PARTISAN REVIEW
smugness, the amoral convention. Sheathe both edges and you have
dullness on your hands.
What shall our poor ,horse do? He has decided that life is not
worth living if he cannot have the power that belongs to his freedom.
This is his choice. Then is he right or wrong? I should say he was
wrong. Freedom is a good in itself, even if it imposes on us a burden
greater than we can bear. And life is a good in itself, it is always
better to be than not to be, etc. But I might just as well say he was
right, for to call life worthless in the name of freedom is the greatest
dignity, as when a man says, I would rather be dead than a slave.
Here we catch a whiff of the real moral atmosphere, having left the
lowlands where choices are made by habit .and instinct, and entered
difficult country, watershed and mountain top, where all direction
is down; this is the very rare air of our freedom. Here no choices are
possible, here morality begins.
As
if to say: "Life
or
death? At this
point the two are one."
But isn't there something wrong here? Don't we say that animals
have always the better part of love? Our poems admire their ease.
Blake in the forest and Walt Whitman in the zoo: we celebrate
always the animal part. Animals in their own nature are greater than
we, in so far as we share that nature. They are fiercer, wiser, more
cunning, more gracious, etc. But it is because he has shared our
human nature that the horse is overwhelmed by the burden; for
indeed we have made pack horse of him, and it's our own burden
that he must carry. The worst one can say is that he's not a real
animal. But he will do to stagger under the burden; for to bear it
is more than any creature can do.
It is worth noting here that the horse sees no ambiguity.
If
he
can
love then he
must
love; if he
does
love then Zelda
must
be de–
sirable (it never enters
his
head to think otherwise). Ambiguity is
itself ambiguous: some it destroys, some it saves. The soldier, who
dismisses it, is saved; the horse, who cannot even recognize it, is
destroyed. And we put ambiguity to good use: to be in an unclear
position is sometimes the greatest advantage a man can enjoy, as
when we give him the benefit of the doubt. But with the animals'
simpler nature, no such refinement is possible; their advantage is
never in the potentiality, always in the act. Which
is
why animals are
ideally suited to carry our burden in parables.
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