T H E MAN ON THE T RA I N
479
seeing the passing scene as a series of meaningful projects full of
signs which he reads without difficulty, another commuter, although
he has no empirical reason for being so, although he has satisfied the
same empirical needs as commuter A, is alienated. To say the least, he
is
bored; to say the most, he is in pure anxiety; he
is
horrified at his
surroundings-he might as well be passing through a lunar land–
scape and the signs he sees are absurd or at least ambiguous. (It
will not be necessary at this point to consider the further possibility
that commuter A's tranquillity is no guarantee against alienation,
that in fact he may be more desperately lost to himself than B in the
sense of being anonymous, the "one" of "one says.")
Alienation, in its turn, is itself a reversal of the objective-empiri–
cal. This is a purely existential reversal and has nothing to do with
art.
It
is very simply illustrated in the case of the alienated commuter.
This man-though he will have met every "need" which can be
abstracted by the objective-empirical method: sexual needs, nutrition–
al, emotional, in-group needs, needs for a productive orientation,
creativity, community service-this man may nevertheless be alien–
ated. Moreover he is apt to be alienated in proportion to his staking
everything on the objective-empirical. By his alienation, the objective–
empirical categories are reversed. What causes anxiety in the one
is
the refuge from anxiety in the other. For example, speaking object–
ively-empirically, it is often said that it is no wonder people are anxi–
ous nowadays, what with the possibility that the Bomb might fall
any minute. The Bomb would seem to be sufficient reason for anxiety,
yet as it happens the reverse is the truth. The contingency "what
if
the Bomb should fall?" is not only not a cause of anxiety in the
alienated man but is one of his few remaining refuges from it. When
everything else fails, we may always turn to our good friend just
back from Washington or Geneva who obliges us with his sober
second-thoughts-"I can tell you this much, I am profoundly
dis–
turbed ..."-and each of us has what he came for, the old authen–
tic thrill of the Bomb and the Coming of the Last Days. Like Or–
tega's romantic, the heart's desire of the alienated man is to see vines
sprouting through the masonry. The real anxiety question, the ques–
tion no one asks because no one wants to, is the reverse: What
if
the Bomb should
not
fall? What then?
