“Do you really believe this?”
“Still think of me as a hundred percent phony?” Paul chuckled good-naturedly. “Well, it so happens, I do believe that. It also so happens that if this thing clicks we’ll have a world organization and if we have that there’ll be a big place for number one in it. It’s all mixed up, Gene. I’d like to hear your motives, straight from the shoulder.”
I was not prepared to answer him, or myself. In fact, to this day, my own motives are a puzzle to which there is no single key, no easy definition. One is not, after all, like those classic or neo-classic figures who wore with such splendid mono-maniacal consistency the scarlet of lust or the purple of dominion, or the bright yellow of madness, existing not at all beneath their identifying robes. Power appealed to me in my youth but only as a minor pleasure and not as an end in itself or even as a means to any private or public end. I enjoyed the idea of guiding and dominating others, preferably in the mass; yet, at the same time, I did not like the boredom of power achieved, or the silly publicness of a great life. But there was something which, often against my will and judgment, precipitated me into deeds and attitudes where the logic of the moment controlled me to such an extent that I could not lessen, if I chose, the momentum of my own wild passage, or chart its course.
I would not have confided this to Paul even had I in those days thought any of it out, which I had not. Though I was conscious of some fundamental ambivalence in myself, I always felt that should I pause for a few moments and question myself, I could easily find answers to these problems. But I did not pause. I never asked myself a single question concerning motive. I acted like a man sleeping who was only barely made conscious by certain odd incongruities that he dreams. The secret which later I was to discover was still unrevealed to me as I faced the efficient vulgarity of Paul Himmell across the portable bar which reflected so brightly in its crystal his competence.
“My motives are perfectly simple,” I said, half-believing what I said. In those days the more sweeping the statement the more apt I was to give it my fickle allegiance: motives are simple, splendid! simple they are. “I want something to do. I’m fascinated by Cave and I believe what he says ... not that it is so supremely earthshaking. It’s been advanced as a theory off and on for two thousand years. Kant wrote that he anticipated with delight the luxurious sleep of the grave and the Gnostics came close to saying the same thing when they promised a glad liberation from life. The Eastern religions, about which I know very little, maintain ...”
“That’s it!” Paul interrupted me eagerly. “That’s what we want. You just keep on like that. We’ll call it 'An Introduction to John Cave.’ Make a small book out of it. Get it published in New York; then the company will buy up copies and we’ll pass it out free.”
“I’m not so sure that I know enough formal philosophy to ...”
“To hell with that stuff. You just root around and show how the old writers were really Cavites at heart and then you come to him and put down what he says. Why we’ll be half-there even before he’s on TV!” Paul lapsed for a moment into a reverie of promotion. I had another drink and felt quite good myself although I had serious doubts about my competence to compose philosophy in the popular key. But Paul’s faith was infectious and I felt that, all in all, with a bit of judicious hedging and recourse to various explicit summaries and definitions, I might put together a respectable ancestry for Cave whose message, essentially, ignored all philosophy, empiric and orphic, moving with hypnotic effectiveness to the main proposition: death and man’s acceptance of it. The problems of life were always quite secondary to Cave, if not to the rest of us.
“When will you want this piece done?”
“The sooner the better. Here,” he scribbled an address on a pad of paper. “This is Cave’s address. He’s on a farm outside Spokane. It belongs to one of his undertaker friends.”