For several minutes after this they both contemplated the level mass of illuminated waters with absorbed concentration. At last Adrian broke the silence.
“What I’m aiming at in my book,” he said, “is a revelation of how the essence of life is found in the instinct of destruction. I want to show—what is simply the truth—that the pleasure of destruction, destruction entered upon out of sheer joy and for its own sake, lies behind every living impulse that pushes life forward. Out of destruction alone—out of the rending and tearing of something—of something in the way—does new life spring to birth. It isn’t destruction for cruelty’s sake,” he went on, his fingers closing and unclosing at his side over a handful of sand. “Cruelty is mere inverted sentiment. Cruelty implies attraction, passion, even—in some cases—love. Pure destruction—destruction for its own sake—such as I see it—is no thick, heavy, muddy, perverted impulse such as the cruel are obsessed by. It’s a burning and devouring flame. It’s a mad, splendid revel of glaring whiteness like this which hurts our eyes now. I’m going to show in my book how the ultimate essence of life, as we find it, purest and most purged in the ecstasies of the saints, is nothing but an insanity of destruction! That’s really what lies at the bottom of all the asceticism and all the renunciation in the world. It’s the instinct to destroy—to destroy what lies nearest to one’s hand—in this case, of course, one’s own body and the passions of the body. Ascetics fancy they do this for the sake of their souls. That’s their illusion. They do it for its own sake—for the sake of the ecstasy of destruction! Man is the highest of all animals because he can destroy the most. The saints are the highest among men because they can destroy humanity.”
He rose to his feet and, picking up a flat stone from the sea’s edge, sent it skimming across the water.
“Five!” he cried, as the stone sank at last.
The girl rose and stood beside him. “I can play at ‘Ducks and Drakes’ too,” she said, imitating his action with another stone which, however, sank heavily after only three cuttings of the shiny surface.
“You can’t play ‘Ducks and Drakes’ with the universe,” retorted Sorio. “No girl can—not even you, with your boy-arms and boy-legs! You can’t even throw a stone out of pure innocence. You only threw that—just now—because I did and because you wanted me to see you swing your arm—and because you wanted to change the conversation.”
He looked her up and down with an air of sullen mockery. “What the saints and the mystics seek,” he went on, “is the destruction of everything within reach—of everything that sticks out, that obtrudes, that is simply there. That is why they throw their stones at every form of natural life. But the life they attack is doing the same thing itself in a cruder way. The sea is destroying the land; the grass is destroying the flowers; the flowers one another; the woods, the marshes, the fens, are all destroying something. The saints are only the maddest and wisest of all destroyers—”
“Sorio! There’s a starfish out there—being washed in. Oh, let me try and reach it!”
She snatched his stick from him and catching up her skirt stepped into the water.