Survival
We know very little about human nature. We know almost nothing about human capabilities. There is vast scope for discovery about man and what he can do. The fact that there is vast scope for discovery does not mean that such discovery is to be sought, or that it will be of any significance if and when it is found.
Such discoveries are made in terms of endurance. They have no universal meaning at all. Such meaning as they have is entirely personal.
A man who walks from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the United States will be applauded and mocked. A man who sails around the world in a small boat or swims the English Channel will be applauded, but not mocked. A man who spends years squatting atop a pole or drinks fifty pints of beer faster than any man has ever done it before will be mocked, and applauded in a mocking fashion. The discrepancies in the way these feats are regarded in the eyes of the world are not rational. To embark upon any of these projects is not particularly courageous. They are all possible. In every case the challenge is internal — to force oneself to accept the rigors and the particular hardships involved. Success, too, is measured only internally, by the degree to which hardship has been accepted, endured, conquered. In all cases, the feat itself is meaningless except in an internal context.
The men who live in Block C are neither applauded nor mocked. They are forgotten. They embark upon their Canaanite existence without courage, without even enthusiasm. For them, the rigors and the hardships are not a challenge accepted but a situation given. The time of hardships is not finite — once condemned to Block C a prisoner is there for life. The feat of survival is a greater one than any of those I quoted earlier, but it is quite as meaningless in any context save the internal one. There is not even any achievement involved — merely survival. Yet this survival offers each man a vast scope for discovery about what he is.
What was Con Radley?
When you are hungry, you want to eat. That is what being hungry means. That, says the crowd (this is the faceless crowd which applauds, mocks, or forgets), is natural.
When the crowd says natural they want to imply that it is right and proper and the way God planned it. What they actually do mean, however, is that they either like it that way or they welcome the opportunity to put on a brave face and play their own version of the endurance game. (This is why there is such a vast difference between eating being natural, shitting being natural, and fucking being natural.)
Apologies for the interlude, but it really is necessary if we are to discuss with any depth of meaning the question of what is/was Con Radley.
Con Radley was a hungry man. It was exactly the same as the hunger you know so well. In terms of the way things actually are it was a perfectly natural hunger. He felt it. It was there. It existed.
And people didn’t like it. It wasn’t, you see, a hunger for food.
What is more, people certainly did not welcome this particular opportunity to don a brave face and accept it.
So the crowd naturally called it unnatural.
Needless to say, nobody gave a tinker’s dam about Con. Nobody cared what he felt or thought or who he was. They only cared about what they felt and liked and liked to think and feel. After all, when you come right down to it (they say), in the final analysis (they say), ultimately (they say), God had put Con on Earth so that he could be part of their environment, and it was damn well up to them to say what he should be and feel and think and do. He hadn’t anything to do with himself.
I’m not going to tell you exactly what kind of a pervert Con Radley was. I mean, you don’t approve of me writing about things like that, do you? You’d prefer that Radley didn’t even exist, especially in this document, to which you think he isn’t at all relevant. If he’s here at all, you want him kept well back out of sight. You want him to be unmentionable.
All well and good. From this moment until he goes the way of all bit-part players, you won’t even notice that Con Radley is in any way different from your own sweet self. He’ll be mentioned only by name, if at all.
You can make up your own mind about who and what he was that made you hand him a free, one-way ticket to Canaan. After all, if you don’t want me to talk about such things, it’s only natural that I should comply.
But I want to say this. In Canaan, Con Radley had no option but to discover things about human nature — his own human nature, that you tried to steal from him by sending him there — that you haven’t even dreamed of. It may mean nothing, except to him (it doesn’t matter whether you applaud, mock, forget, or kill), but to him, it means everything.
It means: up yours.