PARTISAN REVIEW
asked all the assembled writers in their pride. He was merely resting
there, and meant to go on shortly. Where? Why, on up the hill.
How? On his bicycle, of course. What, on the bicycle! Surely he
meant he would push it up? No, he meant to ride it. But up a hiil!
How is that possible? It is, said the young man. The writers were
skeptical. They argued with the young man and with one another
and concluded one of two things: either he w.as not telling the truth
or, if he was, then he was wasting his energy-the proper work for
a young man was a work of the imagination.
"But this is the imagination!" exclaimed the cyclist, and he
swung
his
arm about, pointing first down into the valley, then round
to the hills, and then on up to the high mountains. And he leaped
onto his bicycle and rode up the steep hill, and then up the next
hill, pedaling effortlessly, until he was out of sight.
DISSERTATION
No parable without a moral. I would have set down a moral
after each parable had I not, in each case, felt some uncertainty as
to what the moral might
be.
The first parable, it struck me, was
without moral. I saw it as a matter of deciding whether or not the
horse was right; he had, as it were, drawn his own moral, and one
might or might not agree with him. But this decision, I thought,
involved many things besides morality, some of them even more
important. Turning to the second parable, I felt it certainly must
have a moral: a man does not simply shave
all
his hair and cut his
throat without teaching us something. Moreover, one does not write
of such a man without considering the rule under which his case
falls. But it seemed to me that there were so many morats-practi–
cally every sentence made a point-that I could not decide which
was the right one.
As
for the last parable, there I did see one moral
and only one; but I was so sure of it that I feared I must be over–
looking something, and so my certainty was but another form of
doubt. Thus I am yet to say what the moral of each parable may be.
I am not a moralist by nature. I do not begin with morality
and look for a tale to clothe it-this procedure seems unnatural to
me; but I cannot call it the reverse of the natural one, for the other,
of beginning with a tale and drawing the moral from it, seems just
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