Are books just toys? the toys of consciousness?
Then what is man? The everlasting brainy child?
Is man nothing but a brainy child, amusing himself for ever with the printed toys called books?
That also. Even the greatest men spend most of their time making marvellous fine toys. Like Pickwick or Two on a Tower.
But there is more to it.
Man is a thought-adventurer.
Man is a great venture in consciousness.
Where the venture started, and where it will end, nobody knows. Yet here we are — a long way gone already, and no glimpse of any end in sight. Here we are, miserable Israel of the human consciousness, having lost our way in the wilderness of the world’s chaos, giggling and babbling and pitching camp. We needn’t go any further.
All right, let us pitch camp, and see what happens. When the worst comes to the worst, there is sure to be a Moses to set up a serpent of brass. And then we can start off again.
Man is a thought-adventurer. He has thought his way down the far ages. He used to think in little images of wood or stone. Then in hieroglyphs on obelisks and clay rolls and papyrus. Now he thinks in books, between two covers.
The worst of a book is the way it shuts up between covers. When men had to write on rocks and obelisks, it was rather difficult to lie. The daylight was too strong. But soon he took his venture into caves and secret holes and temples, where he could create his own environment and tell lies to himself. And a book is an underground hole with two lids to it. A perfect place to tell lies in.
Which brings us to the real dilemma of man in his long adventure with consciousness. He is a liar. Man is a liar unto himself. And once he has told himself a lie, round and round he goes after that lie, as if it was a bit of phosphorus on his nose-end. The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire wait for him to have done. They stand silently aside, waiting for him to rub the ignis fatuus off the end of his nose. But man, the longer he follows a lie, becomes all the surer he sees a light.
The life of man is an endless venture into consciousness. Ahead goes the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, through the wilderness of time. Till man tells himself a lie, another lie. Then the lie goes ahead of him, like the carrot before the ass.
There are, in the consciousness of man, two bodies of knowledge: the things he tells himself, and the things he finds out. The things he tells himself are nearly always pleasant, and they are lies. The things he finds out are usually rather bitter to begin with.
Man is a thought-adventurer. But by thought we mean, of course, discovery. We don’t mean this telling himself stale facts and drawing false deductions, which usually passes as thought. Thought is an adventure, not a trick.
And of course it is an adventure of the whole man, not merely of his wits. That is why one cannot quite believe in Kant, or Spinoza. Kant thought with his head and his spirit, but he never thought with his blood. The blood also thinks, inside a man, darkly and ponderously. It thinks in desires and revulsions, and it makes strange conclusions. The conclusion of my head and my spirit is that it would be perfect, this world of men, if men all loved one another. The conclusion of my blood says nonsense, and finds the stunt a bit disgusting. My blood tells me there is no such thing as perfection. There is the long endless venture into consciousness down an ever-dangerous valley of days.
Man finds that his head and his spirit have led him wrong. We are at present terribly off the track, following our spirit, which says how nice it would be if everything was perfect, and listening to our head, which says we might have everything perfect if we would only eliminate the tiresome reality of our obstinate blood-being.
We are sadly off the track, and we’re in a bad temper, like a man who has lost his way. And we say: I’m not going to bother. Fate must work it out.
Fate doesn’t work things out. Man is a thought-adventurer, and only his adventuring in thought rediscovers a way.
Take our civilization. We are in a tantrum because we don’t really like it now we’ve got it. There we’ve been building it for a thousand years, and built so big we can’t shift it. And we hate it, after all.
Too bad! What’s to be done?
Why, there’s nothing to be done! Here we are, like sulky children, sulking because we don’t like the game we’re playing, feeling that we’ve been made to play it against our will. So play it we do: badly: in the sulks.
We play the game badly, so of course it goes from bad to worse. Things go from bad to worse.
All right, let ‘em! Let ’em go from bad to worse. Apres moi le deluge.
By all means! But a deluge presupposes a Noah and an Ark. The old adventurer on the old adventure.
When you come to think of it, Noah matters more than the deluge, and the ark is more than all the world washed out.
Now we’ve got the sulks, and are waiting for the flood to come and wash out our world and our civilization. All right, let it come. But somebody’s got to be ready with Noah’s Ark.
We imagine, for example, that if there came a terrible crash and terrible bloodshed over Europe, then out of the crash and bloodshed a remnant of regenerated souls would inevitably arise.
We are mistaken. If you look at the people who escaped the terrible times of Russia, you don’t see many regenerated souls. They are more scared and senseless than ever. Instead of the great catastrophe having restored them to manhood, they are finally unmanned.
What’s to be done? If a huge catastrophe is going only to unman us more than we are already unmanned, then there’s no good in a huge catastrophe. Then there’s no good in anything, for us poor souls who are trapped in the huge trap of our civilization.
Catastrophe alone never helped man. The only thing that ever avails is the living adventurous spark in the souls of men. If there is no living adventurous spark, then death and disaster are as meaningless as tomorrow’s newspaper.
Take the fall of Rome. During the Dark Ages of the fifth, sixth, seventh centuries A.D., the catastrophes that befell the Roman Empire didn’t alter the Romans a bit. They went on just the same, rather as we go on today, having a good time when they could get it, and not caring. Meanwhile Huns, Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, and all the rest wiped them out.
With what result? The flood of barbarism rose and covered Europe from end to end.
But, bless your life, there was Noah in his Ark with the animals. There was young Christianity. There were the lonely fortified monasteries, like little arks floating and keeping the adventure afloat. There is no break in the great adventure in consciousness. Throughout the howlingest deluge, some few brave souls are steering the ark under the rainbow.
The monks and bishops of the Early Church carried the soul and spirit of man unbroken, unabated, undiminished over the howling flood of the Dark Ages. Then this spirit of undying courage was fused into the barbarians, in Gaul, in Italy, and the new Europe began. But the germ had never been allowed to die.
Once all men in the world lost their courage and their newness, the world would come to an end. The old Jews said the same: unless in the world there was at least one Jew passionately praying, the race was lost.
So we begin to see where we are. It’s no good leaving everything to fate. Man is an adventurer, and he must never give up the adventure. The venture is the venture: fate is the circumstance around the adventurer. The adventurer at the quick of the venture is the living germ inside the chaos of circumstance. But for the living germ of Noah in his Ark, chaos would have redescended on the world in the waters of the flood. But chaos couldn’t redescend, because Noah was afloat with all the animals.
The same with the Christians when Rome fell. In their little fortified monasteries they defended themselves against howling invasions, being too poor to excite much covetousness. When wolves and bears prowled through the streets of Lyons, and a wild boar was grunting and turning up the pavement of Augustus’s temple, the Christian bishops also roved intently and determinedly, like poor forerunners, along the ruined streets, seeking a congregation. It was the great adventure, and they did not give it up.
But Noah, of course, is always in an unpopular minority. So, of course, were the Christians, when Rome began to fall. The Christians now are in a hopelessly popular majority, so it is their turn to fall.
I know the greatness of Christianity: it is a past greatness. I know that, but for those early Christians, we should never have emerged from the chaos and hopeless disaster of the Dark Ages. If I had lived in the year 400, pray God, I should have been a true and passionate Christian. The adventurer.
But now I live in 1984, and the Christian venture is done. The adventure is gone out of Christianity. We must start on a new venture towards God.