“It will explain my life, my whole life, that book,” Adrian muttered. “You’ve only heard a few of its ideas, Phil, only a few. The secret of things being found, not in the instinct of creation but in the instinct of destruction, is only the beginning of it. I go further—much further than that. Don’t laugh at me, Phil, if I just say this—only just this: I show in my book how what every living thing really aims at is to escape from itself, to escape from itself by the destruction of itself. Do you get the idea in that, Phil? Everything in the world is—how shall I put it?—these ideas are not easy, they tear at a person’s brain before they become clear!—everything in the world is on the edge, on the verge, of dissolving away into what people call nothingness. That is what Shakespeare had in his mind when he said, ‘the great globe itself, yea! all which it inherits, shall dissolve and—and—’ I forget exactly how it runs but it ends with ‘leave not a rack behind.’ But the point I make in my book is this. This ‘nothingness,’ this ‘death,’ if you like, to which everything struggles is only a name for what lies beyond life—for what lies, I mean, beyond the extreme limit of the life of every individual thing. We shrink back from it, everything shrinks back from it, because it is the annihilation of all one’s familiar associations, the destruction of the impulse to go on being oneself! But though we shrink back from it, something in us, something that is deeper than ourselves pushes us on to this destruction. This is why, when people have been outraged in the very roots of their being, when they have been lacerated and flayed more than they can bear, when they have been, so to speak, raked through and combed out, they often fall back upon a soft delicious tide of deep large happiness, indescribable, beyond words.”
He was too absorbed in what he was saying to notice that as he made this remark his companion murmured a passionate assent.
“They do! They do! They do!” the girl repeated, with unrestrained emotion.
“That is why,” he continued without heeding her, “there is always a fierce pleasure in what fools call ‘cynicism.’ Cynicism is really the only philosophy worth calling a philosophy because it alone recognizes ‘that everything which exists ought to be destroyed.’ Those are the very words used by the devil in Faust, do you remember? And Goethe himself knew in his heart the truth of cynicism, only he loved life so well,—the great child that he was!—that he couldn’t endure the thought of destruction. He understood it though, and confessed it, too. Spinoza helped him to see it. Ah, Phil, my girl, there was a philosopher! The only one—the only one! And see how the rabble are afraid of Spinoza! See how they turn to the contemptible Hegel, the grocer of philosophy, with his precious ‘self-assertion’ and ‘self-realization’! And there are some idiots who fail to see that Spinoza was a cynic, that he hated life and wished to destroy life. They pretend that he worshipped Nature. Nature! He denied the existence of it. He wished to annihilate it, and he did annihilate it, in his terrible logic. He worshipped only one thing, that which is beyond the limit, beyond the extremest verge, beyond the point where every living thing ceases to exist and becomes nothing! That’s what Spinoza worshipped and that’s what I worship, Phil. I worship the blinding white light which puts out all the candles and all the shadows in the world. It blinds you and ends you and so you call it darkness. But it only begins where darkness is destroyed with everything else! Darkness is like cruelty. It’s the opposite of love. But what I worship is as far beyond love as it is beyond the sun and all the shadows thrown by the sun!”
He paused and contemplated a nervous water-rat that was running along close to the water of the ditch they walked by, desperately searching for its hole.
“I call it white light,” he continued, “but really it’s not light at all, any more than it’s darkness. It’s something you can’t name, something unutterable, but it’s large and cool and deep and empty. Yes, it’s empty of everything that lives or makes a sound! It stops all aching in one’s head, Phil. It stops all the persecution of people who stare at you! It stops all the sickening tiredness of having to hate things. It’ll stop all my longing for Baptiste, for Baptiste is there. Baptiste is the angel of that large, cool, quiet place. Let me once destroy everything in the way and I get to Baptiste—and nothing can ever separate us again!”
He looked round at the grey monotony about them, streaked here and there by patches of autumnal yellow where the stubble fields intersected the fens.
“I prove that I’m right about this principle of destruction, Phil,” he went on, “by bringing up instances of the way all human beings instinctively delight to overthrow one another’s illusions and to fling doubt upon one another’s sincerity. We all do that. You do, Phil, more than any one. You do it to me. And you’re right in doing it. We’re all right in doing it! That accounts for the secret satisfaction we all feel when something or other breaks up the complacency of another person’s life. It accounts for the mad desire we have to destroy the complacency of our own life. What we’re seeking is the line of escape—that’s the phrase I use in my book. The line of escape from ourselves. That’s why we turn and turn and turn, like fish gasping on the land or like those beetles we saw just now, or like that water-rat!”
They had now reached the outskirts of Nance’s withy-bed. The path Sorio had come by deviated here sharply to the east, heading sea-wards, while another path, wider and more frequented, led on across the meadows to the bank of the Loon where the roof and chimneys of Dyke House were vaguely visible. The September twilight had already begun to fall and objects at any considerable distance showed dim and wraith-like. Damp mists, smelling of stagnant water, rose in long clammy waves out of the fens and moved in white ghostly procession along the bank of the river. Sorio stood at this parting of the ways and surveyed the shadowy outline of the distant tow-path and the yet more obscure form of Dyke House. He looked at the stubble field and then at the little wood where the alder trees differentiated themselves from the willows by their darker and more melancholy foliage.
“How frightening Dyke House looks from here,” remarked Philippa, “it looks like a haunted house.”