"But you,who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence--you know him for what he is,brother to you and the dust,a cosmic joke,a sport of chemistry,a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes.He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee.He thumps his chest in anger,and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity.He knows monstrous,atavistic promptings,and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts.""Yet he dreams he is immortal,"I argue feebly."It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities.""Pah!"is the retort."Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire,a marionette of the belly and the loins?""To be stupid is to be happy,"I contend.
"Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless,tepid twilight sea,eh?"Oh,the victim cannot combat John Barleycorn!
"One step removed from the annihilating bliss of Buddha's Nirvana,"the White Logic adds."Oh well,here's the house.
Cheer up and take a drink.We know,we illuminated,you and I,all the folly and the farce."And in my book-walled den,the mausoleum of the thoughts of men,Itake my drink,and other drinks,and roust out the sleeping dogs from the recesses of my brain and hallo them on over the walls of prejudice and law and through all the cunning labyrinths of superstition and belief.
"Drink,"says the White Logic."The Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of existence.And remember what Heine said."Well do I remember that flaming Jew's "With the last breath all is done:joy,love,sorrow,macaroni,the theatre,lime-trees,raspberry drops,the power of human relations,gossip,the barking of dogs,champagne.""Your clear white light is sickness,"I tell the White Logic.
"You lie."
"By telling too strong a truth,"he quips back.
"Alas,yes,so topsy-turvy is existence,"I acknowledge sadly.
"Ah,well,Liu Ling was wiser than you,"the White Logic girds.
"You remember him?"
I nod my head--Liu Ling,a hard drinker,one of the group of bibulous poets who called themselves the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and who lived in China many an ancient century ago.
"It was Liu Ling,"prompts the White Logic,"who declared that to a drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as so much duckweed on a river.Very well.Have another Scotch,and let semblance and deception become duck-weed on a river."And while I pour and sip my Scotch,I remember another Chinese philosopher,Chuang Tzu,who,four centuries before Christ,challenged this dreamland of the world,saying:"How then do Iknow but that the dead repent of having previously clung to life?
Those who dream of the banquet,wake to lamentation and sorrow.
Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow,wake to join the hunt.
While they dream,they do not know that they dream.Some will even interpret the very dream they are dreaming;and only when they awake do they know it was a dream.Fools think they are awake now,and flatter themselves they know if they are really princes or peasants.Confucius and you are both dreams;and I who say you are dreams--I am but a dream myself.
"Once upon a time,I,Chuang Tzu,dreamt I was a butterfly,fluttering hither and thither,to all intents and purposes a butterfly.I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly,and was unconscious of my individuality as a man.
Suddenly,I awaked,and there I lay,myself again.Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly,or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."
