506
PARTISAN REVIEW
the prison gates-it is not a price worth paying.
It
goes against common sense to make agreements of any kind
with people who interpret the very concept of an agreement very
loosely indeed, and who violate common agreements-with people
for whom the lie is their daily bread. You have surely never met any–
one who had anything to do with the secret police and did not feel
cheated by them . For those people, whose gaze is dead-yet restless;
whose mind is blunted-yet skilled in the art of harassment; whose
soul is defiled-yet greedy for social acceptance; for those people
you are nothing but stuff to work over. They have their own particu–
lar anthropology : they believe that anyone can be convinced-that
is , bribed or frightened. For them there is only the problem of the
price paid and the pain inflicted. Although they work mechanically,
every slip you make, every fall, gives meaning to their life. Your
capitulation is not only their professional success, it is their
raison
d'ttre.
You are therefore arguing with them about the meaning of your
own life, about how there is no meaning
to
theirs, about endowing
every human life with meaning. You are continuing the argument of
Giordano Bruno with the Inquisitioner, of the Decembrist with the
Tsarist police superintendent, of Lukasinski with the Tsarist exter–
minating angel, of Ossietzki with the blond man in the Gestapo uni–
form, of Mandelshtam with a Bolshevik party member dressed in a
uniform with the blue NKWD lapel. You are taking part in an argu–
ment that will n ever end-the argument of which Elzenberg says
that the value of your involvement is not measured by the victory of
your idea , but by the value of the idea itself. In other words: you win
not when you gain power, but when you remain faithful to yourself.
Common sense also tells you that if you sign the declaration of
loyalty, you put the whip into the hands of the functionaries. They
will wave this whip around and they will threaten you with it in
order to force you into making another statement that you will coop–
erate. The declaration of loyalty transforms itself into a pact with the
devil : you cannot give even half a finger to those police inquisi–
tioners without their immediately grasping at your entire arm. You
know people whose entire life has been broken by one moment of
weakness or moral injudiciousness : people hunted down by tele–
phone calls, approached in their homes and offices, blackmailed
whenever the opportunity arises for them to go abroad . They have
paid for their moment of rashness with a lifetime of fear and debase-
