614
PARTISAN REVIEW
ventures meticulously secreted away.
"You
are
buttoned up. It's what I brought you out of the house
for. I want to talk about your ghost-overlays."
"Is that phrase from your psychological theories?"
"Yes."
"My father told me you're a genius. Allen Dulles says so."
"Well, I'm not," she said petulantly as if the stupidity of the
supposition doubled every likelihood of great loneliness. "I have a brain
that's marvelously empty when I'm not using it. So it allows thought to
enter which other people would sweep away. Don't you think the
heavens often reach us with their messages just as fully as dark forces be–
low tickle our impulses?"
I nodded. I would not have known how to argue with this. But
then, she was not looking for a debate. By her change in tone, I could
sense that she was in a mood to expound.
"I've always found Freud uncongenial," she said. "He was a great
man with bushels of discoveries, but he really had no more philosophy
than a Stoic. That's not enough. Stoics make good plumbers. The drains
go bad and you've got to hold your nose and fix them. End of Freud's
philosophy. If people and civilization don't fit - which we all know
anyway - why, says Freud, make the best of a bad lot."
She had obviously given this speech before. She must have to ex–
plain her thesis often on the job. So I took it as a mark of friendship
that she was willing to outline it for me. Besides, I liked listening to her
voice. I felt she would give this lecture because she wanted us to be
closer. And felt a pure pang of the nicest kind of love. She was so beau–
tiful, and so lonely. Wildflowers in her hair, and blue sneakers on her
feet. I wanted to hug her, and would have, if not for a sense of the
prodigiously long shadow of Hugh Montague.
"Philosophically speaking," she went on, "I am very much a dualist.
I do not see how one can not be. It was all very well for Spinoza to
postulate his Substance, that wonderfully elusive, metaphysical,
metaphorical world-goo he employed to bind all opposites together and
so be able to declare himself a monist. But I believe he was scuttling the
philosophical bark. If God is trying to tell us anything, it is that every
idea we have of Him, and of the universe, is dual. Heaven and Hell, God
and the Devil, good and evil, birth and death, day and night, hot and
cold, male and female, love and hate, freedom and bondage, conscious–
ness and dreaming, the actor and the observer - I could add to such a list
forever. Consider it: we are conceived out of the meeting of one sperm
and one ovum. In the first instant of our existence, at the moment of
our creation, we are brought to life by the joining of two separate
entities; how very much unalike they are. Immediately, we start to de-
