GEOR.GE KONR.AD
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to run their own lives and since bad work is beginning to acquire a bad
name, the work they do is actuall y quite decent.
The author of these lines, fearing neither despotism nor civil war, is
guilty of heinous sobriety and patent complicity with the majority. His
watchword being trot rather than gallop or ditch, he sees no grounds
for hysteria , no reason to jump ship.
People are expected to serve noble causes. Of causes there is no end,
and we tend to regard our own as noble and other peoples' as ignoble.
Which leads your humble servant to muse, "What cause do I serve?" The
customary answers - culture or society, church or state, humanity or na–
tion, business firm or political party, the integrity of science or the au–
tonomy of art - are all well and good, but since one can serve any
number of masters (loyalty being an infinitely expandable concept) the
simplest thing for me to say is, "I serve no one." Not even myself Am I
serving my wife when I carry her suitcase? Am I serving my son when I
play bear with him? Am I serving my guests when I wine and dine them?
Am I serving my publisher when I hand in a manuscript? No. These ac–
tivities are an integral part of living together: we do what can reasonably
be expected of us, and we take pleasure in it; others pay us back in kind.
Whom do I serve when I lift my pen and set it down on a sheet of pa–
per? Who is served by an idea or a question? A sentence - this sentence -
is because it wishes to be.
If I refuse to serve - if at most I cooperate - what am I good for?
Merely to be? To partake in the sometimes heavenly, sometimes hellish
blessings of existence? To acknowledge my birth by keeping myself alive?
To make ready for the time when I am good for nothing? People don't
come with instruction manuals. If people aren't created to serve a cause,
if they don't do what they do for the sake of posterity or an afterlife, if
they have no preordained obligations, then they are fully responsible for
their own acts! They themselves must determine - improvise, one might
say - their obligations; they themselves must set their agendas; they
themselves must provide a more or less personal rationale for each deci–
sion they make. And that rationale is as central to their existence as the
loves of their life or the tools of their trade. Moreover, internal obliga–
tions grow as external obligations shrink, the critical mind (the intellec–
tual's chief tool) corroding the external plan and allowing the contours
of the internal plan to emerge.
Why not start at zero? Everything that is is more than nothing. Even
