The source of greatest amusement to me has been the solemn injunction that I be faithful to myself. It is an impossibility. Had I sought to follow it I would immediately have been dead. It could only have meant forcing the absurdity of my existence into unity.
There would have been ways if I had not had self-respect. It would have been easy, without self-respect, to make others and myself as well accept all manner of distorted images. But is it so very human to be hopelessly monstrous? Though of course the world feels secure when the monstrous is reality.
I am very cautious, but I am greatly wanting in the instinct for self-preservation. And I am so brightly wanting in it that the breeze through the gap sometimes makes me drunk. Since danger is the ordinary, there is no crisis. It is very well to have a sense of balance, since I cannot live without a miraculous sort of balance; but suddenly it becomes a hot dream of imbalance and collapse. The greater the discipline the greater the tendency toward violence, and I grow weary of pressing the control button. I must not believe in my own docility. No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.
But my life has been only duty. I have been like an awkward novice sailor. Only in seasickness and nausea have I escaped from duty. The nausea corresponded to what the world calls love.
For some reason, Momoko is reluctant to come home with me. We talk for an hour or so after school at the Renoir. Sometimes we have our innocent fun in the park, riding the roller coaster. The Hamanakas do not worry a great deal about having their daughter come home late if it is not after dark. Though I sometimes take her to a movie, of course, I must let them know in advance that we are going to be later. There is not much pleasure in these public dates, and so we also have our assignations, brief ones.
Momoko came to the Renoir again today. She may seem old-fashioned, but she is just like any other girl in the unpleasant things she has to say about her teachers, in gossip about her friends, in talk, all contemptuously masked with indifference, of the scandalous behavior of movie stars. I humor her a little, showing a manly tolerance.
I lack the courage to write further, for my reservations on the surface seem no different from the unconscious reservations of all other teen-agers. Whatever my perversity, Momoko does not feel it as such. So I let my feelings have their way. Unintentionally, I become sincere and honest. If I really were, then the ethical contradictions in my being should be exposed like mud banks at low tide; but the troublesome ones are the banks not yet exposed. As the waters recede they pass a point at which my frustrations are no different from the frustrations of any other young person, the sadness that furrows my brow draws a line no different from that on the brow of any other. It would not do for Momoko to catch me there.
I have been wrong in thinking that women are tormented by doubts as to whether they are loved. I have wished to plunge Momoko into doubt, but the swift little beast has eluded capture. It would do no good to tell her I do not love her. She would think I was lying. My only recourse is to bide my time and make her jealous.
I sometimes ask myself if I was not somehow changed by the dissipation of my sensibilities in welcoming all those ships. There had to be some effect on me. Ships were born of my consciousness and grew into giants and had names. Only so far were they my concern. Once in port, they were of a different world. I was too busy receiving other ships. I did not have the art to become alternately ship and harbor. That is what women demand. The concept of woman, become sensible reality, would in the end refuse to leave port.
I have known secret pride and pleasure in seeing the concept on the horizon gradually take shape. I have put my hand in from outside the world and created something, and I have not tasted the sensation of being brought into the world. I have not felt myself brought in like laundry brought in before a shower. No rain has fallen to give me existence within the world. On the verge of intellectual drowning, my clarity has been confident of proper sensual rescue. For the ship has always passed. It has never stopped. The sea winds have turned everything to spotted marble, the sun has turned the heart into crystal.
I have been self-reliant to the point of sadness. I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated. People have diagnosed the habit as uncommon fastidiousness.
My misfortune has clearly had its origins in nonrecognition of nature. It is natural that I should not have recognized nature, for nature, containing all rules, should be an ally, and “my” nature has not been. I have accomplished the nonrecognition with gentleness. I have not been spoiled or pampered. Always feeling the shadow of persons clamorous to do me injury, I have been careful about expenditures of gentleness certain to do injury to others. One may see in the care a very human sort of solicitude. But mixed in with the very word “solicitude” are unpleasant shreds of weariness.
I have thought that, in comparison with the nature of my own being, the affairs of the world, delicate and complicated international problems and the like, have not been problems at all. Politics and art and ideology have been so many watermelon rinds. Only watermelon rinds left on the seashore, mostly white but tinged with the faint pink of sunrise. For though I have hated the vulgar, I have recognized in them the possibility of eternal life.
Incomprehension and error have seemed preferable to a relentless probing of my depths. This last means indescribable rudeness and discourtesy, not possible without the nastiest hostility. When did a ship ever understand me? It was enough for me to understand. Spiritlessly, punctiliously, it gave me its name and without another word slipped into harbor. It has been fortunate for the ships that not one of them was aware of the situation. Had any one of them shown the slightest misgivings, in that instant it would have been wiped out by my consciousness.
I have put together a delicate machine for feeling how it would be if I were to feel like a human being. The naturalized Englishman is more English than the native Englishman, they say; and I have become more of an expert on humanity than a human being. More, in any case, than an eighteen-year-old. Imagination and logic are my weapons, more precise than nature or instinct or experience, quite waterproof in awareness of and accommodation to probability. I have become a specialist in humanity, as an entomologist might become a specialist in South American beetles. With odorless flowers I have explored the ways in which human beings are captured by the odor of certain flowers, caught up in certain feelings.
So it is to see. I have seen from the signal station how an international freighter sets its sights from a certain distance out at sea, and makes toward shore at twelve and a half knots with the most urgent dreams of home. That was mere probing, my eye was really turned on an invisible realm far beyond the horizon. What is it to see the invisible? That is the ultimate vision, the denial at the end of all seeing, the eye’s denial of itself.
But sometimes I fear that all these thoughts and all these plans of mine begin in me and end in me. It was so, in any event, at the signal station. All the images flung into that little room like fragments of glass cast their light upon the walls and ceiling and left no trace behind. Is it not the same with other worlds too?
I must be my own support and go on living. Because I am always floating in air, resisting gravity, on the borders of the impossible.
Yesterday in school one of our more ostentatiously erudite teachers taught us a fragment of a Grecian lyric:
Those born with the bounty of the gods
Have the duty to die beautiful,