3
There was nothing for me in my own apartment.
The books—even Vogt's Road to Survival, which I had almost finished—looked nervous. The many magazines—through all of which I had coursed while bathing, eating, sitting on the toilet, riding in the plane, idling—were like partly-consumed meals: there were bits here and there I still wanted to taste, to digest—but not now. I was, of course, neither sleepy nor intending to go to bed. I can get along for days, for weeks, on four or five hours of sleep, even without throat cancer. Often, when I am writing a long story, I begin with the sunrise, go to sleep at two or three the next morning, get up with dawn again—and so continue until the job is done.
My body ad-libs its life. When its brain is electrified, when the aurora of thought and imagination and sensation ascends there as a means to work, to dream, to worry, to engage in reasoning or wild speculation, the thing that calls itself "I" follows after, like a boy after a rainbow—and I have found as many pots of gold as a bank president. And when my body has nothing to say or do or think about, I sleep. I lie on the ground. I hoe potatoes and corn, dig garbage pits, make tables and bookshelves, fix gadgets. I sit on a beach and stare at the accumulation of hydrogen cunningly mixed with oxygen. When my body is sick, the I runs to doctors, takes pills, eases itself—and pushes at pain only if it must, like a man wheeling a heavy barrow up a hill. I do not have the illusion of fortitude that makes sadists of, say, Englishmen. I suffer. And when my I is grayed with its own weather, or the bad chemistry of the body that owns it, I suffer, too—jittering and jizzling, mourning and dreading, a repelled, repellent object—a man with blues.
The construction of society does not permit such practices by most. They have the 8:02 to catch, the Monday wash, and their two weeks in July. The church bell rings not when the preacher feels he is close to God, but at eleven, on the Seventh Day. He who is weak with the length of winter cannot escape it; who faints in the summer must faint again upon recovering consciousness—or else employ his I to whip his body so that it will face summer without further protest.
No other animal would do itself such violences.
This is an age of schedules. The people of it have long since foundered in time. Time is a sea that presses them to its bottom—a sea that waterlogs their tissues—a sea that prevents them from the experience of its own medium as other than a weight and an absolute dimension.
Living is drowning with the first lesson at the clock and being drowned forever after that.
My body and my I had endeavored, with some success, to ignore the obsessional meridians. Others may travel them like a baby that has learned to walk and become so enamored of the skill as to proceed, steadily, for the rest of its days, in one straight line on time's sea bottom. We have stopped—separately and together—somewhat explored time's other dimensions—gone to the surface and seen the sun, for example—bought time, stolen it, ignored it, zigzagged, looked back through it, and seen the straight line of the compulsive infant for the circle it really is.