154
PARTISAN REVIEW
doesn't bear a grudge the way you do. He gave me a long talk about
it once-if you analyze the nature of a thousand human beings, all
you're left with is two dozen qualities, feelings, forms of development,
constructive principles and so on, which is what they all consist of.
And if you analyze the human body, all you're left with is water and
a few dozen little heaps of matter floating round in it. We draw up
water just as trees do, and animal bodies are formed of it just as
clouds are. I think that's pretty. Only it makes it rather hard to
know what to think of oneself. And what to do." Clarisse giggled.
"So then I told him that you go fishing for days on end, when you
have time off, just lying by the water."
"Well, what of it? I should like to know if he could keep
it
up
for ten minutes! But
human beings,"
Walter said firmly, "have been
doing that for tens of thousands of years, staring up into the sky,
feeling the warmth of the earth, and no more analyzing it than one
analyzes one's own mother!"
Clarisse could not help giggling again. "He says it's got much
more complicated since then. Just as we float on water, we float
in a sea of fire, a storm of electricity, a sky of magnetism, a swamp
of warmth, and so on. Only we don't feel it. Finally all that's left
is formulae. And what they mean in human terms is something one
can't quite express-that's the whole thing. I've quite forgotten what
I learned at school but it seems to be right enough. And, he says,
if somebody today wants to call the birds his little brothers, like
Saint Francis, or you, then he mustn't go and make it quite so easy
for himself, but must make up his mind to plunge into the furnace,
and flash down into the earth through the trolley-pole of a train,
or go splish-splash down the drain of the sink, into the sewers."
"Yes, yes!" Walter interrupted this account. "First the four ele–
ments become several dozen, and ill the end we're merely left
floating around on correlations, on processes, on the dirty dishwater
of processes and formulae, on something of which one doesn't know
whether it's a thing, a process, a phantom idea or a God-knows–
what! Then there's no difference left between a sun and a match,
nor any between the mouth as the one end of the digestive tract and
the other end of it! One and the same thing has a hundred sides,
each side has a hundred aspects, and every one of them has other
feelings attached to it. The human brain has then successfully split
