principles, convictions that sustained our civilization are gone. And they won’t be resuscitated. Take that on faith for the time being. No, henceforth and for a long time to come we’re going to live in the mind. That means destruction . . . self-destruction. If you ask why I can only say—because man was not made to live by mind alone. Man was meant to live with his whole being. But the nature of this being is lost, forgotten, buried. The purpose of life on earth is to discover one’s true being—and to live up to it! But we won’t go into that. That’s for the distant future. The problem is—meanwhile. And that’s where I come in. Let me put it to you as briefly as possible. . . . All that we have stifled, you, me, all of us, ever since civilization began, has got to be lived out. We’ve got to recognize ourselves for what we are. And what are we but the end product of a tree that is no longer capable of bearing fruit. We’ve got to go underground, therefore, like seed, so that something new, something different, may come forth. It isn’t time that’s required, it’s a new way of looking at things. A new appetite for life, in other words. As it is, we have but a semblance of life. We’re alive only in dreams. It’s the mind in us that refuses to be killed off. The mind is tough—and far more mysterious than the wildest dreams of theologians. It may well be that there is nothing but mind . . . not the little mind we know, to be sure, but the great Mind in which we swim, the Mind which permeates the whole universe. Dostoevski, let me remind you, had amazing insight not only into the soul of man but into the mind and spirit of the universe. That’s why it’s impossible to shake him off, even though, as I said, what he represents is done for.”
Here I had to interrupt. “Excuse me,” I said, “but what did Dostoevski represent, in your opinion?”
“I can’t answer that in a few words. Nobody can. He gave us a revelation, and it’s up to each one of us to make what we can of it. Some lose themselves in Christ. One can lose himself in Dostoevski too. He takes you to the end of the road. . . . Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yes and no.”
“To me,” said Stymer, “it means that there are no possibilities today such as men imagine. It means that we are thoroughly deluded—about everything. Dostoevski explored the field in advance, and he found the road blocked at every turn. He was a frontier man, in the profound sense of the word. He took up one position after another, at every dangerous, promising point, and he found that there was no issue for us, such as we are. He took refuge finally in the Supreme Being.”
“That doesn’t sound exactly like the Dostoevski I know,” said I. “It has a hopeless ring to it.”
“No, it’s not hopeless at all. It’s realistic—in a superhuman sense. The last thing Dostoevski could possibly have believed in is a hereafter such as the clergy give us. All religions give us a sugarcoated pill to swallow. They want us to swallow what we never can or will swallow—death. Man will never accept the idea of death, never reconcile himself to it. . . . But I’m getting off the track. You speak of man’s fate. Better than anyone, Dostoevski understood that man will never accept life unquestioningly until he is threatened with extinction. It was his belief, his deep conviction, I would say, that man may have everlasting life if he desires it with his whole heart and being. There is no reason to die, none whatever. We die because we lack faith in life, because we refuse to surrender to life completely. . . . And that brings me to the present, to life as we know it today. Isn’t it obvious that our whole way of life is a dedication to death? In our desperate efforts to preserve ourselves, preserve what we have created, we bring about our own death. We do not surrender to life, we struggle to avoid dying. Which means not that we have lost faith in God but that we have lost faith in life itself. To live dangerously, as Nietzsche put it, is to live naked and unashamed. It means putting one’s trust in the life-force and ceasing to battle with a phantom called death, a phantom called disease, a phantom called sin, a phantom called fear, and so on. The phantom world! That’s the world which we have created for ourselves. Think of the military, with their perpetual talk of the enemy. Think of the clergy, with their perpetual talk of sin and damnation. Think of the legal fraternity, with their perpetual talk of fine and imprisonment. Think of the medical profession, with their perpetual talk of disease and death. And our educators, the greatest fools ever, with their parrot-like rote and their innate inability to accept any idea unless it be a hundred or a thousand years old. As for those who govern the world, there you have the most dishonest, the most hypocritical, the most deluded and the most unimaginative beings imaginable. You pretend to be concerned about man’s fate. The miracle is that man has sustained even the illusion of freedom. No, the road is blocked, whichever way you turn. Every wall, every barrier, every obstacle that hems us in is our own doing. No need to drag in God, the Devil or Chance. The Lord of all Creation is taking a cat nap while we work out
