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right. Then he prepares to go to Palestine, leaves university, burns his
bridges to a "respectable" career-panics, falls into despair. Eventually
he screws up his courage and actually exchanges a failed Jewish home
for a pristine Jewish homeland. But the dream of national power dissi–
pates almost immediately upon its coming true. In the collective farms
of Palestine, the pleasure principle is pounded by the reality principle;
like the "Helenas" he will later fall in love with, the Jewish National
Home quickly comes to seem a bundle of pedestrian demands. So he
tries to escape again but learns, this time, that the price of freedom is an
impossible self-sufficiency. He nearly starves; he relapses into depres–
sion. His adventure only intensifies latent suspicions that his impulses
are not to be trusted.
Then the young man does something unexpected. He rebounds. He
has learned, so he thinks, the difference between being free and shaking
the bars. He determines to lace his ambitions with a measure of
respectability and applies for a job with a foreign newspaper. He catches
on as a journalist with a famous foreign newspaper chain, the German
Ullstein Trust, and by and by returns to the disciplines of rigorous
observation. He works hard; he excels .
The young man's life, Koestler concludes, is one of greater detach–
ment, but there is the ambiguous pleasure of being taken seriously and
making money-of living well in the world. So after a couple of years,
he separates from the Jewish National Home and returns to Europe, the
larger civilization. He still aches to belong, still resents privilege; his
heart still pounds in the presence of real men and seductive women.
Still, he determines not make the same mistake twice. He would never
again give up the "laws of nature and history" for a "seething rage." He
presents himself to the headquarters of the Ullstein Trust in Berlin, his
home newspaper chain, during the summer of
1929.
II. SICK OF HOLINESS
KOESTLER'S SUPERIORS TOLD
HIM
that if he were "sick of holiness" he
could go to Paris. For Koestler this meant an end to being his own mas–
ter-"venting opinions and passing oracular judgments" in the manner
of Ullstein foreign reporters. It also meant a cut in salary and rank. He
leapt at it.
[M]y education seems always to have proceeded shock and jolt.
The process of quiet maturing I can find nowhere in my past. The
most wonderful of these jolts was the change in scenery from the
