72
PARTISAN REVIEW
do war work of any description, and, with the tribunal's finding, it seems
I cannot be forced to do it; (h) as a moral outcast from the community I
cannot get work of a sedentary kind (if I write for a job, mentioning that
I am totally exempt from military service as a C.O. I never get a reply) ;
(c) owing to a physical disability-which, had I not been a pacifist, would
have pre<:luded me from military service anyway-! cannot do manual
labour of the chain-gang kind. So, until further totalitarian pressure is
~rought
to bear upon me somehow or other, I am at liberty, on the border·
line of starvation, to pursue my own interests.
However, we keep clear of the borderline in one way and another.
We have a garden, in which I grow everything from cabbages to tomatoes;
we have a goat who should be giving us milk later on, and now a few
chickens who should, ditto, eggs.
One result of living in the country is the different texture of experi·
ence, the greater concreteness and solidity, seemingly, of the outer world,
with a certain stabilisation of experience which comes from a growing
familiarity with one particular environment. I do not think we shall go
back to the town at all, afterwards.
If
we can in some way make a living
in the country we shall do so. Our thoughts have been turning, like those
of many other pacifists, to the idea of community, in the rather special
sense in which it is coming to be used by pacifists. So that, with two or
three other families, we are nursing this idea of living a group, communal
life, as self-supporting as possible, on the land.
More and more I am coming to feel that there is a kind of process at
work throughout society, coherent and logical, and that what is important
is for us not to obstruct this process. So far as politics is concerned, I am
becoming more of an individualist, but in a new and responsible sense. I
think that with political movements and ideologies, in nine cases out of
ten we are obstructing this process, imposing our will and mentality upon
a fictitious actuality. The outer structure of society has become so cum·
bersome and unwieldy that it is hopeless for people of good will to
try
and interfere, they can only get their fingers or heads crushed. And we do
see this, in England now-the detachment, palpable and undeniable, of the
vast, massive superstructure of society, all
~at
is a dead weight, a mass,
non-human, from the effe<:tive world of men and women. The war
iJ
essentially an impersonal process, a movement of things, systems, masses.
But with this increasing chasm between the human being and the non·
human framework of society one thing is made clear-that purpose is
absent from what is collective and impersonal, and present only in what
is personal, individual. Historically, it seems to me, what is happening
is
a severance between the world of things and the world of persons, who
have let it get out of control. Given a kind of demonic purpose of its own,
detached from the effective world of persons, the world of things can only
tear away and roll fearfully into the abyss, leaving what remains of
humanity together in a new, personal. relationship. It seems to me that
