An index finger

by Tulis Abrojal

To each of us things are what they appear from each particular point of view. Our idea is our limitation.

He who writes a book presents to other minds a picture of life as it appears to him, from whatever point of view he has chosen. His work portrays both that which he sees outside himself and that which is within. It is a combination of himself and the world as he sees it, for of subject and object are all things made.

When we read a tale it is the author we learn to know, rather than his people; but we know him through his people. They are the dwellers within his mind, and we cannot know them without entering that realm and knowing it, be it enchanted or disenchanting.

Sight and insight make up all literature. Every book is a combination of the author and what he looks upon and studies objectively as well as subjectively. It is truth as he sees it.

I have read many interesting works of fiction; but for the most part I laid them down dissatisfied. They lacked something for which I was always searching. They gave no answer to the questions that early began to trouble me—questions that nobody could answer and few cared to be bothered with. Often they were very attractive pictures of that which the world is to so many—a fool’s paradise.

They dealt with the emotions of those whose lives they portrayed, and they appealed to the emotions of those who read them; and all had ever the one, one theme—the pursuit of happiness. And all pursuers saw the alluring phantom in the same shape, and gave chase to it by the same road. Sometimes they captured it, and then—the book ended. There was nothing else for the author to do when he reached that point, but to let the curtain drop and turn out the lights, lest his audience see that the happiness so hotly pursued was not the true thing after all; but only an appearance, an illusion, a disappointment, as veritable a phantom as ever—which left the one in possession of it no better off than he was before he captured it.

Now the form of this phantom, was the love of the man and the woman for each other, and the possession of each by the other. Romances have been mostly amplified sex chases. They wrought upon the reader’s emotions through many harrowing chapters, the end thereof being that a certain man married the particular woman he was pursuing.

An old man whom I knew in my youth said he only read the first and last chapters of a novel. In the one he became acquainted with the hero and heroine; in the other he found out “whether he got her or not.” By so doing he escaped much emotional wear and tear to which less discriminating readers subjected themselves. As we all know, sometimes “he didn’t get her.” What then? Well, perhaps she died or he died, and that ended the story. Everybody accepted that event as final and incontestable. That was the end, and nobody ventured to ask what lay behind it. It was the end of the successful as well as of the disappointed—the end of everybody in the world, yet nobody sought its meaning.

In this respect the people outside of books were precisely like the people in books. They had the same ideal of happiness, chased it through the same difficulties and disasters, and would not admit that it was a phantom; would not see that Death stalked behind every joy, sat at every feast, touched elbows right and left with the victorious as well as with the defeated, and waited for everybody under the sun. They knew it, of course, but they did not want to think about it or talk about it.

And what was this spectre to which all closed their eyes because of terror? Death was death. That was all they knew. It was the terrible and final thing that could happen. More; it was sure to happen; but it must be put off as long as possible and ignored in the meantime.