“That’s good,” said Mr. Cardan. “I should be sorry to think you were doing anything actively useful. You retain the instincts of a gentleman; that’s excellent….”
“Satan!” said Calamy, laughing. “But do you suppose I don’t know very well that you can make out the most damning case against the idle anchorite who sits looking at his navel while other people work? Do you suppose I haven’t thought of that?”
“I’m sure you have,” Mr. Cardan answered, genially twinkling.
“The case looks damning enough, no doubt. But it’s only really cogent when the anchorite doesn’t do his job properly, when he’s born to be active and not contemplative. The imbeciles who rush about bawling that action is the end of life, and that thought has no value except in so far as it leads to action, are speaking only for themselves. There are eighty-four thousand paths. The pure contemplative has a right to one of them.”
“I should be the last to deny it,” said Mr. Cardan.
“And if I find that it’s not my path,” pursued Calamy, “I shall turn back and try what can be done in the way of practical life. Up till now, I must say I’ve not seen much hope for myself that way. But then, it must be admitted, I didn’t look for the road in places where I was very likely to find it.”
“What has always seemed to me to be the chief objection to protracted omphaloskepsis,” said Mr. Cardan, after a little silence, “is the fact that you’re left too much to your personal resources; you have to live on your own mental fat, so to speak, instead of being able to nourish yourself from outside. And to know yourself becomes impossible; because you can’t know yourself except in relation to other people.”
“That’s true,” said Calamy. “Part of yourself you can certainly get to know only in relation to what is outside. In the course of twelve or fifteen years of adult life I think I’ve got to know that part of me very thoroughly. I’ve met a lot of people, been in a great many curious situations, so that almost every potentiality latent in that part of my being has had a chance to unfold itself into actuality. Why should I go on? There’s nothing more I really want to know about that part of myself; nothing more, of any significance, I imagine, that I could get to know by contact with what is external. On the other hand, there is a whole universe within me, unknown and waiting to be explored; a whole universe that can only be approached by way of introspection and patient uninterrupted thought. Merely to satisfy curiosity it would surely be worth exploring. But there are motives more impelling than curiosity to persuade me. What one may find there is so important that it’s almost a matter of life and death to undertake the search.”
“Hm,” said Mr. Cardan. “And what will happen at the end of three months’ chaste meditation when some lovely young temptation comes toddling down this road, ‘balancing her haunches,’ as Zola would say, and rolling the large black eye? What will happen to your explorations of the inward universe then, may I ask?”
“Well,” said Calamy, “I hope they’ll proceed uninterrupted.”