Alcohol tells truth,but its truth is not normal.What is normal is healthful.What is healthful tends toward life.Normal truth is a different order,and a lesser order,of truth.Take a dray horse.Through all the vicissitudes of its life,from first to last,somehow,in unguessably dim ways,it must believe that life is good;that the drudgery in harness is good;that death,no matter how blind-instinctively apprehended,is a dread giant;that life is beneficent and worth while;that,in the end,with fading life,it will not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond its sprained and spavined best;that old age,even,is decent,dignified,and valuable,though old age means a ribby scare-crow in a hawker's cart,stumbling a step to every blow,stumbling dizzily on through merciless servitude and slow disintegration to the end--the end,the apportionment of its parts (of its subtle flesh,its pink and springy bone,its juices and ferments,and all the sensateness that informed it)to the chicken farm,the hide-house,the glue-rendering works,and the bone-meal fertiliser factory.To the last stumble of its stumbling end this dray horse must abide by the mandates of the lesser truth that is the truth of life and that makes life possible to persist.
This dray horse,like all other horses,like all other animals,including man,is life-blinded and sense-struck.It will live,no matter what the price.The game of life is good,though all of life may be hurt,and though all lives lose the game in the end.
This is the order of truth that obtains,not for the universe,but for the live things in it if they for a little space will endure ere they pass.This order of truth,no matter how erroneous it may be,is the sane and normal order of truth,the rational order &f truth that life must believe in order to live.
To man,alone among the animals,has been given the awful privilege of reason.Man,with his brain,can penetrate the intoxicating show of things and look upon the universe brazen with indifference toward him and his dreams.He can do this,but it is not well for him to do it.To live,and live abundantly,to sting with life,to be alive (which is to be what he is),it is good that man be life-blinded and sense-struck.What is good is true.
And this is the order of truth,lesser though it be,that man must know and guide his actions by with unswerving certitude that it is absolute truth and that in the universe no other order of truth can obtain.It is good that man should accept at face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh and through the fogs of sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion.It is good that he shall see neither shadows nor futilities,nor be appalled by his lusts and rapacities.
And man does this.Countless men have glimpsed that other and truer order of truth and recoiled from it.Countless men have passed through the long sickness and lived to tell of it and deliberately to forget it to the end of their days.They lived.
They realised life,for life is what they were.They did right.
And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon the imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to live.John Barleycorn sends his White Logic,the argent messenger of truth beyond truth,the antithesis of life,cruel and bleak as interstellar space,pulseless and frozen as absolute zero,dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact.John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream,the liver live.He destroys birth and death,and dissipates to mist the paradox of being,until his victim cries out,as in "The City of Dreadful Night":"Our life's a cheat,our death a black abyss."And the feet of the victim of such dreadful intimacy take hold of the way of death.
