MEAN, MAXIMUM, MINIMUM
333
How THE MEAN SERVES Goo
To know where one is, proportioning the self and the objects
of desire, is prayer. Measure is the same as saying Grace.
How THE MEAN
Is
BoTH THE MAxiMUM AND THE MINIMUM
Thru the Mean we avoid the importunities of desire, which
denial would make rage only the more, exposing us to impulses and
accidents. Thus it is thru the Mean that we attain the Minimum.
But the Mean reconciles warring opposites and avoids waste. Thus
it is thru the Mean that we attain the Maximum.
Loose and Robber take their leave. "Lew, take me along!"
screams Liv's little brother, vanishing downstairs after them. "Hey,
where the hell do you think you're going?" cries Liv.
Norm says, "Robber's against Utopia."
"Yes, and he'll soon talk Lew out of it; that leaves only three."
"I didn't think your littlP- brother was very much impressed
either," says Henry Faust, "if you noticed him standing there
laughing in his sleeve."
II.
Liv's little brother makes them let him off in the Loop. They
can't understand what the 12-year-old boy can be after there, so
late at night. But he goes straight to the great Department Store.
Here he knows the Night-Watchman, and for the price of
some trivial intimacies is free to play thruout the great store.
Besides, the watchman has a 14-year-old daughter whom the boy
ardently loves.
Everything is in the great Department Store! to be got by the
infinite power of money, which is exchangeable for all things and
alone proportioned to the infinite appetite. The Department of
Canned Fruits! the Department of Polymorphous Love! Little
brother puts on a pair of roller-skates, to move more swiftly from
pleasure to pleasure.
(It is Charley Chaplin who, in
Modern Times,
invented the
idea of a Department Store as earthly paradise; in
Modem Times
he skates about the store like a graceful comic angel; in one scene
he balances blindfold on the edge of an abyss, a comic angel. It is
of course comic to have everything pell-mell, like Adam in the
garden: for instance, an elephant with a writhing proboscis.)
