LITERATURE,
REVOLUTION AND ENTROPY
375
sent aloft; from the masthead he can descry sinking vessels, icebergs
and maelstroms which are not yet visible from the deck. You can
drag
him
down from the mast and put him
to
work
in
the boiler–
room or on the capstan, but that won't change a thing: the mast
is
still there and from the masthead another sailor will
be
able to see
what the first sailor has seen.
In stormy weather you need a man aloft. And right now the
weather is stormy. SOS signals are coming in from all directions.
Only yesterday the writer was able to stroll calmly on deck, taking
snapshots of "real life"; but who wants to look at pictures of land–
scapes and scenes from daily life when the world has taken on a
forty-five degree list, when the green waves are threatening to swal–
low us and the ship is breaking up? Right now we can look and
think only as men do in the face of death: we shall die-and what
then? How have we lived?
If
we are to live all over again in some
new way, then by what shall we live, and for what? Right now we
need in literature the vast philosophical horizon, the vast sweep
from the masthead, from the sky above, we need the most ultimate,
the most fearsome, the most fearless "Whys?" and "What nexts?"
Those are the questions that children ask. But children are
after all the boldest of philosophers; they come into life naked, not
covered by one single small leaf of dogma or creed. That
is
why
their questions are always so ridiculously naive and so frighteningly
complicated. The new people, who are right now coming into life,
are naked and fearless as children, and they too, like children, like
Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, are asking their "whys" and
"what nexts." Philosophers of genius, children and ordinary people
are equally wise-because they ask equally stupid questions. Stupid
for civilized man who possesses a well-furnished apartment, with a
magnificent bathroom, and a well-furnished dogma.
Organic chemistry has blurred the dividing-line between living
and dead matter. It
is
a mistake to divide people into the living and
the dead: there are live-dead people and live-live people. The live–
dead people also write, walk, talk, act. But they do not make mis–
takes; only machines produce without mistakes, but they produce
